THE STUPIDITY OF POLITICAL FORMULAS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Ahmed JEBRANE
The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 could presage an era of appeasement through the unification of peoples around the Western model of liberal democracy. And in the general euphoria, many people thought that we were going to witness the realization of a universalcivilization. Thus, according to Francis Fukuyama, who was an adviser to President Bush and became famous by writing The End of History or The Last Man, what characterizes our time is a “growinghomogenizationofallhumansocieties”. The growing consensus around human rights, democracy and the liberal economy would constitute a kind of “end point of the ideological evolution of humanity”. And democracy, still according to Fukuyama, contains the principle of a pacification of human relations.
Liberal democracy replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with the rational desire to be recognized as their equal. A world made up of liberal democracies should therefore experience far fewer occasions for war since all nations would reciprocally recognize their mutual legitimacy.
The global village should therefore constitute the horizon of the 21st century. Apparently, the end of the blocks and the globalization of economic exchanges seem to prove Fukuyama right. However, this globalization does not in fact imply any political or cultural unity. On the contrary, for 20 years we have witnessed an increase in bloody conflicts. Huntington's thesis is that despite appearances, the world is moving towards fragmentation rather than unification, towards divisions and rivalries rather than peace. How to understand such a paradox?
If the 19th century was marked by the conflicts of nation-states and the 20th by the clashofideologies, the next century will see the clash ofcivilizations because the borders between cultures, religions and races are now fracture lines. What Huntington shows throughout his book is that “modernizationisnot synonymous with Westernization”. Non-Western peoples are experiencing flourishing economic development but are not ready to sell off their cultural and religious values. The supremacy of the English language, the dollar and the Big Mac is only a superficial phenomenon that does not have a profound influence on these societies. Thus, for Huntington, the real key to history is not economic but cultural. The economic success of the Far East is rooted in Asian culture. Muslim culture largely explains the failure of democracy in much of the Muslim world. The thesis is therefore based on the concept of civilization, which is defined as the broadest cultural entity before the unity of the human race and is essentially characterized by religion. Huntington counts eight civilizations in the present world: the Western, Islamic, Orthodox, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu and Latin American civilizations, Africa appearing only as a civilization in formation. Is such a division relevant? In reality, if there is today a frontal clash between two types of society, it is first of all a clash between a closedsocietyandan opensociety. On the one hand, there are those who want a theocratic society, based on surveillance and censorship. And on the other, there are those who want a society based on the protection of all individual, economic, political and religious freedoms. This conflict transcends religious affiliations since it also
exists within the Islamic world, between a minority of enlightened and modern Muslims on the one hand, and another fanatically intolerant minority on the other.
Among the ingredients fueling the conflict between Islam and the West is the idea, shared by most leaders of the Western world, that the universality of their culture and that their superior power, albeit in decline, confers the duty to extend this culture throughout the world.
Such interventionism, however well intentioned, can only fuel hatred and rejection of the West. However, the foreign policy pursued by the West in the name of human rights is most often assimilated to masked imperialism and only leads to the exacerbation of conflicts. The West must therefore no longer, as in the past, attempt to impose its civilization on the rest of the world.
Yet the West must not renounce its values either. On the contrary, he must seek to rediscover its meaning, without ideological dogmatism. Moreover, peaceful cultural coexistence requires seeking what is common to most civilizations and not defending the supposedly universal characteristics of a given civilization. In the history of humanity, up to this day, progress has always benefited the initiating civilization for a long time. It was the philosophy of the Enlightenment that allowed the West to take a scientific, technological and economic lead over the rest of the world. Powers have always held back human intelligence. Any innovation had to be approved by the holders of political power allied with the rulers of the established religions. The fear of change dominated and men complied with the injunctions of the powerful who feared nothing so much as the questioning of their power.
With the Age of Enlightenment, thereignofindividualfreedom appeared for the first time. The treasures of intelligence previously crushed under the boot of those in power are unfolding like never before. The free men of the West reflect, invent, undertake, improve. The chance of history led the West to be the first civilization to effectively exploit the scientific and technical potential for the improvement of the condition of all. You always need an initiator and there is nothing shameful or reprehensible in being the first. Westerners have not always been. Ancient Egypt was building pyramids and palaces, writing papyri, and the Arab-Muslim civilization was radiating at one time, while Westerners lived in huts in the forests of Western Europe.
What Westerners have accomplished is now benefiting, little by little, all of humanity. So much so that Western political powers today naively fear the dynamism of newcomers, particularly China. But intelligence does not belong to any power, to any civilization. It constitutes the singularity of Man and thrives only in freedom.
The stupidity of certain political formulas that have become famous is astonishing. But ideologues are always wrong about the future, there is reason not to be too worried. The West does not have to choose between the present and the future. But he must prolong the past to have a future. We are all the product of a story and each man brings his stone to the construction of the whole of humanity which is only a long journey through time and space.
Nowadays, the totalitarian temptation is more topical than ever. It obviously comes from ideologies and religions. The ideological aspect is today on the extreme left. The religious aspect concerns the extreme right with radical Islamism. In the first case, it is a question of configuring the future according to the reflections of sociologists and philosophers and of eliminating any adversary through propaganda, militant action and the moral hold on individuals. In the second case, the objective is to freeze history according to the precepts of the Koran. In both cases, it is necessary to go through the destruction of Western civilization, because it is based on freedom because the hatred of freedom and the autonomy of the individual is common to left and right radicalisms. For the far left, the construction of an egalitarian future based on a few simplistic concepts of social science presupposes a strong political power, capable of crushing any resistance appearing on the road to servitude. This idiotic and implacable scenario had already been foreseen by Marxism-Leninism: to access the Eden of the classless society, one had to pass through the dictatorship of the proletariat box. For the Islamist far right, maintaining the power and privileges of political and religious leaders in Muslim civilization presupposes the stifling of peoples' desire for freedom. The condition of women must imperatively remain anchored in the stage of unchallenged male domination.
Workers and employees now vote mostly for the nationalist, so-called populist, right. The values of freedom are therefore defended in the West by a restless, unstable and numerically weakened middle class. Economic competition with emerging countries has led to massive relocations of industrial production and the loss of the monopoly of technological innovation enjoyed by the Western world. Mass unemployment appeared and gave rise to a feeling of decline. The emergence of large multinational groups in the digital field (GAFAM) is gradually transferring control over the processing and storage of information to private actors who are much more responsive and innovative than nation states. These are weakened. The political response of Western rulers has consisted in using redistribution through compulsory levies and public expenditure. They thought they could thus preserve the electoral base essential to any democracy, a united middle class representing approximately two-thirds of the population. But public deficits have accumulated beyond all reason and this middle class has exploded despite everything. Its lower part has become precarious because it is in direct competition with the rest of the world where salaries are much lower. This lobottom class votes for radicalism, mainly on the right, vainly hoping to find through political action the reassuring society of the past. Its upper part adapts to globalization and benefits from it at the cost of great professional mobility and constant availability. It politically supports the moderate political parties that constitute the traditional foundation of Western democracy. But, through her professional activity, she acts concretely for the supremacy of the powerful multinational economic and financial groups.
Peoplefromsomewhere are thus opposed to peoplefromanywhere according to the distinction of the English sociologist David Goodhart. This splitting of the Western middle class into two politically opposed clans considerably weakens Western states and can be considered predictive of an eventual challenge to democratic principles.
The dominating and colonizing West of the 19th and 20th centuries today finds itself weakened internally and externally. Democracy, and therefore freedom, seems weakened in Western nations by the precariousness of entire layers of the population. Geopolitically, the West has moved from domination to competition with the rest of the world. Why indeed should one civilization prevail over the others for the eternity of time? Intelligence is not a Western monopoly and it is only the conjunction of multiple factors that has enabled the
West to be a pioneer in development; chance more than necessity. The intelligence revolution currently underway concerns all of humanity. It is no longer only man's ability to act that is multiplied by machines, but his ability to think that reaches a power that neither Adam nor Allah could have imagined since the creation of the world.
Cultures sometimes tend to assert their identities in confrontation with others. And cultural particularisms, legitimized by religious or ethnic factors, have functioned until now as vectors of conflict and domination. For this reason, each civilization, each religion and each culture, must be able to practice, within its own bosom, tolerance, recognition of freedom of conscience and the right to be different. The complex international situation which took hold after 11 September, as well as following all the other terrorist attacks which have not ceased to mark this decade, makes thedialogueofcivilizations, religions and cultures a humanitarian emergency, impossible to postpone. This dialogue cannot be achieved without a radical challenge to capitalist globalization which imposes “a culture dominated by market values” and builds “inequalities between civilizations”. And to value the action of the anti-globalization movement in its claim of interculturality based on equal exchanges involving economic and political conditions other than those which currently prevail.