Transcript

Aparna Gopalan: Okay, I think we can get started. Hello. Welcome. So glad to be here with everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. My name is Aparna Gopalan, and I’m news editor at Jewish Currents and really excited to be introducing this amazing conversation. I’m going to give some brief bios of our speakers and then just hand it off so we can get started.

AG: So this is The Dig live with Dan Denver and Aziz Rana and Aslı Bâli. Dan Denver is the host of The Dig podcast with Jacobin and the author of All American Nativism with Verso. Aslı Bâli is a professor of law at Yale Law School. Before joining academia, she worked for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Boston College Law School. His first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom, situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism. His most recent book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them, explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the 20th century. So with that, I’m just going to hand it off to Dan.

Daniel Denvir: Thank you. All right. Aslı Bâli, Aziz Rana, and our wonderful audience at Jewish Currents Live. Welcome to The Dig. The goal of today’s discussion is to place today’s eruption of internationalist left-wing politics and solidarity with Palestine in the larger, longer context of the Third Worldist internationalism that was for decades a giant presence as decolonization swept across Asia and Africa, and which had in Latin America its own Third Worldist counterpart in popular left-wing struggles against neocolonialism. Let’s start, then, with a very basic question. Aslı: What is, or was, Third Worldism? What were the various sorts of political projects, strategies, movements that comprised Third Worldism? And lastly, what was the global significance of Third Worldism’s defeat at the hands of neocolonialism and neoliberalism?

Aslı Bâli: Great. So just a little question to start. Thanks. So Third Worldism, first is—or was, I would say—it’s not quite as much of an anachronism as it might seem at the moment, because Third Worldism, or the phrase “third world,” has come to be denigrated in a particular way by virtue of its association with, let’s call it the global south or whatever vernacular you would choose today, and for that very reason has been reclaimed in many ways, including as part of an intellectual movement, Third World Approaches to International Law, or TWAIL, that actively asserts the frame third world today.

AB: But Third Worldism emerged, of course, out of the Cold War, in the sense that it was a third world, in contradistinction to the US-led Western bloc, which was the first world, and the Soviet-led communist bloc, which was the second world. And it was an explicit attempt to forge a solidaristic understanding of a relationship between formerly colonized (or now decolonized) states that identified largely with the left but disidentified with the Soviet Union. With, of course, changes at the margins—I mean, there were many actors within the third world bloc or within the non-line movement that had closer relations with the Soviet Union than with the United States.

AB: But nonetheless, it was this attempt to identify this alternative, which was not primarily centered on ideology, in the sense that the two ideological blocks were, but rather centered anti-imperialism and anti-colonial politics as the basis of solidarity. And imagine, what would it mean to be politically independent? What does decolonization mean for the countries that were former colonies? What do they have in common through their historical experience, and what common project do they have to join? And there was an entire economic program that was attached to the understanding of Third Worldism. And, I mean, we can speak about that in a minute if we want, but for the moment, in response to your question, the defeat of Third Worldism had very specific reasons, a diagnosis and then consequences.

AB: The defeat of Third Worldism meant this left coalition in the decolonized world, which sought to reimagine the terms on which the global international economic order would be structured, and specifically tried to center a critique of the ways in which global capitalism enabled a continuation of colonial relations, and produced the conditions for neocolonialism. That argument was defeated, essentially, by engaging in pairwise picking apart of members of that coalition, by threatening countries that were in the midst of developing. And again, we could problematize and talk about that language, but they were seeking to grow their economies, build infrastructure, and create the basic material prerequisites for an independent political life within their borders, which was a capital-intensive project in parts of the world that had been specifically stripped of their capital resources, and, therefore, had to seek capital investment internationally. And the terms by which that investment was made available to them was so punitive that it forced these pairwise bilateral defections, essentially, from the solidaristic coalition.

AB: So the idea of the coalition of the third world had been to collectively engender bargaining power that would enable the changing of the terms of trade and other elements of the political economy of the international system. But by the late 1970s, an equally powerful coalition in the global north of the west, in that first world, the sources of capital for the development project basically imposed, top-down, another set of terms. And that gave way to the rise of a neoliberal international order. I’m happy to say more about that, but I want to be cautious not to continue too long as we get started.

DD: Aziz, please.

Aziz Rana: Can I just pick up on one thread? I think it’s also really valuable to appreciate the extent to which Third Worldism was organized in juxtaposition to an existing world historical order, which is the dominant order that preceded the era of independence, a system organized around empire.

AR: So it was an imperial state structure, in which you had these massive European powers that were engaged in various forms of rivalry. And, in many ways, that system was predicated on three principles: the first principle is you’re organizing the world around ethno-racial hierarchy so that your racial background ends up shaping the terms by which you have various kinds of rights and opportunities. The second is that this is a world system structured on economic extraction, the treatment of colonies as sites for the extraction of wealth, and the reproduction, really, of profound forms of inequality. And then the third is that all of this produces really intense conflicts among the imperial rivals. So this is a zero-sum world of conflict. And Third Worldism is thinking through a moment in which all of these countries are becoming independent.

AR: But rather than just having formal independence, can you reverse every single one of these principles? Can you actually create a world order that’s organized genuinely on racial justice, a world order that’s organized genuinely on treating the economy as a site for the global commons? A world order that’s not based on Manichaean power struggles between friends and enemies, but instead built on multilateral solidarity. And in a way, the defeat of Third Worldism is the defeat of the last large-scale global movement of states and actors to think outside the bind of each one of those three elements.

DD: Right, Aslı, I want to turn precisely to that question of making a new world order. How did that basic political project of decolonization, the fight to secure political sovereignty by casting off direct colonial rule by Western powers, how did that national political project relate to the broader Third-Worldist struggle to build entirely new global structures, both geopolitically, through institutions like the United Nations, and geoeconomically, through remaking the world capitalist system into a new economic order? How did the national liberation struggles, and then Third Worldist politics, tie all these various threads together, connecting domestic sovereignty to global world-making?

AB: This builds directly on where Aziz just stopped. To begin with, one thing to understand about decolonization was the terms on which states became independent in the formerly colonial world, was actually the moment when the colonial project became most globalized, in the sense that the terms of decolonization were: you have to establish nation-states that look like the European nation-state. You need to have institutions of governance, forms of authority on your territory, understandings of borders that are exactly like what we understand to be the appropriate state form.

AB: So it’s the moment when the European imagination, exactly as Aziz described it, of ethnonational projects that have a homogeneous understanding of the national identity, that are constituted around impermeable borders, that depend upon centralized institutions, becomes generalized globally. So decolonization is actually, in many ways, the way in which it gets undertaken. And this is necessary to be recognized as a competent, meaningful political authority that will become a member admitted to the civilized community—which has become translated into the membership criteria for entering the United Nations.

AB: So you have to have these attributes in order to be recognized as capable of independence. So it fully generalizes the European order that Aziz is describing. And on top of that, even though decolonization is a moment in which, normatively, empire has collapsed in the crucible of two world wars, but also normatively, the idea of imperial control has been impugned—and yet there is absolutely no account of reparation, restitution, any form of redistributive justice that acknowledges centuries of exploitation, of expropriation of land and labor, of extermination, et cetera.

AB: And so these newly independent states that are little proto-European statelets, have been denuded of their wealth and yet are expected to develop all of the attributes necessary to be well-functioning states under good governance criteria, etcetera. Under these conditions, as I mentioned earlier, they’re obviously in need of capital, and they have to turn to the very countries that have been enriched by those centuries of expropriation and enter into relations of indebtedness toward them; in other words, pay debt service to those countries in order to have the resources necessary to actually exercise independence.

AB: Now, under these conditions, many of the leaders of the third world states—Kwame Nkrumah is the one that’s most identified with this particular insight—said: These are the conditions for neocolonialism. There’s no end of colonialism here. There’s only de jure formal independence in exchange for ongoing material dependency.

AB: And so what we need to do is change the terms on which the international system is ordered, the terms that Aziz just described very succinctly in three elements. We need to fundamentally alter this, and in order to do this, we need to take the one thing we have, which is a fundamental legislative majority in the United Nations. Because two-thirds of the world was colonized, two-thirds of the world in a one-state, one-vote system is going to be able to have supermajorities to pass new rules around the terms of trade: around reparative justice, around international assistance, around the conditions under which financial investment is made, and the kinds of returns that can be required, around the market structures that are going to be permitted; in order to first, honor the collective goals of societies, to build their own internal common good, and then secondly, to be stewards of an international system that also is attentive to the global good. So these were the imagined connections between the conditions necessary for meaningful independence at the nation-state level, and the necessary global changes that had to happen to not turn de jure independence into a new form of essential dependence and control and predation by the global north.

AB: But for the reasons I described. In 1974, they used the UN General Assembly to propose a set of very specific rule changes that were called the New International Economic Order that involved all of these things: changes in the terms of trade, control over natural resources, permanent sovereignty over the natural resources within their territories, so that foreign investors couldn’t have total ownership rights over the basic goods that were present within the jurisdiction. All of these rules were passed by the General Assembly. None of them came into existence because of concerted opposition from the global north, and because the global north continued to monopolize the basic control over capital on which these states depended.

AB: And so, for the reasons I described, by the end of the 1970s, what you have instead is not only not economic sovereignty, not the conditions Nkrumah imagined, but actually: market-driven economic solutions, privatization that shrinks the state (meaning the state in the global south) and denudes it of the resources necessary to even minimally achieve any of the projects of development. You have the indebtedness and sovereign debt at very high interest rates becoming payable, and you essentially have deregulation of all the industries in control over natural resources. Neoliberal terms that become ascendant within the United States and the UK and Thatcherites and Reaganomics, et cetera, becomes a global condition that not only ends the New International Economic Order as a feasible political project, but actually lays the groundwork for a level of such increase in inequality within the third world jurisdictions, that you have political instability; you have increasing authoritarianism, in order to stabilize the polity within the borders under conditions of extreme inequality; and you set the groundwork internationally for what becomes the unbelievable concentration of power and wealth in the hands of multinational corporations as a consequence of globalizing these terms of privatization and deregulation.

AR: That’s incredibly well stated. So I feel the only thing that I can really add is, I think it’s really significant that Third Worldism almost necessarily moves from the nation-state unit to both regionalism and then also to the level of multilateral internationalism through things like the General Assembly at the UN. And it has to do with key elements that Aslı has already mentioned.

AR: So the first is that the nation-state was not necessarily the ideal vehicle for the self-determination of local peoples. If you think about the nation-state system, it is basically a product of the European empires carving up the world. And so they were successful as colonial administrative units, oftentimes organized around ethno-racial difference, reinforcing that idea of membership, but not necessarily as a basis for either building communal solidarity, for developing clear markets and markets that might emerge between communities that have long-term relationships amongst themselves.

AR: And so there was already a limitation in the nation-state form that required them thinking in regional terms, which becomes a central element of third-world politics across the 20th century. And then specifically, there’s this basic problem of the way in which independence produces continuous extraction that Aslı was highlighting. And I’ll just give an example from Kenya. My family’s Kenyan, and here’s a version of how this story plays out. So the British are engaged in the mass theft of African land as part of colonization: the forced removal of African people from their lands, the transformation of African farmers and landowners into squatters, and at the same time, the creation of these huge plantations that are governed, effectively, by British settlers in the country. At independence, one of the central claims of African leaders is that, well, we want to have access to this land because the land is the basis for our own economic independence.

AR: The British say, if you want to have access to the land, you’re going to have to buy the land, so you’re going to have to compensate us. This is the American position as well, because there are individual property rights that are being held, and that these property rights have to be preserved within the context of an economic system. The Kenyans essentially have no choice, and so, as a condition of independence, buy land back that had already been stolen.

AR: But guess what? There’s no money to purchase the land because this is a colonized population. So where does the money come from? You take out loans from banks in England. So effectively, you’re paying England, the country that colonized you economically, extracted the basic material assets of your country, just in order to get the land back that was itself stolen. And that, of course, then produces these intense forms of bondage through debt. But an entire ecosystem in which: who emerges as the political leaders that actually have power within the country on the global stage? They’re the folks that are willing to play ball with this system, and engage in various forms of what amounts to domestic theft; that builds a national elite that’s tied to multinational corporations, corporations that goes back to English business. And all of this is what’s being confronted in the context of programs and projects like the NIEO.

DD: It’s a neocolonial strategy that dates back to the Haitian revolution. Totally.

AR: Absolutely.

DD: I want to talk about the specifically Black dimension of this internationalism that was coalescing so powerfully in early 20th-century metropoles: a network stretching from the United States to London that gathered Black thinkers and leaders from North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Aziz, what did these organizations and points of contact across the Black Atlantic look like in the early 20th century, and how did they help to begin to lay groundwork for an era of national liberation struggles that was only just beginning?

AR: So in the early 20th century, what you’re starting to see is already the emergence of real non-white political self-assertiveness among colonized peoples, not just in Africa, but really across what today we’d call the global south, so Africa, Asia, parts of Latin America, with striking connections. And we see this with Black politics in the US as well.

AR: So the emergence of Pan-African congresses and organizations where folks like W. E. B. Du Bois are in conversation with people in the Caribbean, who are in conversation with people in Africa as well. And it’s taking place at a very specific moment for Black politics: The first three decades of the 20th century is a time where the classic civil rights story that’s much more familiar in the United States has really been contained and defeated. So the idea after the civil war, through reconstruction, that African Americans can get freedom in the US through effectively signing on to a shared civic project (organized around things like the 14th Amendment and equal citizenship), that has been systematically contained. And the Black experience is one of bondage to freedom, back again to new forms of Jim Crow bondage. And it presses a set of figures. So Hubert Harrison would be one example very closely associated with Marcus Garvey; Du Bois would be another example to start thinking about alternative analyses for making sense of the American project.

AR: And the analysis that ends up emerging is an analogy with colonialism across the global south, in part because of all of these thick relationships. Now, African American leaders did not use the terminal quote, unquote, “settler colonialism,” which is a product of a much later historical moment. But they’re articulating a form of analysis that has clear links with it. So somebody like Du Bois will say that Black people are colonized people in the US. They’re not a nation in the way that, for instance, other leaders are the anti-colonial resistance figures with respect to a nation; but they’re in a colonial position because the US is organized around a basic divide between racial insiders that get the political and economic benefits of the expropriated labor of Black and outsider populations and the expropriated land of indigenous peoples. And that Black freedom requires altering that colonial predicament and changing the nature of sovereign power within the society.

AR: And that is a link that directly ties a now-global community of color, that’s engaged in extensive conversation. And it’s not just the Black Atlantic. So Indian independence leaders are paying attention to what’s happening in the United States and vice versa. And that produces a context, both in terms of ideas, but also concrete institutions. Like various types of congresses and associations that are drawing together all of these different constituents and leaders. And what it means is that when you have the two world wars, World War I and World War II, that effectively collapse the international system, so that then you have this moment of really intense anti-colonial independence activism—so you can have the national liberation projects because the imperial system is broken down—there’s already both an ideological infrastructure and an institutional infrastructure that connects these communities solidaristically.

AB: That was absolutely brilliant and just so much fun to listen to. The only thing I would add to it, if anything at all, is really less about Black internationalism than about what that looked like in the rest of the world. And so in that same moment, particularly in the early 20th century, the First World War destroys a set of empires that are not the core empires that we’re talking about here in the third world context—they’re the Russian empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire—and creates this laboratory, this experimental space in which the British, the French, and others come in and begin to create these administrative units and other entities.

AB: Certainly, this is true for the Arab world, but it’s also true for the Balkans. And against that vision, these same leaders, leaders of the proto-nationalist movement, movements on the ground, are looking at the conversations that are happening and thinking in federated terms. They’re thinking about: What were the distinctive characteristics of governance that are indigenous to our regions? They actually look like pan-regional or even pan-continental governance.

AB: So in the Arab world, the goal is one greater Arab state. It’s not independence of Lebanon and independence of Jordan (I mean, there isn’t a Jordan at this time). And so they’re looking at these broader internationalist projects, including the ones that are being articulated across the Black Atlantic, and imagining federation as the emancipatory vehicle through which they can collectively exercise control again, as opposed to the carving up that the British and French are up to in this period. And so there’s a lot of inspiration and, as Aziz said, a lot of ideas that are circulating transnationally and globally amongst territories that are now finding themselves teetering on the edge of a new international order, which the Second World War then brings into existence.

DD: To what extent, Aziz, do we need to understand 20th-century internationalism as fundamentally shaped by the Cold War? The US and the West obviously were key forces opposing national liberation struggles everywhere. And the USSR, from Cuba to Angola and beyond, provided material support to armed national liberation movements. But on the other hand, the Soviets dictating so much global left-wing politics was often disastrous. In Palestine, Stalin supported partition, which led communist parties everywhere to fall in line, including Arab communist parties (which was disastrous for Arab communist parties) and also the Communist Party USA, which was heavily Jewish, and prior to that, resolutely anti-Zionist. Also in the US, I just found out from you recently, the politics of the Popular Front led the CPUSA to support the internment of Japanese Americans. And then for the third world as a whole, as Aslı mentioned earlier, anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial politics became intensely identified with the Non-Aligned Movement, which pointedly rejected choosing any side at all in the Cold War. So how should we think through Third Worldism and Internationalism in this context of the Cold War that was there for so much of the era that we’re discussing?

AR: The first thing to say is just that the Cold War absolutely shapes everything when we think about that second half of the 20th century and the way in which a new international order, so the post-World War II order that’s predicated on the sovereign equality of nation-states across the world, how that actually gets translated into the practical experiences of communities on the ground. And the Cold War division, at a fundamental level, as Aslı highlighted, runs against the project of Third Worldism and the vision of national liberation, which was to enjoy something like meaningful economic and political self-determination outside the confines of dominant imperial rivals. And so this is the way in which it’s supposed to be a third option, a nonaligned alternative.

AR: And what the Cold War does is it forces countries to end up constructing their own internal political projects within the terms of these competing authorities, in ways that’s deeply destructive for an ultimate project of liberation. Now, it’s more complicated than that because there’s no doubt that Cold War rivalry created certain kinds of political spaces to begin with, even with the US context. The confrontation with the Soviet Union plays a really central role in domestic transformations when it comes to race and inclusion. That the US is concerned about being a state organized around Jim Crow, but trying to win hearts and minds in the global south because of these rivalries, has effects for domestic reform; it creates pressure on the US to actually back decolonization and break in various ways from England, France, its traditional solidaristic allies.

AR: The Soviet Union no doubt provides assistance to various kinds of anti-colonial projects. So all of that is true. But at the same time, there are these massive problems. One that you already highlighted, the ways in which American foreign policy is a continuation of European imperial power and so engages in various kinds of attacks and suppression wherever it sees anything that seems socialistic. And then on the Soviet side, the extent to which the internal extreme authoritarianism of Soviet politics ends up infecting the assistance that it provides, where there’s a clear effort to domestically shape the internal politics within countries in ways that are really deforming for independent left formations, and also end up creating a framework in which the alternative to a rapacious capitalism becomes an authoritarian state socialism that ends up implicating—it’s not the only reason why we see this happen, but it absolutely has an effect on the direction of internal politics in that first and second generation of independence leaders.

AR: And what this means is that, in a way, Third Worldism survives in lots of different ways after the Cold War. It does not disappear. But even before the Cold War, the vision that we’re describing, that is, a rejection of those classic elements of the imperial order, that is racially egalitarian, committed to a global commons, rejects zero-sum, and that is organized in genuinely democratic terms: that vision has already been contained as a matter of state practice among many of the leaders on the ground. Where you have a state practice that’s deeply authoritarian across parts of Asia and Africa, that delegitimizes really key elements of the Third Worldist vision and is something that folks that are committed to this aspirational imagination have to really confront and think about.

AB: I would only add a couple of things to this. The first is that one has to understand that all of the institutional architecture that we now have dates back to the post-World War Two period, but specifically to the Cold War. So it was established in part to be the answer to the rivalry between these imperial blocs. And it was almost entirely authored by the US, or the US and its bloc. So these are the rules of an international order that was really the first world’s order to the exclusion of—and then there was competition. Obviously, this isn’t true of the Security Council, as the preeminent space where the Soviet-US rivalry was animated all the time. But the World Bank, the international financial institutions, the World Trade Organization, most of the UN’s economic and social agenda, all of those things were deeply framed and structured by first world interest.

AB: And so, in a way, there’s a continuity of that set of Cold War structures and the ways in which the West defined the terms of inclusion that continue to live with us to this day. So the Cold War is, of course, shaping 20th-century internationalism, in that it shapes the entire nature of the post-war infrastructure of the order, the institutional structures of the order. It also does the kinds of things that Aziz was describing, which is because you had imperial rivalry, first of all, it became possible to think about a third world. Third made sense in a way, in part because it created the room in the joints for states that were newly independent to try to play one imperial power against the other, and to try to create a greater margin of maneuver for themselves. That, of course, with the end of the Cold War, collapses in a variety of ways that also have disastrous implications. Also, the terms of decolonization have to be responsive to the presence of an explicitly, if only formally, anti-colonial bloc.

AB: The Soviet Union is an ideological competitor with the United States for the global South. That places certain kinds of constraints on the way one can imagine the postcolonial world, that require at least formally committing to things like one state, one vote, formally committing to a variety of de jure structures that actually suggest independence is at the normative center—that ends up having consequences down the line, including to this day.

AB: And then there are some other basic entailments of the proxy wars, the ongoing interventionism of both blocs that produce their own kinds of solidarity. So, we’ll talk about the ways in which the left gets animated in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. But things like the Vietnam War are a great example of what happens when imperial proxy conflicts of this kind actually engender connections between the intervened state and parts of civil society in the metropole. And so some of these proxy wars created a groundwork that made a transnationalism around Third Worldist politics possible in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Because of the combination of an existence of an alternative left paradigm in the international system that wasn’t just the Soviet Union, because there was a non-aligned movement, because it had a set of left commitments, and because the proxy wars were literally a place where the two communities, the populations, were being forcibly, coercively brought into contact with one another in ways that had their own, both extremely destructive, but also interestingly generative opportunities.

DD: Yeah, along those lines, Aziz, have there been moments when the US/European left have been able to build a majority coalition around anti-colonial, anti-imperialist internationalism inside a Western metropole? Or do the wages of empire and nationalism, the powerful sense of belonging to a powerful nation, enjoyed by workers of powerful countries (particularly, but increasingly by no means exclusively white workers), does that always make for a central contradiction on the Western left? Must Western anti-imperialism thus always be a minoritarian project in solidarity with a global majority? Or have there been moments when anti-imperialism can be part of a domestic majority coalition?

AR: Yeah, I mean, so this is the key question, I think, for folks in the US, and maybe I’ll answer it by talking about the American experience specifically. So it is absolutely the case that at various moments in American history, over the course of the 20th century, you have very powerful domestic coalitions that are making arguments that essentially present a left internationalism, that understands domestic freedom as in contrast to the ambitions and needs of the US security state. So that is straightforwardly anti-imperial.

AR: And really the two high moments, I’d say, are in the years leading up to and around World War One with labor internationalism, where this is a moment in time that, against the backdrop of intense forms of class hierarchy and inequality domestically within the US, and these extreme forms of imperial power rivalry on the global stage, where we have folks like Debs and others that are actually at the forefront of a really sustained working-class coalition that views the interests of workers across race as something that links workers globally and is in contrast to the interests of those that are wealthy and powerful that might be co-nationals. Now, this is something that will recur, which is, it’s a powerful coalition, it is not a majority coalition—and that’s always been the struggle.

AR: Then there’s, throughout the century, different formations like this. So within labor politics, especially in the early part of the 20th century; within elements of feminist politics, where there’s a pushback against the idea of treating feminism as a single issue that’s disconnected from questions of both the peace movement or issues of race. It’s there in Indigenous politics, in terms of thinking precisely of these alternative organizations of federation, concurrent sovereignty, as a way of pushing back against the structure of settler state sovereignty. It’s there in Black politics, as we’ve described. And then the next moment, where there’s a high tide, is again the ‘60s and ‘70s,

DD: The New Left

AR: The New Left. And it’s a high tide because of the conjunction, just like in the first two decades of the 20th century, between domestic politics and the international system. So this is the second half of the 1960s, it’s a period in which you’ve had the successes, legislative successes of the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, but the persistent experience, as Martin Luther King described, of poverty amid plenty. In other words, there have not been substantive transformations that speak to the ways in which structural racism continues apace in the country. So that’s the domestic story, and it’s taking place against the backdrop of the US’s involvement in Vietnam, where you have hundreds of thousands of people drafted yearly.

AR: And all of this revitalizes that colonial analysis that I described from people like Hubert Harrison and W. E. B. Du Bois. And it means that, for groups like SDS, not just for organizations like the Panthers, but for various New Left formations, a colonial and an imperial analysis of the US comes to the forefront as a way of contesting American power. The problem, and in a way like the problem of that moment, speaks to three big issues that have always, in different iterations, shaped efforts to contest empire from the heart of empire:

AR: One is that you have the growing conservatism of the white working class at just the moment, where you have the revival of this anti-imperial politics. And that conservatism is both a product of the economic benefits of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the real New Deal achievements, but also just the transformations in how folks are organized. It’s basically the decline of more conventional working-class consciousness—where you have more people that would be part of a working-class living in suburbs, in racially segregated spaces, whose understanding of self, actual cultural worlds, bear much more in common with, quote-unquote, “middle and upper-middle-class” whites as well, so that there’s a transformation in national identity that goes hand in hand with conservative backlash.

AR: And so this is the beginning of the rise of the Republican world, essentially. The second thing that’s tied to this is the success of ending the draft. So the drawdown of Vietnam and the end of the draft takes a lot of the energy out of anti-imperial activism. So that in a sense, the question about Vietnam becomes limited to a debate about an unjust war within the context of an otherwise moral global Cold War project, rather than the war as indicative of foundational problems with how the US security state is organized.

AR: And all of this ties to the third point, which is the one that you’re speaking to. And that’s what William Appleman Williams called “Empire as a way of life.” And we can see this, frankly, with how the Democratic Party today has attempted to reconstitute itself in the wake of Biden’s decision not to run for re-election. And that’s that it’s very hard across the ideological spectrum for folks that are part of a dominant global power to disassociate from that power. Even like Woody Guthrie, a personal hero, Woody Guthrie’s most famous song is “This Land is Our Land.” It’s a claim of authority across the entire continent. And that cultural sense went hand in hand, and has gone hand in hand, with actual material benefits.

AR: The story of the second half of the 20th century to today is that the US gains extractive economic benefits from being the dominant global power, from dollar hegemony, from the way that the global economy is set up. And that means that it’s been, at a material level as well as at an ideological level, much easier to link together reform (whether it’s racial or economic) with American global power, to tell a story that the historian Mary Dudziak calls “Cold War Civil Rights.” During the New Deal, it’s a link between social democracy and empire. It’s much harder to reverse that connection, to think of social democracy, broadly speaking, as requiring anti-imperialism.

AR: Now, I think it does, because ultimately what empire has promoted is a set of extractive practices that link together security, state elites, and corporate powers that initially begin outside the quote-unquote “American border,” but almost always come back. They boomerang to reshape the nature of labor relations, to cut back against unions, to engage in various forms of racial reaction. But just culturally, organically, in terms of the perceived culture of the society: it’s hard to imagine the country, not in the terms that Harris or Biden or Obama present it as, which is where all of the things you want domestically go hand in hand with this vision of the country globally.

DD: Right. The wages of empire are psychological and material, and the two mutually constitute and reinforce each other. And then we have a DNC with the multicultural Democratic Party promising a prosperous America with the most lethal military in the world.

AB: I’m just gonna say one quick thing on this, which is a corollary of Aziz’s absolutely correct analysis, is the Sinophobia that we see right now. That the idea that we have a multipolar order where power gets distributed more broadly, we can only describe them as rivals or adversaries emerging, is about a deep anxiety about what happens if we lose primacy. And the ways it expresses itself are really interesting because it becomes skepticism about a lot of the very international institutions that enabled American hegemony in the first place. But now, is it possible that they might be repurposed in ways that enable Chinese strength or Chinese economic prowess? Or are the Chinese engaging in this and that practice? Suddenly we might want to withdraw from some of those institutional formations that were the actual expression of our own imperial ambition.

AB: And interestingly, therefore, if the question is, “Is it difficult to have meaningful solidaristic internationalism at the heart of empire,” maybe it is the decline of empire that makes that emergence of solidaristic internationalism possible again. But we encounter it (for the very psychic and economic reasons that were just described) as incredibly anxiety-inducing. I mean, the idea most Americans will just default—I think many of us will default to the idea that a China-led order is just intrinsically worse. And the questions about why we believe that, we can trot out lots of explanations of that—Xinjiang and one-party state and surveillance, et cetera. But, of course, we can also point out the obverse of all of the same things being present here. If you look at this country through the lens of any number of different perspectives, at which point it’s just like, oh, this is Whataboutism. But I mean, at base, what it points to is how deeply felt that advantage is that we have as a consequence of being in the heart of empire, and how much it constrains even the ways we understand our own collective consciousness as being in the left and the West.

AR: So I should say, I think the struggle of the present is precisely how to replace an era of American primacy with a genuinely solidaristic regional multipolarism that’s organized around thinking of the global commons as a shared repository for all. The worry that’s out there, is that right now we’re stuck, in a sense, between an American primacy that has lost its own internal legitimacy, that’s in crisis, but has the power to assert military and economic strength; and the emergence of various kinds of regionalisms that are organized around these “authoritarian capitalist” states, whether it’s China or Russia or whatever. And that’s what we’re struggling or working through.

But I think as part of that, even if folks might be rightly critical of China or Russia, I think one of the things that Aslı highlights, that always struck me as a through-the-looking-glass moment, is just think about during the pandemic: China was going to invest money in the WHO, and the way that was presented was as an actual threat to the international system. And so, it cannot possibly be the case that even regional antagonists, when they’re investing in international institutions, whose aim it is to provide a baseline degree of security to the public, that is itself an attack on the system. If we reach that point and that tells us something about the ways in which what you imagine to be the basic principles of a quote, unquote “liberal international order” have essentially collapsed into this us versus them conflict over resources.

AB: I know we have time issues, but I just—I can’t resist one other point on this, which is the New International Economic Order, in one of its moves, was to try to say: There are circumstances in which international law disallows agreement. So, for example, two states can’t enter into a treaty to engage in slavery or to commit genocide, et cetera.

AB: And there is a specific set of rules that say if states enter into an agreement through coercion—but coercion is defined so narrowly as to mean a gun to the head of the state representative, or armies massed on the border, massed exclusively for the purpose of achieving this agreement. Anything less than that doesn’t count as coercive. And the Third World tried to say: No, economic coercion is very real, and economic coercion produces unequal treaties that result in indefinite control of our natural resources by third parties, et cetera. Economic coercion. There has to be an analysis of economic coercion. And again, the global north locks down, says, “Absolutely not,” forces them into actually a microcosm of performing economic coercion, by saying, “We will penalize you if you continue on this.” So even though you have a majority in favor of this rule, you must let this go. They end up with some soft declaration about, let’s try not to be so coercive.

AB: Fast forward to today, and the G7 gathers to talk about the threat of economic coercion because China is engaging in development policies in the global south, and they’re using their capacity to offer development assistance on the terms that they choose as a way of garnering a foothold in parts of the world that the United States and Europe expect themselves to be the exclusive patrons. And so now, suddenly, the very self-same actors are genuinely concerned about economic coercion. And this speaks to both the tensions that we’re describing, but also, again, the opportunity. Whatever the reason, however the frame, there is a resurfacing of certain kinds of arguments and ideas that we can also repurpose to our own ends.

DD: The central struggles of the 1980s in the United States, which was a period of massive defeat for the left here and in many places, were really notably internationalist: nuclear disarmament, Central American solidarity and refugee rights, and, of course, the anti-apartheid struggle. Aziz, why do you think that internationalism was so ascendant at a moment when the left in North America and so many other places were in such trouble? Interestingly, and I don’t want to get into this too much yet, but today, once again, we see anti-apartheid organizing, divestment campaigns, migrant solidarity, all very much back on the agenda.

AR: Yeah. No, I think this is a really important point, which is the ’80s period can be thought of as a period of really profound left defeat, especially if you’re looking at it electorally. And it’s essentially the end result, in a way, of like the ’72 election when it comes to left internationalist arguments in the context of electoral conflicts between Democrats and Republicans. So that’s a moment in which the democratic campaign in ’72, McGovern’s campaign, in many ways, surfaces a broader critique of the Cold War. And because it leads to such a disastrous defeat, that the lesson of post-’60s politicians in the Democratic Party is that you absolutely have to cleave foreign and domestic, you have to sign up to a national security project and that you have to double down on precisely what you’re describing as the wages of empire.

AR: So that’s the story electorally that carries through the ‘80s. But culturally, it’s not like all of the institutions, cultural practices, the world in which people came of age, in the context of Vietnam, of Black internationalism, just vanishes and disappears. And it’s also a setting in which you have the intensification under Reagan, of added fuel to the fire of the Cold War through really violent actions across large chunks of the world—in which precisely the claim is that the US is exceptional, it has a right to step inside and outside of global rules and arrangements, and that when it backs various forms of violence, somehow that’s still in service of an international system. And that’s getting extensive pushback through all of this institutional infrastructure.

AR: And I’ll say just personally for me, my very earliest political memories are in the ‘80s, in the context of spending time with my parents at rallies, protests; not unlike the stuff that we’ve seen more recently, but dealing with issues related to South Africa. And that’s something that is very real for folks. There’s a story about how the ideas, institutions, and practices of that 1980s moment carries over all the way to the present. And in many ways, we can think of the present that we’re living in, as you highlighted, as having more in common with the politics of the ‘80s than, let’s say, the politics of the ‘60s and ‘70s. But then there’s also a story about what happens in the intervening decades, in which the cultural world that, let’s say, I was born into, that was very real on the ground for folks—so Third Worldism was a real thing in thinking about the connections between Angola and South Africa, and what’s happening in parts of Latin America—how that ends up getting cleaved by almost the end of the Cold War generating the cleavage that the left experienced, interestingly, in the ‘40s and ‘50s with the rise of the Cold War.

AB: So I’m just going to add one quick thing on the ‘80s because I think the ‘90s become a really interesting moment worth engaging with. But with respect to the ‘80s, this very brief point, which is, domestically, in the United States, it’s really 1982, and the Sabra and Shatila massacre that alter the framing of Israel, which from its creation through the 1967 war and even the ‘73 war, is really a project with which, for a variety of cultural and other reasons, the American Left continues to support and identify with to a degree. After 1982 you have the emergence, including, interestingly, in the Jewish community, of real questions about what some of the practices of the Israeli government are. And so I have a similar experience to Aziz, both on the anti-apartheid front, but also this incipient set of critiques (that still are very early and really only mature much later) of the Israeli state and its projects, and then that becomes intensified somewhat around the First Intifada. But really, I would locate that also as an emergent internationalist awareness of the ways in which US support is producing effects in the world that either extends into or even originates in the 1980s.

DD: Yeah, let’s talk more about the 1990s because that was also a massive decade of defeat for the American left under Clintonism. But it was also, again, a notably internationalist decade here and globally; especially the late ‘90s, when I came up on the left as an Adbusters-reading teenager. The global justice movement, then, aka the anti-globalization movement, or counter-globalization movement, was emphatically about cross-border popular labor solidarity against global capitalism, against global corporate power, against the predations of the World Bank, IMF, WTO. Aslı, am I right that this is an unusual thing that happened, this global mass movement, for what we could call a new economic order in the streets of both the first world and the third?

AB: So one of the consequences of the defeat of the New International Economic Order, and more generally, the defeat of Third Worldism and the end of the decolonization moment, if you want, is that the left in the first world was left without specific actors to be in solidarity with at the state level. There were no more clear stories like Nkrumah or Kenyatta or Gandhi or what have you, as these independence leaders that we’re going to align with, and this is what we support. The states of the third world had become predatory states of their own; I and Aziz have both described already how that happened and how that was intimately connected to the failure of the attempt to imagine this world making alternative of what an alternative international economic order could be.

AB: So by the time you get to the 1990s, there are a few notable things: One, there’s no Cold War peace dividend. That just doesn’t end up materializing somehow. So the Cold War ends, and there isn’t what’s anticipated at that point, that many of the things that were being sold as necessary in the Cold War for the national security state would come to decline. Instead, they’re recreated in a variety of ways. But there’s also no obvious global set of state actors with which to identify. So what you have emerged in the 1990s is the first effort, in my view at least, to come up with a transnational civil society left alternative model of what transnational internationalism can look like; and a demand, very much like you said, this is the New International Economic Order from below. This is the grassroots iteration of: What do we need to change the conditions by which the international system is structured in a way that can enable the things that we’re most committed to? And those things are no longer centrally focused on anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, necessarily, in that moment; because you now have the end of apartheid, you have the Oslo peace process. You have a set of things that have altered the terms through which that community is experiencing the international system. They’re thinking instead in anti-capitalist terms. Although, again, Third Worldism was also about the attack on global inequality and the structures that make it possible, including global capitalism.

AB: It’s anti-capitalist, it’s about the environment. It’s about stewardship of the global commons. Human rights and humanitarianism becomes ascendant in this period. So it’s about disaggregating global civil society structures from the states in which they are located (or imprisoned, essentially), and imagining cross-border affiliations. And this is, of course, very much centered in, first of all, bringing class back to the fore, thinking in terms of World Social Forum, imagining ways in which labor and other organized iterations of the working class or marginalized communities within particular societies can connect to one another and articulate an agenda of shared emancipatory projects. I think that’s what’s significant about the 1990s. And I think it lays a groundwork for what comes then in the 21st century: some of the ways we see the resurgence of an older internationalism merge with this model that I’m happy to talk about in a minute, but I know Aziz wants to come in on the 1990s.

AR: So two thoughts. One, a defense of anti-globalization activism, because I think it gets a pretty bad rap. Various elements of the left that I think of myself as a part of, there’s a critique of its horizontalism, its anarchism. And I think it’s important to understand the particular methods and tools in the context of that historical moment. So this is a moment after essentially the collapse of state institutions, political parties like organizations from the ANC to the classically status Third Worldist project that Aslı’s describing. And so it’s a setting in which, if you’re going to engage in global activism, you don’t have the typical or traditional agents. And instead, what ends up emerging is extra-institutional protest activity. And then, moreover, I think from the American perspective, to the extent that there are institutions, institutions would be things like the World Social Forum, that are not housed in the global north effectively. And so you don’t see the institutional creativity and activism, because it’s not in the metropolitan center. And so there’s a way in which that moment is an interesting, incipient point that connects up to the present, of how is it that you build global solidarity and create activist pressure in a context in which you don’t have the traditional statist agents as supports.

AR: On, let’s say, the limitations of the ‘90s—and this is, in a way, anecdotal, it’s coming out of the fact that I was in college in the late 1990s—and I do think that there was a fundamental difference that was generated by the end of the Cold War in terms of activism by that point, as opposed to the ‘80s, that is worth engaging with. Because, in a way, it speaks to the broader drawdown of political imagination that no doubt takes place in the ‘90s and 2000s. And this is the fact that, while there’s this moment, right at the end of the Cold War with Gorbachev, with Havel, with even Mandela, when he gets out of prison, of trying to imagine genuinely an alternative between these two imperial rivals, a humanistic socialism, social democracy for the world; that very quickly gets shut down. And you’re in a setting of American global unipolarity built around what ends up being a fairly rapacious neoliberal system. And it also then alters the terrain of activism. So in the ‘80s, if the activism is around apartheid, if it’s around what’s happening in Central America, if it’s around questions of nuclear disarmament, this is very much still part of longstanding left internationalist projects that link folks domestically, overseas.

AR: This is, if you’re just a college student on an American campus in the ‘80s. By the time I’m a college student, the similarly situated person that is, broadly left-liberal, hasn’t fully fleshed out a framework, isn’t getting initiated into these kinds of movement politics. Instead, what’s available to you is a brand of liberal human rights and liberal humanitarianism that is very different. And in particular, its difference is it replaces a vision of the world that’s organized politically around self-determination for communities on the ground, into a vision that treats American power really as apolitical, as just effectively a moral force, a moral force for good that sometimes does bad and that your effort to engage means engaging in various kinds of human rights projects that are tied broadly to this emerging new post-war liberal order. And what that, does just culturally, is it is a moment of profound break for folks that come of age during that period from what had been, let’s say, a long 20-to-30-year strand where being a student or an activist on a campus is being acculturated into a politics shaped by some version of left internationalism. And that’s that divergence that it’s now taken truly like 20 years to recover from.

DD: And I think that divergence is, Aslı, absolutely clear after September 11. And just thinking back to the lead-up to the invasion of Afghanistan, the protests that I was a part of as a college freshman were so small. And even Portland, Oregon, where I was at the time, was just covered, blanketed with American flags. And even as giant protests emerged ahead of the impending invasion of Iraq, that anti-war movement not only quickly lost steam, it was never really internationalist. How would you describe the character of anti-war politics throughout the War on Terror?

AB: I agree and disagree, in some ways, with the premise of the question. So the post-9/11 immediate response was definitely, I think, a domestic response, let’s say. The way that the left (or anybody that was concerned about the American response) began by organizing themselves, was in a story about the defense of the Bill of Rights, for example, and defense against the Patriot Act, the idea that you had a balance between liberty and security that was off, and also the racialization of communities domestically in the United States, and worries about new detention practices, et cetera. The timeline is so compressed, you get from September of 2001 to March of 2003 in a matter of a year, year and a half of trying to orient yourself to a world that’s post 9/11, and then you’re already on the march to a war in Iraq almost immediately.

AB: Those Bill of Rights defense campaigns, et cetera, meld into what becomes an internationalism around the anti-war movement against Iraq. And then that movement, to my mind, doesn’t dissipate. Actually, I would say, I would share with Aziz, having been a college student in the 1990s, rather than the 2000s, but for me, every left collective I belong to today is tied in some way to the activism I was engaged in in 2002, 2003 around resistance to the Iraq War. And that became a way, I think, of connecting anti-globalization; that historical moment in the 1990s when the anti-globalization movement was being shaped was one in which (as Aziz has described), because you don’t have states that you’re identifying with, the traditional diplomatic fora, international organizations, et cetera, were taken off the table. And what you had was direct action and protest movement from below, from civil society. Then you have the war emerge. And those same people that were involved in many of the left projects of the 1990s are present in those protests against the Iraq War and begin to consolidate a position that draws on that leftism of the 1990s and builds in what I view as a genuinely internationalist approach.

AB: This is in part because the one thing that reemerges after the invasion of Iraq is a truly anti-colonial set of commitments. Because the United States is now engaging in not just one, but two belligerent occupancies in this period, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has now declared a global war. I mean, it has redefined the entire globe as a theater of conflict in which it can engage in discretionary uses of force at its pleasure. And so the ability to now see the relationships between the hyper globalization at home, the interest of the fossil fuel industry abroad, the creation of the entire military-industrial complex comes back into the center. Privatization of war-making, the creation of, essentially, 21st-century mercenarism and all of the different actors that benefit from it, and contractors (like the Dick Cheney connections to Kellogg, Brown & Root). All the things that were the daily bread of those protests, the post-Iraq War protests, are really about thinking through under conditions of hyper-globalization, in a moment of unipolarity, what does it look like to resist this assertion of imperial authority globally, as the United States constructs a project that is, by its own admission, a fully global project of domination? So to me, that’s that moment. And it connects dramatically, then, to what we end up seeing after 2010.

AR: So I had a very similar experience that probably, for me as an adult, the formative political experience has to do with organizing in opposition to the second Gulf War. And if I were to periodize it, I do see it as an incipient moment in shaping the return of a more full-throated internationalism that comes all the way to the present. There are two differences that I think are still worth highlighting, that are the effects, basically, of the Cold War and then the politics that emerged in the ‘90s. One is that nonetheless, that’s an era in which you’re starting to have arguments about the US as an empire, but it’s very much the case that those are not being linked to domestic internal practices. So in other words, you don’t have a domestic conversation about race in the US, about immigration in the US, about the treatment of native peoples in the US that is being directly tied to what the US is doing in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And so that’s a difference in that moment by comparison with what had preceded and what’s gonna end up coming. That the story about empire is very much organized around a claim about global hegemony and what happens outside the border.

AR: Then the second thing that I also think is different, just remembering this, is it was very, very difficult to say, “I’m against the war on terror.” It was much easier, even in left-friendly spaces, to be like, “I disagree with this practice.” And that’s, I think, another product of the way in which the story about American success during the Cold War, whatever might have been the things that the US did, ultimately it won vis a vis the Soviet Union, reshaped the domestic conversation. So it was essentially removed from the table, making more comprehensive critiques of the nature of the security state. And you transformed those oftentimes into these more specific critiques of political practices.

DD: And it was very difficult, if not impossible, to say, “I’m in solidarity with armed resistance to the US wars” in either of those places.

AB: I will come back to that in a minute. But just one quick thing on that is that it’s true that you might not have connected this with a racial justice story that’s a through line with the civil rights movement and the experience of the Black community in the United States. But because of the racialization of Muslim communities and Arabs, actually, it was directly related to an increasingly self-conscious mobilization. And many of the coalitions that those Muslim, Arab, et cetera, communities within the United States were being racialized, were forging connections to the Black community and to the broader communities that have been talking about racial justice domestically in the US throughout.

AR: Which has then paid, I think, dividends that we’ve seen in more recent decades.

DD: If you want to reply briefly to the other point, if you want. Today’s Palestine solidarity movement has erupted in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And it certainly feels like the most internationalist moment in my political lifetime, at least in my American lifetime. And it feels suffused with the rhetoric and politics of an older Third Worldist moment that might have seemed to have been mostly defeated. Aslı, what’s the significance of today’s internationalist moment and movements? How would you situate what’s happening within the history we’ve been discussing, and also in terms of what possibilities in the future it might be creating?

AB: All right, so let me very briefly respond to the second point you just invited me to do earlier. And I was like, which second point? I got it. The thing that the global war on terrorism also did was it enabled a frame by which all countries, of course, principally the United States, but all countries, were able to rename dissidents, dissent movements internally, opposition groups, et cetera, as terrorists. And so the fact of armed resistance to any project, of any state, was easily elided in this way. But most importantly, there were many national liberation movements still underway. We say the period of decolonization ended, but of course, it’s a fully incomplete process.

AB: And for everybody from Xinjiang to Mindanao to Kashmir to Baluchistan, to the Kurds, the Sahrawis, et cetera, all of a sudden, this is just a global picture of terrorist movements everywhere, rather than national liberation, rather than self-determination, rather than the ability of communities that are being deprived of the machinery to defend themselves, finding resources themselves to try to enact a form of resistance. And so that is incredibly depoliticizing and troubling. It becomes a repressive machinery that every country in the world happily doubles down on, especially in the metropoles, I mean, in the first world. But just equally, it’s like every state in the world can benefit from redescribing whatever opposition it faces internally as terrorists. So against that backdrop, now in this moment, how the Palestinians represent perhaps the quintessential incomplete decolonization story, an organization in the PLO that represented just as much as the ANC at one time; the goals of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s; the National Liberation Project, and unlike many of the other movements I just named, had actually been promised a state. From the beginning, from the partition plan in the 1940s, from the creation of the State of Israel, it was predicated on the idea that there’s also a state of Palestine, and that’s in the state of coming into existence, somehow. And that story of incomplete decolonization has two consequences: One of them is that is the way, durably, that Palestine is understood globally by other states who, whatever they may have become today, were once part of the Third Worldist project and understood Palestine in colonial terms from the start, and still do now.

AB: But two, because Palestine has this place, not only in that earlier Third Worldist moment, but also in being identified with this terrorism turn as one of the movements that one can’t be in alignment with when it engages in armed resistance, it really brings together that earlier moment and this one: of what does internationalism have to look like? And Palestine ultimately reflects an allegory for not only the ongoing, incomplete story of decolonization, continuing imperial practices, but now, today, a decade after Ferguson, a decade after the movement for Black Lives identified racial justice as a project at home and abroad (and spoke of from Gaza to Ferguson), we now have a decade in which Palestine is also an allegory for global racial justice projects more generally.

AR: Yeah. So just on that last point, very quickly, that in a way, this completes the through line from the activism around Iraq War to the present. I do think that the Movement for Black Lives plays a really significant role at, again, a very specific moment in time, which is thinking about how to make sense of the, quote, unquote “New Jim Crow,” the persistence of racial subordination in the face of the fact that the country’s supposed to be enjoying something like a post-racial order with Obama as president. And it’s also taking place at a moment in which the country’s gone through a set of rolling social crises, including crises around these forever wars in the Middle East. And it leads activists to increasingly present straightforward critiques of the classically American exceptionalist story: free and equal, from the founding. And so what it promotes abroad is an exceptionalist premise based on principles of liberal democracy.

AR: And so activists are saying no—instead, that there’s foundational experiences of injustice that then shape how the US operates elsewhere, and that domestic transformations to the politics of race require these global transformations. And it means making common cause, both at home and abroad, with communities that have long been marginalized and pushed to the side; including, for instance, the kinds of connections that start to emerge between Black and Muslim activists, as well as immigrant activists. And all of that sets the stage for, I think, a really interesting thing about the politics around activism with respect to Palestine recently, which is the ways in which it combines elements both of the Civil Rights movement from the 1960s and of anti-war activism around Vietnam. So it’s a linkage of the politics of racial justice with the politics of anti-war.

AB: And I just do want to say one thing, which is, it’s true that the Movement for Black Lives has been very instrumental, but also, this is building on decades of Palestine organizing, specifically. And particularly the Palestinians, unlike many other communities, have recognized the challenge of who are you acting in solidarity with, if it’s no longer the Palestinian Authority as instantiated through the Oslo process? If it’s not Hamas, if it’s not this or that actor? And they answered with a direct call, more than a decade and a half ago, from Palestinian civil society, saying to the world, “If you want to be in solidarity with us, engage in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions; look at BDS, understand the apartheid quality of the governance arrangement we labor under, and stand in solidarity in this way.” So they solve the puzzle of: How do you exhibit transnational solidarity at a time without a state actor to whom you can identify that solidarity?

DD: The case that South Africa brought against Israel over the Gaza genocide in the International Court of Justice, represented a global south solidarity at the level of the state that we don’t see that often anymore. Aslı, what role has international law traditionally played in struggles against colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism? And what’s the specific significance of this recent case, which led to the ICJ ruling that Israel was plausibly committing genocide?

AB: Yeah, I mean, this is a question like the first one we began with, which we should spend hours discussing. Let me start with this. The idea of international law and its relationship to imperialism, et cetera, is that international law was always the permissive institutional frame that made imperial projects possible from the get-go at the beginning, the international law before the 20th century to today. So one has to understand that international law is intimately connected to depriving peoples of the global south of sovereignty in the first place, enabling expropriation, extermination, etcetera. But with decolonization, there was a possibility (that I’ve already narrated to some extent) in the General Assembly and elsewhere, of using a legislative majority to enact different kinds of rules. And although that project and the New International Economic Order did not succeed, the idea of one state, one vote remains very powerful.

AB: And in a moment where the United States may be able to protect its allies and proxies in the global order from particular kinds of consequences, it nonetheless stands in total isolation. So what the UN General Assembly, what the International Court of Justice and other places have enabled is demonstrating the degree to which the US and Israel stand nearly alone on the question of how Israel is conducting itself at the moment in Gaza, and the presentation of that is somehow just. And instead, over and over again, you have nearly unanimous resolutions in the General Assembly (although you can’t get them translated because of the US veto) to the Security Council indicting the Israeli project. And then when that indictment gets actually enacted, actual indictment before an international court, it has a certain potency, because it’s taking that set of rules written by the West, written by the First World, the very rules that enabled the imperial project in the first place, and turning them around in the hands of a set of global south actors to hold accountable and indict those who were the authors of the rules. And so it’s a normative reversal, and it’s a placing in the dock of powers that are not accustomed to having these kinds of constraints.

AB: It also has real implications domestically. So on the one hand, I just want to say very briefly, and I know it has to be brief, the ANC is actually the party that brought that case to the International Court of Justice. And the ANC is a neoliberal party today in South Africa that has overseen exactly what Aziz described in Kenya: failure of land reforms, allowing property arrangements of apartheid to persist, et cetera. But at the same time, it remains a liberation movement that many identify with. And so its project at the ICJ has brought forth the Third Worldism of the 1960s. It has a level of support among state actors in the global south that’s remarkable. And by virtue of holding first-world countries accountable, it also empowers people domestically in countries like the United States. So, for example, a set of actors, some of whom lawyers are in the room, brought a case in the northern district of California against the Biden administration for complicity in genocide and failure to prevent, that directly cites the ICJ’s finding (which Dan named a moment ago) and engendered a decision from a judge that said, I may not be able to rule on this because of political question, or whatever, but actually, I call on the Biden administration to hear that they are complicit in this and allowed the testimony of Palestinian Americans in an American court to indict the US’s politics. So it creates, engenders new opportunities, again, of what solidarity can look like transnationally.

AR: Yeah, so just a very small thing. And so this is something that I think is continuous with lots of different kinds of left strategies with respect to the law. Just want to highlight one thing about the nature of the multiple cases through the ICJ, as well as these legal conversations at international level. This is not some radically alternative framework for thinking about the law. Essentially, what the folks that are engaging with these international fora are doing is just saying: the US-Western powers, because most of the world was not decolonized at the time, created a set of rules that were supposed to govern the international order, as well as some foundational treaties. And that, just as a way of living up to liberal legal principles, the so-called rules-based order, we should actually abide by those principles. But the thing that’s always been the case, is that there’s this interesting relationship between liberal legality and more emancipatory legalities. Namely, that once you actually push to commit to the liberal legality, that raises profound questions about the extent to which there’s a basic divergence between the substantive arrangements that exist and the presumptions formally under the law.

DD: Immanent critique.

AR: Exactly. And so I think it’s important to highlight how, in a way, these cases are not at all outside the bounds of what would be very typical legal arguments, but they put pressure on the nature of how the system is, in fact, emerged.

DD: To close out: The American school year is beginning with absolutely draconian measures being imposed across the country. And we see protest movements at a moment of ebb, now that Biden has been switched out for Harris, even as we see liberal and reactionary internationalisms ascendant everywhere. Briefly, what’s going on and how should we move forward?

AR: So maybe two points on the diagnosis. So one about the reactionary internationalism and one about the Harris campaign. So, on the reactionary internationalism, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about left internationalism. And there’s a shorthand in the US for thinking of internationalist politics as something that is a creature either of the left, with its emancipatory traditions, or of a type of do-gooder human rights liberalism. And we tend not to think of the right. And here I think I’d include a broad swath, unfortunately, of the mainstream American political spectrum as internationalist because of the explicit invocations of nationalisms, of various forms of belligerent (and otherwise modes) of patriotism. But it’s absolutely the case that reactionary politics, even if it disavows being, quote, unquote “globalist,” is deeply internationalist and has always been so. And, in fact, reactionary internationalism that we’re seeing resurgent from the connections between somebody like Trump and his favorite politician, Orban, to a whole host of other figures globally, is powerful precisely because of how it’s embedded in state actors and corporate actors, with folks with actual wealth and political power. And that has a real shaping effect on the nature of conversations that exist.

AR: And so part of this moment of ebb that you were describing is a function of the fact that there’s an unequal terrain of power between left international formations that don’t have the traditional agents to assert power, but operate in these solidaristic, non-state, extra-institutional frames. And the fact that it’s much easier for everything from the national security infrastructures of allied countries to be able to construct shared policy, to the ways in which footloose business elites are actually part of an internationalist infrastructure. A recognition of that is recognizing the array of forces that are the circumstance.

AR: The second thing, on Harris, is that I do think this is the story about contesting empire from the heart of empire. It’s that there is a very deep-rooted way of talking about the relationship between American power and inclusion, which is: inclusion goes hand in hand with American primacy, with the US’s dominant global position, and with a romance about the national project, which was so much of what the DNC and the Harris debate really ended up investing in. And that has profound romantic attachment to large chunks of the public, even if it no longer actually works as anything more than an old-time religion. And it’s a specific problem for activists, including in the context of Palestine, that want to draw an alternative way of conceiving of these connections. And it’s seen real problems play out in cases like the Cori Bush primary. It also, for the Democratic Party, particularly—like the Democratic Party’s coalition is a coalition of minority voters and highly educated white voters around a very particular story of the country. And this, in a way, is especially appealing within the Democratic Party. It’s especially useful for minority establishment politicians that can charismatically tell that story, and very hard for both minority-left and white politicians. So where do we go from here? And then I’ll turn it over to Aslı. Sorry that I’ve been going long.

AR: I think one of the things that’s most exciting to me about the moment, is labor’s return to the stage, and return to the stage on internationalist grounds. The fact that you have labor leaders and labor unions that are explicitly making the link between the material experiences of their workers, their members, and the politics around the US’s national security infrastructure, including what it’s promoting in places like Gaza and the West Bank. That is an internationalist development that we have not seen in recent decades. And that has an institutional strength, both within a space in American life, but also with respect to the Democratic Party. And I think it’s a thing (alongside what remains on campuses) to draw from in thinking about reviving left internationalism, both extra-institutionally and institutionally. My apologies.

AB: I know, I now have 30 seconds. I’m going to just say something that’s more global and then something that’s much more micro on the global stage. Just returning to the ICJ case for a second: Palestine specifically, this feels like a moment of such intense defeat and failure for so many, and it’s been a depoliticizing and in some ways demobilizing fact, that genocide gets worse and more profound. And it just feels as if everything that’s been tried has failed. But one thing I want to note about the ICJ case is it put not the occupation at its center, but the Nakba at its center and genocide at the center. In other words, it reopened a set of questions and refocused attention on the shared Palestinian experience across the territories, inside of the 48 territories within Israel proper: of apartheid, of the Nakba, of the fact that there is an ethnic cleansing project underway, which is intrinsic to an understanding of liberating land, and reducing responsibility for a population that has been at the inside of the Israeli political project from the founding.

AB: And so it has reframed the decades of talking about Oslo and the peace process, which we see now today, again, that version of endlessly talking about talking, as the way to understand Palestinian liberation. So now it’s an endless negotiation of ceasefire and that’s it. Like we’re never going to end the genocide. We’re simply going to talk about ceasefire. We’re never going to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. We’re just going about the two-state solution. That model is failing globally. I mean, the feeling of defeat is at the heart of this political project in the United States. But globally, actually, the script has changed so profoundly, there’s no unseeing what’s been seen.

AB: And then domestically, at the very micro level, I would say that we have seen a political economy of higher education (speaking of these campus protests, et cetera), that again, can’t be unseen. What we see again, a profound defeat, the firing of these university presidents, the House Committee on the Workforce and Education. All of this has been the ascendance of a repressive machinery and the right crushing the possibility of dissent and speech on campuses. But at the same time, again, you don’t unsee what you’ve seen. You’ve seen a donor class come out and dictate what happens, and who runs the university, what curricula are permissible, et cetera. And you have genuine faculty and students organizing now around not just FJP’s, but AAUP’s, about thinking about how do we reclaim our space here, how do we actually return to what is supposed to be the mission of the university, et cetera.

AB: That again is a kind of political ferment I haven’t seen on campuses in a very long time. So I think there are paths forward, whether it’s through labor, through thinking about what’s actually happening on campuses, or by remembering that the United States is having difficulty dictating outcomes at the moment at the international level—that means that there are paths, even in the midst of what feels like a moment of defeat.

DD: Aslı Bali, Aziz Rana, and all of you here at Jewish Currents Live, thank you very much. Thank you everyone for coming. Feel free to stay here for the next awesome session. I also want to point out that we do have a member appreciation after-party this evening. So if you want to join us there, feel free to stop by at the tables and get a membership. Thank you.