The French ‘no’ vote was not taken as an answer by the European political class. It was decided that the main constitutional changes could be included in an intergovernmental treaty that could be ratified by governments, not by popular referendum. The Lisbon Treaty was duly signed on 13 December 2007. In order to avoid the ire of Eurosceptics, new Prime Minister Gordon Brown failed to appear at the ceremony and sent Foreign Minister David Miliband instead. Brown signed the document discreetly on a later occasion.84 Britain had got away with it on this occasion, but it would not be the same nine years later.
Nemesis 4: The End of the Global Financial Empire?
On Friday 7 September 2007 long queues formed outside branches of the Newcastle-based Northern Rock bank as ordinary people tried desperately to withdraw their savings before the bank collapsed. Such a run on a major bank had not been seen in Britain since 1866. Northern Rock was the first sign in Britain of a global financial earthquake, the epicentre of which was the United States. It gathered force as confidence in the system evaporated and banks refused to lend to each other. In September 2008 the New York investment bank Lehman Brothers, founded in 1850, filed for bankruptcy and the City of London Stock Market crashed.
The crisis, though unpredicted, reflected the structural flaws of the global commercial republic that had been relaunched in the 1980s. Those flaws were many. First, financial capitalism had become bloated, the driving force of the world economy, with an estimated 40 per cent of profits accruing to the financial sector. Mergers and acquisitions increased the size of global giants and reduced their ability to know what all their branches were doing. In pursuit of ever-higher yields the sector sold ever-more complex ‘products’ that were far removed from the productive process. Hedge funds basically bet on whether markets would go up or down and were supposedly geared to win either way. ‘Subprime mortgages’ were lent to people who did not have the income to pay them and then packaged as securities that could be sold to other investors. The decline in the US housing market after 2006 led to a collapse of this system.
Second, firewalls between commercial banks which took deposits and investment banks which speculated had been taken down. One of these firewalls, the US Glass–Steagall Act of 1932, was repealed in 1999. Northern Rock, a building society that was floated as a bank in 1997, began to borrow money to finance mortgages. Other regulations were removed or avoided, leading to ‘casino banking’ with ordinary savers’ deposits. The City of London was generally less regulated or less policed than New York, earning it the name of the Guantánamo Bay of the banking system. Third, there was a lack of reinvestment in the economy as shareholders demanded higher returns and directors earned higher and higher bonuses. Fourth, and related to this, the takeout from the economy by capital increased at the expense of labour, which was steadily de-unionised, deskilled, delocalised and made precarious. Aggregate demand declined as social inequality increased, making it impossible to sustain economic and financial expansion. The bubble burst.85
There was immediate speculation about whether this was the end of the thirty-year era of neo-liberal or Anglo-Saxon financial capitalism. The financial crisis became an economic crisis, with falling outputs, declining wages and rising unemployment. The down-turn spread to the Gulf where 20,000 migrant workers from India were laid off and could no longer send remittances back to their families. As economies collapsed in Europe and the United States so demand for manufactured products from the developing world slumped. Clothing workers in India and Bangladesh – mostly female – also lost their jobs. The diamond-polishing industry in Surat (Gujarat) collapsed after Diwali in November 2008 and 200 workers committed suicide.86
The financial and economic crisis became a fiscal crisis. The banking crisis was stabilised by a combination of takeovers and bail-outs by governments which considered some banks as ‘too big to fail’. Capitalism reinvented itself as what was dubbed ‘Capitalism 4.0’, which succeeded the ‘Capitalism 3.0’ of 1973–2008. On the other hand the cost of bail-outs and falling revenues as a result of the economic recession drove up government debt by 2010 to 8.6 per cent of national income in France, 10.7 per cent in the United States and 13.3 per cent in the United Kingdom.87 Labour’s chief secretary to the Treasury left an ironic note saying ‘I’m afraid there is no more money’ that was ruthlessly exploited by the Conservatives during the election campaign of 2010 that saw off thirteen years of Labour government.
Governments’ response to the crisis was to pass on the pain to ordinary taxpayers, employees, students and pensioners. Public services were cut by austerity measures and taxes raised from easy targets while failing to chase corporate tax-avoiders. A sense of injustice triggered waves of protest across Europe and the United States. They began in Greece on 5 May 2010 when the government imposed savage cuts and tax rises in order to obtain emergency loans from the European Union and IMF, which imposed its neo-liberal agenda as a condition. In France, where the government decided to raise the retirement age, a fortnight of demonstrations took place in October 2010, supported by trade unions and strike action. In Britain, students demonstrated and occupied campuses against the tripling of student fees in the first significant student movement since 1968 while the UK Uncut movement targeted corporations that were not paying taxes.88 In Spain, where unemployment was at 21 per cent, hundreds of thousands of young people occupied public squares in Madrid, Barcelona and other cities in May 2011. In New York the Occupy Wall Street movement took off on 17 September 2011 as young people protested under the slogan ‘We are the 99%’, against the 1 per cent who owned all the money and controlled the political system by ‘legalised bribery’. It was influenced by events in Athens, Barcelona, Madrid and London and in turn inspired ‘a mass movement of debt resistance across America’ as well as occupations as far away as Bahia, Brazil and KwaZulu-Natal.89 Fifty Chinese intellectuals and activists sent a message on 2 October 2011 declaring that ‘the eruption of the “Wall Street Revolution” in the heart of the world’s financial empire shows that 99% of the world’s people remain exploited and oppressed – regardless of whether they are from developed or developing countries […] The great era of popular democracy, set to change history, has arrived again!’90
In the first decade of the twenty-first century these four crises converged. The first was the overtaking of liberal interventionism by a new form of imperialism triggered and legitimated by 9/11 and the War on Terror. In Iraq it operated according to Bush’s maxim that ‘there are no rules’ and instead of regime change destroyed the state, stirring up a hornet’s nest of jihadist movements fighting Anglo-American occupation and driving waves of refugees out of the war-torn area. The second was a colonial fracture at home, dividing immigrant communities, particularly those of Muslim origin who felt stigmatised and excluded by the host society, which in turn defined French and British identities in ever more colonial and imperialist ways. Immigrant communities identified with the sufferings of their fellow-believers in regions attacked by the Western powers, and in the metropolis a small minority turned to riot and even terrorist attacks. Third, the global financial empire which kept the developing world and much of the developed world in thrall, and was challenged by anti-globalisation movements, experienced a meltdown in 2008. Financial institutions were bailed out by governments but the pain of austerity measures and tax rises was passed on to ordinary people who began to push back. Lastly, the development of a nationalism that was fearful of Islamism and migration and lauded the imperial past had a negative effect on the European project. Voters who were feeling the pinch of austerity were only too easily beguiled by politicians and the press into believing that the real enemy was not the global financial empire but Muslims, migrants and the European Union.
9
The Empire Strikes Back
The Arab Spring and Multicultural Optimism
On 17 December 2010 a 26-year-old Tunisian street fruit and vegetable seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose wares were confiscated by the police bec
ause he was unwilling to bribe them to have a licence to sell, set fire to himself. His death in hospital from the burns he sustained on 4 January 2011 triggered protests against Zine el Abidine ben Ali, president of Tunisia since displacing Habib Bourguiba in a bloodless coup in 1987. These protests forced ben Ali to flee with his family on 14 January 2001 and, refused entry into France, he went to Saudi Arabia.
Protest movements against corrupt and dictatorial regimes spread across the Middle East in what became known as the ‘Arab Spring’. In Egypt, rallies against the regime of Hosni Mubarak, who had been president since 1981, began on 25 January 2011. Clashes with Egyptian security forces resulted in the deaths of over 800 protesters before Mubarak resigned on 11 February and handed power to the armed forces. In August he was put on trial for failing to stop the killing of protesters. In Libya protests against the regime of Colonel Gaddafi, who had been in power since 1969 and remained there by the brutal repression of opponents, began on 15 February 2011 in the eastern city of Benghazi. Military intervention against the regime was authorised by the UN Security Council on 26 February and Western allies supported the rebels. In Syria, equally, protests against the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad, who had succeeded as president in 2000 after his father’s thirty-year rule, began on 15 March 2011. Initially, the agitation was peaceful, but, like Mubarak, Assad was prepared to use lethal force against the protesters to secure his regime. In June 2011 the opposition took up arms and formed the Free Syrian Army in July 2011, taking control of Aleppo.1
In the West there was enthusiasm for the tentative arrival of democracy in the region. The Arab Spring was widely seen as a response to President Obama’s speech in Cairo on 4 June 2009 in which he announced that he had come ‘to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world’.2 In his State of the Union address on 25 January 2011 Obama declared that ‘the United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia and supports the democratic aspirations of all people’, and the Tunisian people were given a standing ovation by Congress.3 On 5 March the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy went to Benghazi to meet rebel leaders. He telephoned President Sarkozy and negotiations began for UN moves that cleared the way for air strikes by France and Great Britain in support of the rebels.4 Six months later, on 15 September 2011, Nicolas Sarkozy and British Premier David Cameron were grandstanding as liberators in Tripoli. Gaddafi was captured and killed by opposing militiamen on 20 October. In somewhat patronising mode, the West congratulated the new arrivals at the table of democracy. The European Parliament awarded the Sakarov Prize for freedom of thought to five representative activists of the Arab Spring, including Mohamed Bouazizi posthumously, in October 2011, and in December the London Times made Bouazizi person of the year 2011.
The optimism of this period was reflected in a cautious hope that France and Britain might be able to strengthen their multicultural societies. The embrace of democracy by Muslim citizens in Arab countries seemed to diminish the threat of militant Islamism and held out hope for the integration of immigrant populations in Europe. Multicultural approaches nevertheless had constantly to battle against the push-back of simpler, overwhelmingly white, French or British national identities and their frailty was always likely to be demonstrated.
On 6 April 2011 Nicolas Sarkozy unveiled a plaque in the Panthéon to Aimé Césaire, the Martiniquais poet and political leader who had died at the age of 94 and praised him as a leader of France’s black Caribbean territories.5 On 1 January 2012 the Palace of the Porte Dorée, which in 1931 has been dedicated to the history of colonialism, reopened as a completely new project, a Museum of the History of Immigration. In Britain, on 27 July 2012, the opening ceremony of the London Olympics directed by Danny Boyle was a powerful dramatisation of the country’s multicultural past and aspirations. England’s Green and Pleasant Land was celebrated alongside the Industrial Revolution of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the suffragettes and the National Health Service (NHS). Doreen Lawrence, the mother of the murdered black British teenager Stephen Lawrence, was among those carrying the Olympic flag. The arrival of the first Jamaican immigrants aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948 was recreated, and British West African rapper Dizzee Rascal and Zambian-Scottish Emei Sandé performed alongside Mike Oldfield and Simon Rattle. Tribute was paid to the victims of 7/7 but there was a confidence that such attacks could be withstood without narrowing national horizons. Inevitably, this was not to the taste of some Britons. Conservative MP Aidan Burley tweeted during the ceremony, ‘Thank God the athletes have arrived! Now we can move on from leftie multicultural crap. Bring back Red Arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones!’6
Jihadism, Refugees and Embattled Monocultural Nationalism
Within two years, regrettably, the optimism of the Arab Spring came crashing down and with it the chances of a confident, multicultural solution to the challenges faced by France and Britain. The Arab Spring turned to Autumn as hopes for democracy faded and civil wars broke out between partisans of dictatorship and fomenters of Islamist revolt. Jihadism intensified with the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as Daesh. This attracted fighters for the cause from Europe and inspired attacks on military, civilian and Jewish targets in Europe. War in the Middle East and Africa drove hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee as refugees towards the relative safety of Europe. In Britain and France fears intensified about waves of immigrants who were often of Muslim origin and were portrayed as threats to national security and national identity. These were combined with fears about the alienation of populations of immigrant origin and the radicalisation of a small but deadly number of immigrants who identified with militant Islamism. Such fears sharpened the crisis of British and French identity which discarded multicultural solutions as not only impossible but dangerous and intensified the construction of monocultural nationalisms. They generated an obsession with immigration which was seen as a threat to native Britons’ access to jobs, housing and services, to national security and to British identity itself. This embattled nationalism, in turn, fuelled criticism of European institutions which were regarded as not doing enough to stop waves of migration and jihadism and which, at the same time, by their creeping federalism, were preventing nation states from ‘taking back control’ to deal with the problem themselves.
Of those countries that experienced the Arab Spring, only one reached the autumn of 2011 with democracy intact. In Tunisia elections to a National Constituent Assembly on 23 October 2011 were won by a coalition led by the democratic Muslim Ennaahda party, leading to the promulgation of a new Tunisian constitution on 26 January 2014.7 In Egypt, the Freedom and Justice Party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood won parliamentary elections held between November 2011 and January 2012, and its leader, Mohammed Morsi, was elected president in May 2012. The pro-democracy movement feared a theocratic state and 13 million people demonstrated on 30 June 2013, calling for Morsi to resign. The military duly obliged, removing Morsi in another military coup on 3 July 2013 and violently crushing all opposition.8 In Libya, things were even worse, as the state collapsed. A General National Congress formed in August 2012 was paralysed by conflict between secularists and Islamists and civil war broke out between competing militias. In Tripoli alone there were 150,000 militiamen. The door was opened to penetration by al-Qaeda, which gained the upper hand in Benghazi and attacked the US consulate there in September 2012.9
In Syria the regime of Assad held on by brute force, with over 8,000 Syrians killed in the first six months of 2012 alone. The democratic opposition in exile set up a Syrian National Council in Istanbul in August 2011 while the Free Syrian Army battled the regime on the ground. The limits of liberal interventionism now became clear. Obama and European leaders announced that Assad must go, but they feared another Iraq disaster even more and at this stage did not send in forces. The UN Security Council called for a ceasefire by both sides on 14 April 2012 but more effective intervention was vetoed by Russia, which backed Assad. As in Libya, civ
il war opened the way to an Islamist resurgence in the non-governed areas of Syria and Iraq in 2012. The al-Nusra Front, a branch of al-Qaeda, was formed in Syria in January 2012, while its rival, ISIS, crossed the non-existent border from Iraq.10 Many ISIS fighters emerged from American camps in Iraq such as the notorious Camp Bucca, and even from Syrian prisons, perversely released by the Assad regime in 2011 in order to enhance its image in the West as the only buffer against Islamic terrorism.11
These new Islamist organisations were generally manifestations of Salafism, a version of Islam that held particular appeal to young Muslims who were violently hostile both to the West and to Muslim elites and regimes that were seen to collaborate with it. It was an Islamic puritanism that required a return to the original simplicity of the faith and the role of an elite in the restoration of the Caliphate – the sacred empire of Islam in the Middle East that had been abolished in 1924, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This was centred on Mecca and extended from Yemen in the south to Greater Syria in the north. Fighters already active in Syria appealed to Muslim militants everywhere to undertake the hijrah or emigration to Syria, where the Last Battle against the West was foretold to begin at Dabiq, between Aleppo and the Turkish border.12
Empires of the Mind Page 26
