29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2001
Issue No.562
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2001 Issue No.562 |
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Dialogue, not clash of civilisations
This week, the Arab League held an important symposium questioning the logic that civilisations are condemned to clash. Mohamed Sid-Ahmed comments
Two distinct perceptions of the future of conflicts at the global level have emerged in recent years, more precisely, after the breakdown of the bipolar world order following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991: a perception based on Samuel P Huntington's clash of civilisations theory, instead of the Marxist theory of "class struggle," on the one hand; and a perception based on the premise that civilisations enjoy a certain continuity and complementarity and can accordingly coexist without necessarily clashing, on the other. The question is whether civilisations can build on the features they share to overcome their differences and interact through dialogue, or whether they are doomed to let their differences push them into conflict situations that can only be resolved through confrontation. This was the theme of a symposium held by the Arab League this week to discuss what has become a subject of cardinal importance following the dramatic events that shook America on 11 September.
Any rational debate must proceed from the premise that we are dealing with two sets of factors here: one that can work toward promoting greater interpenetration and complementarity among societies and another that can, on the contrary, engender conflict between them. The question is which of the two sets of factors predominates at any specific moment. To what extent would it be true to claim that forces conducive to rapprochement between peoples are stronger than those that tend to generate frustration, disappointment and despair, thus deepening rifts and divisions?
A key factor conducive to building a more integrated world order is, of course, the current trend towards globalisation, which has brought about major transformations in the features of the world economy, with the growing weight of the multinationals (some have budgets exceeding those of entire states) and, as a whole, the growing interdependence among the economies of different states, limiting the ability of individual states to invoke their prerogatives of sovereignty as an antidote to external intervention.
Another key factor is the stupendous progress in the field of technology, which has reached such a degree of complexity that it is impossible for any one state, however advanced, to master all fields, making global cooperation and complementarity in technology inevitable. This is particularly obvious in specific fields, such as information technology (radio, television, the fax, the modem, mobile telephones, communication satellites, etc.), which has cancelled distances between people, whether in space or time.
Unfortunately, the technological revolution has not been limited to such benign fields as information. During the Cold War, the arms race produced overkill capabilities that generated an equation of mutual terror preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction and compelling the superpowers to respect a minimum of coexistence. As a whole, though, globalisation, despite the many valid reservations one might have about how the process is unfolding, has brought about a certain osmosis between societies that could eventually make factors of interdependence surpass those of mutual exclusion.
The latter, however, are still very much there. Indeed, they have become more potent in the post-Cold War world. In the previous bipolar world order, the acute contradiction between communism and capitalism served to attenuate discord in and between religions (particularly the monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism). With the disappearance of communism as the second pole in the bipolar world order, discord in the name of religion has resurfaced to occupy centre stage. True, such conflicts are now attributed to a "conflict of civilisations" rather than to a "conflict of religions," actually, to a conflict of a cultural rather than a political/social/economic nature, whose source and justification are events in the past rather than in the present. What is now happening in Afghanistan epitomises the whole issue: the West used radical Islam against the Soviets only to have radical Islam explode in the face of the Western world itself.
In other words, a "clash of civilisations" occurs when the elements of mutual antagonism are stronger than those of mutual affinity, interdependence and integration, while a "dialogue of civilisations" is only possible when the opposite holds true. This leads us to the issue of terrorism. When despair, frustration and hopelessness are such that death becomes preferable to life, when alienation reaches a point where the "Other" is so dehumanised that taking his life is not perceived as a crime but a passport to heaven, a logic of nihilism takes hold. In this logic, all existing social and political institutions are rejected and the only idiom of self-expression left is random acts of terror.
The rejection of politics is no longer an accidental, marginal or regional issue. It has become a global phenomenon, with a pole of terror emerging in opposition to the pole representing legitimacy in what is supposedly a unipolar world order. In fact, however, the world remains polarised, not between the capitalist West and the communist East as in the days of the Cold War, but between the West, as the self-appointed guardian of the new world order, and a pole in violent rebellion against that order, the pole of international terrorism. Acting outside international legitimacy, this pole is made up of disgruntled people harbouring grievances against the injustices, double standards and other perversions exhibited by the "world of legitimacy." The sharp polarisation between the two has become the main feature of global politics today.
Uprooting the pole of terrorism entails more than targeting this or that group of terrorists. Unless the reasons behind the phenomenon are addressed, terrorism will not be eliminated. Terrorism has acquired its global dimension in the last three decades, leading to the inescapable conclusion that its reasons are rooted in the new world order itself. In other words, putting an end to terrorism entails introducing drastic changes to the current global system with a view to removing the reasons for the emergence of a nihilistic pole acting outside and bent on destroying the world of legitimacy. The key question has now become how to ensure that factors of interdependence and complementarity take precedence over factors of mutual exclusion so that civilisations feed each other constructively rather than clashing with each other. We could begin moving in the right direction by taking the following steps:
1) End the war in Afghanistan and prevent its expansion to other areas;
2) Resort more to the achievements of technology than to violence, to neutralise the damaging effects of terrorism;
3) Ensure that the whole debate raised by the confrontation with terrorism is undertaken in a context of transparency and openness, and that the rules of democracy are made available to all parties concerned:
4) Reform the world system so as to render the need to resort to terrorism under pretext that this is necessary to overcome the negative aspects of the system a thing of the past;
5) Reforming the world system could begin with a major undertaking to resolve the Palestinian problem and prove that even the most intractable problems can eventually be resolved if all parties concerned are determined to do so;
6) Finally, create parallel to the United Nations a world organisation of NGOs that would represent civil society in the world at large and guarantee that state bureaucracy does not impede creative ideas emanating from direct popular contribution to political affairs.
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