This article is in response to Dominique Moisi article entitled ‘The Clash of Emotions – Fear, Humiliation, Hope, and the New World Order’ that appeared in Foreign Affairs in the January-February 2007 issue. click here (pdf) for the article.
It was in 1993, just a year after Francis Fukuyama – a Huntington protégé –had announced the ‘end of history’, when Huntington took to the pages of Foreign Affairs, the same platform which Moisi uses, to describe his vision of the world riven with cultural cleavages. He argued that post-ideology- capitalism had already the battle of ideologies - culture would prove to be the organizing force within the world. Huntington’s flawed work has attracted numerous adherents, especially in influential policy making departments of the west - for it fits nicely the racist stereotypes that they hold and works as a wonderful political tool - and spawned a kind of policy making that has turned Huntington’s naive theory into a ’self fulfilling prophecy’.
Dominique Moisi, adds ‘emotion’ to Huntington’s idea of culture, and argues that its only really clash of civilizations as much as a ‘clash of emotions’. What he means by that is hopelessly naive. He argues that Asia displays a ‘culture of hope’, while the West displays a ‘culture of fear’ and the Arab world is trapped in a ‘culture of humiliation’. Ironically, Moisi’s essay ends up looking like a product of his self-described West’s ‘culture of fear’. Moisi’s is a casual, intellectually threadbare analysis that is primarily interested in countering the ‘Arab problem’ but does so by garbing new terminology. Of course the new terminology with which Moisi cloaks his argumentation is nothing more than a rehash of the old or something that can’t be understood by using Huntington’s or Bernard Lewis’s analysis. For example, what Moisi is really arguing about when he talks about Arab ‘culture of humiliation’ is that the Arab culture is stuck in historical paralysis, recounting the glory days of Islam and deeply resentful of West’s rise and yes, the formation of Israel. This shoddy analysis is not only deeply erroneous but shows poor understanding of the geopolitics of the area.
Analyzing world by ascribing ‘emotional’ charges to entire regions of the world is at best a deeply flawed enterprise and to do so to make an often made point about how the West must work to end Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nothing short of criminal. Nations, let alone regions, are much more complex organisms. We cannot group together Egypt and Iran, with their significant pre-Islamic histories and large cosmopolitan populations with the largely urbanized Kuwait or Bahrain or Oman. Neither can be straddle Lebanon, with its French occupation and again outward looking population, with Saudi Arabia for little meaningful analysis will result from it. The other important consideration is that it is easy to get carried away with sloganeering like backward civilizations etc. but the important forces that still shape the world are still the hustle for resources and military supremacy.
If Moisi’s analysis about this ‘culture of humiliation’ is correct, I fail to see why countries in Asia would be so insulated from it. After all, both Indian and Chinese civilizations have seen equally, if not more so, impressive glory days of their respective civilizations. And a majority of Indians and Chinese are equally alienated by the ‘progress’ that has really meant westernization. The rise of Hindu nationalism in India and the associated communal tensions are arguably rooted in the ‘culture of humiliation’. More importantly, Moisi’s assessment of Asia’s culture of hope, seems deeply misplaced given there are more poor people in Asia that anywhere else in the world. It is also important to note that it is terrorists from South Asian country, Pakistan, that were implicated in the bomb blasts in London, and not people from the Arabian peninsula.
Lastly, it is important to note that Moisi’s account makes little mention of two entire inhabited continents – South America and Africa. It is possible that given Moisi’s is really interested in exploring what ails Western-Arab relations, he forgets to analyze how bringing those two continents in affects his analysis. If Moisi had dared to spend a little more time on Latin America, he might have encountered the rise of the new left led by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia, left leaning Michelle Bachelet of Chile and Lula da Silva of Brazil. I wonder what two penny summarization of the culture of entire continent would Moisi would chosen for South America – ‘culture of anger’? Lets for moment analyze Africa, except for North Africa, with sub Saharan economy growing at 4%, Nigeria and Kenya increasingly confident, a quiet and slowly developing Rwanda, tumultuous Zimbabwe racked with hunger after years of Mugabe’s rule, or increasingly prosperous but cleave-ridden South Africa?
The overall point Moisi is interested in making is that the root of Arab ‘culture of humiliation’ is the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of course Israel has become a important rallying cry for myriad of Arabs but it has become so because criticizing it is the only authorized form of dissent as they live under authoritarian regimes that outlaw demonstrating about say lack of jobs. Even if we agree that Arab-Israeli conflict is an important emotive conflict, and it is – not only on the Arab street but in rest of the developing world for it is seen as an unabashed display of American Imperialism – it is still left to us to figure out why is it that the Arab world needs the west to solve conflict within the region? Moisi conveniently leaves out how Israel has been unabashedly armed, supplied and supported continuously by US and other western European countries.
Lets devote our energies to test the fundamental assumption that underpins Moisi’s analysis - the threat faced by the West from Arabs. Yes, Western Europe and US have seen some terrorist attacks but in terms of sheer number of casualties or damage, the impact has been minuscule. There is little rationale ground for fear of terrorism in the West, if we just predicate it on past incidences. Yes, Europe will have to face important questions about assimilation of Muslim immigrants and the nature and shape of society but to irrationally magnify those fears and make the basis of indulging in spiritless intellectual gymnastics is inexcusable. So perhaps inadvertently Moisi has stumbled on the key truth about global reality - the west fighting imaginary ghosts. Obviously Moisi only sees problem with the Muslim world - whose problems West needs to solve - so that it can live peacefully.
There is a perverted art of intellectually bankrupt argumentation that is at display in how Moisi lays out his argumentation – it is a type of shallow argumentation tailored towards a particular audience – the ‘fear ridden elites of the west’ – and hence fits the stereotypes of most who read it, marked by a wholesale neglect of key facts, and full of inexplicable extrapolation starting from few historical facts.