Is Europe Redeemable?

This poster depicts two British soldiers in blue uniforms leading men hailing from the different territories of the British Empire into battle. This poster depicts unity within these people and an implicit willingness to follow the British. Despite this emphasis on unity and fighting together, it is telling of the internal logic of the British Empire that the man from India and Africa – both dark skinned – are placed, even in this poster, at the very back. Even more striking perhaps is the fact that this British poster sees its empire as a valuable resource for fighting the wars that Britain fights. Wars that are only the concern of the people from the territories because said wars are the concern of Britain. They all march under the Union Jack, because through domination the British have compelled them to do so. It has compelled, and condemned them to fight, kill and die.

“Europe is indefensible”, Cesaire writes. He strips the contact between the colonizer and the colonizes of all its trappings of civilization and development and describes it to be devoid of “human contact” and to consist solely of relations of domination and submission. He describes this contact as one which turns the indigenous man into a mere “instrument of production”. A resource. This is the nature of the gaze with which the colonizer views the colonized. The colonized were forced to carry out this role due to the brutalizing actions of the colonizers. Cesaire recounts statements glorifying and calling for violence and the most abject, unthinking cruelty issued by the colonizers with respect the indigenous populations. Europe is indefensible, in part, because it refuses to acknowledge this and sticks to its hypocritical claim that colonialism was a civilizing mission. It is indefensible because it refuses to acknowledge the overwhelmingly important role that the resources of the colonized people served as justification for the colonizers to brutalize and dominate them. Cesaire writes how the colonial powers saw it as absurd that valuable resources “lie forever idle in the hands of incompetents” and that they saw themselves as being tasked with the utilization of these resources lest they go forever unused due to “the incompetence, negligence, and laziness of the uncivilized peoples”. The colonized people were either an instrument to extract those resources or an obstacle hindering the extraction of said resources which were, according to colonial logic, destined to be used ‘properly’ by the European powers.

Perhaps Europe could be defended if this underlying logic and framework changed. However, even now, it has not. One of the most talked about mechanisms for the United Kingdom to stabilize its economy after Brexit is the Commonwealth.  In a recent BBC article, the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, and one of the leading contenders for the most British sounding name, Baroness Patricia Scotland, discusses how the commonwealth is an incredible resource for the United Kingdom and how the United Kingdom’s historic ties – that of Empire – have been underutilized and that more trade was, and is, possible. She then goes on to say how increasing trade between of the countries of the Commonwealth and the United Kingdom is easy because “these countries speak the same language”. This is remarkably telling of how the foundational logic of resource extraction for the benefit of the colonizers has still remained essentially the same. It is the United Kingdom who faces economic hardship because of its own decision and it is the Commonwealth that it immediately looks to for support. Support which it disguises as furthering common good but one which it ultimately needs, only for itself. Nothing has essentially changed. Cesaires equation of “colonization = "thingification” still holds true. They are not redeemable, in part, because the gaze with which they view the once colonized world is still the same.  

This call for Commonwealth unity and economic cooperation is no different than the poster above.