Nazarbayev, historical revivalism, and national legitimacy in Kazakhstan

By Ellen Leafstedt

On 1 December 2019, Kazakhstan celebrated its first Day of the First President since Nursultan Nazarbayev’s resignation from the presidency earlier that year. The national holiday has been celebrated since 2012, but this year was particularly significant as Kazakhstan’s first post-Soviet leader had been celebrated not as its president, but as a symbolic figure: the ‘leader of the nation’, Elbasy.

Nazarbayev takes pride in this role, and the celebrations of his leadership last December focused not only on Nazarbayev as the state-builder, but also the nation-builder of contemporary Kazakhstan. As president, Nazarbayev placed great importance on creating new shared histories, myths, and symbols for Kazakhstan, which form an important part of any nation-building project.[1] Having written several books on pre-colonial Kazakh history, the former president’s central place in these nation-building efforts is significant, given that much of Kazakhstan’s official post-1991 history has been centred around his cult of personality. His interest in revitalizing interest and awareness of pre-colonial history results from his publicised concerns over the fact that ‘over 150 years, Kazakhs nearly lost their national traditions, customs, language, religion’ during Russian/Soviet colonial rule, which in his view has diminished Kazakh national identity too far.

Indeed, as a multi-ethnic country with a major fault line running through its middle between the predominantly Kazakh south and the largely Russian north, it is in Kazakhstan’s interests to bring a sense of legitimacy, continuity and national authenticity to the entire country.[2]

Billboard of Nursultan Nazarbayev
in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Source: Jeffrey Beall

However, maintaining legitimacy is complicated for a country with flawed democratic institutions and political processes governed more by patronalistic self-interest than by the rule of law. Therefore Kazakhstan’s claim to Weberian legal legitimacy, which derives from trust in the rationality and predictability of a political system based in the rule of law, is devalued by the patronal character of the Kazakhstani system. As a result, legitimacy deriving from other sources, such as historical tradition, perhaps take a greater role in justifying the regime’s political authority in Kazakhstan than elsewhere.

For these tasks, the rewriting of history is a useful tool with which to ground hegemonic discourses about what it means to be Kazakhstani (a civic identity) and Kazakh (an ethno-cultural identity) on the state’s preferred terms.[3] The former president has institutionalized his push for greater pride and awareness of this Kazakh nomadic past through cultural policies, such as the ‘Spiritual Revival’ program, which proposes to ‘modernize historical consciousness’ through the production of documentary films, new museums and a park dedicated to ‘The Great Names of the Great Steppe’, as well as an archive digitization project, Archive-2025.

Projects such as these have tended to focus on the period immediately preceding tsarist conquest, the Kazakh khanate period (15^th-19^th centuries). The Kazakhs’ nomadic chiefdom system, comprised of three ‘hordes’ (in Kazakh, zhuz, meaning hundred) and many clans within each horde, long set them apart from other peoples inhabiting the steppe.[4] As a society featuring strong leadership, spiritualism, collectivism, and defined social roles, the khanate period is often portrayed in contemporary Kazakhstan as a semi-utopian golden age. National holidays, museums, and monuments created in the post-Soviet period have linked contemporary Kazakhstan to this ‘golden age’ in an effort to draw on traditional legitimacy.

Moreover, as a project led by the symbolic head of the state, Kazakhstan’s historical revival serves to legitimize not only the existence of the nation-state, but also the form which the state and the nation take in Kazakhstan. More specifically, Nazarbayev’s historical revivalism legitimises the domination of Nazarbayev’s presidency and personality over the public sphere. Historical Kazakh symbols and Nazarbayev’s own symbols are intentionally placed side by side to highlight the links between the country’s heroic past and glorious present.

Arc de Triomphe in Kazakhstan’s capital city of Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana). The gold letters on its face read ‘Eternal Nation‘ in Kazakh, after the name of one of the pillars of the Spiritual Revival program. Source: Wikimedia commons

In front of the Nazarbayev Museum, in his former official residence, a statue of the founders of the first Kazakh khanate, Kerey and Zhanibek, stands as a visual reminder of the two pillars of the regime: historical tradition and personal charisma. Thus, these projects have the effect of not only reinforcing the central place of historical Kazakhs in the country’s national symbols, but also of cementing Nazarbayev’s own place in Kazakhstan’s history.

The framing of the Kazakh khanate as a semi-utopian society also serves as a moral framework, against which contemporary Kazakhstan is evaluated. Nazarbayev for instance says: ‘Our heroic ancestors willed us to always hold our banner high, wishing us great victories. Since then, all our successes and achievements have been realized under our sky-blue flag’. The imagery of Kazakh ancestors tacitly approving of Kazakhstan’s current course gives a sense of continuity between past, present, and future, and legitimizes the current political course by linking it to Kazakh tradition as the ‘correct’ course. By corralling Kazakhstan’s historical narrative into a linear story, the state is able to lay claim over concepts of patriotism, belonging, and ultimately, legitimate political expression. In this sense, historical reframing has the ability to strengthen the stability of the regime by justifying its present with the use of the past.

Moreover, references to the moral character of Kazakh ancestors also serve to de-legitimize movements and ideas which run counter to the state’s desired political culture, resulting in a hegemonic, rather than democratic, understanding of patriotism.[5] This is seen in discourses on the Kazakh tradition of religious tolerance; an official book commissioned by the Ministry of Education, The World of Values of Independent Kazakhstan, maintains that as a result of the spiritualism of Kazakhs’ nomadic ancestors, ‘religious tolerance and lack of fanaticism’ characterize contemporary Kazakhstan.[6] While religious tolerance might initially seem uncontroversial, it is significant because Islamist political movements have mobilized against Nazarbayev’s regime in the past; the state has thus made a point of deflating undesirable political ideas by framing them as fanatical, and therefore, as an affront to Kazakhstan’s ‘inherent tolerance’, unpatriotic or un-Kazakh.[7]

In this way, conformism with the state-imposed political culture is a prerequisite to contemporary Kazakhstani patriotism as framed by official historical discourse, which thus acts to reinforce the undemocratic nature of the current political system. In sum, Kazakhstan’s state-led historical revival projects play a role in strengthening the foundations of the authoritarian state by grounding it in nationalist, traditional, and charismatic forms of legitimacy. In turn, this historical project informs Nursultan Nazarbayev’s reputation as founder of the new Kazakhstani nation-state and upholder of Kazakh traditions and legacies, and will likely continue to do so long after his departure from office.

Ellen Leafstedt is a master’s student in Russian and East European Studies at Oxford University, where her research focuses on political institutions and legitimacy of authoritarian states in the former Soviet Union. Find her on Twitter @ellenleafy.

References:

[1] A.D. Smith, ‘State-Making and Nation-Building’ in J. A. Hall (ed.), States and History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986), pp. 228-263.

[2] S. N. Cummings, ‘Legitimation and Identification in Kazakhstan’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 12:2 (2006), p. 178.

[3] O. Kesici, ‘The Dilemma in the Nation-Building Process: The Kazakh or Kazakhstani Nation?’, Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, 10:1 (2011), p.31.

[4] Some Western and Kazakh historians argue the khanate marked the beginning of Kazakh statehood, as these hordes functioned as political and military unions using customary law; moreover, their nomadic lifestyle arguably distinguished them from neighboring peoples enough to give them a sense of national identity and distinctiveness. Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Stanford University Press, 1987), 15.

[5] Brudny and Finkel show how this hegemonic conception of patriotism is a marker of authoritarian political culture in the case of Russia, where the regime commands discursive hegemony over what behaviors are considered patriotic and appropriates patriotism to mean alignment with the regime; Y.M. Brudny and E. Finkel, ‘Why Ukraine Is Not Russia: Hegemonic National Identity and Democracy in Russia and Ukraine’, East European Politics and Societies, 25:4 (2011), p. 830.

[6] A. Nysanbayev, Mir tsennostey nezavisimogo Kazakhstana [The World of Values of Independent Kazakhstan] (Almaty, 2011), p. 6.

[7] S. Akiner, ‘The Politicisation of Islam in Postsoviet Central Asia’, Religion, State & Society, 31:2 (2003), pp.103-119.

Neo-Pentecostal Power in Brazil – Democratic Decay and the “Purification” of Politics

Rafael Antunes Padilha

Jair Messias Bolsonaro, a former Army Captain of the Brazilian Army, was recently elected President of the largest Latin American nation. Wielding the motto ‘Brazil above all, God above everyone!’, Bolsonaro has achieved infamy worldwide due to his bigoted, xenophobic and openly homophobic statements. On top of that, he reached the newspapers headlines over his anti-conservationist approach towards Brazil’s natural resources.

Recent investigations uncovered an active stance of the Executive in Chief, that ended up providing institutional backup to cattle and soy farmers and their eerie intentions of setting the Amazon rainforest in flames, in what has been called in Brazil ‘a day of fire‘. The country’s current trend of far-right populism and attacks against minorities has thrown Brazil into the international spotlight, sparking public debates over human rights and democratic decay. Despite claiming to be Catholic, the president typically peddles violent discourses to his most hardened supporters: the neo-Pentecostal Christians.

Neo-Pentecostal churches are a relatively recent episode in Brazil’s religious history. Pentecostalism emerged in the country throughout the 1970s and has had a steady membership growth of 7.9% a year; Neo-Pentecostals constitute 65% of all self-proclaimed evangelicals.[1] The rise of Neo-Pentecostal denominations in the country brought a new political force into the mainstream, in the form of several political parties created directly by, or with support from churches in the last twenty years.

Bolsonaro today is perceived by pastors and followers as a catalyst of change in a corrupt Brazil. Bolsonaro’s middle-name is Messias (Messiah) and his social media followers nicknamed him ‘the Myth’. Such a movement evokes the historical phenomenon of messianism in Brazilian politics, which has seen two civil wars attempt to suppress messianic popular figures in the countryside (namely the Canudos War in the 19th Century and the Contestado War in the 1910s).[2] The figure of a savior that shall free the poor masses from their sorrow and finally fulfill the national destiny of glory is an ever-present topos in the Brazilian popular imaginary.

In the present day, there is a profusion of different churches, denominations and eclectic liturgies in the local Pentecostal spectrum. No central authority has been established to bring coherence to the Evangelical Neo-Pentecostal movements’ desires and aims. However, there are among the notorious Televangelical denominations a comprehensive set of successful evangelising tactics that are similar in shape or form.

Figure 1. The multimillion Universal Church of God’s Kingdom Temple of King Solomon in Sao Paulo State. Source: Wikipedia

The Neo Pentecostals in Brazil differ from the Charismatics in the USA by their successful business model that produces strong geographical capillarity. Brazilian neo-Pentecostal megachurches not only manage to organize political parties but have also reached the highest echelons of the State’s administration, from army generals to rank-and-file nominees of ministerial cabinets. Today, local churches like the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God  (IURD in the Brazilian Portuguese acronym), founded by the Rio de Janeiro born Edir Macedo in 1977, and the International Church of God’s Grace, acquired diplomatic passports for their pastors through their connections in the Ministry of Foreign relations, as well as privileges to expand their operations beyond the country’s borders.

As founder of the IURD, Edir Macedo is the precursor of the neo-Pentecostal movement in the country in its present form, and also the architect of the managerial culture within the religious structures. Macedo is vocal in his defense of the ‘Gospel of Prosperity’, according to which, the church’s mission is to obtain happiness and material gains in the earthly life for its flock. A huge component of the church’s activities lies in encouraging generous monetary donations from the followers of the church, which it presents as one of the ways to fall into God’s grace. Those financial gifts are commonly named tithes and can collectively amount to millions of dollars or even to real estate properties.

Figure 2. Edir Macedo, owner of the Universal Church. Source: revistaforum.com.br

Such economic power afforded the IURD a powerful institutional leverage during the 1990s and 2000s that has been built, brick by brick, with the support ofthe center-left Workers’ Party. This alliance between the social democratic left and the largest evangelical groups to pursue electoral victories, ended up opening the gates of the public debate to more conservative discursive repertoires, like the rise of homophobic discourse in Brazil. The former head of the Executive branch of the government for the Workers’ Party, Luis Inácio (Lula) da Silva – a Catholic whose views were influenced by his brother, a friar in the Theology of Liberation – saw in the evangelical demographic an opportunity to advertise outside the oppositional, elitist mainstream media to a more left-leaning administration.[3] Using pastors and TV channels under evangelical ownership, the Workers’ Party managed to advertise its governmental agenda to the poor masses.

With such a formidable institutional framework boosting their religious infrastructure, the largest evangelical churches developed a robust model of conversion and congregation that allowed them to project power overseas, facilitated by the leniency of the State. From Africa, Europe and North-America, the IURD alone now has a foothold in 180 countries and claims to have 12 million active members. In order to amass large numbers of followers, they tend to focus on marginalized and disenfranchised groups (economically and racially).

In the cases of Brazil and Mozambique, religious traditions such as Candomblé (and other animist expressions) are cast as scapegoats for all the evils and hardships that people face in their lives. I witnessed this phenomenon when accompanying a relative in one IURD church service. On the ‘Altar’, the pastor summoned a family from the region whose son was addicted to drugs. Socio-economic problems like violence, substance abuse and poverty are then treated as the work of Exú, an important and traditional figure for religions of the Yoruba matrix in Brazil. The young man, according to the pastor, had attended a ritual in a terreiro (a religious space for Afro-Brazilian beliefs) because of a girlfriend who forced him to partake in ‘demonic’ Candomblé practices and rites. That contact allegedly let the evil spirits take his soul and led him to use cocaine and other substances.

This approximation of different beliefs to evil is neither a novelty, nor usually authentic. These ‘testimonies’ or rituals of cure and exorcism are very often a ‘make-believe’ played by hired actors that appear in different churches or televangelical shows. In a not so remote past, Our Lady of Aparecida (Patron Saint of Brazil and one of the Saints with the largest group of followers in the world) was also associated by IURD with the devil and pointed out as the ultimate cause of all Brazil’s underdevelopment and suffering. The clear message of Pastors and evangelical churches’ leadership is to demonize any competitor in the religious marketplace.

The heavy emphasis of IURD churches on planned parenthood (here meaning the usage of birth control pills, imposition of one single child for each couple and going further to support abortion in some cases) and the tithe can be explained as an attempt to convert marginalized individuals into economic agents for the church, that being, a way of controlling the followers’ family budget expenditures in order to keep the money flow to the institution as strong and stable as possible. The tithe is a source of direct income transfer from the members, like a pension, that enable the religious organisations to design services to improve the quality of living of many of the churches’ members.

In a country like Brazil, where despite the average global real increase of wages above inflation has improved millions of peoples’ lives, the economic toll in middle-income families is still expensive. The high costs of private healthcare and education are the main destination of families’ incomes, considering the poor quality of the public services available. In that manner, the church (IURD) sees larger families as a challenge to their campaigns for large sums of tithes. If one has too many mouths to feed, by the end of the month they will not have enough to give as a contribution to the church.

For the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chauí, the mixing of the spiritual and the economic, and the heavy focus on the entrepreneurial ideology of late capitalism, have guaranteed the survival of the Gospel of Prosperity. According to the IURD’s ‘Theology of Neoliberalism’, the world we live in is the final work of God, and we should therefore manage it in order to unleash prosperity and wealth to all.

One aspect usually disregarded by the Brazilian Left (represented by the Workers’ Party and Socialism and Liberty Party, the main left in Congress), is that the church has successfully empowered commonly marginalized communities with this ideology. With the economic growth of the 2000s, the harnessing of those groups by the evangelical denominations – through the proliferation of small devotional spaces and an evangelical-only network of clothing, food, and furniture, accompanied by the decline of the Catholic Church that refuses to further its reforms and compete in equal standards with the new Christian options in the religious market – produced a circular exchange of money and goods strengthening the new religious organisation itself. Whereas Catholics tend to support more charitable and donation-driven practices, evangelical denominations dedicate resources and efforts in developing a welfare system for their followers under a tight and authoritarian grip of the church’s leadership.

However, the economic boom that Brazil experienced during the years of the  Workers’ Party government (2002-2016) was depicted by the churches not as a direct consequence of a robust democracy and progressive policies, but rather as the result of strictly individual-centered efforts. In a broader sense, whilst the Left decided to relax their grassroots strategies and working-class commitments of the past, even departing from their alliances with progressive Catholics, Neo-Pentecostal televangelical groups used the Left’s traditional anti-hegemonic strategies to conquer a bigger flock. Garages were converted into small temples in every favela, and pastors began to occupy a central role within social-movements (trade unions, prison community rights organisations and anti-poverty groups) and institutions like the notorious Landless Workers’ Movements.

On the surface, the doctrine of ‘brother votes for brother’ implemented by the Evangelical coalition subsumes national politics into a theocratic system that disables the secular qualities of the Brazilian State. However, in reality, the strategic positioning of Neo-Pentecostal candidates (usually bishops), comes as a necessary step in the acquisition of financial resources or tax deductions for the churches’ benefit. The last stage of the political neo-Pentecostal movement pursues the steering of the presidential nomination for the Supreme Court of Justice. Success in this objective could enable ultra-conservative Brazilians to appoint someone who supports their votes as a judge under the Confessional Practice, which is the conscious decision of a policy-maker or judge to make decisions based on the bible rather than the constitution and liberal civil rights.

This demographic shift in the judiciary could result in the blockage of the relatively progressive current nominated bench of the Court, that during the last years criminalized homophobia, approved the bill on same sex marriage, and is about to vote on the decriminalization of cannabis. The most dangerous aspect of this intertwining of Church and State is the presumption of a fixed Christian morality above all. The dynamics of liberal democracy are based upon the balance of forces and different opinions meeting halfway. If the laws, customs and desirable behaviours are written in stone by some kind of ‘enlightened’ authority, diversity is then rendered as deviance. The new social-political landscape of Brazil poses a threat not only to the rules of the democratic game, but also to other religious minorities or dissident voices within Christendom.

Rafael Antunes Padilha is a Bachelor in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo, with majors in Sociology, Political Science and Cultural Anthropology. His bachelor’s thesis was in Rural and Political Anthropology, focusing  on the economic dynamics of Italian Settler’s descendents in Brazil. Last August, Rafael graduated from the Pennsylvania State University in a Masters in Labour and Global Worker’s Rights (with a thesis on the Oaxacan labor movement and their struggle for broader democracy) after a brief period working in South America with Corporate Social Responsability, and freelance research for organisations such as the ILO. Currently, he is preparing to start a second masters, this time in Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Porto.

References

[1] P. Semán, ‘¿Quiénes son? ¿Por qué crecen? ¿En qué creen?: Pentecostalismo y política en América Latina’, Nueva Sociedad, 280 (2019), pp. 26-46.

[2] For more on the War of Canudos, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0205w53; For the Contestado War, see https://www.imdb.com/videoplayer/vi3716720153 and T.A. Diacon, Millenarian vision, capitalist reality: Brazil’s Contestado rebellion, 1912–1916, (Duke University Press, 1991).

[3] The ‘Theology of Liberation’ is the embracing by some Roman Catholics priests in Latin America of Karl Marx’s critique of Capitalism. According to this theology, the Church should have a ‘preferential option for the poor’ and first satisfy their physical, social and economic needs before attending spiritual necessities. For more information, I cannot recommend enough the book Introducing Liberation Theologyby Leonardo Boff and his brother Clodovis Boff.

‘Losers’, ‘usurpers’, and their linguistic and historical translation

Lani Seelinger

The Normalization regime in Czechoslovakia — as Václav Havel aptly illustrated in his widely read work, “The Power of the Powerless” — rested on a carefully constructed social contract. As long as Havel’s greengrocer was willing to put a sign amongst his goods displaying the “Workers of the world, unite!” slogan, he could reap all the materialistic benefits that the regime provided. The words on the sign, however, didn’t express the greengrocer’s deeply held belief; instead, they were a signal that he was willing to comply with what the regime asked.

Václav Havel

But what about when people didn’t comply? The government could deploy certain punishments against the so-called “unreliable” individuals — demotions, blacklisting, the refusal of exit permits, even imprisonment — but one of its most important and effective methods of attack was through the propaganda machine. In the government-controlled media, like the Rudé Právo (Red Justice) newspaper, the regime could denounce the offenders in vicious terms, though their words weren’t intended merely to convey meaning. Again, they served an additional purpose — but this time, they acted as a warning.

In 1977, 242 people signed Charter 77, a document criticizing the regime for its failure to uphold the human rights requirements of documents like the 1960 Constitution of Czechoslovakia and the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The precipitating event for the Charter was the arrest of the members of the Plastic People of the Universe, a psychadelic rock band whose messaging didn’t align with the regime. The so-called “Chartists” then banded together to express their support for the band, because they saw the arrest as being in direct conflict with the regime’s commitments to human rights on paper. The regime reacted in numerous ways, but one of the most important of these was its attacks on the signatories in the press. On January 12, 1977, an article came out in Rudé Právo called “Zkroskotanci a samozvanci,” which translates to something like “Losers and Usurpers” or “Traitors and Renegades,” in which the government denounced the dissidents who had signed Charter 77.

The article begins with a description of the regime’s enemies: “imperialism,” “ the bourgeoisie,” and the “rule of capitalism,” which together have been “looking for new

Via socialismrealised.eu

forms and methods to mount anti-communist attacks, to disrupt the unity of the socialist countries.” This, the article claims, is what the good citizens of Czechoslovakia have to fear — and then it introduces Charter 77 as “the newest defamatory article,” which “a group of people from the failed Czechoslovak reactionary bourgeoisie and the failed organizers of the 1968 counterrevolution passed on to certain western agencies at the order of the anti-communist and zionist headquarters.”

Already, this description relies on a number of recognizable enemy forces purported to be at work in the article’s publishing. In the language of the communist regimes, the bourgeoisie was always the enemy of socialism and the people working to build it, and here too the concept repeatedly turns up. The article also refers to the Prague Spring as “the 1968 counterrevolution” — the period of liberalization that resulted in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in an effort to “protect socialism” — and a “failure”, meant as both a derisive statement as well as a warning to anyone who might try something similar. In the Cold War context, which the article also acknowledges, the West was the main antagonist, connected to all of the enemies mentioned above. By pointing to “western agencies” as the force that spread the charter, the article set up the charter’s authors as connected to Czechoslovakia’s enemies, rather than Czechoslovakia itself.

In essence, this article’s introduction illustrates the characteristics of an antagonist — the “bourgeois world” — and then describes how exactly Charter 77 is working on behalf of that antagonist against the equality, progress, and peace that the socialist system offers. The harsh denunciation of the Charter and its authors, though, only makes up a relatively small section of the article. After calling the Charter an “anti-state, anti-socialist, anti-people, and demagogic lampoon,” and describing its authors as members of the bourgeois, cosmopolitan class attempting to break up the socialist government, it quickly moves on to describing socialism as a system that is more than prepared to deal with such attempts.

“Everything against socialism is good for it,” the article reads, referring to a document calling for reform published in the lead up to the Prague Spring as an example of the sort of “bourgeois print” that the regime had readily handled in the past, despite the best efforts of numerous western media outlets, which it names in particular as the BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde, and others. These and other attempts to “dirty and malign” the system never succeeded, however, as the system was always prepared for such flimsy attack jobs, as the article’s writers maintain: “Socialism nevertheless didn’t even recoil from atomic extortion, much less from hack writers of reactionary pamphlets done to seed fear.”

In conclusion, the article moves into a full-on celebration of socialism’s successes, emphasizing the unity of the socialist countries and their progress beyond the “imperialistic circles.” Charter 77, it says, is just part of the “stream of lies” that the “reactionary propaganda has unleashed into the world about us.” The socialist system and the people within it constitute, the article concludes,

a good, honest path that will steadily guide us to the communist goals. Everyone who works honestly and contributes to the common good will find for himself life security. No mendacious defamatory article can negate history’s truth.

Throughout the article, the authors rely on terms important not so much for their meaning in the dictionary, but for their broader meaning in the national and Eastern bloc-wide discourse. We’ve already discussed the terms used to mark the enemy — reactionary, bourgeois, imperialist, Western — but on the positive side, “Life security” is a good example — in the Czechoslovak case, this meant exactly what Havel’s greengrocer was after — a job, a second house in the countryside, access to passable schools for his children. Readers may not have believed everything that the article claimed, but they would have understood the threat lurking between the lines — this, readers, is the treatment that you can expect if you join the dissident movement.

To audiences today, on the other hand, “Losers and Usurpers” reads rather as a parody, extolling the virtues of a system that would fall less than two decades after the writing of this article and denouncing the people who would emerge, in the eyes of most, as heroes. The terms that held such meaning coming from the Czechoslovak communist leaders have lost that meaning today, deprived of the discourse surrounding them. This phenomenon, however, of government propaganda and at times even normal propaganda relying on fixed discursive elements that mean more than what it says in the dictionary, is far from relegated to the past. “Losers and Usurpers,” then, serves not only as a glimpse into the past, but also as a reminder that it’s always important to approach media, especially when it comes from someone with an agenda, with a critical and discerning eye.

Lani Seelinger is a PhD student at the University of Helsinki and a remote member of the  Department of Education at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Prague. She is also the co-creator and curator of Socialism Realised, an online learning environment aimed at forging a deeper understanding of the lives of the people in communist regimes, and a comparison of these experiences to the present. You can find Socialism Realised on Twitter at @SocialismR.

The Institutionalization of Injustice: The Emperor’s New Clothes?

By Sagar Deva

Despite unspeakable horrors that were routinely carried out against indigenous populations across the globe during the Colonial era, it was rare for colonisers to present their repression of native peoples in anything other than morally positive language. The justification for withholding basic rights from native populations was couched in the language of civilisation, where the native and ‘coloured’ populations were portrayed as insufficiently civilised, and too subhuman to enjoy the basic human rights and dignity that were the prerogative of the white, Christian man.

The coloniser, cloaked in righteous whiteness was divinely ordained to rule over the lesser peoples for their own good, his authority shrouded in benevolence and wisdom. In this way, the rapacious exploitation of entire peoples and nations could be portrayed as a glorious and noble endeavour to ‘elevate’ repressed people closer to the level of the white man through forcible processes of ‘civilisation.’

After the end of the Second World War and the global movement towards self-determination, colonial powers which had previously possessed vast empires were no longer able to directly exploit other nations through the use of military force and direct rule. However, this did not mean that the factors which initially drove these nations to colonise vast swathes of the globe disappeared overnight. Unrestrained greed and a ruthless economic mentality were still prevalent amongst many important states, and were particularly apparent within the emerging global presence of the USA, which had rapidly emerged as the worlds dominant power.

In addition, racial and cultural attitudes which perceived white, western civilisation as fundamentally superior to civilisations in the developing world had not entirely disappeared and were still prevalent amongst certain governments and populations within this dominant diaspora.

Nonetheless, the fact that powerful states could no longer dominate other nations militarily necessitated innovative solutions for entrenching their hegemony in the international system. Military multipolarity, and particularly the existence of nuclear weapons, had substantially reduced the ability of powerful states to impose their authority on the global order. A new approach was thus required to impose the authority of developed, northern powers on the autonomy of developing countries in the Global South and to ensure maximum dominance within the international system.

To this end, the core international economic constitutions were created, which comprised of the GATT (which later became the World Trade Organisation) and the ‘Bretton Woods’ institutions, which included the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Ostensibly, the purpose of these organisations was to provide a fairer economic playing field by promoting ‘free trade’ and opening up markets to ‘fair competition’, as well as, in the case of the IMF, providing emergency loans to countries with questionable liquidity to ensure the financial stability of the international system.

The ‘Gold Room’ at Bretton Woods, where the establishment of the World Bank and IMF was first agreed. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Much of the rhetoric of the US led coalition who were key in the creation of these organisations has been distinctly utopian, referring to the ‘egalitarian’ nature of a global free market and consistently emphasising the supposed ‘fairness’ of the organisation. Thus, the rhetoric and language used by dominant powers has sought to normalize the intensive process of market liberalization engendered by these organisations by positing them as an objective normative good and promoting them as the only way in which ‘good’ global governance might be achieved, a process which will supposedly benefit the entire global system.

However, this attempt to normalize, even constitutionalise, practices of intense, global, market liberalization has in many ways, simply been a way to entrench the economic hegemony of the developed world over the underdeveloped South. In a world where power is increasingly expressed economically rather than militarily, powerful states and associated multinational corporations have utilised the rhetoric of market liberalization and free trade to exert control over other states and entities to the benefit of themselves and the detriment of others.

Many examples of this paradigm exist but two immediately spring to mind. The first of them refers to the process of ‘structural adjustment’ practiced by the IMF, an organisation dominated by powerful developed countries as voting power is directly tied to fiscal contribution.  Structural adjustment was a process whereby IMF loans were only given to countries if they reformed their markets according to IMF guidelines, which invariably demanded as a key condition market liberalization.

These conditions included opening markets to foreign competition and the creation of ‘fiscal discipline’, particularly with regard to reducing government spending on welfare budgets. This strategy was particularly used in the Latin American Debt Crisis of the 1980’s.

However, the only beneficiaries of these processes were multinational corporations, almost invariably based in the developed world, which now had access to enormous new markets. The effects of structural adjustment on Latin American economies were disastrous, lowering real GDP substantially, creating mass unemployment and driving many local, previously government protected businesses into bankruptcy in favour of multinational corporations backed by powerful developed countries. Despite this disaster, the IMF and World Bank continued to utilise slightly amended processes of structural adjustment well after the end of this crisis, often resulting in substantial damage to the host nation.

A second example of where dominant economic powers have sought to normalize unfair trade practices with potentially damaging and dangerous consequences was in the creation of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspect of Intellectual Property Rights’ or TRIPS agreement. This agreement allows for the almost universal enforcement of global intellectual property rights over almost all products including medicines. Under the guise of ‘free trade’ and ‘fairness’, TRIPS has been accused of creating ‘artificial scarcity’ for important medical products by preventing domestic producers from producing generic drugs.

As a result of this, the price of multiple necessary and lifesaving drugs has been increased considerably, with developing countries highlighting the unfairness of the agreement as well the potential loss of life caused by unaffordable medicines. Once again, the key beneficiaries of this agreement were powerful multinational pharmaceutical countries who possessed enormous lobbying power within dominant developed states.

In the past, colonial powers used the language of racial, cultural, or civilizational superiority to justify dominance and exploitation over other, less powerful nations. Nowadays, powerful states instead seek to normalize their dominance through the language of market liberalisation and free trade which unfairly advantage them over less developed states, allowing for their exploitation. Instead of simply accepting the dominant narrative of the global economic institutions, it is instead imperative to understand the impact that such language can have on imposing injustice and disparity in the world today.

Sagar Deva is a doctoral candidate in the University of Sheffield Department of Law. His research focuses on the relationship between international legal theory and global politics.