SOCIAL SCIENTIST
supra-national State institutions; and secondly, these are being imposed upon the world not by US imperialism in isolation but by all the different imperialist countries joining together. Trying Milosevich before a "World Tribunal" is not just an American idea; the Blairs and the Schroeders support it as well.
The question arises: how did a situation arise where imperialism managed to reverse the process unleashed by decolonisation and consolidate itself to such a great extent? The answer no doubt is complex, but the ideological hegemony of imperialism must constitute one element of it. The lead article of the current issue of Social Scientist, which is the text of the Presidential Address by B.Surendra Rao to the Modern India section of the 61st session of the Indian History Congress held in Calcutta, provides inter alia a fascinating examination of this hegemony. "The dialogue in the context of colonialism", he argues, "is never a free exchange of ideas; it is largely surrendering to the dominant, even if it is constantly accompanied by disagreement, protest and repudiation." This does not mean that India did not evolve its own responses or make its own choices within this ambience. But it had to show great strength to survive and define itself then; and it has to show even greater strength to survive the new wave of globalisation. Could it, however, be that bourgeois nationalism has become historically incapable of this resilience in today's world?
This question comes up for discussion, among several others, in Radhika Desai's article on the politics of the Right. Her perception has two related elements: one, the systematic disappearance, within economies, of non-capitalist structures and of the older distinctions between agricultural versus industrial or rural versus urban interests; two, in the absence of any serious inter-imperialist rivalry, the pursuit by all countries of "an international policy of competition and bargaining to gain a more beneficial position for the capitalist interests behind them." Even bourgeois nationalism in other words is replaced by the normal business of international capitalist competition.
The current issue also pays homage to two intellectual stalwarts belonging to the Left spectrum, Ravinder Kumar and Pradhan Harishankar Prasad, who passed away recently.