April 14, 2012
Salman Tarik Kureshi

This piece is not about the 33-year long war in Afghanistan. Nor is it about the so-called war against terror, which some Islamists, ironically echoing Huntington, see as a war between Islam and the west. The war I am talking about is the Cold War, which ended in 1989, with the economic and political collapse of the USSR.

The historian Phillip Bobbitt holds, in his book Terror and Consent, that the Cold War was itself only a part of what he called the “epochal war of the twentieth century”, which began at Sarajevo in June 1914. This war, or a consecutive series of wars, was the climax of nationalism and the evolution of the nation state, which, in Bobbitt’s view, is now in the process of being replaced by the ‘market state’.

According to Bobbitt, earlier states were born of the conquests of princes and monarchs. These monarchic states were amoeboid entities, which shrank, expanded or coalesced according to the relative military and political skills of their rulers. A new kind of state began to emerge, first in western Europe, one that was not necessarily congruent with the monarch’s power. In England in the 17th century, the people cut off the head of their king on behalf of the British state. In the 18th century, the French people also beheaded their king, along with much of the titled aristocracy. Thus, painfully and violently, the specifically modern institution of the nation-state emerged on the stage of history. Now, the point of the nation-state — whether its justification lies in claims of ethnic homogeneity, linguistic unity, religious differentiation, ideological commitment, or any other motivation — is that it is a more or less unified geographical area that commands the continuous institutionalised loyalty and commitment of its citizens. And it defends its citizens militarily against other, usually neighbouring, states.

The stability or otherwise of a nation-state is not really affected by its ethnic or linguistic homogeneity. The Germans have arguably been among the most intensely nationalistic people in Europe, yet the German nation is divided among the three state entities of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Pakistan’s northern and eastern neighbours, China and India, despite their enormous vertical and horizontal diversities and competing consciousnesses, are massively stable facts of geography.

In his earlier work The Shield of Achilles, Bobbitt described the evolution of the state over the last six centuries, through the princely state, the kingly state and the nation-state. He is most interested in what lies beyond the nation-state. This new entity he calls the ‘market-state’.

The nation-state, developed over six centuries as the optimal institution for waging war and organising peace, derived its legitimacy from improving the welfare of its citizens through the provision of security and order, towards which end it used military force and the rule of law. The new market-states, Bobbitt suggests, use various forms of market relationships, offering to optimise the opportunities of their people. They are, or are developing as, states whose borders may even be hazy, compared to earlier rigid territorial markers, since the defence of those borders is not the primary preoccupation of their leaderships. Instead, the energies of these societies move increasingly towards trade and regional interdependence. One observes these kinds of developments happening in, for example, Europe, China and the ASEAN countries.

Just as the market-state flourishes best in a cross-border, globalised environment, its adversaries have also harnessed cross-border, globalised methods of combat. It is an interesting thought that not only amorphous entities like al Qaeda and the Taliban, who use atavistic militancy and armed violence against the forces of modernisation, but also American militarism and ‘exceptionalism’ are obstacles to the emergence of the globalised market state.

So are states like Pakistan, whose reactionary identity narratives and recidivist militarism are entirely out of sync with the times. Pakistan’s strategic role in the Cold War was as part of the US’s anti-communist cordon sanitaire in southern Asia, and this helped us build a strong army and air force and to lay the basis for the kind of elitist economic development we had selected for ourselves. More, we were the military nemesis to the largest non-communist Soviet ally, India, and thereby helped divide the possible Third World unity. We were the US’s conduit to China, and thereby helped break up the communist monolith. Later, we were a staging post for the US’s anti-communist Islamist warriors.

All this strategic utility to the US ended in 1989 and only a transactional on-again-off-again relationship remained. But the Pakistani powers-that-be have not grasped that the Cold War is over and the benefits thereof are no longer available. There are no longer two superpowers, between whom one can choose sides or play off against one another. There is only a loose, but fairly uniform set of values embodied in the phrase ‘international opinion’, against which Pakistan’s continuing preoccupations and attitudes are seen as negatives.

Let’s face it. We cannot expect to snap and snarl at the sole superpower on one side, while seeking its largesse on the other. As Ahmed Rashid pointed out in a recent interview published in this newspaper: “The leadership is not waking up to the really sad realities. There’s this feeling that somehow the Americans will come bail us out, the Chinese will come bail us out. In this day and age, nobody will.”

Since the Cold War ended, numerous other nations have aligned themselves with the new scenarios, experiencing an era of reforming and reshaping their economies, reorienting societal values, embracing new technologies, developing regional trade relationships, and most importantly, establishing peaceful borders. All these changes simply bypassed us.

And there lies the problem. Whether it is our intelligence agencies, with their bizarre double games, or our armed forces, with their expensive shopping lists, or our civilian elite, who skimmed their shares from the inflow of goodies, nobody seems to grasp that the Cold War is long over. The pre-1989 goodies that flowed are simply not there anymore.

Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was a former Japanese army intelligence officer who remained in the forests of the Philippines until 1974, refusing to accept that World War II had ended nearly 30 years ago. Is this characterisation valid for our civilian and military elites? Will we continue to let history go on passing us by, increasing only in numbers as we sink deeper into denial, squalor and internecine violence?

The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet
-Daily Times