Stolen Spaces and Marching Ants !
Time is a tyrant! And a decade is a mere dust in the sands of history but it means much more in the life of a human being. In the mainstream media recap, we see a decade as a sequence of events and tale of newsmakers. Seldom does it lead to interpretation and introspections. In such an attempt, we can see that a decade means different for each strata of society. In the lives of upper class, technology and social media invaded personal experiences to the deepest. Simulations stimulated their desires and plenitude of choices pampered their lives. The working class had to confront tightening labour laws and insecure way of life. Labour increasingly became a mobile commodity integrated to the supply chains and global delivery models. The poor were encircled by spiralling prices and weakening welfare state schemes. Rather than growth, poverty trickled down to the downtrodden.
Under the pretext of globalization, world economy became an integrated financial market. World became flat in that sense. The poor were erased from the flash memories of the elite and the aspiring ones. On the other hand, because of digital divide and growing economic disparity, world became more and more opaque. Adding to the woes of the wretched, Mother Nature created havoc to the millions in the forms of thunderstorms, earth quakes, floods, Tsunami and cyclones. More than anything these calamities exposed the callousness of the governments and the micro-politic agenda of the donor agencies. India saw the massive earthquake in Gujarat (2001) which took more than 30,000 lives.
Indian polity saw the resurgence of coalition governments in Centre adding a new dimension to federalism. The Tehelka expose took the political bureaucracy by storm. The Gujarat riot will always remain as a blot of this decade. The failure of Agra summit put Indian diplomacy in no man’s land. Indo – US nuclear deal generated much acrimony and put an end to the love –hate relationship between UPA and left. Maoists aided by the inflow of weapons from Bangladesh and Myanmar became the serious threat to Indian internal security. The political economy of Kashmir improved marginally and gave way to democratic process.
The same decade saw the upsurge and retreat of globalization. The hype of Y2K puzzle disappeared in thin air. None bothered to count the millions lost in preparing precautionary steps. The alliance of Time Warner and America Online (2000) became the big hit of the millennium. The honeymoon of techies did not last longer. The Tech crunch (2001) and the dotcom bubble were the preludes for the recessions to come. In this sound and fury, all ignored that it was the collapse of minnows which led to the formation of monopolies in technology.
Silicon Valley emerged as the hub of information technology. IT revolution was nothing but the use of existing computer communication platforms for financial and international trade networks. The wave of globalization of labour and capital was accelerated by internet technologies. In Doha round of negotiations of World Trade Organization (2001), it was USA, European Union and Japan which stood for agricultural subsidies retreating from their previous support for neo-liberalism. Though it exposes the hypocrisy of imperialism, more evident is their losing faith in the free market principles. The changing tides of world economy favoured the labour capitals like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and ASEAN nations. The fundamental importance of productive forces in a political economy was amplified by this.
Corporate capitalism exposed its wilderness and chaos with the collapse of the American Energy sector giant ‘Enron’ in 2001. Sarbanes-Oxley laws tried to take grip on US corporate governance. The roller coaster ride of free market capitalism met an unexpected twist from the high heavens itself. American Hedge fund investment groups started collapsing. Mortgage giants like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bailed out their prestige. None could save the fate of sinking Lehman Brothers, 150 years old Investment Bank. Entire financial market in the developed economies felt the tremors. The recent market updates reveal that US economy hasn’t yet circumvented the recession despite the massive government bailout.
This decade witnessed the madness of American imperialism as they invaded fragile nation states using their military might. The aerial attacks on the twin towers of World Trade Centre in September 11, 2001 became the launch pad of American neo-colonial interests. Greed for Oil and urge to retain the dollar hegemony led them to cook up stories against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. When American Missiles bombarded the planning ministry in Iraq (2003), world conscience was a mute spectator. On the other hand, geopolitical interests in Central Asia and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden were the reasons for the Afghan invasions (2001).
Almost ten years on, the war on terror is on going. Taliban and Opium trade in Afghanistan is on rise again. Incapable to curb this, US-NATO army is busy murdering civilians in the Af-Pak border. Abu Gharib jail tortures exposed the savage side of American civilization. The controversial Guantanamo prison opened by USA to detain the war prisoners (2002) is on the verge of closing down.
Organized crime and terrorism were the perennial disturbances for the entire decade. Few realised these as the fruits of social anarchy spread by the proliferation of market economy world wide. The Somali young terrorist holding the American weapon exemplifies the dialectical relation between imperialism and terrorism. US shipped more than 40 tons of weapons into the ports of Somalia. The new decade will tell us who the recipients were. We saw terrorism getting the religious tint everywhere from Indonesia to Colombia. The state of affairs rekindles the memories of crusades in history.
The entire Islamic nations who were against the American oil greed were tainted as terrorists. Thus political Islam was equated with terrorism. By sabotaging the democratic governments in Islamic nation states Imperialism sowed the seeds of theocracy. Yet we failed to realize that terrorism was best exploited by Imperialism to fragment the opposing nation states. Baltic nations and South East Asia stands as the victim to these experiments. But world polity relishes in the convenience of forgetting.
The world continues to be hot and simmering for the Palestinians with Israel breaching all the limits of atrocity. Palestine lost their iconic leader Yasser Arafat in the middle of this decade. All throughout this decade this West Asian strip of land was stripped of all the human rights. Goldstone commission appointed by UN (2009) was a mild solace to their concerns.
The decade saw the transformation of culture industry from a mass media to hegemony over human capital. The decade began with the arrival of Survivor – the Reality show, first of its kind. It was an instant hit in USA. With ‘Idea Star Singer’ making waves all over Kerala just all in this decade we can sense the spread of a global mass culture. Social media became the second nature of netizens. Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and Orkut satisfied the tribal instinct of millions of people. Yet there are concerns of privacy and information security in these social networks. Identity of individual was lost somewhere in the networks. Wikipedia became the ultimate source of anything and everything on universe. The potentials of these sources take us also to the concerns on the authenticity and ideological intentions. The potentials of music were best explored by Apple Inc with their ‘iPod’.
One cannot ignore the winning strides of science in this decade. And we salute in the memory of seven space scientists who shed their life with the burning Colombia Space shuttle (2003). The Genome project (completed first stage in 2003) and the Chandrayan moon mission (began in 2008) were crowing achievements of the decade. SARS and bird flu consumed many lives world wide. It revealed the vulnerability of the healthcare systems world wide. Climate change concerns became a political issue in no time. Development politics and environmental politics locked horns in various international forums. Much hyped Copenhagen summit (2009) failed to deliver any progressive results though it created a coalition of developing nations.
In this decade, imperial states, non-state actors, NGOs and the donor agencies were the key players in the world polity. Identity politics and micropolitics were their weapons for fragmentation of democracies world wide. They scan even the smallest space of every individual. On one side, they weakened the democracies by instigating ideologies of decentralization of power through micropolitics. On the other end, they created political anarchy by funding identity politics and exporting political terrorism. At the end of this drama, as a saviour of democracy, US imperialism marches to foreign soils to liberate the people and deliver them to the world market. Confrontation between democratic nation states and market forces happened to be the major current of this eventful decade. A society wandering in stolen spaces; it is the gift of this decade.
Gokul B.Alex
