Humiliation in the African context

Tabia Princewill met with Professor Badie, director of the International Relations programme at the prestigious Political Sciences School of Paris (Sciences-Po Paris), who was in Lagos recently for a conference organised by the French Embassy, attended by top diplomats, civil society, academics, as well as a network of chief executives.

Professor Badie views international relations as a competition between world powers whereby whosoever holds the highest status is able to humiliate the other and where power rankings are therefore based on the ability (or inability) to humiliate other nations. It is his belief that humiliation is the fundamental undercurrent of modern international relations—in fact, the basis of all relationships because, due to power play one individual always humiliates the other—which accounts for the rise of violent conflict. His lecture at the Lacour hotel in Lagos, Humiliation, or sovereignty in international relations, explained many of the dysfunctionalities of African states, a story told through the history and evolution of the Western state, later copied by most former colonies without ironing out its kinks. According to this theory, conflicts in the developing world most especially, and international crises more generally, are consequences of specific Western historical processes which produced a global system where exclusion and humiliation of some are the mainstay of global affairs, a tendency then replicated at the local level in post-colonial societies. His ideas on global integration (and cooperation) in a multipolar world are very relevant and applicable to a plural society such as ours. In fact, if the “humiliated” nations of Africa and the developing world championed “inclusive multilateralism” (instead of what he calls “club diplomacy” which excludes most former colonies around the world from international decision-making), this could create a more peaceful world system where the protests and disorders of poorer nations are tabled and addressed with their input, for the good of the entire world-system.

“Africa was the first continent to suffer humiliation, through colonisation, the failures of decolonisation, and the present inequality experienced in the international system. It is in Africa that the contrast is so strong between the rich and the poor, the powerful and powerless. Nowhere in the world has the history of a people been so ignored. Not in Asia. When it comes to Asia people admit there was a long imperial Chinese history. In Europe, there is a strong prejudice that before colonisation there was no African history. It’s not only a question of political domination or of social inequality, it is also a question of a total rejection of alterity.”

In short, the Professor started off by saying that the very idea of humanity has been denied Africa. Alterity, or the philosophical idea of diversity, of “otherness” and therefore of respect or tolerance of difference is often denied Africa and its culture.

Professor Badie explains that the global world order as invented by Western states of similar cultures, structures etc. was ill prepared to meet “the other” which was only accentuated, ironically by globalisation where interconnectedness doesn’t necessarily mean real inclusion. Instead of alterity, the West invented hierarchy: a hierarchy of economies, societies and cultures where race was of course a determining factor.

We also discussed the clientelist links between African and Western elites, whereby the former are “obligated” to the later with greater power which results in the subjugation of the poor in Africa. This was reminiscent of Fela’s song I.T.T (International Thief Thief) describing the business partnerships and morally ambivalent relationships between the Nigerian military and Western conglomerates who shared the country’s wealth with little regard for the welfare of the citizenry. African elites have been all too willing to partake in the oppression of their own people, supported and enabled by Western networks of profit, a global system where the poor of all nations and races are routinely humiliated by their lack of socio-economic standing. The African post-independence political elite also realised that “by extending colonial domination through other patterns this could be to their own advantage”.

Professor Badie stated, “those who liberated Africa from colonisation and domination were very prompt to import the western model of the state. Their priority was emancipation from slavery and colonial rule and not the creation of a new political system.” Indeed, the western system is oriented towards sameness. State-building in Europe was based on notions of homogeneity, the almost complete erasure of group identity to form a singular nation and later the classification or hierarchy of selves. In multi-ethnic, multi religious post-colonial nations such as Nigeria, such ideas created nothing less than a ticking time bomb.

E pluribus unum—out of many one, the motto adopted by the United States when the original 13 colonies of Great Britain declared themselves independent and formed a single nation—has been the mind-set championed by decolonisation, the mantra embraced by post-colonial African nations composed of different ethnic groups.

This isn’t to say that the idea of the nation-state is incompatible with Africa if countries like Nigeria and the global system as a whole where different groups and identities coexist, work towards a “more flexible political system” to face up to the risk of confrontation by “managing plural identity seen not as a way of dominating (one another) but as a way of cooperating. No identity should be closed to the other, identity can be a way of communication and exchange”.

Professor Badie believes that with new technologies in a world where “communication is moving faster than identity”, people’s personal adoption of different circles and identities is here to stay. If what is already happening at the local level in people’s personal lives can transcend self-imposed political boundaries, the world would be better for it and identity would be fluid; one could have several co-existing, peaceful allegiances, rather than a fractured, volatile and dangerous conception of the self-e.g. “am I Biafran, a proponent of “One North”, Yoruba etc. or Nigerian?” “What is a Nigerian anyway, if allegiance to the state holds little benefit?”.

State-making in Africa has been the purview of humiliations, ethnic competitions and special interests, mirroring the pathologies of a global system where denial of status (e.g. the G7 group which excludes 196 countries from global decision making), stigmatization and what Professor Badie calls “deviance” hold sway. Indeed, poor nations, regions, or ethnic groups who feel mocked or rejected by the majority, that is, whomever they perceive as “powerful”, react with “deviance”, by also rejecting the values and culture of the dominant “other”, therefore mobilising poor, discontented segments of the population against the other (e.g. the state, another ethnic group or country), which is a reason for the terrorism and violence experienced in developing nations.

“Entrepreneurs of violence” as Professor Badie calls them, political actors who profit off of destabilising nations, take advantage of such situations because of the unspoken, mishandled humiliations endured by the citizenry.

“Several levels of humiliations exist for African citizens: the memory of slavery, colonial rule, the failed process of decolonisation” coupled with “strong, poorly organised frustration and discontent amongst populations then with authoritarian regimes and corruption, discontent gets stronger, so what I would call a demand for social violence exists. When this discontent isn’t politically represented, institutionally expressed or taken care of, it generates a kind of demand, some political actors cultivate this, breeding, feeding this discontent and creating mobilisation to their advantage, creating an unintegrated, extra-political system that generates violence”.

“When the state is strong you identify in priority with the state, citizenship is the priority allegiance, the prior commitment, there is no discussion. In Europe, before globalisation you were first of all a citizen of a nation state and nothing else, even religion was at the margin of the identification process. When the state is weak or fails, when confidence, trust in the state decreases you diversify your identification, ethnicity and religion become more important. Muslim people aren’t more religious than Christians or others but they are facing the collapse of the state in many regions and are looking for other protections, identifications, commitments. If religious actors are able to offer material or symbolic rewards you are prone to strengthen identification to religious groups. We aren’t experiencing the renewal or rebirth of religion but simply, religion is achieving political functions because political institutions are not able to do that,” the Professor stated.

Professor Badie went on to describe what he perceives as the world’s (more positive) future. “Migration is a chance for humanity”. Helping people to meet, creating “favourable conditions for this exchange, creating the conditions of hybridisation, for the philosophies, religions of the world to meet”, could be a solution to many global and local conflicts based on unresolved social issues and poverty. “Africa has to find its own solutions, it is perfectly capable of doing so”, he said. “The real current challenge is to reinvent the local actor who once was the state builder, the mobiliser, writing, inventing the political agenda in global history. We made a mistake by considering that globalisation meant the rejection of the local actor”.

The question now, is if African leaders and elites will allow the empowerment of the grassroots and whether they are ready to engage with the people outside of populist discourse or hate-speech.

The professor quoted Kofi Anan who once said multilateralism (governance in a multipolar world or a multi-ethnic/multicultural society) should be more social than political, based on the goal of human development. “Social actors must join political actors to participate in global regulation. The oligarchical system is endangering our world”, the Professor said.

These words hold true for Nigeria and many other countries where elite manipulation, the politics of special interests and identity, of “us versus them” is profitable, made possible by “this century of mass communication. Previously when frustrated or humiliated people were facing difficulties, they didn’t know that somewhere in the world or even somewhere in their country there were rich or powerful people. They didn’t see them or know they existed. They didn’t imagine there was something else other than their own reality, the fatality of their own existence. This mass communication by which everyone is able to see each other generates a new kind of political mobilisation in which you imagine your enemy, those with a better life or future than yours and this is probably the main characteristic of new violent social movements. The role of the violent entrepreneur is to make the contrast even more explicit and to stigmatise those considered as richer or more powerful, white people, European people, Christians, (or any ethnic group) richer or more powerful than you, people who they claim are responsible for your poor conditions.”

States must adapt to the new conditions of globalisation where “people feel related to several circles” and most of all let go of the “costly prejudice which considers that the role of the political actor is to maintain and protect the institutions as such. Institutions are not goals or ultimate ends, they are instruments, when what you have to do has to change, you have to change your instruments. This is the challenge of our future; different levels of political action must accept to adapt institutions to new functions which are different than what states had to achieve several centuries ago”.

Perhaps this will be Africa’s contribution to the reinvention of global diplomacy. It is only fitting that the continent with the highest incidence of poverty should be the one to push for global governance truly concerned with human development and the fight against poverty, injustice and the humiliations of the post-colonial world order.