When Josep Borrell just lately described Europe as “a backyard” and the remainder of the world as “a jungle”, there was global outrage. Nevertheless, it went comparatively unnoticed that only some days earlier many countries within the West additionally refused to take a public stand towards racism.
In October, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a draft decision towards racism, xenophobia and intolerance. The decision described colonialism and slavery as “grave violations of worldwide regulation”. It requested former colonial and slave-trading states to, amongst different issues, pay reparations “proportionate to the harms [they] dedicated”.
In all, 32 – principally Latin American, African and Asian – out of 47 international locations voted in its favour. 9 international locations voted towards the decision: the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Montenegro, Netherlands, Poland, Ukraine, the UK and the USA.
Partially, their “no” vote is a reminder of the rightward shift in US and European home politics that makes much more liberal governments reluctant to simply accept exterior scrutiny of their international locations’ observe data.
The West’s unwavering assist of Israel and its apartheid-like insurance policies focusing on Palestinians additionally makes any unequivocal criticism of racism troublesome for these international locations.
However there’s additionally a deeper motive: the function that racism and colonialism have performed in shaping the present world order. Committing to reparative motion for these previous crimes might threaten the West’s privileged standing on the worldwide stage.
Racism goes mainstream
Earlier this 12 months, French far-right candidate Marine Le Pen battled President Emmanuel Macron within the second spherical of the nation’s presidential election. She ultimately misplaced, however after her best-ever efficiency, underscoring the general shift in that nation’s politics.
In 2021, France witnessed a 38 p.c improve in anti-Muslim assaults. And earlier this month, a legislator from Le Pen’s social gathering was suspended after he yelled “return to Africa” whereas Black parliamentarian Carlos Martens Bilongo was criticising the French authorities’s method in the direction of refugees.
Within the UK, chopping down on immigration has been a precedence throughout the political spectrum. In the course of the 2015 Common Elections, the Labour Celebration bought mugs in its on-line retailer that learn “controls on immigration”. In the meantime, the Conservative authorities in 2020 pushed by means of a set of legal guidelines that closed the country’s borders to these seen as unskilled and missing a excessive stage of English language proficiency.
Italy has seen a celebration with links to neo-fascism come to energy just lately. Research within the Netherlands and Germany have confirmed structural racism in all the pieces from the labour market to regulation enforcement, and schooling to housing.
And within the US, the rise of white nationalism on show underneath the Donald Trump administration continues within the type of rising hate crimes. A number of states have handed legal guidelines proscribing what lecturers can focus on on racism, sexism and, typically, systemic inequality within the classroom.
On this local weather, European nations and the US are hardly ready to assist a UN mandate for better accountability on how member states deal with racism.
Backing Zionism
However there’s an elephant within the room: Israel. It isn’t mere happenstance that each the UK and the US cited their issues concerning anti-Semitism as a justification for voting towards the decision.
The Human Rights Council decision makes a number of references to the Durban Declaration and Programme of Motion that was adopted in 2001 on the World Convention towards Racism in Durban, South Africa. An early draft of that declaration had equated Zionism with racism. Although the ultimate doc balances the Palestinian proper to self-determination and statehood with recognition of Israel’s “proper to safety”, the Jewish state and its Western backers have since insisted that the convention itself was anti-Semitic.
References to the Durban Declaration – which serves as the worldwide template for many nations within the battle towards racism – function a reminder of the truth that a lot of the world nonetheless doesn’t imagine Israel’s therapy of Palestinians is appropriate. However how might Israel’s buddies in the West acknowledge that reality?
A Deeper Downside
But additionally it is very important to recognise that bigotry and prejudice are central to the best way the world – within the West’s view – is supposed to function.
Take, as an example, the mental foundations of worldwide relations – the self-discipline of diplomats, politicians, public officers, and policymakers that’s involved with how states work together with one another on the worldwide stage. The writings of its earliest theorists assumed a Darwinian racial hierarchy.
This attitude was palpable within the first worldwide relations textbook, Paul Samuel Reinsch’s World Politics on the Finish of the Nineteenth Century.
“Massive parts of the earth’s floor are within the arms of countries or tribes who’re responsible of an under-development of their pure sources,” he wrote. He then steered the necessity for an imperial world order and proposed that it was the duty of the “highly effective races” – learn white powers – to rule over the “extra barbarous or much less properly endowed with pressure of thoughts and character”.
British scholar EH Carr adopted with a equally racist trope in his contribution to An Introduction to the Research of Worldwide Relations, the place he wrote that Africans had been savages and that Indians and Egyptians had been immeasurably “much less superior” than People and Europeans. Carr then steered that it was solely anticipated that Europeans – with their truthfulness, integrity, and superior character – can be “leaders of mankind”.
To make certain, the self-discipline has grown extra refined in its prescriptions for the worldwide order. However a hierarchy persists the place a Euro-American perspective stays on the prime whereas the remaining are relegated to the margins. It isn’t with out motive that worldwide relations has typically been termed a “white man’s” self-discipline that works to take care of a racialised hierarchy on the earth.
It’s this worldview that Borrell’s feedback final month mirrored. In any case, as I’ve argued in my work, the European Union attracts on the colonial roots of lots of its key member states whereas coping with the remainder of the world. Actually, the Treaty of Rome that established the European Financial Group as a customs union or the concept of “Eurafrica” – ostensibly a mechanism of interdependence between Africa and Europe – had been the truth is methods of facilitating the administration of colonial territories overseas.
The European Union additionally presumes inherent superiority in its assertion that “inclusion, tolerance, justice, solidarity and non-discrimination” are central to the European lifestyle and that the EU is subsequently a pressure for good in worldwide relations.
Racism is a political selection
However in the end, acknowledging the deep-rooted racism that persists the world over would additionally require Western nations to apologise sincerely for his or her previous crimes. As an alternative, they proceed to refuse to carry themselves to account.
The UK, in its assertion to the UNHCR, mentioned that whereas the slave commerce and colonialism did trigger “nice struggling”, they didn’t violate worldwide regulation. The US additionally justified its choice to vote towards the decision, partially, by saying that it didn’t agree with the necessity for reparations by former colonial powers.
This refusal to simply accept present-day racism and xenophobia as a legacy of colonialism and imperialism is a political and ethical selection. It’s tantamount to standing in favour of racism: With out addressing this historical past, we can’t restore the society of at present.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
