Issue No. 611
Opinion
Previous issue
Site map
|
|
7 - 13 November 2002 Issue No. 611 Opinion |
Current issue Previous issue Site map | |
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Beyond the air lock
Ilan Pappe* examines the future of Arab-American relations
On 24 May, 2002, the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy met to "look at how the US is viewed overseas". The Advisory Commission was created by Congress in 1948 to oversee US government activities that inform or influence citizens of foreign nations. It is now part of the State Department structure, directly subordinated to a newly-appointed undersecretary of state -- an indication of the new importance attached to the subject by American foreign policy makers, or at the least a token effort to make cultural relationships a crucial factor in American foreign policy. As one member of the committee stated, the commission's task was to find out "how to get public diplomacy in at the 'take- off' instead of at the 'crash' level of foreign policy" -- in other words, to be part of policy-making and not a last-minute resort after policy has failed. The same member was confident that cultural policy would eventually be "the single most important thing in terms of American foreign policy, and perhaps the most difficult to achieve".
The need to revisit American global attitudes, and more importantly to reassess worldwide perceptions of America, became acute after the 11 September attacks. "I think it is true," stated another member, "that in the 10 years before 11 September, roughly the period from the collapse of the Soviet Union and until then, we had really forgotten about the outside world and we didn't care much about what it thought or what it said. This was reflected, as I mentioned earlier, in the decrease of resources for public diplomacy."
This particular meeting in May was public and covered live on cable TV. It was devoted to Middle Eastern perceptions of America and the main guest speaker was the former diplomat and CIA official, Graham Fuller, who had just returned from a speaking tour in the Middle East and who has spent much time in the region in different capacities.
The discussion was accompanied by an air of freshness. The appointment of the undersecretary of state was received enthusiastically. Her new territory was well-defined by the chair of the committee: she was appointed to deal with public diplomacy, "which means an aptitude for expanding the traditional boundaries of diplomacy into the field of cultural relationship and through means such as Web sites and satellite TV." He added sanguinely: "I think that the great news is... public diplomacy is back in a big way... They have added more funds."
So officialdom has been recruited and money allocated and now they have turned to Fuller to advise them how best to use the new resources. Fuller did not seem to share the overall and general enthusiasm. He told the committee that what was needed in his view was not a novel, but a revolutionary, approach. The task, in his eyes, was formidable.
He began by saying:
"I think coming back from this particular trip at this particular time in our Middle East policies, I have never felt such an extraordinary gap of almost separate worlds, hermetically sealed one from the other, that you almost have to go through an air lock to get from one to the other, in which the perceptions that we live with in this country and that we imbibe from our media give us one picture that has almost nothing to do with the picture that people have who are living in the Middle East."
At the heart of the two distinct pictures is, to his mind, the problem of Palestine. A central and complex issue in the Arab world, neglected, marginalised and viewed only through the Israeli prism in the US.
This dismal situation is, according to Fuller, mostly the media's fault. It produces images of the "other" on both sides, which perpetuate the gap. There is a kind of a dual essentialism; both sides view each other in one- dimensional, reduced image.
Fuller kicked off the debate, but it centered on Middle Eastern essentialism and not the American "Orientalism" he wished to deconstruct. Thus, the debate scarcely dealt with the American perception of the Middle East and focused on what one committee member described as "those people's" main problem: "They are not getting the overall picture in this country [the US]."
The wish for the US not to be essentialised is easily understood. In fact it should be supported. Historically, one can go back to the Wilsonian period, and see how for the national elites in the Arab world, including in Palestine, the US symbolised values such as self-determination, anti-colonialism, prosperity and democracy. The core group from which the first leaderships of the national movements in the Arab world emerged, at one or another stage in its socialisation, came in contact with American teachers, or teachers who had been in America. The US was in their eyes the new nation that had succeeded in expelling the British from its homeland (that on the way these brave nationalists genocided native Americans and brutalised millions of Africans was in those days not an issue and hence the image was not tarnished by the less pleasant chapters in America's history of liberation).
But, putting aside agenda and sensitivities that developed only later, even among the victims themselves, there was a positive image of the term "American culture". It was understood as first and foremost a culture of self-determination and decolonisation in a new world that was far better from the one in which the colonised Arab peoples lived.
Thus, when we encounter an official American effort to draw courage from the better years of Arab- American relations, we should empathise with it wholeheartedly. We should support American officials who wish to put forward concepts such as "culture" and "image" in their response to the tragic events of September 2001 and who seem to reject the concepts -- such as force, and destruction -- suggested as the right response by Israeli orientalists. This means that these officials do not share the instinctive and dangerous reactions espoused by the chief policy makers in Washington, epitomised by the "war against terrorism". The Advisory Commission was thus looking within the administration for experts on cultural diplomacy who could be mobilised to enhance a different American foreign policy, one suggested by more radical and left- wing circles.
One doubts the extent to which these "cultural thinkers" within the State Department have the ear of the principal policy makers, but one has to prepare for better times when these exceptional people might, for whatever reason, be more influential in shaping US policy.
The reappraisal presented by these officials is thorough and at times quite solid. It describes and sometimes only hints at -- officials are prudent -- the nadir to which American prestige has sunk in the last decade in the Middle East and Arab world. It is also refreshing to see in the report that the officials believe in something called cultural policy -- namely that American interests in the Middle East cannot just be quantified as economic and political pros and cons -- and abhor the business-like "rationalist" approach to international relations preached by the sorcerers of the political science departments who sit safely in their Ivy League universities.
So far so good. It is in the prescriptive realm that the document disappoints and indicates how little can be expected even when there is a willingness to admit failure and look for new ways of building a better understanding between the Arab world and the US. The team sitting around the discussion table had only institutional solutions, technical remedies to a problem that was ideological, indeed cultural, in nature. It is a problem with a long history, handicapping not only America's world position but -- certainly since America was reinvented as a world superpower in the aftermath of the Second World War -- contaminating international relations as a whole. The solutions proffered by the committee were all about tactics and very little about strategy and even less about vision.
Not that the solutions for the problem of low esteem put forward were nonsensical; they were not. There were two major recommendations. The first was to relocate American cultural centres, those outfits that market American culture, away from the capitals of the Arab states. So that they would not be associated in the public mind with other integral components of the American foreign policy makers representing economic, political and military interests. In fact, it transpired that in many places in the Arab world there are no cultural centres along the lines of those of European countries. The second recommendation was to increase the indigenous representation in these centres' staff, so as to produce a decaffeinated formula of broadcasting "Americanism without Americans" (my term, not the document's).
These twin proposals will, of course, not do the trick. In fact the second ploy is bound to irritate, offend and in some circles even humiliate. But there is a constructive grain in these ideas, which I would like to highlight. They manifest a new spirit, and I think a genuine wish to promote a different policy. But they can contribute to a novel course, and help produce different perceptions of the US in the Arab world, only on two crucial conditions. And these two conditions are totally absent from the discussion as it appears in this document and in other media where the issue is reviewed.
The first is an analysis of what went wrong with general American policy; what produced the present attitudes. This analysis has already been done on alternative stages. It is not a complicated story anymore. American policy was and is biased. The superpower assuming the role of international policeman failed to act as an honest broker in the most significant conflict in the Middle East, the Palestine question. The bias is crystal clear: the imposition of UN resolutions on everyone in the Middle East apart from Israel, a directly anti-Palestinian policy, insensitivity to the most crucial points on the Palestinian agenda, and a carte blanche for callous and oppressive Israeli policies in the occupied territories. As long as this policy remains as it is, cultural magicians and image spinners cannot affect the perception of the US in the Arab world.
The second is to adopt the idea of cultural embassies. It was a success at the beginning of the twentieth century -- see the American universities of Beirut and Cairo. Their heyday was due to two very different attributes. One was their ability to serve as a stage for a polyphonic dialogue between West and East in which it was mutually discussed how to promote a better society on the basis of the dialectical connection between the particular and global cultural identities was mutually discussed. The other one was the agenda and messages adopted by the institutes about crucial and topical questions of the day.
For new versions of such institutes to succeed they have to be first created in Palestine and among Palestinian communities wherever they are, including among the Palestinian minority in Israel. What a change it would be if instead of American missiles from American aircraft and gunships, Palestine was showered with American goodwill and support for a Palestinian vision of society liberated from any kind of oppression. Cultural diplomacy would be enacted for real if American officials become able to show their espousal of the Palestinians' natural rights and aid them in their wish to advance prosperity and improve their quality of life. In terms of budgets, most of the American money, which finds its way to Israel and Palestine, in any form, is used to produce oppressive power, the principal victims of which are Palestinian citizens. Whether shells hit them, or they are oppressed by occupiers administrating their lives, they know, these evils are inflicted on them with help of American money. This transparent American financial scaffolding for the brutal Israeli war machine can only produce negative images of America and Americans within such a reality.
I join the call to de-essentialise America. It has much more to offer to the Arab world in general, and Palestine in particular. And whatever America offers Palestine affects its relationship with the Arab world, and in turn with the Islamic world at large. The need is to direct resources to new avenues based on an inter- cultural dialogue, rectifying past evils and balancing policies in a manner that will indicate that the old American support for the colonised, the oppressed and the deprived can still be revived.
This may not, probably will not, happen within the present administration, but there is a civil service in the US. They sat together in May and will re-adjourn later on while their colleagues prepare the war against Iraq. They should be encouraged and, more importantly than anything else, offered concrete projects lest they stick to the only practical solution in the aforementioned discussion: more American cultural centres, protected by a barbed wire and armed guards trying to sell a different America.
I do not think there is a chance the American University in Baghdad will materialise soon. But while in Palestine CIA agents and diplomats of all sorts are busy building a new security octopus for the benefit of Israel in a futile search for a so-called peace that will satisfy the intransigent Ariel Sharon, there is hope for a different sort of American messenger and message. Yet even in Palestine it cannot be done everywhere. There has to be more evidence of shifts in American policy for any kind of American initiative to be welcomed in places the Israeli army has destroyed and occupied. Among the Palestinians in Israel there is still goodwill. Thus one can think of an American university of the Galilee. This could be a start. It is up to those Americans who would be involved in such a project to find the way to make Palestinians both in Israel and in occupied Palestine feel at home in such a place. Maybe this was the revolution Fuller was talking about.
* The writer is professor of history at Haifa University.
|
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: weekly.ahram.org.eg Updated every Thursday at 20.00 GMT, 10 pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
