On being a transnational oversoul, or, an awkward half-soul

The following is an miniature chunk of dissertation (for the Sussex University course Landscape/Memory/Identity):

In the journal I had been keeping two summers ago whilst travelling in Malaysia, Thailand and Bali, I wrote, “Maybe I am half-not-English, half-not-Malay.” This nugget of angst reminded me of a poem I had quite uncharacteristically written, more recently, about my grandmother Mak Eng and her house in Sibu. In the poem I had supposed my sister and I to be “neither this nor that,” using the image of “other people’s bare brown feet” as a marker of those other people’s authenticity, a kind of obvious and embodied belonging which we were denied. Ranciére writes that the “process of identification is first of all a process of spatialization. The paradox of identity is that you must travel to disclose it… Spatialization presents by its own virtue the identity of the concept to its flesh”. I can’t really remember a time before I was able to observe the peculiar shift that took place as I moved between Hemel Hempstead, a new town just outside the M25 where I went to school, and Sibu, a town on the Rejang river in Sarawak where my mum was born. That movement effected a regular transformation in my sister and I: from feeling often very English in Malaysia to feeling quite foreign in England. I was born in Hemel, but when I am there people still ask me where I’m from. Here, I reply. Then they ask me awkwardly where I’m… you know… originally from. What’s my… erm… background? (Or, in other words, why is my skin brown?) When I’m in Sibu, people often refer to me as orang puteh (white person) and wonder what I’m doing with all these Malay people who are, in fact, my close family. Once, some children approached my sister and I and proceeded to inform us that I was “seventy per cent Melayu, thirty percent orang puteh” whilst my sister, whose skin and hair are a shade fairer than mine, was just “twenty percent Melayu, eighty per cent orang puteh.” They had exposed us; my sister promptly burst into tears.

*

The paradoxical position of belonging to multiple places and, consequently, to no single place entirely, tends to be associated with an uncomfortable privilege. Edward Said – whose autobiography, it should be noted, is entitled ‘Out of Place’ – has said that his various identities and the multiple ‘worlds’ to which he belongs have afforded him “an odd, not to say grotesque, double perspective”. It is this ambivalent position, paradoxically incorporating the privilege of distance with the affliction of never wholly belonging, to which Hollinshead refers in his discussion of diasporic identities. He characterises these as an uncertain, even schizophrenic way of being, somewhere between the richness of a “transnational oversoul” (a term he borrows from Wilson and Dissanayake) and an awkward, off-balance “half-soul”. His argument that such identities are “invariably protean” suggests both insecurity and an automatic worldliness not available to more stable, unambiguously territorial identities which tend to lend themselves to essentialised notions of land and belonging. Others have noted the potential in ‘diasporics’ for the realisation of radical political alternatives, advocating the deconstruction of the parochialism associated with nationalism and other politicisations of identity which bind it to particular territories. Comparisons may be drawn between the marginal space occupied by the diasporic, exiled or migrant, and the politically marginal and insecure “space of radical openness” associated with postmodern cultural politics. Would it be better, then, to resist that impulse towards an immediate and automatic localisation of identity? As Casey notes, ‘Where are you from?’ is the first thing we ask of a stranger. Instead, should we entertain that possibility of de-localisation contained in what Clifford calls the “intercultural identity question” of ‘where are you between?’

Review: Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan (No Harvest But A Thorn)

This book review was written in December 2007 for the course Rice, Spice and Trees: Peasants in Southeast Asia at the National University of Singapore.


Ahmad’s classic post-independence era novel is an exposition of peasant struggle, a gruesome celebration of the rural Malay livelihood and its associated pitfalls. The story follows the family of Lahuma, a padi farmer in a northern Malaysian village, throughout one disastrous padi cycle. After encountering a snake in their field (an indisputable bad omen), Lahuma later pierces his foot on a nibong thorn and is unable to continue working after it becomes infected. His body gradually swells up with pus, and he dies an ignominious death. It is left to his wife, Jeha, and their seven daughters to work the padi field. But the physical and mental strain causes Jeha to slowly go mad, and she must eventually be imprisoned in a makeshift cage in their tiny home, lest she endangers her youngest children or the padi harvest itself. The novel ends with the eldest daughter contemplating her future working the fields, and Jeha, caged, “screaming through the night” (Ahmad 1991 [1966]:177). This simple plot is thickened through the detailed description of everyday life in this rural community: its social stratifications and behavioural norms; the place of women; the peasant as “existentially involved in cultivation” (Wolf 1969:xiv) and essentially connected to the soil; the constant toil and hardship of the farmer; his cosmology, his fears. Ahmad frequently narrates from the perspective of his central characters as well as taking on a more omniscient third-person style of prose, giving a very full, almost ethnographic depiction of peasant life.

Vulnerability and anxiety are entrenched in this portrayal. Lahuma worries constantly about the day-to-day work at the rice field, and about his family’s future subsistence as their small plot of land decreases in size. When he dies, this anxiety passes to Jeha; after she goes mad, it is their daughters who then shoulder the burden. The village as a whole is subject to the whims of nature: to its floods, its attacking birds, its infestations of crabs, its thorns, its snakes. The peasantry is also constrained by the limited agricultural land upon which ever greater demographic pressure is exerted, exemplified by Lahuma’s concern about the insufficiency of his plot of fourteen relongs. There are hints at the social stratifications leaving the family dependent on the help of the Tok Penghulu (the head of the village), as well as at the presence of Chinese to whom Lahuma is loth to relinquish any more land. The village seems to fit Wolf’s characterisation of the peasantry’s “basic dilemma” as a constant, conscious effort to maintain its “precarious balance” against forces threatening to undermine it (1966:16). It is this vulnerability that leaves the most enduring impression.

Prayer and perseverance: the peasant hero
The novel’s constant and deepening anxiety about the future and the struggle for subsistence is (paradoxically) combined with a total and unshakeable trust in divine providence. It starts by anchoring Lahuma’s existence firmly within the land in “both a liturgical and genealogical charter” (Aveling 2000:112). Lahuma (whose very name is significant: huma, as Ahmad has acknowledged (1991:473), means ‘field’) remembers his own grandfather in the earth and silently repeats the mantra: “Life and death, dearth and plenty, are in the hands of God. In the hands of Allah the almighty” (Ahmad 1991 [1966]:1). Evident here is the rhythmic, repetitious quality characteristic of the book as a whole, which serves to create the sense of timelessness and inevitablity exemplified in the following passage:

Lahuma’s struggle for the children’s survival – sheer survival – would not end. It was going to be carried on by Jeha. Carried on by Sanah. Carried on by Milah. Carried on by Jenab. Carried on by Semek. Carried on by Liah. Carried on by Lebar. Carried on by Kiah. They would survive with the rice. Or die with the rice.
(Ahmad 1991 [1966]:95)

Ahmad also uses repetition to convey the determination of his characters in the face of desperate circumstances, constructing them as archtypal hardworking “peasant heroes” (Tahir 1982):

I will go down to the rice field… I will not come up again until all the plots are completed. I will pull up the seedlings at the belukar when the time comes. I will carry the bundles of seedlings down to the rice-field. I will plant the seedlings row by row. I will replace and rice-stems that may break. I will pull up the weeds that vie with the rice-plants. I will chase away the tiaks when the rice turns gold. I will harvest the rice in gemals. I will cary the gemals into the rice-barn. I will thrash the rice until the stalks come off. I will sun the rice until it is dry. I will pound the rice until the husks come off. I will cook the rice into hot steaming food…
(Ahmad 1991 [1966]:49)

Whilst the novel is incredibly effective at communicating the hardship and labour involved in rice production, as the very notion of the ‘peasant hero’ might suggest, such characterisations of the Malay peasantry are not ideologically or morally neutral. It is a commonplace within studies of rural Malay societies that a simplistic, conservative Islam prevails, which is associated with “a simple series of truths… A good man was one who worked hard and was wary of strangers” (Banks 1983:28). Moral status is highly dependent on hard work and acceptance of one’s rezeki (what one has been alloted by God). Some commentators have interpreted Lahuma’s total subservience to the will of God as passive, even fatalistic (see for example Banks 1987:118), indeed reflecting many anthropological readings. Swift, for example, has observed that in the Malay peasant cosmology, “[i]f someone dies an untimely death, “their span was up”… [there is] a predisposition to explain everything in terms of luck, and to neglect trying to improve one’s position, for after all one has very little control over it” (2001:91). However, the seemingly paradoxical combination of trust in fate and commitment to hard work is reconciled both in Islamic theology (see for example Basri and Zarkashi 1992:399, 401), and in Ahmad’s characters, who do not once question God’s wisdom and purpose, yet at the same time do not cease in their toil. It seems as if Ahmad is seeking to present a model ‘peasant’ response to circumstances of great hardship and suffering; indeed, he is not shy of generalisations:

The yield of rice was very poor. And the people of Banggul Derdap were plunged in gloom. But their gloom was not confined to themselves. They did not connect it with Allah the Almighty. They did not curse God. It was their habit to accept with resignation the disasters which so often befell them. Such was their life. Never to know full satisfaction. And they accepted the disasters of crabs and tiaks with fresh determination and spirit; to plant rice again next year if Allah the Almighty willed that they should survive till then.
(Ahmad 1991 [1966]:171)

It is difficult to read this passage without noting the implicit moral approval.

The construction of the peasant
Seen in the historical context of a newly independent Malaysia and contemporaneous discourses around ‘modernisation’ and ‘underdevelopment’, the anxiety that characterises the novel’s tone takes on a broader significance. For Ahmad, the peasant lifestyle and subsistence is cyclical in nature – in addition to the constant use of repetition, the novel’s time frame is one rice cycle from beginning to end, and the final chapter is entitled “The Cycle Continues” – denoting a certain stability, an enduring quality. This stability is reinforced by constant reference to elements of ‘tradition’. For example, the position of women is deemed unchanged by the possiblity of secular education: as Jeha says, “Girls needn’t know how to read. Doesn’t change the market value. I never even went to school” (Ahmad 1991 [1966]:18). Given that the area of peninsular Malaysia in which the novel is set has in the twentieth century “been transformed from an isolated and largely self-sufficient region into an administrative unit of a modern nation-state, and its residents are tied into the cash economy of rubber production” (Bailey 1983:8), we can ascribe a clear intent to Ahmad’s insistence on tradition; on the unchanging aspects of the peasant cosmology. He has made clear elsewhere his belief that wage labour, rubber tapping for the cash economy and collecting jungle products are not real farming, and that most Malays in the village of Banggul Derdap were “not real farmers” (cited in Aveling 2000:53); Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan, then, articulates the traditional ‘real farmer’.

Yet this representation obscures a great deal. Firstly, the very notion of a ‘real farmer’ or ‘authentic peasant’ tradition must be interrogated. Ahmad’s unsubtle rendering of Lahuma and family as existentially connected with the soil cannot be separated from its ideological buttressing of Malaysian society’s explicitly racialised division of labour. Twentieth century anthropologists such as Swift have also uncritically employed this form of social categorisation: “To know a person’s race is to know that he will probably perform one of a few economic functions. The Malay is primarily a peasant” (2001:88). This essentialises historically contingent social permutations, obfuscating the constructedness of the ‘Malay peasant’ (1) and how the peasantry initially came to work the land in such a way, as migrants, pioneers and settlers (2). Ahmad’s undeniably grim portrayal also obscures the wry humour that has been noticeably present in every kampung I’ve ever visited, unwittingly denying one of the ways in which the subordinated peasant may express his interpretation of contemporary events – his “hidden transcript” or “partial transcript” that may well constitute a form of resistance (Scott 1985:284-6). For example, though the Islamic worldview of the Malay peasant is presented as both profound and profoundly uncritical, there is no mention of the cynicism with which local religious leaders are often received (3).

Modernist ambivalence: the “babble and roar”
However, beyond the role of the author or anthropologist in disciplining the rural population, Ahmad’s reification of the Malay peasantry is also indicative of a broader anxiety – a “babble and roar about what Malay life style should be” (Nash 1974:65) – that characterised the Malay population during the postwar period and its associated social upheavals. ‘Modernity’ and later ‘development’ was seen as something external, foreign; both desired and feared (Johnson 2007:13). Nash also cites the rural expression, that if we don’t change we’ll be driven to hanging from the trees, which “sums up the poignancy of a peasantry who are the lagging members of a modernizing nation” (1974:67). This conception of the peasant is not mere paranoia; key anthropologists have also encouraged such a view (4). Other commentators have also noted the rapid de-kampung-isation of the Malays (see for example Sardar 2004). Viewed in social-historical context both the anxiety which is so intrinsic to the novel, and the simple, steadfast souls who inhabit its cyclical peasant universe, can be seen as symbolic of the endemic ambivalence of the period. Ahmad, at one point the national laureate of Malaysia, attempts to discursively ‘fix’ the peasant in his traditional lifestyle, asserting a permanence to Malay peasant culture in the face of existential threat. As Foucault (1970:290) argues, “if language expresses, it does so not in so far as it is an imitation and duplication of things, but in so far as it manifests… the fundamental will of those who speak it”.

Though Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan certainly provides a meticulous and moving depiction of peasant life, preserving it somewhat in the context of large-scale social change; ultimately its value must be seen in its exemplary construction (and simultaneous obfuscation) of ‘the Malay peasant’, and the reification of tradition in response to the perceived threat of ‘development’.

(1) The Malayan colonial economy was structured according to (and dependent on) this racialised division of labour; when Malays began to sell their land to Chinese, Indian and European buyers, threatening the organisation of the rural Malay population in their kampungs (villages), colonial administrators adopted a paternalistic discourse of protection. To prevent the “extinction” of Malay “tradition” – seen as “a race of yeoman-peasantry… deluded by visions of present but transitory wealth” (cited in Ong 1987:19-20) – they actively prevented such sales from taking place, whilst also restricting Malays who wanted to cultivate cash crops instead of food (1987:21). Clearly the essentialisation of peasant identity can be seen as a strategy of “containment” (Kearney 1996:60). During the period in which the novel was written there are further ideological implications of constructing the Malay as ‘native’ to and hence bound to the land itself, considering the political motives behind state and legal discourses according certain rights to bumiputera (lit. ‘sons of the soil’).
(2) (see also Walker 2001 and Tan 2000 for examples from Thai and Vietnamese contexts respectively).
(3) For example, Nash (1974:60) recounts one common anecdote in the village in which his research was based: “A man catches a strange fish. He brings it to a Tok Guru asking if it is halal (lawful) to eat. The Tok Guru hesitates in replying. The fisherman says it would be a shame to throw it away since he wanted to give the Tok Guru half of it. The Tok Guru immediately says that the fish is of course halal.”
(4) Wolf, for example, places the peasantry “midway between the primitive tribe and industrial society… They are important historically, because industrial society is built upon the ruins of peasant society. They are important contemporaneously, because they inhabit that “underdeveloped” part of the world whose continued presence constitutes both a threat and a responsibility for those countries which have thrown off the shackles of backwardness” (1966:vii). He clearly understands the peasant existence as both threatened and threatening in equal measures – and additionally, as a social permutation whose ultimate decline and replacement by modern industrial society is inevitable (and even desirable).


Bibliography
Ahmad, S. 1991 [1966]. No Harvest But A Thorn [Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan], trans. A. Amin (Petaling Jaya: Fajar Bakti)

Ahmad, S. 1991. Sastera Sebagai Seismograf Kelidupan (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka)

Aveling, H. 2000. Shahnon Ahmad: Islam, Power and Gender (Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia)

Bailey, C. 1983. The Sociology of Production in Rural Malay Society (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press)

Banks, D. J. 1983. Malay Kinship (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues)

Banks, D. J. 1987. From Class to Culture: Social Conscience in Malay Novels Since Independence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies)

Basri, G. and Zarkashi, M. P. 1992. ‘Islam and Rural Development in Malaysia with Special Reference to Malaysian Fisherman’ in King, V. T. and N. M. Jali (eds.) Issues in Rural Development in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka)

Foucault, M. 1970. The Order Of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House)

Johnson, D. 2007. ‘Malay Representations of Modernity, the Present and the Future’, Paper presented at the ICAS5 Conference: Shaping a Future in Asia. Kuala Lumpur, 2-5 August

Kearney, M. 1996. Reconceptualizing the peasantry : anthropology in global perspective (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press)

Nash, M. 1974. Peasant Citizens: Politics, Religion and, and Modernization in Kelantan, Malaysia (Ohio: Center for International Studies)

Ong, A. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: State University of New York Press)

Sardar, Z. 2004. The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur (London: Reaktion Books)

Scott, J. C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press)

Swift, M. G. 2001. ‘Malay Peasants’ in Baharuddin, S. A. (ed.) Social Anthropology of the Malays: Collected Essays of M. G. Swift (Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia)

Tahir, U. M. M. 1982. ‘Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan: The Story of a Peasant Hero’, in Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 16 (1): 26-47.

Tan, S. B-H. 2000. ‘Coffee frontiers in the Central Highlands of Vietnam: networks of connectivity’ in Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 41 (1): 51-67

Walker, A. 2001. ‘The ‘Karen Consensus’, Ethnic Politics and Resource-Use Legitimacy in Northern Thailand’ in Asian Ethnicity, 2 (2): 145-162

Wolf, E. R. 1966. Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall)

Wolf, E. R. 1969. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row)

Critically evaluate Frantz Fanon’s contribution to our understanding of contemporary oppression, and to the politics of dissent and resistance

this essay was written in 2008 for Life, Power, Resistance: Critical Perspectives on a Post-Westphalian Era, an International Relations course at Sussex University

I

Interpretations of Fanon’s writings are multifarious and frequently misleading. He has been variously cast as a violent revolutionary, a critical psychologist and a repressed homophobe, among other things, none of which can be addressed in the scope of this study. Rather, I take as central Fanon’s insight into the racialisation of oppression, briefly outlining what is meant by this concept before locating it within the colonial moment, in order to draw it into a broader discussion of the failings of European humanism. I argue for its continued relevance both in terms of its explanation of the utility of ‘othering’, and because of the parallel we can draw between the dehumanising humanism that Fanon attacks, and the logic of sovereignty that constitutes ‘Westphalian’ norms. I then go on to consider possible alternatives to accepting this racialised and universalised objectification, echoing Fanon’s suspicion of strategic cultural essentialisms and pointing instead to his advocacy of openness towards the other as a meaningful politics of resistance.

II

For Fanon, oppression means something more complex than the subjection to violence or the constraining of agency. Oppression is to be denied one’s own humanity: “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence” (1986:139). It is to negate the claim to be a ‘Man’. In other words, though he tries to master his own humanity, a humanity which has both been promised to him and which he senses in the immensity and depth of his soul (1986:140), he finds instead: 

I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors… I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.” (1986:112)

This resonates with Said’s analysis (1978) of the discursive construction of the Orient, itself clearly influenced by Fanon’s account of how the European “had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (1986:111). Fanon’s innovation was to show how this denial is racialised; how it is inscribed on the body. A process of self-composition becomes a construction of the black man according to “a racial epidermal schema,” a “uniform” from which he can never escape (1986:112, 114). The negative stereotypes attached to this epidermis may change, but ‘the fact of blackness’ remains. Fanon will continue to be “overdetermined from without… I am fixed” (1986:116).

Fanon’s work has been tremendously influential for later ‘neo-colonialism’ and Dependency Theory critiques, articulating the injustice of colonial rule and the hypocrisy of “native intellectuals” and post-independence leaders, whilst inspiring a revolutionary fervour in many Third World readers. His last book is a “bible of the decolonisation movement” (Stuart Hall, cited in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, 1996). Of greater significance for this paper, however, is his characterisation of the colonial world as “a world cut in two”, as “a Manichaean world” (1990:29, 31). Again echoed by Said, Fanon describes how the native other is defined as lack, as being what we are not.

The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers… (1990:32)

This, argues Fanon, is central to the psychology of colonial rule that is internalised by the native. Disrupting this “mentally debilitating” ideology (Gibson 1999:109) is crucial for attaining real independence, hence Fanon’s scathing attacks on new leaders of the new nations, the “spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism and of today’s national governments” who failed to mount a “real struggle for freedom” to effect the transfer of power (1990:37, 36).

It might be said that Fanon’s highly incisive critique of colonialism has now been rendered somewhat less potent within contemporary contexts. We no longer conceptualise oppression as a struggle between settler and native, and we may be apt to dismiss Fanon’s revolutionary zeal as a mere ‘apostle of violence’, as commentators frequently do (Pithouse 2003:2). However, this colonial Manichaean split has its present manifestations; a discriminatory denial of humanity once again taking a specifically racialised form. Taking just one example, representations of ‘Africa’ portray it as a place of famine, war, disease, genocide and hunger; these appear to be “‘native’ African products” (Taylor 1998:136). We have seen, consumed, and discarded countless black faces in the news, in Oxfam pamphlets, and in advertisements promising that you can ‘make a difference’ for just £2 per month. The accumulation of images of Africa construct a seemingly inconsequential realm of otherness, a reflection of the state of nature Europe is deemed to have long since transcended.

Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetative rhythm of life – all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary. (Fanon 1990:33; emphasis added)

Of course, this vocabulary serves its purpose. It permits us to remain undisturbed by ongoing structural violence suffered by vast numbers of the world’s population; it enables us to celebrate military interventions, to keep silent at the erosion of civil liberties, to penetrate weak economies with our capital. This much should be clear. What Fanon’s analysis highlights, in fact, is the more contentious observation that this violent dehumanisation is not made up of piecemeal aberrations and individualised acts, but rather is constitutive of European humanism.

III

This is explicit during, though not limited to, the colonial period. The discrepancy between Western discourses on “human dignity”, and the “Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe” (1990:34, 251), is a discrepancy observable today – the most obvious example being calls for ‘democratisation’ and ‘freedom’ whilst deposing recalcitrant leaders or invading uncooperative states. Fanon exhibits a frustration that Europe continues to be held up as the exemplar, as “a paradise close at hand” (1990:41), when all he sees is the most terrible violence. The oppressed subject finds himself in a catch-22: invited to join the ranks of universally equal men whilst simultaneously discovering he has been rendered immobile by that same universality. It is the settler who “makes history and is conscious of making it” (1990:40); his is the plot whereby the native is constructed as the background.

Thus it is not the physical violence done to the native that results in his dehumanisation, nor is it merely the creation of an ideology that can legitimate such violence. For Fanon, it is the assumption of universality which necessitates the subsumption of the colonised subject into a pre-given understanding of humanity, with a pre-defined telos. As such, it may well be the liberal – perhaps even “colour-blind” or “anti-racist” – perspective which actually replicates this racist objectification, as argued by Schmitt (1996) and Lentin (2003). Like overt racism it simply stops at the racialised epidermis, declaring a “disavowal of difference… [a] political raciology, which constantly reinvokes the body while disavowing its primacy” (Ali 2005:166-167; emphasis added). Fanon laments this disavowal which is once again rooted in the invariability of his aspect: “When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle” (1986:116). This refusal to engage with the other may be termed “the prejudice of equality”, stripping the other of his otherness (Rasch 2003:140), or what Schmitt calls ‘objectification’ – “a carefully orchestrated and systematic refusal of genuinely human relationships” (1996:36).

We can draw a parallel between this dehumanising humanity and the Westphalian logic of sovereignty. This too paradoxically combines universal equality with particularism, resulting in a system of containment which exercises the externalisation and repression of the Other in the name of “sameness” (Blaney & Inayatullah 2000:32). As Walker (1993) identifies, orthodox international relations theory actively constitutes this “inside/outside” or self/other demarcation insofar as it continues to insist on the primacy of state sovereignty. Sovereignty, like objectification, seems to say: “I am “my own man” and you are yours. We are separate. We do not share with each other; at best we do things alongside each other” (Schmitt 1996:44). And yet, significantly, this recognition rests upon a refusal to entertain challenges to the basic principle of liberal pluralism, namely “an overriding monism, the monism of humanity” (Rasch 2003:136). It denies “the existence of a human substance truly other” (Todorov 1984:42-3), a denial that there can be an Other both equal and different. Western humanism is inseparable from its simultaneous constitution of the inhuman – which takes the form of any such challenge – and therefore from the project of the ‘civilising mission’; the project of “correcting” those who fail to fulfil their human potential (Rasch 2003:137-138). Furthermore, this once again takes on a racialised character, being grounded in the inclusion of the New World as a bestial state-of-nature against which Europe could achieve a ‘bracketing of war’ (Schmitt 2003:142). The European pluriverse relied on externalising the hierarchical relation to extra-European territory (Rasch 2003:127).

IV

What alternatives to this totalising, racialising metaphysics might be offered by Fanon’s work? One immediate counter to a dominating universalism is the reassertion of particularism, exemplified in the contemporary context by arguments for cultural relativism. These seem to challenge dominant actors to live up to the ideal of mutual recognition by refraining from imposing ‘Western’ norms on noncompliant societies. However, this strategy may result in an essentialised authenticity, reducing contestation to an identity politics whose only possible tactic is to demand “recognition” (Lentin 2006). Fanon’s initial seduction by Cesaire’s negritude – “From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this our salvation?” (1986:123) – like contemporary identity politics, ultimately fails to address or indeed challenge the way in which the politicised ‘identity’ in question is itself called into being by a dominant conception of humanity. It reinforces the egocentrism of the European, allowing him to say “We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world… In a way, you reconcile us with ourselves” (Fanon 1986:132).

It also permits the voice of the oppressor to seize upon this strategic essentialism and sublimate it within another teleology, hijacking the self-representation of the oppressed. Fanon accuses Sartre of doing precisely this in his Black Orpheus (1948), denying Fanon the ability to define his own end: “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me” (1986:134). A similar utilisation can be identified in the advocacy of many contemporary NGOs ‘on behalf’ of the marginalised groups they seek to represent. For example, activists and academics among the Karen hill tribes in Thailand have inadvertently produced what Walker (2001) labels “the Karen Consensus”, trapping the Karen in a fixed primordial identity (sustainable, egalitarian, non-commercial) in order to demand certain rights from the state – to the detriment of those Karen who wish to make other sorts of claims (for government schooling, televisions, trade).

It is this tendency which provokes Fanon to refuse outright any sort of transcendent ideal, to articulate instead a humanism based upon immanent power (Pithouse 2003:10-11).

In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been the unforeseeable… The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself… I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower. (Fanon 1986:135)

Moulard-Leonard recasts Fanon within a Deleuzian non-dialectical becoming premised on the concept of “Difference-in-itself” and hence the possibility of “radically creative self-alteration” (2005:242-243). It is a transformation which does not necessitate a given end to the process of becoming.

Despite this, however, it is possible to discern in Fanon’s new humanism a latent telos framed by residual assumptions of European humanism, specifically the notions of history-making, progress and self-determination. He declares that to be human is to “introduc[e] invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself” (1990:229); that “no attempt must be made to encase a man, for it is his destiny to be set free” (1990:230). Yet we must historicise the idea that history-making is emancipatory, active, and self-consciously dynamic. Once again, the European encounter with the New World constitutes a formative moment, necessitating a progressivist hierarchy of human societies in which some are more advanced than others, a “dual modality of historical time… events as at once contemporaneous and noncontemporaneous” (Koselleck 1988:249). Furthermore, in the 18th century, Christian linear salvational teleology came together with secular rational prediction to produce the peculiarly modern concept of progress (1988:17); and the Calvinist emphasis on “good works” contributed to the idea that man makes his own history (Weber 1930:xiii). Such Eurocentric values clearly run right through many postcolonial and subalternist efforts which couple ‘agency’ and ‘subjectivity’ in the essentialist-liberal-humanist tradition (O’Hanlon 1988). There may not be space in this humanism for even more radically different conceptions of history-making.

V

This may be reconciled, however, by the fluidity of Fanon’s approach and his radical commitment to destabilising all fixed identities, and the fluidity of his approach to dialogic communication. He states clearly on the first page of his first book, “I do not come with timeless truths” (1986:9). Thus, rather than seeking to positively define The New Humanity, Fanon’s work permits a new humanity to arise out of every moment where there is a “genuine transcendence of the divisions and hierarchies that push us into unequal spaces and trap us in limited, reductive identities” (Pithouse 2003:18). Although he has often been mistaken for an uncritical advocate of violent revolution, as noted above, and certainly comes across as dismissive of the more incremental social changes or post-colonial (neo-colonial) structures that have characterised many ex-colonies, it would be unfair to characterise Fanon’s revolutionary zeal within a simplistic dichotomy between the evil coloniser and the struggling colonised, in which the principle objective is to destroy (and replace) colonial authority. His method of resisting colonial Manichaeanism is precisely to advocate an openness to the other – an openness echoed by Blaney and Inayatullah in their call for a “critical dialogue” (2004:219), or by a Levinasian “ethics of alterity” (Campbell 1994:477).

Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You? At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness. (Fanon 1986:231-232). 

Bibliography
Ali, S. 2005. ‘Uses of the Exotic: Body, Narrative, Mixedness’ in C. Alexander and C. Knowles (eds.) Making Race Matter: Bodies, Space and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan)

Bernasconi, R. ‘Casting the Slough: Fanon’s New Humanism for a New Humanity’ in L. R. Gordon, T. D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White (eds.) Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell)

Blaney, D. L. and Inayatullah, N. 2000. ‘The Westphalian Deferral’ in International Studies Review 2 (2), 29-64

Blaney, D. L. and Inayatullah, N. 2004. International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge)

Campbell, D. 1994. ‘The Deterritorialization of Responsibility: Levinas, Derrida and Ethics after the End of Philosophy’ in Alternatives, 19:4, 455-484

Fanon, F. 1986 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press)

Fanon, F. 1990 [1961]. The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin)

Gibson, N. 1999. ‘Thoughts about Doing Fanonism in the 1990s’ in College Literature 26 (2), 96-117

Koselleck, R. 1988. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press)

Lentin, A. 2006. ‘De-authenticating Fanon: Self-organised anti-racism and the politics of experience’. Available at http://www.alanalentin.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=25. Accessed 16/02/08

Moulard-Leonard, V. 2005. ‘Revolutionary Becomings: Negritude’s Anti-Humanist Humanism’ in Human Studies 28, 231-249

O’Hanlon, R. 1988. ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia’ in Modern Asian Studies, 22:1

Pithouse, R. 2003. ‘That the Tool Never Possess the Man: Taking Fanon’s Humanism Seriously’. Available at http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/afphil/docs/pithouse1.pdf. Accessed 8/2/08

Rasch, W. 2003. ‘Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy’ in Cultural Critique 54, 120-147

Said, E. 1978. Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul)

Sartre, J-P. 1948. ‘Orphée Noir’ in L. Senghor (ed.) L’Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France)

Schmitt, C. 2003 [1950]. The Nomos of the Earth in the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press)

Schmitt, R. 1996. ‘Racism and Objectification: Reflections on Themes from Fanon’ in L. R. Gordon, T. D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White (eds.) Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell)

Taylor, J. 1998. Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press)

Todorov, T. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row)

Walker, A. 2001. ‘The ‘Karen Consensus’, Ethnic Politics and Resource-Use Legitimacy in Northern Thailand’ in Asian Ethnicity, 2 (2), 145-162

Walker, R. B. J. 1993. Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Weber, M. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin)



1996. Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask [film], directed by I. Julien

To what extent is the neoliberal paradigm limiting in the study of ‘offshore’?

this essay was written in 2007 for International Political Economy II, an International Relations course at Sussex University

Neoliberal economists typically ignore the existence and role of the offshore economy in their analysis. This is an extraordinary omission, which speaks volumes about their political values.

(Christensen 2007:216)

This essay first critically examines the construction of ‘offshore’ both within the parameters of a neoliberal analysis (1)  and in light of some of its critiques, looking initially at the broader context of economic globalisation’s supposedly inexorable advance, and then at offshore understood as a competitive state strategy in natural response to the exigencies of the global market. I then explore moments of disjuncture that threaten the smooth functioning of the neoliberal narrative, arguing that a genealogical or more broadly poststructuralist/constructivist methodology is far more useful to the study of offshore than neoliberalism’s ideological postulations. I specifically interrogate the notions that offshore represents an outcome or phase of a linear teleology of global finance, and indeed that the phenomenon of offshore is a mechanistic, ‘automatic’ development taking place outside of human or political volition. Finally, I consider the role of the neoliberal framework in the process of offshore’s ‘moral dislocation’, concluding that neoliberalism seeks to frame highly political and morally-charged operations within a bland discourse that insists on the neutrality of the market. Thus it is necessarily flawed in its contribution to the study of offshore, because it attempts to disguise the invariably political and pragmatic functions of offshore in the contemporary global political economy.

I

[neoliberal narratives, and other stories]

The present preoccupation with the theme of ‘globalisation’ among IPE scholars and other contemporary discourses tends to construct offshore as something which reflects, or indeed exemplifies, the increasing pressures towards deregulation, the rise of finance, and the corresponding decline of the state (in other words, the increasing subservience of the once sovereign state to global capital). An observable demarcation is drawn: first, the postwar Bretton Woods international order of “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1982), characterised perhaps somewhat nostalgically as the era of regulation and the general ability of states to exert some form of control over capital; the Fordist ‘social-compromise’ in which state sovereignty could be used to secure certain obligations from business and finance. Second, the international order’s subsequent evolution from the late 1970s onwards to the present neoliberal or post-industrial era, in which global capital has thrown off its state-imposed shackles to become the “mastering force” (Helleiner 1993:20) in world politics. According to one prominent commentator, “[l]ike a phoenix risen from the ashes, global finance took flight and soared to new heights of power and influence in the affairs of nations” (Cohen 1996:268). This development is presented as a natural progression, in distinctly linear terms; from the local to the national to the transnational (for such an evolutionary narrative, see for example Martin 1994:255). It is something bound up with the inevitable advancement of humankind and its increasingly efficient and superior technologies of communication. Furthermore, to a great extent, globalisation is seen as something apolitical and beyond our control – either as individuals or as national governments.

[T]he evolution of the international financial system… characterized by the acceleration of international capital movements … [has] challenged the capacity of the state to provide effective governance not only of financial markets themselves, but also of economic affairs generally.
(Cerny 1994:332)

Within this broader structure, then, the presence of offshore centres and tax havens – characterised by low regulation and low taxation – is understood to exert a downward pressure on governments, compelling them to keep regulation and corporate taxation low (Johns and Le Marchant 1993). This naturally undermines the sovereign ability of the nation-state to make policy, wherever policy objectives conflict with the need to maintain conditions that attract investment. In business circles and neoliberal thought generally, this development is welcomed as global capital’s somewhat automatic response to the “myriad of taxes and regulations” it is forced to negotiate (Hampton and Abbott 1999:13), and as evidence of governments’ slow adaptation to the requirements of global business. Though it is not necessarily accurate to claim that neoliberal scholars and policy-makers ‘ignore’ the presence and role of offshore, it is certainly true that, as far as possible, offshore is incorporated into existing frameworks of analysis – it becomes “part of the neo-liberal ideology of ‘deregulation’” (Picciotto 1999:64) – rather than presenting a reason to revise those frameworks. For example, despite the obvious logical inconsistencies that arise from a simplistic analogy between the firm and the state, prominent neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman seek to apply unproblematically the notion of free ‘competition’, as a mechanism to maximise efficiency, to the state.

Competition among national governments in the public services they provide and in the taxes they impose, is every bit as productive as competition among individuals or enterprises in the goods and services they offer for sale and the prices which they offer.
(Friedman 2001)

Outside of neoliberal and business circles, such developments are often lamented rather than celebrated; however, significantly, even critical accounts tend to lapse into the same determinism exhibited in the analyses cited above. Global capital remains the prime mover, its internal dynamic propelling it further and further from any state control, rendering it increasingly able to “effectively to cast judgement on the fiscal and monetary policies of nation states themselves through the disciplinary fear of capital flight” (Hampton and Abbott 1999:2). This notion of the “capture of the state” (Christensen and Hampton 1999) or the “competition state” (Cerny 1997) resonates with Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, in which he treats ‘money’ as something essentially abstract and which can therefore manipulate human geographies and territorialities – it “has no definite relationship to space: it can exercise its effects upon the most remote areas” (1990:504). Offshore, Picciotto notes, is understood as “an expression of the limits that capital can impose on the forms and functions of the state” (1999:48).

The danger of such representations, however, is their tendency to dichotomise ‘state’ and ‘capital’ too simplistically, without serious investigation into the historicity and complexity of these two naturalised categories. They also seem to characterise the market, finance, or capital more broadly “as an autonomous powerful agency” (de Goede 2005:4) – in other words, as something separate from the human and collective subjectivities which produce and sustain it (see Roberts 1994:91). This is both ahistorical and disempowering, since it seeks to present as natural or ‘technical’ certain power practices which not only find their legitimation in human discursive practices, but also clearly benefit certain groups of people at the expense of others – as Scholte notes, “offshore finance has been largely reserved to large corporations and so-called high net worth individuals” (2005:21; see also Palan 2003:187). Any meaningful critique of this system, then, must interrogate not only the material practices of a system which appears unjust or amoral, but also the discursive practices which reinforce and legitimise it. Narratives of ‘globalisation’ and offshore finance lose their analytical value once they become ideologies or “legends”, identifiable because they run “far too smoothly” (Auerbach, cited in Shapiro 1993:56).

II

[the pertinence of poststructuralism]

International Political Economy remains one area of IR which has yet to embrace poststructuralist thinking wholeheartedly, or even engage with it in a serious way (de Goede 2003). Many IPE scholars do not recognise its value, arguing that postmodernist preoccupations with discourse and knowledge practices are of limited use to a discipline characterised and constrained by certain empirical and material realities (see, for example, Laffey 2000:441). As Campbell notes, power has become conceptualised in mainstream IPE as “a commodity to be wielded by agents” (1996:18), in contrast to poststructuralist theorisations which understand power as constitutive of social relationships and bound up with knowledge and discourse. Yet scholars who dismiss poststructuralist approaches on the grounds that they deal exclusively with discourse present a mistaken characterisation of one central tenet (2): namely that discourse is constitutive of material practices – “[t]o understand it simply as a discourse is to misunderstand discourse’s materiality” (Thrift 2001:430). For example, neoliberal narratives which posit the actuality (and inevitability) of the ‘globalisation’ process in fact materialise and legitimise that very process through the normalisation and repetition of otherwise banal concepts such as ‘going global’ or ‘global strategies’, therefore having a ‘real’ effect on actual processes and decisions made in business models, financial practices, law, and government. These discourses are then validated by a constructed ‘reality’ which, in circular fashion, then reinforces the validity of the discourse. The appearance of ‘truth’ thus “resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power” (Nietzsche 1967:290), which masks the utilitarian meanings of truths.

Orthodox approaches to historical phenomena – which construct such ‘legends’ as those described above – tend to first typologise a particular structure or reify a particular process or idea, before reading history backward in order to provide the teleological narrative to explain its realisation. This kind of approach “aims at dissolving the singular event into an ideal continuity… events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning… We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities” (Foucault 1987:231). Genealogy, by contrast, (see Nietzsche 1998 [1886]; 1969 [1887]; and Foucault 1987) as a historical method developed by poststructuralist scholars, seeks out the suppressed alternatives; the historical contingencies; the discursive foundations for what is now perceived as natural or inevitable. Thus if ‘offshore’ can be revealed to be the production of conscious, deliberate and ongoing reconstructions of statehood, then uncritical narratives of globalisation and deregulation can be greatly undermined. Furthermore, this may enable a radical understanding of knowledge/power practices in the global political economy that invests criticism and discursive deconstruction with transformative potential.

Examples abound in which the simplistic neoliberal narrative is called into question or, alternatively, rendered entirely irrelevant. We can point, for instance, to Abbott’s (1999) investigation into the offshore financial centre Labuan, the “pet project” of Malaysia’s ex-prime minister Dr. Mahathir. He details how the Malaysian government poured resources into Labuan’s development, and yet how its central motivations are not primarily rational-economic; nor can they simply be attributed to a strategy of accommodation to global financial exigencies as implemented by the archetypal ‘competition state’. Rather, key ideological factors must be acknowledged, such as the fact that East Malaysia (where Labuan is located) is thought to lag behind the west of the country in terms of economic development, or more broadly the context of ‘Vision 2020’, Mahathir’s expressed intention to make Malaysia a fully ‘developed’, ‘modern’ and industrialised nation by the year 2020. Reputation also remains a primary concern – as one commentator put it, “if you’re not one of the top 200 banks in the world, they’re not interested” (cited in Abbott 1999:195) – and potential operators are subjected to strict criteria to establish their credentials. Further motivations include the development of Islamic banking and Islamic offshore finance, and also certain nationalistic or developmental concerns: namely, particular benefits generated for the Malaysian economy, such as the creation of a captive market and the improvement of Malaysia’s financial system more generally (1999:197-202). The significance of such factors is highlighted by the relatively negligible impact of Labuan’s OFC status for island employment, or by the (similarly negligible) proportional contribution of offshore finance to both Labuan’s economy and Malaysia’s economy on the whole. In turn, the motivations behind international banks’ decisions to commit to the Labuan OFC project should also not necessarily be viewed in purely economistic terms; in fact many were concerned to show visible support for the project in order to demonstrate political commitment to Malaysia’s (or Mahathir’s) overall developmental vision.

Indeed, any investigation committed to disturbing the too-smooth narratives of globalisation and deregulation will find that such pragmatic, non-economistic considerations are not, as the orthodox neoliberal might have you believe, an exception. Sovereignty is not necessarily being undermined; the state is not necessarily becoming subservient to the exigencies of global capital. In fact, as Palan (1998) argues, offshore exemplifies and makes explicit the palimpsest of pragmatic – and manifestly political – processes by which statehood and sovereignty are being continually reconstructed. ‘Sovereignty’ itself, which in contemporary discourses tends to be conceptualised as having a fixed (or fixable) meaning, is shown to have gone from representing a religious claim to the land, to embodying an independent, secular right over a certain territory. Later still it became bound up with emerging ideas about the ‘nation’ – the “imagined community” (Anderson 1981) – as agentive force, the symbol of national ‘self-determination’. And this was further combined with juridical capabilities, or ‘the right to write the law’. The present moment of ‘offshore’ marks yet another reconstruction of sovereignty, characterised by the “increasing use of sovereignty as a commercial asset” (Palan 1998:629-30). Palan introduces the notion of “sovereign bifurcation” (1998:627) to describe the strategy states employ in order to simultaneously pursue two contradictory objectives: the “traditional” forms and functions of statehood, and the “commitment to transnational capitalism” (2003:11) – without undermining state ‘sovereignty’ itself.

The very concept of abstracted (rather than literally geographical) ‘shores’ is also revealed to have developed over time in a piecemeal and instrumental fashion (Palan 1998:635-7). The principle of the Law of the Sea, which only became widely accepted around the beginning of the nineteenth century, was preceded for several centuries by actual claims and unilateral assertions over particular waters – thus, and for quite pragmatic reasons, the notion of sovereignty came to incorporate the important precedent of separation between literal, physical boundaries and juridical or ‘fictional’ boundaries. This also provided a model for the division, alteration, and limitation of ‘sovereignty’. A further example of particular import for the study of offshore is the concept of corporate ‘residence’, which originates in the fragmentary legal-pragmatic response to the proliferation of corporations towards the beginning of the twentieth century, and the need for the state (in this case, the UK) to demand taxes from companies conducting their “real business… where the central management and control actually abides” (Lord Loreburn [1906), cited in Picciotto 1999:49). However, such definitions are contestable from place to place, and the system has to be negotiated using a sort of trial-and-error methodology, in order to deal with flexible avoidance tactics of increasing complexity. “The tax authorities of the developed countries have done their best to combat each device as it became known… [but] they have hardly challenged the fertile minds and flexibility of the ‘tax planning’ industry” (Picciotto 1999:59). Significantly, the developments outlined above do not represent an evolutionary narrative; no latent telos underlies each progression. Rather offshore “took shape over time in bits and pieces and in a series of discrete policy decisions” (Palan 1998:640).

III

[offshore as moral dislocation]

Why, then, should neoliberal (and other) accounts present the construction of offshore as a natural development? Why intentionally relinquish control over a system of such manifest importance? The answers to these questions appear just as instrumental, pragmatic and discrete as those motivations which ultimately contributed to the very creation of the offshore world. It has already been noted that offshore finance is in practice almost exclusively reserved for the extremely wealthy; high net wealth individuals and successful corporations display a remarkable tendency to consider themselves somehow above, or external to, national or social (and, some would say, ‘moral’) obligations such as taxation (Christensen and Hampton 1999:170). One commentator (Baker 2005) estimates the ‘uphill’ flow of capital – that which flows from poor to rich countries through the activities of wealthy individuals and companies – at roughly US$500 billion every year, dwarfing the volume of aid flowing ‘downhill’. Another study (Boyce and Ndikumana 2005) asserts that sub-Saharan Africa is in fact a net creditor to the rest of the world, since “external assets (i.e. the stock of flight capital), exceed external liabilities (i.e. external debt)” (Christensen 2007:218-9). Christensen explains this apparent paradox by noting that whilst the assets are privatised, largely channeled through or existing within offshore finance and banking centres, the debts exist in the public realm, falling upon the public institutions of government. He further highlights how activities traditionally understood as ‘corrupt’ and ‘criminal’ account for approximately 35 per cent of transnational “dirty-money” flows from poorer states; and yet how ‘acceptable’ practices such as “illicit commercial activity, incorporating mispricing, abusive transfer pricing and fake and fraudulent transactions account for 65 per cent of such flows” (Christensen 2007:219). Clearly, what Thrift and Leyshon term the “regulatory dislocation” of offshore (1997:61) may aptly be called a ‘moral dislocation’ also. As Roberts notes, “[f]ast-paced and complex international financial practices can slide between something that may be illegal according to one jurisdiction’s laws but perfectly legal according to another’s” (1999:133).

The moral dislocation of offshore, however, goes beyond this relativism created by the inconsistencies between different jurisdictions. What characterises the neoliberal conception of offshore is its framing of the kinds of processes outlined above as non-moral, as governed and motivated by basic market logic, or the logic of capital. This logic is seen to be “fairer”, as Einaudi (1928:35-6) asserts, in reference to the example of tax havens exerting pressure on other jurisdictions to reduce tax levels to the lowest rate possible. “Tax is a cost of doing business so, naturally, a good manager will try to manage this cost and the risks associated with it. This is an essential part of good corporate governance” (P.J. Henehan, senior tax partner of Ernst & Young, cited in the Irish Times, 7/5/04). Indeed the whole discourse of offshore and global financial investment, despite being presented as rational, even mechanical, is couched in a particular ethic of rights and freedoms which transcend the nation-state and its particular jurisdiction. As Palan (2003:14) emphasises, highly ideological assumptions underlie presentations of natural ‘rights’: of human ‘rights’ (the absolute freedom of the investor); sovereign ‘rights’ (the freedom of states, even little ones, to make their own laws); and even corporate ‘rights’ (the freedom to move elsewhere to avoid what is deemed to be excessive regulation or taxation). The global political order becomes “premised upon the dominance of the investor and reinforcing the protection of his or her property rights. The mobile investor becomes the sovereign political subject” (Gill 1998:25). Tax becomes a “cost” rather than a fundamental social obligation.

It is to this depoliticisation of finance, necessitating not “some sort of lapse or mistake but an express operation of… technologization: a reduction to calculability” (Edkins 1999:1), and the willful disregard to the social and political implications of financial activity, that I refer when I speak of the ‘moral dislocation’ of offshore. The insistence that offshore represents the subordination of the state to financial markets is itself ideological: as with the very origins of modern accounting and bookkeeping, the materiality of offshore structures – and not just the knowledge about it – has been discursively constituted “through the reiteration of norms” (Butler 1993:10). In other words, these are performative discourses; they tend “to create what [they] purported to describe” (Poovey 1998:56; original emphasis). Attempts to present it otherwise, to dislocate material practices from discourse and morality, have a clear ideological motive:

offshore provides the perfect legitimization of the goals of neoliberalism in terms of pragmatic social aims, defined as “what we can reasonably expect under the circumstances,” conveniently forgetting that the realm of possibility is a socially constructed one.
(Palan 2003:15)

Rather than attributing the creation of offshore to a depersonalised dynamic – the transcendental power of capital – a poststructuralist approach demonstrates a constructivist insistence on human agency. This is crucial to any critical interpretation of offshore, since it necessitates a historicity which “means that global changes are not an inexorable economic process” (Picciotto 1999:43; emphasis added). To answer the question posed at the beginning of this section – why consciously seek to remove human agency and control from the global financial system? – it is clear that neoliberal discourses serve to obscure the pragmatic and manifestly political functions of offshore in the global political economy, whilst legitimising certain practices and ideological assumptions which they seek to present as natural and apolitical. As such, the neoliberal paradigm is not merely of limited use to the study of offshore; in fact, it must be decisively contested.


(1) In using the term ‘neoliberalism’ I refer only intermittently to individual ‘neoliberal’ writers: throughout the essay I use the expression more generally to denote certain elements of neoliberal doctrine of particular pertinence to this study, such as the belief in deregulation and minimal state intervention, the abstraction of finance from social or political volition, or the adamantly materialist approach to a system manifestly more “fictitious” than any before it (see for example Roberts 1991:91; Picciotto 1999:48). These of course influence and characterise other theoretical approaches that would be loth to find themselves under the ‘neoliberal’ banner; these may too come under criticism, though I refer to them as ‘orthodox’ or ‘mainstream’.
(2) Although ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’ are at best umbrella terms used to describe a broad range of theories and theorists (some of whom reject such labelling outright) and cannot therefore accurately be said to collectively present any coherent central “tenets”, it is possible to attribute certain key themes or preoccupations common generally to ‘poststructuralist’ IR and IPE. Namely, the notion that power and knowledge mutually produce one another, and the rejection of a universal or objective reality or truth – intellectual and other endeavours are held to be “battlefields of contending representations” (Devetak 1996:185). Thus dominant discursive ‘truths’ constitute material ‘realities’.

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To what extent is ‘crony capitalism’ a reasonable explanation for recent experiences of the East Asian ‘developmental state’?

this essay was written in February 2007 for International Political Economy II, an International Relations course at Sussex University

The main problem in East Asia was not macroeconomic, but structural. Deep flaws afflicted the financial system. They include excessive leverage, and a banking system based excessively on directed lending, connected lending and other collusive personal relationships. Ten years ago, finance experts called it relationship banking, and thought it might help to minimize “problems of asymmetric information and incentive incompatibility;” today we call it “crony capitalism”… the rules of economics turn out to apply to East Asia similarly to elsewhere.
(Frankel 1998:2)

Despite being a view propagated by numerous official bodies such as the US Treasury and the IMF, as well as numerous neoliberal scholars, the notion that the 1997 crisis was all “the result of some politicians in Bangkok who got their hands caught in the cookie jar” (International Herald Tribune 14/08/98) is both empirically flawed and theoretically dubious. This essay first outlines the orthodox or neoclassical understanding of ‘cronyism’ and its pejorative connotations, before considering the ‘developmental state’ paradigm that emerged with East Asia’s ‘miracle’ growth. I then attempt to recast the concept of cronyism within its historical and cultural context, dispensing with neoclassical ideas of ‘correct’ economic practice and notions that crony capitalism itself represents either an explanation or a necessary outcome. In other words, this essay is not so much concerned with the extent to which such practices did or did not contribute both to the high growth rates in the region and later to the 1997 crisis; rather it asks how we should view cronyism – as a deviation from the ‘natural’ workings of the market system, or as somehow constitutive of particular variants of capitalist practice? I stress the value of a comprehensive institutionalist approach, as opposed to the neoclassical vs. developmental state inter-paradigmatic debate.

THE NEOCLASSICAL VIEW

[cronyism as deviance]

Like many neoliberals, Frankel (1998) concludes – somewhat triumphantly – that the East Asian crisis proved the Anglo-American economic model to be the most successful after all, which in turn demonstrates that the neoclassical ‘rules’ of economics do apply universally. From this perspective ‘crony capitalism’, a term used to describe a variety of practices including nepotism, preferential treatment, favouritism, or more generally “forms of trust violation that can occur whenever a state tries to manipulate incentives or, in other ways, alter market outcomes” (Johnson 1998:654), is perceived to be a deviation from liberal or neoclassical standards like transparency, regulatory frameworks, and competition policy. The dirigiste state represents not an alternative model of political economic conduct, but a failure to institutionalise these universally applicable norms (Hughes 1999). This ideology is premised on the separation of capital and state, on a system in which the free market provides the most efficient and fair allocation of resources. Thus cronyism is not only imbricated with ‘corruption’ – defined as the abuse or appropriation of public roles and resources for private benefit (Robinson 1998:4) – and therefore subject to all the moral associations of deviance and theft; it also exemplifies a model of capitalism characterised by the intermingling of the otherwise pristine spheres of public and private, by excessive state intervention in the economy with ‘market distorting’ structural consequences. There is assumed to be a negative correlation between economic and financial liberalisation, and the incidence of corruption (World Bank 1997), whilst cronyist practices are perceived as fundamentally unsustainable – the worm in the apple that would inevitably have undermined the Asian ‘miracle’ sooner or later.

THE ‘DEVELOPMENTAL STATE’ PARADIGM

[cronyism as ‘culture’, or a necessary evil]

An alternative view within mainstream discourses heralded the Asian ‘miracle’ as counterevidence to the dependentistas’ critiques of the capitalist world system, arguing that state-directed development was indeed possible – and thus there is some reluctance to dispense entirely with the notion of Asian economic success. Neumann admits that cronyism’s “impact has not always been benign as recent events persuasively showed”, but argues that nevertheless the vertical patron-client relationships which, for him, characterise the region can in fact be conducive to economic growth despite micro-economic ‘distortions’ – for example by maintaining conditions of political stability so that “insulated technocrats” are free to pursue conservative economic policies (2002:11). This kind of interpretation posits a very different idea about how the market should be organized in relation to the state, implying that East Asian economies, in “co-joining private ownership with state guidance” (Woo-Cumings 1999:2), have demonstrated that the public/private distinction fundamental to neoclassicism need not necessarily be upheld. Lee and Naya (cited in Moon and Prasad 1998:17-8) describe these Asian state/society or government/private enterprise networks as actually integrated into a “quasi-internal organization” characterised by “extended bounded rationality, reduced opportunism and uncertainty, reduced small-number indeterminacies, better information, and a group-oriented atmosphere” (Lee 1992:193). This exemplifies the ‘developmental state’ model, which emphasises endogenously generated growth created by, for example, state-directed interventionist or protectionist measures, in contrast to the neoclassical stress on orienting economies to the exogenous imperatives of the world market.

Within this paradigm there is a tendency to excuse cronyist or corrupt practices as somehow indigenous to Asian societies, and therefore permissible insofar as they continue to promote economic growth. There is an attempt to remove the pejorative connotations associated with such practices, pointing out the inappropriateness of applying neoclassical assumptions about the nature of motivation and exchange to societies generally characterized not by the atomistic individualism and horizontal relationship ties of Western post-industrial societies, but rather by a more collectivist model in which vertical patronage networks remain predominant. In these contexts, exchanges are not necessarily contractual, nor are they necessarily regulated by an impersonal rationalist-legal framework (Dean 1999). In this view

crony capitalism was not the intent but a by-product of the structural characteristics of the Asian-type economies. These structures include cartelization of the keiretsu-chaebol variety, bank-based systems of capital supply, mercantilism and protectionism vis-à-vis external economies, and rule by bureaucratic elites despite a pretence of democracy. The intent of these structures was to enrich the nations of East Asia, not to meet consumer demand, global efficiency, individual choice, or any of the other motives posited by neoclassical economics.
(Johnson 1998:655)

DIVERGENCE, OR DIFFERENCE?

[an institutionalist approach]

The problem, however, in the representation of cronyism according to both analytical perspectives outlined above, is that they possess severely limited explanatory value. Each remains preoccupied with notions of success and failure, seeking to account first for the East Asian states’ miraculous growth despite their apparent disregard for certain liberal fundamentals, and then for a crisis which in different ways threatened to undermine both perspectives. Indeed, “[i]ndicting crony capitalism for the crash of 1997 is like blaming the Roman empire for its fall: in that case, you should also praise it for its long success” (Godement 1999:55). Furthermore, each typologises a model or norm which necessitates too-broad generalisations and reinforces the state/market dichotomy. Thus ideological factors and normative concerns are here inseparable from theorising about the East Asian experience, and any such analyses thus tend to be incomplete. As Moon and Prasad argue, “we must realign the ontological foundations of the East Asian political economy” (1998:19), advocating a more broadly institutionalist approach. This methodology rejects more orthodox notions of universally applicable models through which to interpret state and market behaviour; insisting that political economy is inseparable from the social institutions in which it is embedded. It challenges not only the state/market dichotomy, but also the separation of culture, belief, legitimisation and ideology from the study of political economic processes. From this perspective cronyism must be viewed not as deviant behaviour from some established pattern, but rather as the crystallisation of different institutions, structures and practices which are continually interacting and synthesising (Clark and Chan 1998).

In fact, the very separation of state and market – i.e. of economic and political modes of authority – in Anglo-American and European societies, by which the state as a rational-legal authority combined with a bureaucratic administration took on its ostensibly public character (rationalising currency, taxation etc.), has been shown to be a process both historically and geographically specific (see for example Silberman 1993; Teschke 2003). And in fact the economic/political separation itself is highly dubious, since much recent historical materialist scholarship details how what is taken to be a natural or universal phenomenon is in fact a socially constructed distinction which serves to obscure the inherently political or power-based nature of economic or market transactions (1)  (Wood 1995; Rosenberg 1994). Furthermore, and of greatest import for this study, in no sense can it necessarily be replicated elsewhere: as Hamilton-Hart (2002) points out, the gradual process of state-rationalisation in Southeast Asia (with the exception of Siam/Thailand perhaps) was a process bound up with the political, administrative-bureaucratic and cultural institutions of colonisation and the processes by which formal independence was achieved, in addition to the cultural and religious institutions that already existed.

So, rather than seek to draw generalisable conclusions and prescriptions, we can note important differences in how ‘crony capitalism’ manifests itself in the experiences of different East Asian societies. For example, the Marcos and Suharto regimes in The Philippines and Indonesia respectively have been characterised as ‘client-pathological’ (Clark and Chan 1998:27;36), whereby a ‘weak’ state or government permits manipulation of the economy by powerful groups, as opposed to the ‘client-paternalistic’ state-society complex evident in countries such as Malaysia. Here a “constitutional bargain” between Malay political elites and Chinese business elites has been enshrined in policy and law, with elite-mass relations best described as ‘feudal’, patrimonial and authoritarian (Case 1998:153) – an innovative method of exercising control over a highly pluralistic society (2). In this very stable regime, “UMNO (3)  elites, granting the state licences and contracts that sustained Chinese business, in turn received campaign contributions, “secret funds,” and memberships on the boards of Chinese-owned companies. Top Chinese business people, for their part, were given some political voice through the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) in the governing coalition” (Case 1998:151). Still more forms of what has been broadly characterised as Asian ‘crony capitalism’ are evident in the patriarchal Chinese Confucian models in Hong Kong and Taiwan, promoting strong familial ties, and in the more feudal Confucian traditions of Japan and South Korea, supporting large corporate cartelisations such as the keiretsu and chaebol (Clark and Chan 1998:31-2).

Clearly, then, the relationship between cronyism and economic growth must be wrenched away from its causationalist moorings, and interpreted with reference to factors such as religion, demography and colonial history, just as much as to individual policymakers and state strategies. ‘Crony capitalism’ represents a theoretically and empirically inadequate explanation for either the Asian miracle or the crisis, or indeed the specific natures of individual societies, and its continued, habitual usage tells us more about those employing the term than it accurately reflects a reality.

(1) And indeed, state-market relations in the US and Europe are by no means clean of the supposedly corrupting influences of cronyist practices (see for example Shorrock 2002 for a discussion on the Carlyle group, or more generally van der Pijl 1998), suggesting that cronyism and the overlapping of political and market spheres may in fact be a normal behavioural tendency under capitalism, and not a deviation. Given this, the stereotype of Asian ‘crony capitalists’ can only be viewed as a hypocritical and vaguely racist representation – as Dr Mahathir of Malaysia suggests, speculating on the prospect of Malaysia implementing IMF-advised policy reforms along neoliberal lines: “there will not be any giant Bumiputra [lit. ‘people of the earth’ – generally used to refer to the Malays, who benefit from favourable treatment under Malaysian economic policy] companies. And we will be happy as there will not be any more Bumiputra ‘billionaires’ and ‘millionaires’ with their Mercedes, private jets and luxury yachts. All those who are accused of being political leaders’ cronies will be got rid [of]… The foreign workers will earn high wages. They will in turn be the millionaires and billionaires with the Mercedes, private aircrafts and luxury boats” (Mahathir 1998:61).
(2) The Chinese ‘minority’ constitutes nearly a third of the total population.
(3) UMNO is the United Malay National Organisation – the Malay-dominated main political party.

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Newspaper articles
International Herald Tribune 14/08/98. T. Fuller. ‘Asian Crisis: More Than Just Crony Capitalism’.
The Nation 14/03/02. T. Shorrock. ‘Crony Capitalism Goes Global’.