PATRICK BULGER | Ukraine: A false dawn for globalisation’s Age of Aquarius

Appalling scenes that bear testimony to the brutality of Russia’s war in Ukraine play out on our TV screens with numbing routine now. We witness the tragedy of ordinary people, their livelihoods and the lives of their loved ones extinguished in the molten-metal fury. It’s heartbreaking stuff, a bitter wake-up for those who had imagined Europe would never again experience the misery that attended World War 2. But history has caught up with modern Europe and the world. Globalisation’s Age of Aquarius has met its match.

Viewing the conflict in Ukraine in humanitarian terms is an appropriate civilised response, but where TV excels at packaging glimpses of shocking happenings, by its nature it does less well in perspective and context, especially beyond its own ideological confines. The biggest “back room’’ story of this war is what it says about the state of our world, and where we are, or thought we were, in what many took for granted as the natural evolution of political society. Assessed honestly, it’s self-deluding to view the war as anything but a train smash for globalisation. It may take decades just to remove the wreckage.

Take the claim by some commentators that the West’s image and reputation have been enhanced by the war, for at last the free world is uniting in defence of democracy, standing up for what is right after decades of democratic softening-up and debilitating welfarism. In reality, though, with the exception of North America and Western Europe, much of the world has stayed on the sidelines.

Prime among the West-is-best cheerleaders has been the popular historian Francis Fukuyama whose End of History, published in 1992, celebrated the demise of the Soviet Union and the “victory’’ of free-market capitalism. The end of history was also the end of ideology, or at least those ideologies that offered any stricture on the self-celebrating, individualistic new age, freed from an inconvenient past.

In this “me-first’’ nirvana the human instinct would ineluctably arc towards democracy, freedom and open economies, cocooned in a global community of peace and tolerance of all humankind. From a cultural-historical perspective, the age of globalisation was the most profound of the legacies left by the hippy movement of the 1960s, whose former members dominated politics and government in Washington and Europe. Their two mascots were the saxophone-playing Bill Clinton and the UK’s Tony Blair, who as a student was a guitarist who modelled himself on Mick Jagger.

Ideology was old hat: Blair dumped decades of Labour working-class solidarity to ingratiate himself with homeowning Ford Escort drivers; Bill helped by Hillary turned his back on his Southern red-neckism to pretend to be a cool eastern seaboard Democrat. In the new non-ideological age, history counted for nothing. A mere folly of a misspent youth.

Ideology was old hat: Blair dumped decades of Labour working-class solidarity to ingratiate himself with home-owning Ford Escort drivers; Bill helped by Hillary turned his back on his Southern red-neckism to pretend to be a cool eastern seaboard Democrat.

Where there were once two opposing superpowers that broadly represented different and rival ways of ordering society — the one communist, the other capitalist — now there was just one. It didn’t bristle aggression as much as it brooded in a fierce motherly way over the new world order of which it was the sole custodian. Poke it with a stick, as Osama bin Laden did on 9/11, and it responds with blind fury.

The limits of the new, post-ideological world order were exposed in Bosnia in the 1990s, where the end of Yugoslavia unleashed historic ethnic and religious resentments. Easier targets for Western protection proved to be in the Middle East; in Iraq a pointless and illegal US invasion unseated Saddam Hussein, ushering in years of civil war. One of the last pretend holdouts against Western imperialism, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, was bombed into oblivion.

None of these conflicts, regarded as temporary setbacks in the march ever-forward, would slow the juggernaut of globalisation, driven by corporations and logistical imperatives. The new age would be one of rational self-interest unburdened by history and ideology. And almost as an exclamation mark at the end of this heady assertion of human enlightenment, a new and democratic SA emerged, apparently shorn of hatred and prejudice and deftly ducking the racial conflagration so many had warned about. Also in this case, ideology had to be abandoned.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous rampage through Ukraine suggests two things: history, far from being at an end, is very much still with us; and, two, that what the West regards as a way of life that comes so naturally that it hardly qualifies as ideology is, alas, just its own ideology. It may be unquestionably “better”, but that doesn’t mean the world is prepared to embrace it without regard to countries’ own interests and pasts.

Of course one could argue Putin is using history to camouflage his imperial ambitions, and his own instinct to stay in power. But who could not argue that the big winner in this war is, surprise, the US, which has gladly watched the tensions boil over these past 10 years?

The sad fact is that in much of the world history refuses to yield, acting instead like rising damp to undermine idealistic political structures. Putin’s war is just one among many instances of resistance to the anaemic, secular offering of globalisation compared with the dizzying intoxicant of cultural identity and bellicose populist nationalism.

This atavistic political instinct, which seeks to dress the future in the costumes of the past, inspired the Brexit vote in the UK in 2016 and Donald Trump’s election. It is the same tendency that saw China reaffirming policies inspired by Mao Zedong, seeded the revival of “Great Russia” ideology in the Kremlin and spurred the growth of nationalist movements across Europe and in India. Brazil voted into office a soldier contemptuous of all democracy. Not to be left out, in a fit of populist pique in 2007, the ANC turfed out a good president in Thabo Mbeki, replacing him with the presumably more historically compatible and ideologically comforting Jacob Zuma. In all these cases revenge was at play.

In the rush to globalisation and dilution of sovereignty we would do well to remember the past weighs heavily, especially in societies where it is demanded of them that they forfeit their history, customs and habits for a bright new promised future. A mirage perhaps. And when they are given no choice in the matter, the past becomes a refuge and a comfort zone few will surrender without a fight.