Sanjaya Baru | Rubio’s Munich Manifesto Is Make West Great Again

The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, US secretary of state Marco Rubio reminded his European audience at last month’s Munich Security Conference, because, as he put it, “godless Communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings” had transformed the world. Against this backdrop, Mr Rubio argued, “many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past”.Urging his European colleagues to reject such a dismal view of the future of the “Christian West”, Mr Rubio assured Europe that President Donald Trump’s project to make America Great Again (MAGA) was in fact a strategy to “Make the West Great Again” (MTWGA). “The United States and Europe, we belong together”, he reassured his European hosts. “America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The men who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.”Mr Rubio went on to declare: “We are part of one civilisation: Western civilisation. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilisation to which we have fallen heir.”The United States is connected with Europe, Mr Rubio said, “not just economically, not just militarily… We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally. We want Europe to be strong. We believe that Europe must survive, because the two great wars of the last century serve for us as history’s constant reminder that ultimately, our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours, because we know that the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own”.I have quoted Mr Rubio at length because, surprisingly, his speech received little attention and even less rebuke in India. Mr Rubio’s “Munich Manifesto”, so to speak, is both a declaration of the civilisational unity of the “Christian West” and a call to arms against not just “godless Communists” but also “anti-colonialists” of the Global South. It is a long time since a Western leader has unabashedly regretted the end of European colonialism.From Cuba and Venezuela next door to Europe and West Asia in the Middle and across Eurasia all the way to the Far East, the United States seeks to retain the dominance it acquired at the end of the Second World War. Mr Rubio’s assurance to Europe came in the wake of recent European concerns that President Donald Trump may dump them in pursuit of MAGA. No wonder he received a standing ovation.We do not know from the media reports if any of the Indian worthies in attendance at Munich stood up to respond to this antediluvian manifesto of neo-colonial aspirations. Unlikely, because so many of our elite who represent India at such conclaves have internalised the view that continued Western dominance and a world order under American leadership is in India’s interests.We must thank Mr Rubio for his brutal honesty. For we have understood from his speech that it is not just the “godless Communists” of China that the West worries about but also the “anti-colonialists” of the Global South. Sadly though, even as we spout “atma nirbharata” at home, sing Vande Mataram, say Bharat Mata ki Jai and hope to be leaders of the Global South, many of us have no qualms believing that continued Western dominance makes the world safer.There is today a generation of Indians that has all but forgotten, perhaps never even been taught, that the Indian sub-continent was home to the earliest anti-colonial movement led by the Indian National Congress. India’s struggle for freedom from European colonialism (not just British, but also French and Portuguese) inspired anti-colonial struggles across Asia and Africa. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were and remain inspirational figures across the post-colonial world — what is now called Global South. It was a British historian, Angus Maddison, who reminded us that till 1700 China and India were the world’s dominant economic entities, together accounting for 50 per cent of world income, and that two hundred fifty years of colonialism, from 1700 to 1950, reduced this share to below 10 per cent. Over the last eight decades they have not only increased their share of world income, but have also enabled several other post-colonial nations to improve their lot.While Asia’s share has been rising, led by East and Southeast Asian nations and more recently India, that of the West, particularly Europe, has been declining. This reversal of fortunes is a historical phenomenon shaped by demography, the spread of education, economic development and political empowerment of millions in what was once called the “Third World”. For some time after the Second World War, the West facilitated the rise of the Rest. China was the biggest beneficiary of the process and has now risen enough to begin to worry, if not challenge, the West.Mr Rubio’s call to arms of the “Christian West” is an understandable response to the rise of an Asian challenger, the “godless Communists”. This is an inevitable competition between a declining and a rising power. What, however, deserves condemnation is his regret that “anti-colonial uprisings” ought to be challenged too. This view seeks a reversal of history and a return to an inglorious past. Anti-colonial uprisings have contributed to the political liberation and economic emancipation of millions across Asia, Africa and Latin America — large continents conquered and dominated by the West. That Donald Trump’s America wants to preserve the trans-Atlantic alliance to enable a united West to continue to dominate over the Rest is a project that India must explicitly reject.Colonial dominance and exploitation was a blemish on human civilisation. India inspired the world by fighting it and claiming victory. India’s political leadership owes it to the people of India and the leadership of our national movement to reject Mr Rubio’s manifesto. It is unfortunate that the present leadership has chosen silence over the assertion of national dignity.Sanjaya Baru is a writer and economist. His most recent book is Secession of the Successful: The Flight Out of New India



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