UNILATERAL ACTION IN A UNIPOLAR WORLD

T h r o u g h o u t much of recorded history, individuals, groups and nations have been no stranger to the ‘dominantdominated’ relationships of unipolar arrangements. Thus for example, while incidental details may vary, the recurring theme of European, and now some would say American colonial enterprise, has always been something quaintly described as ‘unequal terms of trade’.

Decoded, this translates to a monopsony of the coloniser for obtaining sought after raw materials and labour at cheap throwaway prices from its colonies, seamlessly coupled with a monopoly in which the processed finished goods are sold back to the colony and sometimes the world at large, at much higher ‘monopoly’, rates.

The only limiting parameters in this stranglehold of unending looting are the meagre subsistence level remuneration paid to the primary producers and colony labour to allow their survival and keep them available as a captive market for finished goods and services.

As for providing services and employment to the colonised subjects, we have Macaulay’s infamous 1835 ‘Minute on Education’ which explicitly sought to establish “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”, the quintessential WOG, (Westernised Oriental Gentleman), trained to serve as a collaborating link with the colonised populace.

Although tempered by ‘Wood’s Despatch’ to the Governor General of India in 1854, allowing for ‘vernacular’ primary education and the setting up of the three ‘Presidency’ universities, the prevailing policy was one of limiting higher technical and professional education and subsequent employment in the higher civil and military services to ‘home’ candidates of the colonial power.

As Jawaharlal Nehru caustically remarked, the Indian Civil Service, was “neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service”. All Indians did was to pay for their own subjugation.

Setting high tariffs and even banning import of Indian hand-woven ‘calicoes’ and muslins during the 18th and early 19th century and allegedly even cutting off the thumbs of many local weavers in Bengal so as to establish the monopoly of British mill-woven cloth, forcing the cultivation of indigo for the manufacture of dyes, forcefully acquiring large areas of land for its forest, mineral or cash crop produce,

effectively turning the bulk of local inhabitants into subsistence landless labour on their own lands and even ‘exporting’ ‘slave’ and ‘indentured’ labour from Africa and India respectively to cotton, rubber and sugarcane plantations abroad; the ingenuity of the colonial system knew no bounds.

Over time, some of the local ‘collaborators’ of the dominant colonial regimes managed to secure a degree of co-option into the ruling fraternity. Others, taking up the cause of the dispossessed, participated in slowly rising political resistance, including some stray as well as organised instances of armed revolt.

Notwithstanding this, the dominant pattern remained one of the colonial masters unilaterally exercising unfettered power at will. Cut to the end of the Second World War and for a while, it seemed the picture would change.

The defeated ‘Axis’ trio had lost all their colonies and conquests while the victorious European colonisers, Britain, France, Belgium, Holland et al were all too caught up with post-war reconstruction. Without going into details country-wise, it would also be fair to say that the opposition to colonisation was now imposing unacceptably heavy economic and human costs which the erstwhile colonisers had little stomach for.

The ‘decolonisation’ of the Indian subcontinent and large parts of South East Asia and Africa over the succeeding years was accompanied by a ‘bipolar’ Europe, with the US led NATO on one side and the USSR led Warsaw Pact on the other.

Soon, these two blocs, each an insular unipolar system under its leading nation, were locked in a ‘Cold War’ for overall dominance! However, a sizeable number of nations, ours amongst them, remained ‘nonaligned’ with either bloc.

With the newly set up United Nations and multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the IMF providing a passable if somewhat uneven multilateral setting, the post-war ‘Trente Glorieuses’, (glorious thirty years), was largely a period during which these non-aligned middle powers could operate within a multilateral multi-polar framework.

The unilateral policy thrusts of the new unipolar dominants, the US, USSR and later China, to some extent, continued however resulting in a number of ‘proxy’ wars all over the globe with one superpower supporting one of the adversaries while the other pitched for its opponent For the superpowers, such mentoring brought handsome profits and benefits while war-related losses exclusively fell to the lot of the ‘followers’.

The ‘bipolar’ system however did not preclude unilateral action by a dominant unipolar influencer. Thus, in Iran in 1954 the democratically elected Premier Mossadegh who was ‘nationalising’ the country’s oil resources was replaced with a sympathetic monarch supportive of British and American oil interests.

Following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, reformist Prime Minister Imre Nagy was arrested after a Soviet military takeover, tried in secret and later executed, supposedly for attempting to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and declare neutrality.

In 1968, the USSR, with assistance from Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria and logistical support from East Germany, invaded Czechoslovakia, overthrew Alexander Dubcek for promoting “socialism with a human face” and replaced him with the communist hardliner Gustav Husak, establishing the Soviet Brezhnev Doctrine justifying armed intervention in any Warsaw Pact country straying from accepted practices.

USA’s Monroe Doctrine of 1823, declaring the Western Hemisphere out of bounds for European colonisation, was further buttressed by the ‘Roosevelt Corollary’ of 1904 asserting the US’s right to act as an “international police power” in Latin America.

While ostensibly seeking to protect the independent nations of the Americas, this has also been viewed by some as the precursor of US neocolonialism. In 1973, a Chilean coup-de-etat, widely felt to be with CIA planning and support, replaced Salvador Allende, the elected Socialist

President with General Augusto Pinochet. This was reportedly after the US cut off foreign aid, blocked international loans and disrupted Chile’s copper exports to “make the economy scream”; all part of its ‘Cold War Containment Policy’.

The South East Asian initiative of this policy, this time against both Russian and Chinese backed communists, finally ended with the US withdrawal in 1975, but not before immeasurable havoc had been wreaked, not only in Vietnam but also in neighbouring Laos and Cambodia.

Post dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1991, it was hoped that a more unipolar world would be a calmer place, despite the fact that both Russia and China continued to be players laying claim to dominance in their neighbouring regions.

With the LTTE and Al Quaida’s actions unequivocally demonstrating that unilateral sub-national or even international action is not the sole preserve of ‘dominant’ nations, the world now faces the prospect of ‘non-state’ actors putting ‘skin in the game’ even as so called ‘deep state’ components within dominant nations exercise undue and disproportionate influence over national policies.

These new threats should have made even ‘dominant’ states, acting within a largely unipolar environment, more circumspect in taking unilateral initiatives. The recent developments in Venezuela have dashed any such hopes. As the words of the song go, “when will they ever learn?”