Q&A: “If It Is Globalisation, It Must Be Everybody’s”

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Interview with Amartya Sen, Nobel economist

LONDON, Nov 21 2007 (IPS) - The “war on terror” is not everybody’s language, nor for that matter is “globalisation”, says Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen. Nor is anyone right to think that religious radicalism is really an Islamic problem, he says.

Such views made Sen, an Indian, a natural choice to lead the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding in its search for civil paths to peace. The group’s report titled “Civil Paths to Peace” was launched in London last week.

That report was presented to Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Ugandan capital Kampala Nov. 23-25.

The report follows a mandate from Commonwealth Heads of Government to look into the causes of conflict, violence and extremism in the 53 members of the Commonwealth, the countries that once formed the British Empire.

IPS European regional editor Sanjay Suri interviewed Amartya Sen after the launch of the report:

IPS: What does your report see as the prime causes of conflict? Amartya Sen: I think that just as the First World War was fed by playing up nationality divisions, at the moment a lot of the debates, are, and a lot of the fury and flames are connected with the divisions of religious distinctions. And I think to overcome that we have to see the richness of human relations. And we’re really concerned with that.

It’s a complex subject. And yet unless we engage with the battle for people’s minds, there’s no way, we believe, of defeating violence and terrorism in the world. It cannot be done by militarism alone. We don’t take the view that military actions never make any difference. It can make a difference, but certainly the civilian initiative, civilian commitment and a variety of instruments connected with media, education, the political process and civil society engagement can make a difference.

IPS: It is usually considered proper to speak broadly of a religious problem, but a lot of people see it as primarily an Islamist problem. AS: I don’t think it is a problem of religion as such, because, I mean I am not religious myself, but I can see that for people who are religious, religion can have quite an enriching role in their life. But that’s quite different from using religious divisions for purpose of a sectarian division, and for purpose of perpetrating violence on people who do not share the religion but have another religion.

But that is not confined to Islamic, what you now call Islamic terrorism. That is a very small group of people of Muslim faith who happen to take a particular view about how to advance it; I think the vast majority of Muslims don’t take that view.

And you see that kind of violence in others too. When there were the Gujarat riots in India it was the Hindu sectarians who played a part. Similarly the Buddhist sectarians have played a part in the Sri Lankan riots, and so on. So I think it’s the confusion between the enriching role of religion, which is one identity among a plethora of identities which human beings have.

IPS: But what is called the global war on terror is really against Islamist violence. AS: Well, the “global war on terror” is not our language, of course. When we refer to it, we call it the so-called war on terror. I think no matter what we think about military initiatives, and many people took the view within the Commission that the Afghanistan initiative was more correct in a military way than the Iraq initiative was, but no matter how we size up on that issue, we all agreed that the basic philosophical understanding that underlines the ‘war on terror’ is far too limited. It does not engage sufficiently in the battle for people’s minds.

And in that it so happened that by seizing on one particular type of violence’s cause, it has taken a reading of the world in which a clash of civilisations, particularly between so-called western civilisation and so-called Islamic civilisation plays a big part.

But that’s not the way the world is divided. People between people who are Muslims, or Christians or Jews or Hindus or Sikhs can participate in the same business activities, can take part in the same celebration of language and literature, enjoy the same kind of music, there are all kinds of ways in which they are united. It’s just a question of taking a small sub-set of a very large group, and then identifying that whole group with that little subset. Which does not produce a very good way of understanding.

IPS: So is the idea of a clash of civilisations misplaced? AS: It’s a wholly wrong expression. For at least three different reasons.

One, that these divisions of civilisation are done on grounds of religion. But we don’t have only religious and civilisational identity. When I talk with a Muslim friend û I happen to come from a Hindu background û when I talk with a Muslim friend, whether in India or in Pakistan or in Bangladesh, or for that matter in Egypt or Britain, it’s not a relation between a Hindu civilisation and a Muslim civilisation. It could be two Indians chatting, or two sub-continentals chatting. Or two South Asians chatting, or it could be two people from developing countries chatting. There are all kinds of ways in which we have things in common. So the civilisational division is a very impoverished way of understanding human beings. In fact, classifying the world population into civilisation and seeing them in that form is a very quick and efficient way of misunderstanding absolutely everybody in the world.

Second, as these cultures have grown, they have had huge connections with each other. Indian food drew the use of chilli from the Portuguese conquerors. British food is deeply influenced by Indian cooking today. Similarly maths and science and architecture travel between regions. So does literature. So, civilisations have not grown into self-contained little boxes.

The third mistake is to assume that somehow they must be at loggerheads with each other. It is just one division among many. And there are others; there are men and there are women. The gender division. Now if that leads to hostility between them, that will be a different thing. And then one has to see what kind of rhetoric has made that possible. And if there is lack of justice to women, how both men and women may have a joint commitment in overcoming that quality.

It’s the totality of neglect of these issues; the multiplicity of identities, the non-insular interactive emergence of world civilisation which is increasingly a united one, and the absence of the reason for a battle just when a classification exists, these are the ways in which the rhetoric of a clash of civilisations is not only mistaken, but is doing an enormous amount of harm today.

IPS: The Commonwealth is often spoken of as a microcosm of diversity. What could it symbolically or practically do? AS: We’re not trying to arrive at a position in the Commonwealth that everyone will have the same politics. Or exactly the same view on economic relations. We have a variety of views. But we also have shared interests, and a shared commitment to peace and prosperity and to good living. These are the commitments we want to pursue, and they can be pursued without having to resolve all our differences.

So the Commonwealth brings a multilateral dialogue based approach to dealing with each other’s differences, and that’s what we have tried to deal with in the past. For example when we were battling with South Africa overcoming apartheid, similarly when there have been religious divisions and riots we are concerned with overcoming them. So the Commonwealth brings an approach, a multilateral dialogue-based approach in which civil initiatives take priority over military ones. That’s where the Commonwealth’s contribution is.

IPS: But whose globalisation is it anyway? That of the West? Of goods, the market? Of people, ideas? AS: It depends on what you mean by globalisation. Globalisation of ideas has been one of the most important ways in which human progress has occurred. People have learnt scientific techniques from somewhere, mathematical techniques from other places. At the moment the non-western world learns a lot from advancement in the West in terms of science and engineering.

On the other hand at the time of the Renaissance and then later at the time of the European enlightenment, there was an enormous contribution of Chinese science to European understanding. Indian and Arab mathematics which transformed the way of the 11th, 12th, 13th century world in which maths was done. Similarly the Arab heritage in providing an interactive dialogic commitment in the days when the Arab world was very powerful.

It is often overlooked now that when Aristotle and Plato were obliterated in the so-called Dark Ages after the classical period, it is only through an Arabic translation that Aristotle and Plato survived. And they were re-translated back into Latin in order to revive that part of western civilisation. So globalisation of ideas has been a hugely constructive thing.

The globalisation of economic relations could be too. But it’s a question not of being against globalisation, it’s a question of making sure that different communities, different parts of the world can all benefit from the globalisation process, rather than the benefit being unequally shared, going mostly to some people and not others.

It’s really the sharing, the avoidance of inequality that we are looking at. And that is not a question of being anti-globalisation. And I don’t think it is a question of whose globalisation. If it’s globalisation then it’s everybody’s globalisation.

But you’re right, that’s a good question to ask, to make sure that globalisation is really that of the globe. And not just one part of the globe.