Guest Post by ISHAN FOUZDAR

[This post is the third essay of the series in Kafila titled Decolonial Imaginations. Links to the previous essays are given at the end.

The terms ‘decolonization’ or ‘decolonial’ have become quite critical now, given that the impulse of justice lies at the core of these concepts. Neither postcolonial nor decolonial perspectives are compatible with right-wing ideologies but the fact that Hindutva ideologues in India and the rightwing globally are now trying to appropriate that language makes it seem to some that the very idea of the postcolonial or decolonial is suspect. We believe that this demonizing of decolonial theory from a position defensive of the European Enlightenment needs to be unpacked in the interests of a mutually productive debate. Kafila will be publishing a series of interventions on what the idea of the decolonial imagination involves, locating decolonial theory as speaking from the margins, drawing attention to identities which the orthodox Left subsumed under ‘class’ and which the rightwing in India seeks to assimilate into Brahminism. Additionally the orthodox left’s rejection of spiritual beliefs and inability to engage with them is also a factor that may have produced the space for right wing appropriations of a field marked “religion”. 

We hope that these interventions will clear the ground for productive conversations on the left rather than polarised and accusatory claims.]

Introduction

Anti-colonial thought is under attack. Some scholars have accused decolonial and postcolonial theories of nativism. Interestingly, the phenomenon that provoked this accusation is stranger than the accusation itself. The global North and the global South have witnessed an unlikely alliance of anti-colonial rhetoric and right-wing discourse. While the Hindu Right in India deems Muslims to be colonial invaders, the Right Wing in Europe constructs the influx of refugees as a colonial invasion, which will lead to a ‘great replacement’ of White Europeans by West Asian and African refugees. The solution – ‘decolonise’ by expelling the colonisers and reviving the ‘glorious’ ‘indigenous’ past. This invokes several questions: How do European right-wing groups lay claims on decolonisation? Are there common links between these right-wing ‘decolonisation’ projects? More importantly, does the presence of anti-colonial language in right-wing discourse automatically translate to the conclusion that postcolonial and decolonial theories are inherently nativist?

I undertake two broad tasks. First, I lay forth the ‘anti-colonial’ rhetoric of these right-wing projects. Secondly, I condense their similarities and use them to show why anti-colonial thought should not be seen to be irredeemably polluted by this misappropriation.

Before I trace the right-wing appropriation of anti-colonial language, a caveat about the usage of the terms anti-colonial, postcolonial and decolonial is in order. I use anti-colonial thought to broadly bundle postcolonial and decolonial theories. The reason being that both theoretical schools present varying critiques of the socio-cultural and intellectual legacies of colonialism. The difference in the kind of critique separates postcolonialism from decolonial theory. While the former critically engages with colonial modernity, the latter seeks to delink from the ‘colonial matrix of power.’ Moreover, it is important to note that the decolonial theory being referred to emerges from the works of Latin American thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano and Nelson Maldonado-Torres. There are other responses to colonialism emerging from Africa which set out the terms of decolonisation differently. I do not delve into the African responses, but David Lehmann’s arguments against deeming Fanon decolonial and Kwasi Wiredu’s ‘Conceptual Decolonisation’ are decent entry points into this interesting thought-world.

The ‘Native’ and ‘Progressive’ New Right

To understand how anti-colonial thought became prevalent in global right-wing politics, I undertake two tasks: a survey of the contemporary moment and a historicisation of the same.

A Survey of the Present

Writing a sympathetic piece on Renaud Camus, the person credited with formulating the conspiracy theory of the ‘great replacement’ (more about this later), Nathan Pinkosi, a US academic and commentator, states,

Our task is not to preserve or defend the West. If Camus is right, we are way past that point. Our task is to decolonize the West. [emphasis added]

Pinkosi is not alone in demanding West’s decolonisation. The ideas he shares with Camus have resonated with the rhetoric of right-wing groups in Russia, Europe, and India. Camus alleged that an elitist group was conspiring to replace white Europeans (especially French) with refugees from Africa and West Asia. If we pair this with another book, The Colonisation of Europe (2016), written by Guillaume Faye, we see the way in which refugees are constructed as colonial invaders. From here, it is easy to observe this theme being repeated ad infinitum in Europe since the 2015 Refugee Crisis. Since former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel’s decision to welcome refugees, heads of the German far-right party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) such as Frauke Petry and Alexander Gauland, have alleged that it would unleash ‘madness which would be at the expense of our (German) society.’ Petry mocked the welcome culture by making statements such as ‘too many people are now feeling the fatal consequences of Merkel’s “welcome guests”’ and ‘Is the world now open enough, Mrs. Merkel?’ Furthermore, he suggested that police should ‘shoot at refugees’ to stop them from entering. Similarly, the former leader of the French far-right party National Rally (formerly National Front), Marine Le Pen, stated,

Behind mass immigration, there is Islamism. Behind mass immigration, there is terrorism. There is this immediate threat, there is the transformation of our country that you can see, there is a threat on the long run of our values, of our civilisation, of our traditions, of our landscape.

While Europe demands ‘decolonisation’ of this kind, Asia is not far behind. Since coming to power in India in 2014, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP)-led government has justified its nation-building project in the language of ridding the country of its colonial vestiges. Policy decisions such as basing the new Indian Navy insignia on Chatrapati Shivaji’s royal seal, emphasis on Hindi in revamping the penal codes and normative turns such as the use of Vishwaguru, Vishwamitra and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam in its foreign policy are justified within this decolonial logic. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), BJP’s parent organisation, justified these moves in its magazine’s editorial by deeming the British Raj and the Islamic rule as colonial projects with different means but identical aims. The title of this edition, ‘#Decolonisingminds Breaking the Barriers’, captures Sangh Parivar’s emphasis on decolonisation. Moreover, actors like J Sai Deepak, Sanjeev Sanyal and Vikram Sampath have tried to portray Hindu nationalism as a decolonial force, reimagining India as a Hindu ‘civilisation-state.’

A critique of Western hegemony has also informed Vladimir Putin’s ‘great Historic Russia’ rhetoric. Delivering a speech after annexing and subsuming four Ukrainian oblasts into Russia, Putin said:

It is obvious that the current neocolonial model is ultimately doomed. But I repeat that its real masters will cling to it to the end. I repeat, the dictatorship of Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of Western countries themselves.

While portraying himself as the defender of the Global South, Putin has striven to construct a homogenous Russia, based on traditional Russian values. His project has been bolstered intellectually by the likes of Aleksandr Dugin. One of Russia’s foremost contemporary philosophers, Dugin eulogised Russia’s annexation of Ukraine as a battle against ‘absolute Evil, embodied in Western civilisation … and its liberal-totalitarian hegemony.’

A History of the Present

Evidently, the Right has appropriated anti-colonial language to make a case for ethnonationalism and anti-refugee sentiments. However, one still needs to ask what enables the Right to claim anti-colonial thought. Did the Right abruptly decide to take up anti-colonial rhetoric, or are there more sophisticated philosophical and theoretical roots to this moment? I argue for the latter.

In January of 2017, the leaders of the right-wing nationalist parties of France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, among others, met in public to celebrate the triumph of Donald Trump and Brexit. Making a case against the European Union and the Euro, Le Pen argued that these supra-institutions ‘deny the diversity’ of Europe. Making a case against global institutions and ‘globalism,’ Le Pen called for a return of diversity: ‘There is, behind each of our peoples, a unique fabric of particular family traditions,’ she said. ‘There is a language. There is a history.’ These ‘national’ features, according to this gathering, necessitated taking the nation-state back from globalist regimes.

Respect for diversity and a subsequent attack on meta-narratives are features not commonly associated with right-wing politics. However, if one follows these ideas backwards, one would find their systematisation in a cultural movement called Nouvelle Droite (ND) or the European New Right (ENR), which emerged and dominated far-right politics between the 1960s and 1990s. The tabooisation of fascism in post-Second World War Europe gave rise to a right-wing thought which declared itself to be anti-fascist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist, committed to ridding Europe of the hegemonic liberal universalist paradigm. ND was spearheaded by French theorist Alain de Benoist, who, along with forty other ultra nationalists, founded ND’s official think tank, Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE, Research and Study Group for European Civilisation). Through the 70s and 80s, ND turned into ENR by gaining prominence through establishing several journals across Europe and Russia and consistently publishing in them. Dugin’s ‘neo-Eurasianism’ (more about it later) and FN’s anti-immigration and pro-diversity stances stem from this cultural movement.

How does De Benoist construct a right-wing thought which reconciles anti-immigration with anti-racism, anti-fascism and anti-capitalism? How do anti-racist and pro-diversity arguments build up a system of thought which is anti-liberal and anti-egalitarian? Benoist frames his thought in anti-colonial terms. First, the ‘right to difference’ of individuals and communities is treated as natural. Each culture is treated as unique and self-contained, and the diversity of such bodies of internally homogeneous cultures is of utmost importance. This is the foundation for the anti-colonial argument. According to De Benoist, the liberal Enlightenment modernity represented a form of Judeo-Christian-infused universalist regime which colonised the indigenous populations of Europe. Since it came out of the Judeo-Christian tradition, this universalist regime presented a form of ‘cultural totalitarianism’ which sought to do away with Europe’s native diversity of thought and culture. Making a case against human rights — a manifestation of this Christian totalitarian regime—Benoist argues,

The West’s conversion to universalism has been the main cause of its subsequent attempt to convert the rest of the world: in the past, to its religion (the Crusades) … today … to its moral principles (human rights).

Decolonisation here translates to rejecting Western universalism, it is de-Westernisation, not decolonisation. Stemming from a pro-diversity position, it divides the world into cultural totalities wherein each culture deserves its own space, devoid of a centralising force (such as a state, supra-state or liberal universalist values like secularism), to flourish. Interestingly, this translates to an anti-immigration agenda. Since every culture needs its own space to maintain its traditional environment and norms, it follows that

while Muslims should develop their own possibilities and morality in Dar al Islam [the lands of Islam], the authentic European should master and connect to his/her own regional environment and its constitutional myth, deeply rooted in its historical narrative.

Immigration, therefore, is deemed harmful for the home and host populations. Decolonisation, hence, becomes a demand for banning intercultural encounters and a call for the indegenes of Europe and the Third World to struggle against a common foe: ‘the colonialism of the global human rights regime’.

The culmination of this thought leads to the rejection of the nation-state, guided by the right to difference principle. To counter the centralising tendencies associated with the nation-state, De Benoist made a case for an ethnoplural European Empire. This ethnoregional confederation was envisaged to be a federal arrangement where all cultures would have their own zones. Famously, De Benoist called it ‘an Empire of a hundred flags.’

The contemporary European Right does not demand the abolition of the nation-state. However, it owes its disdain for refugees, allegations of elite centralism against the EU, eulogisation of native cultural diversity and consistent denial of fascist accusations to the political thought of ND. Similarly, participating in several ENR conferences and discussions, Dugin expanded De Benoist’s imagination to include Russia in this empire based on an Indo-European myth that the pagan Indo-European warriors were the original tribes of the land. The European Empire, thus, becomes an ethnoregional Eurasian Empire. Similarly, in the Indian context, Deepak too has used the pro-diversity argument to make a case for India to be a ‘federal civilisation state’ underpinned by Hindu unity.

These features are eerily similar to the arguments made by postcolonial and decolonial scholars. In the following section, I highlight these parallels and simultaneously show why these similarities should not mean the rejection of anti-colonial thought.

Against Burying Anti-Colonial Thought

The foremost parallel which is drawn between the contemporary right-wing’s decolonisation rhetoric and anti-colonial thought is that both are critical of Western universalism. In fact, recent scholarship has taken a step ahead, arguing that the rampant ‘anti-Westernism and anti-modernist high theory’ of postcolonial and decolonial schools enabled the Right to consolidate its position. In other words, any critique of Western imperialism is charged with paving the road to nativism. On the face of it, postcolonialism and decoloniality appear as the culprits. Their critique of epistemic violence, calls for provincialisation of European thought and for delinking from the global neoliberal order, find praise and space in right-wing rhetoric. However, do some cases of nativist appropriation of anti-colonial language prove accusations of nativism placed on anti-colonial thought? I think not.

Close observation reveals the causation-correlation fallacy. A few cases of nativist appropriation cannot be conclusive causal evidence to argue that anti-colonial theories lead to nativism. To make a causal case, one needs to examine the kind of criticism which anti-colonial theories make of the West and show that it is the same as the right-wing criticism. Let us perform this exercise. How does the Right criticise the West? It demonises the West. It constructs the West as a fixed totalitarian Judeo-Christian force which has cultural domination as its central mission. Is this critique shared by the postcolonial and decolonial scholars? A cursory look at postcolonial literature suggests otherwise.

At the beginning of her book Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Leela Gandhi differentiates postcolonialism from postcolonial revenge. Postcolonial theory critiques certain aspects of European modernity, such as the naturalisation of European philosophical traditions and the historicism which tells the non-West, ‘first in the West, and then elsewhere.’ However, the criticism does not turn to demonisation. On the contrary, postcolonial scholars such as Homi Bhabha disturb the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy by showing how colonialism was an ambivalent process. In other words, the relationship between the colonial masters and their subjects consisted of complex feelings of attraction and repulsion. While the colonial powers tried to subjugate their subjects by ‘civilising’ them, it led to the subjects using the same civilising tools to oppose colonial rule. This made the relationship more complex and contradictory than a linear oppressor-oppressed relationship.

Postcolonial scholarship, therefore, neither presents the West as an all-evil demon nor simplifies the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised as one of pure domination. It disturbs the clean dichotomy and tries to critically understand colonial entanglements. Following from this premise, postcolonialism does not demand a rejection of the West. It does not deem everything Western to be colonial. Rather, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, postcolonial theory treats European modernity as ‘indispensable’ even as it is ‘inadequate.’

However, some scholars have argued that while postcolonialism does not reject European modernity in totality, decoloniality does. The decolonial school is composed of a galaxy of scholars, predominantly from Latin America, who have proposed the rejection of colonial modernity. Let us follow their argument. Walter Mignolo borrows from the work of Anibal Quijano, who defined ‘coloniality of power’ as a system of cultural and epistemological domination that persists after the end of political decolonisation. Mignolo frames ‘coloniality’ as a matrix that perpetuates Enlightenment particulars as universals, thereby maintaining colonial domination. In addition to the metaphor of a matrix, decolonial scholars define coloniality as the darker side of modernity. The logical progression of this argument leads Mignolo to identify coloniality and modernity as two sides of the same coin. Decoloniality, therefore, is defined as ending the ‘fictions of modernity.’ It entails delinking from the colonial matrix of power to construct pluriversal spaces which house indigenous ways of life that were suppressed by the ‘Modernity/Coloniality’ dyad. Mignolo and Quijano advocate a rejection of European modernity in toto because they view it as a constellation of processes that led to a systematic erasure of pre-colonial epistemologies.

In a recent article, Dugin framed China’s and Russia’s stances against the West as ‘decoupling’ or delinking from the Western world order. Moreover, Dugin, Deepak and the ENR have used the pluriverse to buttress their pro-diversity stance, which makes the foundation for their anti-egalitarian and anti-immigration argument. The argument seems persuasive: decoupling/delinking from the Western universalist order will lead to the establishment of an ethnoplural pluriverse (the Eurasian Empire) where all cultures will have their zones to protect their traditions. Prima facie, the decolonial theory seems to be extremely amenable to this right-wing project. However, one can see the flaw in this argument by asking: What is the purpose of the critique?

The answer reveals a crucial difference in the way pluriverse has been envisaged by both schools of thought. As scholar Miri Davidson has argued, the Right demands a ‘closed pluriverse’ whereas decolonial scholars argue for an ‘open pluriverse.’ In other words, the Right critiques and intends to delink from the West to create cultural silos. They construct cultures as totalities which flourish in isolation and thereby envisage an arrangement where cultures do not engage in dialogues. On the contrary, decolonial scholars envisage a pluriverse where the worldviews of different cultures are entangled. It is an imagination where cultures form and flourish through dialogues and confluences. Instead of creating cultural borders, Mignolo calls for ‘border thinking’ wherein the border is seen as a space of least control; subsequently, a space where the scope for dialogic thinking is the greatest.

In this aspect, decolonial scholars stay true to the histories of cultural confluences, which Ranjit Hoskote and Ilija Trojanow have traced. In their book Confluences, Hoskote and Trojanow show that the traditions that are today compartmentalised into Western, European, Eastern, South-Asian and so on were never closed systems. Like the confluence of tributaries makes a river, these systems flowed into and out of each other, carrying attributes of each in some proportion. Whereas the Right tries to impose boundaries on cultures in the name of preserving diversity, Hoskote and Trojanow announce: ‘no confluence, no culture!’

Conclusion

Anti-colonial rhetoric is a disturbing addition to the arsenal of the contemporary global Right. The apparent similarities between the arguments of anti-colonial theorists and the thinkers of the Right have understandably disturbed scholars and students across the world. However, as I have tried to argue, the similarities are only superficial. As the adage goes, the devil lies in the details.

Anti-colonial theories and the Right share neither the same critique of the West nor the same purpose of the critique. Rather, it is a case of appropriation where the Right has tried to superficially adopt anti-colonial language to put on a progressive disguise. I have tried to probe this disguise to show how the Right maintains a culturally essentialist stance behind the mask of preserving diversity. In the name of protecting heterogeneity, the thinkers of the Right maintain a position of cultural purity. This sense of cultural purity feeds into the politics of hatred wherein right-wing actors claim nativity of one community and deem other communities ‘colonial foreigners.’ Anti-colonial thought, on the contrary, suggests otherwise. Mahmood Mamdani best summarises this position, and I conclude with his words:

It may be futile to look for a single origin of civilisation. Maybe the origin of civilisation […] is not in a place but in an encounter. From this point of view, the search for a single place, a single origin, appears yet another version of the continuation of the 19th-century race-based search for purity. The alternative would be to think not in terms of one original inspiration but a plurality of influences, not in a single origin but in confluence.

Ishan Fouzdar is a doctoral scholar at Shiv Nadar University

Links to previous posts in this series

Sleeping with the enemy? Postcolonialism, misread and misjudged: Shamayita Sen

Beyond philosophical gaslighting – seven theses on decolonization/ decoloniality: Aditya Nigam