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?