Different Governments for Different Folks
A commentary by Will Tanner in Tablet published last year (“Back in the USSA”) deals exhaustively with the multiple iniquities of the postapartheid South African government. Tanner’s remarks leave no doubt that this black majority regime has unleashed considerable mischief, seen particularly in a spoils system run by the ruling class that preys on the population, seizes the farmland and homes of the Afrikaners, and tolerates random acts of murder and mayhem. Tanner’s examination of this abhorrent regime, whose outrages the Western media have predictably ignored while celebrating South Africa’s victory over white racism, deserves our praise. And I am giving Tanner’s timely revelations due praise, except for this passage:
The economic aspect of South Africa’s decline is primarily a result of its postapartheid obsession with extending the country’s cursed racial logic, this time in the name of justice and equity.
This identification of black South African tyranny with “the country’s cursed racial logic” rests on a fallacy. It is one driven by political correctness among journalists and historians on both the establishment right and left. The disorder and violence that has come from black majority rule in South Africa are entirely consistent with black rule elsewhere, including in American cities, where black majority governments have done pitifully little to control crime and graft and have routinely engaged in antiwhite rhetoric.
Postcolonial governments throughout Africa have also often been characterized by corruption and crime, and it seems simplistic to blame this widespread problem on the convenient whipping boy of white racism. There may be a wide variety of reasons that explain this persistent problem of appalling misrule, but white racism, in my view, belongs well down on the list of causes.
In the case of South Africa, the “white apartheid” government, which the new order replaced, had the highest living standard in Africa, a developed industrial infrastructure, and a very civilized Western-style government, at least for whites, but its judicial system often benefited blacks as well. Many blacks emigrated to South Africa because the living conditions were far better there than in any black African state. The black majority government could have built on that brilliant legacy, but instead decided to despoil the white population and rule even more corruptly and shamelessly than the municipal administration of Baltimore or Houston. That had nothing to do with a “cursed racial logic” left from bygone times. Rather, we are looking at how those who have no concept of equal justice for all, constitutional constraints, or respect for others’ property govern once they are put in a position to wreak havoc.
But the whites who colonized Africa did commit an ineradicable sin, the effects of which still bedevil the continent. The French historian Bernard Lugan has expatiated on this sin in his many books on Africa, works in which he dismisses the leftist fixation on white racism and instead focuses on other consequences of the European presence in Africa. What European imperialists did was divide up the continent in such a way as to place warring or mutually hostile tribes in the same territories conquered by European colonialists. Europeans foolishly imposed this shared living space on their colonial subjects, and before they left, instructed those who were to be “liberated” in Western liberal principles and on the formation of nation-states.
In France, this enterprise arose on the political left in the late 19th century, when the self-proclaimed legatees of the French Revolution proclaimed the need to spread their ideas to less enlightened societies. The attitude of the French left toward colonialism was reversed, after the socialists and then communists took over command from the older directing class—that is, from progressive colonialists. But Lugan is correct to remind us of the leftist origin of what the post-World-War-II left typically blamed on the imperialist right. Leftist support for colonialism can also be found among the English Fabian socialists and even in some statements of Marx that presented European expansion as a modernizing force.
The European efforts to Westernize colonial subjects in Africa generally turned out badly. One of the ghastliest massacres in postcolonial African history took place in the country of Rwanda, in which the Hutu tribe went on a rampage and slaughtered and raped masses of Tutsis. At one time, the latter held a higher place in the East African caste system and received tribute from the Hutus. During the German occupation of the area from 1894 to 1918, no attempt was made to interfere with long-standing tribal arrangements. After the German defeat in World War I, however, the Belgians were given control of the region and worked intermittently to “Westernize” it. The ultimate result of this governmental reform was a failed nation-state with a non-functioning Western constitution and lots of tribal warfare.
According to Lugan, the best form of governance for Africans was the tribal organization to which native populations were accustomed, not some ill-conceived attempt to export the latest Western political model. It was the colonial effort to have African tribes coexist in European areas of control and then give them unsuitable political institutions, which was the real “white curse.” Lugan is not moved by the charge that Europeans destroyed Africa by practicing slavery. African tribes were already extensively practicing slavery among themselves. Nor did more than a small fraction of the European economy ever benefit from the slave trade. Almost all European economic developments occurred internally, with Western nations trading with each other. Where Western countries messed up “bigly” was in their attempts to Westernize African tribes, particularly the ones who had no desire to live together. This was the real Western colonial sin.
A similar failure can be found among Arab nationalists, as Ofir Haivry shows in a long essay published in this issue of Chronicles, “The Strange Death of the Arab State.” In that case, it was not foreign powers but Arabs who were responsible for the importation of Western fashions. Almost all Arab nationalist republics, as Haivry details, have ended in violence and corruption, not very differently from the fate of postcolonial sub-Saharan African states. In both cases, Western interventions or occupations have been blamed for failed nation-states, but the less tendentious explanation is that when surveying political cultures, one should notice that one size doesn’t fit all. Different societies develop differently; what works or used to work in one place doesn’t necessarily work in another.
Upon first reading, it seemed to our editors that Haivry was contrasting the disastrous experiment in Arab nationalist governments with the far greater stability of Arab feudal monarchies. Although Haivry does not recommend either form of government, the monarchies, in his telling, seem to work much better in Arab societies than the alternative. Considerable work on the subject of Arab nationalism comes from Elie Kedourie, the Arabist and historian of the Middle East. Kedourie’s groundbreaking work England and the Middle East (1956), and just about everything he published thereafter, made a profound impression on my young mind. Kedourie blamed English “romantics” for fostering a mystique of Arab nationalism, which they bequeathed to those who were still anchored in a tribal culture. The chaos and maladministration endemic to Arab nation-states resulted at least partly from the importation of culturally unsuitable Western ideas and enthusiasms.
According to Kedourie, whose family lived under the Ottoman Turks, a reformed imperial government would have been more compatible with Arab tribal institutions than borrowed Western movements. Kedourie points out that although national identity is vital for European nation-states, the force of modern nationalism hasn’t always worked well even for Westerners. World War I broke out due to the struggle between rival European nationalisms.
When the British took over Middle Eastern territory from the Turks after World War I, they should have been less welcoming of the Arab nationalist movement. By then, however, there was strong support for Arab nationalism among the British governing class, going back into the 19th century. It would have been hard to convince British foreign policy experts, argues Kedourie, that Arab tribal societies with hereditary rulers worked best for Arabs. Even if the march toward Arab nationalist revolutionary regimes had become unstoppable by the interwar period, it might be asked whether the British Foreign Office should have greeted it as a joyous development that British leaders wished to promote.
Second thoughts came in 1956, however, when the British military tried to take back the Suez Canal from the Arab nationalist dictator Abdul Nasser. That move took place, with French and Israeli military assistance, after Nasser nationalized the critical waterway. The invasion and attempted occupation of the Canal famously failed after the Eisenhower administration nixed it. American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pointedly refused to rescue what he saw as England’s collapsing empire.
The point being made is an Aristotelian one. Because a specific form of political organization is appropriate for some places does not mean it will work well everywhere. Only Greeks, according to Aristotle, could create a functioning polis, in which those who rule alternate in power with those who are ruled. But that doesn’t mean that other peoples couldn’t be ruled reasonably well under monarchies or other forms of government that were appropriate to their circumstances. Derailments of government occur when a form of rule does not fit the customs and disposition of a people.
In line with this view, it may be observed that African societies worked better when they were strictly tribal, that is, before they were given Western exteriors and burdened with a multi-ethnic population. In a similar way, American blacks did better economically and socially in their own ethnic communities before the 1960s than when they became the majority underclass in multiracial urban areas.
For a while, American blacks were able to maintain internal cohesion and traditional authority structures even in large cities, but by the 1960s all that changed. Their communities fell apart with cultural and demographic transformations, while blacks succumbed to anti-white incitement from their own race hustlers and radical white agitators. As my deceased friend, the distinguished sociologist Stanley Rothman, used to tell me: Of all groups, Jews and Asians do the best in modern urban environments; blacks, unfortunately, do the worst.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/editorials/different-governments-for-different-folks