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As India and Pakistan confront each other again, I remember that VS Naipaul managed to upset both countries. And Argentina, east Africa, Islamic south-east Asia, the Caribbean, Iran. Few writers have seen more of the world. Few have found it more wanting. Some put this down to the western chauvinism of a man who named his cat after the first Roman emperor. For others, it was just a lucid mind at work. His prose stings because it tends not to do abuse, or even adjectives, so much as the patient accretion of telling detail.
Either way, something that might be called the Naipaul paradox is going on in the modern world. Foreign travel has been growing for decades. But so has nationalism. This “shouldn’t” be true. Although no one except a fool or Mark Twain ever thought travel was necessarily “fatal to prejudice”, it was fair to expect a general lowering of enmities as people, and peoples, came into contact.
To see how that is going, look around. The hardening of relations between China and the west from around 2012 came after an era of tourist and student traffic from the one place to the other. Brits and Italians are among the most prolific travellers in the world. Both countries have voted for propositions or parties that might be called nationalist over the past decade. In 1995, eight per cent of Americans were planning a foreign trip in the next six months. In 2023, more than a fifth were. In which of those two periods was the US more internationalist?
Mark Zuckerberg’s belief that online contact would “bring the world closer together” has dated laughably. But at least people say so. It feels ruder, almost transgressive, to point out that travel has also flopped as a uniter of the species. In Europe, it is still a midwit dinner party applause line that such and such a percentage of Americans don’t have passports. Leaving aside the methodological problem here — the document wasn’t needed for some foreign trips until 2007 — so what? When 3 per cent held valid passports, the US voted for George HW Bush, the old China hand and CIA man, the most outward-looking of presidents. Now that nearing half do, Donald Trump is in the White House.
Why did travel fail? The kindest answer is that other forces drove nationalism, such as immigration, and that things would be even tenser now without the great increase in travel. Another is that most of the increase is accounted for by people who were liberal-minded to begin with. Those most in need of foreign exposure are still dodging it.
Each of these is a plausible line, but then so is a third: that travel should never have had such heroic claims made for it. If cross-border mingling by itself thickened the cord of human sympathy, Europe would have a more tranquil past. In other words, it is entirely possible to be a worldly jingo. It is possible to engage with another culture while rejecting it. Otherwise, the time that Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai and the Islamist forerunner Sayyid Qutb spent in the west would have disarmed them, instead of heightening their awareness of difference.
Travel is enormous fun. Besides that, it can be an educational top-up, if you arrive in a place with a foundation of reading. (And if you don’t over-index whatever you happen to observe in person.) But a connecting experience? A reminder of the essential oneness of humankind? If it were that, we should have expected national consciousness to recede, not surge, in the age of cheap flights, a dissolved Iron Curtain and a China that became porous in both directions.
To explain this away, some will insist on the difference between crass “tourism” and real “travel”. Please. This has become a class distinction, nothing more, like that between “expats” and “immigrants”. Besides, Naipaul, at least before he turned into a cartoon of Great Man hauteur, put in the leg work. He is the postwar writer of English who makes even the best of the others appear to be playing at the job. If he recoiled from the world that he roamed, it seems he wasn’t, for once, exceptional.
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