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Last night I watched the absurdly stupid and awful-looking surprise hit movie of 2022, the Tollywood epic RRR. While slogging through this 3-hour parade of xenophobic melodrama, incoherent action, and kindergarten-level sentiment was a struggle, it did make me wonder about two ideas that I’ve always thought should be in direct conflict with each other but aren’t treated as such: “Anti-Colonialism” and “Open Borders.”
As I understand it, the principle behind “Anti-Colonialism” is that Group A is never entitled to move into Group B’s space and take it over, replacing Group B’s preferred culture and/or method of governance with Group A’s preferred culture and/or method of governance, thereby subjugating Group B as second class in their own space. However, this school of thought seems to be most popular among the same political/intellectual cohort that also champions very loose immigration controls, commonly referred to as “Open Borders” (even though that phrase suggests no control whatsoever, whereas the reality is probably something closer liberal immigration controls). With an “Open Borders” mindset, there is no stopping Groups B-Z from moving into Group A’s space and altering its culture or assuming control of its institutions if any of those Groups does so with enough numbers or organization. “Open Borders,” on principle, refutes the very notion of any group’s ownership of any space, which more or less dismantles the paradigm of “Anti-Colonialism.” How do these two ideas co-exist in the same mind without producing uncomfortable cognitive dissonance?
It seems uncharitable to suggest that the salve for this cognitive dissonance is simply racism; or, to put it how I suppose the “Open Borders Anti Colonialist” would think of it, “intersectionality.” That is, the principle behind “Anti-Colonialism” is not really the wrongness of generic groups subjugating each other but rather the wrongness of one static “Bad Group” (that happens to be largely defined by skin color/geographical origin) subjugating other Groups (of other skin colors), who by the nature of their subjugation and opposition to “Bad Group” are thereby “Good Groups.” “Open Borders,” too, is a policy only sought after when the same “Good Groups” are immigrating into the space of the same “Bad Group,” rather than vice versa. These are intended as strictly one-way ideological roads, and not as equal-use roadmaps for Groups A-Z.
I don’t get the impression that this intersectional solution to the “Open Borders Anti Colonialism” knot is oft-contemplated by the typical “Open Borders Anti Colonialist,” who rather thinks of both notions as having sprung from the same well of humanist good intentions. Is the racial/intersectional question actually essential to this paradigm, or is there some other less invidious key that unlocks the conflict between “Open Borders” and “Anti Colonialism?” in the progressive mindset?
I’ll hand this to RRR: It aptly confounds Western culture-warring by presenting its own set of ideas that may be difficult for some Western progressives to reconcile: It pits noble indigenous revolutionaries against the cartooniest of all racist villains and does so with a strident rallying cry against gun control. One of the protagonists has the stated goal of “putting a rifle in the hand” of every colonial subject, and suggests that a bullet only attains its true value when it kills an immigrant (or, in this exact case, any white person).
All else I'm agreed with. But the issue in the West is that there's no actual external manipulation of the method of governance! It's the difference between inviting someone into your house and giving them your television, vs them breaking in and stealing it. If you ask for your television back in the former case, you look like an idiot.
It can't be colonialism if the motive force is derived from within. It's not like Germany is scared of Afghanistan sending gunboats down the Rhine thus they grant Afghan 'asylum seekers' leave to enter the country. There's no formal extraterritoriality where the British aren't allowed to control immigration - at least what extraterritoriality there is isn't coming from Iraq... It's coming from the EU and various human rights courts. But colonialism from Strasbourg is laughable. If you're a state and you don't like what a court has to say, you can just ignore it. China does it all the time. If Western countries choose, they can just say 'no, we don't want any immigration, close the borders'. They don't face invasion for doing so. The opposition comes from within, from corporate leaders, human rights lawyers, NGOs and the US state department.
When I was in school I was taught that in the past everyone in the country used to be white but now we have postmen and taxi drivers from every part of the world (and that this is a positive development because everyone thinks differently in some non-specific but positive way)... it wasn't that African Union marines had marched in to re-write all our textbooks (the US did this to Japan post WW2). It wasn't the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or the Non-Aligned Movement who required us to embrace multiculturalism wholeheartedly. We did it ourselves.
More precisely, the Open Borders Anti-Colonialists did it and ignored any complaints. Around OBACs, watch your backs!
One could say that these decisions were not really made democratically in that internal opposition to high immigration has been consistently ignored in the US and elsewhere:
In the UK, a credible argument for bipartisan duplicity on immigration: https://twitter.com/t848m0/status/1560662923101347840
In the US, it beggars belief that an extremely powerful country is somehow unable to build a border wall or otherwise prevent illegal immigration. California passed Proposition 187 to restrict illegal immigration only for it to be struck down by a judge. Opposition is internal, it is not as though the US's sovereignty is challenged by foreign forces.
Yet this still isn't colonialism IMO. There should be a different word for it.
This feels like a Schelling gerrymander to me: you're finding a distinction, any distinction, between 1800s imperialism and 2000s mass immigration, and then claiming that constitutes the morally relevant crux difference when in fact it's an irrelevant difference.
The "bad thing that complainants are mad about" is "losing self-determination in one's homeland". Whether that happens via the application of gunboat diplomacy or not is at most an exacabatory factor. If Britain had signed sphere-of-influence treaties with the Princely States absent coercion, the people in those states would still have been mad then (and would remain mad now) that in 1800s their ancestors had to kowtow to whitey when he walked past.
Most of Malaysian politics these days revolves around Malays being mad that the Chinese - who immigrated legally and without Qing China threatening to invade anyone - keep taking over the economy. The fact that the Chinese got to Kuala Lumpur without any coercian is small comfort to the Malays who occupy the lowest socioeconomic section in their own country.
To an extent this literally did happen to Hyderabad. I mean there was certainly violent coercion, but mostly from the Marathas - a voluntary alliance with the British worked well for them. But unfortunately the alliance led the Nizams to grow weak, and instead of building up an army they started building infrastructure and universities.
Hyderabad didn't lose self rule until it was colonized by India during Operation Polo in 1948.
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