In thinking about how we've arrived at this moment of reaction across Europe and the US, I can't help but return to the longer cycles of history and the way in which rather than solve world historical problems, we have often simply recreated them in alternate forms.
1/
When anti-colonial liberation movements made colonialism no longer tenable, the response was not to fundamentally alter the relations between the colonial powers and the newly independent states, but to recreate them via neo-colonialism.
2/
When neo-colonial extractivism à l'outrance became unsustainable, the response was not to fundamentally alter developmental models, but to cloak them in neoliberal globalization.
3/
As a result, rather than a just, equitable and sustainable global order, we have a highly imbalanced and volatile one, in which lack of opportunity in the Global South drives migration that fuels nativism in the Global North, even as nostalgia for colonial grandeur fuels resentment of decline.
4/
The failure was not so much one of imagination, because there was no shortage of voices calling for new approaches and theorizing the new cultural imaginaries needed to embrace them.
It was more a failure of courage, and a failure to see the dignity that is always owed the "other."
/Ends
It's not lack of imagination or courage or theory.
They are unwilling.
Like you keep lacking all kinds of things when an annoying colleague invites you for drinks.
He presses you hard enough, you'll blow back.
Western society sees a colony as an annoying needy colleague.
An imbalance of power cannot be fixed with imagination or courage.
When the power shifts, the rest comes next day. Plenty examples.
