Edward Said (3): Language and Empire, Nationalism and Extremism in Post Colonial World, 'Western' or 'World' Philosophy.

“No one can deny the persisting continuity of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human was about.” Edward Said (Culture and Imperialism)

English Language as an element of empire?

Said also discusses the role of English language as being used as the Lingua Franca of the colonial world and maintains that ‘English’, “the lingua Franca for metropolitan Britain: global, comprehensive, and with so vast a social authority as to be accessible to anyone speaking to and about the nation. This Lingua Franca locates England at the focal point of a world also resided over by its power, illuminated by its ideas and culture, kept productive by the attitudes of its moral teachers, artists, legislators.” (Culture and Imperialism 123)

Robert Phillipson (2008) tries to throw some light on role of English language and teaching in expansion of the empire on a more contemporary scale. He believes that;

“'British Council' was established in 1935 to promote British interests and English, partly in response to the success of the fascist governments of Italy and Germany in using language teaching and higher education scholarship to promote their national interest.” (5)

“English is not merely an instrument for communication, it is a value one identifies with for the social functions the language is seen as serving, its utility in the linguistic market” (5)

“the asymmetrical relationship between ‘natives’ and ‘non-natives’ is confirmed in the naming of the profession. ‘The naming ‘TESOL’ already assigns dichotomous Self-Other subject positions to teacher and learner. It interactionally and officially positions the Anglo-teacher as self, and positions the learner in a life trajectory of forever being other –continuing the colonial storyline… " (Lin and Luke 2006: 67 cited in Phillipson 2008)

He maintains that English brings about a huge amount of linguistic and cultural capital to the user and argues that teaching English as an international language or a lingua franca is always an inherently political endeavour which is carefully packaged ‘in a mantle of the apolitical’ (15)

In trying to move away from the role of the language to examine the role of such accumulated power and authority in British circles Said lists some of the historical moments in which Britain has had an explicit display of power over colonies and concludes that while Orientalist novelists and historians derive their authority from these obvious superiority in known ‘power’ they at the same time are a part of the discursive mechanism of power creation through creating “worlds” in which such power relations are presupposed. As such there appear to be a circularity in production and consumption of Orientalist ideologies.

“what Ruskin, Tennyson, Meredith, Dickens, Arnold, Thacheray, George Elliot, Carlyle, Mill- in short the full roaster of significant Victorian writers- saw was a tremendous international display of British power virtually unchecked over the entire world. It was both logical and easy to identify themselves in one way or another with this power, having through various means already identified themselves with Britain domestically…There is an impressive circularity here; we are dominant because we have the power (industrial, military, moral), and they don’t, because of which they are not dominant; they are inferior, we are superior..” (127)

Such circularity is an inherent quality of a system of ideology-discourse-ideology of any kind, the type which can analysed and discussed in racist/discriminatory ideaologies as well.

Nationalism and extremism in post colonial time

Said condemns hijacking of the anti-colonial, anti-imperialistic discourses by local authoritarian regimes in the post colonial time e.g. Idi Amins and Saddam Husseins of the third world and maintains that such “nationalism” are counter productive (264).

Said tries to explain the complexity of the concept of ‘nationalism’ in the context of anti-imperialistic struggles; "'nationalism' is a word that still signifies all sorts of undifferentiated things, but it serves me quit adequately to identify the mobilizing force that coalesced into resistance against an alien and occupying empire on the part of peoples processing a common history, religion, and language.” (269)

At the same time he shows that such nativist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist movements in colonial or more contemporary world tends to pave the way for authoritarian regimes who, in turn, derive their legitimacy from such discourses.

“Nationality, nationalism, nativism; the progression is, I believe, more and more constraining. In countries like Algeria and Kenya one can watch the heroic resistance of community partly formed out of colonial degradations, leading to a protracted armed and cultural conflict with the imperial powers, in turn giving way to a one-party state with dictatorial rule and, in case of Algeria, an uncompromising Islamic fundamentalism opposition…No transformation of social consciousness here, but only an appalling pathology of power duplicated elsewhere- in the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Zaire, Morocco, Iran… Any way nativism is not the only alternative"(277).

“Democracy in any real sense of the word is nowhere to be found in the still ‘nationalistic’ Middle East: there are either privileged oligarchies or privileged ethnic groups. The large mass of people is crushed beneath dictatorship or unyielding, unresponsive, unpopular government” (363).

Thus, quite sadly such anti-imperialistic discourses lay the foundation of oligarchies in post colonial world e.g. Iran (Said cites Jalal Al Ahmad’s ‘Occidentosis’ as an example of an anti-imperialistic account which blames the ‘West’ for all the evils in the world. 276). However, he admits that his agenda for this book is not to focus and analyse how anti-imperialistic discourses legitimate radical undemocratic systems in the post colonial world (333).

Perhaps understandably Said’s account of Iran –when discussed in more details- does not seem to be as comprehensive as expected. In discussing the first “Gulf war” (the name being controversial itself!), while he criticizes Saddam Hussein for trying to wipe out Kuwait he strongly criticises Saddam’s expansionist strategies and asks; “What sort of muddled and anachronistic idea of Bismarckian ‘integration’ was it to wipe out a country and smash its society with ‘Arab unity’ as the goal?” (362). What can be observed from an Iranian perspective is that nothing of the kind is even argued for Saddam’s expansionist invasion of Iran which engaged Iran and Iraq in 8 years of devastating war. Was that war not “Bismarckian” enough? Was that war a legitimate intend under the “Arab Unity”? Why turning a blind eye here as if nothing of the kind ever happened before the "first Gulf War"? Was it really the "first"?

He continues that “the most disheartening thing was that so many people, many of them victims of the same brutal logic, appear to have supported the action and sympathised not at all with Kuwait. Even if one grants that Kuwaitis were unpopular (does one have to be popular not to be exterminated?)”. Once again why not asking the same about Iran. Isn’t he also falling prey to the same hegemonic perspective of those who “appear to have supported the action” in the case of Iran? isnt it true that Iran –after 1979 revolution- was nothing to be favoured so all the world just decided to turn a blind eye on what Saddam tried to do?

Another major criticism on this part of his analysis is that he is assuming an inherent originality to “borders” in former colonies. He seems to miss out considering the fact that all these "borders" in the former colonies were drawn not very long time ago. I am not trying to say that it is “ok” for Saddam not to respect Kuwait as a sovereign country. However, this is a very important historical element that needs to be accounted for in a discussion like this. Thus, it is ethically the right thing to say that Kuwait was to be a “nation to be obliterated” through “murderous proposition”, but the use of language by Said seems rather too strong and worse this is only mentioned for Kuwait which is a very close allied of USA. Is Said falling to the same macro-structure of hegemonic power that he is so critical of?


'Western' or 'World' philosophy: A Euro-Centric philosophy

Said criticizes Western contemporary philosophy -and its more recent post modern and critical approaches- as being ignorant or not paying enough attention to the fact that the world is not necessarily experiencing what the ‘West’ is experiencing in terms of polity and philosophical perspective. That is to say that ‘Western’ philosophy does not have the means to account for ‘trans-European’ phenomenon like, colonialism or imperialism.

“Much of Western Marxism, in its aesthetic and cultural departments, is similarly blinded to the matter of imperialism. Frankfurt School critical theory, despite its seminal insights into the relationships between domination, modern society, and the opportunities for redemption through art as critique, is stunningly silent on racist theory, anti-imperialistic resistance, and oppositional practice in the empire. At lest the silence be interpreted as an oversight, we have today’s leading Frankfurt theorist, Jurgen Habermas, explaining in an interview (originally published in the new Left Review) that the silence is deliberate abstention: no, he says, we have nothing to say to ‘anti-imperialist’ and anti-capitalist struggles in the Third World, even if, he adds, ‘I am aware of the fact that this is eurocentrically limited view’. All the major French theoreticians except Deleuze, Todorov, and Derrida have been similarly upheeding, which has not prevented their ateliers from churning out theories of Marxism, language, psychoanalysis, and history with an implied applicability to the whole world. Much of the same thing can be said about Anglo- Saxon cultural theory, with the important exception of feminism, and a small handful of work by young critics influenced by Raymond Williams and Sturat Hall” (336)

Similar tendencies can generally be seen in what can be classified under a ‘post modern’ approach and the critic of ‘modernism’; be it in sociology, rhetorics, political science or philosophy. A lot of these theories assume a uni-form world with similar experiences of secularity, positivism, modernity and the so-called “enlightenment” and continue to subliminally assume universality in academic endeavours. The argumentation theory and systematisation of fallacies in argumentation e.g. in works of Van Eemeren is an example in which it is assumed that argumentation is the main source of power and legitimation in societies and such a society cherishes the ‘consent making through deliberation’ (Habermas) as the main or only way of winning ‘power’. A point which may not apply in the majority of lands in the world!

Said emphasizes on different qualities of different ‘worlds’ and argues that;

“ In the west, Post-modernism has seized upon the ahistorical weightlessness, consumerism, and spectacle of the new order. To it are affiliated other ideas like post-Marxism, and post-structuralism, varieties of what the Italian philosopher Gianni Vatimo describes as ‘the weak thought’ or ‘the end of modernity’. Yet in the Arab and Islamic world many artists and intellectuals like Adonis, Elias Khoury, Kamal Abu Deeb, Muhammad Arkoun, and Jamal Ben Sheikh are still concerned with modernity itself, still far from exhausted, still a major challenge in a culture dominated by turath (heritage) and orthodoxy. This is similarly the case in Caribbean, East Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent...” (399)

Yet, after highlighting the inefficiencies of assumptions of universality and perfect similarity he shows how discriminatory ideologies work on the concepts of binary boundaries and ‘differences’ and how such conceptualisations are not valid any more and should be avoided.

“No one today is purely one thing. Lables like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are no more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of culture and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their own cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuity of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human was about.” (408)



Said E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism, Random House, London.

Phillipson, R. (2008) ‘The linguistic imperialism of neoliberal empire’ Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 5/1.