Global Citizenship and the Legacy of Empire

April Biccum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135218973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates the parallels between mainstream development discourse and colonial discourse as theorized in the work of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said. Aiming to repoliticize post-colonial theory by applying its understandings to contemporary political discourses, author April Biccum critically examines the ways in which development in its current form has recently begun to be promoted among the metropolitan public.

Biccum contends that what has begun is a sustained marketing campaign for development that is a repetition, augmentation and ultimately much greater success of the work of the Empire Marketing Board of 1926. Demonstrating how this marketing campaign for development attempts to facilitate support for neo-liberal globalization, Biccum contends that this theatre of legitimation is emerging in response to growing critical voices and counter-hegemonic activity on the international stage.

Featuring in depth analyses of the UK, cultural values, DfID, the commemoration of the slave trade and campaigns including Live8 and Make Poverty History, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of postcolonial studies, development studies, and international political economy. It will also offer insights valuable to a wider range of subjects including critical theory and globalization studies.

1

A shift in vocabulary

In this ‘new’ era of threat, crisis and (in) security how do we understand and contextualize this contemporary historical moment? Wherefore the twentieth-century utopian dreams of socialism or liberal democracy? Whither the ‘end of history’, the promise of modernity? Why, half a century from the crisis of fascism are ‘we’ still not ‘safe’, our freedom secured, the world developed and democracy and prosperity still not guaranteed for all? Amid the war on terror, the resulting crisis in civil liberties, the mélange of international security, the ‘threats’ posed by global poverty, the imminent environmental catastrophe, global migration flows, asylum and refugee crisis, there has been a decisive shift in vocabulary in the discourses of development and modernity.

Accompanying and prompted by the terror wars is the re-emergence of the figure of empire. I say figure because this has become a renewed formal narrative applied to this contemporary moment. An avalanche of academic literature, translated into public and popular discourse, has erupted, narrating this contemporary moment as a ‘new’ era of imperialism (Cooper, 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Cox, 2003a, 2003b; Simes, 2003; Ikenberry, 2004; Lal, 2004; Mann, 2004; Saull, 2004; Wade, 2004), for which it is largely apologetic, or a ‘new’ globalized empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000) which, even if normatively opposed, is regarded as distinct from the European state-led empires which preceded it. The academic debate on the left has configured largely around Hardt and Negri's now seminal work (Balakrishnan, 2003), and the debate on the right has made the case for a New American Century of intervention and state reconstruction (Mabee, 2004). In the popular domain, Niall Ferguson's Empire has been televised, popular works have multiplied, and the reconfiguring of imperialism as a history wrongfully maligned has appeared here and there in the popular press as it has in academic discourse. So it would seem that the shift in vocabulary in the mainstream discourse of development has also been accompanied by metropolitan attempts in popular and public discourses on the centre and right of the spectrum to normalize the ‘new’ imperialism, justify the (re) colonization of the Middle East, pose neo-liberal capitalism as the only option for global governance, and narrate this contemporary moment as a rupture from its past through a repackaging of British colonial history in an apologetic frame. All of these intersecting discourses are examples of what I call narratives of contemporaneity¹ competing narratives occurring across disciplines which implicitly or explicitly attempt to narrate this contemporary moment, and in so doing, implicitly or explicitly corroborate a narrative of history. I begin with the premise that these narratives are politically operational, that is, they engender political effects through their repetition in public discourse.

While on the left the debate has configured around the nature of social change for a new kind of global power, with a few critical voices asserting that echoes from the past remain (Arrighi 2003; Seth 2003; Amin 2004; Reno 2004; Mabee 2004), the connection does not seem to have been made, within even the critical literature in international relations and on that of development, that the debate over the ‘new’ American imperialism has occurred virtually in tandem with a ‘new’ agenda in development and in social policy across Europe, comprising a multifaceted shift in vocabulary around poverty, modernity and contemporaneity from within the discourses of authority. There has been a shift in vocabulary which, this book will show, is being aggressively marketed. Broadly, the twentieth century can and has been periodized by a dividing line between state-led Fordist models of development and the expansive, networked flows of the global girdling phenomenon of globalization which has undergone extensive theorization (Hirst and Thompson 1996, Friedman, 1999; Held et al., 1999; McMichael, 2008). Not only have the activities and nature of states and governments, military, communications, trade and finance architectures changed, along with the running commentary, the architecture for international development is said to have changed along with the discourse in which it is embedded. States that were previously developing internally are now being instructed to gear their development toward a global market (DfID, 2000a, 2000b; McMichael, 2008). Development policy makers are now telling us that globalization is the name of the game and it brings with it a new host of problems predicated on the nature of a networked and interconnected world. So there is a new kind of poverty, a globalized poverty which through the complex interactions of the market will affect ‘us’ here in the metropolis, and it is regarded as a cause of a whole host of economic and social problems from environmental to civil/military, and to pose a significant threat. The global development architecture has responded to the new globalized poverty by a resurgence of poverty reduction mechanisms as the renewed focus of policy instruments after the perceived failure of structural adjustment, from conditionality to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and development aid, projects and instruments have been redesigned to target the new global poverty and the resurgence of inter-state conflict and postcolonial ‘state failure’. Governments across Western Europe have shown their commitment to the eradication of the new global poverty by introducing time-bound targets both nationally and internationally. The international commitment comes to us in the form of the Millenium Development Goals established at the UN meeting in Johannesburg in 2000. The MDGs and these shifts in the global development architecture combine with the new humanitarianism of the UN in its paradigm of ‘human security’ and the militarized interventions in the ‘war on terror’ to form a ‘new’ global interventionism. Though exactly how new all of this is, is precisely what is under interrogation here. The masses of literature on empire and the new imperialism may make reference to the US–UK relationship and comparisons between Britain's nineteenth-century empire and that of the twentieth-century US are on offer, but on the whole the focus is on the US with few comments made about the contribution Britain's colonial legacy might be making to the ‘new’ imperialism, except through apologetic accounts of how the US might follow Britain's largely ‘successful’ imperial endeavour. This book argues that one such contribution can be located in Britain's role in international development and the Labour government's recent new initiative to garner public support for development under neo-liberal terms. If, as some of the literature suggests, there are lines of continuity between American and British empires (Barkawi and Laffey, 2002; Spark, 2003; Steinmetz, 2005), these lines of continuity must be legible within UK policy itself in relation to its empire. If empire is a category of analysis that applies to this contemporary moment, the UK must figure in a large aspect in the nature of global empire, however theorized.² I argue in this book that continuities between nineteenth- and twentieth-century empire are legible in the architecture of development, and I take the UK as my focus to illustrate with recourse to postcolonial theory exactly to what extent British rhetoric on development, as mouthed through its recently formed Department for International Development (DfID), bears still the mark of empire. If empire as a category of analysis is going to be redeployed to characterize this contemporary moment, then the British contribution to this project needs to be theorized in a way that is not apologetic on the legacy of empire, and which foregrounds the epistemic silence around the fact of British empire that has characterized disciplines in the human sciences and the architecture of twentieth-century global governance (Barkawi and Laffey, 2002). Britain portrays itself as a leader in the global development project and has only been able to do so in ambivalent relationship to its colonial past. In order to understand how Britain has postured itself to be this global leader we need to take account of Britain's national narrative, which has undergone a complex crisis around the fact of empire, which has been engineered and reorganized through a marketing campaign for development, which attempts to reconfigure Britain's global role and its partnership with the US in global leadership.

In the last thirty years or so the UK has undergone a series of shocks to its conception of itself that configure easily around its former colonial legacy. For instance, there has been a revolution in its race relations apparatus in the wake of violence and civil disturbances within and upon its black and minority ethnic and migrant communities. Beginning with the Scarman Report in response to the 1981 Brixton riots, Britain's race relations policy has undergone a series of shifts. Initially, the finding that the civil disturbances were a function of ‘racial disadvantage’ unleashed government funding targeted at redressing the problems and needs of Britain's Black and minority ethnic communities, producing a host of Black voluntary sector organizations that Arun Sivanadan of the Institute for Race Relations argues effectively stifled the voluntary inter-community political activism and solidarity of the 1960s and 1970s and captured a select group of middle-class representatives pushing government social policy and acting as mouthpieces for entire communities (Sivanandan, 1998). As a result of the death of Steven Lawrence in 1994, the public inquest admitted that the problem was the existence of institutional racism, and the government began legislating for the mainstreaming of positive race relations in the 2001 Race Relations (Amendment) Act. Further civil disturbances in 2001 in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham produced an abrupt reversal of Britain's multicultural polices of the 1980s by proclaiming that policies of voluntary sector funding had led to communities leading ‘parallel lives’ and that Britain's postwar and postcolonial migration boom had produced a fractured nation. A debate over British values has ensued and a civil society push for social cohesion figures largely in the crisis in the asylum system and the tightening of immigration controls, in conjunction with the global terror wars and the internal threat of ‘homegrown terrorists’. Meanwhile Britain is strengthening its role in the ‘new’ international development agenda, and through its partnership with the US over Iraq and Afganistan has positioned itself as a global leader. These events signal what I'm calling a crisis in Britain's national narrative coalescing around this shift in race relations from multiculturalism to social cohesion, a debate over British values and the emerging marketing campaign for development. A central tension in this shift is the slippage around the need to not quite fully acknowledge its former role as imperial hegemon and the full implications of Britain's engineering of the transatlantic slave trade. The tenuous admission of the existence of institutional racism (quickly commuted to a policy of social cohesion) is never adequately linked to the racist apparatus that was necessary to empire. Changes in Britain's national narrative around the fact of empire are manifesting themselves in a review of the national curriculum which will revise how history is taught in schools under proposals that it be neutral and ‘factual’ on the subject of empire, while Gordon Brown's speeches to the Fabian society in 2006 have argued for ‘liberty’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘fairness’ to be promoted as Britain's core values in the public sphere, and that these recovered values will equip Britain for a leadership role in the global economy (Brown, 2006). Other manifestations include the commemoration in 2007 of the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, which as we shall see in Chapter 3, was done in such a way as to emphasize Britain's role in abolition and de-emphasize Britain's role as a key player in the trade. This manner of narrating Britain's slave history is common, as is evidenced by the work of Manchester historian Marika Sherwood (Sherwood, 2004). All the while the occasion of commemoration has been used to highlight slavery's continuance under global capitalism which has then been operationalized in support of the development agenda for Africa, because development under neo-liberal terms is posited as the redress for modern forms of abject labour. An about-face is no more evident than in the fact that 2007 saw the city of Liverpool commemorate its role in the slave trade while 2008 saw Liverpool honoured by UNESCO as Europe's ‘City of Culture’. The fact is that despite recent apologia for empire (Ferguson, 2004), if Britain were truly honest to its citizenry and the world about slavery and empire its national cohesion would unravel at the seams. This slippage is thus crucial in the context of the debate over America's global leadership which sees the figure of empire re-emerge as an applicable category of analysis for global relations, an apologia and legitmation for global security or a normative accusation against what are regarded as the newest forms of global oppression when all the while the ghost of the British empire³ haunts these debates within international studies.

It is within this context that the crisis in Britain's national narrative is yielding to the marketing of the development agenda in the areas of education, civil society and media. The national narrative of tolerance and multiculturalism is being morphed into a national narrative configured around development and poverty reduction as both a moral imperative of Britain's foreign and multilateral policy, and incumbent upon Britain's political interest internationally. The second reason I focus on the UK is because with the election of the Labour government in 1997, the discourse of mainstream development in the UK has undergone a vital shift which includes the introduction of its own department, the DfID (as opposed to being housed within the Foreign Office as it was under the Conservative government), whose remit has been not only to converge with the EU and the US around policy and spending for development but also (and this is crucial) to garner public support for development through the use of promotional literature and educational schemes, not least of which is the introduction of the global dimension in the national curriculum. Interestingly and significantly, the DfID situates its origins with the responsibility of the British government for the development of its colonies in the 1929 Colonial Development Act. The election of this government and its establishing of the DfID is concurrent with relevant shifts in social policy and organizational direction throughout Europe towards poverty, security and migration. Previous to the establishment of the DfID as its own government department, the foreign aid function of the British government was intermittently either its own ministry (Ministry of Overseas Development (ODM)) or housed under foreign and Commonwealth affairs as the Overseas Development Administration (ODA). The establishment of the DfID is significant for the policy and ideology of this Labour government with respect to the role envisaged for England in the world and its relationship to trade and the Majority World. The DfID was inaugurated as a symbol of the Labour government's commitment to ‘development’ as a more benevolent foreign policy, and it has a more significant role in government and a large and increasing budget. In addition, its role in advocacy has increased substantially and is intimately connected to the new poverty reduction agenda.

The new global commitment to a reduction in the new global poverty has manifested itself in significant changes to education and the communication of the need for a new poverty reduction agenda to the metropolitan public. Changes in the education sector have been responding to globalization and the new global knowledge economy by making changes which aim to foster the skills and values needed to produce a competitive citizenry and a competitive education sector product. Changes in the nature of global trade have meant that national education systems perform the dual role of producing both a marketable citizenry and education sector and an exportable education service (Robertson et al., 2002). The education sector has also become a key area in the communication of the new poverty reduction agenda in the form of ‘development education’ a policy area which until very recently had only been the remit of civil society but has since the late 1990s been the subject of increasing government funding and attention across the UK, the US and the EU. It is this latter aspect of education which is the subject of this book, as it is a key feature of both the shift in vocabulary around poverty, modernity and development and a key area in which this shift in vocabulary is being communicated and produced. Thus the UK began its marketing campaign with the election of the Labour government in 1997 which established the Department for International Development with a dual remit of development abroad and raising awareness of the need for development at home. The intervening years have seen studies to establish the exact nature of public perceptions of development, joint work with the BBC to counter some of these public perceptions, and a major funding stream, the Development Awareness Fund (DAF), which is responsible for rolling out the marketing campaign in all areas of civil society from education, media, faith groups and trade unions.

Since then the US and EU have followed suit. The formation of a Legislative and Public Affairs arm of USAID is responsible for forming relationships with US embassies in developing countries to promote citizen awareness of the ‘generosity’ of the American people via US development aid, and does the same work domestically under the Development Education programme. The development policy of the EU is relatively young in comparison to the US and UK but it too has begun to engage in activities meant to gauge and raise public awareness of development. Two Eurobarometer reports from 2007 titled ‘Europeans and Development Aid’ and ‘Citizens of the New EU Member States and Development Aid’ respectively, detail the sentiments of existing EU citizens and new EU citizens towards development. For the EU is it particularly important that the citizens of the new member states understand the obligation for development that membership implies, despite the fact that many of the new member states were only recently themselves the recipients of development aid. EU partnership with civil society for development education has been focussing largely on the citizens of new member states.

Domestic marketing campaigns for development in the US, EU and UK are all also linked to transnational endeavours and the increasing ‘Hollywoodization’ of advocacy. The mass spectacle of Live 8 in 2005 has seen the increasing involvement of Hollywood celebrities, with the likes of Madonna and Angelina Jolie using adoption to highlight the plight of African children, with Bono and Bob Geldof diversifying their activities in the ONE campaign to include advocacy on policy and public-private partnerships to endorse the development agenda, such as the Red Label and the Global Fund to Fight Aids. Where for Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1994) culture in the nineteenth century was purposefully separated from politics in order to facilitate an imperial world view (Said, 1994), what we are currently witnessing in the shadow of the anti-globalization movement, is bringing a specific, sanitized version of popular protest together with popular culture. What is erupting is a mass marketing campaign for development that has its origins in the UK, is being extended across the US and EU, has erupted in a multilateral commodity spectacle, and must be theorized under the rubric of empire.

Recent critical interventions in development studies (Ferguson, 1990; Duffield, 2001a, 2001b; Harrison, 2004) have emphasized that development, as a technology or architecture of power, has as its aim the production of appropriate self-sustaining subjectivities in the Global South amenable to their insertion in the global economy, and that this development architecture, therefore, is directed at changing behaviour, managing threats, and producing entrepreneurs who can ‘trade their way out of poverty’⁴ (Duffield, 2001b). My argument here is that the ‘new’ development agenda is reinforced by efforts to produce the appropriate subjectivities domestically, appropriate for the ‘new’ imperialism and for the neo-liberal project by repackaging and marketing the nineteenth-century civilizing mission. I argue that the developmental project abroad is accompanied by a subject-producing project at home. My case study, for reasons already made clear, takes its focus as the UK. This subject-producing apparatus is part of the way by which the Labour government, vis-à-vis the discourse of development, narrates the UK as metropolitan nation that is civil, developed, modern and therefore equipped t...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• RIPE Series in Global Political Economy
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A shift in vocabulary
• 2 By the logic of a rupture
• 3 Marketing development: A ‘new’ national narrative
• 4 Authorized versions of ‘Otherness’: Creating imperial subjects abroad
• 5 Marketing empire: Creating imperial subjectivities at home
• 6 Women mark the borders of civility
• 7 Toward the conscious exploitation of ambivalence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index