Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (24 page)

CHAPTER 12

A GLOBAL SUCCESS STORY

The end of empire has been accompanied by a flourishing of other means of subjugation.
¹

K
WAME
N
KRUMAH
,
N
EOCOLONIALISM

W
e live today in a world of economic globalization—a global marketplace that has been decisively shaped by America and the West. Progressives claim that the first step in this globalization was the direct colonialism of the British and the French, and it has been followed by America-led “neocolonialism,” another form of economic exploitation that amounts to theft. To a generation that grew up in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s, nothing seemed more obvious than that colonialism itself was theft on a grand scale. Britain, for example, took cotton and other raw materials from India, converted them into finished products in the factories of Manchester and Liverpool, and then sold those products domestically and internationally. Indians would end up buying shirts manufactured in England with Indian cotton—while the Indian handlooms closed down.

Yet for the British to purchase cotton at the Indian market price does not seem, by itself, to constitute theft. The Indian farmers had been selling at that price to the Indian handloom mills. Nor can the British be faulted for using the machines of the Industrial Revolution to efficiently convert cotton into cloth, nor for selling that cloth to Indians more cheaply than the Indian handlooms could. Not only were British manufacturers not stealing from the Indian people; they were actually giving them a better deal than they were previously getting from the Indian mills. Moreover, there is a deeper factual point that often goes unrecognized in the anti-colonial literature. In that literature we read innumerable claims to the effect that “the Europeans stole rubber from Malaya, and cocoa from West Africa, and tea from India.” But as economic historian P. T. Bauer points out, before British rule, there
were
no rubber trees in Malaya, nor cocoa trees in West Africa, nor tea in India. The British brought the rubber tree to Malaya from South America. They brought tea to India from China.
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And they taught the Africans to grow cocoa. In these cases, far from “stealing” native resources, the British deserve credit for introducing profitable crops that benefited the native economies as well as British global trade.

Even more broadly, it makes no sense to claim that the West grew rich by taking everybody else’s stuff for the simple reason that there wasn’t very much to take. Most Third World countries were desperately poor before colonization, so they could hardly be worse off in material terms after the colonizers went home. How, then, did the West become affluent if not by stealing from Asia, Africa, and South America? The reason is the West invented some new things that didn’t exist before. These inventions were modern science, modern technology, and modern capitalism. Science here refers not merely to invention but to what Alfred North Whitehead terms “the invention of invention,” a new mechanism for generating knowledge and converting
that knowledge into usable technological products. Capitalism here refers not merely to trade but to property rights, contracts, courts to enforce them, and later limited liability, credit, stock exchanges, insurance, and the whole ensemble of institutions that Adam Smith outlined in the
Wealth of Nations
. Science, technology, and capitalism are Western institutions that developed due to internal causes, from the scientific revolution to the Industrial Revolution.

The impact of the West in transforming developing countries for the better was noted in the nineteenth century by, of all people, Karl Marx. Marx credited colonialism with transforming feudal society into modern industrial society. “England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society,” Marx acknowledged. In particular, “It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the spinning wheel.” Marx added, “This loss of his old world … imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the Hindu.” Even so, Marx emphasized that the Hindu had been living in a village system based on the hierarchy of caste and economic and social oppression. Moreover, “These idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, have always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism.” Marx pointed out that through such mechanisms as railways and steam power, Britain unified India and integrated her into a global system of trade. Marx termed this a “fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia,” a positive development that he characterized as a “regeneration.”
³

Progressives today reject this aspect of Marx, because Marx seems to say that while colonialism is theft, the theft was historically necessary as part of the modernizing process. Marx didn’t justify colonialism or capitalism but he sought to transcend them. Progressives, however, want to reverse them, and their abhorrence for Marx’s views in these areas is part of the reason many on the left have soured on Marx. Today’s progressivism is less indebted to Marx than
it is to Lenin. Lenin “rescued” Marx by arguing that colonialism represented the final crisis of capitalism. In Lenin’s view, the Communist revolution had not occurred in Europe because European leaders found a temporary solution to their domestic problems. They ameliorated internal class conflict by conquering other countries and exploiting the workers there. Lenin called on people in the colonies to drive out the colonizers. This, he concluded, was good not only for the self-determination of the colonies but also to accelerate the crisis and collapse of European capitalism.
⁴
This double benefit helps explain why the otherwise foreign ideology of anti-colonialism became so attractive to many leftists in the West.

Marx might have disappointed the progressives, but was he right? On this particular issue, I think he was. No one, least of all Marx, suggested that the British came to India with purely noble intentions. Some Englishmen, like Macaulay and Kipling, spoke of the “white man’s burden” to share civilization with the lesser peoples, but today such rhetoric is rightly dismissed as a rationalization for conquest. Like previous conquerors—the Afghans, the Persians, the Arabs, the Mongols—the British ruled largely for their own benefit. In order to administer the empire, however, the British had to build roads, railways, and ports. They also built the major cities of India: Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. (The subsequent re-naming of these cities does nothing to change the historical fact that they were founded and built by the British.) The British also had to educate a native class of Indians. This required teaching them English. Education exposed Indians to new ideas that were largely alien in traditional Indian culture: modern science and technology, self-government, the rule of law, property rights, human rights, individualism, and self-determination. Ultimately the Indians learned the very language of political liberation from their captors.

Since India’s independence in 1947, Indians have been reluctant to acknowledge the benefits of empire. Years ago I wrote an essay in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
titled “Two Cheers for Colonialism” and it stirred up a big controversy when it was republished in India. Even some of my relatives were outraged, with one of my aunts advising me, “We Indians are not supposed to say things like that.” She was right; I was violating a national taboo. But that’s changing. Recently India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke at Oxford University and there he did something no previous Indian politician dared to do—he praised the British legacy in India. “Today with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian prime minister to assert that India’s experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences. Our notions of the rule of law, of a constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age-old civilization met the dominant Empire of the day.”
⁵

Why did it take more than fifty years for an Indian leader to state the obvious? The reason is that, for most of this time, India failed to take advantage of what it gained from the British legacy. In this respect, India was similar to many other former colonies in Asia and Africa. Ironically this failure is due to the leadership of these nations falling under the anti-colonial spell. The anti-colonial ideology, forged in the colonies and subsequently embraced by many in the West, blamed the West for the poverty and underdevelopment of the “Third World.” So the new leadership of many independent countries adopted a resolutely anti-Western stance. Because the West was opposed by the Soviet Union, these leaders were putatively non-aligned but in practice pro-Soviet. Because the West was capitalist, India and others decided to go in the socialist direction.

This was, as we now know, a disastrous mistake. We can see this by comparing, say, South Korea and Kenya. When Kenya became independent in the early 1960s, it was at the same economic level as South Korea. But Kenya took the socialist road and South Korea took the capitalist road. Today South Korea is many times richer than Kenya. Sure, there are important cultural differences between the two countries. But we can also verify the superiority of capitalism to socialism by comparing South Korea with North Korea. Same people, same culture. Yet North Korea remains desperately poor while South Korea is a comparatively rich country. India suffered the same fate as other socialist nations—it had a stagnant economy, and indeed for nearly half a century India was symbolized by the “begging bowl.”

During this period—the second half of the twentieth century—the former colonies bewailed the continued economic strength of the West and pressed for foreign aid, foreign loans, and other handouts to alleviate their poverty and backwardness. Sometimes this aid was urged on the basis of compassion; mostly it was demanded as a matter of entitlement. Over a period of several decades there was a huge inflow of aid and loans to India and the poor nations of Africa. Nevertheless, none of this assistance made a significant difference. There are various reasons for this, including government misappropriation of foreign money. Perhaps the main reason, however, is that foreign assistance solved short-term famine and poverty but did nothing to enable the poor countries to become self-reliant. Basically, the poor countries used up the aid and then demanded more, or they spent the loans and then asked for new loans to repay the old ones. Until the late 1980s, it seemed that the world would long remain divided into an affluent West and an impoverished non-West.

What a difference a couple of decades makes. Between the late 1980s and today, the world has changed dramatically. Countries once
termed “Third World” have now become “developing countries” or even “emerging markets.” These emerging markets are growing at a rate three to five times faster than that of the West. While the economies of Western countries are growing at around 2 percent a year, the emerging markets are growing at 6 to 10 percent a year. China, once a backward economy, stands in the next decade or so to become the world’s largest economy. India, while trailing behind China, could become the world’s second largest economy by the middle of the century. Brazil, another large and once-backward nation, is also on the move and quickly becoming a serious economic contender on the world stage.

How did these once-impoverished countries gain economic traction? They did so by exploiting what may be termed “the advantage of backwardness.” At first it seems crazy—or at least paradoxical—to assert that backwardness can possibly be an advantage. Poor countries themselves had long regarded their backwardness as a serious impediment. This point of view was clearly expressed by the African writer Chinweizu. In his book
The West and the Rest of Us
, Chinweizu wrote, “The poor have no way of influencing or changing the world market prices to their benefit.”
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Chinweizu’s assumption was that the rich countries are powerful enough to set world prices and the poor countries have no choice but to go along.

Actually Chinweizu was wrong. There was never a problem with the rich countries having too much bargaining power. Rather, the problem was that, other than supplying some basic raw materials, the poor countries made little or nothing that anyone else wanted to buy.

What launched the “emerging markets” and changed the whole global economic picture? It was an epiphany on the part of China, India, and other countries. China was the first country to get there, and India second. China and India had long been considered
“problem” countries on account of their large populations. In fact, overpopulation was considered the main reason those two countries were so poor. But under Deng Xiaoping, China realized that population need not be a liability; it can become an asset. If a poor country can put its large population to work and make stuff that the rest of the world wants, then it can undercut the world price and grab a substantial share of the world market. China has, in the last few decades, made itself the manufacturing capital of the world, and businesses in every country must now figure out how to beat—or at least contend with—the “China price.” India followed China but not so much in manufacturing prowess as in deploying its educated, English-speaking, and technologically sophisticated middle class to provide needed global services at an unbeatable price. Together China and India in the past two decades have driven the global engine of economic growth.

Here we get to a tremendous irony. By exploiting the advantage of backwardness within a global economy, China and India have together lifted hundreds of thousands of people into affluence, and hundreds of millions of people from poverty into the middle class. Thanks to globalization, the United Nations Millennium Development goal of reducing world poverty by half by 2015 is likely to be met. Beyond the economic gain, the ordinary person in China, India, and other emerging countries now has an increased sense of self-worth and possibility. The future no longer looks like a bleak replica of the past. So these are not only material improvements, they are also moral gains. For progressives, this comes as a surprise. For decades progressives have advocated anti-poverty programs in poor countries. The main mechanisms for this were foreign aid and loans. These did little good, while technological capitalism has proven to be the greatest anti-poverty scheme ever invented. As one Indian entrepreneur put it, globalization and technological capitalism are
finally helping to achieve Gandhi’s dream of wiping a tear off every Indian face.