A New York Times Op-Ed by Pankaj Mishra calls the comedy of errors which Brexit has become a ‘moment of moral dereliction by the county’s rulers.’ He compares the present debacle to the imperial endgame in India, a period in which Britain’s myths of its enlightened leadership collided with harsh facts about “the malign incompetence” of its actual ruling class. Prime among the mediocrities who exposed the sham of imperial authority was Lord Mountbatten, an icon of the upperclass dilettantes who believed it was their destiny to administer the empire, irrespective of their actual abilities. A prominent conservative historian later described Mountbatten as a “mendacious, intellectually limited hustler” but Britain nevertheless granted him the authority, as the last viceroy of India, to settle “the destiny of some 400 million people.” The ongoing farce of Brexit, Mishra suggests, has “offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.”
Mishra argues that Brexit has other echoes of the partition of India. The Brexiteers’ cluelessness about Scottish secession, their apparent indifference to the political significance of the border in Ireland, are eerily similar to “the unconscionable breeziness with which the British ruling class first drew lines through Asia and Africa and then doomed the people living across them to endless suffering.” This is because Britain’s disorderly exit from its empire was the product of a ruling class that was never adequately equipped for the governance of a multi-faith, multi-ethnic empire. And yet, despite decades of damning evidence about its shameful misrule around the world, this elite’s inflated sense of itself has changed little since the dissolution of Britain’s empire.
It is hard not to view the Trump administration through a similar lens. The president’s ignorance of basic governance, not to mention his innocence about the wider world, has produced what might be called a calamitous ad-hocracy. Bureaucratic improvisations are so routinely needed to disguise Trump’s whimsicality that the US media seems to be suffering from outrage fatigue. So it may be unsettling, but no longer a surprise, to read that Secretary of State Pompeo’s speech in Cairo, includes a blustering promise to end “the age of self-inflicted American shame” in the region. The Guardian reports that Pompeo also made clear that he had come to the Middle East “as an evangelical Christian” and told an audience at the American University in Cairo that his State Department office contained “a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God and his word, and the truth.” The main result of this spiritual guidance appears to be renewed belligerence towards Iran and an uncritical embrace of Egypt and Israel.
It is tempting to treat these embarrassments as payback for imperial arrogance, but the fact remains that many postcolonial societies, including those in Latin America and the Caribbean have been saddled with rulers that are no less entitled or incompetent. Much of the region has endured governments that have either looted the state for private gain, suppressed critical voices, ignored democratic norms, or installed cronies with a righteousness that would not be out of place on either side of the Atlantic. In fact, the malign incompetence in Washington and Whitehall today are better understood as cautionary tales of what can happen to any country when its rulers ignore the complexity of the challenges they are facing.
