Revolt

Nadav Eyal

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062973368
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Globalisierung

"A well-written and thought-provoking account of the current crisis of globalization. Not everyone will agree with Eyal's interpretation, but few will remain indifferent." —Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens

An eye-opening examination of nationalism's spread around the world as the promise of globalism wanes

Revolt is an eloquent and provocative challenge to the prevailing wisdom about the rise of nationalism and populism. With a vibrant and informed voice, Nadav Eyal illustrates how modern globalization is not sustainable. He contends that the collapse of the current world order is not so much about the imbalance between technological achievement and social progress or the breakdown of liberal democracy as it is about a passion to upend and destroy power structures that have become hollow, corrupt. or simply unresponsive to urgent needs. Eyal illuminates the benign and malignant forces that have so rapidly transformed our economic, political, and cultural realities, shedding light not only on the economic and cultural revolution that has come to define our time but also on the counterrevolution waged by those it has marginalized and exploited.

With a mixture of journalistic narrative, penetrating vignettes, and original analysis, Revolt shows that the left and right have much in common. Eyal tells stories of distressed Pennsylvania coal miners, anarchist communes on the outskirts of Athens, a Japanese town with collapsing fertility rates, neo-Nazis in Germany, and Syrian refugee families whom he accompanied from the shores of Greece to their destination in Germany. Into these reports from the present Eyal weaves lessons from the past, from the opium wars in China to colonialist Haiti to the Marshall Plan. With these historical ties, he shows that the revolts' roots have always been deep and strong, and that rather than seeing current uprisings as part of a passing phenomenon, we should recognize that revolt is the new status quo.

Chapter 1

An Attack on a Newspaper

I once had a hand in an attack on a Pakistani newspaper by more than two dozen armed men. I could hardly have anticipated it and certainly did not want it. I knew neither the attackers nor the victims; indeed, I had never visited the newspaper’s offices. Pakistan and Israel, where I live, do not have diplomatic relations. But in a globalized world, things a person does in one country can have dire, occasionally overwhelming consequences for people living far away. Sometimes it is more ominous than anything you expected.

I met Ammara Durrani, then a senior editor for Pakistan’s Jang Media Group and a writer for the country’s largest English-1anguage newspaper, the News International, in 2004. We were members of a group of journalists who had come to the United States for a lengthy professional program funded by the State Department, at the invitation of one of the country’s best-known public radio stations, WBUR of Boston. The organizers from the station had what they thought was a brilliant idea. They’d bring together hostile tribes, Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis. The program focused on the media’s role in conflicts, a polite way of saying that journalists feed the fires of conflict and inflame public opinion, and perhaps it would be better if they didn’t. The Bush administration was interested in projects of this sort because, in the midst of its war on terror and the occupation of Iraq, it needed the fig leaf of promoting dialogue between hostile peoples as a demonstration of its commitment to resolving international conflicts by peaceful means. The organizers may have believed that Israelis and Palestinians might be able, thousands of miles from home, and in the presence of a parallel conflict on the Indian subcontinent, to find a common language. It was a vain hope. With foreigners in the room, they entrenched themselves in their traditional positions. So did the Pakistanis and Indians. Nevertheless, some exceptional and culture-crossing friendships emerged. Everyone got along with Ammara. She was the quintessential Oxfordian, speaking eloquently serious and polished English. All the Middle Easterners, whether Israeli or Palestinian, envied her.

Her passport, like all those issued by her country, specified that it was valid for travel to all countries except Israel. There is a long tradition of cold hostility between the Jewish state and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It dates back to the birth of both countries, within a year of each other, as Britain divested itself of its empire. Despite and in fact because of this, Durrani and I remained in contact by email after the American seminar. In 2005 she began work on an in-depth article on the unofficial relations between the two countries, and the possibility that these might be upgraded to full diplomatic recognition. She wrote to me that she’d be delighted to interview Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for the piece. My guess was that it would not be easy to get him to grant an interview. But if she wanted, I suggested, I could probably land her an interview with Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres, whom I knew well. Durrani seized the opportunity. Peres, a former prime minister and Nobel laureate, was no less an international figure than Sharon—in fact, he was probably better known. But there was a problem. She told me that, because of the hostility between the two countries, she could not place a telephone call from Karachi to Jerusalem. In 2005, Skype and other such services were not available. I thus suggested that she send her questions by email. I would arrange an interview through Peres’s press spokesman. I would ask him her questions just as she wrote them, tape-record his answers, and then transcribe and send them to her.

Peres’s office was only too enthusiastic to have him interviewed by a prominent Pakistani newspaper, and Peres himself was always more than happy to broadcast his indefatigable political optimism. So it happened that, one day in mid-January 2005, I sat across the table from Peres in the Knesset’s cafeteria, and instead of chatting him up, as usual, about the possibility that he might seek to recapture the leadership of the Labor Party—a routine issue of the type I dealt with on a daily basis on my politics beat—I interviewed him for a Pakistani newspaper, adding some questions of my own. I typed up his answers and sent them to a very pleased Ammara Durrani, who wrote them up for the News International.

Fourteen years later the two countries still had no official relations, but by this time Ammara Durrani and I could place video calls between Karachi and Tel Aviv and reminisce about that interview and its aftermath. Ammara told me that, at the time, she had not been entirely frank about her feelings.

“I was afraid,” she told me. “This was the first time that a top Israeli official had given a statement to a Pakistani media group. This was unprecedented. So I was terribly afraid and expected a negative impact, and a big one. What really gave me the confidence was support from my editors—it was an immediate ‘Yes, let’s do it.’” And they sure did. The interview appeared on the front page, following Durrani’s four-page article on the relationship between the two countries, citing officials in Israel, the US, and Pakistan.

The headline was “Peres: If Pakistan and India Can Do It, So Can Israel and Pakistan.” The subhead: “Says There Is No Shame in Peace; If Pakistan Wants to Be a Part of the ME Peace Process, It Cannot Do So with ‘Remote Control.’”

The piece led to neither peace nor diplomatic relations. A day after it appeared, in the dark of the night, a group of about thirty armed men on motorcycles arrived at the main offices of the Jang Media Group. They fired shots in the air, overwhelmed and beat the security guards, broke into the editorial offices, trashed the newsroom, and tried to set it on fire. Fortunately, no one was killed. They left shouting “Allahu Akbar!” It was clear to everyone in Pakistan that the attack was a direct response to the interview. A reaction not necessarily to what Peres had said but simply to the precedent that had been set, that a large and well-known Pakistani media outlet could publish an interview with a senior Israeli official calling for peace between the countries. The attack was reported by international news agencies, such as Reuters, largely because of this context. The Pakistani government condemned the attack, as did Reporters Without Borders. Closing the circle, the attack was also reported in Israel, where the interview that set off the incident took place. It was news creating news.

Let’s take a close look at what happened here.

Two journalists who had grown up on the far corners of a huge continent met in a class sponsored by the government of a country on a continent on the opposite side of the world, a superpower seeking to bolster its position by ongoing mediation of conflicts around the globe—at the same time that it itself occupied a large swath of the Middle East. The journalists’ countries were enemies, but the two of them could communicate freely, thanks to technology that collapses the huge distance and breaches the diplomatic and political barriers between them. Extremists responded to an interview signaling the possibility of peace and conciliation—with violence. The attack was reported all over the world, returning to Israel as a news item.

This entire incident, from beginning to end, took place over just a few days. It is a story of human connections, the viral nature of ideas, the technological challenge to hidebound politics, fundamentalism, media involvement. It’s also a story, of course, of capitalist interests, in this case the need for a newsworthy headline so as to sell newspapers. This latter factor is the prime generator of the whole sequence of events. The violent end of the story demonstrates how these supranational interactions pose an increasing threat to local power structures, traditions, and beliefs. Opponents do not, and will not, sit idly by. They are rebelling.

Just three years later it became clear that this doesn’t happen only in a country like Pakistan. It is happening everywhere, in different ways, and by different means. I saw that when, during a stay in London, the entire world slid into its most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A WALKER IN LONDON FINDS HIMSELF OUTSIDE TIME AND gradually oblivious to his schedule. The eyes drink in the street, its intensity, the sediments of humanity laid down and mineralized there over centuries. Human diversity is so typical of London today and so much a part of British history that one might think that all these people accept it as a matter of course. Not true. Many people on the street feel a profound sense of alienation, of being strangers among themselves. It is a feeling that both disconcerts and stimulates the city. Nearly 40 percent of Londoners were born outside Britain, most of them outside the European Union. Three hundred languages are spoken in the metropolis. Alienation is at the root of its current identity.

I was a stranger among those mutual strangers. My wife and I needed a break from the steeplechases of our local Israeli careers. We wanted to experience life elsewhere, so we decided to pursue graduate degrees far from home. New York, London, Paris, Washington—the truth is that it didn’t really matter to us where we might land. We came from a distant province and, as far as we were concerned, each of those places was the center of the universe, wonderfully foreign and tantalizing for us.

My route to the university was a fixed one. I strode along the streets bordering Bloomsbury to Theobalds Road and then to my favorite spot. It was in a sort of alleyway, narrow and ancient-looking, heading off from the main thoroughfare. Reeking of fried food, the alley was adorned with an old pub and a few cheap cafés offering tasteless sandwiches. I imagined it teeming with rats bearing the Black Death and people emptying excrement into the street. The alley’s filthy walls and congestion exuded that. The modern city had transformed this little walkway, making it almost exotic. It bustled with human traffic, the hurried strides of suits in the morning rush hour.

At the end of the alley, past a small park, I reached the clutch of buildings that form the urban campus of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), not far from Holborn station and the British Museum. It’s not Oxford or Cambridge—instead of green spaces and bike paths, there is the bustle of an ambitious city preoccupied with its own affairs.

It was September 2007, and the world was more or less coherent, even if deeply polarized between the ideology of the Bush administration and the international community. Those with sensitive ears could hear, as the bullet train of change shot forward, that the ties in the tracks laid by the previous era were groaning. But few yet had grasped the deep meaning of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath. My fellow-students and I in the LSE program were slated to study global politics, comprising global governance, the challenges being faced by economic institutions like the World Bank, international trade, interest rate policy, post-imperialism, equality and the growing international income gap, and immigration policy. As I came from a small country in the Middle East, and most of my time was devoted to its turbulent politics, I was less expert than my classmates about matters like international trade policy or foreign direct investment. However, unlike the rest of them, I was a journalist. I had covered election campaigns, seeing prime ministers go ballistic when they were asked probing questions. I covered the second Lebanon war, running for cover when rockets rained onto northern Israel, and went to the Oval Office to cover official visits. That was the baggage I arrived with. In other words, like every reporter in distress, I could make up for insufficient knowledge with anecdotes—like the story of the Pakistani newspaper. But my baggage, like that of the other students, would soon prove itself to be of very limited relevance. Just a few months later, in the midst of our studies, globalization would face its worst crisis since the Great Depression, and international politics would begin to change and challenge the assumptions an entire world order was built upon.

This tectonic shift in international economics and politics was, of course, not included in our weighty textbooks or in the lectures we heard, which had been written and delivered before the crisis. Only the most radical approaches in the syllabus addressed, in some way, the earthshaking turn of events that swept away the complacence of the experts.

At the end of 2007, the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, realized that a liquidity crisis was impending because of defaults on subprime housing mortgages, which led to a collapse in the speculative derivatives market based on those mortgages. The United States soon faced a large-scale financial crisis. At the beginning of 2008, the Bush administration tried to counter it with a stimulus package, but that didn’t work. Then, between the spring and autumn of that year, giant American firms like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers began to fail. These were the very same firms that my classmates had been hoping to get jobs at.

It was one of those instances in which our textbooks became obsolete as we read them, their theories proven invalid as soon as they were put to the test. As the crisis smashed models and refuted the pronouncements of pundits, we were forced to question much of what we thought was certain. Born in the 1980s or at the beginning of the 1990s, my classmates and I had grown up in a world of expanding interconnectedness, changing at an exponential pace. It had seemed obvious that the entire globe would become more integrated into a single economy and order, and that this would bring us and everyone else more prosperity. But then the false premise of globalization’s inevitability collapsed.

A Constant Revolution

During the last ten years, globalization has lost a great deal of its luster. The data itself points to the shrinking or stagnation of international trade, cross-border investment, and bank loans relative to world GDP, a phenomenon The Economist calls “slowbalisation.” The great economic crisis undoubtedly undermined globalization’s fundamental assumptions. Perhaps people simply tired of the optimistic prophecies of a globalized world that dangerously downplayed the dark side of the force.

But the fickle fashions of public discourse cannot change the stark truth that globalization is a constant revolution. I use the word “constant” to denote the aggressive way in which globalization is changing, in an ongoing and intensive way, how people have lived from time immemorial. It has created a climate in which human beings must cope with the world, materially and conceptually, as a single and integrated place. The minute such a matrix is in place, the circumstances of our lives change constantly and radically. It is a political perpetual motion machine fueled by the energy produced out of the ever-growing tension between the local and the global.

The ebb and flow of globalization shapes the international milieu, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Globalization expresses a fundamental uncertainty that has permeated history from the imperial ages of China and Rome to the present day. Is the world melding into a single whole, or remaining a collection of separate communities?

As glob...