Tag: historical perspective

Terrorism is popularly defined as the unofficial or unauthorised use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. The other more comprehensive definition of terrorism by the US Code of Federal Regulations is the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property, to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

For me, it is very difficult to define what constitutes terrorism. However, I define terrorism as violence directed at innocent people or institutions without any rational reason and for no cause or purpose other than those known to the terrorists and even if there is cause for such violence there should be respect for laws of military engagement protecting children, women, the infirm and old people as contained in the Geneva Convention. Terrorism is not a new thing.

There are many incidents in human history that struck terror in the minds of the victims. The pogroms against the Jews in Russia, the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, the killings of Igbo in the North, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the various inter- tribal attacks and killings in many parts of Africa and Asia, the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Serbs in recent times all constitute acts of terrorism but are better treated under the rubric of genocidal acts and crimes against humanity rather than as terrorism as we have come to understand the term.

What can be described as terrorism stretches back in history. It may even be difficult to arrive at what to call terrorism because one man’s terrorist may be another man’s nationalist fighter. It will surprise many that until 1994 the revered Nelson Mandela was on the official United States list of terrorists. Condoleezza Rice, the then National Security Adviser to President George Bush and General Colin Powell the then Secretary of State claimed to have been totally embarrassed and had to do something quickly to get his name out of the list.

Between 1095 and 1297 or even earlier than that, Christian crusaders fought unsuccessfully to liberate the Holy Christian sites in the Middle- East from the Muslims and in this crusade they fought with considerable ferocity and violence to terrorise the Muslim community. Western knights killed and were killed in the defence of their faiths. The Muslim Saracens obviously thought the Christian knights were terrorists and the thought was equally reciprocated.

Although we can say that the Christian crusaders had a purpose in their courageous fight against the Muslims whose religion they neither understood nor appreciated. Even in biblical history before the birth of Christ, the conquest of what is now Palestine by the people of Israel was not without violence. I do not want to go into what historians have called ‘just and unjust wars’. The point that I am making is that what today is terrorism did not just happen. Man’s long history has witnessed different types of terrorism in the past. However, the terrorism of modern times is quite different from the old form of terrorism which was either politically or religiously inspired.

The conquest of the North American continent by white American settlers in order to realise what they call the American manifest destiny as well as the conquest of Southern America by the Spanish and the Portuguese conquistadores was done with tremendous ferocity and violence against the native peoples who must have considered them terrorists. The conquest and carving out of colonial empires by the West was done with much violence; Africans and Asians did not stand a chance against the maxim guns of Western imperialism.

To come nearer home, when Sir Frederick Lugard was sent to Nigeria for its conquest and pacification, his mandate was to subdue all opposition by military force. As Sir Frederick Lugard while reporting home about his successes always claimed that he had to inflict maximum mortal casualties on Nigerians because according to him, black people value lives less than white people. Since western historiography is written from the perspectives of the victors rather than the vanquished, the violent aspect of colonial rule is hardly mentioned.

Western historians will of course defend this violence as being necessary in order to save the Africans and Asians from the barbarism and superstition of traditional bondage. They would say, ‘we cannot make omelette without breaking eggs’ and that the end of western colonial rule must be judged in the globalisation of the world following westernisation and modernisation of the so-called primitive and underdeveloped areas of the world. The dark continent of Africa was lit by the light of western imperialism, they would argue. I am not one of those who would put all the blames of the underdeveloped world as being due to western colonialism. In any case, my late teacher, Professor J.F Ade-Ajayi dismissed the colonial phase as a mere episode in our long history.

Wars have been part of human history since the beginning of time. Kingdoms have risen and fallen as a result of victory or defeat by one group or the other. The various empires of the world whether in Asia, Africa or Europe were established as a result of imperialistic desires of man and the ability to fight for whatever they believed. The wars of conquest can therefore not be seen STRICTLY in terms of terrorism no matter the millions of casualties suffered by people as a result of them.

At least there were war aims that were sometimes carefully articulated by the leaders for which the ordinary people were mobilised to fight for. At least by our definition of terrorism, the First World War in which the whole world was involved and the more gruesome Second World War in which six million Jews were industrially murdered and close to 25 million Germans, Russians, English, Americans, Canadians, Japanese, Australians and New Zealanders, Africans, Indians, Chinese, to mention just a few, were killed, belong to different category of violence.

Obviously, the Jews who suffered in the hands of murderous German SS officers would have seen their tormentors as terrorists. But their tormentors felt that they were removing the Jews who constituted a troublesome presence in Europe. So however weird, wicked, and unacceptable their reasons might have been, the National socialists of Adolph Hitler had their reasons for the so-called final solution of Jewish problem.

In modern times in Europe, terrorism can be said to have become first a problem in mid 19th century when an anarchist ideology propounded by Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian ideologue advocated that the destruction of the then existing states and building new ones on their ashes was the way forward for Europe out of its problems. His ideas were quite complex and were to influence communist ideology and syndicalist movement in Spain without their acknowledging him. Many acts of terror were committed in his name all over Europe and governments then found it extremely difficult to understand what it was all about. But when his ideas are studied very well, they constitute important basis for the communist ideology.

It was in the anti-colonial environment of a cold war and bipolarity in world affairs that the process of decolonisation gathered momentum. America traditionally had been opposed to colonialism, with the exception of the aberrant behaviour of the conquest of Spanish territories in Cuba and the Philippines in the 1890’s. America’s anti-colonialism has been demonstrated since their intervention on the world stage from the time of James Monroe in the 1820’s through the time of Woodrow Wilson to the time of F.D. Roosevelt. Their opposition to Franco-British intervention in the Suez Canal in 1956, during the presidency of the 34th president of United States, Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) was in tune with their opposition to propping up the old Empires of Britain and France. Throughout the Second World War American policy makers had left the British in no doubt that they would strenuously work for the dismantling of the old Empires. The existence of colonial empires, the Americans reasoned, contributed to the outbreak of wars. America also wanted to occupy the high moral ground in their titanic struggle with the Soviet Union. Both the United States and, ironically their foe, the Soviet Union were committed to a policy of decolonisation for different reasons. America was driven by anti-colonial idealism fundamental to the origin and evolution of the United States itself but for Soviet Russia, right from its foundation by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) anti-imperialism was an article of faith because Lenin believed that all wars were imperialistic wars fought for carving out the world into markets as a result of not knowing what to do with surplus production and primitive accumulation of capital in the highly industrialized countries. Whatever may be the reasons for support of the liquidation of the European Empires in Asia and Africa, the nationalist leaders of these areas exploited the situation to their countries’ advantage in the traditional European fashion of power politics and national interest.

By 1947, beginning in India and ending in the 1970s the Europeans lost their colonial empires in Africa and Asia and by 1990 the remnant of colonial empires in Africa notably Namibia was freed. The biggest prize, South Africa, has been freed from institutionalized policy of racial discrimination and apartheid. She has since joined the civilized world under a non-racial majoritarian democratic regime. This happy ending could never have been achieved but for the determined effort and struggle of independent African countries joined by other progressive forces in the world notably in the Socialist countries and the Scandinavia. The United States policy oscillated between support for justice, benign neglect and what in the Reagan years was called constructive engagement which was a euphemism for support of racist oppression in South Africa.

One can look at events during this period from reactive and active perspectives. the African saying that when two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers guided the actions of many Afro-Asian and Latin American countries at this time. The point was that no developing country wanted to be caught in the middle of the struggle for hegemony between the Capitalist West and the Communist East. This was why many countries in this group embraced the policy of non-alignment. This was a policy based on self-interest. It was, of course, not a policy of neutrality in the traditional sense of steering clear at all times of political engagement.

Non-alignment meant that decision of which side to take would be based ideally on sovereign assessment and high moral principles and not on political expediency or ideological preference. This was the Theory. But in practice many of the non-aligned countries took pro-soviet positions in international politics. There were reasons for this. The stridently anti-colonial propaganda of the socialist countries was very alluring and attractive. In practical terms, the socialist countries demonstrated their support by supplying weapons and instructors for the various liberation movements particularly in Southern Africa. The socialist countries were also more prepared to offer financial and technical aid to independent African countries. The apparently great industrial strides made by the socialist countries, particularly the Soviet Union through the five-year development plans easily recommended itself to the African countries. Capitalist mode of development with emphasis on individual capital was regarded as inappropriate since indigenous individual capitalists were few and far between and the foreign capitalists were only interested in extractive industries rather than investing in consumer oriented labour intensive industries. Because the problem of youth unemployment was one of the greatest problems that the newly independent countries had to face, they found the ‘full employment’, characteristic of the commandist and centrally planned economies attractive. The example of India’s embrace of centralized planning based on five year programmes was copied by most African countries during their first decades of independence.

Furthermore, the will to be different from the brutal collectivisation of agriculture in the Soviet Union and the free-for-all land alienation by a few in western countries underpinned the economic basis of non-alignment. Non-alignment was a policy based on high moral ground. Its founders Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) of India, Ahmed Sukarno (1901-1970) of Indonesia, Marshall Josip bros Tito (1892-1980) of Yugoslavia, General Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) of Ghana, cleverly assessed the international situation and decided that it would be unwise of them to allow their countries to get sucked into the life and death struggle for mastery of the world. Non-alignment gave these leaders the feeling of some relevance. Their friendship and support were courted and sought by the leaders of the West and the East.

In reality, all the great events of the 20th century have been resolved without the input of the non-aligned nations. We can recall, for example, the Berlin blockade of 1948, the Hungarian rebellion of 1956, the Berlin air lift of 1961 and, most importantly, the Cuban crisis of 1962. For the first time, since the advent of nuclear weapons, the United States and Soviet Russia faced each other over the America’s blockade of Cuba over Soviet Russia’s missiles in Cuba. The world stood at standstill until Soviet Russia’s premier Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894-1971) blinked, when he realised his policy of adventurism and brinkmanship, left the young president John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) no alternative than to risk nuclear war. Other events in which the non-aligned nations were marginal include the spring revolution of Czchekoslovakia of 1968, the resolution of the Vietnam war, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the coming down of the Berlin wall, the collapse of communism in Russia itself, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa. In terms of Realpolitik the non-aligned movement has been rather tangential in the politics of the modern world.

•Concluded

In ancient world of the Middle East, between 1500 and 500 years before the birth of Christ, a common great civilization occurred and dominated the area from the Tigris – Euphrates (Babylon) to the Nile (Egypt) and beyond. The choice then was between empire and chaos – just as in nature one empire fell giving rise to another. The empires of Alexander, the Romans, Chinese and the Mogul empire in India operated not on the basis of international relations but on conquest. There could be no relation between civilization and barbarism. Even up to the 17th century in Europe the accepted concepts was that of a universal empire and not the coexistence of sovereign states. It was not until the consolidation of the French, English and Spanish national states in opposition to the universal Holy Roman Empire that the idea of the proper mode of relations between sovereign states began to evolve.

Two philosophers, Jean Bodin (C1530-1596) and Hugo Grotius (Huig Van Gruit) (1538-1645) were the first two people to properly articulate the underlying philosophy that should guide the relations among states. This is not to forget that before them Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) had something profound to say about interstate relations even though tangentially. This Italian diplomat and writer, the son of a prosperous Florentine lawyer, had in one of his books 11 Principe written in 1513 but published in 1532 said that the prince even in his foreign relations need not be bound by covenants entered to solemnly by him. He was also not bound by promises made as long as he concentrated on the end in view since the end would justify whatever means he adopted for political and territorial aggrandisement of his state. Machiavelli is not usually known for his contribution to the evolution of politics among nations but his amoral ideas have no doubt influenced politicians since the 15th century.

Jean Bodin was a lawyer and an attorney to King Henry 111 of France. Writing against the background of Machiavellian philosophy, he insisted that the sovereign has an obligation to keep faith in treaties and alliances and should not for political expediency repudiate treaties solemnly entered into if the international system were not to dissolve into anarchy. This identified need for restraining absolute sovereign in their international dealings influenced Hugo Grotius, 50 years later, to carry forward the philosophy of Jean Bodin. Hugo Grotius was an international jurist, born in the Netherlands and practised law in The Hague and held at various times diplomatic positions on behalf of the French and Dutch governments. He was finally appointed ambassador to France by the Swedish government. In his book De Jure belli et Pacis (1625), he advocated that sovereign states should coexist in amity and peace with one another through the restraints of international law and existing norms that govern relations among states. His importance in the history of jurisprudence rests not on constitutional law but upon his conception of a law regulating the relations between sovereign states.

The practical urgency of the problem in the 17th century laid in the chaos associated with the rejection of the universalism of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church and the wars of religion which followed the Counter Reformation. The wars of religion brought to international relations, the intrinsic bitterness of religious hatred and afforded the colour of good conscience to the most barefaced schemes of dynastic aggrandisement.

Coupled with this was the economic imperative which led the western European nations along the road of expansion, colonisation, commercial aggrandisement and the exploitation of newly discovered territories. Hugo Grotius claimed there was an immutable law of nature which governed relations between sovereign and subject and one government and the other. This law of nature was the fundamental basis of the civil law of every nation and this civil law was reflected in the laws binding every nation. The originality of this classical idea of natural law which had been discussed by Plato (C427-347BC), Aristotle (384-322BC), the stoics and Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43BC), was that Grotius believed that the same intrinsic principles are fundamental to the behaviour of states in their relations with one and the other. One of the most significant contributions of Hugo Grotius was his elucidation of the concept of extra territoriality, otherwise known as diplomatic immunity which was originated by the French jurist Pierre Ayraut (1536-1601). This concept was further developed by Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694), and by the 18th century the idea of diplomatic immunity had taken firm root and this concept of immunity was formally consolidated by the Vienna Convention of 1961. The idea that what binds human beings together on an individual basis can be transposed to relations between nations can be seen also in David Hume’s (1711-1776) A Treatise of Human Nature when he wrote, describing the basis of human relations and collaboration in founding civilized societies.

“I observe that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly enough be called a convention or agreement betwixt us, though without the interposition of a promise since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are performed upon the supposition that something is to be performed by the other party … assures us still more that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct: and it is only on the expectation of this that our moderation and abstinence are founded”.

It is this logic of rule governing not only an individual behaviour but state behaviour that underpins the working of international relations.

The study of International Relations has always been subsumed within the study of History until very recently when, like political science, it became a separate discipline. Nevertheless, history has remained the foundation of a meaningful study of this important subject whose beginning was also historically determined. Serious study of International Relations began after the First World War. The loss of millions of men and wholesale destruction of property led to serious soul-searching as to how to prevent future conflicts on this grand scale. The study of politics among nations was therefore considered fundamental in avoiding another World War. The fact that the Second World War still broke out and that since 1945 we have witnessed many proxy wars that have led to the death of millions of people does not diminish the importance of the study of International Relations. Rather than throw up our hands in exasperation, scholars have fine-tuned their tools of study so as to reduce to the barest minimum, the volatility and variability of such a discipline anchored on human behaviour. One is not saying here that the role of scholars of International Relations could be decisive in the matters of war and peace because cynics might ask, “how much injection of available knowledge in the field did Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin factor into their foreign policies in the inter war years?” To many of the authoritarian and totalitarian exponents of politics of power relations in this century, diplomacy was only seen as a holding operation before countries were ready to unleash, with all its ferocity, destructive and offensive power of the state. Treaties amounted to nothing but chiffon de papier and indeed and in truth wars were politics by other means.

Coming nearer home. To what extent has the available knowledge of the imperatives of Nigeria’s foreign policy influenced and affected recent operation of Nigeria’s foreign policy? This kind of argument will miss the point of scholarship and search for knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The utility of this kind of academic enquiry would then depend on the calibre of political leadership and the prevailing factors of international politics and domestic concern of the period. Today, as a result of experience and documentation of international norms and diplomatic practice, certain ground rules have been established which while not totally preventing outbreaks of wars, have however, reduced them and, or mitigated their serious consequences.

The academic discipline of history provides a serious scholar, the broadest knowledge available to mankind. A historian must necessarily be aware of whatever revolutionary advances in the arts, philosophy, medicine, engineering and the sciences that have left their impact on man and his environment. In fact, all knowledge is historical. Man logically builds on the achievements of those who have toiled in the same field in the past. Progress in all fields of human endeavour takes knowledge and experience of the past as points of departure in the constant search for truth and knowledge. The study of history is such a vast area of academic pursuit that it is humanly impossible to master the entire field. What a historian does is to specialise and embrace a philosophy that would guide him or her in his or her studies. Historical knowledge is so fundamentally important that no society can make progress without it. One must know from where one is coming in order to know where one is going is a popular wise saying.

One of the early historians of civilization, the French man, Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694-1778), in his book The Age of Louis XIV published in 1738 wrote that history provides

“…the comparison which a statesman or an ordinary citizen can make between the laws and customs of other countries and those of his own; this is what leads modern nations to emulate each other. The crimes and misfortunes of history cannot be too frequently pondered on, for whatever people say, it is possible to prevent both.”

The same sentiment is echoed by George Santayana when he said those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

History only repeats itself if it does at all, as a result of human folly and weakness. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (C500 BC) said, no two events can be absolutely similar just as one cannot jump into the same body of water in a stream twice because the universe is in constant state of flux. The positivist idea of history, which I subscribe to claims that in spite of the variable factors of the human element one can make predictions about the future course of events if things remain equal and firmly rooted on the knowledge of the past. It is this belief that has informed the choice of the topic of this article.

Knowing the past and recent development of Nigeria’s international relations, I can without arrogating to myself the special gift of prophecy forecast the dynamics of the future foreign policy of Nigeria. In any case historical periodisation is only for tidiness and scholastic convenience.

The difference in real life between the present, the past and the future is hardly perceptible. Albert Einstein, the father of the theory of relativity, said in 1955 that the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only an illusion, however persistent. He said, “the laws of physics as we know are time-symmetric”, they run just as well backwards as forward in time. In other words, the future exists simultaneously with the past: Isaac Newton the great physicist said the future already exists and that it can be known in advance. History is, of course, not physics and I certainly would not want to reduce such a complex field as history to mathematical exactitude but even in quantum mechanics (physics), the uncertainty principle said it clearly – the more precisely one measures what, the less precisely one could measure when. The same sentiment of time past being present in time future is echoed by the poet T.S. Eliot; when he wrote “time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future is contained in time past”.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928, further explained the continuous evolution of historical events and the link between the past and the future when he wrote:

“for our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present – no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and swells as it advances and as the past grows without ceasing, so there is no limit to its preservation. Memory is not a facility of putting away recollections in a drawer. …in reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically in its entirety, probably it follows us at every instant”.

The course of human history is influenced by a confluence of physical, material and spiritual forces. The mistake Marxists made was to see historical development purely through the materialist prism.

Prediction of the future by the scientist or the historian is not totally different because of the variability of not just human factor but even of natural phenomena. The prediction of the future by the positivist historian is surprisingly as useful as that of a natural scientist’s futuristic anticipation.