A Road Unforeseen Read online

  And capital had triumphed with a vengeance. With no ideological opponent to restrain them, US and European financial and business interests went on the offensive. Working through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and inspired by the gospel of free trade, they pushed open the markets of the world. Capital had always been mobile, but now it broke down national boundaries as never before. As American companies moved their work and resources from country to country in search of the cheapest labor and raw materials, labor unions in the US began to crumble and the living standards of most Americans declined.

  The triumph of the capitalist narrative after 1989 fast-forwarded the world into a state of revolutionary transformation in economics, politics, and technology. In the name of free trade, Western financial institutions, led by the US, imposed “shock therapy” on the former Soviet bloc, creating a new ruling elite of thieves in which public goods were looted by government-connected oligarchs, and vast numbers lost the social benefits they once had without getting any richer. This cataclysm discredited democracy to the point that Vladimir Putin, a former KGB director, was elected president.

  In much of the Global South, the offensive took the form of “structural adjustment,” opening countries up to world trade, forcing government-owned industries to privatize, and devastating fragile local economies. In exchange, the countries’ leaders were given loans, the repayment of which could eat up their entire social service budgets.

  In this “new world order,” labor too became globalized, as huge numbers of migrants flooded Europe and the US in search of work that would enable them to support their families back home—families who could no longer feed themselves because competition from subsidized American crops, war, climate change, or predatory landowners had made farming unsustainable, or because they had switched from growing their own food to growing export crops for an international market whose prices fluctuated wildly because of speculation by traders in faraway world capitals.

  In response to these changes, the international Left developed a critique centered on the concepts of “neoliberalism” and “globalization.” What both terms really mean is an unrestrained global free market based on an unproven economic theory that says any benefits gained by the rich will trickle down to the poor. And indeed, in some places, particularly China and India, while people at the low end of the economy remain profoundly poor, the middle class has expanded through the emergence of new industries and opportunities. But in many other places, this theory has led to unbelievable wealth for a few—the one percent—and declining standards of living for most. Workers in Italy, Greece, Spain, and the United States, for instance, have seen their livelihoods grow increasingly precarious, their government services disappear, and their labor unions and social benefits shrink.11

  In the Middle East, despite the fabulous wealth of oil-dependent elites, most countries are cursed with stagnant economies and very high levels of poverty and illiteracy. For many years their politics, too, were stagnant, the life crushed out of them by entrenched military dictatorships which had long since wiped out their left-wing opponents and were now threatened only by Islamists, whom they did their best to accommodate.

  When the “Arab Spring” revolts began in 2011, their initial demands were economic—the poor simply could not survive. These uprisings were transformed within weeks by massive demands for democracy as well as economic reform. But, except in Tunisia, the social forces were not organized enough to develop a democratic alternative to dictatorships. Instead, the rewards of insurrection were scooped up by Islamists or the military—or in Egypt, first one and then the other. The autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, for all its tribalism and corruption, is a shining exception to this pattern.

  Particularly in Egypt and Tunisia, women were active in the Arab Spring uprisings despite extreme sexual harassment from police, thugs, and Islamists—harassment that was especially violent in Egypt, where female protestors were assaulted by mobs in the public square and by police. Some were stripped and beaten, like the hijab-wearing “woman in a blue bra,” whose picture, being dragged off by police, went viral; others were subjected to forced virginity tests.12 The message of these attacks was a familiar one to women all over the world: Stay home if you want to be safe.

  These assaults took place in a region feminist sociologists sometimes call “the patriarchal belt,” which stretches from the Middle East and North Africa to South Asia and is described thus by Handan Caglayan, a political scientist at the University of Ankara: “The patriarchal family in this geography is the main social unit, and the oldest men have rights over all the other family members. The main characteristic of the social structures under the patriarchal belt is the strict control over women’s behavior. In question is a strong ideology which relates the honor of the family to women’s chastity.”13

  I deliberately do not use the term “the Muslim world” for this region. “The patriarchal belt” is a geographical designation, not a religious one, for the region also contains Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Parsees, Sikhs, Hindus, and many smaller religious groups, while Muslims themselves have a great range of doctrinal variations and cultural practices. And throughout the region, living alongside people who live by the old rules, are others who passionately rebel against these rules and think the defense of secularism and defeat of patriarchy are essential to real democracy.

  As feminist sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti explains, the increased level of violence against women in this region is not a sign of the old patriarchal order’s strength but of its weakness: “The fact is that the provisions that underwrite the positional superiority of men over women in Islam are, sociologically speaking, in tatters. The male provider image jars with the multitudes of unemployed male youth who are unable to provide for themselves, much less protect women from bread-winning roles and the rigours of exposure to public spaces. We are witnessing a profound crisis of masculinity leading to more violent and coercive assertions of male prerogatives where the abuse of women can become a blood sport.”14

  This violence is intimately tied up with the rise of fundamentalist and other right-wing identity movements since the end of the Cold War, movements that invoke a dream of homogeneous ancient communities ruled by male elders. As these movements become more powerful, their capacity for violence grows and can lead to war with neighboring ethnic or religious groups. Control of women as the symbols and carriers of a “pure” national, ethnic, or religious identity is central to the programs of such movements, and when they go to war, rape is the weapon by which they demonstrate their victory over “the other,” by defiling “his” women and making them give birth to enemy aliens.

  In a 2006 talk before the American Society of International Law, Gita Sahgal, a founder of Women Against Fundamentalism in the UK, defined fundamentalist movements as existing both within and outside the state, sometimes simultaneously. “While some of these movements may be represented by traditional power structures, such as the Catholic Church, many fundamentalist political formations are modern, frequently global, political movements, which draw their strength from large diaspora support and while insisting on ‘purity’ and ‘authenticity’ have little relation to traditional religious formations (which may be patriarchal and oppressive but are not necessarily fundamentalist). They recreate ‘tradition’ to provide new meanings to older practices, and in doing so invent traditions just as nineteenth-century European nationalism did.”15

  The year 1989 is notable for a great worldwide upsurge of fundamentalism. In Afghanistan, the Taliban moved into the vacuum left by departing Soviet troops and began to impose their brutal version of sharia law. In an alliance between the South Asian Sunni fundamentalists of Jamaat e Islami and the Shia fundamentalists who follow Iran’s leadership, Islamists mobilized globally against Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, burning books, staging riots in Islamabad, Bombay, and Dhaka, and bombing the British embassy in Karachi. The campaign culminated in a fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah
Khomeini that forced Rushdie underground for many years. In Yugoslavia, Serbian nationalist Slobodan Milosevic consolidated his rise to power with a speech in Kosovo that looked back to the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of the region six centuries earlier and called on Serbs to go into battle to defend Christian civilization. In India, the Hindu extremists of Shiv Sena began their long climb to political power by winning local office in the state of Maharashtra. In the United States, Pat Robertson formed the Christian Coalition to serve as the organizational center of a drive by Protestant evangelicals to transform the Republican Party into the defender of Christian “family values” against the globalizing elites of the Northeast and the West Coast and their degenerate ways.

  Why did these fundamentalist movements become so strong after 1989? Two reasons are usually given. First, with the removal of Soviet state control, nationalist and religious identity movements that had been building up steam for decades blew the lid off the pressure cooker. Second, with globalization, capitalist forms of organization and notions of individual liberty—wrongly defined as Western—penetrated to the most remote areas, bringing their values and media to threaten traditional male elites, who reacted violently. While the US interventions in the Middle East and South Asia—from the overthrow and murder of Iran’s Mossadegh in 1953 to the support of Afghan jihadis against the Soviets to the 2003 invasion of Iraq—have certainly destabilized the region, the seductions of Western media and the freedom offered by the internet have been equally upsetting to supporters of ancient traditions and power arrangements.

  But I believe there is a third reason for the rise of fundamentalism around the world: the success of the global women’s movement, which has been growing in strength, despite numerous setbacks and massive cooptation. Its legal achievements peaked at UN conferences in the early nineties, setting off alarm bells in traditionalist enclaves from the Vatican to Saudi Arabia.

  The backlash had already begun in the US, where the gay rights movement and Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, had been galvanizing conservative opposition since the late seventies. But in many parts of the world, the women’s movement did not make substantial gains until the nineties, when new information technologies enabled organizers to coordinate their activities across borders. Linked by a blizzard of faxes, women worked together transnationally at the 1992 UN Conference on the Environment in Rio; the 1993 UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna; the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo; and the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing.

  The transnational feminists in this movement defined themselves in terms of universal human rights, but insisted that the human rights framework had to be applied to women’s lives in ways not previously imagined, ways that challenged the long-established distinction between public and private spheres. Why, for instance, was it murder when a man killed a woman he didn’t know but an “honor crime” if he killed his wife or sister or daughter?

  By insisting that human rights are indivisible and apply in the home as well as in the public square, the women’s movement brought violations like forced marriage, mistreatment of widows, and “honor killings” into the open, not to mention the widespread practice of female genital mutilation (FGM).16 Since the family is the last bastion of traditional male authority, right-wing identity movements have been enormously threatened by attempts to give women equal rights and protection under the law, which they see as an invasion of privacy. They fiercely resist such change in the name of tradition, religious dogma, or defense of the family. They also criticize these innovations as Western, although in fact, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself, the framework of women’s human rights has been profoundly shaped by women of the Global South.

  While Eleanor Roosevelt may have chaired the drafting committee for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in fact, the UDHR was drafted and redrafted by people from former colonies all around the world, as human rights expert Susan Waltz has documented. Their concerns went far beyond the US emphasis on civil and political rights to include social and economic rights, female autonomy, national liberation, and freedom from discrimination by race and ethnicity—issues that were not on the minds of the US political class in 1948. In Waltz’s words:

  The most ardent champions of socioeconomic rights, for example, came from Latin America (rather than Soviet bloc countries, as often supposed). The Soviet bloc delegations resisted encroachments on sovereignty but tenaciously pressed the issue of nondiscrimination, and it is thanks in large part to their persistence that every article of the Declaration applies to everyone. Egypt is responsible for the strong statement of universality at the opening of the Declaration, its delegate having pushed to make the Declaration’s provisions applicable “both among peoples of the Member States and among peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.”

  Anticipating concerns of our own times, delegates from India, the Dominican Republic, and Denmark fought to have rights expressed in gender-neutral language and for explicit recognition of the rights of women. The delegate from Poland called attention to the issue of human trafficking, and the draft was amended to prohibit slavery “in all its forms.” A young woman delegate from Pakistan, herself raised in purdah (the custom of keeping women fully covered with clothing and apart from the rest of society), spoke out strongly against child marriage.17

  One of the most influential drafters was Hansa Mehta, an Indian feminist activist, who insisted that Article I be worded “All human beings are equal in dignity and rights,” arguing that if the usual language of “All men are created equal” were used, it would not be applied universally but be taken to exclude women. Indeed, Mehta was “the key figure who ensured gender equality in the document.”18

  Still, decades after the adoption of the UDHR, forced and child marriages remained common in many parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, while domestic violence was still epidemic throughout the world. For this reason, a global coalition of feminists mobilized for the 1993 UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, organizing a special Tribunal on Violence Against Women, which they saw as a human rights violation. Forcing violence against women onto the agenda of the UN Conference, they persuaded participants to redefine rape, formerly considered a minor and inevitable part of conflict, as a war crime. The next year, the same coalition defeated an alliance between the Vatican and conservative Islamic states at the UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, and succeeded in reframing population issues in terms of women’s health and reproductive rights. This campaign culminated in the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, which gave a new breadth of vision and authority to the idea of women’s human rights.

  The organizing efforts behind these UN conferences led to rising expectations and increasing assertiveness in women all over the world, and created a cadre of activists who were able to push for change in their own countries on matters as various as domestic violence, equal pay, and female genital mutilation (FGM). Real progress resulted. Some countries (India, France, Sweden) passed rules mandating quotas for women in their legislatures. Women moved into jobs previously reserved for men and, with increased income, were more able to leave brutal or unsatisfactory marriages. Naturally this progress was resented, particularly when new laws affected land ownership—still reserved for men in many parts of the world. Tribal leaders and traditionalists thought the world was coming to an end, and became part of the social base for the fundamentalist movements that are such a threat today, the most violent being Daesh.

  By taking up arms to oppose Daesh, Kurdish feminists have set a new standard for the next wave of feminist action, saying that it must incorporate armed self-defense when necessary along with social and economic rights. But, as in the nineties, the international Left has failed to grasp the importance of these epic developments in women’s consciousness and mobilization, and has been unable to develop a coherent and principled response to the rise of fundamentalism. Instead, it got stuck i
n the middle of a paradigm shift.

  Unable to find a new theoretical footing after the disappearance of “really-existing socialism,” left-wing thinkers of the nineties called for resistance to neoliberalism and globalization. But they rarely noticed how central female labor was to these economic and social changes, or understood their relationship to Kandiyoti’s “crisis of masculinity” and the growth of fundamentalist movements.

  In the US, thanks to stagnant wages, out-of-control health care costs, and minimal social benefits, women’s unpaid work caring for children and the elderly props up the whole economy. In the Global South, women do most of the work involved in agriculture and food production; make up the basic labor force in the textile, electronics, and garment industries; and are the main commodity in the global sex trade. Some countries import women for these purposes; others, like the Philippines, export them. All the kinds of labor traditionally belonging to women, including childcare and care of the aged, have become items that are bought and sold in a global market. Women are thus central to the whole project of global economic integration and modernization.

  For these economic reasons, if for no other, the international Left should have made women’s liberation central to its program. But that didn’t happen. Starting in Rio in 2001, a succession of World Social Forums became the central gathering place for the international anti-globalization Left under the slogan, “Another world is possible.” But even though women worked hard organizing for these events, feminist issues were usually relegated to a separate space rather than integrated into any overall program.19 In fact, fundamentalist movements that appropriated the language of national liberation were more easily accepted than feminists who opposed them in the language of universal human rights.