Harry Kaulen (pronounced ”Cowling”) is 70 and looks it. His black skin is deeply lined from years in the sun. He is a gardener — and a particularly knowledgeable one.
Twenty years ago his wife went off on the holiday of a lifetime to visit an old friend who lived in the United States. Swept off her feet by Los Angeles and a new lover, she never returned.
Heartbroken, Kaulen devoted himself to a relentless acquisition of knowledge. He studies the encyclopaedia and the Economist every day. He knows the capital city of every country in the world (except Malawi, I discovered).
Kaulen lives in Belize, a former British colony then called British Honduras. This time of year Belize City is trapped between two celebrations 14 days apart, semi-paralysed by a state of almost perpetual partying.
The first celebration, on September 10, marks the battle of Fort George when the Spanish were gloriously repelled in 1798 — though, as Kaulen willingly admits, it was not really much of a battle. It seems that it was the world’s second-largest barrier reef and not the resolute attitude of the English defenders, who had got there first, that prevailed against the Spanish Armada. More a ”turkey fight”, as one historian put it.
This weekend the Belizeans turn towards the commemoration of their independence from British rule on September 24 1981. A devoted Anglophile, Kaulen insists that it is the first date that is more wildly celebrated.
”The English gave us institutions and infrastructure”, he says. ”Just look at the condition of our neighbours, all Spanish colonies.”
Certainly, there is a docility to Belizean democracy that is in marked contrast to the instability and political turmoil that has bedevilled Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Mexico. The cool hand of English reserve permeates the political culture.
Yet parliamentary democracy is number three on the list of 12 things that Kaulen believes the British Empire gave the world, behind the English language and the dictionary as its primary tool of interpretation.
Putting aside the linguistic hegemonic, indulging the inclusion of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, accepting the telephone, the printing press and the first computer, acknowledging the Industrial Revolution for its technological advances if not the capitalist excesses it spawned, and positively welcoming cricket, rugby and football, it is perhaps the only item on the list that one might quibble with.
Long on form and rather shorter on substance, the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy tends to fail even Kaulen’s own modest test: a system in which the majority get their way while the minority have their say. Representation at the cost of participation.
As Belize began its long weekend of partying on the night of September 10, the Imperial power of this age, the United States, began a different form of commemoration. The second anniversary of 9/11 appears to herald a new period of, perhaps, a deeper self-reflection. At least that’s the hope.
The New York Times of September 11 carried a mammoth 3 000-word piece on its op-ed page by the academic Robert Wright that began with the words: ”Among the ideas that seemed to collapse along with the twin towers two years ago was a view of globalisation as a kind of manifest destiny.
”Unlike the 19th century version of manifest destiny, this vision didn’t involve expanding American borders,” the article continues, ”Rather, America’s values — notably economic and political liberty — would spread beyond those borders, covering the planet.”
The ”manifest destiny” of the 19th century was, of course, the British Empire, inspired by the impetus and market needs of its Industrial Revolution.
Despite his search for ”root causes”, Wright fails to see as a cause what he later goes on to condemn anyway for its effects. He fails to record a more potent parallel. The Industrial Revolution in Britain created a massive over-supply of goods that needed new markets to justify a decent return on the capital investment.
For decades now the US economy has faced an almost identical situation. It over-supplies to such an extent that it too must access markets if it is not to hyperventilate dangerously. This imperative has driven US foreign policy since World War II.
The editorial column opposite Wright’s piece contained two conflicting messages. The first argued that the second anniversary of 9/11 was the moment to reassess the form of patriotism that the attack on the World Trade Centre provoked.
”It has become, for some people in some ways, a more brittle expression of national sentiment — a blind statement of faith that does more to divide Americans from one another than to join them together.”
The leader column then encourages Americans to accept that it is ”not the least bit unpatriotic to question some of the arguments that led to war in Iraq”. This is encouraging. Slowly, the notion of dissent is returning to American political discourse. ”It’s time to move on” is the general sentiment. But move on to where?
For beneath this editorial, a second, headed ”The Other September 11”, reminds us of the insidious involvement of the Nixon administration in the coup that unseated Chilean President Salvador Allende and replaced him with the murderous Augusto Pinochet.
A new book by Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File, presents declassified documents showing that the Nixon administration began plotting to bring down Allende just hours after he took office.
Nixon feared that Allende’s socialism would close off markets and encourage resistence to US commerce throughout the hemisphere. What has changed? A lot in fact: the stakes are higher, the needs of US capital ever greater.
As Wright says, ”The architects of America’s national security policy at once grasp cross-cultural interdependence and don’t. They see that prosperous and free Muslim countries are good for America. But they don’t see that the very logic behind this goal counsels against pursuing it crudely, with primary reliance on force and intimidation.”
And, further, ”they don’t appreciate how easily, amid modern technology, resentment and hatred metastasize”. Witness, says Wright, the spectacular inattention to the needs of the Iraqis now. At least the British left behind institutions and infrastructure, reminds Keulen. What will the Americans leave behind?
Thus has this American imperial power fought two major wars in two years in the name of liberal intervention but really to extend the interests of neo-liberal capitalism, by definition a throw-back to the laissez-faire world of the Victorian age.
Seven hours drive north of Belize City, the World Trade Organisation meeting in Cancun, Mexico, ended without an agreement. In Uruguay in 1993 the US and the European Union used their power to get access to new, open markets in poor countries without making any substantial concessions themselves. This round had a different outcome. The Belizean trade minister arrived home claiming that he was the author of the phrase ”rather no deal than a bad deal” that had united the developing world against the G10.
If this unity holds it might prove to be a seminal moment. One in which a more incisive grasp of global political economy takes root, without which Wright’s craving for a new age of moral enlightenment and global governance might actually be worth more than the paper on which Kaulen reads it.