Untitled Artwork by Syrian-born Berlin-based director and artist Sulafa Hijazi Untitled Artwork by Syrian-born Berlin-based director and artist Sulafa Hijazi

Some years ago, the elderly and amiable former President of Uruguay, Jose Mujica at the end of an interview he gave to the Al Jazeera journalist Theresa Bo, suggested that the world was headed to hell. Sadly, today well-intentioned calls for peace in the face of war become the littered detritus of best intentions that have always paved the road to hell, a road the world now inexorably marches on and which Mujica referenced so well.

The wars in the world show no signs of ending. The two most prominent ones are the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated on 24th February 2022 and which nears three years and the over a year of relentless Israeli attacks on the Gaza strip since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. There are other, lesser-known theatres of conflict such as Sudan, where for two years a civil war has raged between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). There is also a frightening fluidity to global politics, evident in the rapidity with which the Bashar al Assad regime in Syria fell and the flurry of diplomatic activity that has accompanied the newly powerful Ahmad al-Sharaa’s overseeing of state building activity.

Like a festering sore that stubbornly refuses to heal and, in the process, reveals an underlying systemic disease, the current unending wars are symptomatic of a world order simply not fit for purpose. This was a world order dispensed by US-led Western hegemony, that at its best, was about conveniently and cynically maintaining a veneer of commitment towards democracy, human rights and a rules based international order. These elements were played up to the hilt after the Russian invasion of Ukraine by the Biden administration in its early days. The very same elements were shelved by the same Biden administration for the sake of its most exceptional of allies, Israel, for whom all manner of atrocities, including a livestreamed genocide, is par for the course.

What is the underlying sickness at the heart of the international order that manifests itself in unending wars? This essay suggests, two immediate crucial components of the sickness are capitalism and nationalism. For the last five decades since the 1970s, we have witnessed the earlier form of Keynesian capitalism put in place to rebuild the ravages of WW II, being replaced by neoliberalism and its creation of a global market. Neoliberalism has not in its five decades of dysfunctionality provided two things that keep restive populations and especially working classes pacified: economic growth and employment. Instead, neoliberalism has turned out obscenely unsustainable levels of inequality. The forthcoming Trump presidency will prove to be a simultaneously tragic and farcical culmination of this dysfunctionality.

Neoliberalism created chasms of inequalities were at the best of times, just about contained by the constricted channels of liberal-democracy in its notional representation and functioning. Today, the theory and practice of even that bare minimum functioning of liberal-democracy stands undermined. The Stanford historian Walter Scheidel in his book The Great Leveler chronicles the effects of wide inequality and suggests that every time such chasmic inequalities open up, processes of social levelling he refers to as the ‘‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’’, which are mass mobilisation warfare, transformative revolution, state failure and lethal pandemics, come into play to flatten them. That is why, it may be futile to expect any substantive political change coming from the routine rigmaroles of four to five yearly election cycles. The next few years may be characterised by more war with the most familiar historical signpost for our times being a reliving of the horrors of the 1930s.

Will War Sire the New World Order?

The ancient 6th-century BC Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed polemos pater panton, “war is the father of all things”. Without extolling war, the purpose of the quote is to suggest that as the world awaits the birth of a new order, one hopefully less ridden with war, that birth itself may well be sired by the excesses of war. Today, war seems the default condition of human beings with peace appearing as a mere transiently punctuated and unsustainable interlude. It was out of the unsustainability of peace between Athens and Sparta that Athenian imperialism was defeated in the Peloponnesian Wars between 431 and 404 BC. The Athenian empire and its attendant democracy was stalled by this military defeat. In one of those iterative recurrences that history can often be about, the fall of US-led Western imperialism could very well arise from the expertise-induced export to the Middle East of what the Columbia University academic Timothy Mitchell in his 2011 book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, calls ever fainter and withering ‘carbon’ copies of democracy.

The trainers include Adrian D'Souza, Yogita Bali, Helen Mary, Dipika Murty, Akash Chikte and PT Rao. Among the drag-flickers are Rupinder Pal Singh, Gurjinder Singh, VR Raghunath and Jaspreet Kaur.

Karl Polanyi in his 1944 book The Great Transformation understood the massive changes of the early decade of the 20th century as arising from the “hundred years’ peace” in Europe lasting from 1815 until the beginning of WW I in 1914. Even the Crimean War (1853-1856) did not really reverse the trend of this “hundred years’ peace” where haute finance or high finance played a crucial role. In other words, capitalism had no vested interest in creating war. The important lesson from Polanyi’s book is his analysis of the complex carryovers of the 19th century such as the balance of power system, the gold standard and the self-regulating market that all came crashing down in the early part of the 20th century, bringing about the momentous changes that his book focuses on. Analogously, the unending wars of the 21st century are an outcome of the complex carryovers of the 20th that will not let the 21st century know peace until the unsettling ructions that roil it, remain unresolved.

The Complex Carryovers of the 20th Century

Four of these complex carryovers of the 20th century that haunt the 21st century are unregulated capitalism, settler-colonialism, racism and nationalism. All four are evident in the Gaza crisis, the likely hinge on which the world order will change. The hundred years peace that Polanyi alluded to in his book between 1815-1914 is mirrored in a subsequent “hundred years’ war on Palestine” that is the title of historian Rashid Khalidi’s acclaimed book. The UK-based political scientist Ahron Bregman in his book Israel’s Wars: A History Since 1947 notes how each of Israel’s wars such as the 1967 Six-Day war and the 1973 Yom Kippur war, among others, must be seen “in a historical perspective, as a single war with a single continuity…”While for many, Gaza is a moral issue, the answers may lie in the brute unyieldingness of the four carryovers mentioned. It may be useful to turn to each.

Today, the biggest obstacle to the fight against racism, colonialism and capitalism is nationalism that has from the previous century recrudesced into a far more virulent strain.

Capitalism. The more conscientious have wondered how the world can stand silently by as ghastly images from Gaza of death, destruction and starvation are livestreamed to our devices. One need only look into the platform capitalism of Instagram, Facebook, Tik-Tok and X/Twitter. When the history of the Gaza genocide is written, as it inevitably must, the question will arise as to why Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers, supposedly the most moral army of the world, digitally shared their misdeeds, when perpetrators cover their tracks. The answer again is in the digitally all-consuming nature of this genocidal Gaza war. Even those of us outraged and shocked by the depravity of war, may inadvertently be complicit in the platform capitalism that ensnares and imprisons us, much in the same way the enchained prisoners in Plato’s famous cave allegory remained transfixed to the images on the wall in front of them, that were shadows cast of objects behind them. The more compulsively we share images and videos of the Gaza destruction, the more we contribute to the profits of platform capitalism. We reinforce our trans fixation to the screens of our devices. In a shift from Plato’s cave allegory where the prisoners are collectively chained, our own imprisonment becomes more personalised through our devices that lock us into individualised silos-of-solitude that exponentially compound the prisoner’s dilemma.

Colonialism. Noam Chomsky and Illan Pappé have characterised Israel as an anachronistic form of settler colonialism whose 20th-century establishment harkens back to the 17th and 18th centuries. Israel’s bellicose expansivity has been more than obvious in terms of its stated intentions in Gaza and more recently in creating a buffer further into Syrian territory, capturing Mount Hermon, beyond the initial buffer that the already annexed Golan Heights was. It is in the compulsively unstoppable quality of its settler colonialism—that can only exist as long as it keeps expanding its borders—that the explanation of Israel’s unending wars be found. It also reveals the hollowness of the “Israel’s right to exist” nostrum repetitively used by its defenders.

Racism. The racism at the heart of the US led West is evident in the opportunistic upholding of an international rules-based order. The burden of justice of the international legal system has generally fallen on African leaders such as Omar al-Bashir of Sudan when an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant was issued against him in 2009 or the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony in 2005. There was an alacrity with which Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine were dubbed as war crimes. The contrasting response to the ICC arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu cannot be missed. A central pillar of the international rules-based order is the 1948 Genocide Convention that arose predominantly from the anti-Semitism that prevailed in Europe, prior to the end of WW II and specifically the Nazi holocaust. Today the genocide convention is instrumentally invoked in the Orwellian manner of all nations being equal with some being more equal than others. There is an outraged disbelief expressed by Israel’s Western supporters as to how the Genocide Convention can be invoked against, of all countries, Israel.

Nationalism. The fight against anti-Semitism as one form of racism is a good and worthy fight to redeem the 21st century and rid it of all forms of racism. That struggle must not be undermined by Zionist ultra-nationalism, which labels any and all criticism of Israel, even the extreme charge of genocide as anti-Semitism. In 2018, then leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, rejected the definition of anti-Semitism put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that his own party was only too eager to accept. In his view the definition prevented legitimate criticism of Israel. Today, the biggest obstacle to the fight against racism, colonialism and capitalism is nationalism that has from the previous century recrudesced into a far more virulent strain. It is yet another complex carryover of the previous century that fuels the wars that consume humanity.

(Views expressed are personal)

Amir Ali teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, JNUmango win, New Delhi