new left review 80 mar apr 2013 29

régis debray

DECLINE OF THE WEST?

America searches for its identity; Europe has lost its way; China is rediscovering itself. And so the melancholy ‘violins of autumn’ reprise their refrain in the lands of the setting sun. Strange times: the hardy-perennial notion of ‘the West’

is ubiquitously used to ennoble the usual suspects, the us, the uk and France; opinion-makers celebrate ‘occident alism’ and call for further rounds of Western military intervention—yet Spengler’s infamous coinage, The Decline of the West, features once again in the comment pages. Enough of Rambo; back to Hamlet. The causes of the malaise are clear: demographic submersion, deindustrialization, public debts and deficits, environmental pollution, falling competitiveness, exchange rate of the yuan, loss of faith in the growth model; etc. The catalogue is all too well known.

The sense of depression is due in no small part to the sway of the accountants, upshot of a merchant–manufacturing society that has wished away its own cultural and historical foundations. Given the discreet silence of the anthropologists, the ultra-specialization of the historians, the self-effacement of the geographers, the academicism of the sociologists of religion, it is hardly surprising that, when the econo-mists set the key, what follows is an adagio. As if a sound balance of payments were sufficient to ensure power and influence, rather than merely a precondition; as if the West had never seen deficits, stagna-tion, recession and bankruptcies before. A hegemonic position does not depend just on the exchange rate or the price of labour. If gdp deter-mined rank, then the sermonizing ectoplasm of the eu would be on equal terms with the us and China. In fact the prc, already the world’s largest trading power—and, by 2030, probably the biggest economy, as it was 200 years ago—could simply step up to Number One. But none of this is predetermined. Apart from anything else, political economy lacks the instruments to grasp the fine distinctions between the weight of a

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nation and its role, between influence and preponderance, the economic and the political; these things aren’t taught at business school. Lying behind or beneath the statistical data, they need to be borne in mind by all who would sound the knell—impatiently in the East, mournfully in Europe—of Western pre-eminence. A stocktaking, however brief, may serve to set out these invisible factors, taking a clinical view rather than that of a quack or mortician. First we’ll list the West’s trump cards, then its handicaps.

five trumps

Unprecedented cohesion

Largely a mythical invention—but myths are not unimportant—‘the West’ has had many avatars over the past millennium: Christianity, circa 1250; Enlightenment Europe, circa 1750; the Berlin club, circa 1900, to carve up the planet; ‘Free World’, circa 1950, head-to-head with Stalin. Every human community constitutes itself against an opponent, and the West’s crystallizations have always functioned through an antagonism with a meddling and malevolent East: Saracen or Ottoman, inferior races, slave-owners, obscurantism, the Gulag. A drama in a hundred different acts between good and evil, civilization and barbarism, light and darkness. But none of these historical manifestations of ‘the West’ had anything like the level of organization and coherence of today’s. The natural world suggests an image of misty, aestheticized contours for the land where the sun goes down. The geo-political profile of the Euro-Atlantic zone, by contrast, is starkly defined: nato, in a word, with ‘the West’ as its pen-name. The politico-military system is currently under-going an expansion: its vanguard is situated in the West’s west, the United States, but it now includes old Eastern Europe, up to the Baltic states. This ‘security architecture’ has solid buttresses in the Asia-Pacific region with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. And if the United States intervenes here on its own account, outside nato, it still tends to do so in the name of the West, speaking for its security and values.

The West is unipolar: none of its members contests America’s lead. The aberrations of George W. Bush left European rulers either unruffled or enthralled: no protesting voice was raised against the invasion of Iraq

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except, briefly, that of France, to the horror of most of its peers. The West has become the only multinational bloc capable of a rapid and coordinated use of force, as in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya. The Organization of American States is divided, Mercosur stammers, alba declaims, North Africa is fragmented internally, the African Union is up for grabs. The Arab League, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and asean are forums, not fully equipped decision-making bodies. The G20 has become a media event. Only nato can speak with a single voice, an undisputed line of command and a doctrinal consensus. The ‘European pole of defence’ depends on artificial organizations like the former weu, or on wishful thinking. What other regional power can implement—let alone overturn—a un resolution?

It is symptomatic that no member of nato—a defence alliance—broke ranks in 1989: hurray, we won, let’s celebrate; goodbye. But sympto-matic of what? Not just of the exhaustion of Europe, resigned to its vassal status, dreaming its federalist dream of a vast Helvetic Confederation—a Switzerland minus mountains and compulsory military service—while offloading its security onto the Americans. Value judgements aside, this strategic incoherence is itself a sign of cohesion: the ‘community of val-ues’ and of fears is strong enough to override divergent interests on each side of the Atlantic.

The supposedly lofty terrain of ideals and values—more important in constituting a balance of power than idealists may think—displays the same capacity for integration. The notion of ‘the rights of man and of the citizen’—albeit revised by hyper-individualism into ‘human rights’, from which the citizen has disappeared—establishes the basis for legitimate civic norms. And while these are far from being respected everywhere, the dictator’s abuse of authority is the object of general censure, not least in the countries concerned. ‘Asian values’—primacy of the group over the individual, discipline, hierarchy, harmony, frugality—briefly brandished by recalcitrants (Malaysia and Singapore), did not withstand the shocks of the 1997 economic crisis. Islamic values have fired the toughest civil-disobedience movements of late; but, tested in power, over the long term they don’t seem guaranteed a better fate. Anchored in revelation rather than sagacity, the words of the Prophet are more restrictive than those of Confucius: the imposition of the sharia is contested inside the Muslim world by the educated young and sections of the urban middle class, whereas the cement of human-rightsism in the West shows little sign of

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cracking.1 Even if the belated conversion of the colonizers—long-term adepts of napalm, torture and forced labour—to the religion of rights brings a smile to the lips of the ex-colonized, the stance has fairly unani-mous approval, for the same reason that the young Muslim in Tunisia or Iran wears jeans beneath her veil. Clothing is also a commitment.

Monopoly on the universal

All states pursue their vital interests abroad. China, short on raw materi-als for its development, keeps jealous guard over its commodity sources and supply lines across both hemispheres, without excessive tact; let’s call it holy egotism, something we’re all familiar with. But only the West has the ability to represent its particular interests as the expression of those of humanity in general—as freedom, emancipation, progress. The geographic emblem of this coincidence: domiciling the un headquar-ters in New York. The institution accredited as the universal conscience, located in the heart of the solo superpower; the metropolis of the high-est law is that of greatest military force. The ten countries that voted for Security Council Resolution 1973, establishing a no-fly-zone over Libya, represent 10 per cent of the world’s population, as do the ten Southeast Asian members of asean. But the latter would never describe themselves as ‘the international community’, except as a joke. This presentational deceit is not a spin-doctor’s invention. It is a sincere belief, half-paternalist, half-evolutionist; packaging the classic double standard—right to secede for Kosovo, pro-West, but not for Abkhazia or South Ossetia—in the most ferocious idealism.

Humanity’s aristocracy—a confederation of democracies that sees itself as a League of the Public Good, against a Holy Alliance of despots and crooks—cannot view itself as the rest of the planet does: just another such Holy Alliance. Incapable of understanding the hatreds it arouses, the West’s lack of consciousness makes for its good conscience. Neither Asians nor Africans claim to hold the key to future happiness, while Muslims no longer dream of remodelling the rest of the world in their

1 Small fissures, though, appear on occasion. In 1981, as a member of the French delegation to the un, the author can testify to the us Administration’s support for the Khmer Rouge after their overthrow by Vietnam. Cambodia’s seat was still occu-pied by the representatives of Pol Pot, under explicit pressure from Washington. Grounds for relativizing not the reference but the reverence due to these champi-ons of human rights.

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image. The Pashtuns known as Taliban only want to get rid of the for-eigners and establish sharia law in their valleys. No one else, apart from the us, issues opinions on everything that takes place in the world, draws up and imposes lists of bad guys (amended to fit the needs of the con-juncture), or decides on sanctions against such-and-such alleged rogue state. The world’s policeman is also its judge, since the us is in a position either to instrumentalize the Security Council or to bypass it. Despite the Russian and Chinese vetoes, which delay rather than prevent, with agencies deactivated and a non-executive General Assembly, the un is so little an insurmountable obstacle that even a former Secretary General, Boutros-Ghali, could declare it ‘in thrall to the Atlantic Alliance’.2

The West is the only bloc of states willing and able to overthrow far-away regimes, which offer no apparent threat to world peace, with or without the approval of the un; or to support rebellions, dissidents and separatists, through clandestine or semi-covert means. Imperial nations have, of course, always wanted to exercise control over their near-abroad: Russia over its European and Caucasian glacis; China over its march-lands, Tibet, northern Korea, Mongolia; India over the small Himalayan states, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. But we have yet to see the Middle Kingdom launch cruise missiles laden with cluster bombs 7,000 miles from its shores, or offer messages of support to the Basques, Kurds, Irish or Flemish. Nor Iran encircle the us with military bases on the Mexican and Canadian borders, like those in Iraq, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman. There is a big difference between a perceived threat and a real one.

Since the us has interests everywhere, ‘guaranteeing the security of the United States’—the first duty of its President, also nato’s de facto commander-in-chief—demands a no less global capacity for the pro-jection of armed force, which the us alone possesses. At $700 billion per year, America’s military budget equals that of the rest of the world combined, though it has among the best natural defences. Only nato has bases on all five continents; there are 800 us military installations overseas. It is this unprecedented combination of pragmatism and mys-tique, resolute modernism and diehard archaism, that constitutes the power of the new world order.

2 See his remarks made at a seminar on 7 April 2009, titled ‘La politique extérieure des Etats-Unis après l’élection d’Obama’; available on Fondation Res Publica website.

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Global business school

The West guarantees and shapes the formation of international elites through its universities, business schools, financial institutions, officer-training colleges, commercial organizations, philanthropic foundations and major corporations. No empire has ever ruled by force alone. It needs relays among native ruling circles, and this centrifugal incuba-tor produces a global class of managers who incorporate its language, its references and revulsions, its organizational models (rule of law and ‘good governance’) and economic norms (Washington Consensus). It is this moulding of managerial cadres from an already globalized mid-dle class that transforms domination into hegemony, dependence into acceptance. Beyond the internships for young leaders—3,000 per year, organized by American embassies—this digital brain drain engenders a shared collective unconscious. China’s ‘red princes’ send their boys to be educated in the us, whence they return well-equipped for the pursuit of wealth. In Europe, the young find it not just natural but indispensable to obtain a qualification from one of these ‘centres of excellence’.

There is no far-flung land, minority or sect that does not have its suc-tion pump of more or less well-implanted representatives in the us, with their connections in Congress and in the Administration, whose best-placed elements can, if they wish, return to their country of origin, making it their second home. They are the Afghano-ricans, Albano-ricans, Mexico-ricans, Afro-ricans (the Jean Monnet-style Gallo-rican was merely a prototype). This planetary hr department can pull a Karzai out of its pocket in an instant. A Palestinian from the World Bank, an Italian from Goldman Sachs, a re-cast Libyan or Georgian: the ease with which America is able to install a captain at every helm is the reward for its generous embrace of foreigners, an opening of national identity that the British Empire never risked, but which has earned its successor hundreds of thousands of adoptive children, of every nationality—and the possibility of filling its ambassadorships with people originating from their countries of residence.

China, India, Egypt, even little states like Israel or Armenia, benefit from loyal diasporas as channels of influence. The function of the 30 million Chinese expatriates in Southeast Asia is well known. America, which is no more a land of emigration than are the Nordic countries, does better: it has 42 million immigrants at home, the diasporas from every

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continent—Hispanics, Asians, Africans. Only the Western states—and the us first and foremost—have so many gangways to distant countries. We might periodize as follows: from 1850–1950, the West sweats the natives, inoculates, opens schools. From 1950–2000, the natives who have survived and learned the language come as immigrants to the West. From 2000–2050, the West educates the most talented and sends them back to top jobs in their country of origin, to propagate the West’s ideas and defend its interests. Win–win?

Programming human sensibilities

It seems only natural that the dollar has been the world’s reserve cur-rency since 1945, allowing the us to get deep into debt without much pain. No coercion is involved; it has all been quite consensual—though no doubt helped by attendant military might. Giving Gulf oil exporters a security guarantee against their Iranian neighbours ensures they won’t get any crazy ideas about selling their oil in euros rather than dollars. But consent would not come so naturally without the help of soft power. The top ten advertising agencies are occidental; Hollywood can conquer half the prc box office with just ten films—whereas the Chinese mir-acle doesn’t seem to have enraptured the Middle Kingdom itself. Star Wars, Avatar, Batman. McDonald’s, contemporary art, jeans, baseball: in the relations of love–hate, seduction–repulsion that the West exercises over its peripheries, however ancient their cultures or vast their popu-lations, the talking-pictures transmission of an incomparably richer standard of living and life-style is worth far more than any propaganda. The us has no need of international cultural institutes—Cervantes, Goethe, Confucius—to stamp its mark. In Vietnam, Coca-Cola won the war the gis lost.

One result is that the West now finds itself the standard-bearer in battles for cultural emancipation—by gays, women, blacks, minorities—across the East and South.3 Just as Communism’s dissidents were the children of rock ’n’ roll, those of Islamism may be the offspring of Disney and Madonna. And just as the entertainment industry can make money out of the enemies of the spectacle, so the capitalist mainstream exploits

3 This is the argument of Frédéric Martel in Mainstream: Enquête sur cette culture qui plaît à tout le monde, Paris 2010; see also Médium no. 27, April–June 2011, ‘Mainstream en question’, conversation with Frédéric Martel.

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the talents of those who oppose it. The opinion pages of the New York Times may be barred to Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Edward Said and Howard Zinn, but the proliferation of small journals, radio stations, reviews and websites allows these dissonant voices to resonate far beyond the underground. Michael Moore and Charles Ferguson, direc-tor of Inside Job, are positively respectable, like Krugman or Stiglitz in economics. The laws of profit and freedom of opinion have compelled the Anglo-Saxon world to develop a digestive capacity for absorbing and recycling red cells—or even saffron ones: the Dalai Lama, whose Buddhist precepts are rigorously opposed to Western worldly prac-tice, is made an honorary citizen everywhere. Hence the paradox of an enzymatic empire that does not outlaw its domestic anarchists or anti-imperialists; in which criticism of the illegal annexation of the West Bank is permitted, and where a political analyst can argue in favour of the Iranian bomb as guarantor of peace, not end of the world.4 As if the gravitational force of this civilization had radicalized Nietzsche’s formula: whatever wants to kill me makes me stronger. Immunizing itself through the regular absorption of negative criticism: herein lies the West’s great talent, its dynamism and its armour-plating.

Scientific innovation

This could have been our starting point: outstanding r&d, resulting in a clear lead in this decisive field. No doubt this will lessen: there are already more Indian and Chinese engineers than American. But the list of scien-tific Nobel prizes and industrial patents should reassure any doubters: in the domain of science, the keys to the future still lie in Silicon Valley and mit. One curious effect of this concentration of grey matter: it is widely understood that the info-sphere imposes English as the lingua franca on five continents, and that a language of communication is as much a way of thinking as a tool. It is not surprising if the Egyptian Army is an annex of the Pentagon, given that the latter guarantees its finance, trains its officers and, above all, supplies its jealously sought-after weapons and software systems; business as usual. But the fact that Tahrir Square was organized via the Net, Facebook and sms—using know-how from Californian campuses—is more striking. The tools of anti-Western upris-ings are Western, and America’s henchmen are indirectly sacked by the us itself. Behavioural modelling—which can certainly play nasty tricks

4 Kenneth Waltz, ‘Why Iran Should Get the Bomb’, Foreign Affairs, July–August 2012.

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on the sorcerer’s apprentice—allows the us, through corporations and other extensions of itself, to busy itself on both sides of the counter: secret policeman and tortured Muslim Brother.

Al Qaeda famously adopted the business model of McDonald’s: a holding company, franchising its brand to local outlets. But the Web, the develop-ment at the heart of the new ‘Made in usa’ technologies, propagates and reinforces the essence of modernity itself: the primacy of the individual over the group. The interconnectedness of the Internet not only elevates the horizontality of social relations, free from hierarchy and control from above; it gives the individual unprecedented room for initiative. The it revolution, modelled by the West, can be read as the after-sales service of an internalized Protestant capitalism.

five handicaps

Hubris of the global

Pride, immoderation, fall; the tragic hero must sooner or later pay the price. The loss of a sense of proportion, that old imperial failing, now operates on a far vaster scale. Spanish, Dutch, French and English pre-decessors were relativists, knowing themselves vulnerable; however megalomaniac, they didn’t aim to re-educate, supervise and inspire the entire globe. A quarter of the earth’s surface was enough for Queen Victoria; only a few short-lived ‘sons of Alexander’—Napoleon in 1808, the Thousand Year Reich in 1941—hoped for more than that. But since the Soviet rout in 1989, the Western Alliance has been prey to delu-sions of grandeur. It boasted about establishing ‘a new world order from Vancouver to Vladivostok’. It multiplied its ‘partnerships’ all over the world, from the Middle East (Israel, Jordan), to the Caucasus, Central Asia and Eastern Europe, even imagining it could bring Moscow into its orbit, with Parisian intellectuals sent to recycle the totalitarian Slav soul according to the new catechism.

What was impossible yesterday is all the more so today, with the pro-liferation of both infra- and supra-state actors. No Pax Americana—or Sinica—can maintain order and security when the un itself seems little more than a cork on the ocean. No superpower, with or without

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an anti-missile shield, is safe from sarin gas or a booby-trapped truck, much less the consequences of an epidemic or a tsunami. To want to stabilize a world that thrives on instability—and would be still more vio-lent and conflict-ridden if denuclearized, giving free rein to conventional weapons on both sides—is a delusion worthy of a Pangloss or a Dr Strangelove. The 1990s neo-cons were not so far from that.

The term ‘imperial overstretch’ once described the moment when the ambition of the centre exceeded its physical capacities on the periphery.5

With electronic and digital technologies, those capacities have taken a formidable leap forward over the past three decades. To see all, hear all, decipher all, even on the other side of the world, is no longer techni-cally impossible. Nor is killing on-screen a suspect 10,000 miles away, with a Hellfire missile shot from a Predator drone. Or paralysing a rival control system with a computer worm like Stuxnet. Since the bomb-ings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the new-model West can permit itself collateral damage on a far greater scale than that inflicted by Roman or Napoleonic legions. Its air and space superiority exposes it to greater excesses than did Britain’s control of the seas. ‘Preventive bombing’, outside any defined legal framework, confirms the prognosis of Carl Schmitt on the deterritorialization of war and its mutation into military policing operations. But the strength of the weak remains the local, faced with which the global becomes the weakness of the strong.

Superiority complex

The self-assurance that comes from being on top makes you indifferent to harsh realities below. Touching down is fatal for a surveillance plane, unless it is within an imperial ‘green zone’. Antaeus the giant regained his strength by touching the earth; here, it’s the opposite. The civiliza-tion which invented ethnology, that of Montaigne and Lévi-Strauss, now displays a mixture of arrogance and ignorance in its actions overseas that would have appalled a Strabo or a Polybius. Prisoners both of their abstract universalism and their tv equipment, dazzled by their own fire-works, these messianic missionaries take several years to realize that, in the eyes of the locals, they are an invasion and occupation force. They saturate a theatre of operations of which they know neither the past nor the language, nor the food, religion, family structure or the elementary

5 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, New York 1987, p. 515.

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reflexes. They can calmly set fire to the Koran or pee on an enemy corpse. The world’s policeman is largely ignorant about the world and does not want to know about any other value system than his own. There is a price for this.

Democracy as an absolute constitutes a speck in the eye. Set aside the intellectual problems of using an innocent capital ‘D’ to erase all the concrete distinctions between one form of democracy and another—‘consociational’ democracy (Lebanon, with its communalist top-ups), ethnic democracy (Bulgaria, Israel, Turkey, with first- and second-class citizens, depending on their ethnic origin), parliamentary (Great Britain), secular (France), religious (Egypt, Tunisia), fideistic and plutocratic (usa: Thanksgiving plus paid political advertising), and so on. More serious are the practical repercussions of forgetting that the world is not made of individuals (one man, one vote) but of communities—national, religious or tribal—which govern the individual’s loyalties and behaviour.

The intruders, reinforced by fire-spitting helicopters, wads of dollars and ngos, merely touch the surface of the occupied countries before they pull back to their fortified bases. Those who are losing the Afghanistan war ought to have remembered how France, with its electric-shock devices and its theorists, lost Algeria. They would have done better to consult Maurice Godelier’s Metamorphoses of Kinship, where they could have learned that the tribe—a collective formation with a promising future—represents the base unit of more than half the world, from the Bedouin kingdoms to the pre-colonial Americas, via Central Asia, Africa and southern Europe (Albanian and Sicilian honour crimes). And that this hemisphere sets its compass neither by human rights nor by individual interest.

No human group likes to see foreigners in control at home. This purely animal reflex bears a noble name: sovereignty. In Europe, the notion—in fact, the sentiment—of national honour provokes smiles of pity or stupefaction in two out of three under-50s. In the States, ethnocentrism is such that people cannot imagine that these noble sentiments could be shared by backward peoples. For an emancipated post-national, a denizen of some postmodern Left Bank who sees the nation-state as a museum piece or a joke, the idea that some fifty peoples are prepared to fight to have one indicates a pathetic infantilism. For the born-again Tea Partyists, any human being who wants to wave something other than the

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star-spangled banner must be part of the Axis of Evil. Lack or excess of attention, the result is a shadow zone.

Born in Hawaii, raised in Indonesia, master of marketing, Obama is more cultured than a backwoodsman like George W. Bush, who so fascinated European rulers from Blair to Sarkozy. He knows that other worlds exist here below; hence the more courteous behaviour. But to consider that this correction of aim represents a conversion to multilateralism would be to mistake desires for reality—and to forget that an outsider American may be more imbued with the foundational myths of his country than someone of old wasp stock; more convinced that he must fight to defend the ontological privileges of his Promised Land by all necessary means, including the clandestine. And so cyber-sabotage and killer drones make strikes in sovereign countries. According to American sources, during Obama’s first 40 months he issued more than five times the number of authorizations for targeted assassinations in Pakistan alone than Bush managed in eight years—262 to 49—with countless civilian victims, and ideal recruits for Al Qaeda among the survivors. Special Operations Command (socom), with a budget that has risen in ten years from $4.2bn to $10.5bn, is now reported to have 60,000 personnel, includ-ing operatives spread over seventy countries. The ‘President’s army’ is increasingly dependent on the ‘intelligence community’ rather than the Pentagon, to avoid any judicial complications.6

White, black, mixed-race or yellow, the us president is, was and always will be ‘exceptionalist’ and imbued with the sense of a higher mission; the only variables worthy of attention are how, and to what extent. Only countries with a powerful mystique or national mythology are capable of a muscular foreign policy, with all that implies in terms of cruelty and illegality abroad, but also of domestic denial and sacrifice. Manifest Destiny and pact with Yahweh: the United States and Israel, two nations that do not doubt their supernatural origins, have a vocation for this type of state of exception. Those who are convinced they carry within them-selves something incompatible with the norm do not feel bound to obey the same treaties or conventions. In 1998, a handful of countries, includ-ing the us, China, Israel and Qatar, formally opposed the establishment of the International Criminal Court. Better: by threatening diplomatic

6 Figures from New America Foundation, cited in Chris Kirk, ‘Obama’s 262 Drone Strikes in Pakistan’, Slate.com, 8 June 2012; and ‘Admiral Seeks Freer Hand in Deployment of Elite Forces’, nyt, 12 February 2012. [nlr]

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reprisals or cutting food supplies, the us obtained agreement from sixty countries that they would guarantee in writing the future impu-nity of American soldiers, thus depriving the icc treaty of its substance. Subjecting a gi to the same legal restrictions as the average soldier may now result in us sanctions.

Refusal of sacrifice

On 24 August 1914, 26,000 French soldiers were killed at the Front. Poincaré did not leave his office: tomorrow would be better. In fact, an average of 1,000 soldiers were killed each day between 1914 and 1918. On 18 July 2011, seven French soldiers were killed in an ambush in Afghanistan. The nation paid homage: there was a funeral oration by the President, who would soon visit the ambush site; a media frenzy. A demand for compensation was filed by one victim’s family, for ‘breach of service’. In Indochina and Algeria, closer comparisons, the loss of human life, although on an entirely different scale, did not give rise to any such fanfares or recriminations.

The reversal of our individual and social relationship to death, in such a short space of time, is an astonishing phenomenon, heavy with conse-quences. Deep down, the West no longer has the morale of its morality, the valour of its values. Less, at least, than it either promises or proclaims. The arms have got bigger, the heart has shrunk. Phobia of physical con-frontation; surreal ideal of a war with zero dead; replacement of the cult of the hero by the cult of the victim; the end of military service; con-signment of the citizen-soldier to the museum, to be replaced by the professional army, composed as far as possible of helots and foreigners. Goliath has gone soft. No doubt this was the price to pay for a higher living standard, the triumph of rights over duties and the happiness imperative, as well as the psychological repercussions of technological over-equipment. The cry of the new dispensers of justice—‘Why are we waiting to send in the planes?’, over Belgrade, Kabul, Tripoli, Damascus, Timbuktu—optimizes the tranquil control of airspace, while adhering to the principle of safety first. Tomorrow’s swashbuckler will not be in a plane, but at a screen.

This is the media-friendly triumph of a striker who spends the game on the bench. The mood is interventionist, the climate pacifist: contradiction. The West now has to bomb in the guise of a friend of

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humanity, in order to neutralize opposition. The fear of the real extends to prohibiting the word ‘war’ in favour of ‘peacekeeping operation’ or ‘protecting civilian populations’. The use of force, under the aegis of PsyOps, tends to cloak itself as humanitarian relief. Soldiers would be advised to present themselves as social workers. The prudent paint their helmets blue: hard practices, soft ideals. Their fanatical adversaries know nothing of this hiatus: without any comparable panoplies of terror, they think hard and act hard, too. In other words: if the East retains a sense of the sacred, the West has dispensed with it. There are more and more for whom the ‘new idea in Europe’, in Saint-Just’s phrase, seems petty-minded and out of date. But its absence creates a paralysing anxi-ety about ‘safeguarding personnel’ and, upstream, evasions, clichés and self-serving lies. Preserving the sweetness of the evening conflicts with the crusader spirit—more an early-morning thing.

Prison of short-termism

The long-standing handicap of democracies, which ‘only tackle external problems for internal reasons’, as Tocqueville saw, has been exacerbated by the arrival of the seducer state and the rule of opinion. Anxious about re-election, the executive must obey the injunctions of Congressmen or key constituencies, to the extent of antagonizing a billion Muslims to appease an influential community. The obligation is for quick results, therefore shortcuts and expediency. In its wake, the curtailing of mandates (from seven to five years for the French president, for exam-ple), the waltz of personnel, shortened attention spans and obsessive channel-surfing. And this, at the moment when the epochal temporali-ties of ethnic memory and religious messianism are resurfacing: the return of the Inca, the Zulu, the Berber; the lama, the rabbi, the aya-tollah, the archimandrite. Unhappy chassé-croisé. The short-termism of the Northern indignados is out of step with the indignados of the South. Here, feelings run high over unbearable images of massacres, famines and violence, but the bubble of mediatized emotion won’t last a month; the optimum is three to fifteen days. There, it’s not just that the images may be different—Operation Cast Lead, absent from Western screens, was broadcast live on Al-Jazeera with correspondents on the ground—but the bitterness is patient and underground, vendetta-fashion, if ready to explode at the first excuse. The West dreams of a lightning war; the South, which sees this coming from afar, prefers a war of attrition. Here, the talk is of strikes; there, resistance. The striker thunders and invades,

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in the blink of an eye; the resistance bogs the enemy down, infiltrates and exhausts it. In other words, time is working against the West, master of space and hostage of the moment.

Presentism, feeding on flashes and clips, is strategic non-realism, since it obliterates past and future. Looking forward, there is no evaluation of the medium- and long-term consequences of immediate decisions, which typically turn out contrary to the envisaged goal—Sunni Iraq falling under the control of pro-Iranian Shi’ism being the paradigm. Emotional presentism undermines strategic intelligence. Looking back, locked in its muddled and volcanic moralism, the presentist West brushes aside the memories of others and the humiliations it has subjected them to. The dominated always have a longer memory than the dominators. The slave trade is not a dead letter for the descendants of slaves; nor the second electoral college, rigged by the French, for Algerians; nor the ‘no dogs or Chinese’ signs in the French concession in Shanghai for the great-grandchildren of the coolies. The feeling of humiliation, an ‘engine of history’ long underestimated, though more explosive than economic exploitation due to the resentment it entails, has not figured since 1945 on the radar screens of Western decision-makers. There is a price to pay for this disdain. (It might be said in mitigation that to do otherwise would have gone against human nature. We all remember the blows we have received a thousand times better than those we’ve given.)

Dispersal of the troublemakers

A side-effect of nation-states’ attrition, under the onslaught of Western interventionism, has been the dispersal of the sources of disorder, which increasingly outsmart the vigilance of the centre. The fact that the flip-side of techno-economic globalization has been the politico-cultural balkan ization of the planet cannot be attributed to any carelessness in particular: the increased stress on belonging, which has followed tech-nological standardization, is a thermo-mechanical phenomenon with its own logic, like a valve, or the tides. But to forget that the state holds a monopoly on legitimate violence—and that its destruction results in the proliferation of irregulars with Kalashnikovs, difficult if not impos-sible to pin down as interlocutors—is an altogether human blunder. Blowing off the safety catch of political sovereignty with missile strikes and commandos ends up by conjuring forth ethnic or mystical forces that are harder to reason with, since they speak a different language.

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No doubt Israel would rather deal with established state authorities, as in the frontal border wars of 1956, 1967, 1973, than with armed ngos and nomads without phone numbers. Better the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank than Al Qaeda; better Hamas in Gaza than the Darmush clan, devoted to hostage-selling; in Syria, better an official but localized tyrant—‘a lion in Lebanon and a rabbit in the Golan’—than hundreds of religious fanatics with surface-to-air missiles, scattered across the country side. Perhaps it was not such a good idea to eliminate Arafat and make the Authority a laughing stock in the eyes of the ordinary Palestinians; or to ignore Hamas—which was severe in bringing the Darmush clan to heel, and which keeps its extremists on a tight leash in Gaza City itself.

The frontline of global jihad is advancing through the regions where the central state is collapsing, in sub-Saharan Africa in particular, and the West is not blameless in this disintegration. Having allied with Wahhabism and Saudi money to defeat the more-or-less secular, marx-isant Arab nationalist movements, the West now complains of having to deal with would-be theocrats. An impertinent critic might still see the reunified Umma, without borders or nationalities, dreamed up by the Pakistani Abu’l-A’la Maududi, as an oneirico-theological counterpoint to the Frenchman Pascal Lamy’s dreams of global governance over the sin-gle market of the wto. But it is obvious that the privatization of violence is of little concern to the self-proclaimed custodians of world peace—either internally, with the transnational criminal networks, or externally, with the dissemination of chemical, biological and nuclear arsenals to unreliable hands. Frankenstein would be right to be worried.

To conclude: does the balance of the ‘greatnesses’ and ‘constraints’ of the West—not what it has, but what it is—amount to an equilibrium? In terms of dynamics, probably not. But in the short term, a quali-fied yes. Not that the headman of modernity is on the right track, far from it. The good the West believes it embodies is a trompe-l’oeil, ever less convincing. But whether we like it or not, for the time being it remains in pole position; hugging the rope, the French would say. And not about to find another one with which to hang itself, as Lenin once cheerfully predicted.

A longer version of this essay was published as ‘Occident, fiche clinique’ in Médium, no. 34, January–March 2013. Translation by Ros Schwartz.