The Invisible Armada

2024/11/17

4- From the end of the Second World War to the end of the 20th century, the world experienced two very distinct surges of “democratization”, with all the ambiguity of this very term. These mutations took contrasting turns, having occurred in very different spatio-temporal contexts.

The first surge, located between the immediate end of the war and the mid-1970s, is in turn divided into two entirely distinct topoi .

On the one hand, the main countries defeated during the world conflict, Japan and Germany, in its western part, experienced a process of conversion to democracy intrinsically linked to the conditions of their occupation by the victorious powers, the States- United Japan and the Allies in West Germany – democracies. The case of Italy, another defeated power, is significantly different – it did not experience lasting occupation and the transition from fascist rule to parliamentary democracy resulted from the combination of the Wehrmacht's gradual retreat towards the North , the rout of his local minions after the Allied landing in Sicily, and a popular insurrectionary movement arising from the Resistance led in particular by the communists.

The conversion of West Germany and Japan to democratic rule cannot be reduced to the dimension of assimilation or political acculturation imposed by force by the victors of the war. It is not the simple extension or transfer of the occupation regime. It also results from mimetic processes, that is to say from its adoption by local political and cultural elites, through a lasting process of political, but also social, cultural and moral acculturation. Of course, in Japan, the proconsul of the United States, a soldier, guides step by step the establishment of democratic institutions while preserving the imperial institution 15. But this radical reorientation of the institutional form of the government apparatus and the regime of politics, of the form of government and of the state structure is conditioned by the consent and active collaboration of local elites. In the same way, in West Germany, it was the occupying powers which charted the direction and set the framework for the reestablishment of democracy, which imposed the conditions for denazification, while the military occupation continued until the last decades of the last century – the United States still has the Ramstein air base in Westphalia today.

The decisive point here is the unusual and intrinsically paradoxical turn of this figure of "democratization": it does not result, in the countries concerned, from the sequence of a foundation or re-foundation of a democratic regime on a popular movement of emancipation, on a resistance or an uprising, on a shared aspiration for democracy understood as a regime of freedom, but on the contrary on a defeat, an alignment, a bringing into line imposed by a foreign power – therefore on a process at the heart of which the figure of submission and heteronomy is established.

But added to this is the transposition of a model and the mimetic effects associated with it. This figure of imported and controlled democracy is a sort of oxymoron – but one which has flourished greatly since then. The link between accession to the state of majority (Kant) and democracy is undone, or, in historical terms, the connection between the spirit of 1848, of the People's Spring, and the aspiration or promises of democracy. It is therefore in this configuration that a very paradoxical democracy is established, that of a “government of the people” placed under the regime of a minority state extended under another form – no longer the Nazi dictatorship or the militarist/expansionist clan in Japan, but that of the masters and guardians, the liberal powers who won the war. Democracy has, in these conditions, the color of defeat and the form of a carbon copy – a regime borrowing the essentials from the political systems of the winners. A radical disconnection (delinking)  has taken place here between democracy and the aspiration to the condition of majority, to say nothing of the spirit of the uprising against what tends to keep the people in a perpetual condition of minority.

Those who then adopt a democratic constitution dedicated to becoming a habitus throughout society do so under the influence of an affect which is not the love of freedom or the spirit of independence, but rather realism in its most trivial sense, or opportunism. The cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder ferociously explores the mysteries of these strategies and tactics of imitation, adaptation and the small and large profits that can be derived from them 16. Democracy, established under these conditions, is associated rather with base passions than with sincere conversion to a form of government and a way of life inspired by high values and ideals. With its “cargo cult” side (the “magical” side of borrowing revenues that benefited the victor), it concludes a pact with the alignment – an attenuated form of submission, but certainly established on the side of the heteronomy – in international politics, from the 1950s, Japan and Germany became more royalist than the king, more aligned with the United States than all the other dependent states and clients of American power, advanced bastions of West facing the other camp during the Cold War (FRG Frontstaat facing the Soviet bloc and Japan providing services and military bases during the Korean War then the Vietnam War).

More than faithful allies, they are aligned and followers, recent converts competing in zeal in adopting the ways of seeing and doing, the interests of the hegemonic power to which they have rallied under the influence of overwhelming circumstances. This figure of conformist and aligned democracy leads quite naturally to the lasting establishment of a political and cultural conservatism with marked features in these two countries (embodied, in the order of institutional politics, by the PLD in Japan, in business virtually continuously since Japan regained its sovereignty, and CDU/CSU in then reunified West Germany).

The maintenance of American military bases is the symbolic mark of the introjection by the dominant elites of these countries of the subalternity associated with democracy. Of course, these main lines of the history of Germany and Japan after the Second World War would be less visible when these two countries, becoming leading economic powers, have entered into competition with the supremacy of United States as the world's leading economic power. But never this economic competition which, in the United States and Western Europe, gave rise, at the end of the last century, to some bout of anti-Japanese fever reviving the specter of the "yellow peril" transferred from the demographic sphere in the economic sphere 17, did not go so far as to question the systemic alignment of Japan and Germany with the United States and the Western bloc, their territorialization in this space – the global West inseparable from its white roots .

Japan, it is more and more evident today, has become the centerpiece of the Western bloc in East Asia, facing the rising power of China, the Frontstaat of the West facing this great Other in the region, expected to be supported in the near future, according to Washington's wishes, by South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines; Australia constitutes the great rear of this arc or first barrier of the “free world” revamped as a global democracy facing China, a continental power above all, struggling to deploy its large maritime space 18. In the same way, Germany is, in the eyes of Washington, the center of gravity and the centerpiece of NATO, much more than France, reputed to be weak-willed and unpredictable. With these two countries, we have two barriers of total democracy in the face of what still resists it, two barriers of “Western civilization” understood globally in a perspective that fully assumes the warlike and offensive tone of the “clash of civilizations” .

The more things “advance” (in the sense of confrontation), the more the hegemonic bloc relaunches itself in a perspective of contain and roll back , that is to say reconquest, and the more the specter of race war and species returns to haunt the scene of the announced mega-altercation 19. In this matter, we must learn to call a spade a spade, however damning the diagnoses resulting from a sober analysis of the conditions of the present may be.

When I read in Taipei Times , the local organ of the adjuncts of American hegemonism, that “the revitalization of Western civilization passes through Taiwan” (3/06/2023), I distinctly hear the echo of a war of civilizations tirelessly fueled by the crusaders of imperialist/universalist democracy and whose immemorial persistence is the war of races and/or colors. The (barely) implicit in this strong statement is in fact devoid of ambiguity: Taiwan (as a real state power and supposed nation) is urged to take the step which will definitively distance it from the Chinese world and move it from the other side of the color divide in this war of species and civilizations. Over the course of this process, the Taiwanese will become white people by adoption , as these abandoned children from South Korea are the subject of lucrative trafficking organized by certain Christian churches, leading them to be adopted. by white families in North America or Western Europe. The path drawn here by this promoter of Taiwan-American collaboration has the appearance of a re-enactment of the process by which Japan, after the Second World War, was globally "westernized" and found its place in the hegemonic bloc, while relaunching, in the face of China, a revanchist nationalism directly linked to the ideology which, in the 1930s and 40s, inspired the march towards the abyss of militarist and expansionist Japan.

It is on this type of sometimes dizzying arrangements that the New Western-centric Alliance, placed under the sign of the Annunciation of Universal Democracy, thrives. It is now an integrated system, endowed with a certain flexibility, tolerating variations, as long as Democracy remains its master signifier; this, in contrast to the turn presented by the bloc designated as “free world” in the general configuration of the first Cold War. This constituted a camp united by alliances and forms of dependence, placed under the leadership of the United States, the form of the regimes (democracies, authoritarian regimes, tyrannies, military dictatorships, etc.) mattering little, the allegiance and military alliances defining its functionality. In the present configuration, the factors of integration, the forms of dependence, the systems of alliance have become inseparable from the discursive issues and from what appears as a cultural and moral fight: the promotion of Democracy as a vector of Civilization – the unique incarnation of Reason and Progress in the present era.

We therefore see it: this first line of force of the “democratization” of the world after the Second World War is placed under the sign of constant equivocation. This makes the hastily celebrated wedding of the expansion of democracy (as politeia and form of life) and the Universal more doubtful, or, as well, what can commonly be referred to as the process of “universalization” of democracy. .

Thus, the fundamentally mimetic, guided - if not forced - nature of this reorientation (bifurcation) towards the democracy of Japan and Western Germany induces the appearance of a somewhat unthinkable form of democracy, because it is based on the cancellation of the pact which, in principle, links it to autonomy and emancipation. What is territorialized in this advent is, first of all, dependence, the inscription in space of a “part” (the Western camp) which relentlessly fails to pass itself off as the whole (of the “civilized” humanity). In the archaic terms of the war of races which constitutes the great rear of the perpetual struggle of the West with the other worlds, the democratization of Western Germany and Japan following their defeat does not take place so much in the horizon of universality or universalization than in that of their whitening in the form of rallying to the great model of the American way of life and liberal democracy. On this occasion, the Germans ceased to be Huns ( “Boche”, in French) and the Japanese apes (described as such by American propaganda during the Pacific War) to become normal Whites again, for the former, and quasi -Whites, Whites by assimilation for the latter who, in a way of reciprocity, brought thousands of terms borrowed from English (American) into the Japanese language, after the Second World War, at the time of the Occupation and after.

It is therefore well established that the conversion of these two countries to democracy, followed by defeat, did not lead to a revival, a rejuvenation, a reinvention of the democratic regime and way of life, but rather to the institutionalization of a fixed form of pluto-democracy, of a cold democracy where relations between those who govern and those who are governed are mediated by powerful apparatuses of power, which, in Japan, finds its outlet in exemplarily passive forms of citizenship, if the we can say (participation in elections is generally low). In these public democracies, an abysmal distance separates the governing elites and economic leaders from the people below – these are therefore “young” democracies which were born old and which have remained so, crippled by all the ills that affect liberal democracies today. There was no reestablishment of democracy in these latitudes, rather a form of cloning which, on a global scale, had as its primary consequence a decisive strengthening (given the weight of the two countries concerned) of Western hegemony. -centric whose background color persists to be white.

What was therefore reinforced throughout this process of adoption of Japan and Germany by the “family” of Western democracy was not the pact of the latter with the Universal, but rather on the contrary the provinciality of this formation with a hegemonic vocation. A white family that adopts a child from elsewhere remains, at its core, a white family. The mixture of species is, here, a pure artifact providing the weakest of illusions.

5- The second line of force of the expansion of the democratic paradigm after the Second World War is associated with the accession to independence of most of the countries colonized by European powers, mainly, in the 1960s and 70s. In this configuration, the new independences present themselves a priori as the crucible for a revival, even a reinvention of democracy in the specific conditions of what we today call the Global South. The establishment of democratic regimes leads directly to often tumultuous, interminable, fierce struggles for independence. These are popular democracies, that is to say resulting from the mobilization and sacrifices made by the people in these struggles which are supposed to result from this momentum; democracies driven by national sentiment and shared pride in having put an end to colonization. It is therefore a process of rejuvenation of democracy which is then expected, in imperialist metropolises as in formerly colonized countries, from the establishment of democratic institutions drawing their legitimacy from the struggle for independence and rediscovered dignity of the colonized.

However, this post-colonial spring of democracy did not take place, any more than the establishment of “popular democracies” in Eastern Europe during the Cold War was able to rebuild the democratic regime – on the contrary, the said popular democracies quickly appeared as “democracies” by antiphrasis. In the former colonized countries, either pseudo-democracies have been set up under supervision remaining dependent on the former colonizer (as in all the former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, with the exception of Guinea), or radical, socialist democracies,  led by former leaders of the anti-colonial struggle, democracies leaning towards the socialist bloc and often torn apart by civil wars. In all cases, the democratic veneer of these post-colonial regimes did not take long to peel off: in a few years, these fragile or circumstantial democracies were most often replaced by authoritarian regimes, more or less bloody dictatorships established following military coups, autocracies, tyrannies of all kinds.

The failure of neo-democracies in the post-colonial world, even more than the farce of "popular democracies" in Eastern Europe, has had the undoubtedly disastrous consequence of a vigorous refocusing of democratic normativity on the global North and the white world, a re-intensification of the Western-centrism of democracy . For this kind of simple and expeditious philosophy of history which began to flourish in the Reagan-Thatcher years, these failures tended to reinforce the notion of a natural harmony between democracy, Westernity and the white world. From then on, democracy was no longer universalizable except in the infinitely dubious form of the export of a white, Western commodity. The insurmountable aporia is there: it is at the very time when the provinciality of democracy is displayed as a Western and white "thing" that the galloping fever intensifies leading its new missionaries to export its forms and benefits to the four corners of the planet.

In the earlier phase, during the Cold War, the regents of Western hegemony were perfectly fine with having to deal with all kinds of sinister dictators and obscurantist autocracies, as long as they played the game of alignment or submission. What is new, from the Reagan-Thatcher years, is the globalization of the democratic paradigm, in the form of all-out promotion of the discourse of Human Rights; the transition from a regime of ideological struggle (where, again, as the word "ideology" indicates, a war of ideas is at stake , whatever the quality of these) to another where the discursive issues , where everything is at stake in the formatting of discourses, the discipline to which they are subject, the production and circulation of “elements of language” entering into composition in the authorized (legitimized) narratives of the present.

Under this new regime which overlooks the epoch (the one which is and remains ours), democracy ceases to be primarily a politeia, a regime of politics and common life, to become above all a master signifier, the keystone of the order of discourses promoted by those who govern and those who dominate. Now, of course, these masters of the narrative of the present (or sovereign narrators of the epoch) are, more than ever, white narrators, rigorously refocused on narratives whose matrix is the notion of a native and elective affinity between democracy and culture Western, white world. As an extension of this vision , the democratization of the world, confused with the universalization of the democratic paradigm, can only take the form of a transplantation (of democracy adapted to the conditions of other worlds) supported by all forms of adequate pedagogy . 

The relationship between teacher(s) and student(s) is mercilessly put back into place when supra-national bodies in the hands of white Western powers are called upon to rule on good or bad governance practiced by the leaders of fledgling democracies or non-democracies. -democracies of other worlds.

In the phase following the accession of formerly colonized countries to independence, the grafting of democracy onto this other world (which we called “Third” at the time) failed, overall, as did this alternative. to liberal democracy, internal to democracy, which would have been “popular democracy” (and socialist) turns out, in the same chronology, to be nothing more than a farce. – These two factors combined, in their historical scope, tend decisively to reinforce the providentatialism of Western-centric white democracy. This double failure reinforces the latter in the vocation that it assumes to carry out this intrinsically inconsistent operation: “universalizing” democracy by exporting it – two operations in one, two operations which, precisely, in their very principle, exclude each other: in fact what is exported retains by definition the brand of the individual, its “brand of origin”, as they say in the trade.

Thus emerges this figure under the regime of which the countries of the West, the white global North rediscover their vocation to instruct and teach other worlds by injecting them with democracy. It would in fact be that the collapse of the latter, at the previous stage, , in the throes of bad government in all its forms (dictatorship, bloody autocracy, anarchy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism) would have demonstrated their inability to access the Elysian fields of democracy and therefore, the imperative need for legitimized democracies to open the way for them, to exercise the salutary supervision which will allow them to access it.

This is the reason why, from the 1980s, after the fall of the Soviet Empire and with the rejection, as much in Africa, Latin America as in Eastern Asia and South-East Asia, of authoritarian regimes and military dictatorships, the second push of "democratization" fundamentally takes the form of a new colonization , surreptitious, this one, in the form of export/import of democracy driven both by the white democracies of the Global North and by supra-state institutions controlled by these very powers. In this configuration, white and Western-centered democracies act as guides and initiators, according to modalities and under a regime certainly very different from that of classic colonization, placed under the explicit sign of the superiority of the white race on all the others; but the hegemonist and supremacist matrix remains fundamentally the same – that of Western historical and cultural providentialism equipped by Destiny with its vocation to ensure the conduct of the peoples of the world.

It is now Democracy, an ideality with capital, the concept of concepts which supports this presumption, as it was in the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries the notion of the superiority of the white race. Two epochs, two presumptions, two configurations and two distinct operations, but whose source remains unchanged - the educational and instructive vocation of the West to civilize other worlds, other peoples. This vocation has a color, the game consisting today in an ever more marked way of ensuring that the human groups being included in the new territories of global democracy think about themselves and see the world under the regime of evidence and according to structuring categories in the white world.They have to whitewash their thoughts, their emotions, their languages, their speeches, their ways of doing things. They have to make white out of all kinds of colors, ranges and chromatic variations.

The society of the United States is the laboratory and the advanced point of this operation which only bears the name of crossbreeding in the most illusory mode possible - it is not a question of placing the social order and the composition of populations under the sign of a fusion, a synthesis or a synergy of cultures and colors, but under that of the assimilation of elites from other worlds to the white matrix. This is how the integration and promotion machine produces, in the United States (and Canada), neo-whites who are whiter than white by recycling, promoting and rewarding Asians, Africans, African-Americans, Arab-Muslims. , even, carefully selected – this by means of rigorous formatting to the conditions of white domination and the culture of domination in force in the territories of Western hegemonism. You just have to open the newspapers, watch TV to see or hear them in all the majesty of their new condition, of their transfiguration.

The same processes are underway in all societies of the Global North. The factory of Whites by adoption, Whites of honor, Whites by assimilation is running at full speed there. But these processes of assimilation and recycling have their obscure counterpart – the ever more merciless rejection, in these metropolises of the white world, of the colored plebs who are given no chance of crossing the color divide : more are numerous in the States -United the leaders of institutional politics with Hispanic-sounding names, and higher are the walls and barriers erected between white America and its Latino counterpart – on the border with Mexico. In France, one day or another it will be a Minister of the Interior of sub-Saharan African or North African origin who will preside over the massive refoulement of the latest arrivals from other worlds, undesirable and lacking adequate residence permits. We already have a female Minister of Culture with an Algerian background who is a laughingstock, not because of her post-colonial name but just because of her unfathomable futility.