Brexit: Line isn’t between Left, Right, it’s North/South

Britain has voted to exit from the European Union, and the shockwaves are being felt around the world, including here in Mumbai. We live in a time of unprecedented, near-instantaneous interconnectedness. London and Mumbai are closer today than Mumbai and hinterland Maharashtra. To get from Mumbai to London one merely needs to board a flight. Eight hours of sipping wine, napping, reading and watching movies at altitudes of around 32,000 feet will get you to London, if you can afford the ticket.

Getting to the state’s interiors, the places-between-places that the global traveller from Mumbai flies over, is a harder, and often longer, journey. If you have to do the distance by bus or train, rather than your own air-conditioned car, it becomes more difficult.

This tyranny of proximity is not a situation unique to Mumbai. It is also true of Delhi, Bengaluru, or for that matter, London.

The shrinking of physical distances between cosmopolitan cities is accompanied by a shrinking of mental distances. At the same time, there is a growing disconnect between the global jet set and their country cousins everywhere.

The Brexit vote brought this disconnect out in sharp relief. England voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU, but London was an exception. It voted strongly to remain in the Union. There is now a petition going around for London to secede from England. It had garnered more than 108,000 signatures by Saturday afternoon.

Given a choice, many cities around the world might vote to secede from their surroundings. They mentally seceded from the hinterlands long ago.

The typical young man or woman sitting before a laptop in a cafe or getting a drink with friends at a pub is quite alike in Mumbai, London, New York, Paris, Berlin, or Auckland. These are people who wear the same clothes, eat the same foods, watch the same TV shows and films, and use the same phones and computers. Their lifestyles are similar across geographies.

What does this person have in common with a poor, barely literate farmer Does the Mumbaikar who frequents Social have anything in common with the Maharashtrian who frequents the bidi workshops of Solapur

Obvious income disparities exist within cities, but the lifestyle that accompanies a certain level of prosperity in the city is part of global establishment culture. This establishment is composed mainly of a thin global elite that has benefited from the processes popularly known as globalisation. The lifestyle of this lot is the one showcased as worth aspiring to.

It is doubtless alluring, but only a very small percent of people globally make it. Here in India, going by income and wealth levels, less than 3 per cent of the population — at most – is anywhere near that lifestyle. This possibly explains why, in a country of 1.25 billion people, you’ll often hear someone muttering, “Everyone knows everyone”.

The supercilious hauteur with which the establishment elites regard the concerns, values and choices of those who haven’t made it — their less fortunate and less sophisticated country cousins — is fuelling political reactions from India to America. The Brexit vote is another intimation of this reality.

Thinking about it in terms of Left and Right has confused the world. Left Liberals assume that anyone who is not them is a Right-wing nut. However, as the Brexit vote showed, on crucial issues, there are a lot of people from both Left and Right who come to similar conclusions through differing paths. The Brexit vote also had a Lexit component — Leftists in favour of the exit. Reports in the British press say that the working classes and poor largely supported the exit. Around 17 million people voted for Brexit, but only 3.7 million had voted for Nigel Farage’s Right-wing UK Independence Party in the last elections, Lexit campaigners Leftleave pointed out after the vote. Where did the additional millions come from

What has happened in the years since 1991 and the end of the Cold War is that the lines between the global North and the global South have blurred. The global North is no longer simply demarcated by countries in Western Europe and North America. It is now a global culture. The dividing line between global North and global South now runs not only between countries, but also through them.

The cosmopolitan elites, wherever they may be, are members of the global North. The local, the desi, the indigenous — who is often also the poor, the victim of global capitalism — is typically a member of the global South.

The response from these losers of globalisation has been confused and misread because of the ideological blinkers of Left and Right. Those two categories need to be put where they belong, in the history books. They have lost contemporary relevance in a globalized world.

Communism was tried in several variants in many countries around the world for extended lengths of time. It proved to be cruel, inefficient and intolerant, and eventually crumbled.

The American way has also been tried, and is being found wanting. From Occupy Wall Street to the increasingly loud voices warning of rising inequality everywhere, to Brexit, there is a straight line.

The economic aspect is only one part of it. Globalisation is also associated with a certain homogenisation. The most global spaces in the world are airport terminals and five star hotels. Inside those places, it can be hard to tell which country one is in.

The resistance to this homogenisation comes not from the people expiating their guilt by shopping for ethical, organic food at astronomical prices. It comes from local indigenous cultures, and from religions, which are associated with the Right wing everywhere.

The assumed hierarchy of global cosmopolitanism being superior to local cultures leads to a situation where the global citizens everywhere are on one side and the local citizens everywhere are on the other.

The culture of the global North has long been assumed to be the universal culture, the one that all others will eventually grow up to become. This assumption can now be challenged.

The dividing line that matters in today's world is not between Left and Right. It is between North and South.