Are progressive values only found in the West?   

Men and women came together during the Egyptian revolution to call for liberation (Pic: Gigi Ibrahim/Flickr commons license) the West

Is standing up for women’s and migrant’s rights and LGBT+ liberation in countries in the Global South part of an attempt to impose “Western values” on unwilling societies? That appears to be the stance of Hugo Lloris, the goalkeeper captain of the French football team who will be in Qatar for the World Cup.

Last week, he discussed his refusal to wear a rainbow armband during the contest. “When we are in France, when we welcome ­foreigners, we often want them to follow our rules, to respect our culture, and I will do the same when I go to Qatar, quite simply,” Lloris said.

“I can agree or disagree with their ideas, but I have to show respect.” Far from an outlier, Lloris’s views echo those of parts of the establishment in the Global South. Qatari government ministers recently accused Western media coverage of the World Cup of “racism” and “hate speech” when describing the lives of migrant workers who live and die there. 

Not very long ago, Trinidadian Anglican Bishop Victor Gill described attempts to rid the world of anti-gay laws as a form of “neo-colonialism”. Standing behind Lloris’s idea of “showing respect” is the belief that Qatar, and many other countries, are innately misogynistic and homophobic. 

The prejudices there are said to be part of a traditional religious or ethnic culture, and therefore inescapable. But there is no such thing as a national culture that is ­understood in the same way by all classes in society. Everything from the way we speak, to what we eat and how we dress is divided along class lines.

Most importantly, so are the ideas about the kind of society we live in. That means that even the religious ideas that inspire the laws of many states are ­interpreted in very different, and sometimes contradictory ways. 

While the rich see religion as a justification for their rule, the poor often see the exact opposite, believing that god favours the downtrodden. The revolt currently gripping Iran shows how these ideas can clash. Women there were routinely derided by Western politicians and media as “controlled” and lacking any sense of agency.

It was proof, they said, of the backward nature of Islam.  But with women protesters today leading a mass ­movement on the streets—some veiled, some unveiled—who today would dare make a similar claim?

There are other lazy assumptions behind ideas of an inherently reactionary Global South, and much of that is to do with how commentators understand the West. Champions of liberal ­capitalism claim the newly emerging system drew on 17th century Enlightenment philosophies of individual liberty. 

These, they argue, are the ideological root of the specific forms of sexual freedom we know today. Because, they say, no similar movement took place outside Europe, the rest of the world remains trapped in social backwardness. Such assertions are generally levelled first at Islam.

But the history of the Islamic world shows that it raised many of the themes which later became associated with the Enlightenment, and did so ­earlier in time.

Cruel Britannia—the bloody truth about the British Empire

  Read More

The charge ignores another important challenge too. That homophobia was deliberately cultivated by the British Empire in its colonies as part of a way to create the right conditions for capitalist accumulation. In short, Britain’s ruling class laid down the basis for reactionary laws.

The family became an important way of deciding how property disputes were to be settled and was codified in law. That in turn set the place of women and children in the system. Laws governing the raising of taxes, trading with overseas countries, and the enshrining of cast customs were all passed in the best interests of the colonisers.

From the 1860s onwards, the British Empire spread legal ordinances and common law throughout its possessions. Among these were laws that banned sexual relations between males with the threat of long imprisonment. That many cultures in colonised countries accepted a more flexible approach to gender was proof, said the British, that something had to be done to “civilise” them.

For example, 16th century English traveller Andrew Battell was shocked by the Imbangala people in what is today Angola. “Men in women’s apparel, with whom they kept amongst their wives,” he recorded in disdain.

In the Indian subcontinent, the Hijra transgender people lived in distinct communities and were said to be imbued with mystical powers. Their long ­history meant they were ­mentioned in ancient Hindu religious texts and were accepted as dancers at ­weddings and other events.

While the local implementation of anti-gay laws varied, the outcome was that a combination of morality and state sanction helped popularise ­homophobic ideologies that continue to exist today. Of the 71 countries around the world in which same-sex sexual relations are illegal, more than half are former British colonies or protectorates.

The laws remain today, not simply because they reflect local cultures. It’s because the new rulers of the Global South also find them a useful tool for disciplining workers and the poor, and creating division. The story of the enlightened West also falls apart when we look how it isn’t actually as liberated as those in power say it is.

In the United States, the supposed centre of the free world, the crime of “Sodomy” and other forms of sex between men, stayed on the statute books of many states until the 1970s. The fundamental right of a woman to control their own fertility was not even partially assured until the Roe v Wade court judgement in 1973—which has now been reversed. Descriptions of life for LGBT+ people in 1960s America matches many of those we hear today from the Global South. 

Here, for example, is Tangents magazine’s description of a raid on the Black Cat gay bar in Los Angeles in 1967.  “12 vice-squad officers— plainclothesmen—started ­beating patrons to the floor about 5 minutes after midnight. “They did not identify ­themselves except by their weapons. After beating the patrons, the 14 to be arrested were laid face down on the ­sidewalk outside the bar.”

The raid was routine and unsurprising, but the protests against it—two years before the famous Stonewall Riot in New York— were something new.  They grew into a radical street movement which threw the establishment onto the defensive while changing ­popular attitudes.

Within two years, LA councillors that had backed the police crackdown were voted out to be replaced by those that openly canvassed to win votes from LGBT+ people. The legal changes when they came were not a response to a rational impulse in the establishment, but to an enormous uprising from below.  They certainly had nothing to do with the supposed ­superiority of Western culture.

The idea of democracy, freedom and liberation being “Western values” would have appeared a cruel joke to the millions of people suffering under the yoke of colonialism in the middle of the 20th century. Fighters for independence across Asia and Africa wanted nothing less than equal rights and true democracy. 

But they found themselves jailed and tortured by the British for their insistence. The claim would have had an equally unfunny ring in the ears of most ordinary people in 18th and 19th century Britain too. The rich denounced their demands for democracy as “mob rule”.

Edmund Burke, the father of modern Conservativism, talked of the threat of the “swinish multitude” that would dominate if the right to vote was extended to everybody.  That the ruling class wanted to restrict ­freedoms for both ­working people in Britain as well as those they sweated in the colonies makes an important point for those fighting today.

The rights that exist now in the West are the precious results of past struggles.  Rather than a benevolent and enlightened ruling class ­handing them out, they were instead paid for in blood.

The lack of rights for women, LGBT+ people and for ­workers, in many parts of the Global South is not a reflection of their culture or the way people would like to live if they were given a choice.  Instead, it reflects the degree of violence and state repression that people face when they dare to rise up.

So, when Lloris says he only wants to show respect to the countries that he visits, the only deference he is showing is to despot rulers—and their ­backers in the West.