Allister Sparks
TRAVELLING in Europe as it undergoes a surge of recidivist nationalism in the midst of its great experiment in forming a union of 28 member states, has put me in mind of a conversation I once had with the grande dame of European journalism.
Countess Marion Döhnhoff was in her nineties at the time, but still working for the fine German newspaper, Die Zeit, that she had helped found after World War II. Hers had been a vividly eventful life. She had been part of an anti-Nazi group during the war, four of whose members were executed for attempting to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944 – 70 years ago on Sunday – but the countess herself escaped arrest.
Then, as the Red Army advanced on her baronial estate in East Prussia, Marion abandoned the old family castle, left her Mercedes-Benz in its garage, and mounted a horse to ride for seven weeks to the northern city of Hamburg. Why the horse? I asked. “To go off-road,” she explained. “The roads were so jam-packed with fugitives I would never have made it by car.”
So it came about that on one of her many trips to South Africa, where the race conflict engaged her sharp sense of world issues, I asked this magnificent woman who had seen and done so much a question that had long intrigued me.
“In your long life,” I asked, “is there one great truth above all others that you have learned?”
There was a long, thoughtful pause. Then: “Yes. That there is no truth. There is no true way of world order. Hegel was right. The pendulum swings.”
She was referring, of course, to the philosophy of the major German thinker of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Friedrich Hegel, who contended that all facets of history, from ideas to politics, the arts and religion, manifested themselves in a set of opposites and contradictions that ultimately integrated and united.
“Thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” was his framework, in which the pendulum of history swings back and forth, but always keeps moving as the synthesis becomes a new thesis that generates its own antithesis. This Hegelian “dialectic” was to influence almost every philosopher for the next two centuries, including Karl Marx, with his concept of “dialectic materialism” as the core theme of communism.
As my own years have advanced since that conversation with Countess Döhnhoff, I have become more and more convinced of the truth of her observation. There is no perfect system.
Yet as history unfolds we keep encountering ideologues who believe they have discovered it. These are humankind’s most dangerous moments, for any system purporting to offer permanent happiness to all cannot tolerate opposition. No-one can be allowed to oppose so noble an objective. It must be a one-party system.
Thus communism offered the perfection of eventual equality for all, the exploitation of none – until it crumbled under the weight of bureaucratic domination and the loss of individual freedom. At which point free market fundamentalism claimed victory, with the triumph of “the Washington consensus”, which, like a rising tide, was supposed to lift all boats. The US political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed the victory with his book, The End of History– in the Hegelian sense. The only trouble was that the triumphalism introduced a phase of greed, boom and bust. The Great Recession.
Today the world is in turmoil just about everywhere. People are on the move, trading and travelling. Globalisation is generating its own reaction, as the Muslim world reacts against the homogenising influences of Western, particularly American, culture and economic dominance as well as the universality of the English language; while at the same time the West is experiencing an unprecedented inflow of economic migrants, from lands of poverty to those of wealth and opportunity.
Eurosceptic far right parties scored heavily in the recent European elections, more than doubling their seats in the Brussels parliament, with Britain’s UK Independence Party (Ukip) and Marine le Pen’s French National Front winning more seats than any other in their respective countries.
The strong showing of Ukip, formed just 11 years ago, has established it as a force in British politics. With a general election due next year, this has alarmed British Prime Minister David Cameron into announcing that he will hold a referendum to decide whether Britain should remain in the EU or not.
Meanwhile, Scotland will vote in a referendum on September 18 to decide whether it should become an independent state. If the “yes” vote wins that will sever Scotland’s centuries-year-old relationship with Britain as part of the United Kingdom.
To outsiders it sounds like a dotty idea, since all the evidence shows that Scotland would lose out financially with severance, and the Scots are not known for their eagerness to forfeit money.
Yet the nostalgia of ancient grievances against the Sassenachs runs strongly in the Scottish bloodstream, so opinion polls are showing that the gap between the projected “no” to independence vote and the “yes” vote has narrowed from 31 percent in 2012 to between 41 percent and 45 percent this month. Enough to alarm JK Rowling, the pro-union Scottish author of the Harry Potter series, to donate £1 million (R18m) to the “no” campaign.
What all this points to is that people everywhere are reacting against the closeness of “the other” as globalisation shrinks the world into Marshall McLuhan’s “global village.” McLuhan’s thesis is generating its own antithesis.
People in the developed world of Old Europe are resenting the influx of economic refugees from the poorer countries, many of them ex-colonies, while those in western Europe are resentful of the freedom EU membership gives to work-seekers from eastern Europe, historically the poorer part of the continent, to move into their countries not only to snap up lower-paid jobs but, as some in the western countries see it, to dilute their national identity as well.
Jobs and culture. Economics and religion. These are the flashpoints. Millions of Muslims have moved into Christian Europe, from Turkey to Germany, from Indo-China and the Maghreb to France, from the Dutch East Indies to the Netherlands, from Pakistan and India into Britain. The French have tried, foolishly I believe, to prevent Muslim women from wearing the head-scarf. Resentments are easily provoked. The English have been more sensible, leaving individuals to be themselves so long as it harms no-one else.
London today hardly seems like the English capital it used to be. A walk about its streets puts one in contact with a multitude of different languages and skin complexions. Many English conservatives find this upsetting. Others find it hugely stimulating, for London is now a truly multi-racial, multi-cultural world city, vibrant in its cosmopolitanism.
The key thing to note is that this is an unstoppable trend. Modern communications and mass travel make it so. In Hegelian terms, this is the new synthesis, emerging out of the integration of the world’s past nationalisms and its globalising present.
The world is becoming one and the challenge ahead is that we all have to learn to live with one another in peace.
In that, at least, the new non-racial South Africa finds itself a pioneer. But then we, too, are experiencing our Hegelian swings.