Introduction to the INURA
(International Network of Urban Research and Action) Panel on Urban
Theory/Berlin Revisited at the 99th
Annual AAG (American Association of Geographers) Conference, New
Orleans, USA, 8 March 2003
Kanishka
Goonewardena
University of Toronto І
kanishka@geog.utoronto.ca
What’s urban planning and
theory got to do with the latest war on Iraq?
More than one would have first thought, it seems. According to its proponents, the war is
about human rights and democracy for Iraq—as well as peace and security for the
US and its obedient allies—all of which are to be achieved by forcibly removing
the evil dictator Saddam Hussein from power.
Iraqis will be certainly better off without him, yes; and progressive planners
advocating for democracy and human rights through whatever work they do may
well be inclined to lend their principled support to the well-advertised
humanitarian aims of this putatively pre-emptive strike.
Yet, the moral case for war
rings hollow. For the historical record
of US imperialism that now sports the feather of the ‘international community’
in its cap—and goes by the euphemisms of globalization and neoliberalism in our
academic discourse—leaves no room for the official claims for war to be taken
at face value. If we are to trust that
human rights and democracy (however defined) have always been the global goals
of the US, then it becomes impossible to make sense of its overt and covert
support for all manner of brutal dictatorships over the years, especially in
the Muslim world; not least in the case of Suharto’s in Indonesia, which
murdered many more of its own citizens than did Hussein’s in Iraq, with ample
backing from the CIA. Nor can we
understand, if we are to believe that recent US administrations have
represented the will of the ‘international community’, even in the limited
expression of the UN, then why the US (and its loyal and momentarily disloyal
allies) turned a blind eye to all those violations of UN Security Council
resolutions by Israel, while acknowledging its formidable nuclear arsenal and
weapons of mass destruction with a knowing wink. Not to mention former support for Hussein himself, which Mr.
Rumsfeld knows well. The clear pattern
that emerges from the history of US foreign policy veiled by human rights and
democracy reveals not humanitarian values, but increasingly naked and arrogant
self-interest. If there is any morality
in it, it consists of the decisive rejection of Platonic Right is Might by
Nietzschean Might is Right.
Washington’s Faustian bid for
world dominance now involves the globalization of a ‘free market’ that is
anything but free—a global economy quite literally rigged in favour of the US
über alles, by any means necessary, including the IMF, the World Bank and the
Military Industrial Complex. The thirst
for oil, no doubt, springs from the same master plan. The vital part played in it by urban planners and theorists who
have long promoted neoliberal ideology and provided legitimacy to
auto-dependent forms of urban sprawl, as thousands who had to drive to
anti-war rallies in the US would have noted, has aligned planning with US
imperialism. Against this unholy
alliance, the progressives among us must heed the advice given to American
activists by the leader of the Brazilian landless peasants’ movement, João
Pedro Stedile, upon being asked how they could be of help in the South:
‘overthrow your neoliberal governments’!
In the name of human rights and democracy, a radical regime
change is needed indeed—in Washington.