The Garden and the Jungle: How the West Sees the World
Author: Edwy Plenel, translated by Luke Leafgren
ISBN-13: 978-1635425598
Publisher: Other Press
Guideline Price: £15.99
The starting point for Edwy Plenel’s short book, essentially an extended essay, is a speech by then EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell in Bruges in October 2022, which pitched the “garden” of Europe, “where everything works”, against most of the rest of the world, which is “a jungle”.
It is a formulation that had previously surfaced in a 2018 book by the US neoconservative Robert Kagan, and in a comment by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak on his own country, which he described as a “villa in a jungle”.
Borrell’s use of the phrase was, for Plenel, proof that the western left is no less prone than the right to a racialised configuration of geopolitics, which has been merely sublimated since the end of empire, and which in recent years has been resurgent.
The panic over immigration in Europe and North America, which has been whipped up by the far right, and indulged by centrist parties, is in turn informed by this worldview; Plenel notes that a migrant encampment in Calais 20 years ago was dubbed “the jungle” by French police.
A former editor of the French daily Le Monde, and founder of the investigative news site Mediapart, Plenel is a man of the left, but very much a humanist principled left, with little time for the campism that infects many on that part of the spectrum. He values Ukrainian resistance to Russia as much as he does Palestinian resistance, and considers Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Bashar al-Assad as worthy of opprobrium as Binyamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.
The rise of the far right, which has “resumed the work of destruction that the defeat of the fascists in 1945 temporarily interrupted”, is one side of the coin in Plenel’s argument; another is the failure of western countries, particularly France, to examine their legacies of colonialism. Each feeds into the other.
Though Plenel’s arguments are persuasive in themselves, there is also a sense he is preaching to the choir and he is probably not going to convince those in the hard centre, never mind those on the right. The book’s understandable focus on France, with one chapter on one of the last French overseas colonies, New Caledonia, will also most likely hamper its appeal.
Comments are closed.