(John McCann)
POLITICS
In an interview a few days after his inauguration in January this year, Donald Trump famously stated: “The world is a mess. The world is as angry as it gets. The world is an angry place.” Academics do not often agree with Trump, but his summary of international affairs as an angry place has reminded academics of the emotional state of the world and the need to focus on anger.
Understanding the underlying state emotions that inspire and perpetuate the antagonistic collective identities of these states can explain the endurance of anger between these states, and potentially contribute to resolving the impasse.
Barely a month after Trump’s statement, Pankaj Mishra’s book The Age of Anger: A History of the Present was published. Mishra sketches a world full of rage, which, he predicts, has not seen its high-water mark. Progress and enlightenment, Mishra tells us, have failed us despite turbo-capitalism, the global export of democracy, hyper-globalisation and technological advances. Too many people are left behind in a world that increasingly alienates them, resulting in resentment and anger.
Anger is a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure or hostility. It can also be a reaction to a provocation, a wrongful violation or an insult. Anger is not new, Mishra reminds us. Like Mishra, I suggest that anger is one of the prevailing and compelling emotions in contemporary societies. But, in departing from Mishra, I propose several other features of the current age of anger and I refer to new anger.
First, I propose that states — and not only their populations — have emotions such as anger. State anger is the filtration of popular and elite emotions. In turn, these popular and elite emotions distil from elites, the population, national identity and interests, and the population’s collective political memory and a state’s history.
Some states demonstrate emotions that characterise them as angry states. Examples of this are events such as 9/11, the Arab Spring, the rise of Islamic State, the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Charlie Hebdo and Danish cartoons incidents, international reaction against Brexit, the heated and abruptly ended telephone conversation between Trump and the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, on February 1, and North Korea’s repeated provocations of the international community by testing ballistic missiles. Resurgent populist anger has been ascribed to economic inequalities and the cultural backlash thesis. To this I would add nationalistic rhetoric (America First, Make America Great Again and the Leave [the European Union] campaign), stereotyping (Angry Arabs, Ugly Americans and Axis of Evil), distrust of political leaders, corrupt elites, large-scale immigration and political alienation.
An emotion like anger is a stimuli that determines a state’s worldview and behaviour. What makes states angry? Perceived humiliation, changes in social and moral status and prestige, unresolved historical grievances and the hegemonic behaviour of other states.
Emotions such as humiliation and betrayal contribute to the production of anger, violence and war. In other words, emotions precede, influence and follow the decisions states make.
Second, anger remains socioculturally significant. Anger is only one of the seven deadly sins and one of the five stages of grief. Some cultures regard expressions of anger as a taboo and a sign of weakness but recognise the wrath of God. But symbolic expressions of anger are socially acceptable.
The All Blacks, for example, continue to perform the traditional Maori haka (traditionally an ancestral war dance expressing anger and strength) before rugby games. The etymology of the word emotion refers to a social moving, stirring and agitation. Alternatively, in the modern lexicon, emotions always cause a stir, especially unresolved, accumulated intergenerational humiliation and anger.
Third, the commercialisation of anger through angertainment. Angry Birds, for example, is a popular computer game. Eight film sequences of The Fast & the Furious have been released. Disney cartoons aimed at child audiences are full of anger and violence. And social media is “all the rage”.
Fourth, the industrialisation of anger. War has been described as organised anger. War is also industrialised anger. Annual sales of arms and military services by the top 100 companies in the past year amounted to $370.7-billion. Ironically, anger management is a growing global industry. In the United States, for example, this industry is worth $ 16.5-billion.
Fifth, the narcissistic and anonymous display of anger. Narcissistic rage links shame and humiliation, aggressiveness and vengeance. Public hangings, online videos and live streaming of murders and road killings have been reported. Moreover, the release of classified documents such as the Panama Papers and those on WikiLeaks are additional examples where anger has been personified as the anger and narcissism of individuals and groups such as Julian Assange and Anonymous.
Sixth, sacred anger and political self-sacrifice. The events of 9/11 are widely regarded as a global turning point in respect of religion and the mobilisation effect of anger. Since September 2016, Islamic State’s online magazine Rumiyah (Arabic for Roman) is published in English, Arabic, German, Turkish, French, Indonesian and Uyghur. Rumiyah’s reference to Rome is from a hadith containing Qur’anic prophecy that Muslims will conquer Rome.
Whereas the kamikaze of World War II or soldiers in war represent state-endorsed political self-sacrifice, contemporary suicide bombing, suicide terrorism, hunger strikes by enemy combatants and self-immolation as political self-sacrifice express anger and suffering (martyrdom) on behalf of others.
Angry states practice ragecraft as a form of statecraft. How do we know that a state is angry? Often, anger is expressed in accusation and blame, a discourse humiliating or shaming another state, strongly-worded statements, the recalling of diplomats, embargoes, sanctions and terminating diplomatic ties. A state strategically calculates the dangers and risks associated with its anger, making the display of this emotion a calculated rational decision.
One of the characteristics of anger is that it is always relational — even intimate. An angry state is always in an emotional relationship with the target state. States that seem to fall in this category include India and Pakistan, the US and North Korea, Arab states of the Middle East and Israel, China and Japan, Russia and its former Soviet Republics, Libya, and the US and Cuba.
According to Gallup’s 2015 Global Emotions report, which measured feelings and emotions in 148 states, respondents from Iraq and Iran seemed the angriest in the world. Those from Cambodia, Liberia, South Sudan, Uganda, Cyprus, Greece, Togo, Bolivia and the Palestinian Territories also reported high levels of anger.
Recent examples of confession and guilt (Germany for the Holocaust), remorse and apology, for example, includes Russia’s 2010 apology to Poland for the Katyn massacre. In some instances, states such as Cuba, the former Soviet Union and Libya have expressed their anger towards the West as a collective and not necessarily always against one particular state.
Angry states understand emotions, and are skilful in deliberately constructing and displaying anger, thus recognising the political utility of anger. Although anger can threaten relations between states, it also protects what a state values. Anger is about what matters to them.
A state can also frame an issue as emotional or explosive. The US’s rallying of its own anger as well as its ability to rally collective displays of anger with its Coalition of the Willing in the wake of 9/11 is an example of this. The US has been very successful in constructing and reinforcing the War on Terror beyond a mere US interest into a global phenomenon.
Another characteristic of this age of anger is the anger of state and political leaders, rather than diplomats expressing their states’ emotions. Diplomacy does not seem to be the only anger management strategy available to states. Leaders’ anger is increasingly reported and tweeted. Trump took to Twitter to get to the White House. A serial tweeter, the US president has repeatedly displayed his anger against opponents, including the media, Democrats, Russians and North Korea.
Apart from its strategic utility for states, danger can lurk in anger. It can undermine trust between and confidence in states, it can cloud a state’s rationality, act as a motivation for a state’s belligerent behaviour, signal a state’s weakness and result in it being the target of reversed anger, result in destructive aggression and war, and justify state behaviour.
Subsequent to 9/11, a very angry US created a new geopolitics of anger with references to an Axis of Evil (North Korea, Iraq and Iran), an “Arc of Instability”, a Coalition of the Willing, a War on Terror. Apart from this, the US’s emotional state in the wake of these events has resulted in emotions of anger and fear resulting in legal exceptions such as renditions, detaining “enemy combatants” in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and the reinforcement of American exceptionalism. In other words, the US has emotionally legitimised its exceptionalism.
History is the graveyard of anger, the present its incubator. We have not seen the end of new anger in politics or of the politics of new anger.
Jo-Ansie van Wyk is professor in the department of political sciences at Unisa. This article is based on her inaugural lecture, The Age of Anger: Angry States and Emotions in Contemporary International Relations