On reparations

This short essay argues that contemporary defences of reparations act as a continuation of the Victorian liberal empire. The overarching argument for reparations goes something like this: Over the last three hundred and fifty years or so, Western Imperialism - American, British, French, German, Dutch, Spanish - interfered,  invaded, instilled puppet regimes in, and extracted other countries’ natural wealth. In the Victorian era, British and American empires defended this to subjects at home and abroad as a civilising mission. After World War 2 and the second half of the twentieth century, these empires contracted. The new nation states struggled, often lapsing into civil war or brutal dictatorships, and thus their populations suffer much more compared to the populations of their historical oppressors despite decolonisation, the process by which those nation’s people return to self-determination. Reparations therefore acknowledges that since those in the former imperial core have better lives due to their past conquests, there is a moral duty to redistribute the wealth unfairly extracted. The question is not just whether it is morally right to do so, but how we might go about doing so. There is no easy answer. Indeed, all of the currently existing approaches seem to me to repeat late-imperial civilising missions. 

The most obvious way we might do our duty is by attempting to export the institutions we think necessary for a modern, liberal state and which these nations have apparently failed to develop due to our interference. England and America have a separation between the judicial and executive branches, an objective legal code, property rights, and broadly socially liberal laws. The state protects you not just from violence, but from other people’s attempts to use state power to take your rights away from you. Yet these institutions are relatively new; broad emancipation, equality under the law, widespread literacy, property rights, protection from violence, freedom to trade, literacy etc are barely one hundred years old; (barely) post-imperial institutions developed as part of the broader imperial project. Let us say that the population of another country comes to us and asks for help in building secure institutions. They are struggling to control their country, the military is hinting at a coup, another famine is looming. Any help we give legitimises a government, or in some cases a territory, that exists only because of imperial machinations. Even if we are able to create a liberal, democratic state (something we’ve just failed to do in Afghanistan, might I add) over a period of time by exchanges, advisors, and diplomatic nudging, we are at the same time legitimating that nation’s claims over peoples, territory, and hierarchy. Yet if we do nothing, that state will fail and people will die.

Let’s say we don’t attempt to create a liberal political class; we instead give direct grants or food at moments of crisis. These still have to be distributed; we require a network of actors within the state with the knowledge and social capital to make things happen. Again, we need to balance long and short term goals with de facto recognition of the current power-holders. Hyper Targeted cash grants, such as GiveDirectly, appeared to sidestep state power. Yet again, even the simplest acts have consequences: their in-country networks and own team-members conspired to steal some $900,000 in the DRC. Other aid agencies have seen staff use their power to choose who eats, who gets enough food or water or shelter for sexual, fiscal, and political ‘advantage’. Any attempt to distribute any resource, whether that is food, water, fuel, or cash, necessarily creates networks, hierarchies, and abuses. We again seem to be in a catch-22; we want to try to define and tackle illegitimate power networks. Reparation, after all, means fixing, healing, and building legitimate and free political structures. But operating anywhere requires local knowledge; knowledge which requires engagement with the very political structures one seeks to subvert.

A neoliberal approach might say that therefore businesses, factories, trade, and manufacturing are the best route out of poverty and toward freedom. Back in 2015, the Adam Smith Institute argued that sweatshops make poor people better off. Essentially, we in our first world countries might scoff at the working conditions and poor pay, but 12 hour shifts for a dollar an hour under fluorescent light is preferable to subsistence farming. This may or may not be the case. But this is no clear link between general prosperity, liberal democracy, and political freedom. In the wake of the cold war, Fukuyama’s argument seemed plausible; in 2023 however, China’s surging economy, increasing middle class, and brutally effective state-capitalist surveillance suggests it’s perfectly plausible for the state to triumph over the liberalising pressures of international trade. Another problem of course is that this harks back to the arguments of 19th century England in much the same way as we defended political interference in other states in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. It very well may be better that the subsistence farmer has a better life in a factory than in the field. But for a western state, linked as it is with business, to claim that this is part of a wealth-creating, liberalising, and enlightened policy should at least raise some eyebrows.

All of these options depend on some functioning government, however autocratic or illegitimate. Haiti lacks even that. It is unsurprisingly one of the best arguments for reparations at the same time it underscores its practical difficulties. Discovered (much to the surprise of the Taino inhabitants) by Christopher Columbus in 1492, what is now Haiti saw the first permanent European settlement in the Americas. Claimed first by the Spanish Empire, it was the French who widely formalised the sugarcane crop on which its brutal slave economy depended. Revolution brought brief emancipation; Louverture and Dessalines wrested control from Napoleon, but independence came at the price of ‘reparations’ to France (paid off in 1947) which permanently hobbled the nation for over a hundred years. When the state inevitably failed, the Americans moved in; and when the Americans moved out, a dictator - Papa Doc - took over until 1986. Inevitably, a brief attempt at elections failed, and the Americans returned in the mid 90s. Then it got worse. 2004 and 2008 brought multiple hurricanes; 2010 saw a magnitude 7 earthquake which killed up to 300,000. As infrastructure faltered, cholera swept the island (in part due to a leak from a United Nations peacekeeping station). More hurricanes, and another earthquake followed, as did the assassination of the president in July ‘21. Haiti now has no parliamentary quorate, a faltering judiciary, and over 100 gangs vying for control of the capital alone. This is state failure. While the government called on France to provide reparations in 2013 then, we must ask what this would look like. The answer seems to be something akin to invasion. This time not by the Americans or the UN, but the imposition of a Kenyan security force backed by the USA, Jamaica, and other countries to fight the gangs which now control most of the country. Inevitably, the Kenyan force has itself been accused of abuses. The best the country can hope for, then, is less violence. Less hunger. That the occupying force will be less brutal than the gangs which replaced the state. Again, we have returned to something like multinational state building ‘for the good of the nation.’

Even the lightest touch risks unpredictable consequences. Let us say that we recognise that cash grants, returned art, structural aid, inter alia all reinforce the existing political structures that we’ve decided need to wither. We know that anything we put into the country in the hope of encouraging liberal democracy tends instead to have multiple effects we can’t even forecast. Why not offer an escape? Visas for study work, and training. At first glance this appears plausible, but we again run into the same problem: Visas need to be given out, which requires infrastructure and collaboration with the government. Visas then become political capital, and we allow the enculturation of the elite’s next generation. In the 80s and 90s the American government hoped that by giving plentiful student visas to the children of the Chinese Communist Party elite, they would return home imbued with American Freedom and liberal democracy would follow. As we have seen, this underestimated China. Encouraging widespread emigration, with the vague hope that a remittance based economy might forge transnational links, has other issues. CEE migration to the UK led to political turmoil in Britain; while it lulled and reversed, with many now migrating in the other direction, the inability of our own politicians and state to properly integrate and maintain the demos at times of demographic change risk fundamentally weakening the economy, which paired with reactionary politics makes us less able to deal meaningfully with the question of reparations. Even the best case scenario - brain drain, diaspora - brings more suffering for those who have no option but to remain immiserated in their home countries, and again we return to what is essentially a moral question of how far we should maintain (what we determine to be) unjust structures in order to keep its subjects alive.

Yet the central problem remains: some countries in the world are richer than others, and the others were typically hobbled, owned, and mined of people and goods for profit by the rich. To look for direct links, for statistics and details obscures that brute fact. While the inequality remains, common attempts to redress the balance risk maintaining the inequalities and authoritarian regimes that emerged in the wake of decolonisation risk and further underscoring the very conditions which cry out for justice. Cash, food, oil, advice, infrastructure, consultants, all require networks that at best make these countries further sites of extraction for post-imperial corporations and states and at worst give dictators, tyrants, and warlords the resources to entrench their positions. Even something as simple as returning a piece of art from a public museum only to see it end up in private hands, behind a mansion bought from corruption, seems a continued failure rather than an act of contrition. It may not be ours, but if we hand it over to someone who will not, in fact, return it to the ‘nation’ then neither are we returning it to its rightful owners. 

There is of course another issue here; the assumption that some material or intellectual conditions necessarily engender a particular socio-politics. That if a society is rich or free enough it will necessarily be the other. This is something close to what Fukuyama, Kojeve, and Hegel (may have, perhaps) believed, and which the former defends with recourse to older cycles of political order and decay and rebirth. Yet while this seems simplistic, a closer reading gives a way forward: political order and decay are dialectical processes and questions of legitimacy and right and freedom must emerge through conflict and reason. We can no more impose legitimacy than we can shout at a lone seed to grow. Conversely, to grapple with these questions is to acknowledge why current states are the way they are; fragile and withered things.

That, of course, does not mean that we have a right to own that which isn’t ours; we can argue about the legitimacy of states, of their relationship to their antecedents, of our role in creating nations out of people we divided with a ruler 3,000 miles away, and we can worry ourselves into paralysis by attempting to model the second and third order effects of each action. But that only further serves to delude ourselves that we have a special civilising mission, that we can walk into another country, and decide how far our benevolence will stretch. To do so is like watching a lawyer crying as he explains how, sadly, giving you back your family estate would be unfair on the thief’s grandson, watching and smiling from inside the house.