Trump and Trumpism have become global words. A whole thesaurus of meanings, synonyms and antonyms have been built around the US president’s reappearance. But Trump as a set of words is anarchic, compared to Trump as a discourse. Trump as a discourse is devoted to giant collectives like large corporations and super-states. It has little space for the defeated. And Trump as a discourse restricts the conversation around power.
It is in this context that social scientist Chandrika Parmar raised an issue: how do we relate to Trump as an individual? How do we react to him to make sense of our own lives? Parmar holds that the discourse of the individual, for all the talk of individualism, has disappeared. She adds we must reassert the individual as long as Trump remains the trump card in the pack, and the individual the joker.
This point was made in a different era by social activist Ela Bhatt, who was deeply concerned about creating a new front against globalism. Home science, she said, is about homecoming. About being at home in the world. And globalism denies both. Globalism, she claimed, is neither about swadesh nor about swaraj. It is a parochial rendering of politics.
She added it is women who suffer the most. She felt that home science should create a new theory of international relations. She would have added that Trumpism destroys the very idea of citizenship. Citizenship as a right of passage is never complete. The refugee, the migrant, the transient and the student perpetually remain vulnerable.
Bhatt felt a home science of international relations would involve the individual and his domesticity. It is best caught in a joke where the housewife describes the new international relations as a ‘Trump-olin’. The challenge for the individual is how not to be squashed in the process.
Bhatt worked with Jimmy Carter and others in creating a peace process in Africa. She pointed out that women can be stalwarts of such a movement. War and violence involve long periods of waiting, mostly for the women. International relations is too often looked at in terms of contracts, and not in terms of the individual phenomenology of waiting.
So I would like to suggest a new theory of civic internationalism. As Bhatt put it, one has to revive a new theory of internationalism as civics. It has to reclaim its roots in domesticity and the individual.
One has to begin with a sense of laughter. Trump is treated in odd silence. There is pomposity about the entire discussion. It is restricted to experts. The individual has to return to it. The joke is one of the first possibilities of entry.
A precocious student suggested that Rajni Srinivasan, the Columbia University student who was evicted, should have been given the Tom Paine award. Over 150 Indian students are reported to have been evicted. It is ironic that Indian students have been passive to it. As passive as the Indian state. It is time Indian citizens take part in international debates and local colleges open up centres for Palestine studies. Each college becomes conversant about Hamas and the debate about the Gaza Strip. Each college has to work to realise that the US and Israel are joint participants in a genocidal venture.
Such activism would completely alter the logic of international relations. It would change not just the logic of the syllabus, but of constitutions, too. The logic of social Darwinism played out by Putin, Trump and Israel will have to be openly challenged. International relations is now an arid field built around security and the nation-state. One will have to rework and pluralise it by creating new possibilities of citizenship and freedom. Civil society will have to be a part of internationalism and a new democratic freedom. The refugee and the migrant can no longer be treated in the language of vulnerability and helplessness.
One has to see this as part of an inventive theory of democracy.
It is for this reason that the individual can no longer be passive, content with rights and indifferent to duties. This demands we rethink democracy, pedagogy, knowledge and ethics. One would like to suggest every school and university become a repository of knowledge which is being erased, but one hardly notices that modern information theory tied to power is about erasure, obsolescence and triage. Individuals, communities and culture are disappearing and there is no memory of them. Just imagine if a few dozen schools in India were to open conversations with schools in Palestine. It would be a metaphor for social injustice.
This relates to a new sense of ethics. Individuals should take new pedagogic stands to re-create peace studies in a new ethical form. Storytelling is important and the story-teller must return to politics and international relations. One of the things that civic internationalism has to return to is a theory of memory. If one looks at the news today, all one sees is crass indifference to the disappearance of people. Social Darwinism is rampant even at the tacit level of erasure and indifference.
One would like to make another suggestion in this context. I realise that the Directive Principles deal with the future and that peace studies is a futuristic subject. One must include in the Constitution new directives regarding peace and ethics. The passivity of citizens to foreign affairs will no longer do. The national security state can no longer be an unquestioned entity. There has to be a Palestine in every Indian imagination. Only then can we see echoing sympathies to the situation in Ukraine, or closer home for the Rohingyas.
One of the institutions one has to arrange through the Directive Principles is the availability of a peace-keeping force. The artist Nikolai Roerich had suggested a ‘Green Cross’ to accompany the Red Cross. It was supposed to protect cultural institutions in wartime. The idea needs to be extended from culture to peace. We need not protect monuments to war, but memories of suffering and marginalisation. We need a new kind of language to talk about war. We need a new metaphor for ethics.
The individual, in the full intensity of the social and the moral, has to return to politics. Only then can he make sense of his own everydayness in the era of Trump and Putin.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)