The Prince of Doom
When a writer’s intelligence displays itself with as much brilliance as it does in the essays of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and chooses its examples so aptly, in support of such a coherently developed and clearly and elegantly styled thesis, it suborns its readers, numbs their critical ability, and makes them accept the most fantastic assertions as undying truths. I’m a confessed victim of this charme each time I read Enzensberger, and I do so frequently, since I know of no essayist among my contemporaries who is more stimulating or who has a sharper sense of what is urgent, of the true issues of the day.
A good example of this is two recent essays, “The Great Migration” and “Civil War,” collected in Civil Wars, which address subjects that will be at the center of international political debate for the immediate future, and possibly for a good part of the next century. Under the spell of his apocalyptic description of the world we live in—a world convulsed by the uprooting of peoples rejected everywhere, and threatened with annihilation by a blind, senseless, molecular, and protoplasmic violence—I experience the kind of “pleasing horror” that Borges says colors his nights when he has been reading fantastic stories. But once the spell of the reading has lifted, I feel the same way I did after I watched David Copperfield rise off the ground and levitate in Earl’s Court: I loved it and I clapped, but I’m sure he didn’t fly; I know I was taken in by his magic.
Although written separately, the essays refer to flip sides of the same phenomenon. Massive migrations, the cause and effect of a good part of the generalized violence that Enzensberger sees as spreading around the world like an epidemic—a kind of social AIDS—have always existed and, in certain eras, affected a greater percentage of the population than they do today. The difference is that in the past they were welcome—the European colonizers of the United States, Canada, or Australia; the Spanish, Turkish, or Italian guest workers in Germany and Switzerland in the sixties—and today they inspire panic, a rejection that stirs up racism and xenophobia.
This change in attitude toward the immigrant in modern society originates in part in so-called structural unemployment, or the permanent disappearance of jobs, which leads the citizens of a country to fear that they will be displaced by foreigners in a shrinking labor market. It also springs in part from their feeling that their cultural identity is threatened when they are obliged to coexist with communities of different languages, customs, and religions that don’t want (or aren’t permitted) to dissolve into the culture of the host country.
Enzensberger demolishes all the fantasies and myths about “homogeneous societies” (they don’t exist) with impeccable arguments, and gives as an example German society, which, over the course of its modern history, has received and absorbed innumerable waves of migration while sending emigrants all around the world. And he correctly points out that the repugnance prosperous countries feel for immigrants disappears when those immigrants are rich. Who would deny a visa to the sultan of Brunei? Don’t Hong Kong bankers obtain British passports with ease? Couldn’t a Lebanese, Iranian, or Paraguayan millionaire secure residency in Switzerland?
From all this he concludes that the real problem isn’t immigration but poverty and that poverty is also the root and hidden cause of the violence spreading like wildfire around the globe. This far I can follow him. I can also follow his analysis of modern violence, though only up to a point, since I suspect that he exaggerates. According to him, violence no longer requires ideological or religious pretexts to erupt; it is frequently gratuitous and self-destructive, and it is turning the globe into a jungle of opposing tribes, where “all difference has become moral risk” and “a subway car can become a little Bosnia.” And yet the nationalist fanaticism seething in the former Yugoslavia or the religious fanaticism that motivated the massacres in Algeria doesn’t fit this identikit; behind such behavior lies not the mere sleepwalking impulse to kill or die but the conviction—doubtless stupid and criminal—that by acting in such a way one is fighting for a cause that justifies the terror. It is preferable that it should be so, in my opinion, because violence born of an idea or a belief can be combated, while the other, fated kind that supposedly comes metaphysically or genetically programmed in humans is impossible to fight and would inevitably hurtle us toward apocalypse.
Enzensberger’s pessimism has as its point of origin the creation of the world market. The triumph of the capitalist system and the fact that today production and commerce can “only” happen on a global scale, within the network of economic interdependence in which businesses and companies function, have created an enormous mass of “structural” poor people (he calls them “the superfluous masses”) who, in Third and First World countries (since the Second World has disappeared), live in purgatory, condemned to a marginalized existence from which there is no possibility of escape. The violence shaking the planet results from the desperation that this tragic situation engenders in a considerable portion of humanity.
Let’s hear it from Enzensberger:
Few dispute that the world market, now that it is no longer a vision of the future but a global reality, produces fewer winners and more losers as each year passes. This is not confined to the Second and Third Worlds, but applies equally in the core capitalist countries. Where, there, whole countries, or even whole continents, drop out of the international exchange system, here, increasing sections of the population can no longer keep up in the competition for advantage that gets more brutal by the day…The general level of violence, you might conclude, is no more than the desperate reaction to a hopeless economic situation.
This catastrophism is not supported by events and is grounded in an erroneous vision of capitalism, which is a much greedier system than Enzensberger supposes. Thanks to its innate voracity, the system that the market created has been extending itself from the ancient European cities where it was conceived into every corner of the world and has established a global market that is now, in effect, an irreversible reality. As a result, poor countries today can begin to stop being poor and, like Singapore, can develop an economic structure even more solid than that of Great Britain, or build up the astronomical financial reserves of Taiwan, or create a million jobs in five years, as Chile has done.
As I was reading Enzensberger, Philippe de Villiers, the new leader of the French extreme right, howled in Britain: “One British worker is worth ninety Filipino workers!” And instead of being pleased by this good news, he was alarmed and wanted to use it to justify his theory in favor of protectionist barriers to defend France from such unworthy competition. I can understand that de Villiers, who seems to me a man of another age, might not realize that the cheap production of shirts and pants by Filipino workers also benefits French consumers and that it is very much to the advantage of French industry that the Filipinos, thanks to the markets that their factories are conquering, are raising their living standards and increasing their purchasing power with the result that they can now acquire the products that France is able to produce better than other countries. What I don’t understand is how the prince of the European intelligentsia can side with the enemies of economic internationalization, convinced that the wealth of the world is finite, that it has reached its upper limit, and that from now on if one country prospers, another will get poorer.
The truth lies elsewhere. Capitalist countries wouldn’t give China the velvet-glove treatment if they feared that its new industries would sink their own (since, as de Villiers would say, one worker from Chicago or Frankfurt is worth two hundred Chinese workers). Those producers are also consumers, and the development of one country provides the businesses of other countries with enormous opportunities. The more the world market grows, quantitatively and qualitatively, the more benefits there will be for those capitalist businesses that realize they must adapt to the rapidly changing conditions of the world market if they do not wish to disappear.
This new reality has profoundly altered the European world and is generating insecurity and fear in those who—correctly—suspect that it will ultimately change institutions, customs, and, especially, privileges that they believed immutable. The idea of nationhood, for example, as well as notions of identity and culture and habits and perspectives in work and human relations will have nothing to do with previous conceptions. A good number of the current conflicts—like those motivated by resurgent nationalism and fundamentalism—are the instinctive reactions of communities and individuals to a revolution that is doing away with tribal culture and creating a world of liberated entities, “free from God or country” but—let us hope—still ruled by law. If the latter also disappears, Enzensberger’s nightmare will likely come true, although in ways other than he has foretold.
It is in this globalization of life that one must probe for the source of the collective violence that is, in fact, increasing dramatically. I think it has to do, in good part, with the universalization of communications, which lets the world’s poor know, day by day and hour by hour, all that they are lacking and others enjoy. This creates impatience, unrest, frustration, and desperation, and political and religious demagogues know how to cultivate that fertile ground in order to push their demented proposals. But the dissatisfaction of the poor and their disgust with their own poverty are also a formidable energy that, properly channeled, may be converted into an extraordinary force for development. This is what has happened in the countries of Southeast Asia, which, for all the criticism that can be leveled against them—in the realms of political liberties and human rights, for example—have shown that it is possible to create millions of jobs and respectable living conditions in societies that until just yesterday figured among the most backward on earth. The same thing is beginning to happen in Latin America, where Chile is today a model of democratic growth that other countries try to emulate.
This is not naïve optimism but the simple affirmation that there are enough examples in contemporary reality to show that if free enterprise and the market system are adopted with everything that they imply—and they imply much sacrifice and effort, certainly—a country may be lifted out of poverty, even in a relatively short period of time. That few Third World countries have chosen this option is true; but it is also true that it is there, within their reach, waiting for them to decide to select it. It is the first time in history that this has been the case—that countries have been able to choose prosperity or poverty—and even if it were only for that, in defiance of my admired Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s portents of doom, I believe that we are both lucky to have been born in this age.