habeas ideas
Searching for the next communism
Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld
Issue date: 3/8/06 Section: Forum
First it was uncharted territories, then colonialism and finally communism. Since the rise of the Age of Discovery, the West has searched for, and usually found, an adversary about which to orient its essence. For a while, European kingdoms oriented themselves around exploration of uncharted lands in the search for new wealth. After that, the focus turned towards the actual administration and exploitation of these lands, which lasted through the two world wars and finally collapsed by the end of the 1970s. From World War II on, the West established itself as the stalwart of capitalism and democracy, in direct opposition to communism. This battle ended in 1991, with the collapse of Soviet Union, and since then, the West has been searching for an opponent through which it can create a common enemy.
Many potential systems arose as possible enemy replacements. Saddam Hussein provided a cute distraction. Several places, including Haiti in 1994 and Yugoslavia in 1999, seemed to offer a vision of the West as a benevolent peace force, restoring order where needed and protecting innocents when threatened. But other experiences, like America's hasty withdrawal from Somalia and the UN's Rwandan negligence, suggested the appetite for dirty gruntwork was small, that the restoration of peace and order was only desirable when it cost few lives. Thus, the West went through the '90s soulless, without a clear opposition force.
Two political theorists, Samuel Huntington of Harvard and Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins University, offered competing visions at the beginning of the 1990s about the future of the world. Huntington, in his article "The Clash of Civilizations?" (1993), posited that the world would face a values clash between enlarging civilizations, and this would provide the basis for future conflict and orientations. Fukuyama, writing in "The End of History" (1992), offers a dialectical interpretation of history, with the end result being the victory of democracy. He posits that with democracy triumphant as the only ideological system, historical processes would cease.
Events of the last five months, roughly from the start of the Muslim riots in France and parts of Europe to the recent Dubai ports controversy, have seen an intensifying polarization of rhetoric between the "West" and "Islam." To a casual Western observer, i.e. politicians and laymen, Muslims - distinctions are rarely made between geographic populations, as if Muslims are the same everywhere - are violent, angry, undemocratic, uneducated and generally not of the same value of the West. To someone from the other side, the West - the West also being treated as a homogenous bloc - is xenophobic, greedy, insensitive and intolerant. The first simplified understanding would explain why Muslims are always rioting, why they burn everything, and why they do not understand free speech. The second simplified conception explains why the West draws Mohammad's turn as a bomb, seeks to exploit the Middle East for oil, will let India - but not Iran - have a nuclear arsenal, and why America will let British and Chinese firms manage its ports but not an Arab one.
It would be a mistake to extrapolate the next 50 years from the last five months, though one could draw a conclusion supporting Huntington, as the Muslim world and Western Christendom are both separate civilizations in his world view. One could further argue that another system will instead orient itself against the West. Energy extremism in countries like Venezuela, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia, which have artificially inflated political economic power due to high energy prices and their large reserves, could be the West's new competing system. As it represents an actual political, economic and military infrastructure, in contrast to Islam's primarily cultural opposition, one could argue that energy extremism is a more viable opponent to the West. Or one might see the lack of a power center, i.e. a country playing the role America does for the West or Russia did for the USSR, for Islam or for energy extremism as a clear indicator of each one's lack of viability.
It would be premature to divine the future from recent events, if one assumes that Huntington's dialectic interpretation is correct. Right now, the world is not experiencing a clash of civilizations, but rather a clash of interpretations: must there always be a definite other, or has the world reached a homeostatic state of evolution?
Zachary is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences.
Many potential systems arose as possible enemy replacements. Saddam Hussein provided a cute distraction. Several places, including Haiti in 1994 and Yugoslavia in 1999, seemed to offer a vision of the West as a benevolent peace force, restoring order where needed and protecting innocents when threatened. But other experiences, like America's hasty withdrawal from Somalia and the UN's Rwandan negligence, suggested the appetite for dirty gruntwork was small, that the restoration of peace and order was only desirable when it cost few lives. Thus, the West went through the '90s soulless, without a clear opposition force.
Two political theorists, Samuel Huntington of Harvard and Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins University, offered competing visions at the beginning of the 1990s about the future of the world. Huntington, in his article "The Clash of Civilizations?" (1993), posited that the world would face a values clash between enlarging civilizations, and this would provide the basis for future conflict and orientations. Fukuyama, writing in "The End of History" (1992), offers a dialectical interpretation of history, with the end result being the victory of democracy. He posits that with democracy triumphant as the only ideological system, historical processes would cease.
Events of the last five months, roughly from the start of the Muslim riots in France and parts of Europe to the recent Dubai ports controversy, have seen an intensifying polarization of rhetoric between the "West" and "Islam." To a casual Western observer, i.e. politicians and laymen, Muslims - distinctions are rarely made between geographic populations, as if Muslims are the same everywhere - are violent, angry, undemocratic, uneducated and generally not of the same value of the West. To someone from the other side, the West - the West also being treated as a homogenous bloc - is xenophobic, greedy, insensitive and intolerant. The first simplified understanding would explain why Muslims are always rioting, why they burn everything, and why they do not understand free speech. The second simplified conception explains why the West draws Mohammad's turn as a bomb, seeks to exploit the Middle East for oil, will let India - but not Iran - have a nuclear arsenal, and why America will let British and Chinese firms manage its ports but not an Arab one.
It would be a mistake to extrapolate the next 50 years from the last five months, though one could draw a conclusion supporting Huntington, as the Muslim world and Western Christendom are both separate civilizations in his world view. One could further argue that another system will instead orient itself against the West. Energy extremism in countries like Venezuela, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia, which have artificially inflated political economic power due to high energy prices and their large reserves, could be the West's new competing system. As it represents an actual political, economic and military infrastructure, in contrast to Islam's primarily cultural opposition, one could argue that energy extremism is a more viable opponent to the West. Or one might see the lack of a power center, i.e. a country playing the role America does for the West or Russia did for the USSR, for Islam or for energy extremism as a clear indicator of each one's lack of viability.
It would be premature to divine the future from recent events, if one assumes that Huntington's dialectic interpretation is correct. Right now, the world is not experiencing a clash of civilizations, but rather a clash of interpretations: must there always be a definite other, or has the world reached a homeostatic state of evolution?
Zachary is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences.
