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Timothy Mitchell – Mısır’ın Sömürgeleştirilmesi (2024)

Amalrok: Book One by Timothy Mitchell

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To perform the nation, groups must be included by first declaring them excluded for their lack of civilization, villages destroyed in order to preserve them, pasts declared lost so that they may be recovered. Fathy wanted to “revive” an indigenous culture as a means of developing an Egyptian national heritage. To perform this revival, he needed the people of Gurna. Yet he needed them as a people outside the nation, whose removal would help bring the nation and its past into being. The Gurnawis were to be treated as ignorant, uncivilized, and incapable of preserving their own architectural heritage. Only by seeing them in this way would the architect have an opportunity to intervene, presenting himself as the rediscoverer of a local heritage that the locals themselves no longer recognized or knew how to value. As the spokesman bringing this heritage into national politics, the architect would enable the past to speak and play its role in giving the modern nation its character. The people of Gurna could enter into national politics only by submitting to an act of violence. To preserve their heritage, the architect first had to destroy it. Old Gurna was to be pulled down and rebuilt—and not just because it was built over antiquities, for if the project succeeded, Fathy hoped that every other village of Egypt would also be demolished and rebuilt (a proposal later taken up by the United States development program in Egypt). The preservation of the past required its destruction so that the past could be rebuilt. Likewise, the performing of the nation required that every one of its rural inhabitants be declared outside the nation, uncivilized and unhygienic, so that in rendering them civilized and clean, the nation could be made.

Democratic politics developed, thanks to oil, with a peculiar orientation towards the future: the future was a limitless horizon of growth. This horizon was not some natural reflection of a time of plenty. It was the result of a particular way of organising expert knowledge and its objects, in terms of a novel world called ‘the economy.’ Innovations in methods of calculation, the use of money, the measurement of transactions, and the compiling of national statistics made it possible to imagine the central object of politics as an object that could expand without any form of ultimate material constraint. In the 1967–74 crisis, the relations between these disparate elements were all transformed, and they are being transformed again in the present. Understanding the contemporary politics of oil involves the difficult task of bringing together the violence that has been repeatedly deployed to secure arrangements for the production of oil and the forms of spectacle and representation that seem somehow an equally indispensable aspect of the undemocratic politics of oil – not least the representation of the most recent rounds of US militarism as a project to bring democracy to the Middle East. We can better understand the relationship between spectacle and violence, and between other apparently disparate or discordant features of the politics of oil, by following closely the oil itself; not because the material properties or strategic necessity of oil determine everything else (on the contrary, as we have seen, a lot of hard work went into producing America’s ‘strategic dependence’ on its control of Middle Eastern oil), but because, in tracing the connections that were made between pipelines and pumping stations, refineries and shipping routes, road systems and automobile cultures, dollar flows and economic knowledge, weapons experts and militarism, one discovers how a peculiar set of relations was engineered between oil, violence, finance, expertise and democracy. These relations are quite different from those of the coal age. If the emergence of the mass politics of the early twentieth century, out of which certain sites and episodes of welfare democracy were achieved, should be understood in relation to coal, the limits of contemporary democratic politics can be traced in relation to oil. The possibility of more democratic futures, in turn, depends on the political tools with which we address the passing of the era of fossil fuel

Democratic politics, as we know, came into being after ordinary people came to form critical, collective components in the new machineries of industrial life. The modes of mass democracy that emerged in response to these popular pressures were organised by separating professional politicians, authorised and regulated through political parties, from ordinary citizens, who were asked to delegate their role in decision-making to the governing party. From the mid-twentieth century, democratic politics was further regulated through a distinction between techno-scientific experts and laypersons. Specialists in the fields of science, technology, warfare, industrial management, public health, accounting, law, and above all economic planning, acquired responsibility for deciding issues of public concern. In unsettling two divides – between society and nature, and between experts and ordinary citizens – technical controversies can provide the opportunities to rebuild more ‘technical’ forms of democracy. The need to reassemble sociotechnical worlds can open up new points of vulnerability, where experts and professional politicians might become liable, once again, to the claims of those through whose lives new arrangements must be built. There is no inevitability to this. But in order to take advantages of opportunities that may arise, we must bring these questions of nature, technology and expertise into view as the place where opportunities for democratisation occur. Can we draw on these ways of thinking to think about the politics of oil? Does the uncertainty over the future of fossil fuels create a set of questions that cannot be answered if we insist on a clear distinction between nature and society; between the resources of nature on the one hand, and the kind of social order that can be sustained on the other? Or between the expertise that speaks about facts of nature and the non-experts who are asked to accept the word of experts, and to delegate to professional politicians the decisions to be made on the basis of those facts? If controversies overflow this distinction, do they create a new kind of political space, a forum in which the composition of the collective is at stake in questions over possible states of the world?

In the second half of the twentieth century, governments sought to weaken this unusual power that workers had acquired by an equally simple engineering project: switching from using coal to using oil and gas. As early as the 1940s, the architects of the Marshall Plan in Washington argued for subsidising the cost of importing oil to western Europe from the Middle East, in order to weaken the coal miners and defeat the left. In Britain, this attack on the energy system that had empowered the left culminated several decades later in the attempt by the Conservative government to destroy most of what remained of British coal mining in order to eliminate what the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, termed ‘the Enemy Within’ – the country’s most powerful labour union. The National Union of Mineworkers had led the battle that developed between organised labour and the state following the 1967 financial crisis, when the blocking of oil supplies had triggered the collapse of the pound, and in 1974 had defeated an attempt to use another crisis in energy supplies to weaken its power, bringing down the Conservative government. A decade later, the development of nuclear power stations and the oil and natural gas fields of the North Sea provided government planners with the means to end the country’s dependence on coal for generating electrical power. The Conservatives were able to reopen the war against the miners in 1984 with a new round of pit closures. The strike that followed was the longest in British history, and the most intense labour conflict since the general strike of 1926. The government failed to destroy the NUM, but six years later the domestic security agency, MI5, with help from American intelligence agencies, leaked to the press false allegations that the NUM leadership had misappropriated funds from Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi. (Created in 1916 in response to a panic over German spies, MI5 had quickly turned its attention to those organising the wartime labour strikes mentioned in Chapter 3, and to the intellectuals on the left attempting to establish the ‘democratic control’ of empire.) The Libya allegation was an effective weapon with which to weaken the NUM by destroying its popular support, allowing the government to carry through its programme of putting an end to British coal mining – an industry that had employed over 2 million workers in 1982–83. By 2009, just five long-wall coal mines were left in operation