Visions of decolonizing society certainly sound progressive, but when the rubber meets the road the concrete proposals behind decolonial ideology are often internally inconsistent, sacrificing real progress for the enjoyment of sounding radical.
Anyone paying attention to modern trends in the academy in the last several decades will have noticed the quick growth of a now large body of interdisciplinary literature known as decolonial theory.
While this strain of thought has led to some embarrassing trends in education, such as “decolonizing math” — which are quickly picked up by the culture war and used as fodder by the right to call their political opposites unreasonable — it does still provide an important mode of thinking that has been neglected since the end of European colonialism in the 20th century. Namely, how the former centuries-long colonial projects of European countries still live on in certain thoughts, practices and even policies of today’s former colonial powers and the world at large.
The discipline of decolonial studies has lots of interesting things to say about how certain prejudiced attitudes and behaviours persist today that are remnants of a colonial mindset and former-colonial culture.
However, for all its critical might in educational contexts, decoloniality quickly reveals itself to be a poor base to build a broad forward-looking political project. This largely stems from the fact that while it’s not hard to produce convincing theories about how a colonial mindset and practice persists in certain aspects of today’s hegemonic cultural centres, agreeing on what former-colonial or settler-colonial formed societies are today is where the issues begin when trying to figure out how to craft policy for a better and more just world.
Oftentimes, decolonization advocates in the political sphere believe that colonization — in the European sense of total control of governance and exploitation of a culturally and ethnically distinct people by an imperial power or “mother country” — still exists today, just in mutated form. Nations like Canada, the United States and France, despite being UN members subject to the historically significant UN General Assembly Resolution 1514, which made colonial foreign rule illegal under international law, are still colonial nations, they say.
To be clear, marginal forms of colonialism still exist in the world today. For example, the US still has two semi-independent colonies in Puerto Rico and Guam, and the violence that Israel is currently unleashing on the occupied territory of Gaza, an illegal occupation since the June 1967 war in the region, is probably the most acutely unjust contemporary case of a colonial nation. Even Russia’s annexation of Crimea and current military control of eastern parts of Ukraine as a result of the ongoing war can be appropriately deemed as a neocolonial project with all of Putin’s irredentist rhetoric about the territory of Ukraine originally being Russian.
The issue is that a view that the essential nature of European colonialism still exists today leads to a bunch of inconsistencies that make political planning for a better world basically impossible.
For example, where radical advocates of decolonization feel they have the strongest argument for the persistence of colonial rule writ large is with countries that began as settler-colonial projects, mainly nations in North America. After all, the Canadian state born of France and Britain’s colonial projects settled itself on land that was already inhabited by Indigenous communities. The Canadian state then committed cultural genocide to those Indigenous inhabitants right up until the second half of the 20th century. The lack of historical justice through reparations, adequate funding of reserves and denial of cultural genocide are major issues persisting in Canada today.
However, despite the undeniable injustice in the Canadian case — which in relative terms was somewhat tame compared to the brutal genocides the Spanish subjected Indigenous peoples in the south of the continent to — the fact that Canada was formed as a settler-colonial project doesn’t necessarily mean it still is one or that Canadians born today are colonizers.
Again, this objection doesn’t rob a decolonial perspective on contemporary Canadian politics of any of its explanatory power; what the opposite objection — that Canadians born today are colonizers — does is sow absolutely phantasmatic and impossible standards for concrete policy proposals to alleviate minority injustice, including for Indigenous peoples.
If Canadians born today are colonizers, and pretty much most of the global population agrees that colonization is reprehensible, the only way to produce fully just policies, decolorizers argue, is to dismantle the Canadian state entirely and give the whole country back to the Indigenous population to decide what to do with.
From this perspective, a $20 federal minimum wage in Canada is no longer a straightforward, unalloyed good; it’s simply a materially beneficial policy to an otherwise colonizing population that’s already advantaged, poor or rich, due to being settlers and using the resources of a land they don’t belong on.
Not to mention, if the Canadian state is being dismantled for a full-scale land-back initiative, there’s the issue of where to put the 36-some-odd million people who now must leave. Do they go to France and Britain? Or maybe just anywhere in Europe will suffice.
The call for full-scale land-back also begs the question: What are the metrics for determining colonizers who should lose their property and emigrate and those who are exempt?
Is, say, a Yemenis migrant settled in Canada who has fled from the vicious Saudi Regime — which Canada has close economic ties to despite being a genocidal-maniac monarchy — a colonizer because they secured their path to citizenship and perhaps even was able to afford a mortgage and start a family? If yes, it’s certainly ironically cruel to tell this hypothetical Yemenis person, a product themselves of an outsider nation attacking their own right to self-governance, that they have to pack up and return their family to a war-torn country that Canada, through funding Saudi arms, certainly has indirect responsibility for creating the unlivable conditions of.
If this hypothetical person is exempt from a decolonial land-back movement given their oppressed-migrant status, then what about the working poor in Canada, or Black Canadians who are descendants of slavery? To go with the latter group scenario, does that mean that Black Canadians who through ancestry testing are determined to not be the descendants of slaves also have to leave on the grounds that they are colonizers as well?
At a certain point, it appears the only reliable metric would be if you’re White or not. Chances are, if you’re a White Canadian, you’re either a descendant of the British or French peoples who settled in Canada or are a descendant of other European nations — many of them having their own colonial empires at one point in history, or at least not being colonized themselves — that came to settle in Canada.
But this metric also quickly becomes problematic. If the Yemenis person from earlier is exempt from removal due to settling in Canada to avoid the violence of an oppressing external nation with imperialistic-type policies, then what about a White Irish person living in Canada today whose parents immigrated to Canada in the mid-19th century due to the Irish potato famine, which, to add another layer of complexity, was the product of British colonial policy in Ireland.
Changing the focus from Canada makes the issue even more complex as the nation’s slow severing of ties to Britain was more of a product of non-violent negotiations aided by a centuries-in-the-making general cultural attrition towards early Modern-era colonial rulership. Consider, for example, the United States, which broke from colonial rule from Britain in an extremely violent revolutionary war. Though still settlers of a colonial project, the American revolutionaries viscerally rejected colonial rule to an extent.
What effect, if any, do these specific caveats create on the colonizer-or-not balance sheet? Ignoring them and just doing an “if you’re visibly white, you leave” test would surely be a crude form of racism missing the nuance that the Irish case, to pick one example, brings into the math.
The point is these questions are impossible to answer. The notion that there could ever be a science to determine who is more colonizer or less colonizer based on some criteria for oppression points is hopelessly misguided and helplessly unserious in terms of alleviating injustice in society.
An opponent of this position might ask: What about the decrying of Israel as a settler colonial state? If you aren’t for decolonizing society after all, how can you stand up for Palestinian independence?
It’s actually fairly simple to be consistent with this position and be against the colonial aspirations of Israel or Russia.
The answer is not new; it comes from broad Enlightenment-era values of universal rights to self-determination and individual autonomy. In other words, the belief that all human beings, regardless of race, gender, sex, nationality, ethnicity and the like, are all entitled to certain basic rights over their life and can be exempt from non-just forms of coercive action by other actors.
Now while these basic Enlightenment values, originating in Europe around the time of the continent’s height of global imperial status, certainly have a hypocrisy to them, it doesn’t mean those values on their own are therefore undesirable or somehow the language of the colonizer. It was, after all, the values inherent in the French Revolution — liberty, fraternity, equality — that inspired the Haitians to revolt against their French rulers in the world’s first-ever successful slave revolution, as Marxist C.L.R. James writes in his magisterial The Black Jacobins.
The decolonial rhetoric of dismantling former-colonial and settler-colonial states ultimately relies on a fantasy of some kind of peaceful homeostatic pre-modern world before European colonialism came and corrupted humanity. It fails to broach the nuance of how even a horrible institution like modern colonialism can exist within the same constellation of ideas that brought about the French Revolution and many of the rights we enjoy today in liberal-democratic societies. Instead, this perspective sees any contiguity between the ideals produced out of the modern era and the practice of colonialism coming from the same or a similar source as reason to reject all European thought from that time, root and branch.
This mode of thinking is a huge mistake as it’s the same rationale behind thinking that a $20 minimum wage in Canada or providing free healthcare in the US are not universally good policies because they’re being instituted by colonial nations to help colonizers, ipso facto, making them colonial policies instead of simply just good ones.
Overall, universal principles of justice and the right to self-determination are vastly more politically viable and genuinely radical over impossible-to-define metrics of identity and impossible-to-settle questions around the reorganization of populations to “undo” colonialism.
