Centuries ago in Europe and America, the mercantile and industrial bourgeoisie, or the bourgeois grouped in independent urban ‘republics’, sometimes in alliance with the aristocracy or lesser nobility (England and Italy, respectively), sometimes the revolutionary masses (France), sometimes the military (Prussian Junkers), and in America in the process of opening up a vast new continent, consolidated modern nation states. More such states emerged on the bayonets of the victorious Napoleonic armies of revolutionary France. In the following period these several successes spawned colonialism, and therefore, the johnny-come-late rest of the world, with a few exceptions (Japan), saw no such consolidation of democratic modern nation states in the succeeding centuries.

In China, a rambling antiquated empire was put out of its agony by a communist takeover after a brief bourgeois failed-state episode; in Russia even that interlude was missing. The bourgeois of the advanced world, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, "creates a world after its own image", but what a nasty, messy, blood drenched post Second World War 60 year process it has been. In a word, across Asia, South America and Africa, with but a few exceptions, creation of civilised, modern, bourgeois democratic nation states has, by and large, been a resounding failure.

Enter fundamentalism

Other actors came forward to help where an effete bourgeoisie had failed; the proletariat in Russia, a worker-peasant revolution in China and Vietnam, an occupying Red Army in Eastern Europe. More recently it has been the turn of the petty bourgeoisies and one of its manifestations, fundamentalism; not only religious fundamentalism, but other forms. Ethnic fundamentalism, if you care to call it that, has had its day in Lanka and the ex-Yugoslav nations, murderous tribal rivalry in parts of Africa, all desperate attempts to consolidate nation states. A plethora of military dictatorships resembling totalising fascism, and to that extent a form of fundamentalism, emerged in Latin America, the Middle East, Burma and Indonesia. The great difference between all fundamentalist projects attempting to consolidating nation states, and the great bourgeois revolutions, is that the former evoke a fury of identity politics and cultural primitiveness. No matter whether it is religious (Iran, Al Qaeda, Hindutva) or ethnic (the killing fields of Lanka, Rwanda and Sudan), fundamentalists search for an ideology and a modus to consolidate a nation state on a primitive, pre-bourgeois, ‘us versus the other’, identity driven foundation. These projects always fail.

The first shoots of success in the creation of a nation state emerges only when the project transforms to a more mature plural, bourgeois democratic modus (India, South Africa, South Korea, and Indonesia at long last) or when it moves beyond its bourgeois horizons as in Cuba, Venezuela and recent experiments in Latin America. Fundamentalist projects always fail; even Iran, despite the anti-imperialist gains in the Middle East thanks to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, as a nation state, is a failed state. They fail because of the nature of their cultural roots cannot compete and survive in an age of global trade, technology, finance, markets and communications. Combined and uneven global development, incorrectly termed globalisation, makes it impossible for any totalitarian fundamentalist state ideology to survive – the starkest example is bankrupt Stalinist fundamentalism in North Korea.

A good look at religious fundamentalism

Professor Sathi Clarke of the Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington DC, previously of the United Theological College, Bangalore, focussed on religious fundamentalism at a refreshing lecture delivered at the Ecumenical Institute, Havelock Road, better known as Marshal’s Joint, on August 6. Clarke, who has a doctorate from the Harvard University Divinity School and tangible expertise in his subject, handled the symposium with depth and clarity. He dealt with fundamentalisms that are nation state projects and those that are not necessarily so. As he spoke Hindutva and Iranian Islamic Fundamentalism came to my mind as examples of the former, Al Qaeda the latter. At question time Clarke conceded that though his focus was on religious fundamentalism, Sri Lanka was a nation state project that exemplified regressive ethnic, not religious conflict. More-Sinhala, less-Buddhist fundamentalism seeks to lay non-pluralist, non-modernist ideological foundations for the creation and consolidation for its particular version of the nation state; outraged Tamil nationalism responds, eventually, by going to war. Classical fascism too, Clarke conceded, was a totalising and therefore fundamentalist experience, but this time not for the creation of the nation state but its mobilisation for military and anti-socialist purposes.

Clarke’s point of departure is an abhorrence of violence and he recounted theories of the origins of violence as endemic to humankind; biological, cultural, historical-economic, gender, resistance to empire, and Jihad versus MacWorld theories. Biological theories hold that a proclivity to violence is coded into our genes and the cultural thesis, recently identified with Samuel Huntington, holds that the world is partitioned into eight mutually hostile culture blocks between whom conflict is foreordained – the Western, Islamic, Indic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental and I can’t recall the other two. The gender version says that the problem is priapistic male hormones typified by Italian machismos behind Ferrari steering wheels. The resistance to imperialism and J vs. MacW thesis are much the same; they are about people fighting to reclaim their lebensraum from imperialism which sucks their blood and prostitutes their cultures. The Marxist historical-materialist take on violence and the state is well known.

This is all great stuff, but Clarke does not tell us which of these portfolios he is investing in. He prefers a tangential take-off into how religion has contributed to and supplemented the catastrophe, whichever of these theses happens to right. Mind you, I don’t mean to demean the lecture which was top class; I only want to register this point. Indeed, Clarke does not duck religious issues; he agrees that religion bears some full frontal responsibility. First, textually; some passages in the Bible, the Koran and the Mahabaratha, he grants, are pretty bloodcurdling and rationalise carnage and cruelty.

There is also a second version of religion sanctioned brutality, the chance of getting a little bit of heaven right now, here on earth. The Hindutva brigade and Ram seekers are after just this, that is metabolising a bit of the divine millennium right now on the Indian doorstep. Finally the Jihadists; promised lascivious delights, feminine, culinary and Bacchanalian, in heaven, enough to make any earthly (earthy?) lecher drool, in exchange for self-immolation with a bomb and fuse in a crowded marketplace. No way can the religious texts be absolved of responsibility, says Clarke. Pretty pungent I thought for a theologian and man of the frock to cede that the canonical text, the word of god, can be such incendiary stuff!

Internationalism, pluralism and fundamentalism

Dr. Clarke’s way-out has the nerve of a modern Martin Luther; he counsels inter-religious engagement (ok that’s tame), but also rejection of "toxic passages" in the Biblical, Koranic and Gita texts, "civility audits", and expunging religious symbols and rituals that engender hatred and violence. Fine by me, and I am prepared to pray that Dr Clarke doesn’t get himself burnt at the stake, but as a political animal, I have an additional take on the matter.

Fundamentalism is dying, but even its death agony evokes havoc. Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Hindutva, North Korean Stalinist fundamentalism, Sinhala chauvinism, and the like are not yet finished, and they will do more harm before they are extinguished, though the 21st Century has given notice that this is their

last hurrah. Change and development are irresistible but unevenness in benefits is playing havoc with the poor, the marginalised and the culturally fearful – that is the majority of the global population. Imperialist led globalisation has not shown the ability to bridge the gulf between the oppressed and the conditions of oppression, nevertheless fundamentalism is an atavistic reaction, a throw back that the steamroller of internationalism will eventually crush. Then, the incredibly difficult challenge is the conflict between internationalism, on an ever widening scale, and the celebration of pluralism on whatever scale makes social and cultural life fruitful and meaningful.

Abuse of power, signpost to totalitarianism

In Lanka anti-pluralism prevails ad nauseam – majoritarian chauvinism, armed minority nationalism, a semi-theocratic constitution, a government that wants to legislate the Eight Noble Truths and the Ten Commandments – I am refurbishing my cellar before 2015 – and most recently, legislative proposals prescribing what names political parties can give themselves! Add to this the 6th Amendment and we have legislative strangulation.