Modernity and Globalisation

Modernity and Globalisation Gurminder K. Bhambra

Democracy and Silence Week 10

Democracy and The Modern World • Western history as a narrative of freedom and progress or, in other words, Enlightenment • The modern world is seen to have come into being through the twin revolutions of democratisation and the processes of industrialisation • The genealogy of democracy is generally given as going back to the French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence

Democracy and the Modern World • The US and France overthrew an old order and declared freedom and equality for all • The ‘all’ was not everybody, nor was it every adult • The exclusions were based around race, class, and gender • Property restrictions were largely lifted for men (but not Black men) in the 1860s in the US, and in the French revolutionary period 1792-1848 (UK all men given the vote in 1918) • Women got the vote in 1920 in the US, 1944 in France (UK, 1928) • Race was more complicated ...

Genealogies of Democracy • The US and France maintained institutionalised inequality through slavery, social segregation and colonisation for the next two centuries • the desegregation laws in the US were only passed in 1964; and Algeria only gained independence from France in 1962 • The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) abolished slavery and established a written constitution in which colour was no bar to holding political or administrative office; this, however, rarely gets mentioned in our discourses on political emancipation

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union ... • ‘Two hundred and twenty one years ago ... a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had travelled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence ... The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery ... ’ Barack Obama, 18/03/08

Democracy in the US • Thomas Jefferson (3rd US President and founding father): • ‘Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions … pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (administrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.’ • Abraham Lincoln (16th US President): • ‘Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’’ • ‘This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.’

Democracy in the US • de Tocqueville: • ‘there is no intermediate state that can be durable between the excessive inequality produced by servitude and the complete equality that originates in independence. The Europeans ... first violated every right of humanity by their treatment of the Negro, and they afterwards informed him that those rights were precious and inviolable’ • ‘If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.’

The Enlightenment and Slavery • The thinkers who wrote on human freedom were, largely, members of the bourgeoisie • At least 20 per cent of the French bourgeoisie were dependent on slave connected commercial activities • The Enlightenment thinkers did not generally write about slavery • Slavery was used as a metaphor for examining other social practices • Metaphor: using one concept to understand something different, usually with at least one thing in common

Metaphors of Slavery • Rousseau: ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.’ • Locke: ‘whenever the Legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience’ • Marx: Not only are the workers ‘slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself’

Erasures of Slavery • In this way, Enlightenment thinkers, while apparently talking about the phenomenon of slavery, rarely addressed existing slavery • This erasure is also present in more recent work • Simon Schama’s (1987) Embarrassment of Riches, for example, discusses the growing wealth in the Netherlands in the 17th century with no mention of one of the primary ways in which that wealth was procured: involvement in the slave trade • This omission is not ‘of the time’ where the excuse of different norms and standards can be used to explain, justify, and absolve it, but rather, is an omission of our times

Silences There are two types of silences: • The silence of those who lived contemporaneous with the events they write about • The silence of modern day thinkers who, knowing about past events, choose not to make the omission of them an issue today, this is the silence of invisibility • Racism in the past is relativsed by saying that we can’t judge them by today’s standards • Or then, what was said was of such universal importance that it doesn’t matter whether they were racist or not Susan Buck-Morss

Haiti and Political Emancipation • 1804: Haitian Declaration of Independence • abolition of slavery, equality of all people regardless of colour, free republic • Haiti and the French Revolution • the clause abolishing slavery in the French Declaration of Human Rights was only inserted after a deputation from St. Dominge went to France and argued in front of the Constituent Assembly for it to be included

Preliminary Declaration 1. The people inhabiting the island formerly called St. Domingo, hereby agree to form themselves into a free state sovereign and independent of any other power in the universe, under the name of empire of Hayti 2. Slavery is forever abolished 3. The Citizens of Hayti are brothers at home; equality in the eyes of the law is incontestably acknowledged 4. The law is the same to all, whether it punishes, or whether it protects 10. Fathers and mothers are not permitted to disinherit their children 12. No whiteman … shall put his foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor, neither shall he in future acquire any property therein 13. The preceding article cannot in the smallest degree affect white women who have been naturalized Haytians by Government, nor does it extend to children already born, or that may be born of the said women. The Germans and Polanders naturalized by government are also comprized in the dispositions of the present article 14. All acception of colour among the children of one and the same family, of whom the chief magistrate is the father, being necessarily to cease, the Haytians shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks

Democracy and Silence • Democracy is presented as a resource for the emancipation of others with little recognition of the structures of oppression upon which it has been articulated • This is not to suggest that democracy is necessarily problematic, but rather, that any extension of democracy requires us to reconsider the effect of the initial exclusions on its contemporary structures

Questions for the Vacation • Susan Buck-Morss suggests that ‘if the historical facts about freedom can be ripped out of the narratives told by the victors and salvaged for our own time, then the project of universal freedom does not need to be discarded but, rather, redeemed and reconstituted on a different basis’ (2000: 865). • What other silences would need to be broken?

Modernity and Globalisation