Institutions shoring up Eurocentrism and 'Western civilisation' are not 'non-partisan'

A contribution to Thought Leader by David Saks reminded me of an intellectual movement with which I associate myself, and which questions the continued application of Western thought/Eurocentrism as the dominant paradigm for social organisation — especially governance, policy-making, development and so forth. Out of this movement emerges a body of thought that questions the application and/or propagation of specific concepts such as modernisation, good governance, democratisation and development — and even “freedom”.

These critiques are, in other words, not directed at any of the inherent values in these concepts, per se, but at the ways in which such ideas are promoted, prescribed and propagated as orthodoxy by the dominant institutions (in the broadest sense of the word) in the world. Among these institutions are the better-known organisations and formations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Economic Forum and the Bank of International Settlements. There are, also, the lesser-known ones (no less insidious in the way they shape orthodoxy): sub-national formations such as Freedom House and the Council on Foreign Relations — both the latter are in the United States.

These “institutions” in a sense define what they consider to be important and what they consider to be unimportant. They establish categories such as “evil empire,” “axis of evil,” “rogue states”, “Licus” (low-income countries under stress), “failed states” and “collapsed states”. Based on their own conceptions of right and wrong, their own preferences and prejudices of the social world, or their own (national) interests, they identify the countries or societies which they believe should fall within these categories. In other words, and in terms of these preferences, (other) sovereign and independent societies or countries may be added to any of the lists as “evil”, “collapsed”, “rogue”, “failed”, or “free” or “un-free” states.

These categories become orthodoxy, which is then reproduced through specific media channels and vehicles; most notably among which are the Economist, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Intellectuals associated with these vehicles tend to play a policing role, as modern-day janissaries who, like their counterparts in the Ottoman Empire, reproduce the orthodoxies that emanate from the centres of power — then discipline and/or punish their own communities.

For instance, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publishes the Failed State Index in which sovereign independent countries are placed on a sliding scale of failure. What effectively happens is this: a group of intellectuals organically linked to the social order that creates successive US government policy and decision-makers (among themselves) determines criteria by which to discipline and punish (other societies). I should make the point that the idea of organic intellectuals is not my own; it is from the work and ideas of Antonio Gramsci.

Nonetheless, among these intellectuals we may, today, have a person like, say, Strobe Talbot, who is president of the Brookings Institution (a Washington think tank) and who also served as deputy secretary of state in the US government between 1994 and 2002. You may also have someone like Nancy Birdsall, who is president of the Centre for Global Development (another Washington think tank) and who served as executive vice-president of the Inter-American Development Bank and director of policy research at the World Bank.

There are, therefore, clear links and — we may assume — important ideological solidarities between avatars of “non-partisan” or “non-profit” think tanks and policy-makers in the US government and/or the World Bank.

In terms of the latter, my favourite statement of Birdsall’s is the one which is based on an assumption that what is good for the US is good for the rest of the world. In the context of globalisation and inequality, Birdsall said that not all inequality was bad, and that the “central objective of social policies” ought, therefore, not to be directed at reducing inequality. This approach, she said, was “rooted in the Anglo-Saxon tradition”. Here we see how “Anglo-Saxon” traditions are promoted and exported as appropriate for others in the world. This view may then be reproduced by politicians, Cabinet ministers, journalists or commentators as modern-day janissaries operating in their own countries.

This brings me to Freedom House, which David Saks described on Thought Leader as “a respected and genuinely non-partisan human rights NGO”. This is, I want to argue, is a misrepresentation of Freedom House; it is a misleading, uncritical, ill-informed description that serves no more than to reproduce the institution’s preferences and self-image, as well as the orthodoxy that it propagates. Either by accident or design, Saks seems to ignore important social and historical forces that established this institution and that keep it in place. Freedom House is, in short, quite possibly the cynosure of Western institutions populated by (Western) intellectuals with attendant modern-day janissaries whose task it becomes to discipline and punish other societies …

Freedom House would consider itself to be “a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world” — as is its prerogative. In a general sense, it is really hard to argue against that; as George W Bush suggested, you’re either with those who love freedom or you’re against them. A more critical look, based on detailed empirical research would — more accurately, I would argue — consider Freedom House as a veritable “who’s who of neoconservatives from government, business, academia, labour and the press”. Indeed, research by Holly Sklar established that Freedom House produced “conservative research, publishing, networking and [was a] selective human rights organisation”.

Freedom House would consider itself to be “non-partisan” and a “non-profit” organisation, which, I would suggest, gives a veneer of respectability. Being “non-profit” or “non-partisan” does not mean that a particular organisation does not have an ideological basis, nor does it mean that such an organisation does not have vested interests. For one, it seems viable to be a non-profit in the US when (as is the case with Freedom House) up to 95% of your funding is believed to come from the US State Department. What is closer to the truth is that almost all think tanks serve specific ideological interests. In the US, in particular, think tanks like Freedom House share specific ideological solidarities with Republicans and Democrats, with powerful corporations (Steve Forbes is on the board of trustees) and the neo-conservative movement (Samuel Huntington is also a trustee).

One of Freedom House’s main projects, democracy promotion is a cornerstone of doctrinaire neo-conservatism, and its antecedents can be traced back to the idea of manifest destiny which is so dear to elites in the US. Manifest destiny has its earliest incarnation in the US when, as explained in a previous post to Thought Leader, former president Theodore Roosevelt considered the indigenous people of North America as backward and as being in the way of European expansion across the continent. He wrote, at the time, that the wars by whites against indigenous people in North America were “the most righteous of all wars” because the indigenous people were “savages”. Part of this destiny was, of course, to bring the values of Europe to the indigenous people.

In the contemporary period, Freedom House is at the vanguard of the US’s democracy promotion project — a project that has not always been pacific and benevolent, and which has almost always been driven by the ideological, military or economic interests of Washington. While historical examples of these machinations are legion (Angola in southern Africa, Vietnam in East Asia, Nicaragua in Central America and so forth), Freedom House was more recently directly implicated in subversive terrorist campaigns against independent countries in the Caribbean and Latin America — after these countries were added to lists and/or categories as being “weak” or “corrupt”, or labelled as “pseudo-democracies”.

Now once again, I should stress, there may be nothing inherently wrong with opposing corruption. However, the motives and the tendency of Eurocentric societies to apply (their own) principles to other countries, and the terror or subversion campaigns they launch against these “others”, is what cannot be glossed over with useless, convenient or intellectually occlusive fig leafs such as “non-partisan” and “non-profit”. Organisations like Freedom House may be non-partisan or non-profit (and their earliest founders may have opposed the Nazis during World War II), but they have an interest in shoring up the dominance of the principles, policies and practices of Western civilisation and Eurocentrism as the dominant paradigm for the organisation of the social world.