Could it all have been a fantasy, propagated by rootless elites with no regard for the experience of the ordinary, somewhat traditional citizen or worker? I ask these questions because the forces that were unleashed in 2016, here but especially abroad, suggest that too many people have chosen to retreat into their laagers.
The promise of multiculturalism, that diverse people could live and work together, guided mostly by meritocracy and liberal values, is being abandoned. As the world is jolted into the post-Brexit, Trumpian era, the South African post-apartheid project is also facing increased scepticism. The rainbow has been fading, as racism, xenophobia and patriarchy continue to taint daily interactions and remain embedded in many institutions.
One of my favourite authors, Zadie Smith, comes to mind when it comes to these questions. Her first novel, White Teeth, first published in 2000 and set in her beloved melting pot of north-west London, fixed her status in the public imagination as the poster-child of multiculturalism. As a bi-racial woman writing about migration, identity and integration, she represented the spirit of that moment when old boundaries between races, nationalities and cultures were being erased. The world she paints in White Teeth is not utopian and she is not naïve about the complications that arise when cultures collide. But all that is in the past. She reports that she is now regularly accosted by readers wanting to know how she feels about the decline of multiculturalism. In a speech she gave on receiving the 2016 Welt literature prize, she remarks on how the idea of a melting pot must have seemed like a provisional, experimental notion to those who are rooted in homogenous communities. Whereas she had taken her colourful London neighbourhood for granted, as just another way of living, not a trial.
It’s no great mystery how we got here. Economists such as Dani Rodrik have long pointed out that the blind spot of globalisation, and its associated ideas, is how it treats its ‘losers’. In a world where capital, goods and, to a limited extent, people are mobile, there will be those who find themselves on the wrong end of outsourcing, international trade or migration. Their skills are no longer valued the same way, or they are completely displaced by workers elsewhere and familiar neighbourhoods no longer look the same way. In the past, the ‘losers’ have been typically associated with the developing world. They were easily dismissed as the uneducated or unemployable. But the losers in the wealthy, industrialised economies have also found their voice. Now it seems that wherever you look, poor or rich country alike, rural enclave or megacity, ordinary people have lost their patience with economic insecurity. The blame is laid at the door of the outsider, the foreign, the offshore.
Yet it strikes me that the homogenous, ‘pure’ world that is hankered for by those nostalgic followers of Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Hofmeyer and others is irretrievable from the past. You can’t unknow your neighbour. When societies attempt to retreat from globalisation and multiculturalism, it becomes a defensive gesture. From then on, they define themselves against the ‘other’ that is to be feared. Homogeneity is no longer innocent and an accident of history, but an aggressive act to keep intruders out. In South Africa, problematic attitudes are rising across the spectrum. Racist incidents keep popping up in the news cycle. But even amongst the supposedly progressive, one finds that some segments of the ‘fallist’ movement define Africanness in a narrow way that rejects all that appears to originate outside the continent.
There will be beneficiaries from protectionism and exclusion, as there were from openness. The irony is that it won’t be the ordinary men and women who voted for Trump or who drive out foreign-owned businesses in the townships. Once again, it will be a narrow elite that reaps the rents from an inward-looking economic and social policy. The modern world, despite all the undeniable progress that has been made, struggles to sustain a politics of inclusion. There is no need to perform a requiem for globalisation and multiculturalism just yet. This moment, too, shall pass.
The question that remains is how humanity will forge ahead without, once again, leaving too many behind.
