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Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
In his book The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) Samuel Huntington writes: "The world is engaged in simultaneous processes of fragmentation and integration ..." (p. 36).
Four hundred years of plundering the colonies in Asia, Africa and South America have left their mark in the citadels of power and wealth in the colonial countries. Those who did not share in the booty, fully participated in the arrogance of lording over subjugated countries. It thus deeply affected the psyche of the colonising people, thus laying the foundations of racial and other kinds of discrimination. The Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture according to Samuel Huntington was brought to the United States by the Pilgrims and now forms the underlying basis for the American socio-politico-techno-economic institutions. After the loss of the colonies the role of the imperial masters was taken over by the Anglo-American oligarchies of a unipolar world. And they not only technically refined the old order, but widened its scope and made it more ruthless, destructive and distant, so that the victims are hardly aware of those who are really destroying their lives.
The technique of "divide and rule" was effectively employed by the British in colonial India. And they divided the country before they left. Similar techniques were employed by the USA in post-Soviet Russia to segregate the Muslim countries of central Asia with the ulterior aim of integrating the latter in their own sphere of influence. The disintegration of Yugoslavia was an effect of the same policy of creating smaller client states owing allegiance to the unipolar order. The same tactics were used to break away the oil-rich East Timor—which is now called a democracy and a free Christian state—from Islamic majority Indonesia. It is now managed by an advanced client state of the USA—Australia. Similar processes employing diverse techniques of disintegration and re-unification are at work across the world.
A process of integration of the European countries is taking place, through the European Union and NATO. But a wide gulf is now being created within the European Union, through the promotion of the concepts of adversarial old and "new Europe". The guidelines all along are to ensure the protection and expansion of the economic and security interests of the superpower. And this in reality implies deprivation and insecurity for other countries. Any state which challenges the unipolar assumptions, policies and actions becomes a candidate for "Regime Change". Many governments, even when popularly elected have been the victims of this policy in the past and the most recent and blatant case is oil rich Iraq.
This has triggered worldwide concerns and endeavours to checkmate the continuing and growing neo-imperial trends within the unipolar system. Nations are seeking new alignments to safeguard their cultural identity and sovereignty and build a new support system for their old values. Religion, culture and the use of terrorism ("the war of the poor", according to Leon Uris) are currently providing a better safety net against the unipolar policies, than economic and political alignments. What the world needs is a network of independent self-supporting states, decentralised as far as possible but culturally integrated where desirable. This can alone provide a better chance for the human family to escape starvation, destruction, decimation and the epidemic growth of criminality and terrorism provoked by unipolar policies subservient to narrow oligarchic interests. A multicultural world must seek a new synthesis of the material with the spiritual on the upward path of evolution.
Behind the success of a high consumerist society, there is the evolution of an entire value structure and the build-up of a promotional infrastructure which have turned shopping and entertainment into cultural expressions. These lowest forms of culture have been the biggest contributors to the expansion of the consumer society. Having reached a point of saturation, the consumer system requires more and more intensive technological changes and promotional efforts, while intensifying its compulsive search for new markets. This constant interference with other systems is being attempted at the expense of all traditions including those of moderation and restraint. Thus the "consumeristic crusade" is widening the cultural gap between the United States and Europe, because the latter sees the dominant American "Consumer Culture" submerging all that Europeans cherish within their own civilisations. Similarly, divisive interventions in the developing world are making the process of harmonisation at a human level more problematic and difficult.
The plans for mono-culturisation of diverse societies and the imposition of unicivilisational models of development have accelerated the processes of disintegration of weaker, exploited societies even while they are being "fitted", willy nilly into the Imperial system. This is to the serious detriment of the developing world and has now begun to affect many of the developed countries. On this path the interests of the unipolar system and of the world community have begun to violently diverge, reaching a point of no return. This spells disaster for the future, and the unipolar system must be made to retreat.
J.C. Kapur
New Delhi
September 2004