Black Earth(138)

Hitler was a child of the first globalization, which arose under imperial auspices at the end of the nineteenth century. We are the children of the second, that of the late twentieth century. Globalization is neither a problem nor a solution; it is a condition with a history. It brings a specific intellectual danger. People have no choice but to think on a planetary scale—as Hitler and Carl Schmitt never tired of emphasizing. Since the world is more complex than a country or a city, the temptation is all the greater to find some master key to understanding everything. When a global order collapses, as was the experience of many Europeans in the second, third, and fourth decades of the twentieth century, a simplistic diagnosis such as Hitler’s can seem to clarify the global by referring to the ecological, the supernatural, or the conspiratorial. When the normal rules seem to have been broken and expectations have been shattered, a suspicion can be burnished that someone (the Jews, for example) has somehow diverted nature from its proper course. A problem that is truly planetary in scale, such as climate change, obviously demands global solutions—and one apparent solution is to define a global enemy.

The Holocaust was different from other episodes of mass killing or ethnic cleansing because German policy aimed for the murder of every Jewish child, woman, and man. This was only thinkable because the Jews were understood as the makers and enforcers of a corrupt planetary order. Jews can again be seen as a universal threat, as indeed they already are by increasingly important political formations in Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. So might Muslims, gays, or other groups that can be associated with changes on a worldwide scale.

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Climate change as a local problem can produce local conflicts; climate change as a global crisis might generate the demand for global victims. Over the past two decades, the continent of Africa has provided some indications of what these local conflicts will be like, and hints about how they might become global. It is a continent of weak states. In conditions of state collapse, droughts can bring hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation, as in Somalia in 2010. Climate change can also increase the likelihood that Africans will find ideological reasons to kill other Africans in times of apparent shortage. In the future, Africa might also become the site of a global competition for food, perhaps with accompanying global ideological justifications.

Africa was a part of Germany’s colonial past when Hitler came to power. The conquest of Africa was the final stage of the first globalization, at the time of Hitler’s childhood. It was in sub-Saharan Africa that Germans and other Europeans relearned their lessons of race. Rwanda is an artifact of Europe’s scramble for Africa in general and of German East Africa in particular. The division of its population into Hutu and Tutsi clans was the typical European method of rule: to favor one group in order to govern another. It made no more and no less sense than the idea that Poles and Ukrainians belonged to a different race than Germans, or that Slavs should be recruited from starvation camps in order to aid in the killing of Jews. Today’s Africans can and do apply racial divisions and fantasies to one another, just as Europeans did to Africans in the 1880s and 1890s and Europeans did to Europeans in the 1930s and 1940s.

Mass killing in Rwanda provides an example of a political response to ecological crisis on a national scale. The exhaustion of the country’s arable land in the late 1980s was followed by an absolute decline in crop yields in 1993. The government recognized overpopulation as a problem and was accordingly seeking ways to export its own people to neighboring countries. It faced a political rival associated with the Tutsis whose invasion plans involved the redistribution of precious farms. The government’s policy of encouraging Hutus to kill Tutsis in spring 1994 was most successful where there were land shortages. People who wanted land denounced their neighbors. Perpetrators said that they were motivated by the desire to seize land and by the fear that others would do so before them. During the campaign of killing, Hutus did indeed kill Tutsis, but when no Tutsis were available Hutus also killed other Hutus—and took their land. Because Tutsis had been favored by the colonial powers, Hutus who killed them could cloak themselves in a myth of colonial liberation. Between April and July 1994, at least half a million people were murdered.

The starvation in Somalia and the mass killing in Rwanda are dreadful suggestions of what climate change might bring to Africa. The first exemplifies death brought directly by climate, and the second, racial conflict brought by the interaction of climate and political creativity. The future might hold the third and most fearsome possibility: an interaction between local scarcity and a colonial power capable of extracting food while exporting global ideology. Even as Africans themselves struggle for access to arable soil and potable water, their continent presents itself as the solution to the food security problems of Asians. The combination of weak property rights, corrupt regimes, and one half of the world’s untilled soil has placed Africa at the center of Asian food security planning. The United Arab Emirates and South Korea have tried to control large swathes of Sudan. They have been joined by Japan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia in consistent efforts to buy or lease agrarian terrain in Africa. A South Korean company has tried to lease half of Madagascar.