This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

P — Politics

For me, politics was a second amniotic fluid. I grew up swimming in it, for between 1930 and 1960, the first thirty years of my life, the best and the worst of the polis paraded before my eyes. The best thing about it was the constructive, Aristotelian understanding it gave me of political challenge: politics as a worthy endeavor, one that responded to culture, tradition, individual respect, and the strength of community. Of course, as a child or adolescent I didn’t think of it as such. I felt it because I had the good fortune to grow up in two parallel political societies: the United States of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Mexico of President Lázaro Cárdenas; the New Deal and the culminating moment of the Mexican Revolution. Roosevelt led his nation out of the worst depression it had ever known, through acts that reflected his trust in the human capital of the United States. He inspired faith and even enthusiasm among his citizenry, and he gave the state an active role in tackling unemployment, financial restructuring, the creation of modern infrastructures, education, and culture. He saved North American capitalism and North American capitalism neither recognized it nor thanked him for it. Roosevelt, the aristocrat from Hyde Park, New York, was a renegade, a cripple, and possibly even a Jew. In Mexico, Cárdenas gave the revolution the definitive impetus it needed. Agrarian reform liberated hundreds of thousands of rural peasants who had been tied to the earth for centuries, and if the effects of agrarian-ism were and still are debatable, one thing remains certain: the peasant was now free to go to the city and offer himself up as cheap labor for the (also debatable) process of industrialization. The nationalization of the oil business contributed cheap fuel to nascent Mexican industry. Cárdenas laid the foundations for capitalist development in Mexico. And the Mexican bourgeoisie neither recognized this nor thanked him for it. With Cárdenas, this growth was accompanied by distributive justice. Never before in Mexico’s history had the distribution of wealth been as equitable as it was during his presidency. The labor and farm unions of the day fulfilled their role in defense of the worker. At their core, however, they harbored a snake: an exclusionary, anti-democratic corporativism.

Roosevelt’s politics prepared the United States to enter World War II. Cárdenas’s politics served to demonstrate that the fight was an ethical struggle as well. His principled foreign policy was also a pragmatic policy of generosity. Cárdenas opened Mexico’s doors to a pilgrim Spain, the republican emigration that strengthened and brilliantly enlightened the cultural life of Mexico.

But while these were the bright lights of politics, the shadows that hovered over everything during those years threatened to extinguish them entirely. Spain’s war was the first sign of a political regime that was openly designed to serve the interests of evil. Franco disguised it as a nationalist crusade, his bishops blessed it, and his fascist and Nazi allies provided the weapons for it. Spain was a warning of what was to come. Never before in history had evil proclaimed itself as such, so openly and without any kind of aesthetic justification. Genocide, absolute tyranny, racism, extermination, the Holocaust, the Final Solution: it was all a foregone conclusion. Adolf Hitler decided that the Devil should finally take human form. If God had done so with his son, Jesus, Satan could do the same with his clone Adolf. Jaspers warned us in advance that Hitler’s strength resided in his lack of existence: Hitler was the empty leader of the rootless masses.

The defeat of the German socialists and Communists in 1932 can be explained by the fact that the Left looked at the world through the tunnels of economic infrastructure, exactly as the Marxist bible preached. Hitler kidnapped the cultural superstructures, looked up toward the heights of Valhalla, and appealed to the Wagnerian myths, to the dreams and false illusions of the German Volk, to the damage and humiliation of the peace at Versailles, to his country’s sense of ethnic and intellectual superiority, and to their physical need for a space to live, the Lebensraum. His evil and its means were always so transparent. Yet the lies Stalinism told may have been even worse, for Communism was a movement that was supposed to put a humanistic, liberating philosophy into practice. Stalin’s perversion of the socialist dream— the purges, the Gulag, the abolition of the most basic rights, the leader’s paranoia, and the atrocities of his torture — was worse than the fulfillment of the Hitlerian nightmare. Hitler never deceived anyone. Stalin donned the mask of Marxist humanism and cheated hundreds of thousands of honorable, devoted, though perhaps naïve Communists. Gide may have lost his faith in 1936, but Aragon hung on until the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Neruda held out until Khrushchev’s report to the Twentieth Communist Party Congress.

World War II was justified; it has been called the only good and necessary war. Our youthful solidarity enthusiastically joined forces with the fight against fascism. I spent the war years in Argentina and Chile, the latter being the first Latin American country to consciously develop into a democratic system, from a democracy of aristocrats to a democracy of political parties, the press, and social organizations. In 1941 the Frente Popular (Popular Front) was in power, with Pedro Aguirre Cerda as its president, and the prevailing spirit was one of social reform backed by a literary growth that fused words with freedoms, poetry with politics. My Chilean education necessarily contrasted quite powerfully in my mind with Argentina, where I lived during 1944. A fascist military regime, sinister precursor to Perón’s populist dictatorship, deformed education (the anti-Semitic Hugo Wast was minister of education at the time) and maintained Argentina as fascism’s political redoubt and, later on, a safe haven for Nazis on the run.

Politics may very well be the eagle that flies higher and achieves a broader vision of things from the “high cliff of the human dawn,” as Pablo Neruda asserted in his Canto General. Or perhaps it is Yeats’s “rough beast” of “The Second Coming” that “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.” The Cold War tried to put the eagle in a cage and cast a spell upon the serpent, replacing them with a hybrid between camel and crow, that sleepy creature of the desert so resistant to thirst, and that rapacious scavenger bird, ready to claw our eyes out. With McCarthy, the United States succumbed to an anti-Communist paranoia that led its inquisitors to emulate the very thing they were fighting against, the intolerance and cruelty of Stalinism. The resistance of the North American democratic institutions held out and, as an extension of their social struggle, set the stage for the civil rights movement and antidiscrimination laws. There was a McCarthy. There was a Martin Luther King, Jr. But if Americans can sometimes be benevolent Dr. Jekylls inside their own country, they so easily become monstrous Mr. Hydes when they leave its borders. The good-neighbor policy of coexistence with the Mexican and Chilean Left, Brazilian corporativism, or the Central American and Caribbean dictatorships (“Somoza is a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,” as FDR said) turned into an anti-Communist campaign under Eisenhower and Dulles. This campaign confused Kremlin politics with many reformist movements, and ended up fighting them all: Arbenz in Guatemala and Goulart in Brazil, the seductive and comprehensible revolution led by Castro in Cuba, and the cleanly elected democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile.

All of this fatally stunted the growth of much-needed social, economic, and political reform in Latin America, and plunged Cuba into an extralogical imitation of “real socialism” as pernicious as the extralogical imitation of the models of authoritarian capitalism in the rest of Latin America, which would become ruthless dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay. As a result, politics in Latin America has come to be synonymous with reconstruction but above all construction. Chile, Uruguay, and to a certain degree Argentina, can restore democracy. Central America and the Caribbean must construct it, while Mexico must transform the “perfect dictatorship” of the singularly powerful PRI president into an imperfect democracy with political parties, division of powers, accountability of the executive branch, activation of human capital, and improved distribution of income.

How can the challenges of democracy be met?

The world stage has undergone radical changes. The Cold War created a kind of shared jurisdiction between the United States and the Soviet Union based on the balance of nuclear terror. Ever since then, we have witnessed the weakness and, occasionally, the disappearance of traditional methods of social bonding and problem solving.

Nation and empire, state and international community, public sector, private sector, and civil society. All these traditional labels are now very clearly — sometimes paradoxically, sometimes furtively — in crisis or at least in mutation.

Why does this happen?

Because we have not been able to create a new legality for a new reality — the reality of globalization.

The modern Western world — that is, from the Renaissance onward — built itself around notions that had little relevance in the medieval realm: the nation, the state, international law, the mercantile-capitalist economy, and civil society.

What kind of relevance — moreover, what kind of reality — do these circumstances represent to our globalized, post — Cold War world? Given that Latin America finds itself situated between both of these premises, we can venture to suggest some shared ideas.

Nation and nationalism, for example, are modern terms that arose to legitimize notions of territorial, political, and cultural unity, and were necessary for the integration of the new states that emerged from the rupture of medieval Christian communities.

But what, then, provoked the emergence of nationalist ideology?

Emile Durkheim speaks of the loss of old centers of identification and adhesion.

The nation fills that loss.

Isaiah Berlin adds that all nationalism is a response to a wound inflicted by society.

The nation heals that wound.

And today, we repeat with them:

If both nationalist ideology and the very concept of the nation are in crisis, what new ideology and structures will keep society aloft? What is the great contemporary social wound, and what kind of sutures will close it? What will we call this still nameless process that will allow us to create a new legality for a new reality?

How can the national and collective centers of identification be replaced?

We would like to think that as nationalist moments become diluted, internationalist moments will fall into place.

But things haven’t happened that way.

The case of Kosovo demonstrates the peril and doubt that plague the new international order.

The possibility of armed intervention in a delinquent state is provided for in the United Nations Charter. Not provided for, however, is the notion of a regional organization — NATO, in this case — assuming the right to intervene, overriding the international judicial order, sowing confusion and insecurity, and promoting a de facto right to interfere.

A new international order will not be possible if the strongest parties are allowed to intervene at whim, for that will generate dilemmas that will only jeopardize justice, security, and the very powers behind such intervention.

This does not mean that a solution is impossible.

On the contrary. The Balkan crisis calls upon all of us to introduce reforms to an international system created for and by a multitude of victorious nations at the end of World War II, whose goal was to confer greater representation and greater mobility on the various international institutions.

Once, when I was in Rome, I had a conversation with the prime minister of Italy at the time, Massimo D’Alema, who was convinced that NATO needed to take action in Kosovo. He confessed that although he had moved ahead with the conviction that he was on the side of the right, he had nevertheless been quite distressed about it and above all was aware that had action been taken a decade earlier, tragedy could have been averted through diplomatic and judicial means. “This has not been the case,” D’Alema said, adding that to prevent a Kosovo from occurring again, the international system would require reforms, through the creation of — and I quote the Italian premier—“crisis prevention instruments, based not only on military means, but on political and economic resources as well.”

In other words: a new legality for a new reality.

Now we find ourselves facing a situation of diluted international jurisdiction. But at the same time we find that national sovereignties, once the nemesis of people’s rights, have also grown pale and weak in the face of an onslaught that was unforeseeable half a century ago.

This is called globalization, a movement in which so many men and women on the threshold of the twenty-first century have deposited both their hopes and their fears.

Globalization subjugates and almost categorically rejects the nationalist ideology upon which the modern world was founded, but it also poses some critical questions to be answered within each individual national community, the public, private, and third sectors, the business world, culture, democracy, and the state itself.

The political responses to this transition from nation-state to globalized world will not come quickly, as was the case with the nation-state and the rise of sovereignty during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It is worth noting that the Middle Ages did not create a vertical, unaccountable system for the Christian community. The system evolved — and evolved into what would come afterward — through a conflict between temporal and religious power. The battles between Gregory VII and Henri IV, Gregory IX and Frederick II, and Boniface VIII and Philip IV of France created a tension between the Church and the state absent in Byzantine Russia and its identification between the czar and the Church, the Caesaro-Papism that lasted until the arrival of the party-state symbiosis under Lenin and Stalin. Democracy was born out of Western medieval tension, as the temporal sphere broke free from the spiritual sphere and both found themselves obliged to accept and respect the configuration of local powers, political powers (legal systems, courts, municipalities), and social powers (corporations), all of which introduced the possibility of a sovereign nation-state as well as a new round of debates concerning this novel issue. Politics, as far as Machiavelli is concerned, is an autonomous and amoral realm. For Bodin, it cannot be separated from sovereignty, which excludes all pluralistic participation. Hobbes invokes a naturalist absolutism, and only with the advent of the Enlightenment (and before that, with English parliamentarianism) do social classes, corporations, and eventually individuals become actors on the political stage.

Are we now in the throes of a movement comparable to such political upheaval? Will we be able to establish an international order that can control the lawless jurisdictions of the market, of drug trafficking, of migration? Will we have international bodies that we can rely on to regulate these processes? Markets that will be forced to obey regulations governing social welfare and the development of the poorest nations? Decriminalization of international drug trafficking, which will deny the cartels their extravagant and illicit profits? Controlled and codified immigration policies protected by labor laws that recognize the invaluable contribution that immigrants make to the societies that receive them? Some indicators point in this direction. A universal agreement on the sanctity of human rights, a refusal to allow the statute of limitations to be used in cases of crimes against humanity, and the International Court on Human Rights can deny impunity to those who shamelessly violate these rights and help to foment a culture of international justice that could be applied to the world’s markets, which would then be forced to adhere to social welfare regulations and political responsibility. The creation of the International Criminal Court (the Rome statute) will crown this effort by investing politics with a legal basis and punishing the violation of both.

All of this will strengthen the nation-state politically, just as the events of the very early twenty-first century have proven. Strong economies are only possible with strong states — not big states, simply regulatory ones. And strong states are only possible with strong societies that demand adherence to political mandates and regulations regarding transparency and accountability, societies that not only hold periodical elections, as Pierre Schori notes, but can fill the voids between elections as well: to revoke mandates, hold referenda, demand parliamentary responsibility on the part of governmental ministers, and provide for an independent public prosecutor who is empowered to bring to justice any and all abuses of power.

Politics is so much more than an election-day event. We need to increase political participation, broaden access to communications, and ensure that people understand and defend their rights. Politics must become a daily exercise of rights and vigilance. More than ever — and despite the fact that it is unpopular to quote Hegel — politics have a thesis (law), an antithesis (ethics), and a synthesis (legality and morality). And to counterbalance Hegel, there is perhaps no one better than Burke to remind us that politics is an association, not only in an economic sense but “in all art, in all virtue, in all perfection.”

The sum of my political hopes does not mean I am blind to the dangers of the proliferation of criminal jurisdictions beyond all control, or to the notion that one single superpower might jeopardize the world’s will to create entities for justice, development, and environmental protection, or to the possibility that in the name of a supposed “clash of civilizations” entire cultures can be demonized.

Thanks to Judaism, thanks to Islam, late medieval Europe came to understand once again, and the Western world came to see once again. And we, their descendants, cannot subscribe to a “clash of civilizations” that negates half of our existence. History is ebb and flow; its nature is cyclical and the modern Western world would not exist were it not for the contributions of the Islamic world. As such, Islam’s current technical deficit can only be overcome by generously repaying the universal debt to the communities that live by the faith of Mohammed.

Islam and Judaism have given us all so much. Can we not reciprocate, in the first place, with a commitment to peace through the generosity of negotiation? And in the second place, by acknowledging the intrinsic and predominant humanity of the Arab nations, and by refusing to imprison them behind the intolerable bars of something synonymous with terror and blatant evil?

With this in mind I offer my political concerns for the new century.

I am concerned about the ruthless exploitation of our planet’s limited resources and by our assault upon air, water, and land.

I am concerned about the fact that by the year 2001 we were 6 billion men and women on this Earth: the greatest demographic leap in history, if you consider that when Christ was born the population was 300 million, and in 1900 it was 1.7 billion.

I am concerned that prejudice and exploitation, disguised as social order, continue to deny women — who account for more than half the world’s population — their basic rights to work, representation, and freedom.

I am concerned that the freedom of the markets will dominate and deny the freedom of labor.

I am concerned that the global economy encourages the free movement of goods and restricts the free movement of workers.

I am concerned that an authoritarian capitalist order with no totalitarian Communist enemy to battle will impose a single and dogmatic market model upon the world.

I am concerned about the return of the worst signs of fascism: xenophobia, racial discrimination, political and religious fundamentalism, and the persecution of the migrant laborer.

I am concerned that the drugs empire has created its own jurisdiction of impunity, above all national and international legal jurisdictions.

I am concerned about the deterioration of urban civilization right across the globe, from Boston to Birmingham to Bogotá to Brazzaville to Bangkok: the homeless, the indigent who must beg for subsistence, the disregard of our elderly, uncontrollable pandemics, insecurity, crime, the decline of health and education services. .

I am concerned about the resurgence of senseless arms races between poor neighbors for the benefit of wealthy neighbors.

I am concerned that for the first time in history human beings have the frightening capacity to commit suicide while murdering nature, whereas before the nuclear age, nature always survived our tragic madness.

I am concerned by the rise of unilateralism, which denies multilateralism as the only possible path to international cooperation.

I am concerned by the barbaric stance of preventive war, which denies diplomacy, conciliation, and constraint as instruments of international order and promotes suspicion between neighbors, an extension of the arms race, and deception on an international scale: where were Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction?

I am concerned by the diversion of the fight against terrorism to the selective overthrowing of tyrants if they happen to sit on barrels of oil.

I am concerned by the curtailment of freedom in the name of security.

I am concerned about a world without witnesses.

I am concerned about all that jeopardizes the continuity of life.

All of this is part of politics, of life in community, and of the citizenry in the polis.