Month: March 2023

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Je ne sais pas

When I was a child, my mother would read to us from an illustrated version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The content of each page – words in a large well-spaced font followed by a colourful picture – was bordered by bright patterns. Young children are often drawn more to the rhythms of speech than its meaning (their attention seems always to be directed to the conditions which make things possible rather than the things themselves). To the extent that I concentrated on the content of the story, I thought of – and can still partly remember – pictures surrounded by margins so decorative that they threatened to crowd out the main event. I imagined that the margin would grow with each turn of the page, surrounding, constricting and finally overwhelming text and image and, in so doing, bringing about an ending. I thought, or I imagine now that I thought, that perhaps this was the movement which guided the story.

The French filmmaker Alice Diop often refers to her work as an attempt to draw attention to the margins. Marginality does not, as her films make clear, suggest inferior status. It can exist on both vertical and horizontal axes. The closest analogy is psychological: what is marginal is what is not thought about, what is suppressed. The director of six documentaries and most recently Saint-Omer, for which she won the Golden Lion at Venice, Diop is the child of Senegalese immigrants who moved to France in the late 1960s. Born in 1979, she grew up in the Cité des 3000, a district of Aulnay-sous-Bois, a northeastern suburb of Paris built to house migrants working in the nearby Citroën car factory. She studied history, focusing on the legacy of colonialism, at the University of Evry, before training at the prestigious Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son (La Fémis). Like the writers Didier Eribon and Annie Ernaux, she is a transfuge de classe who has dedicated the early part of her career to challenging polite society’s view of the dominated classes.

Conceived as a political project, Diop’s documentary work offered successive portraits of the banlieues that intend to dispel misconceptions and half-truths. Clichy For Example (2006) documents the aftermath of the riots that swept through France after two men died fleeing from the police; Danton’s Death (2011) follows an aspiring black actor, Steve, who dreams of being cast as the lead in the Büchner play after which the film is named, but encounters belittling acts of racially charged dismissal; On Call (2016) presents a series of vignettes set in a refugee medical centre which focus on the psychological and physical difficulties of its patients; Towards Tenderness (2017) examines race, love and masculinity via a set of interviews with young working class men. Most recently, We (2021) saw the director bring herself into the frame, reflecting on the death of her father and the co-existence of modernity and tradition in Paris’s suburbs. Taking inspiration from François Maspero’s Les Passagers du Roissy-Express, a book of photos and prose documenting a journey through the outskirts of Paris which Diop says taught her to love the banlieues, the filmtraverses the city’s periphery without stopping at its centre.

The film marked something of a departure for Diop. Made in response to the Charlie Hebdo attack, We counterposes an image of a France divided between secularism and religious fanaticism with one whose fissures are too subtle to discern. Its scope – monarchists and car mechanics, nurses and game hunters – was wider than anything that Diop had previously attempted. In one scene we see a crowd, entirely white with the sole exception of a black priest, at a mass commemorating Louis XVI at the Basilica Cathedral in Saint-Denis. The camera scans the faces of the attendees. Some are moved, almost to tears, as they listen to the priest read Citizen Louis Capet’s final address. There is something pathetic about the scene, which is shot with an ambivalence that hesitates between disdain or pity. What we see are not those who would once have supported the Vichy regime, but a confused mass descending into the tomb of a dead king that is not kind enough to close behind them. Strange things live on in Paris’s margins.

In what follows, Diop recalls a dream in which she has mislaid the keys to her apartment. She recognizes the names of other residents on the intercom but cannot find her own. Eventually she is let in by a woman to whom she explains that she once lived in the building with her family. From deep in her pocket Diop retrieves a heavy bunch of rusty keys. With force the door yields; she enters, tentatively, and is greeted by a darkness which feels like a ‘tomb’. Unlike the monarchists of Saint-Denis, though, the director wakes up. Video footage of her father recalling his arrival from Senegal now plays. We see him move his face away from the camera and touch it as he speaks – through discomfort at being filmed or the effort of recalling the past? ‘I have always had work since I arrive in France.’ Should we share in his pride or find something melancholy in his assertion of it? Diop again lets the camera linger long enough for a shadow of doubt to be cast over first impressions. Her aim in such scenes is less to challenge a stereotype than, through the slow gaze of the camera, create a space in which the viewer can reflect on the varying meanings of the lives and words of her subjects.

Ambiguity is at the centre of Saint-Omer, Diop’s first feature film and her finest work alongside We. The film is inspired by the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegal-born French woman sentenced to twenty years in prison for the murder of her child. Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), who confesses to the crime but pleads not guilty, confounds jurors and onlookers with her eloquence and psychological opacity. Asked by the judge why she killed her child, Laurence utters a line which will become a refrain: ‘Je ne sais pas’. At the film’s midpoint its other central character, Rama (Kayije Kagame), a black professor of literature who has travelled from Paris to the suburb of Saint-Omer with the aim of writing a book on the trial receives a call from her editor, who asks, ‘What is she like?’ A pause, slight but heavy follows. Whether this is out of exasperation or to collect her thoughts we do not find out, for Rama’s editor quickly supplies an answer: ‘She sounds fascinating’ (To whom?) ‘The press say she talks in very sophisticated French.’ Finally Rama speaks, her voice steady and dismissive: ‘She talks like an educated woman, that’s all.’

Diop’s animating theme is hereby complicated by the fact that Laurence, as with the real-life Fabienne, is in some respects the opposite of an outsider. She comes from a well-off Francophone Senegalese family; we are told that her father is a translator for the United Nations, that as a child she was forbidden from speaking Wolof. (Diop did not speak Wolof at home either and recalls her parents being warned off doing so by her teachers.) That Laurence’s background could count as marginal, that it could make her interest in European philosophy and literature inexplicable and fascinating, is a consequence of the provincialism that Diop sought to expose in We.

The existence of Rama, easily read as a fictionalized version of Diop but probably closer to her image of an ideal viewer, allows the drama of the trial to be seen from a sympathetic perspective. This is in stark contrast to the fetishistic response of the French press, who were quick to treat the real-life events as an expression of ungraspable cultural differences between Africans and Europeans. Rama however is also locked in her own, more familiar drama: a difficult relationship with her mother and her working-class upbringing and the anxiety – fuelled by her pregnancy – that she is at risk of becoming either too close to or too distant from them. In the first glimpse of her personal life, Rama, accompanied by her husband, visits her family. She hesitates when asked by her sister whether she can take her mother to the hospital, before insisting she cannot. At play is not just Rama’s refusal to allow her mother into her life, but the sense that her autonomy has been won by drawing a screen between her upbringing and the life she has made for herself. We are invited to compare the two women: how thin is the line which separates the successful professor and mother-to-be with the woman on trial?

Further details of Laurence’s life are soon revealed. An emotionally distant but disciplinarian mother whom she resents; a kind father that does not raise her but whom she admires; a wealthy family; a bookish, isolated childhood; and an elite class position which places her uncomfortably in French society. Added to this is a relationship with a much older man, Luc Dummontet, with whom she begins an affair not long after arriving in Paris. He is married with children and an irregular presence in her life. When Laurence tells him that she is pregnant with his child he keeps this news to himself, even after the child’s death. Dummontet is frail and pathetic; sheepishly, he complains of Laurence’s jealousy, her anger, her silent treatments, his fear that she will leave him because of his age and declining health.

Rama looks on with compassion, but through Laurence’s plight she is playing out her own fears and anxieties. One night, sitting alone in her hotel room she listens to recordings of the trial. As we hear Laurence speaking about her mother, Rama thinks back to her own childhood. A wordless scene around a kitchen table unfolds. Rama’s mother finishes a drink from a bowl after which she washes it and then retrieves a container of Nesquik from the cupboard, placing it on the table for her daughter who has entered and, without speaking, sits to drink some chocolate milk. The young Rama is wearing pyjamas and her mother is dressed for work; it is dark outside and unclear whether it is early morning or evening. When the camera returns to Rama as an adult her face is heavy with sadness. Is there something in Coly’s sad story that could have relevance to the life of Rama or any other observer?

The latter half of the film attempts, with varying degrees of success, to interrogate this question by treating Coly as a symbol of universal issues of femininity and agency. Laurence tells the court that she was a victim of sorcery, an excuse which the film gives us plenty of reasons to doubt without discounting it. In Saint-Omer’s most unpleasant scene, the police officer tasked with investigating the case explains that in an attempt to provide a cultural explanation for Laurence’s actions he suggested witchcraft. A back and forth ensues between the officer and prosecutor about the difference between infanticide and female genital mutilation, a practice the latter describes as having ‘cultural value’.

To read this scene purely as an instance of racist ignorance and dismissal would be to miss something. The police officer’s fantasies offer Laurence an opportunity to envelope herself in mystery, withdrawing into the symbolic world and becoming someone that cannot be reduced to received social categories. In her final monologue – repeating the words uttered by Fabienne – she explains how, standing on the shore with her child in her arms, the moon rose before her ‘lighting the path like a spotlight’. The judge attempts, unsuccessfully, to point to inconsistencies between this poetic narrative and Laurence’s initial testimony but to no avail – ‘Je ne me souviens pas’, she replies. Evidently, within the world of facts there is no possibility of making oneself intelligible, at least for someone like Laurence.

In her earlier films, Diop was often torn between a desire to depict working class life authentically and angst about the meaning of her images. In the case of Danton’s Death, for instance, she has said that she was careful with her footage lest it might inadvertently reinforce pre-established narratives about working-class men from the banlieues. Steve smoking weed with his friends was left on the cutting room floor: ‘We were not there to reinforce stereotypes but rather to dispel them!’ Rather than careful, sometimes excessive curation of the material, Diop’s solution in Saint-Omer – as in We – is to embrace ambiguity and complexity. But the solution comes at a cost: it runs up against the director’s commitment to a kind of universalism. Two provocative but ultimately contradictory statements made by Diop clarify this: following the release of We she declared in an interview that ‘Cinema makes it possible to test in an extremely sensitive way the existence of the other’; after the release of Saint-Omer, she claimed that ‘the black body carries something universal… I think that all men and women feel some kind of mirroring through this figure of a black woman… that is a political statement.’

The insistence that there are ways of being that cannot be reduced to pre-given frameworks and a desire to show that the particular is in fact universal pull in opposing directions. Saint-Omer responds to this contradiction with a forking path, following one before retracing its steps to follow the other. The first sees Diop granting Laurence the right of indeterminacy. Rama withdraws to her hotel room and watches a scene from Pasolini’s Medea. We watch Maria Callas tenderly dispatch her two children with a blade. They offer no resistance. She opens the window to a moon which lights a path across her face before the camera turns to Rama, stunned with recognition, her face lit by the same glow. A line from Pasolini to Laurence to Rama is drawn – its meaning unclear, its existence indisputable.

The second path is illuminated by a monologue from Laurence’s lawyer, who argues that her client is in need of psychological care. We hear of the chimeric nature of women who, like the mythical beast, are ‘hybrid creatures composed of different animal parts’. Women carry their mothers and their children with them; they live torn between different selves. The camera shifts to the women in the audience, moved almost to tears by this speech. Something like universalism emerges here but the cost of its appearance is never seriously interrogated by Diop. In Laurence’s story there is undeniably some analogy to the condition of women, to some universal – not to say mythic – experience of maternity. But in embracing it, are we not confining ourselves to a binary between ghettoization through racist narratives or universalism offered by empathetic members of the middle classes? Lost in this false choice is the incomprehensibility of Laurence’s actions beyond the poetic drama of her worldview.  

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘What’s Your Place?’, NLR 136.

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Sovereign Africa?

At the Munich Security Conference last month, Namibia’s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila was asked about her country’s decision to abstain on a UN General Assembly resolution to condemn Russia for the war in Ukraine. Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, an economist who has been in post since 2018, did not flinch. ‘We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict’, she said, ‘so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world, instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities’. The money being poured into arms, she continued, ‘could be better utilised to promote development in Ukraine, in Africa, in Asia, in other places, in Europe itself, where many people are experiencing hardships’.

This view commands a broad consensus across the African continent. In September Senegal’s President Macky Sall, the Chair of the African Union, echoed the call for a negotiated settlement, noting that Africa was suffering the effects of sanctions-induced food and fuel price inflation while simultaneously being dragged into the conflict that the United States has provoked with China. ‘Africa’, he said, ‘has suffered enough of the burden of history . . . it does not want to be the breeding ground of a new Cold War, but rather a pole of stability and opportunity open to all its partners’.

The ‘burden of history’ and its emblems are well-known: they include the devastation wrought by the Atlantic slave trade, the horrors of colonialism, the atrocity of apartheid and the creation of a permanent debt crisis through neo-colonial financial structures. Whilst enriching European nations and spurring their industrial advancement, colonialism reduced the African continent to a provider of raw materials and consumer of finished products. The terms of trade sent its states into a spiral of indebtedness and dependency. Attempts to break out of this condition – by Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana or Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso – resulted in Western-backed coups. Technological development in the name of social progress was rendered impossible. Hence, despite immense natural and mineral wealth and human capacity, more than a third of the African population now live below the poverty line: almost nine times the global average. By the end of 2022, the total external debt in Sub-Saharan Africa was a record $789 billion: double that of a decade ago, and 60% of the continent’s gross domestic product.

In the last century, the leading critics of these colonial dynamics were Nkrumah and Walter Rodney; yet there is little contemporary scholarship that carries forward their legacy. Without it, we often lack the conceptual clarity needed to parse the current phase of neo-colonialism, whose stock concepts – ‘structural adjustment’, ‘liberalisation’, ‘corruption’, ‘good governance’ – are imposed by Western institutions on African realities. Yet, as the statements of Sall and Kuugongelwa-Amadhila show, recent conjunctural crises – the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, rising tensions with China – have highlighted the growing political gulf between Western and African states. While the former rush headlong into a Great Power conflict with terrifying nuclear stakes, the latter fear that warmongering will further weaken their developmental prospects.

As African nations have diverged from the Atlantic powers, many have edged closer to China. By 2021, 53 countries on the continent had joined the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), designed to enhance trade and diplomatic relations. Every year for the past two decades, bilateral trade has risen – from $10 billion in 2000 to $254.3 billion in 2021 – such that the PRC has become the main trading partner for the majority of African states. At the eighth conference of the FOCAC, China announced it would import $300 billion worth of manufactured goods from African countries by 2025 and increase tariff-free trade, later waiving tariffs on 98% of taxable goods from the twelve least-developed African nations. The afterlife of colonialism means that Africa’s overseas trade is still heavily financed by debt; its exports are mostly unprocessed raw materials, while its imports are mostly finished products. For China, investment in Africa is motivated by the desire to strengthen its role in the global commodity chain, and by political imperatives such as the need to gain African support for Chinese foreign policy positions (on Taiwan, for example).

Chinese financial institutions have also disbursed significant loans for African infrastructure projects, which are grappling with an annual shortfall of over $100 billion. China’s advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, green technology, high-speed rail, quantum computing, robotics and telecommunications are attractive to African states, whose new industrial strategies – such as the development of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) – rely on technology transfers. As the former president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, wrote in 2008, ‘China’s approach to our needs is simply better adapted than the slow and sometimes patronising post-colonial approach of European investors, donor organisations, and non-governmental organisations’. This is a widely held view in countries still suffocated by IMF debt traps. It has become all the more prominent amid the recent decline of Western Foreign Direct Investment on the continent.

Closer ties between Africa and China have elicited a predictable backlash from Washington. Last year, the US published a strategy document outlining its approach to Sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast to what it describes as its own ‘high standards, values-driven, and transparent investment’, China’s investments are characterized as an attempt to ‘challenge the rules-based international order, advance its own narrow commercial and geopolitical interests, undermine transparency and openness, and weaken US relations with African peoples and governments’. To counter such ‘harmful activities’, the US hopes to shift the terrain of contest away from trade and development, where China has an advantage, towards militarism and information warfare, where America still reigns supreme.

The US established Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2007, and over the next fifteen years constructed 29 military bases across the continent, as part of a network spanning at least 34 countries. AFRICOM’s stated objectives include ‘protecting US interests’ and ‘maintaining superiority over competitors’. It aims to enhance ‘interoperability’ between African militaries and US and NATO special operation forces. Building military bases and setting up liaison offices with African armies has been the primary mechanism for leveraging US authority against China. In 2021, AFRICOM General Stephen Townsend wrote that the United States ‘can no longer afford to underestimate the economic opportunity and strategic consequence Africa embodies, and which competitors like China and Russia recognise’.

At the same time, the US has ramped up its propaganda campaign on the continent. The COMPETES Act, passed by the Senate in March 2022, pledged $500 million for the US Agency for Global Media, as part of an attempt to combat PRC ‘disinformation’. A few months later, reports began to circulate in Zimbabwe that the US Embassy had funded educational workshops that encouraged journalists to target and criticise Chinese investments. The local organisation involved in the programmes is funded by the Information for Development Trust, which is in turn funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Development.

Needless to say, the West’s militarization of Africa over the past decade has done nothing for its people. First there was the disastrous 2011 war in Libya, where NATO led the push for regime change, resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties and the destruction of key infrastructure (including the world’s largest irrigation project, which provided 70% of all the fresh water in Libya). In its wake, the Sahel region experienced an upsurge in conflicts, many of them driven by new forms of militia activity, piracy and smuggling. Soon after, France launched interventions in Burkina Faso and Mali, which – rather than clean up the mess of the Western war in Libya – served to further destabilize the Sahel, allowing jihadist groups to take over large tracts of land. French military involvement did nothing to alleviate conditions of insecurity. Indeed, Global Terrorism Index rankings worsened for both countries: from 2011 to 2021, Burkina Faso went 113th to 4th, while Mali moved from 41st to 7th. Meanwhile, the US continued its decades-long intervention in Somalia, internationalizing its local conflicts and strengthening its violent extremist factions.

The recent departure of French troops from parts of the Sahel has hardly reduced the scale of Western military operations in the region. The US retains its major bases in Niger; it has developed a new military footprint in Ghana; and it recently announced its intention to maintain a ‘persistent presence’ in Somalia. It is clear that the African Union’s plan for ‘Silencing the Guns’ – its campaign for a conflict-free Africa by 2030 – will never be fulfilled as long as Western states continue their pattern of bloody intervention and weapons companies reap massive profits from arms sales to state and non-state actors. As African military expenditures skyrocketed between 2010 and 2020 (by 339% in Mali, 288% in Niger and 238% in Burkina Faso), a vicious cycle of militarism and underdevelopment was gradually consolidated. The more money spent on arms, the less is available for infrastructure and development. The less spent on development, the more armed violence is likely to break out, prompting calls for further military spending.

This year, the African Union will mark 60 years since the foundation of its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity. During the 1963 inaugural conference of the OAU, Nkrumah warned leaders that in order to achieve economic integration and stability, the organization would have to be an explicitly political one – motivated by a clear and consistent anti-imperialism. ‘African unity’, he explained, ‘is, above all, a political kingdom which can only be gained by political means. The social and economic development of Africa will come only within the political kingdom, not the other way round.’ Yet, despite the best efforts of decolonisation movements, economic interests – primarily those of Western multinational corporations and their state backers – ultimately usurped politics. In the process, African unity was hollowed out, and with it the sovereignty and dignity of the African people.

Nkrumah’s vision may be far from fulfilment in 2023. His contention that ‘no independent African state today by itself has a chance to follow an independent course of economic development’ still rings true. Despite some noble attempts, such as the 2016 resolution to ban foreign military bases, the African Union has so far been unable to free itself from neo-colonial constraints. Yet the continent’s refusal to toe the line on the New Cold War – its calls for peace negotiations in Ukraine, its reconfiguration of international partners – suggests that a different world order is possible: one in which Africa is no longer beholden to the ‘united West’.

Read on: Giovanni Arrighi, ‘The African Crisis’, NLR 15.

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Curious Stranger

July 1957. A 26-year-old Romila Thapar waits at Prague Airport. She is dressed in a sari. The pockets of her overcoat are bulging with yet more saris. ‘It is blasphemous’, she laments in her diary, to have crumpled ‘the garment of the exotic, the indolent, the unobvious, the newly awakening East’. But there is no more room in her suitcases. They are stuffed with photographic equipment (‘cameras, cameras, more cameras’) and saddled with ‘large bundles of books and papers, strapped together with bits of string’. Thapar – today the pre-eminent historian of ancient India – is on her way to China along with the Sri Lankan art historian Anil de Silva and the French photographer Dominique Darbois. Earlier in the year, the Chinese Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries had accepted de Silva’s proposal to study two ancient Buddhist cave sites in the northwestern Gansu province, Maijishan and Dunhuang. After some hesitation, Thapar, then a graduate student at SOAS in London, agreed to join de Silva as her assistant. She had been nervous about her limited expertise in Chinese Buddhist art, as well as the practical difficulties posed by the cave sites. And not without good reason. Just imagine crawling about in those rock-cut caverns ‘enveloped in billowing yards of silk’.

But China was still far away. The three women were waiting for their delayed connection to Moscow. The latest, much-publicized, Soviet plane had got stuck in the mud. Loitering in the terminal, Thapar observed the entourage of the Indian actors, Prithviraj Kapoor and his son Raj, a newly anointed superstar in the Socialist Bloc. As heavy rains poured outside, some members of the group began discussing the film Storm over Asia (‘Would they think it rude if I gently pointed out to them that the film was not by Sergei Eisenstein, but by Vsevolod Pudovkin, and that the two techniques are so different that one can’t confuse them’). Elsewhere, a French family tune into Radio Luxembourg; a young African man listens to the BBC on his radio; the terminal loudspeakers play the Voice of America (‘poor miserable propagandists’). Late into the night, Thapar leisurely smokes her black Sobranie. She thinks of herself ‘an overburdened mule wrapped in folds of cloth’.

This journey followed a new, but already well-worn, diplomatic trail. In 1950, India had become the first non-socialist country to recognize the People’s Republic of China. Two years later, a motley crew of Indian economists, writers and artists embarked on a self-styled Goodwill Mission. Their visit inaugurated a wave of political and cultural exchange that lasted for nearly a decade. In 1954, Nehru and Zhou Enlai signed the Panchsheel Agreement (‘five principles of peaceful co-existence’) in Beijing. Friendship societies bloomed on both sides of the MacMahon Line. And Indian trade unionists, state planners and litterateurs became eager pilgrims to Mao’s fabled cooperative farms. This growing decolonial intimacy was memorably captured in the breathless opening sentence of a 1956 dispatch, ‘Huai aur Cheen’ (‘Huai and China’), by the cultural critic Bhagwatsharan Upadhyay: ‘Abhi mazdoor-jagat Cheen se lauta hoon’ (‘I have just returned from the workers’ world of China’). The tone of the original Hindi conjures a neighbourhood gossip returning with the latest news from a corner teashop.

Thapar’s diary, recently published as Gazing Eastwards: Of Buddhist Monks and Revolutionaries in China, is a relic of this fraternal decade. But she was neither an emissary of the Indian state nor a member of any friendship societies. Unlike her fellow countrymen, Thapar’s travels were not fettered by the demands of cross-border diplomacy. Traversing the Chinese hinterland on trains and trucks by day and recording her experiences by night (often in the flickering light of a single candle), she travelled and wrote with greater freedom. The resulting travelogue is not only steadfastly historical, but also unexpectedly entertaining, a quality sorely missing from the reverential accounts of her compatriots. For instance, when the historian Mohammad Habib chanced upon a group of elderly war veterans during the Goodwill Mission, he sanctimoniously declared: ‘We are your sons from distant India’. Spreading her arms, a woman promptly responded: ‘If you are my sons, then let me press you to my heart’. When Thapar encounters a member of the youth team working on the Beijing-Lanzhou railway line, she cheerfully asks the young man if he stuck pictures of pin-up girls on the wall by his dormitory bed (he did).

Thapar’s political commentary is equally revelatory. Unlike other visitors who eulogized the popular emblems of Chinese development – factories, farms, oil refineries, dams – she highlights the uncanny persistence of ancient China in the Maoist era. As the workers laid the foundations for new construction sites, the remains of prehistoric societies were turning up with unprecedented frequency. After just a few years, hundreds of accidental archaeological digs spread out across the country. During stopovers at a neolithic excavation site near X’ian and a Ming-era Buddhist monastery in south Lanzhou, Thapar learned that groups of archaeologists and younger students were being attached to construction sites, where they mended, labelled and catalogued the discovered artefacts on the spot. The quantity of newfound prehistoric greyware was in fact so large that the country was facing a severe shortage of buildings to house them. During conversations with Thapar, the officials explained this popular enthusiasm by repeatedly quoting Mao’s directives to archaeologists – ‘discover the richness of China’s past’ and ‘correct historical mistakes’.

Faced with Thapar’s inquiries about the pitfalls of ‘salvage archaeology’, the provincial archaeologists and museum officials regurgitated statistics; politics was never mentioned, while the name of Marxist archaeologist Gordon Childe drew blank faces. Her requests to meet the historians of ancient China, university students and young intellectuals meanwhile were brusquely ignored. This puzzled Thapar to no end, not least because their counterparts in India were working through similar problems. Back in Bombay, she had recently come into contact with the left-wing polymath D.D. Kosambi, whose work contained a blend of Marxist theory, numismatics, archaeology, linguistics, genetics and ethnographic fieldwork. In An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956), Kosambi lyrically described India as ‘a country of long survivals’, where ‘people of the atomic age rub elbows with those of the chalcolithic’. China, Thapar slowly realized, was no different.

Recording her group’s trek towards Maijishan and Dunhuang, Thapar’s travelogue gracefully blends the world-historical with the everyday. Multiple timelines gather a heterogenous throng of characters onto the stage. At a monastery in Xi’an, we hear of the legendary seventh-century monk Xuan Zang lugging cartloads of Buddhist manuscripts, sculptures and relics collected during his sixteen-year sojourn across northern India. Back in the twentieth century, in nearby Lanzhou, Czech-made Škoda buses ferry Chinese workers to a power station. As Thapar proceeds across the hinterland, extended spells of isolation are broken only occasionally, as when a radio set catches the BBC News (‘the Russians had developed an intercontinental rocket that had alarmed the Western world’). On most days, Thapar’s battered copy of Ulysses serves as a marker of the passage of time (‘Ulysses is stuck at page 207 and at this rate will probably see me all through China’). Fittingly, this drama reaches its climax at the ancient cave sites, nested at the Chinese end of the Silk Routes which had once linked the region with Central Asia, India, and the eastern Mediterranean.

Thapar and her companions were the first group of foreign researchers to access the Maijishan site. Carved into sheer cliff faces, the caves contained hundreds of Buddhist murals and sculptures created over the course of a millennium. They were ‘like museums of Chinese paintings’: offering something like a historical timelapse of how the earliest Gandhara-era depictions of Buddha’s life were gradually adapted to the Chinese landscape. Every evening, the group descended from ‘heaven’ on rickety wooden ladders, sometimes nearly a hundred meters long. Back in the candlelit monastery, as wolves and bears roved outside, their experiences were equally startling: we hear of holidaying Chinese soldiers singing Cossack folk songs picked up from the touring Russian Red Army choir; a head monk toasting the end of the hydrogen bomb; a guard playing scratched folk records, featuring a Chinese cover of ‘Aawara Hoon’, the title song of Raj Kapoor’s latest hit. Meanwhile, at Dunhuang, the group discover that the Western explorers of the early twentieth century had vandalized and stolen numerous murals, paintings and manuscripts from the ‘Caves of a Thousand Buddhas’. In 1920, the White Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks had found refuge in these same caves, and had spent their days gouging out gold from the artworks.

The thread of the present ties these proliferating timelines together. In 1957 the Chinese revolution started to unravel. Shortly before Thapar’s arrival, Mao had effectively ended the Hundred Flowers Campaign. His key distinction between ‘fragrant flowers’ and ‘poisonous weeds’ had instead impelled a brutal ‘anti-Rightist campaign’. Meanwhile, despite stiff resistance, the CCP was still pushing its ill-fated campaign for rural collectivization. Arriving in Beijing, Thapar fleetingly notes the ubiquitous ‘bright, bold cartoons and statements’, portraying the so-called ‘Rightists’ as venomous snakes. In the following weeks, her solidarity with the Maoists was severely tested by ongoing clampdowns on intellectual freedom (she was greatly disturbed by the case of the feminist novelist Ling Ding, who had been denounced and exiled). Despite warm encounters with the locals, she greeted village cooperatives with a mixture of guarded suspicion (‘Were we expected to believe that before 1951 production was low, in 1954 it rose by half and by 1956 it had doubled?’) and open cynicism (‘I asked somewhat diffidently if they had tried any experiments along the lines of Lysenko in Russia’). On returning to Beijing, she was told that Professor Xiang Da, an authority on Dunhuang, was too busy to meet her, only to discover from a newspaper report that he had already been charged as a Rightist last month. Soon China would be utterly transformed by the Great Leap Forward and the ill-fated Sino-Soviet split. The 1962 Sino-Indian War over their borderlands would close the curtain on a short-lived decolonial friendship.

In the six decades between Thapar’s journey and the diary’s publication, her scholarly studies have spanned the history of state formation in early India, the politics of the Aryan question, the conflicts between the Brahmanas and the Shramanas (the Ajivika, the Buddhist and Jaina lineages), the Itihasa-Purana traditions, and the Indian epics, among others. Along with Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma and Bipin Chandra, Thapar is widely credited for inaugurating a paradigm shift in the study of Indian history – a radical break with the British colonial periodization and research methods. Her honours include both the Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences, and the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India (she has declined it twice). In the context of such an illustrious career, the diary is likely to be read as a relic of youthful indulgence. And yet, as Thapar has often argued, past events always accrue new, unexpected meanings in the present. It is hardly surprising, then, that the diary has significant affinities with her later work.

In the widely acclaimed Somnath (2004), Thapar describes how a single event – the destruction of a Hindu temple by Mahmud of Ghazni, a Turkic king, in 1025 – has been narrated across Turko-Persian and Arabic chronicles, Sanskrit temple inscriptions, biographies and courtly epics, popular oral traditions, British House of Commons proceedings and nationalist histories. Patiently decoding these dissonant voices, Thapar disproves the myth of Hindus and Muslims as eternally warring civilizations, established by British colonizers and popularized by their modern-day heirs, the Hindu nationalists. In doing so, Thapar reflexively shows that history is a process of ‘constant re-examination and reassessment of how we interpret the past’. Her pursuit however has never devolved into a postmodernist free-for-all. This is not just because of Thapar’s lifelong engagement with sociological theories, economic histories, archaeological methods and Marxist debates, but also because her scholarship has always been grounded in the public life of postcolonial India. Thapar has written school textbooks, given public lectures on All India Radio, and published extensive writings on the relationship between secularism, history and democracy in popular periodicals.

In recent decades, Thapar’s work has been systematically discredited by a Hindu right-wing smear campaign (popular slurs include ‘academic terrorist’ and ‘anti-national’). She has responded with characteristic aplomb, poking more historical holes in the fantasies of a ‘syndicated Hinduism’. Shortly before turning 90, she published Voices of Dissent (2020). Written during the upsurge of nationwide protests against the new citizenship laws (CAA and NRC), the book traces a genealogy of dissent in India – spanning the second millennia B.C. of the Vedic times, the emergence of the Sramanas, the medieval popularity of the Bhakti sants and Sufi pirs, and the Gandhian satyagraha of the twentieth century – that offer a vital corrective to the popular right-wing tendency to label ‘dissent’ as an ‘anti-national’ import from the West. Yet with the BJP pushing for the privatization of higher education, its affiliates infiltrating university administrations and its stormtroopers terrorizing college campuses, the struggle for decolonizing Indian history is no longer merely a matter of critique. There now exists a nationwide network of 57,000 shakhas operated by the RSS (the parent organization of the BJP), where the rank-and-file receive both ideological and weapons training, while the BJP’s IT Cell has infiltrated the social media feeds of millions of Hindu middle class homes, promoting its historical propaganda.

These changes have not only upended the paradigm shift in Indian history of which Thapar was a leading figure but have also illuminated its political limits. Historically anchored in the Nehruvian-era universities, the decolonial turn has struggled to significantly transform popular consciousness beyond the bourgeois public sphere. The Hindutva offensive has put liberal and left intellectuals in a difficult double bind. This contradiction was first captured by Aijaz Ahmad, shortly after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, now widely recognized as the emblem of the ‘Hindu nation’. The Indian left, Ahmad had argued, cannot abandon ‘the terrain of nationalism’, but nor can it just occupy this terrain ‘empty-handed’, that is, ‘without a political project for re-making the nation’. In Ahmad’s words, to counter Hindutva with secularism is certainly ‘necessary’, but it remains ‘insufficient’. Likewise, countering the syndicated, market-friendly Hinduism by recovering a subversive genealogy of the Indian past is necessary but by itself, it too remains insufficient.

Thapar’s studies of ancient India naturally offer no ready-made cures for these modern maladies. One incident from Gazing Eastwards though reads like an allegory for future action. As Thapar declared in a lecture for All India Radio in 1972, ‘the image of the past is the historian’s contribution to the future’. In Lanzhou, Thapar and de Silva’s clothes drew considerable attention from the Chinese public. Trailed by curious strangers, they found it difficult to walk the streets. To blend in, they ditched their saris in favour of peasant jackets in the customary blue, made famous by Maoists at the time. As the universities continue to crumble, perhaps historians of the new generation should also discard their clothes of distinction, and blend as organizers, pedagogues and foot soldiers into the agrarian and citizen struggles erupting against the BJP-led right.

Read on: Pranab Bardhan, ‘The “New” India’, NLR 136.

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Victorious Defeat

I.

Historically speaking, political funerals have been associated with authoritarian rule. Surrounded with an aura of sanctity that even brutally oppressive regimes have been reluctant to suppress – with exceptions, of course, as the Israeli state demonstrated during Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral procession last May – political funerals have often acted as outlets of public dissent when other forms of protest are unavailable. The association, however, misses an important precondition: a conception of grief and mourning as a collective ritual. Such a perspective can help make sense of our contemporary predicament. The gradual eclipse of political funerals does not, of course, signal the eclipse of authoritarianism. It rather indicates another wind of change, one that has swept through authoritarian and liberal regimes alike: the transformation of mourning into a private affair. 

Against the spirt of his times, Gáspár Miklós Tamás’s funeral in Budapest in January 2023 was unequivocally political. It did not just bring together relatives and old friends. The overwhelming majority of those who made their way to Farkasrèti cemetery on that cold Tuesday afternoon did not know Gáspár personally. With the exception of a couple of supporters of Orbán’s government (some of whom came, perhaps, to see with their own eyes what a Hungarian newspaper announced after Gáspár’s death: the end of Hungarian Marxism), this wonderfully mixed crowd of young and old, local and visitors, was there because their grief for the loss of a public intellectual was not a private affair.

II.

Gáspár was born in 1948 in what was historically seen as the capital of Transylvania, a city Hungarians call Kolozsvár and Romanians Cluj. In 1974, in line with Ceaușescu’s attempts to embed his rule in nationalist mythologies, the pre-Roman Napoca was added, giving the city its contemporary name, Cluj-Napoca. Linguistic differences and national myths aside, these various appellations all describe a ‘castle within a closed space’. The ruins of castle Turnul Croitorilor remain on the outskirts of the old town, but the rest of the name has never rung true. The city’s permanently suspended sense of national belonging meant that it was more open than closed: Gáspár’s wide horizons, intellectually and geographically, can be seen as a testament to that.

With life stories forged in the turbulent years before, during and after the Second World War, his parents Gáspár Tamás (1914-1978) and Erzsébet Krausz (1907-1977), committed internationalist communists, were a strong influence in this same direction. While many Jewish relatives from Gáspár’s mother’s side were murdered in Auschwitz, she escaped deportation because she was already imprisoned as a ‘Bolshevik agitator’ by Antonescu’s Nazi-allied military dictatorship. His father, in prison since 1938 for communist activities, had his sentence abbreviated by forced conscription to the front, returning to Cluj in 1944 with an injury that forced him to walk on crutches for the rest of his life.

Their trajectories after the war reflected the fate of a large part of the revolutionary movement crushed by Stalinism and nationalism. Many of their comrades, who had survived torture at the hands of the Romanian and Hungarian secret services or the Gestapo, returned from Nazi concentration camps only to be re-arrested by the authorities. Contrary to Stalinist apologetics, it was steadfast allegiance to the emancipatory project that made such people dissidents against the new ‘socialist’ regimes. In his childhood and adolescence, Gáspár’s parents transmitted their knowledge and experiences to their son: alongside music, poetry and philosophy and the necessity of rigorous study to grasp each one, they taught him techniques for withstanding torture, in expectation of the arrival of the black car of ‘their’ Party.

Gáspár’s turn came in the early hours of a bitter February morning in 1974. The reason was not had he had done but what he refused to do, namely write an idiotic appraisal of Ceaușescu’s new ‘moral code’ for the Utunk literary magazine where he was employed. This cost him his job and, shortly after, the black car arrived, inaugurating a period of intense intimidation. When the regular ‘invitations’ of the Romanian secret police became unbearable and a prison sentence only a matter of time, his parents urged him to leave the country. In 1978 he did exactly that.

He could have settled in France: an uncle worked at the Renault factory in Paris. Instead, he opted for Hungary, inspired by the growing opposition movement there. His mauvaise reputation preceded him, however, and he was greeted by the secret police of a system just as ‘mendacious, stupid, brutal, repressive and treacherous’ as the one he had left behind. A job teaching philosophy at the University of Budapest would eventually also be cut short by his engagement with the dissident movement. When, after the Jaruzelski coup in Poland of 1981, he published his support for the Polish opposition under his own name, he was, once again, fired.

III.

It is often overlooked today, but the revolt of East German construction workers in June 1953, the workers’ councils of Hungary in 1956 or the 1968 uprising in Czechoslovakia were made in the name of proletarian self-management, not that of market freedom. Gáspár’s dissident network similarly advanced a critique of the regime from the left. Yet, though inspired by the anti-Stalinist positions of Socialisme ou Barbarie or Karl Korsch, by the 1980s many dissidents, Gáspár among them, started feeling that ‘attempts to overcome the Soviet-style system from the left were doomed’ (see his ‘Where We Went Wrong’, 2009). Increasingly convinced that putting an end to dictatorship meant ‘paying the price of capitalism’, they began to seek theoretical justification for their change of position. The times found Gáspár taking various teaching posts in the West: his wide knowledge and his linguistic genius – he was more than fluent in many languages ­– allowed him to teach in universities including Columbia, Oxford, École des Hautes Études, Chicago, Yale and the New School. In these years, his deep disappointment and anger at the oppression of the ‘communist’ regimes melded with a (neo)conservative zeitgeist.

Their collapse was accompanied by an upsurge of collective hope and political imagination. Gáspár hastily returned to take part. But the dismantling of the Stalinist apparatus went hand in hand with ‘an economic black hole, galloping unemployment and Third World-type inequalities’ (see his ‘Words from Budapest’, 2013). Party chairman for the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) and elected to the opposition after the transition, Gáspár felt implicated in the historical disaster during which, in a country of 10 million, 2 million jobs evaporated while parliament spent months debating the republican coat of arms. ‘Our naïve liberalism’, he later reflected, ‘delivered a nascent democracy into the hands of irresponsible and hate-filled right-wing politicos, and contributed to the re-establishment of a provincial, deferential and resentful social world, harking back to before 1945’. What was intended as ‘liberation from centralized coercion’ ultimately resulted in nothing more than a ‘weakening of compound social power’.

In response, Gáspár ‘went back to school’ and re-emerged, once again, a dissident. In addition to Marx, Gáspár returned to the council communist and anarcho-syndicalist traditions that he believed had seen ‘much more clearly than famous and brilliant theorists that, however deserved the terminal defeat of the Soviet bloc. . . it was at the same time a historical disaster, heralding the demise of working-class power, of adversary culture, the end of two centuries of beneficent fear for the ruling classes’. He became an avid reader of Italian operaismo and the German Wertkritik school as developed by authors like Moishe Postone and Robert Kurz, as well as the writings of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood. Guy Debord became one of his favourite thinkers. These resources, coupled with his observation of a transition that had unleashed the ‘most destructive power of capitalism’, set the stage for his most profound contributions to radical critical theory, re-conceptualizing communism as the emancipatory abolition of capital, state, nation and class. While most of his writings on these topics are in Hungarian, a significant number of essays and interviews were written, given and/or published in English, French and German. (And as his young comrades confirmed recently, a lot more will be published in English in the near future.)

IV.

Gáspár wrote and commented extensively on Central and Eastern European affairs. In numerous interviews (whose eloquence renders them of equal value to his writings), the dissident years before the collapse of the Soviet world and the transition to market capitalism were central topics, as were subsequent developments in the region. One of his most influential texts, On Post-Fascism (2000), is widely seen as a prophetic account of what has now become the all too familiar phenomenon of ‘authoritarian’ or ‘right-wing’ populism. For Gáspár the term ‘post-fascism’ was more appropriate.

Such interventions contributed to an image of Gáspár as an expert analyst of the region and a reliable forecaster of its authoritarian turn. Though flattering, this view is somewhat misleading. It was his analysis of the universal tendencies within capitalist social relations and its propensity towards (and compatibility with) authoritarianism that above all propelled his thinking, rather than any intimate knowledge of Romania or Hungary. On Post-Fascism begins, after all, by shredding any implication that what he is about to describe is regionally specific. Pointing to ‘a cluster of policies, practices, routines, and ideologies that can be observed everywhere in the contemporary world’, Gáspár’s primary concern was to spell-out what was post about contemporary fascist and authoritarian tendencies. Rather than relying on a violent mass movement, death squads and even the occasional suspension of the social function and political power of the bourgeoisie, contemporary authoritarianism in fact sits very comfortably within Western-style electoral democracies and a free market framework. In the absence of a radical, communist workers’ movement (the eradication of which was the historical task of Nazism), there was no longer any need to militarize the whole of society. Militarizing the police appeared to be sufficient.

It is for this reason that the frequent depiction of authoritarianism as a peculiarity of Central and Eastern Europe (and Gáspár as its local critic) is ultimately a mystification. The Polish and Hungarian governments do not hide their contempt for key aspects of EU law, or have any qualms about presenting their racist, anti-LGBTQ and anti-left positions as a defence of Western Christian civilization. But it was a French president who declared that the existence of a ‘rule of law’ renders any talk about repression or police violence ‘unacceptable’, while his militarized police maimed hundreds of gilets jaunes demonstrators with full impunity. It was in Greece that investigative journalists were wiretapped by the secret services and where the law-and-order dogma propounded by the government co-existed with extensive evidence of police collaboration with the mafia. Gáspár’s insistence that it was a mistake to approach contemporary authoritarianism through the lens of Central and Eastern Europe was not, unfortunately, given the attention it deserved. Even many on the left who otherwise refuse to normalize authoritarian tendencies in Western liberal democracies continue to describe their emergence as a process of ‘Orbánization’ .  

V.

Gáspár also pioneered the concept of ethnicism (‘an apolitical, destructive practice opposed to the idea of citizenship’), contrasting it with a civic-democratic nationalism that he went so far as to proclaim the only remaining ‘principle of cohesion in a traditionless capitalism’. In later years, however, he grew increasingly sceptical of the universalizing potential of national citizenship: buried under anti-Roma policies in Eastern Europe or the EU’s systematic anti-migrant violence, citizenship had become weaponized as a justification for exclusion. When parts of the left joined this chorus and condoned the exclusion of migrants as a prerequisite for re-establishing a national welfare state, Gáspár did not just see a form of ‘banal left nationalism’, inspired by bygone visions of social democracy. He also saw in such positions the shameful affirmation of a contemporary paradox in which equality, for the first time in history, is portrayed as ‘an elitist idea’.

Recognizing this regression did not mean, however, that Gáspár saw equality as the end goal of a radical transformation of society. In one of his most penetrating analyses, ‘Telling the Truth About Class’ from 2006, he explored the ways in which the historical trajectory of the left had been split between a demand for equality and recognition of the working class and a call for its abolition. On one side, Gáspár saw a ‘Rousseau-ian’ affirmation of class: against the bourgeois projection of the working class as barbaric and uneducated, a mob ‘tied to vice and corporeality’, Rousseau-inspired socialism counter-projected the working class’s cultural superiority and ‘angelic’ nature. On the other side was the lineage deriving from Marx, who had identified the historical potential of revolutionary transformation in the wretched and alienated existence of a proletariat that has ‘nothing to lose but its chains’. Calls for a more egalitarian and democratic inclusion of workers might be noble, but they ignored the constitution of the working class through the capitalist mode of production. Quoting from the Grundrisse, Gáspár reminded his readers that ‘labour itself has become a moment of capital’; for this reason, while calls for equality (rightly) attacked persistent systems of privilege and caste, they failed to identify the significance of capitalist social relations in the production and maintenance of class society. Communism should be the abolition of class society, not an equitable recognition of its constituent parts.

VI.

A few years ago, I was invited to Hamburg to join Gáspár on a panel discussion that sought to criticize left nationalism and notions of sovereignty through emphasis on the question of migration. As luck would have it, the organizers had us staying in the same house; it did not take long before we decided to extend our stay for a few days, which we spent taking long walks around this exceptionally hospitable German city, trying out sausages, drinking wine, and talking insatiably. In that time and place we became, I dare say, friends.

Ever since, we maintained regular contact, using emails for logistical arrangements (we brought him to Berlin for a public discussion on nationalism and migration, an event that took place under the heavy shadow of the Hanau massacre that had happened the day before) but hand-written letters for more engaged exchanges. The terrible news of his cancer intensified our correspondence. Among other things, I promised him that once he beat that awful disease, I would find a small datscha near Berlin for him and his daughter Hanna. He welcomed the idea as something that could ‘help our mood and give us a semblance of a putative future’.

The fluctuations of his illness and the state of the world at large did little to subdue his pessimism. ‘It is an uphill struggle’, he wrote to me two years ago, ‘to defend myself from feelings of disgust, contempt & hatred when I am looking at this world’. But expressions of despair were, despite everything, the exception. Short of breath but full of life, he wondered in his last letter if he could ‘venture forth on an eight-hour train journey to the town of my birth’. He was also excited about finishing a text on how ‘resistance to war had turned young Lukács, Bloch [and] Benjamin into revolutionaries’. Regretfully, I never responded. The fear of sending a letter that might never be received paralyzed me.  

VII.

When we first met in Hamburg, I gave Gáspár a copy of Paolo Virno’s ‘The Horror of Familiarity’, a text which he became very fond of. In it, Virno evokes the dialectic between Heimlich/Unheimlich (familiar/uncanny) prevalent in our times, drawing attention to the ominous, hyper-modern appeals to tradition and Heimat. ‘Anytime one tries to say: country, community or authentic life, penetrative and frightening screams come out’ Virno writes, suggesting instead that the search for familiarity is a ‘historical bet, not an already guaranteed property’. In a similar vein, Gáspár answered the accusation that communism is insensitive to the ‘Home’ by unequivocally declaring: ‘Yes, it is, as it is concerned about the homeless’. As it turned out, his last public intervention was a text defending the homeless against renewed attack in Hungary. ‘One should not live on the streets’, he wrote, ‘one should protest there’. There is, perhaps, no more fitting legacy than this.  

Read on: G.M. Tamás, ‘Words from Budapest’, NLR 80.

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New Stability?

On 1 November 2022, the night of the Danish general elections, a triumphant Lars Løkke Rasmussen – leader of the newly established Moderates party – told his followers, ‘This country is going to have a new government!’ Exit polls put the Red Bloc, the progressive coalition supporting the Social Democratic incumbent Mette Frederiksen, short of an outright majority. The right-wing Blue Bloc were also forecast to miss that threshold. Which meant that Løkke’s centrist platform, which elected 16 deputies out of 179, was set to play the role of kingmaker, potentially catapulting Løkke himself into high office.

He had been there before. From 2009 to 2011, and again from 2015 to 2019, Løkke served as Prime Minister and leader of the largest Blue Bloc party, Venstre. In this capacity he continued to hollow out the welfare state, strengthen punitive migration policies and ignore the climate crisis. He also sought to suppress the most right-wing elements in his Bloc by reaching across the aisle – running, in the 2019 election, on a pledge to unite the centre by working with Frederiksen’s Social Democrats and marginalizing the two ‘wings’, left and right. This would have marked a historic rupture in Danish politics, where parties outside the mainstream typically have to be considered, and thrown a bone or two, when building minority governments.

Although Løkke’s party increased its seat share in 2019, the overall performance of the Blue Bloc was dismal, and Frederiksen showed no interest in working with her rivals. Three years later, though, the situation had changed completely. This time it was Frederiksen herself who ran on the platform of creating a cross-party centrist government. Having spent the entirety of her administration resisting the demands of smaller red and green parties, she had now made it her mission to isolate the left and rule without it.

The final results confounded the early polls: the Red Bloc had, in fact, secured a majority with the slightest of margins. But Frederiksen was no longer interested in a leading a ‘progressive’ government. Instead, she formed a coalition with the Moderates and Venstre, now led by Jakob Ellemann-Jensen. While the Social Democrats secured almost 28% of the vote, its new partners came in second and third place: Venstre with 13% and the Moderates with 9%. That was enough to make Løkke Minister of Foreign Affairs, while Elleman was appointed Minister of Defence. The Social Democrats took the finance ministry as well as the office of Prime Minister. The left performed relatively poorly, with a combined vote of 17%, while the far right – reconfigured as three separate parties – collectively won 14%.

Løkke had broken with Venstre after the 2019 elections and named his new outfit after the governing party from the popular TV drama series Borgen. Life imitates art, as they say; but if Zelensky made the transition from fiction to reality, Løkke has done the opposite: modelling his persona and programme – and even his party’s brand colours – on this centrist fantasy-world. Such Netflixification reflects a wider shift in Danish political culture. Although the country has traditionally been governed by broad coalitions spanning multiple parties, the division between the Red and Blue Blocs was its major fault-line. In this electoral landscape, consensus was established on a range of issues, while specific policy areas were subject to relatively peaceable debate. This meant that a basic level of ideological contestation was preserved; real differences could be aired, albeit to a limited extent, and voters could easily categorize each party according to its Bloc. This system, though far from ideal, at least guaranteed a degree of public participation – which, in turn, ensured political stability and basic trust in the state. Such factors helped to slow the pace of neoliberalization and keep living standards relatively high. They also contributed to Denmark’s comparatively effective handling of the Covid pandemic.

Under this model, Danish businesses may have complained about higher taxes, but they profited from the country’s healthy, educated workforce. Politicians likewise resented the need to make deals with peripheral parties, but they were equally attached to the routine of stable governance. Now, though, the elite’s conception of stability has changed. The alternation of the Blocs has fallen out of favour, and the priority is to fight the wings – or yderfløjene – while consolidating the centre. Frederiksen has framed this about-turn as a response to the changing global conjuncture: war in Ukraine, the rise of China, inflationary pressures. Her election slogan, ‘Safety Through Uncertain Times’, captured this new disposition. 

Frederiksen has a strategic interest in forging this alliance. Leading the Social Democratic government since 2019 has made her an isolated political target. Since her election, the right has portrayed her as a would-be dictator, exploiting the Covid crisis to push through policy in a constant state of exception. She hopes that, by diminishing the intensity of these attacks, a broader centrist coalition will improve her long-term prospects. For Løkke, meanwhile, the new government provides an opportunity not only for a personal comeback but also for ruling without the racism of the far right, whose representatives – such as the Danish People’s Party – had previously undermined his ability to present himself as a sensible, pragmatic technocrat. For these leaders, the main inspiration is the Germanic model, which allowed Merkel to spend decades stifling dissent while maintaining a political status quo that benefited domestic business. Another parallel is Macron’s ‘revolution’ in France, where a dynamic centrism short-circuited the nominal contest between left and right.

Yet such analogies show how easily this model of stability can undermine itself. In France, election turnout is in freefall and the memory of the gilets jaunes still haunts the Élysée Palace. In Germany, the GroKo proved too unwieldy and uninspired to deal with the country’s most pressing issues, from public investment to climate breakdown. The Danish political system is already beginning to display some of the same symptoms. In 2022, voters were confused by the proliferation of new centrist parties, which emerged out of nowhere and were typically dominated by single politicians hoping to create a cult of personality around themselves: Løkke’s Moderates, Inger Støjberg’s Danish Democrats, Alex Vanopslagh’s Liberal Alliance. These faux-charismatic leaders stole one another’s policies, broadcast a similar range of vacuous soundbites and engaged in endless circular debate about, well, nothing really.

Vanopslagh courted younger male voters with a mixture of entrepreneurialism and Jordan Peterson-inspired self-help psychology – mounting an aggressive online advertising campaign that targeted TikTok and porn sites. Støjberg, a former Minister of Integration, leaned into xenophobia, capitalising on the fact that she had previously served a two-month prison sentence for illegally separating asylum-seeker couples. Løkke was hesitant to put forward any concrete policy ideas, aside from tax breaks for the rich and the gradual abolition of state pensions. What all three had in common was the lack of a traditional party apparatus: no large membership base, no conferences, no internal democratic culture. These were top-down PR operations. As they came to dominate the election campaign, public enthusiasm waned. Turnout sank to its lowest level since 1957 (excluding 1990, when voters had been worn down by a series of snap elections). The practice that Peter Mair described as ‘ruling the void’ was now fully operative in Denmark.

Three months into its tenure, what are we to make of Frederiksen’s ‘post-ideological’ government? One of her first acts was to renege on an agreement she had made with the left to increase investment in child care. At the same time, she introduced a raft of regressive tax cuts and – despite public pressure – refused to increase taxes on one of the country’s largest businesses, Mærsk, which posted record profits of over €25 billion for 2022 while paying an effective tax rate of less than 0.3%. Frederiksen recently announced her intention to scrap one of the country’s bank holidays while rapidly increasing military spending. She also unveiled plans to ‘reform’ higher education by cutting the majority of masters courses in the humanities and social sciences down to one year. The latter decision is particularly strange, since no one – not even Danish business – seems to support it. Yet the Social Democrats hope it will advance their political narrative, which positions them on the side of an ordinary, hard-working Denmark, against a parasitic stratum of educated cultural elites. Regrettably, this narrative – which has seen the Social Democrats adopt the anti-immigrant talking point of its erstwhile opponents – has so far enabled the party to appeal to a broad range of social groups.

Frederiksen’s removal of the bank holiday has, however, elicited more resistance than most of her previous policies. More than 400,000 people signed a petition against the bill, about 50,000 demonstrated in Copenhagen, and Social Democratic politicians were disinvited from May Day events across the country, signalling a growing rift between the party and the major trade unions. Although union leaders still maintain friendly relations with Frederiksen and her inner circle, rank-and-file discontent may make this increasingly difficult to sustain. Traditionally, the so-called ‘Danish Model’ demands that industrial disputes are settled by the stakeholders – workers and bosses – with politicians staying out of negotiations or at most playing a mediating role. Yet Social Democratic MPs have become more brazen in their willingness to interfere with this settlement. This has drawn criticism even from the notoriously timid grassroots members of their own party. Whether it leads to deeper divisions between the government and organized labour remains to be seen.

The latest opinion poll shows that support for the governing parties has fallen precipitously, by a combined 11.3%, while the wings have gained about 5% each since the elections. But these shifts in public mood do not mean that a counter-hegemonic project is on the horizon. The Social Democrats remain by far the largest party, with a solid support base comprising public-sector employees and working-class constituencies outside the largest cities. The party and its allies are intent on pushing through a centrist programme that seems as ineluctable as it is unpopular. But the new stability that they are establishing may rest upon a cracked foundation.

Read on: Niels Finn Christiansen, ‘Denmark: End of the Idyll’, NLR I/144.