This article correctly highlights that in many ways the rapidly increasing rise of separatism is a reaction to the past 30 years of hyper globalization and the attempt to force the entire world under a one-world system. It is an inherent urge of most peoples to want to exercise sovereignty over themselves and their lands.
The failure of large centralised bodies of power is only accelerating and not decreasing as we move further into the 21st Century. The political crises that now stretch from Lebanon to the Punjab, in the central part of Asia, highlight this to a great degree. In Europe we see the European Union’s disintegration accelerating, which is leading it to engage in desperate acts of expansion in a vain hope this will hold it together. This trend is largely what has fuelled the rising conflict in Eastern Europe centered in Ukraine.
Amazingly this article also ends by making the very point we have long made on this blog only it does so from the opposite end. It sees Separatism as a “problem” that can only be fixed with Imperialism. Indeed the opposite of nationalism and sovereignty is indeed Imperialism. Therefore this very clearly shows that finally the left and right wing working class should be able to unite around a common core of anti imperialism. Restoring a robust anti imperialist movement is long overdue in the world at the moment. Imperialism is actually the problem, which is fuelling the global financial collapse, the ecological crisis and the relentlessly increasing scale of armed conflict and its resultant refugees. The solution to this is for organized political movements to start supporting separatists wherever they may be. From Kurdistan to Khalistan to Texas, this is the future that awaits the latter half of the 21st Century.
As we build this anti imperialist movement we must also avoid the trap of the duality of saying “Empire X is bad therefore Empire Y that contests it must be good”. ALL the empires must be rejected. ALL empires are evil empires. This is not even due to some cabal of super villains sitting at the hearts of these empires plotting to be the most evil world leader ever. It is simply a result of the mechanism of expropriation and conquest that must occur for any empire to exist to begin with. The solution to this is to reject all the major empires simultaneously.
In the Middle East, where the duality has been trapping everyone into feeling that the only way to resist the atrocities of the Sunni Islamic Caliphate is to support a broadening Shia empire across the region, this has lead to many social activist groups finding themselves incapable of working together. Working class Alawites in Syria or working class Arabs in Palestine cannot offer support to working class revolutionaries in Iran because they see the fall of the Shia Empire as opening a door to their own decimation at the hands of the Caliphate Empire or the Israeli colonial project. A solution to this is to instead support the model that has been proposed here. Separatist movements across the region can stand in solidarity together against all empires.
On the global scale the three major empires mentioned in the article the United States and its satellite EU, China and Russia can be rejected simultaneously and safely dismembered into much more healthy constituent nations. This will serve to alleviate the energy crisis and the ridiculously fragile supply chains that the giant empires require to subsist.
There is a fourth empire that has been pushing to establish itself at this moment of inflection. This is the internationalists and their attempt to create a one world single empire. Through beaurcratic institutions like the World Economic Forum and the World Government Summit they seek to develop a single unified global policy. Klaus Schwab at the latest World Government Summit even had the audacity to deliver a “State of the World” address as if he was some self appointed world Vizier. In that speech he gushed over the technology finally arriving that would allow those gathered to become “Masters of the World”. As we can see he is still locked into a dominator mind set.
Astonishingly it was actually Elon Musk at the conference who brought up another great argument against a one-world empire. An argument we have made previously here.
The risk to the current system of not being able to survive exogenous shocks, now that it is over centralised and over complicated, has been increasingly getting higher. Any doubt that this is a risk should have been put to rest in the pandemic. When this group attempted to use single, one size fits all, policies across the world at the same time, to deal with the Pandemic, it lead to the chaos and disaster we have been living through the past 3 years. Their inability to understand that different cultural regions will require different policy prescriptions was clear to see for all. A heavily centralised imperial project will undoubtedly end in total collapse and another round of ‘mysterious’ ruins, like Athens, Persepolis or Thebes, will be left for future humans to wonder about. If we are lucky enough to survive as a species.
The better option is to truly celebrate difference and diversity. Allow separatism to spread around the globe as a panacea to Globalisation and intensive internationalism, and have better firewalls between the decentralised global elements so as to prevent crises of hegemony like the one we saw in the global economy in 2008 or global healthcare in 2020.
This was something that the left wing in western civilisation was pushing for a great deal in the years between 1995 to 2004 with their anti globalization movement. Interestingly, since the Trump movement in the United States and especially since the Covid policy failure fiasco, this is something that increasingly many on the right wing in the west are also open to accepting needs to be changed now. A unique moment in history is therefore at hand to bring these disparate groups together under an anti Imperialist banner.
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