Fears and Hopes in a World of Turmoil Ahilan Kadirgamar

Today, I mark my one hundred and fiftieth Red Notes column. As I started writing this column, I reflected on if and how I should continue on this twice-a-month weekend preoccupation. If it were cricket, at a century and a half, I would have to consider if the pitch is changing and the light is fading, and how long to continue batting before getting all out or retiring. But what about in writing? Am I steady with my strokes; how is the world changing, and is anybody even reading?

My first column in March 2017 was titled, ‘Global Turmoil: International Tutelage and Adherence in a Time of Crisis’. I began that column by paying homage to one of my mentors and comrades, Kethesh Loganathan, who also wrote a column in the Daily Mirror for many years. He was silenced by an LTTE assassin in August 2006, when he was a year younger than I am now. The broader world I described in my first column is eerily similar, and perhaps gotten worse today.

International Tutelage and Pressure

This is what I wrote in my first column, over seven and a half years ago:

“The global economy has not recovered from the Great Recession of 2008. Brexit signalled last year the tremendous backlash against neoliberal globalisation and the rising tide of anti-immigrant and racist forces in Europe. With the election of Trump, the American mask has come off, and its naked exploitative interests are bound to undermine international treaties and laws, which for better or worse, maintained a certain global order and stability. Furthermore, even the emerging power China is in a deep economic crisis, as its debt driven construction boom has reached its limits…

“If the political leadership in the West is too much to stomach, there is always the bureaucracy of the international organisations whether it be the UN, the IMF or the World Bank. The buck does not stop there, when these international agencies lose their legitimacy with repeated political and economic crises – as with the war in Iraq and the anarchic fallout in the Middle East or the global economic crisis of 2008 – there are the metropolitan academic centres for coaching, whether it be Harvard or Oxford. So, for countries like Sri Lanka, it is not a question of what advice is sought or given, rather how and through what institutions, the same imperial policies are pushed and received gratefully by our elite.

As the global order unravels, there will be more aggressive and lethal manoeuvres from the metropolis, and there will be further dispossession in the Global South

“The most far reaching international disciplining of Sri Lanka in recent years is the IMF Extended Fund Facility Agreement in June 2016. However, even as the IMF demanded liberalisation of capital markets to allow for the free flow of capital into Sri Lanka, that very month, three senior researchers of the IMF wrote an article titled, ‘Neoliberalism: Oversold?’, about the risks of such policies. They argued that the chances of financial crises and inequality increases with such capital inflows. The IMF researchers were forced to question such policies after the IMF’s failed interventions in Europe, particularly in Greece. But in practice, the IMF works with double standards, one for the West and another for the Global South… As Sri Lanka stumbles along on the knife edge of an economic crisis, the advice we receive pushes us towards a deeper crisis…

“With Sri Lanka at the crossroads in a time of global turmoil, it is high time we eschewed our colonial mind-set of looking for solutions in the West. Rather, we must learn from struggles in other countries like ours, against their neoliberal states enriching their elites and critiques of similar forms of Western tutelage. More importantly, we must listen carefully to the protests of our people for land and housing, for sustainable agriculture and fisheries, for free healthcare and education, and for permanent work and decent working conditions.”

Has the world not changed much since I started writing my column? Am I just repetitious in my writing? Or is the global order in a downward cycle with wars raging around the world along with economic crises in countries like Sri Lanka?

Over the next two weeks, we will see the results of two important elections. The outcome of the Trump and Harris election in the United States, which this time has little to offer the world. The Democrats in power have been as naked as the previous Trump regime in pushing imperialist interests. The liberal order supposedly built since the Second World War and claims of international promotion of human rights now stand fully exposed with the West’s unconditional support for Israel’s horrible wars and heinous crimes in the Middle East.

In this context, amidst our hopeful moment in Sri Lanka after regime change, the General Elections next week are under the shadow of tremendous pressure from the West to stick with the IMF road of deprivation. The economic depression devastating Sri Lanka requires considerable relief, but the new government is constrained by powerful global actors demanding repayment of defaulted loans to international creditors.

As the global order unravels, there will be more aggressive and lethal manoeuvres from the metropolis, and there will be further dispossession in the Global South. The debt crisis of the 2020s now affecting over half the developing countries is only being patched up to prolong the extraction of global finance capital. It is in these troubled global waters that the National People’s Power (NPP) government will have to swim.

Looking back from the future

In the impossible probability that I will be writing this column seven and a half years into the future, what would I be writing?

That destructive wars and brutal extraction by global powers has morphed liberal democracies onto the path of authoritarian populism and fascism in many parts of the world. Alternatively, that a non-aligned world led by progressive leaders emerging in the Global South are building a post-neoliberal world favourable to working people.

Closer at home, Sri Lanka has gone into its 18th IMF Agreement and again in the middle of a debt restructuring process following its second default on high interest International Sovereign Bonds (ISBs). And that free education and healthcare have been completely dismantled with drastic cuts and privatisation. Furthermore, Sri Lanka’s only major sector is tourism that falters from year to year, even as public utilities – unaffordable to working people – are owned by multinational giants from India and China. Alternatively, Sri Lanka has become one of the first indebted countries to exit the IMF programme in the 2020s, and found avenues of development financing avoiding commercial borrowing with ISBs. That a self-sufficient economy reviving agriculture with a strong food system has reduced inequality, and the country has become a beacon of economic democracy.

As Sri Lanka goes into a decisive parliamentary election to form a new government for the next five years, the great expectations of the citizenry cannot wait seven and a half years. They will want to see changes in the next year itself. Elections, we know, are only one form of democratic engagement, and in the absence of social and economic changes, working people’s protests will follow suit regardless of who is in power. The year ahead is bound to be eventful, with either major progressive changes or more dispossession and repression.

(This article was originally published in the Daily Mirror Online on November 4, 2024)