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ThesisAsian representations are used as a counterpart to the West - Asia becomes the OtherZhang 14Charlie Yi Zhang, Charlie Yi Zhang is an assistant professor in global studies at South Dakota State University. Using feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, and political economy as primary frameworks, his research focuses on how global neoliberal restructuring is proceeding and perpetuated through the categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Building on these categories as critical heuristics, he is also interested in how marginalized groups are creating alternative dimensions of living and survival outside the dominant neoliberal economy. He can be reached at [email protected]. “Untangling the Intersectional Biopolitics of Neoliberal Globalization: Asia, Asian, and the Asia-Pacific Rim”, Feminist Formations, Volume 26, Issue 3, Winter 2014, Published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Pages 171 – 176 //jazmyn

First, I untangle the convoluted etymological triad of Asia, Asian, and Asia-Pacific and dismantle their colonialist, racist, sexist, and/or neoliberal investment. Building on different scholars’ deconstructive readings of these terms, such as Edward W. Said’s (1978) and Aihwa Ong’s (1999, 2003, 2006, 2010), I will interrogate their embedded meanings that have been translated into new discourses and practices to sustain neoliberal economies in the Asia-Pacific Rim. Second, I will demonstrate how populations in the Asia-Pacific are disassembled and then reassembled to facilitate global division and migration of labor through the intersectional biopolitics of race, gender, and class. As shall be elucidated, along the intersectional contours of these biopolitical governing parameters new controlling images are (re)created to legitimize this process. Third, I will show how gender and class inequalities are used intersectionally by the Chinese state to facilitate China’s transition from socialism to neoliberalism and its reintegration with the global economy. Using China as a central site of inquiry, I will explicate how intersectional biopolitics is fundamental to neoliberal globalization. Finally, I will use Liu Xiang, the state-sponsored, hyper-masculine icon as an example to show how gender is co-opted by the party-state to construct a racialized discourse of an Asian model to validate its alternative neoliberal practices, and to challenge US neoliberal practices. This strategy, however, has reinforced neoliberal control by endorsing its racializing biopolitical script. This article therefore seeks to dislodge the intricacy, ambiguity, and contingency of neoliberal practices and ideologies that are anchored in the shifting contours of identities. As shall be demonstrated, only a multi-axis, analytically diverse and flexible, and culturally and materially integrative framework can capture the essential feature of intersectional biopolitics as the underlying mechanism that fuels neoliberal globalization and leads us to newly imagined possibilities for changes. In the following section, I will start by deconstructing the varying meanings of Asia, Asian, and AsiaPacific in different socio-historical backgrounds in order to better understand how they have

contributed to the current neoliberal conditions. Untangling Asia, Asian, and the Asia-Pacific In Clinton’s Foreign Policy article, the terms Asia, Asian, and Asia-Pacific are used interchangeably to justify the US statist machinery that is ready to trump over the Asia-Pacific Rim. Despite a common etymological root, these terms are constructed in disparate socio-historical contexts and laden with different values and even contradictory meanings that need to be qualified. As Michel Foucault (1972) reminds us, cartography is never neutral, but inflected by power. Asia is no exception. As a geographic construct, the concept of Asia was constituted out of complex, dynamic histories and processes (Wilson 2006). As

Said suggests in his groundbreaking Orientalism (1978), the monolithic notion of Asia was first created as a barbaric Other to shore up the 172 · Feminist Formations 26.3 modern boundary of Europe and a unified trajectory of human societies . It was embedded in the Eurocentric imaginary to classify and unify world civilizations to the telos of modernity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries , when “the European Enlightenment and colonial expansion provided conditions for the development of a new system of knowledge . . . . The notions of Europe and Asia were both products of this process of knowledge construction” (Wang 2007, 4).

Not only a geographic category but also a form of civilization , Asia is constructed to represent an anachronistic Other to European capitalism and the modern nation-state . In other words, it was produced to uphold the Eurocentric unilinear narrative of human societies. As Kwai-Cheung Lo (2010, 7) observes, “ the traditional notion of Asia is a Eurocentric fabrication that distinguishes the advanced West ern subject from despotic, backward , and non-Christian civilizations , and that channels Western anxieties about insecurity and loss of hegemony .” On this account, the construct of Asia as a unified entity is steeply inflected with colonialist meanings. In the twentieth century, variant versions of pan-Asianism originated from Asian countries’ responses to the European imperialist expansion; to name but a few, the Japanese pan-Asianism that Asia should unite against European invaders, and Indonesian pan–Southeast Asianism against Dutch colonialism. Initiated as counter-imperialist endeavors, some of these constructions of pan-Asianism were also penetrated by imperialism and colonialism. As Ara Wilson (2006) notes,

during World War II, the homogenizing notion of Asia was invoked by the Japanese to propel their colonialist and militant juggernaut and legitimate their invasion of other countries in the area, as indicated by the deceptive and coercive discourse of its “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” In this

regard, the European colonialist conception of Asia lays the discursive foundation of pan-Asianism, later invoked by Asian countries like Singapore and Malaysia to legitimize their alternative neoliberal practices to the Western, especially the US paradigm. Although sharing the same etymological origin, in Western societies the term Asian is not just an adjective designating a geographic region, but also a racial category that can be traced back to the US socio-economic upheavals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As defined by Howard Winant (2004, 155), race is “a concept that signifies and symbolizes socio-political conflicts and interests in reference to different types of human bodies.” As he sees it, racial classification based on phenotypical and genotypical differences is a social product of modernity in around the sixteenth century by and for the burgeoning capitalist economy in North America. Also, racism is an artifact to consolidate the racial hierarchy in the service of US slavery and capitalism, which first took the form of black/white dichotomy. Building on Winant, Sally Kitch (2009) further contends that there is a gendered foundation of racial formation in US history. As a relatively newer racial category in the United States, Asian is also founded on gender ideology. In the late nineteenth century, Chinese and Charlie Yi Zhang · 173 Japanese immigrants, as two of the earliest immigrant groups from Asia, were

considered two different ethnic groups rather than one race. As Catherine Lee (2010) argues, gender played a fundamental role in the formation of Asian as a homogenizing racial identity for Chinese and Japanese. As she shows, attracted by the

increasing demand of the construction and mining industries in the midnineteenth century, thousands of Chinese males came to the United States as laborers. Compared with the large number of males, very few Chinese women came to the United States during this time. To satisfy the sexual and affective needs of the male workers, some of these women took the role of partial “wife” for multiple men. Although this alternative familial paradigm served the interests of industrial capital by reducing the cost of labor

reproduction, Chinese women were nevertheless naturalized as inherently “promiscuous” and “slutty”—an Orientalist imagination that fueled the denigrating conception of the entire Chinese immigrant group. When recession hit the US economy during the so-called long depression (1873–96), the gendered and sexualized conception of Chinese immigrants was translated into discourse of the “yellow peril” that legitimized the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. In contrast, as a newer immigrant group, the Japanese came to work in the agricultural economy that began to thrive in the West at the end of the nineteenth century. As farm work is usually family-based, Japanese immigrants were more sexually balanced compared with the Chinese, and Japanese women were thus considered familyoriented, differentiating them from the “prurient” Chinese women.

However, the newly claimed West territory soon gave rise to the crisis of a unified identity of Americanness (Van Nuys 2002), and Japanese women’s alleged high fertility (although not statistically verified) was considered a threat to the racial purity of the (white) American nation-state. The gendered and sexualized conception of the Japanese soon relegated them to an inferior position in the racial hierarchy, with the Chinese . In this sense, as Lee (2010) contends, gender was the key that first helped to ethnically differentiate the two groups, and then it racially conflated them as one racial group—Asian. Racial ideology reshapes the gender identity of Asian Americans as well. In the popular

imagination, Asian men are usually depicted as “intelligent,” while Asian women are viewed as docile, submissive, and fragile. Attempts were made to verify these perceptions with “scientific methods” (Rushton 1997). For Asians, whose intelligence was presumed to be greater than that of whites, the only reasonable solution was to keep them out entirely (Reddy 2003, 23). Racial ideology depicts Asian men as less “sexual” and softer and weaker in physical strength, placing them in a disadvantaged position as they deviated from the norm of Anglo American masculinity (Yu 2001). In contrast to the constructed image of the “over-heterosexualized Black men,” Asian men are considered not heterosexual enough, thus posing a threat to heteronormative white masculinity (Collins 2004). The social consequence of the intersectional mechanism of gender

and race for Asian American men is termed racial castration by David 174 · Feminist Formations 26.3 L. Eng (2001). As we can see, the intersection of race and gender grounds the socio-cultural basis of Asian identity in the United States , which later spread to other parts of the world, such as the Asia-Pacific Rim, through the expansion of US hegemony and politico-economic influence . In the United States since the late 1970s, the meanings of Asian have varied with shifting socio-economic conditions. Since immigration reform in the 1960s, Asians and Latinos have become

the major immigrant groups (Plaut 2010). In contrast to the poor/working-class immigrants during the nineteenth century, many well-educated, middle-to-upper-class technological professionals, entrepreneurs, and students from Asia have been attracted by US policies designed to boost the knowledge economy—a position that the United States assigns to itself in the global industrial hierarchy. The economic successes of these segments of new Asian immigrants are then over-generalized as the “model minority” myth—a success story of new immigrants through assimilation into American life and values

(Maeda 2005). As will be shown below, this racialized (and gendered) image has been fueling the perpetuation of neoliberal global control. The Asia-Pacific Rim was constructed in the service of US-led neoliberal globalization in the late 1970s. As Ong (2006) points out, this extra-sovereign territorial construct was constituted through the disassembling and then reassembling of state territories in order to create a latitudinal space for the crossPacific movement of capital and labor that spans from the West Coast of the United States to East and Southeast Asia. The offshoring and outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to Asian countries within this area effectively lowers the labor costs and increases profit margins of US corporations. Also, because of these market needs, laborers migrate to this territory for opportunities of economic survival and/or prosperity. Clinton’s presumptuous pronouncement of the “Pacific century,” for instance, can be interpreted as a rhetorical attempt to reassert US dominance in the area. Ong’s discussion of the Asia-Pacific Rim is based on the Foucauldian concept of neoliberal governmentality, which views neoliberalism as a set of coherent governing practices. The following section, centering on neoliberalism as governmentality, will illustrate how the hierarchization of labor across the area is enacted and justified by the intersection of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Neoliberalism as Governmentality Although neoliberalism has become the single script of globalization (Hardt 2011), it is never without challenge. As Saskia Sassen (2007) notes, earlier feminist scholarship has documented various effects on women by, as well as their resistance to, it. Recently, such scholarship has moved beyond the paradigm that views neoliberal globalization as a homogenizing process and women as its universal victims, and produced nuanced analyses of its contingent effects on Charlie Yi Zhang · 175 different groups of women.5 The Foucauldian (2008) concept of neoliberalism as contingent and variable governing practices is of particular use to challenge the reductive understanding of neoliberalism and corporate globalization. Harvey’s (2003) theorizing of “accumulation by dispossession” also proves instrumental to understanding how cultural identities can be invoked to create new operative space for over-accumulated capital.6 Moreover, feminist of color framings of intersectionality help tease out the overlapping relationships among various identity categories to deepen our knowledge of the central role of intersectional biopolitics in neoliberal globalization.7 One underpinning of neoliberal globalization is the reproduction of human beings as differential labor to engineer and accelerate transnational market competition. As Foucault (2008) contends, neoliberalism is a type of governmentality, or an art of governance with a self-coherent agenda to organize, regulate, and manage societies. As he sees it, governmentality is the reasoned way of governing best, the calculation of governing practices to maximize economic and political profits for societies. Foucault (2011, 4) further clarifies governmentality as “the techniques and procedures by which one sets about conducting the conduct of others,” or “an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future” (1982, 789). In other words, to govern is “to structure the possible field of action of others” (790). In this regard, the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life become the core of governmentality in what he calls “biopolitics” (2008). Scientific, medical, legal, and cultural discourses, as well as institutionalized systems, were created to study, differentiate, stratify, hierarchize, and engineer human beings as a “population” in order to better govern society. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault ([1976] 1990) demonstrates how the development of the burgeoning capitalistic economy in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was made possible through the regulation and adjustment of bodies and the population by controlling and normalizing the spectrums of sexual possibilities. As he illustrates, all sexualities (particularly homosexuality) except for those between heterosexual couples were delegitimized so as to normalize heterosexuality as the only acceptable social norm in order to guarantee the reproduction and sustained supply of capable subjects for the capitalist economy and market competition. As a particular type of governmentality, the raison d’être of neoliberalism is the creation and maintenance of market competition to maximize the benefits of the entire society and the pivot is the production of enterprising subjects (Homo economicus) for this relationship (Foucault 2008). Foucault’s conception of neoliberalism is particularly useful for the case of China because, as Li Zhang and Ong (2008) note, without a political overhaul (like the former Soviet Union), the creation of a new type of market subjectivity is key to China’s socio-economic transformation. Although Foucault draws our attention back to real people with the concept of neoliberal governmentality and his highlighting of biopolitics as 176 · Feminist Formations 26.3 its primary mechanism, except for sexuality, he leaves a theoretical lacuna by under-discussing humankind as also gendered, racialized, and classed subjects (Stoler 1995). As Margaret Somers (2008) argues, the essence of the market is that unequal subjects transact equal exchange values in the market. Such embodied attributes as gender, race, and class are the important biopolitical parameters for the creation of diversified market subjects (Giroux 2008). From a different perspective, David Harvey (1982) brings cultural identities into the discussion of neoliberal globalization. As he sees it, the root of neoliberal globalization is the over-accumulation of capital—the saturated market and shrinking demand vis-à-vis over-produced commodities—which left little space for capital reproduction in the industrialized countries in the late 1970s. Besides over-consumption (see Baudrillard [1970] 1998; Jameson 1990), another outlet to over-accumulated capital is what Harvey (2003, 149) calls “accumulation by dispossession”: “to release a set of assets (including labor power) at very low (and in some instances zero) cost,” particularly in non-Western countries. Over-accumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and turn them into profitable use. Although accumulation by dispossession takes place in various and contingent forms, such extra-market systems/cultures as “kinship structures, familial and household arrangements, gender and authority relations” definitely play an important role (146).

Western discourses construct the Orient to act as the Other to affirm Western superiority Bertens 12Hans Bertens, November 12, 2012, Hans Bertens is based at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. He is the author of The Idea of the Postmodern (Routledge, 1995). “Literary Theory The Basics” Section: Orientalism, //jazmyn

With all due respect for the pioneering work done by Commonwealth literary studies and by postcolonial writers such as Edward Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, Chinua Achebe, and Wole Soyinka, postcolonial studies in its current theoretically oriented form starts with the publication, in 1978, of the Palestinian–American critic Edward Said’s book Orientalism. Drawing on Foucault and, to a lesser extent, Gramsci, Said’s study completely changed the agenda of the study of nonWestern

cultures and their literatures and pushed it in the direction of what we now call postcolonial theory. Orientalism is a devastating critique of how through the ages, but particularly in the nineteenth century – the heyday of imperialist expansion – which is the book’s focus, Western texts have represented the East, and more specifically the Islamic Middle East (for the sake of convenience I will simply refer to ‘theOrient’or‘theEast’here).UsingBritishandFrench‘scholarly works … works of literature, political tracts, journalistic texts, travel books, religious and philological studies’ (Said 1991: 23), Said

examines how these texts construct the Orient through imaginative representations (in for instance novels), through seemingly factual descriptions (in journalistic reports and travel writing), and through claims to knowledge about Oriental history and culture (histories, anthropological writings, and so on). Together, all these forms of Western writing form a Foucauldian discourse– a loose system of statements and claims that constitutes a field of supposed knowledge and through which

that ‘knowledge’ is constructed. Such discourses, although seemingly interested in knowledge, always establish relationships of power. In Foucault’s work, power is first of all a force that serves itself. We may think we use it for our own purposes in our capacity as free agents, but in reality it works first of all through us and not for us. From Foucault’s POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM AND THEORY 203 anti-humanistic perspective we are functions within networks of power. For Said, however,

the West’s representations of the East ultimately work within the framework of a conscious and determined effort at subordination . For Said, Orientalism – this Western discourse about the Orient – has traditionally served hegemonicpurposes . As we have seen, Antonio Gramsci thought of ‘hegemony’ as domination by consent – the way the ruling class succeeds in oppressing other classes with their apparent approval. In Gramsci’s analysis it does so through culture: the ruling class makes its own values and interests central in what it presents as a common, neutral, culture. Accepting that ‘common’ culture, the other classes become complicit in their own

oppression and the result is a kind of velvet domination. Orientalism, then, has traditionally served two purposes. It has legitimized Western expansionism and imperialism in the eyes of Western governments and their electorates and it has insidiously worked to convince the ‘natives’ that Western culture represented universal civilization. Accepting that culture could only benefit them – it would, for instance, elevate them from the ‘backward’ or ‘superstitious’ conditions in which they still lived – and would make them participants in the most advanced civilization the world had ever seen. For Said, Western representations of the Orient , no matter how well intentioned, have always been part of this damaging discourse . Wittingly or unwittingly, they

have always been complicit with the workings of Western power. Even those Orientalists who are clearly in sympathy with Oriental peoples and their cultures – and Said finds a substantial number of them – cannot overcome their Eurocentric perspective and have unintentionally contributed to Western domination . So instead of the disinterested objectivity in the service of the higher goal of true knowledge that Western scholarship has traditionally claimed for itself, we find invariably false representations that have effectively paved the way for military domination, cultural displacement, and economic exploitation . I should perhaps say at this point that in later publications, and in response to criticism, Said has modified his position and presented a less homogeneous picture of Orientalism, while he has also down LITERARY THEORY: THE BASICS 204 played the extent to which it merely constructs and never describes. There is no doubt, however, that Orientalism, whatever its shortcomings may have been, revolutionized the way Western scholars and critics looked at representations of nonWestern subjects and cultures (just like feminism had somewhat earlier revolutionized the way we look at representations of women and African–American studies had revolutionized the way in which in particular American criticism looks at representations of African–Americans). Said’s book also drew attention to the way in which

the discourse of Orientalism serves to create the West as well it creates the East . West and East form a binary opposition in which the two poles define each other (see Chapter 5). The inferiority that Orientalism attributes to the East simultaneously serves to construct the West’s superiority. The sensuality, irrationality, primitiveness, and despotism of the East constructs the West as rational, democratic, progressive, and so on. The West always functions as the ‘centre’ and the East is a marginal ‘other’ that simply through its existence confirms the West’s centrality and superiority . Not surprisingly perhaps, the opposition

that the West’s discourse about the East sets up makes use of another basic opposition, that between the masculine and the feminine. Naturally the West functions as the masculine pole – enlightened, rational, entrepreneurial, disciplined – while the East is its feminine opposition – irrational, passive, undisciplined, and sensual. Race, ethnicity, and the dominant position of the metropolis were already well established on the literary-critical agenda when Orientalismappeared, as was the study of Commonwealth writing in English and the study of English literature dealing with colonial relations (E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India(1924), for instance). Said, however, was the first to draw on the new French theory and on the recently discovered Gramsci (parts of whose work had been published in English in 1971 – see Chapter 4) in dealing with these issues.

Orientalism offered a challenging theoretical framework and a new perspective on the interpretation of Western writing about the East (and other non-Western cultures) and of writing produced under colonial rule – which might be read both for signs of complicity with Western POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM AND THEORY

205 hegemony and for a possibly counterhegemonic stance. (Just like Gramsci, Said makes room for intentionally counterhegemonic moves.) Orientalism put the role of the West’s cultural institutions (the university, literary writing, newspapers, and so on) in its military, economic, and cultural domination of non-Western nations and peoples firmly on the agenda and asked questions that we still ask concerning literature’s role in past and present racial, ethnic, and cultural encounters. As a matter of fact, our questions have since 1978 only proliferated. Can we really see all Western writings about Said’s East, and, by implication, the non-West in general, as more or less indistinguishable from each other as far as their representations of the non-Western world are concerned? Mary-Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes from 1992, for instance, argues that travel writing by women about the nonWest is rather different from travel writing by men. Said himself would be the first to admit that such differences are real enough and postcolonial criticism is still busy mapping them.

GENERAL THESISOrientalism is the structure of thought grounded within the political dominance of the Middle East and Asia by the WestSingh 04

(Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University, 9-24-2004, "Amardeep Singh: An Introduction to Edward Said, Orientalism, and Postcolonial Literary Studies," https://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004/09/introduction-to-edward-said.html,DMW)

Said directly challenged what Euro-American scholars traditionally referred to as "Orientalism." Orientalism is an entrenched structure of thought, a pattern of making certain generalizations about the part of the world known as the 'East'. As Said puts it: “Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, "us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them").” Just to be clear, Said didn't invent the term 'Orientalism'; it was a term used especially by middle east specialists, Arabists, as well as many who studied both East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The vastness alone of the part of the world that European and American scholars thought of as the "East" should, one imagines, have caused some one to think twice. But for the most part, that self-criticism didn’t happen, and Said

argues that the failure there –- the blind spot of orientalist thinking –- is a structural one. The stereotypes assigned to Oriental cultures and "Orientals" as individuals are pretty specific: Orientals are despotic and clannish. They are despotic when placed in positions of power, and sly and obsequious when in subservient positions.

Orientals, so the stereotype goes, are impossible to trust. They are capable of sophisticated abstractions, but not of concrete, practical organization or rigorous, detail-oriented analysis. Their men are sexually incontinent, while their women are locked up behind bars. Orientals are, by definition, strange. The best summary of the

Orientalist mindset would probably be: “East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet” (Rudyard Kipling). In his book, Said asks: but where is this sly, devious, despotic, mystical Oriental? Has anyone ever met anyone who meets this description in all particulars? In fact, this idea of the Oriental is a particular kind of myth produced by European thought, especially in and after the 18th century. In some sense his book Orientalism aims to dismantle this

myth, but more than that Said's goal is to identify Orientalism as a discourse. From Myth to Discourse. The oriental is a myth or a stereotype, but Said shows that the myth had, over the course of two centuries of European thought, come to be thought of as a kind of systematic knowledge about the East. Because the myth masqueraded as fact, the results of studies into eastern cultures and literature were often self-fulfilling. It was accepted as a common fact that Asians, Arabs, and Indians were mystical religious devotees incapable of rigorous rationality. It is unsurprising, therefore that so many early European studies into, for instance, Persian poetry, discovered

nothing more or less than the terms of their inquiry were able to allow: mystical religious devotion and an absence of rationality. Political Dominance. Said showed that the myth of the Oriental was possible because of European political dominance of the Middle East and Asia. In this aspect of his thought he was strongly influenced by the French philosopher Michel

Foucault. The influence from Foucault is wide-ranging and thorough, but it is perhaps most pronounced when Said argues that Orientalism is a full-fledged discourse, not just a simple idea, and when he suggests that all knowledge is produced in situations of unequal relations of power. In short, a person who dominates another is the only one in a position to write a book about it, to establish it, to define it. It’s not a particular moral failing that the stereotypical failing defined as Orientalism emerged in western thinking, and not somewhere else.

https://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004/09/introduction-to-edward-said.html,DMW)

IranHistorically the sale of arms to Iran is directly tied to maintaining the US power structureLittle 08

(Douglas Little, University of North Carolina Press, "American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 ", 2008 Kyle Shah)

The policies that the Carter administration inherited from Nixon and Ford seemed, at first glance, to constitute low-risk, cost-effective tactics

for preventing trouble in a strategically important part of the world. U.S. efforts “to assist and encourage Iran to become a regional power which would assume limited security responsibilities and play a generally more active role supportive of our mutual interests, ” a State Department transition briefing paper pointed out on 3 January 1977, had largely succeeded. “Iran has accepted this role—for it was consistent with the Shah’s view of Iran’s key position in the area—and has used its military power (in Oman), its financial strength (loans to India, Pakistan,

Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan and Syria) and its general influence to help resolve regional disputes.”133 Cyrus Vance, who moved into the seventh

floor at Foggy Bottom three weeks later, saw a certain logic to recent U.S. policy in the region. “The Shah’s determination that Iran must

assume more responsibility in the gulf coincided with the adoption of the ‘Nixon Doctrine’ which envisioned key regional states as surrogates

for American military power in preserving order and blocking Soviet inroads,” Vance recalled in his memoirs, and the Carter administration

“recognized the importance of Iran in Persian Gulf security matters.”134 National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who second-guessed

Cyrus Vance on just about everything from human rights to nuclear disarmament, shared the secretary of state’s faith in the Nixon Doctrine in

the Persian Gulf. Praising Carter’s predecessors for “building up” Iran and Saudi Arabia “as the two American-backed pillars of regional

security,” Brzezinski agreed that the shah had become “our major strategic asset in the wake of the British disengagement from ‘east of Suez’”

during the Nixon and Ford years. “Recognizing Iran’s strategic centrality,” he remarked several years later, “we chose to a ta l e o f f o u r d o c t r i n e s 147 continue that policy, approving major sales of arms” to the shah, whose realm was the “pivot of a protected tier shielding the crucial oil-rich region of the Persian Gulf from possible Soviet intrusion.”135 Gary Sick, a holdover from the Ford administration who quickly emerged as the chief Iran

specialist in the Carter White House, confirmed that “the Nixon-Kissinger policy of placing U.S. security interests in the Persian Gulf almost exclusively in the hands of the shah had been fully absorbed by the bureaucracy and the U.S. power structure.” But for Sick the downside to the Nixon Doctrine was obvious. “The United States now lay strategically naked

beneath the thin blanket of Iranian security,” he observed long afterward. “By the time President Carter arrived in the White House ,” Sick added, “whether one liked it or not, Iran was the regional tail wagging the superpower dog.” 136 By all accounts Jimmy Carter liked it less and less the longer he was in office. Worried that continued U.S. arms sales to the shah and other autocratic Third World clients under the auspices of the Nixon Doctrine would divert resources from economic development, weaken respect for human rights, and, in the long run, undermine political stability, Carter sent Secretary of State Vance to Tehran in May 1977 in hopes of

developing “a better way of determining Iran’s future military needs and how they could best be met.” Vance assured the shah that the Carter administration still wished to work closely with him on a plan “for denying the Soviets opportunities to increase their influence” in the Persian Gulf. He confirmed that Washington would deliver the F-16 jet fighters and awacs electronic surveillance aircraft that Iran had ordered earlier , but not

high-performance F-18 fighter-bombers. He gently reminded the shah that the Georgia Democrat regarded “the primacy of human rights as a

national goal.”

Terrorism

The threat of terrorism creates an Outsider Enemy along the Orient which justifies a permanent state of emergency and preemptive strikesZizek 05

[Slavoj Zizek, “In These Times”, 2005, August 11, http://www.lacan.com/zizekiranian.htm, \\wyo-bb]

Every power structure has to rely on an underlying implicit threat, i.e. whatever the oficial democratic rules and legal constraints may be, we can ultimately do whatever we want to you. In the 20th century, however, the nature

of this link between power and the invisible threat that sustains it changed. Existing power structures no longer relied on their own fantasmatic projection of a potential, invisible threat in order to secure the hold over their

subjects . Rather , the threat was externalized, displaced onto an Outside Enemy. It became the invisible

(and, for that reason, all-powerful and omni-present) threat of this enemy that legitimized the existing power structure's permanent state of emergency. Fascists invoked the threat of the Jewish conspiracy , Stalinists

the threat of the class enemy, Americans the threat of Communism-all the way up to today's "war on terror ." The threats posed by such an invisible enemy legitimizes the logic of the preemptive strik e. Precisely because the threat is virtual, one cannot afford to wait for it to come. Rather, one must strike in advance, before it is too late. In other words , the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too visible protective measures of defense-which , of course, are what pose the true threat to democracy and human rights ( e.g., the London police's recent execution of the innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes).

http://www.lacan.com/zizekiranian.htm

Nuclear war Orientalism proposes the idea that North Korea and the Middle East cannot be trusted with weapons, and those weapons are better off with the US. However, Empirics and history prove that the US is just as dangerous in possession of nuclear weaponry as the Orient. Tarak Barkawi, 4-1-2013, "Nuclear Orientalism," No Publication, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/201341695253805841.html Kyle Shah

Once again, the Crazy Emperor of the Hermit Kingdom - North Korea - is threatening nuclear war. Or so the media would have us believe. The BBC and other news outlets have taken to publishing maps with concentric rings donating the speculative ranges of North Korea's creaky missile systems. One never tested missile might

possibly reach Alaska and do for Sarah Palin and the polar bears. The basic idea purveyed by the media and by US spokespersons is that Oriental despotisms -as Iran and North Korea are regularly portrayed - cannot possibly be trusted with nuclear weapons. Accordingly, US policy, to which the UN and much of the world have subscribed, is that it will "never accept" an Iranian or North Korean bomb. While rational people would never use a nuclear weapon except in circumstances in which it was rational to do so, unbalanced, crazy types might decide to unleash their nuclear arsenals, or turn them over to terrorists, or what not. It would seem that only rational Western nations like the US can be trusted with nukes. Images of

Mad Mullahs and Asiatic Despots aside, there are obvious reasons why Iran and North Korea would want nuclear weapons. Most significantly, a nuclear weapon is a guarantee that they will not suffer the same fate as Iraq in 2003. One of the only times it is rational and credible to make nuclear threats is in a situation of existential crisis - when regime survival is at stake. For this reason, no one invades or pushes too far a power armed with nuclear weapons. Were Iran or North Korea to use a nuclear weapon in any other circumstance, they would face obliteration. Since nuclear weapons can be traced to their origin, it would be suicidal for these countries to provide weapons to terrorist groups. Such groups do not have a country to lose, unlike the leaderships of Iran and North Korea. So if Iran and North Korea turn out to have rational reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, and are likely to be governed by the same realities of nuclear deterrence that constrained the US and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, what about the rationality of US policy? For one, for the US to say it will "never accept" what is already a reality is an absurdity: North Korea already

has the bomb. It must now be treated as a nuclear power. More broadly, the recent history of US foreign policy is not exactly a testament to rationality. In response to a terrorist attack which killed nearly 3,000 of its citizens, the US invaded two countries, starting wars that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Ten years later, it has lost both of those

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/201341695253805841.html

wars and broken its budget. Luckily, not every country that suffers from terrorism reacts with such deadly and self-defeating spasms of revenge and blood lust. North Korea has in living memory suffered from the wanton destructiveness of US policy. This is a fact which must be remembered in the face of media images of North Korea's supposedly irrational militarism and aggressiveness. Over the three years of the Korean War, in the words of General Curtis LeMay, the US Air Force "burned down every town in North and South Korea". The US used 12,000 pound "Tarzan" bombs until there were no more targets for them, in addition to thousands upon thousands of bombing sorties . Thousand pound napalm bombs were dropped from B-29s to "wipe out all life" in

tactical localities. Towards the end of the war, the US bombed North Korea's dams. One resulting flood "scooped clean" 27 miles of river valley. Moreover, it is the US which has made repeated nuclear threats against North Korea, despite the fact that North Korea has never posed a serious threat to the US . The use of nuclear weapons was considered several times during the Korean War, both tactical and strategic. In April 1951, B-29s with nuclear weapons were deployed to Guam, ready for use if China escalated its conventional involvement in the war. Later in the war, lone B-29s simulated nuclear attack runs on Pyongyang. Over the course of the war, a million North Korean civilians were killed by US , UN and South Korean forces. This history offers some perspective on the recent crisis, which began not with North Korean threats but with US and South Korean war games and manoeuvres. These included practice sorties by two nuclear capable B-2 stealth bombers sent over South Korea, loudly announced in the media so that the point would not be lost on North Korea's leaders. North Korea responded with bombast, including the incredible notion that it was preparing an amphibious invasion of the US. Guam, still a base for US nuclear bombers, was "threatened" by North Korea's jury-rigged missiles. In turn, the US deployed its equally ineffective but much more expensive THAAD missile defence system to Guam. One wonders what is more laughable: the idea that North Korea could hit a speck in the Pacific like Guam or that the boondoggle offspring of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars might actually work. What is not laughable is the fact that it is the US which has a consistent pattern of threatening the use - including first use - of nuclear weapons. No one is in doubt that US nuclear weapons actually work, and the US remains the only power ever to have used them in anger. Notably, it used them in a situation in which it was itself no longer threatened. The North Korean bomb may be an uncomfortable fact of life. But so too is the US bomb. And none of us should make any easy assumptions about the rationality of the leadership of either country, however.

The Nuclear war rhetoric of the aff is rooted within the logic of nuclear orientalismGusterson 99

(Hugh Gusterson, anthropologist at George Washington University, Feb 1999, “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination”, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 14, No. 1,https://www.jstor.org/tc/accept?origin=%2Fstable%2Fpdf%2F656531.pdf%3Frefreqid%3Dexcelsior%253Ac4f00c7e3aa4763ef2a2cce0a64822ac,DMW)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9970346/Pentagon-sends-missile-defences-to-Guam-as-North-Korea-approves-nuclear-attack-on-US.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/29/north-korea-attack-us-what-happens-next

http://www.isodarco.it/courses/andalo09/doc/holloway_reading-CHCW.pdf

http://mondediplo.com/2004/12/08korea

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2001/01/hitchens-200101

There is a common perception in the West that nuclear weapons are most dangerous when they are in the hands of Third World leaders. I first became interested in this perception while interviewing nuclear weapons designers for an ethnographic study of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)- one of three laboratories where U.S. nuclear weapons are designed (Gusterson 1996). I made a point of asking each scientist if he or she thought nuclear weapons would be used in my lifetime. Almost all said that they thought it unlikely that the United States or the

Russians would initiate the use of nuclear weapons, but most thought that nuclear weapons would probably be used-by a Third World country. The laboratory took a similar position as an institution. For example, using terminology with distinctly colonial overtones to argue

for continued weapons research after the end of the Cold War, an official laboratory pamphlet said, Political, diplomatic, and military experts believe that wars of the future will most likely be "tribal conflicts" between neighboring Third World countries or between ethnic groups in the same country. While the Cold War may be over, these small disputes may be more dangerous than a war between the superpowers, because smaller nations with deep-seated grievances against each other may lack the re- straint that has been exercised by the US and the USSR. The existence of such potential conflicts and the continued danger of nuclear holocaust

underscore the need for continued weapons research. [LLNL 1 It is not only nuclear weapons scientists who believe that nuclear weapons are much safer in the hands of the established nuclear powers than Third World countries .

There has long been a widespread perception U.S. defense intellectuals, politicians, and pundits-leaders of op clear weapons-that, while we can live with the nuclear weapons of ficial nuclear nations for the indefinite future, the proliferation of ons to nuclear-threshold states in the Third World, especially the I would be enormously dangerous. This orthodoxy is so much a part tive common sense that, like all common sense, it can usually be st fact without fear of contradiction (Geertz 1983). It is widespread and in learned journals,' and it is shared by liberals as well as conse example, just as Kenneth Adelman, a senior official in the Reagan tion, has said that "the real danger comes from some miserable The country which decides to use these weapons either out of desperati ity" (1988), at the same time Hans Bethe-a physicist revered by m work on behalf of disarmament over many decades-

has said, "The nuclear weapons in the hands of more responsible countries to deter such use by Third World nations (Bernard 1994, quoted in Shroyer 1998:24 Western alarmism about the dangers of nuclear weapons in The hands was particularly evident when India and Pakistan set off th nuclear tests in May 1998. Many analysts had already

identified So the most likely site in the world for a nuclear war. After India's Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Democrat, New York) said, "If Pakis bomb, we are on the edge of nuclear warfare" (1998). Three days l ing Pakistan's tests, Moynihan elicited agreement from Senator J (Republican, Arizona) when he said that the world was "closer to n than we have been any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis" (A Speaking to Reuters wire service, David Albright, president of

the institute for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D. I don't think they [India and Pakistan] are up to the task of preventional conflict from accidentally slipping into a nuclear exchange." washington Post agreed: "Today, in the aftermath of a series of test explosions by the bitter rivals, there is no place on earth with greater potential of a nuclear war" (Moore and Khan 1998:1).

The Nuclear Apartheid is rooted within an orientalist discourse in which who has the capabilities to gain nuclear weapons and who is restricted from accessing them are defined in binary oppositionGusterson 99


According to the literature on risk in anthropology, shared fears often veal as much about the identities and solidarities of the fearful as about the actual dangers that are feared (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Lindenbaum 1974). The immoderate reactions in the West to the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan, and to Iraq's nuclear weapons program earlier, are examples of an entrenched discourse on nuclear proliferation that has played an important role in structuring the Third World, and our relation to it, in the Western imagination . This discourse, dividing the world into nations that can be trusted with nuclear weapons and those that cannot, dates back, at least, to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970. The Non-Proliferation Treaty embodied a bargain between the five countries that had

nuclear weapons in 1970 and those countries that did not. Accord- ing to the bargain, the five official nuclear states (the United States, the Soviet

Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China)3 promised to assist other signatories to the treaty in acquiring nuclear energy technology as

long as they did not use that technology to produce nuclear weapons, submitting to international inspections when necessary to prove their compliance. Further, in Article 6 of the treaty, the five nuclear powers agreed to "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament" (Blacker and Duffy 1976:395). One hundred eighty-seven countries have signed the treaty, but Israel, India, and Pakistan have refused, saying it enshrines a system of global "nuclear apartheid." Al-

though the Non-Proliferation Treaty divided the countries of the world into nuclear and nonnuclear by means of a purely temporal metric4-

designating only those who had tested nuclear weapons by 1970 as nuclear powers-the treaty has become the legal anchor for a global nuclear

regime that is increasingly legitimated in Western public discourse in racialized terms. In view developments in global politics-the collapse of

the Soviet threat a war against Iraq, a nuclear-threshold nation in the Third World-th of this discourse in organizing Western geopolitical

understand growing. It has become an increasingly important way of legitimatary programs in the post-Cold War world since the early 199

military leaders introduced the term rogue states into the Amer fear, identifying a new source of danger just as the Soviet threat (Klare 1995). Thus in Western discourse nuclear weapons are represented so that "theirs" are a problem whereas "ours" are not. During the Cold War the Western discourse on the dangers of "nuclear proliferation" defined the term in such a way as to sever the two senses of the word proliferation. This usage split off the "ver- tical"

proliferation of the superpower arsenals (the development of new and im- proved weapons designs and the numerical expansion of the stockpiles)

from the "horizontal" proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries, presenting only the latter as the "proliferation problem." Following the

end of the Cold War, the American and Russian arsenals are being cut to a few thousand weapons on each side.5 However, the United States

and Russia have turned back appeals from various nonaligned nations, especially India, for the nuclear powers to open discussions on a global convention abolishing nuclear weapons. Article6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty notwithstanding, the Clinton administration has declared that

nuclear weapons will play a role in the defense of the United States for the indefinite future. Meanwhile, in a controversial move, the Clinton

administration has broken with the policy of previous administrations in basically formalizing a policy of using nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states to deter chemical and biological weapons (Panofsky 1998; Sloyan 1998). The dominant discourse that stabilizes this system of nuclear apartheid in Western ideology is a specialized variant within a broader system of colonial and postcolonial discourse that takes as its essentialist premise a profound Oth- erness separating Third World from Western countries.6 This inscription of Third World (especially Asian and Middle

Eastern) nations as ineradicably different from our own has, in a different context, been labeled "Orientalism" by

Edward Said (1978). Said argues that orientalist discourse constructs the world in terms of a series of binary oppositions that produce the Orient as the mirror image of the West: where "we" are rational and disciplined, "they" are impulsive and emotional; where "we" are modern and flexible, "they" are slaves to ancient passions and routines; where "we" are honest and compassionate, "they" are treacherous and uncultivated. While the blatantly racist orientalism of the high colonial period has softened, more subtle orientalist ideologies endure

in contemporary politics. They can be found, as Akhil Gupta (1998) has argued, in discourses of economic development that represent Third

World nations as child nations lagging behind Western nations in a uniform cycle of development or, as Lutz and Collins (1993) suggest, in the

imagery of popular magazines, such as National Geographic. I want to suggest here that another variant of contemporary orientalist ideology is

also to be found in U.S. national security discourse. Following Anthony Giddens (1979), I define ideology as a structuring political ideas,

institutions, and behavior which (1) make structures and institutions created by dominant social groups, c tions appear to be naturally given and

inescapable rather th structed; (2) presents the interests of elites as if they were unive obscures the connections between different social and political as to inhibit massive, binary confrontations (i.e., revolutionary (4) legitimates domination. The Western discourse on nuclear pr ideological in all four of these senses: (1) it makes the simultane of nuclear weapons by the major powers and the absence of nuclear weapons Third World countries seem natural and reasonable while problematizing atempts by such countries as India, Pakistan, and Iraq to acquire (2) it presents the security needs of the established nuclear pow were everybody's; (3) it effaces the continuity between Third World nuclear deprivation and other systematic patterns of deprivation in the underdeveloped world in order to inhibit a massive north-south confrontation; and (4) it legitimates the nuclear monopoly of the recognize nuclear powers.

ARM SALES lead to the criminalization of middle east over gaining nuclear weapon capabilities that perpetuates the logic of orientalism in which the west must police the east with its nuclear weaponsGusterson 99


The particular images and metaphors that recur in the discourse on proliferation represent Third World nations as criminals, women, and children. But these recurrent images and metaphors, all of which pertain in

some way to disorder, can also be read as telling hints about the facets of our own psychology and culture which we find especially troubling in regard to our custodianship over nuclear weapons . The metaphors and images are part of the ideological ar- mor the West wears in the nuclear age, but they are also clues that suggest buried, denied, and troubling parts of ourselves that have mysteriously surfaced in our distorted representations of the Other. As Akhil Gupta has argued in his analysis of a different orientalist discourse, the discourse

on development, "within development discourse .. . lies its shadowy double ... a virtual presence, inappropriate objects that serve to open up the

'developed world' itself as an inappropriate object" (1998:4). In the era of so-called rogue states, one recurrent theme in this system of representations is that of the thief, liar, and criminal: the very attempt to come into possession of nuclear weapons is often cast in terms of racketeering and crime. After the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests , one newspaper

headline read, "G-8 Nations Move to Punish Nuclear Outlaws" (Reid 1998:1), thereby characterizing the two countries as criminals even though neither had signed-and hence violated-either the Non-Proliferation Treaty or the Com- prehensive Test Ban Treaty. When British customs officers intercepted a shipment of krytrons destined for Iraq's nuclear weapons program, one newspaper account said that Saddam Hussein was "caught red-handed trying to steal atomic detonators" (Perlmutter 1990, emphasis added)-a curious choice of words given that Iraq had paid good money to buy the krytrons from the company EG&G. (In fact, if any nation can

be accused of theft here, surely it is the United States, which took $650 million from Pakistan for a shipment of F-16s, cancelled the shipment

when the Bush administration determined that Pakistan was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, but never refunded the money.) Ac- cording to

an article in the New York Times, "it required more than three decades, a global network of theft and espionage, and uncounted millions for Paki- stan, one of the world's poorest countries, to explode that bomb" (Weiner 1998:6). Meanwhile the same paper's editorial page lamented that "for years Pakistan has lied to the U.S. about not having a nuclear weapons program" and insisted that the United States "punish Pakistan's perfidy on the Bomb" (New York Times 1987a:A34, 1987b:A34).

And Representative Stephen Solarz (Democrat, New York) warns that the bomb will give Pakistan "the nuclear equivalent of a Saturday Night

Special" (Smith 1988:38). The image of the Sat- urday night special assimilates Pakistan symbolically to the disorderly under- world of ghetto hoodlums who rob corer stores and fight gang wars. U.S. nuclear weapons are, presumably, more like the "legitimate" weapons carried by the police to maintain order and keep the peace.l8

US Nuclear weapon discourse is based within conceptions of masculinity that perpetuate the vision of the West as a parent and the orient as a child, wife, and criminal Gusterson 99


Third World nations acquiring nuclear weapons are also described of passions escaping control. In

Western discourse the passionate, or instinctual has long been identified with women and animals and implicitly contrasted male human rationality (Haraway 1990; Merchant 1980; Rosaldo 1 certain recurrent figures of speech in the Western discourse on proliferation cast proliferant nations in the Third World in imagery that carries a subtle or subhuman connotation. Whereas the United States is spoken of as having vital interests" and "legitimate security needs," Third World nations have " "longings," and "yearnings" for nuclear weapons which must be cont contained by the strong male and adult hand of America. Pakistan h dent ardor for the Bomb," says a New York Times editorial (1987a:A Rosenfeld, writing in the Washington Post, worries that the United St forever "stifle [Pakistan's] nuclear longings" (1987:A27). Represe Markey (Democrat, Massachusetts), agreeing, warns in a letter to th ton Post that America's weakness in its relationship with Pakistan m the Pakistanis "can feed nuclear passions at home and still receive mas tary aid from America" (1987:A22). The image is of the unfaithful sponging off her cuckolded husband. But throwing the woman out may cause even more

disorder: the W Post editorial page, having described Pakistan's nuclear weapons program in an allusion to the ultimate symbol of Muslim femininity-as conceale a veil of secrecy," goes on to warn that there are "advantages to ... ha stan stay in a close and constraining security relationship with the Un rather than be cast out by an aid cutoff into a loneliness in which i could only grow" (1987:A22). Thus, even though American intelligen 1986 concluded that the Pakistani uranium-enrichment plant at Kah gone

all the way" (Smith 1988:104), and even though the preside longer, as he is required by law, "certify Pakistan's nuclear purity" 1986), the disobedient, emotive femininity of Pakistan is likely to be less disruptive if it is kept within the bounds of its uneasy relationship with the United states Third World nations are also often portrayed as children, and the States, as a parental figure. The message is succinctly conveyed by o per headline: "India, Pakistan Told to Put Weapons Away" (Marsh Ben Sanders praises the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a means to "pro atomically innocent" (1990:25). But what about when innocence is los Chapman, speaking of India and Pakistan, argues that "it's fine to cou agers against having sex. But once they have produced a baby, another is in order" (1998:21). New York Times editorials speak of U.S. "scold Pakistan and "U.S. demands for good Pakistani behavior

from now on” (1987a:A34). Some commentators fear that the U.S. parental style is permissive and will encourage misbehavior by Pakistan's naughty siblings: advocated an aid cutoff said the time had come for the United States to set an example for other would-be nuclear nations" (Smith 1988:106). Warning that American parental credibility is on the line, the New York Times says that "all manner of reason and arguments have been tried with Pakistani

leaders. It's time for stronger steps" (1987a:A34). These metaphorical representations of threshold nuclear nations as criminals, women, and children assimilate the relationship between the West and the Third World to other hierarchies of dominance within Western culture. They use the symbolic force of domestic hierarchies-police over criminals, men over women, and adults over children-to buttress and construct the global hierarchy of nations, telling us that, like women, children, and criminals, Third World nations have their proper place. The sense in the West that Third World nations have their proper place at the bottom of a global order in which nuclear weapons are the status symbols of the powerful alone

Discourse Surrounding Nuclear War is rooted within desire for the political conditions to conquer the Orient Singh 04

(Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University, 9-24-2004, "Amardeep Singh: An Introduction to Edward Said, Orientalism, and Postcolonial Literary Studies," https://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004/09/introduction-to-edward-said.html,DMW)

Orientalism was a book about a particular pattern in western thought. It was not, in and of itself, an evaluation of the importance of that thought. It was written before the peak of the academic ‘culture wars’, when key

words like relativism, pluralism, and multiculturalism would be the order of the day. Said has often been lumped in with relativists and pluralists, but in fact he doesn’t belong there. In his later literary and cultural work, especially in

Culture and Imperialism Said generally avoided the language of confrontation. Where others have angrily rejected the literary heritage of the Western Canon, Said, has instead embraced it, albeit ambivalently. Where others denounced Joseph Conrad

https://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004/09/introduction-to-edward-said.html,DMW)

and Rudyard Kipling as racist dead white men, Said wrote careful reappraisals of their works, focusing on their representations of India and Africa respectively. Said did not apologize for, for instance, Joseph Conrad’s image of the Congo as an essentially corrupting place inhabited by ruthless cannibals. But Said did acknowledge Conrad’s gift for style, and explored its implications: Conrad was sophisticated enough to sense that he did indeed have a blind spot. Conrad recognized that the idea of imperialism was

an illusion, built entirely on a very fragile mythic rhetoric. You see some of this in the famous quote from Heart of Darkness: The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea -- something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . . ." The lines are spoken by the sailor Marlowe, who was in effect an observer-participant to the scene of Kurtz’s fatal breakdown in the upper Congo. He is a veteran, of the colonial system, and this is the first place where his views become apparent. Like many others in his trade, Marlowe was in fact ambivalent about what was, in

effect, his job. He knows the violence of it and the potential evil of it, but he still tries to justify it through recourse to the "idea at the back of it." But even more puzzling: that "idea at the back of it" is not an idea of reason, or human rights, or technology (or the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction). The idea is something to "bow down before, offer a sacrifice to..." The desire to conquer the earth, in short, is as irrational a desire as any. Said refers to this passage a few times in his essays. One such response is as follows, where

Said sketches an account of the political conditions that made imperialism possible in England and France, as well as general readings of several works of literature. I quote at length because this is a perfect example of Said’s ability to blend

political/historical analysis with literary criticism: But there's more than that to imperialism. There was a commitment to imperialism over and above profit, a commitment in constant circulation and recirculation which on the one

hand allowed decent men and women from England or France, from London or Paris, to accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be subjugated and, on the other hand, replenished metropolitan energies so that these decent people could think of the empire as a protracted, almost metaphysical obligation to rule subordinate, inferior or less advanced peoples. We mustn't forget, and this is a very important aspect of my topic, that there was very little domestic resistance inside Britain and France. There was a kind of

tremendous unanimity on the question of having an empire. There was very little domestic resistance to imperial expansion during the nineteenth century, although these empires were very frequently established and maintained under adverse and even disadvantageous conditions. Not only were immense hardships in the African wilds or wastes, the "dark continent," as it was called in the latter part of the nineteenth century, endured by the white colonizers, but there was always the tremendously risky physical disparity between a small number of Europeans at a very great distance from home and a much larger number of natives on their home territory. In India, for instance, by the 1930s, a mere 4,000 British civil servants, assisted by 60,000 soldiers and 90,000 civilians, had billeted themselves upon a country of 300,000,000 people. The will, self-confidence, even arrogance necessary to maintain such a state of affairs could only be guessed at. But as one can see in the texts of novels like Forster's Passage to India or Kipling's Kim, these attitudes are at least as significant as the number of people in

the army or civil service or the millions of pounds that England derived from India. For the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire, as Joseph Conrad so powerfully seems to have realized in Heart of Darkness. He says that the difference between us in the modern period, the modern imperialists, and the Romans is that the Romans were there just for the loot. They were just stealing. But we go there with an idea. He was thinking, obviously, of the idea, for instance in Africa, of the French and the Belgians that when you go to these continents you're not just robbing the people of their ivory and slaves and so on. You are improving them in some way. I'm really quite serious. The idea, for example, of the French empire was that France had a "mission civilisatrice," that it was there to civilize the natives. It was a very powerful idea. Obviously, not so many of the natives

believed it, but the French believed that that was what they were doing. The idea of having an empire is very important, and that is the central feature that I am interested in. All kinds of preparations are made for this idea within a culture and then, in turn and in time, imperialism acquires a kind of coherence, a set of experiences and a presence of ruler and ruled alike within the culture. (see http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/barsaid.htm) A final point, about postcolonial studies. The development of Said’s ideas about literature and art paralleled those of the field of post-colonial criticism as a whole. It began in anger – Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Malcolm X. And it has ended up in a rather different place, embraced in the very academic settings that once might have laughed at the very notion of a canonical body of, say, African Literature. Post-colonial criticism, which began under the combative spiritual aegis of [Frantz] Fanon and [Aime] Césaire, went further than either of them in showing the existence of what in Culture and Imperialism I called 'overlapping territories' and 'intertwined histories'. Many of us who grew up in the colonial era were struck by the

fact that even though a hard and fast line separated colonizer from colonized in matters of rule and authority (a native could never aspire to the condition of the white man), the experiences of ruler and ruled were not so easily disentangled. (from the London Review of Books: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n06/said01_.html) That means that nativism cannot be an effective answer to western hegemony (later he gets more specific: "Afrocentrism is as flawed as Eurocentrism"). There’s no simple way to achieve decolonization, just as (in the more limited context of the United States), there’s no simple way for anyone to disentangle him or

herself from the effects of racism. But it also means that, in many respects, colonialism is still with us. It was through the colonial system that most of the national borders in Africa and Asia were drawn up, in many cases arbitrarily. But more than that are the effects of colonial language, the colonial state bureaucracy, and especially colonial attitudes to things like economic development.

Nuclear war claims function inside of the binary created Orientalist discourses– Saying we are to be trusted and they are to be feared in reference to the EastGusterson 6Hugh Gusterson April 8 2006, Hugh Gusterson is an anthropologist at George Washington University. His work focuses on nuclear culture,

international security and the anthropology of science. “A Double Standard on Nuclear Weapons?” MIT center for International Studies of the

Conventional Wisdom http://cis.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/gusterson_audit.pdf //jazmyn

There has long been a widespread perception among U.S. defense intellectuals, politicians and pundits that, while we can live with the nuclear weapons of the five official nuclear nations for the indefinite future, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to nuclear-threshold states in the Third World, especially the Islamic world, would be enormously dangerous. This orthodoxy is so much a part of our collective common sense that, like all common sense, it can usually be stated as simple fact without fear of contradiction. It is widely found in the media and in learned journals, and it is shared by liberals as well as conservatives. For example, just as

Kenneth Adelman, a senior official in the Reagan administration, said that “the real danger comes from some miserable Third World country which decides to use these weapons either out of desperation or incivility,”2 at the same time Hans Bethe—a

physicist revered by many for his work on behalf of disarmament over many decades—said, “There have to be nuclear weapons in the hands of more responsible countries to deter such use” by Third World nations .3 Western alarmism about the dangers of nuclear weapons in Third World hands was particularly evident when India and Pakistan set off their salvos of nuclear tests in May 1998. Many analysts had already identified South Asia as the likeliest site in the world for a nuclear war. Soon after India’s tests , Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said on The Charlie Rose Show, “ If Pakistan tests the bomb, we are on the edge of nuclear warfare.” Three days later, following Pakistan’s tests, Senator John McCain said that the world was “closer to nuclear war than we have been any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”4 Speaking 2 Audit of the Conventional Wisdom to Reuters, David Albright, president of the liberal Institute for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., opined, “I don’t think they [India and Pakistan] are up to the task of preventing a conventional conflict from accidentally slipping into a nuclear exchange.” 5 Nuclear Orientalism

According to the anthropological literature on risk, shared fears often reveal as much about the identities and solidarities of the fearful as about the actual dangers that are feared. The immoderate reactions in the West to the nuclear tests conducted in 1998 by India and Pakistan, and to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program earlier, are examples of an entrenched discourse on nuclear proliferation that has played an important role in structuring the Third World, and our relation to it, in the Western imagination . This discourse, dividing the world into nations that can be trusted with nuclear weapons and those that cannot, dates back, at least, to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970. The Non- Proliferation Treaty embodied a bargain between the five countries that had nuclear weapons in 1970 and those countries that did not . According to the bargain, the five official nuclear states (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China) promised to assist other signatories to the treaty in acquiring nuclear energy technology as long as they did not use that technology to produce nuclear weapons , submitting to international inspections when necessary to prove their compliance. Further, in Article 6 of the treaty, the five nuclear powers agreed to pursue “negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and

to nuclear disarmament.” One hundred eighty-seven countries have signed the treaty. Saying it enshrines a

http://cis.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/gusterson_audit.pdf

system of global ‘nuclear apartheid,’ Israel, India, and Pakistan have refused [the treaty] . North Korea has

withdrawn from the treaty. The Non-Proliferation Treaty has become the legal anchor for a global nuclear regime that is increasingly legitimated in Western public discourse in racialized terms. In view of recent

developments in global politics—the collapse of the Soviet Union, two wars against Iraq, and international crises over the nuclear weapons programs of North Korea and Iran—the importance of this discourse in organizing Western geopolitical understandings is only growing. It has become an increasingly important way of legitimating U.S. military programs in the post-cold war world, where “ rogue states” have supplanted the old evil empire in the imaginations of American war planners . The dominant discourse that stabilizes this system of nuclear apartheid in Western ideology was labeled “Orientalism ” (albeit in a different

context) by Edward Said. According to Said, orientalist discourse constructs the world in terms of a series of binary oppositions that produce the Orient as the mirror image of the West : where “we” are rational and disciplined, “ they” are impulsive and emotional; where “we” are modern and flexible, “ they” are slaves to ancient passions and routines ; where “we” are honest and compassionate, “ they” are treacherous and uncultivated .6 While the blatantly racist orientalism of the high colonial period has softened, more subtle orientalist ideologies endure in contemporary politics and are applicable here . Four Common Arguments Against Proliferation Following are four arguments about nuclear proliferation that are integral to this orientalist common sense. I contend that all four are based on

an assumption that “ we” can be trusted with nuclear weapons while “they” cannot —an assumption that cannot be sustained when the evidence from nuclear history is examined more closely . 1. Third World Countries Are Too Poor to Afford Nuclear Weapons It is often said that it is inappropriate for Third World countries to squander money on nuclear weapons when they have such pressing problems of poverty, hunger, and homelessness on which the money might more appropriately be spent. For example, when India conducted its “peaceful nuclear explosion” on May 18, 1974, one Washington official, condemning India for having the wrong priorities, was quoted as saying, “I don’t see how this is going to grow more rice.” 7 Similar comments were made after the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of 1998. Mary McGrory, for example, wrote in her column in the Washington Post that “two large, poor countries in desperate need of schools, hospitals, and education are strewing billions of dollars for nuclear development.” 8 Such statements are not necessarily wrong, but read with a critical eye, they have a recursive effect that potentially undermines the rationale for military programs in the West as well. First, one can interrogate denunciations of profligate military spending in the Third World by pointing out that Western countries, despite their own extravagant levels of military spending, have by no means solved their own social and economic problems. The United States, for example, which at the time of India’s nuclear tests in the mid1990s allotted 4 percent of its GNP to military spending against India’s 2.8 percent,9 has for almost all of the past twenty-five years financed its military budget by accumulating debt. Meanwhile, in the United States, advocates for the homeless estimate that two million Americans have nowhere to live, and another thirty-six million Americans live below the official poverty line.10 Second, American taxpayers have consistently been told that nuclear weapons are a bargain compared with the cost of conventional weapons. They supposedly give “more bang for the buck.” If this is true for “us,” then surely it is also true for “them”: if a developing nation has security concerns, then a nuclear weapon ought to be the cheapest way to take care of them. Third, critics of U.S. military spending have been told for years that military spending stimulates economic development and produces such beneficial economic spin-offs that it almost pays for itself. If military Keynesianism works for “us,” it is hard to see why it should not also work for “them.” 2. Deterrence Will Be Unstable in the Third World During the cold war,

Americans were told that nuclear deterrence prevented the smoldering enmity between the superpowers from bursting into the full flame of war, saving millions of lives by making conventional war too dangerous. When the practice of deterrence was challenged by the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, Pentagon officials and defense intellectuals warned that nuclear disarmament would just make the world safe for conventional war. Surely, then, we should want countries such as Pakistan, India, Iraq, Iran and Israel also to enjoy the stabilizing benefits of nuclear weapons. Western security specialists and media pundits have argued, against this, that deterrence as practiced by the superpowers during the cold war may not work in Third World settings. One of the main reasons given is that Third World adversaries tend to share common borders. As one commentator put it: “While it would have taken more than a half-hour for a Soviet-based nuclear missile to reach the United States—time at least for America to double-check its computer screen or use the hotline—the striking distance between India and Pakistan is no more than five minutes.”11 However, this formulation focuses only on the difference in missile flight times while ignoring the fact that the missiles deployed by the two superpowers were, by the end of the cold war, MIRVED and extraordinarily accurate. (MIRVed missiles—equipped with Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles—carry several warheads, each capable of striking a different target). Some arms controllers worried in the 1980s that the two superpowers were entering a destabilizing “use-it-or-lose-it” situation where each would have to launch its missiles immediately if it believed itself under attack. Thus, once one adds accuracy and MIRVing to the strategic equation, the putative contrast between stable deterrence in the West and unstable deterrence in South Asia looks upside down, even if we were to grant the difference in flight times between the cold war superpowers and between the main adversaries in South Asia. But there is no reason to grant the alleged difference in flight times. Michael Lev says that it would have taken “more than half an hour” for American and Russian missiles to reach their targets during the cold war. While this was true for land-based ICBMs, it was not true for the submarine-launched missiles the superpowers could move in against each other’s coasts. Nor was it true of the American Jupiter missiles stationed in Turkey, right up against the Soviet border, in the early 1960s. Nor was it true of the Pershing IIs deployed in Germany in the 1980s. When the

antinuclear movement claimed that it was destabilizing to move the Pershings to within less than ten minutes’ flight time of Moscow, the U.S. Government insisted that anything that strengthened NATO’s attack capability strengthened nuclear deterrence. Here again we see a double standard in the arguments made to legitimate “our” nuclear weapons . 3. Third World Governments Lack the Technical Maturity to Handle Nuclear Weapons The third argument against horizontal proliferation is that Third World nations may lack the technical maturity to be trusted with nuclear weapons. The Washington Post quotes an unnamed Western diplomat stationed in Pakistan, who, worrying that India and Pakistan lack the technology to detect an incoming attack on their weapons, said the United States has “expensive space-based surveillance that could pick up the launches, but Pakistan and India have no warning systems. I don’t know what their doctrine will be. Launch when the wind blows?”12 If one reviews the U.S. nuclear safety record, the comforting dichotomy between a high-tech, safe “us” and low-tech, unsafe “them” begins to look distinctly dubious. First, the United States has not always made use of the safety technologies at its disposal. Over the protests of some weapons designers, for example, the navy decided not to incorporate state-of-the-art safety technologies into one of its newest weapons, the Trident II, and it ignored the recommendation of an expert panel that the Trident II be redesigned to make it safer.13 Second, if one looks more closely at U.S. early-warning systems, one finds that they create risks of their own. For example, it was the high technology Aegis radar system, misread by a navy operator, that was directly responsible for the tragically mistaken U.S. decision to shoot down an Iranian commercial jetliner on July 3, 1988. Similarly, and

potentially more seriously, in 1979, the U.S. military began prepara tions for nuclear war after a mistakenly inserted training tape led personnel in the strategic command apparatus to think a Soviet attack was underway. American interceptor planes were scrambled and air traffic controllers were told to bring down commercial planes before U.S. military commanders detected the error. As for the American safety record in transporting and handling nuclear weapons, there is more cause for relief than for complacency. There have, for example, been at least twenty-four occasions when American aircraft have accidentally released nuclear weapons and at least eight incidents where U.S. nuclear weapons were involved in plane crashes or fires.14 In other words, the U.S. nuclear arsenal has its own safety problems related to its dependence on highly computerized warning and detection systems, the cold war practice of patrolling oceans and skies with live nuclear weapons, and large stockpile size. Even where U.S. scientists have developed special safety technologies, they have not always been used. The presumption that Third World countries lack the technical competence to be trusted with nuclear weapons fits our stereotypes about those countries’ backwardness, but it distracts us from asking whether we ourselves have the technical infallibility the weapons ideally require. The discourse on proliferation assumes that the superpowers’ massive arsenals of highly accurate, MIRVed missiles deployed on hair-trigger alert were stable and that the small, elemental arsenals of new nuclear nations would be unstable, but one could quite plausibly argue the reverse. This leaves one wondering whether prejudices about the weapons’ owners are not masquerading as technical concerns about weapons configurations and safety protocols. 4. Third World Regimes Lack the Political Maturity to Be Trusted with Nuclear Weapons The fourth argument concerns the supposed political instability or irrationality of Third World countries. Security specialists and media pundits worry that Third World dictators free from democratic constraints are more likely to develop and use nuclear weapons, that military officers in such countries will be more likely to take possession of the weapons or use them on their own initiative, or that Third World countries are more vulnerable to the kinds of ancient hatred and religious fanaticism that could lead to the

use of nuclear weapons. These concerns bring us to the heart of orientalist ideology. In the words of Richard Perle, a prominent neoconservative, nuclear weapons are “one thing in the hands of governments animated by rational policies to protect national interests and a normal regard for human life. They are quite another in the hands of a brutal megalomaniac like Saddam who wouldn’t blink at the mass destruction of his enemies.”15 Similarly, but on the other end of the political spectrum, Senator Edward Kennedy warned that “nuclear weapons in the arsenals of unstable Third World regimes are a clear and present danger to all humanity. … Dictators threatened with attack along their borders or revolutions from within may not pause before pressing the button. The scenarios are terrifying.”16 The presumed contrast between the West, where leaders are disciplined by democracy, and the Third World, where they are not, does not hold up so well under examination. The governments of Britain, France, and Israel, not to mention the United States, all made their initial decisions to acquire nuclear weapons without any public debate or knowledge. Only in India was the question of whether or not to cross the nuclear threshold an election issue. Pakistan also had a period of public debate before conducting its first nuclear test. And how safe are the official nuclear powers from coups d’état, renegade officers, or reckless leaders? France came perilously close to revolution as recently as 1968, and in 1961 a group of renegade French military officers took control of a nuclear weapon at France’s nuclear test site in the Sahara desert.17 Britain, struggling to repress IRA bombing campaigns, has been engaged in low-level civil war for most of the time it has possessed nuclear weapons. The United States has, since it acquired nuclear weapons, seen Presidents John F. Kennedy assassinated, Gerald Ford threatened with an empty gun by a member of the Manson family, and Ronald Reagan wounded by a gunman. There also have been problems with U.S. command and control. During the Cuban Missile Crisis a group of military officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base jerry-rigged their missiles so that they could launch their nuclear weapons independently of the national command and control structure and outside of normal procedures requiring multiple officers to enable a launch.18 During the 1950s some senior U.S. military leaders drew up plans for and advocated preemptive nuclear attacks on the Soviet Union. One of these, Curtis LeMay, was by 1954 provoking the Soviets by sending U.S. reconnaissance flights over the USSR—technically an act of war—despite President Truman’s orders not to do so. A New Discourse I do not want to minimize the potential dangers of nuclear proliferation. But these dangers should not be represented in ways that obscure both the dangers inherent in the continued maintenance of our own nuclear arsenals and the fact that our own actions are often a source of the instabilities we so fear in Third World nations Where does this leave us? There are three different discursive positions on proliferation, each pointing in the direction of a very different global security regime, that do not embody the “orientalist” double standard. The first, a position of exclusion, is based pragmatically in the conventions of realpolitik. It involves the candid declaration that, while nuclear weapons may be no more dangerous in the hands of Muslims or Hindus than in those of Christians, they are a prerogative of power, and the powerful have no intention of allowing the powerless to acquire them. This is a position that, in its rejection of easy racism and phony moralism, is at least honorable in its frankness. The second position, participation, is based on Kenneth Waltz’s argument that all countries benefit from acquiring nuclear weapons.19 This position may have more appeal in certain parts of the Third World than in the West. It is the position of India, Israel, and Pakistan, for example, which have, like the older nuclear nations, sought to maximize their power and freedom by acquiring a nuclear capability. These countries pursued nuclear weapons in search of

greater security vis-à-vis regional rivals and out of a desire to shift the balance of power in their client relationships with the superpowers. The third position, renunciation, breaks down the distinctions we have constructed between “us” and “them” and asks whether nuclear weapons are safe in anyone’s hands. “What-must-on-no-account-be-known,” says Salman Rushdie, is the “impossible verity that

savagery could be concealed beneath decency’s well-pressed shirt.” Our orientalist discourse on nuclear proliferation is one of our ways not to know this. This position has been nicely articulated by the late George Kennan: I see the danger not in the number or quality of the weapons or in the intentions of those who hold them but in the very existence of weapons of this nature, regardless of whose hands they are in. ... I see no solution to the problem other than the complete elimination of these and all other weapons of mass destruction from national arsenals; and the sooner we move toward that solution, and the greater courage we show in doing so, the safer we will be.20

Terrorism

The construction the middle eastern oriental is rooted within the ignorant image of the jihad menace and terrorism which positions the Arab world as a perpetual “other”Little 08(Douglas Little, Professor of History and International Relations at Clark University., "American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 ", University of North Carolina Press, 3rd edition, 2008, DMW)

Although few Americans realized that “assassin” was an Arabic word, many probably believed that the brutal act of terrorism in the streets of Cairo, like Black September’s bloody raid outside Munich nine years earlier, was very much in keeping with the Arab character. Seven months before the Olympic massacre, a retired State Department Middle East expert had

published a psychological profile warning that the repeated humiliations inflicted by Israel would unleash a “collective need for vengeance”

deeply rooted in Arab culture. “It is difficult to describe the depth of the Arabs’ emotional need for revenge, but suffice it to say that Islam itself found it necessary to sanction revenge,” Harold Glidden observed in February

1972. “The felt need for revenge is as strong today as it was in pre-Islamic times.”116 Other orientalist broadsides followed in quick succession. Raphael Patai, an Israeli-educated anthropologist who had taught Middle Eastern studies at Princeton, Columbia, and

other American universities, offered his readers a 34 orientalism, american style bleak view of the “backwardness, cultural decline, indeed, fossilization” of the Arab world in 1973. The troubled relationship with the West, Patai

explained, was the result of everything from prolonged breast-feeding to faulty toilet training, all of which “produced a disturbing inferiority complex in the Arab mind which in itself made it more difficult to shake off the shackles of stagnation.”117 Two years later British orientalist John Laffin informed the Amer- ican public that “violence exists at every level of Arab

life,” thanks mainly to “poverty and frustration — sexual, economic, [and] political.” Long ago, Laffin added, “history ‘turned wrong’ for the

Arabs,” leaving them subordinate to the Western powers. The “consequent trauma,” he concluded, was “a principal reason for the great

psychological sickness which fell like a plague upon the Arab race.”118 William Brown, a U.S. diplomat posted to Cairo and Beirut during the

1960s, confirmed Patai’s and Laffin’s orientalist diagnoses in a 1980 retrospective aptly titled The Last Crusade. Arab nationalism was “beyond

the control apparatus of any state” and had “a reactive quality arising from the Arabs’ experience with the West,” Brown observed. “A relative

and toler- ant perspective is not possible within the Arabs’ world of absolute and God- given truth.”119 Critics such as Edward Said were quick to challenge these orientalist assumptions. As early as 1978 Said insisted that such pathological stereotypes of the Arabs constituted little more than self-serving rationalizations for Western cultural and economic imperialism. “Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad,” he observed bluntly.

“Consequence: a fear that the Muslims (or Arabs) will take over the world.” The net effect of this fear was ignorance, Said concluded in the final chapter of Orientalism, ignorance that seemed destined “to keep the region and its people conceptually emasculated, reduced to ‘attitudes,’ ‘trends,’ statistics: in short, dehumanized.”120 Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s Said broadened his critique, stressing that America’s habit of viewing “Arabs as basically, irrecusably, and congenitally ‘Other’” clearly reflected “racist overtones in its elaboration of an ‘Arab’ anti-democratic, violent, and regressive attitude to the world.” This, Said pointed out in Cul- ture and Imperialism in 1993, “contributed to the polarity that was set up between democratic Israel and a homogeneously non-democratic Arab world, in which the Palestinians, dispossessed and exiled by Israel, came to represent ‘terrorism’ and little beyond it.”121

Middle East The irrational fear of the “Islamic Bomb” is just a carry over from years of Orientalism and IslamophobiaCraig 17

(Malcolm Craig., 3-13-2017, "Nuclear Orientalism?: America, Pakistan, and the ‘Islamic Bomb’, 1979-2016," Asia Dialogue, https://theasiadialogue.com/2017/03/13/nuclear-orientalism-america-pakistan-and-the-islamic-bomb-1979-2016/ KS)

The heavily freighted idea of an “Islamic bomb” has been around for some decades now . The notion behind it

is that a nuclear weapon developed by an “Islamic” nation would automatically become the Islamic world’s shared property – and more than

that, a “nuclear sword” with which to wage jihad . But, as with many terms applied to the “Islamic world”, it says more about

Western attitudes than about why and how nuclear technology has spread. The concept as we know it emerged from anxieties about

proliferation, globalisation, resurgent Islam, and conspiracies real and imagined, a fearful idea that could be applied to the atomic ambitions of

any Muslim nation or non-state group. It looked at Pakistan’s nuclear programme and extrapolated it to encompass everything between the

mountains of South Asia and the deserts of North Africa. And ever since it appeared it has retained its power to shock, eliding terrorism, jihadism, the perceived ambitions of “Islamic” states, and state-private proliferation networks into one fearsome term . It has also made a useful avatar for all sorts of specific threats – Muammar Gaddafi’s anti-

Western “fanaticism”, Saddam Hussein’s socialist Ba’athism, the Iranian Mullahs’ revolutionary Islamic ideology, contemporary fundamentalist

terrorism, and Pakistan’s military-Islamic thinking. But of course, the Islamic bomb idea is part of a web of complex geopolitical ideas.

International terrorism, the rise of modern political Islam, and Western interventions all muddle the issue. And oddly enough given the way it’s

used today, the term in fact began its life outside the West. High Hopes The connection between religion and the bomb was in fact first

explicitly made in 1970s Pakistan, where leaders Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Muhammad Zia ul-Haq both saw nuclear weapons as the means to

enhance the country’s status within the so-called “Muslim world”. Yet Pakistan’s atomic program was at its heart a nationalistic security

project, not a religious one. The term “Islamic bomb” didn’t appear in the Western news media until around 1979, when the Iranian Revolution set outsiders worrying about the potential intersections between nuclear weapons, proliferation and Islamic politics. At around the same time, India was mounting a campaign against

Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions; its government and media duly began deliberately stoking fears of a pan-Islamic nuclear threat originating with

Islamabad. Israel’s government, too, made it clear that it believed an Islamic bomb was imminent. Media revelations about Pakistani

metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan also helped to spur interest. In 1975, Khan had stolen uranium enrichment centrifuge blueprints from the

URENCO plant in the Netherlands. These ended up providing the technical basis for Pakistan’s bomb programme. Khan’s theft – and the

genuine conspiracy that was Pakistan’s international nuclear purchasing project – led to conspiracy theories. Despite him being a Pakistani

nationalist, the Guardian newspaper stated that “Dr Khan Stole the Bomb for Islam”. His act was seen not as the actions of one man, but as part

of a wider “Islamic” conspiracy. In 1979, media institutions including West Germany’s ZDF, the UK’s BBC, and the US’s CBS all popularised the

concept. On little evidence, it became accepted that this was a project designed to benefit the entire Muslim world. But despite the genuine

Pakistani-Libyan connections, there was simply never a unified Islamic nuclear quest. Conspiracy Theory Through the 1980s and 1990s,

countries as diverse and mutually antagonistic as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Niger and Pakistan were all tied together by the Western fear of an Islamic bomb. Prominent commentators such as Jack Anderson and William Safire consistently deployed the term ; politicians as diverse as Tam Dalyell, Edward Kennedy, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan all talked about it in fearful terms. All were off-base. After Khan’s international

proliferation network was exposed in 2004, there duly appeared a slew of books on the subject, more than a few of which posited that there

was an international “Islamic” conspiracy to acquire “the bomb”. Khan was portrayed as a “nuclear jihadist” bent on righting perceived wrongs

inflicted by the West on the world’s Muslims. Again, a genuine conspiracy became tied up with conspiracy theory. Yes, Khan did proliferate

centrifuge technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea – but he was motivated by money, power and prestige, not religion. Today, the spectre of

the Islamic bomb haunts certain corners of the internet. From the Huffington Post to Breitbart and the Washington Times, the term crops up

again and again, always used to imply that nations such as Iran harbour ambitious ideological motives for their nuclear ambitions. It’s true that

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https://theasiadialogue.com/2017/03/13/nuclear-orientalism-america-pakistan-and-the-islamic-bomb-1979-2016/

prominent Muslim figures from Bhutto to bin Laden spoke rhetorically about a “bomb for the ummah”. But this was never more than rhetoric.

Leaving aside all nuclear matters, internecine and sectarian differences and conflict mean that global Islamic political unity is unlikely in the

extreme. The Islamic bomb has always been a convenient device with which to elide complex problems of religion, politics and nuclear weapons. And sadly, it still is. Those who still casually bandy the term about would do well to think about where it really comes from.

Representations of the Middle East as inferior and barbaric positions them as the antithesis of the West through orientalist tropes - Gemma Kumaraea, MURAJ, “Homeland and Orientalism: An Examination of Arab Muslim Identity and US” - https://pubs.lib.umn.edu/index.php/muraj/article/download/1325/1130/ sfrrpt

Homeland is an edge-of-your-seat sensation,” according to the official website of the show. Homeland, a spy thriller television series currently renewed for its seventh and eighth seasons starting in 2018, is broadcasted on the cable channel Showtime. It is based on an Israeli series titled Prisoner of War, which was acquired by 20th Century Fox Television and adapted into Homeland for American audiences (Otterson, 2017). The original series was produced by Keshet, an Israeli media production company, that was brought on as a producer of Homeland as well. The executive producers are Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, both of whom additionally worked on the early 2000s American spy thriller 24, a show that also featured an American counter-terrorism unit (IMDB) and themes similar to those of Homeland. Homeland has been at the center of intense controversy; despite the fact that the show has won two Golden Globe Awards, as well as multiple Primetime Emmy Awards for Best Drama Series and Outstanding Lead Actors, it has also garnered harsh criticism on the basis of its depictions of Arabs and Muslims (IMDB; Edwards, 2017). The show is rated Mature and as such, is clearly geared toward a slightly older audience; however, despite its mature rating and the fact that it is aired on a premium cable network, the show has been vastly popular, consistently garnering viewership in the millions (O’Connell, 2013 ; Otterson, 2017). The series follows brilliant but volatile agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) as she works for the Central Intelligence Agency in their counter-terrorism unit. At the beginning of the first season, Sergeant Nicholas Brody, who was presumed dead after being captured in Iraq eight years prior, is found and returned home. Abu Nazir, a Palestinian terrorist and al-Qaeda commander who is the show’s main antagonist, held Brody captive. While Brody is heralded as an American hero, Carrie is not so easily convinced of his intentions; she had been warned that a US prisoner of war had been radicalized and suspects Brody is the double agent. The majority of the first and second seasons focus on Carrie’s struggle to determine Sergeant Brody’s intentions. Eventually, the CIA discovers that Tom Walker, another US prisoner of war presumed to be dead, is alive and had become radicalized. Although suspicion then shifts towards Walker, it eventually becomes evident that Brody and Walker had been working together in plotting a domestic terror attack along with another couple who had become radicalized, Faisel and Aileen. Brody eventually plans to assassinate the Vice President of the United States and many of his staff using an explosive vest; however, he changes his mind at the last moment. Brody’s terrorist inclinations are finally discovered by the CIA at MURAJ • z.umn.edu/MURAJ 2 Volume 1 • Issue 1 large and after intense interrogation and manipulation, they convince him to work with them to eliminate Abu Nazir. Brody struggles to balance his work as a newly elected congressman with his role working for the CIA as an undercover agent in Nazir’s in-group. This group includes Roya Hammad, a terrorist sympathizer and reporter, as well as a local man serving as a bomb-maker. As more of Abu Nazir’s contacts come to light and the situation becomes increasingly complicated, Carrie and her team struggle to keep things under control. At the conclusion of season two, Abu Nazir is captured and killed; however, his death does not stop a bomb from exploding at a CIA headquarters event, killing over 200. Nazir frames Brody for the explosion and Brody and Carrie are forced to flee. The show additionally follows Carrie’s challenges as she grapples with mental illness, Brody’s struggles as a convert to Islam, and the challenges of Brody’s wife Jessica and their two children, Dana and Chris, face as

they attempt to adjust to Brody’s return and the consequences of his bizarre behavior. Themes of American nationalism, Arab identity, and Islam all prevail in the show. These detailed and strategic frames reflect larger underlying beliefs about an implied dichotomy between the global East and global West. My research question therefore is as follows: how

does Homeland represent Arab Muslim identity and US nationalism in the context of Orientalism as defined by Said? That is to say, how does Homeland frame and link Arab Muslim identity and American nationalism as categories that are inherently antithetical to one another? First, the paper examines previous research conducted on the representation of Arabs and Muslims in American media, the concept of US nationalism, and how Orientalism plays a role in American self-concept as well as attitudes towards the Middle East, and how that overarching framework is demonstrated in our media content. Immediately following, I analyze how Homeland addresses concepts of Orientalism in general, as well as Arab Muslim identity and US nationalism in particular, and the sociopolitical relevancy of these representations. Literature Review Through a long and rich history of textual analysis and study, it has been established that the media play a vital role in both forming a framework through which audiences see the world and in setting

the agenda to establish what is or is not important in a current sociopolitical landscape (McCombs & Shaw, 1972, p. 176). Media both informs and is informed by social perception of the world. Ground-breaking work by Gerbner in 1976 established his idea of ‘cultivation theory,’ by which a particular way of seeing the world is established and internalized through repeated exposure to that framework. Although cultivation of a framework is only one of many pieces of audience beliefs, Gerbner’s work set

an important precedent for understanding the relationship between media production and viewership. Hall’s work additionally builds upon this idea by examining the creation and maintenance of ideologies in media, particularly racist ideologies (2003). On inferential racism, Hall argues that there are “naturalised representations of events and

https://pubs.lib.umn.edu/index.php/muraj/article/download/1325/1130/

situations relating to race, whether ‘factual’ or ‘fictional’ , which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions ” (2003, p. 90). The naturalization of certain beliefs and the ways that lines between a set ideology and what is objectively “true” about the world become blurred must form our understanding of how racist and Islamophobic ideology is presented in media. A negative ideological framework has pervaded media representation of Islam and the Middle East. Ahmed and Matthes (2017) conducted a meta-analysis of media representations of Muslims, examining 345 studies published from 2000-2015. They found that Muslims

were overwhelmingly portrayed in a negative manner, and that furthermore, media discourse relied on Orientalist tropes to frame Muslims as the ‘Other .’ S haheen (2003) went back even further, detailing the lengthy history of representation of Muslims and Arabs in his work by

examining over 900 films from more than a century. He found that stereotypes describing Muslims as “heartless, brutal, uncivilized, religious fanatics” have become pervasive in media through the years (Shaheen, 2003, p. 171). Alsultany has updated and expanded this representational work, developing categories for a variety of stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims, particularly in the overarching category of what she refers to as “simplified complex representations.” According to Alsultany, simplified complex representations are the contemporary form of Islamophobic representations, in which it may appear that Arabs are now presented as having more well-rounded and rich characterization in media, but beneath the surface, characters are still trapped in the same reductive storylines revolving around terrorism. Alsultany claims that “Post-9/11 television is testimony to the fact that the stereotypes that held sway for much of the twentieth century are no longer socially acceptable—at least in their most blatant forms. But this does not mean that such stereotypes (and viewers’ taste for them) have actually gone away; they have only become covert” (Alsultany, 2012, p. 27-28). Alsultany also did research on the ways in which nonprofit advertising in MURAJ • z.umn.edu/MURAJ 3 Volume 1 • Issue 1 America attempts to sell the idea of a diverse and multicultural society that is inclusive of Muslim Americans. The issue became increasingly complicated after September 11th, when national confusion and fear was

heightened. “In addition to government practices that defined Americans and Arabs/Muslims as binary opposites,” Alsultany wrote, “government and media discourses relied on old Orientalist tropes that positioned American national identity as democratic, modern , and free and the Middle East as primitive, barbaric, and oppressive ” ( 2007, p. 594).

Halse (2012) found additional Orientalist beliefs creeping in to media representation. He examined the show 24 and discovered a post September 11th shift to a new Muslim stereotype: the radicalized Muslim in disguise as the average American. In fact, the show was promoted

using the phrase “They could be next door.” According to Halse, 24, which was produced by the same individuals as Homeland, builds on the idea of the East and the West as fundamentally antithetical to one another. Powell (2011) also examined the framing of Islam and Arab communities in a post September 11th world. Her research found that media representation framed “Muslims/Arabs/Islam working together in organized terrorist cells against a ‘Christian America’” (Powell, 2011, p. 91). Her work is important in addressing the other side of the equation: the development of an identity for the West that can be presented as antithetical to the East. It is here that the concept of US nationalism becomes important to understanding this implied dichotomy. In his book examining the concept and creation of nationalism, Anderson (1983) defined a nation as “an imagined political community” in which people find an identity in their sense of nationalism. This sense of unifying identity forms a “deep horizontal comradeship” (1983, p. 49 & 50). In a population searching for meaning, nationalism fills a gap and creates unified meaning. However, the identity that becomes formulated can have dangerous implications. In an examination of the paradoxes of nationalism, Pei (2003) argues that “American nationalism is hidden in plain sight” (p. 34). American is highly nationalistic, yet does not believe itself to be. Two important aspects that are relevant to this piece can be drawn from Pei’s research. First of all, according to Pei, when examining statistics about American attitudes, it becomes clear that “Americans not only take enormous pride in their values but also regard them as universally applicable” (2003, p. 32). There is a very strong belief in the superiority of American policies and values, as well as a strong belief that they could benefit the rest of the world. Yet another aspect of US nationalism can be directly linked to this—what Pei referred to as “the

willingness of ordinary citizens to contribute to the public good” (2003, p. 32). Although military prowess is not discussed in this piece, it is easy to see how this confidence in US values and a willingness to contribute can lead to a strengthening of American military powers. In his work examining American nationalism in the context of United States foreign policy following September 11th, McCartney (2004) argues that following the September 11th attacks, attention was immediately and successfully diverted to the war in Iraq. He argues that “enduring nationalist themes provided the basic structure in which Americans organized their comprehension of and reaction to the terrorist attacks” and that a part of the reason for intervention in the Middle East was to change the world “to suit American interests by making it more consistent with American values,” which he argues has always been an aspect of American nationalism (2004, p. 400). The attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center

provided a perfect backdrop to seamlessly connect American nationalism to interference in the Middle East. Monten (2005) agrees with McCartney’s assessment, arguing that US nationalism “has historically been defined in terms of both adherence to a set of liberal, universal political ideals and a perceived obligation to spread those norms internationally” (p. 113). This attitude extensively shaped American politics following the events of September 11th. These ideals and beliefs are strongly rooted in the history of Orientalism. Edward Said famously coined the term Orientalism in his 1978 book. Orientalism, which Said defines as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’”, is vital to defining the relationship between the East and West (1978, p.

112). Orientalism posits the global West as the antithesis to the East , setting up a dichotomy in which the East is defined as inferior , backward, and primitive, while the West is defined as superior, modern, and

progressive. Orientalism arose from a long history of interaction between the Middle East, France, and Britain, which involved complex power dynamics and

intense conflict. However, it is important to note that the East, herein referred to as the Orient, does not reflect the Middle East; the Orient is a creation of the West with little basis in fact. It is this inaccurate and offensive concept of the East that is posed as the antithesis to the West. Said’s research revolutionized the ways in which scholars examined the relationship between the global East and West. Kumar (2010) examined the resurgence of Orientalist concepts during the second Bush administration. According to Kumar, Orientalist beliefs have once more become dominant after September 11th. Coverage on major news MURAJ • z.umn.edu/MURAJ 4 Volume 1 • Issue 1 sources has led to the naturalization of an epistemological framework rooted in Orientalist beliefs and attitudes. She addresses and refutes five of these prominent Orientalist concepts, including the ideas that Muslims are inherently irrational/backward as well as the idea that they are innately violent. She also addresses the “clash of civilizations” theory, coined by Lewis in the 1950s, which resurged during the Bush administration. This particular theory posits that conflict in this case is due to inherent cultural and religious differences between the global East and West. Asad, in his 2007 book on suicide bombings, addresses this idea, arguing that the problem with this theory is that it ignores a lengthy history of interaction between the East and West, and

the fact that neither of these parts of the world developed in isolation. Asad also addresses why terrorism and ostensibly legitimate warfare are seen differently, concluding that the main difference is that killing that is sanctioned by governments is legitimized. Furthermore, he argues that justifications for categorizing something as warfare instead of terrorism are additionally predicated on the supposed status of the nation: “it is not cruelty that matters in the distinction between terrorists and armies at war, still less the threat each poses to entire ways of life, but their civilization status. What is really at stake is not a clash of civilization… but the fight of civilization against the uncivilized ” (2007, 37-8). This argument neatly ties together Orientalism, differentiation, and state-level justifications of violence . As George W. Bush said in 2006, “We face an enemy that has an ideology. They believe things. The best way to describe their ideology is to relate to you the fact that they think the opposite of what we think.” This idea of the East as the antithesis of the West is strongly rooted in American society historically and currently, and has become a justification for foreign policy , ubiquitous in media representation. Analysis Orientalism A thorough analysis of Homeland indicates that it is predicated upon concepts of Orientalism. The dichotomy of terrorism/counter-terrorism goes deeper than simply an attack/protect plot line; throughout the series, it is shown that the true dichotomy is in the way that the Middle East is posited as antithetical to the West. Characters within the Western hemisphere, defined by a sense of US nationalism, are held up as the opposite to everything the Muslim Arab world represents. The inherent, underlying values and belief systems of each are detailed as completely different and mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the show depends upon an ethnocentric depiction of the Middle East. A specific idea of the Orient is created through a Western gaze, and that idea of the Orient is posited as the antithesis of the West; the ‘real’ Middle East is never relevant. Narratives stemming from the Middle East are completely ignored in the show, which solely utilizes its particular concept of the Orient as a

counter-argument to the West. The West is moral, civilized, and modern, as are its people; the East is inherently immoral, violent, uncivilized, and completely backward, as are all those who stem from that area. The only possible way to salvage such a society is through violence, or rescuing the occasional Arab woman from such a dangerous place. Nationalist values are furthermore presented as the moral of the story, inspiring average Americans to take up arms to defend their homeland. Furthermore, a sense of US exceptionalism comes into the picture; the West resorts to extreme acts of violence, but only because they have been “backed into a corner,” so to speak, and have no other choice. In reinforcing this narrative, despite the violence of its Western characters, Homeland reifies the dichotomy of the moral West positioned against an immoral East. These aforementioned concepts of Orientalism are demonstrated through the entire show, particularly in the way they intersect with Homeland’s narratives surrounding Arab Muslim identity and US nationalism. Arab Muslim Identity One of the most salient issues in the show is the representation of Arab Muslim identity. Statistically, Arabs comprise a relatively small percentage of Muslims worldwide; however, Homeland conflates Arab and Muslim identities as being indistinguishable. In doing so, they draw from a long and rich history of stereotyped and statistically inaccurate representations of Arab Muslim communities (Shaheen, 2003). This representation has been at the forefront of criticism of Homeland; many individuals and organizations within the Arab and/or Muslim community argue the show draws upon offensive, stereotyped, and one dimensional representations of their people (Alsultany, 2007; Alsultany, 2012). An analysis of the first two seasons of Homeland suggests that their concerns have validity. In the first two seasons of the show, without exception, Arab Muslims are shown to be backward, violent, and uncivilized. “They yell ‘death to America’ no matter what we do,” Vice President Walden shouts during season two. Furthermore, Homeland fails to present even a singular Arab or Muslim character who remains uninvolved with terrorism. In the opening few minutes of the series, two different acts of violence are perpetrated by Arab MURAJ • z.umn.edu/MURAJ 5 Volume 1 • Issue 1 Muslim characters on Western characters. First, Carrie Mathison is violently dragged from an Iraqi prison by guards. Despite the fact that she was in the prison illegally, a stark point about the violence of the Arab world is made when her white body is dragged kicking and screaming down the filthy hallway of an Iraqi prison by multiple Arab men dressed in Muslim garb. Furthermore, Sergeant Brody is shown being tortured and imprisoned by al-Qaeda. This is demonstrated with visually disturbing images of brutality, involving beatings and blood. Furthermore, the Arab characters behaving violently toward Brody go a step further in their cruelty and brutality, forcing him to beat his fellow captured marine to the point of unconsciousness. In doing so, Homeland demonstrates that Arab Muslims not only seek violence against men from the West as a form of revenge, but enact violence for enjoyment as well. From these initial moments of the show, there is little improvement. Every single scene taking place in the Middle East includes senseless violence on the part of Arab Muslim characters. Additional stereotypes include excessively wealthy characters, Arab men sexually possessing white women to the point of total control, abusive Arab husbands, violently rioting Arabs, a multitude of terrorist characters, and even more terrorist-sympathetic characters. Even Arab Muslims within the US are under suspicion by the federal government, solely for being Arab and Muslim, invoking the ‘insidious Muslim’ stereotype. It soon becomes clear that a journalist named Roya Hammad is a terrorist sympathizer, despite having a high profile career, being college educated, and working at the White House. A man named Faisel who was a college professor and husband buying his first house turns out to be a terrorist working on a plot to enact a domestic attack. Faisel and his wife even use the symbol of an American flag as an indicator that their safety is compromised; this drives home the point that although these Arab Muslims may look and act like Americans, and even own these symbols of overt patriotism, they are not one of us—they are secretly plotting the downfall of the West. Even working for the CIA, as Arabic-speaking and Muslim character Danny Galvez does,

is not enough; when Carrie Mathison suspects there is a mole at the CIA, he is the first to be investigated, solely because he is Muslim. Additional comments about Muslims being “Qu’ran thumpers” and coming from “nomadic cultures,” as well as Muslim greetings (peace be upon you) and the Muslim statement of faith (there is no god but God and Muhammad is His prophet) are uttered solely in situations of terrorism and violence, clearly framing Arab Muslims as overly religious, backward and uncivilized, and inherently violent. As an additional point of interest, Arabic spoken by Arab characters is rarely translated on the show; Arabic spoken by white characters is translated. This difference further positions Arab Muslims in a position as Other, as if their native language is something inherently suspicious. Furthermore, the show conflates of the entire Middle East regarding countries, names, and organizations. Barriers and distinctions are blurred to create a singular homologous, homogenized entity. The setting of the show consistently switches between Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Pakistan without clear reason; furthermore, it presents all of the countries as roughly the same. They are all inaccurately presented as speaking Arabic and lacking basic modern resources such as grocery stores, electricity, and coffee shops. One episode set in Lebanon sparked outrage for depicting the country inaccurately (BBC News). Carrie Mathison flees through the streets of what is supposedly Hamra Street in Beirut, running through decrepit and filthy buildings and down unpaved roads. She has changed her eye color and covered her hair, supposedly to blend in. In reality, Hamra Street is a flourishing economic hub for Beirut, drawing large groups of tourists year-round. It is a well-developed area, including clothing stores, street festivals, and even Starbucks. Furthermore, Hamra Street is filled with ex-pats who would not give a blonde haired, blue eyed, uncovered woman a second glance. However, in order to reinforce the concept of the Orient as uncivilized and backward, Homeland chose to frame Beirut as a place filled with violence and a complete lack of real culture or modern amenities. Furthermore, the long history of cultural interchange between the East and West is completely glossed over. These regions are presented as historically and currently completely separate. Another notable issue reflects the naming of characters. Abu Nazir’s son, Issa, is repeatedly invoked as the reason for Brody’s radicalization; however, his name is never pronounced correctly. Additionally, Roya Hammad, former refugee, White House reporter, and terrorist sympathizer, is supposedly Palestinian, but has a Persian name. Terrorist organizations are also conflated and mixed up. Abu Nazir is an al-Qaeda leader; however, at the beginning of season two, he is supposedly working with a Hezbollah commander. Although there have been isolated incidents of cooperation, in general, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah are at war with one another despite sharing the common enemy of the West. All of these may seem like smaller issues in the grander scheme of the show; however, they are indicative of a larger underlying issue at play. The Arab world is filled with a variety of distinctive, unique, beautiful cultures. However, none of this rich and meaningful historical and MURAJ •

z.umn.edu/MURAJ 6 Volume 1 • Issue 1 cultural context is relevant for the purposes of Homeland. As Said said, the Orient , after all , is not an actual depiction of the Middle East, but instead an artificial creation by the West . Homeland demonstrates this clearly. Accuracy and distinctions regarding the complexity of the Muslim world are absent—rather, to service the purposes of the show, the entirety of the Middle East is conflated to create a reductive depiction of a diverse portion of the world and simply present an impoverished and homogenous hotbed for terrorism instead. Additionally, Arab Muslim bodies are depicted as disposable and treated as less than human. When it is revealed that the CIA knowingly killed over 80 Arab children, the entire situation is treated as more of a PR catastrophe than a humanitarian crisis. During a raid, the CIA further kills several individuals who were praying at a Washington DC mosque; little sympathy is shown in this situation and it is simply framed as another PR disaster and another situation where a terrorist slipped away. Afsal Hamid, a captured terrorist, kills himself while in CIA captivity after someone slips him a razor blade; his storyline is subsequently dropped and what happened in that scenario is never revealed. After Faisel is killed by the CIA, Aileen negotiates a Muslim burial for him, but there is no follow-up. Even in the first episode, an Arab man who was a terrorist that supposedly had information on a radicalized prisoner of war is allowed to be executed by his country in the name of avoiding an international conflict. Brody kills an Arab bomb maker in the middle of the woods and the murder is dropped after one episode; what exactly happened to him post-mortem is never clarified, nor does the audience ever receive any background information on him. It is simply posed as a kink in the plans for detonating a bomb. In situation after situation, Arab Muslim bodies are treated as replaceable and worth less than their white counterparts. When they are featured in storylines, their characterizations are brief and one dimensional with no follow-up, and more often than not, there are no storylines in the first place. Arab Muslim lives are treated as expendable, interchangeable, and secondary, there only to enact violence and then be removed from the plot line. US Nationalism US nationalism forms a main thread of Homeland; the main goal of the CIA counter-terrorism unit throughout seasons one and two is to protect the United States from an imminent attack. Even the title of the show indicates this fierce protectiveness of American soil and an obligation to not only commit to fighting terrorism abroad, but also domestically. However, the way that US nationalism as a concept is created and reinforced in the show points to a variety of beliefs about identity that are rooted in Orientalism. From the very first episode of the show, the need for an “American hero” is emphasized. The opening sequence sets the scene for the imminent danger of an attack on American soil; images of an innocent child playing are juxtaposed with explosions and audio visual clips of past US presidents speaking about terrorism. “We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad”, intones Obama in an edited press conference clip. Furthermore, in a voiceover, Saul Berenson, a CIA agent, says that “It was 10 years ago; everyone missed something that day” in a clear reference to September 11th, considering the first season of Homeland aired 10 years after the attacks on the Twin Towers. Carrie Mathison says that she “can’t let that happen again.” From the first minutes of the series, a clear precedent is set and is reinforced in each episode: America is in danger. Because of this looming threat, violence enacted by Americans is framed as justified. Early on, it is clarified that the military has no desire to be in Afghanistan, but “the terrorists are still out there, for blood” according to the CIA and as such, America has no choice but to engage in violence. War and violence are clearly posed as undesirable, but are seen as an unavoidable necessity in the face of violence from the Arab world. Even a situation in which the CIA knowingly bombed and killed over 80 children is seen as justifiable; very few characters are depicted as being upset about it because those in power are presented as having had no other choice. The lives of those Arab children are posed as being a worthy sacrifice for American safety and peace of mind. Protecting the nation comes above all and can justify any act. In this case, the dividing factor is the depicted value set behind each group; whereas the Muslim Arabs are written as ruthless fanatics who enjoy violence and use it with impunity, American forces are written as being driven by moral concerns and only resorting to violence when they are backed into a corner. US exceptionalism is rife throughout the show. Anything the US does is acceptable; Middle Eastern countries, however, are never afforded the same luxury or opportunity to defend themselves. In fact, while interrogating and

manipulating Sergeant Brody, Carrie Mathison reassures him, saying “that’s the Brody that knows the difference between warfare and terrorism.” The implication is clear ; the violence of American forces is a legitimate military tactic, while the actions of Arab countries is simply fanatical and unreasonable violence . Enter Sergeant Brody and his perfect nuclear MURAJ • z.umn.edu/MURAJ 7 Volume 1 • Issue 1 American family. They’re hardworking, white, Christian, and moral. Brody and his wife Jessica were high school sweethearts; she worked two jobs in high school and he struggled for his education as well. They later married, had two children, and he joined the armed forces. They attend church and pray before meals. Furthermore, upon returning home, Brody is an American hero and is immediately forced to the forefront of every major news source, depicted as a returning American patriot. Brody is not inherently violent, but he is willing to do anything to protect America and make sacrifices for the larger goal of the nation. Jessica, his wife, was in a long term relationship with another man prior to his return; however, upon her husband coming home, she immediately recommits to him and to their original marriage vows. They pose for the cameras and interviews, showing off their perfect American lives. When he converts to Islam and his wife finds out, the ensuing conflict clearly demonstrates the identity conflict. “I married a US Marine,” she yells at one point and the connotation is clear; being a US Marine and a Muslim are mutually incompatible. She goes on to describe how his conversion would shame the whole family and they would need to “hide their faces,” further emphasizing this incompatibility. The implication is clear: American is not Muslim and Muslims are not American. With the exception of occasional cameos by the family members of other characters, no other family besides the Brody family is regularly depicted in Homeland; for the purposes of the show to be served, they only need this singular family. The Brody family encapsulates all the qualities of a picturesque American family. Their

situation, down to every last detail, includes all the building blocks for US nationalism. They’re white, they’re Christian, they’re educated, and they’re committed to the causes of the United States military forces. Furthermore, when one of them steps out of line and tarnishes the all-American family picture, their incompatibility with US nationalism is emphasized. Homeland draws clear lines to indicate what is an identity rooted in American nationalism and what is not. However, as the show progresses, it becomes clear that their family is beyond fractured. Brody is an undercover terrorist who is struggling with the mission assigned to him by Abu Nazir; his marriage with Jessica is distant and filled with discord; and their daughter is rebelling. However, even as their picture-perfect family disintegrates, the show is still very clear that they are not like those quantified by Homeland as the Other. Brody, despite working with terrorist leader Abu Nazir and planning to kill the Vice President via suicide vest, is still seen as reachable and is consistently humanized. He is continually given second chances and explanations are offered for his behavior. His nuclear family relationships are repeatedly invoked to humanize him. He backs out of committing his suicide vest attack after an emotional call from his daughter. Later, Carrie reminds him that Abu Nazir “kills Danas and Chrises and Jessicas,” once more invoking his family members. He is painted as a troubled man who is put in a difficult position but is ultimately saved by his commitment to his family. In this way, despite his blatantly terroristic actions—murder, tipping off a terrorist leader to an American-led attack, and almost setting off a suicide vest amongst others—the show puts a clear divide between him and the ‘real terrorists.’ He is neither heartless not an inherently cruel individual; he is an American corrupted by the heartless and cruel Arabs. In contrast, Abu Nazir’s son was killed by American forces when he was only a child; however, Nazir’s connection to family is never invoked to humanize him or fill out his character. Family connection as a humanizing aspect and understandable motivation for behavior is reserved for characters from the global West. Another example of the way in which white terrorists are still positioned as distinct from the Other can be seen in the example of Faisel and Aileen. Faisel, a college professor and terrorist, moves into a house near the airport with his white wife Aileen at the beginning of season one. When the CIA discovers they are terrorists, they immediately shoot and kill Faisel, while Aileen escapes. When the CIA finally catches up to her, she is personally driven back to headquarters in a car, while a CIA agent attempts to make conversation with her. The agent additionally takes her out for dinner and to visit his childhood town. Ultimately, through conversation, it is determined that she met Faisel while living in Saudi Arabia. The agent suggests that she never would have become radicalized had she not “fallen in love with a boy.” Her behavior is excused, justified, and humanized in a way that the behavior of the Arab Muslim characters are not. Even though she is a confessed terrorist who was planning on carrying out an attack on American soil, she is still presented as separate from the ‘real’ terrorists. Conclusion In conclusion, Homeland is a continuation of many of the representations of Arab Muslim communities and US nationalism we have seen before. Homeland can be considered to simply present updated versions of the same stereotypes and tropes of the past. “If 24 was the quintessential television drama of the war’s early phase— with its ticking-time-bomb scenarios glorifying torture, its MURAJ • z.umn.edu/MURAJ 8 Volume 1 • Issue 1 glorifying torture, its mass killings of US civilians by weapons of mass destruction, and its constant stream of one-dimensional terrorist enemies—Homeland is hailed as a liberal alternative, more appropriate to the Obama era,” writes Kundnani (2014). Alsultany’s simplified complex representations play out again and again in the show’s storylines; although it may appear that audiences are getting more complex and culturally accurate representation, in reality, the characterization boils down to the same one-dimensional representations. Furthermore, these representations draw upon Orientalist tropes, presenting the East as a negative inversion of the West. The Arab world is shown as a simplified and primitive place filled with violent religious fanaticism; Arab Muslims are seen as cunning, devious, and terroristic, present only to antagonize the Western characters before being disposed of. In contrast, the West is filled with ethical and progressive characters fighting to protect their homeland, clear products of a sense of US nationalism and identity. Although the storyline becomes increasingly convoluted as the show progresses, every character can still be boiled down to fall into one of these two categories, both of which

are based in Orientalism. Media play a large role in informing audience beliefs and attitudes. Viewers draw from media to develop their beliefs about what is or is not important and what is or is not true. In our current sociopolitical climate, what viewers believe is or is not important and true about America’s foreign relationships and our country’s Arab Muslim citizens could not possibly be more important. In our past election cycle, attitudes on Islam became a dividing factor between the two candidates and their respective political parties. Shows like Homeland may draw from real life events and issues, but they also simultaneously produce and reinforce beliefs in their audiences. When we present one dimensional, reductive characterizations of Arab Muslims, we do a disservice to millions; furthermore, when we define US nationalism as

simply the antithesis to the Middle East, we create a singular and exclusive sense of what it means to be American. Furthermore, Orientalism creates real consequences regarding how America behaves in the Middle East . Until we can move into representations that allow for ethnorelative thinking and truly complex characterization, storytelling narratives will continue to intentionally or unintentionally produce the stereotypes and frameworks that have been identified as being present in our media for over a century. Orientalism is outdated, offensive, and inaccurate, and we need to do better.

The United States has constructed a hierarchy of race in which the middle east is positioned at the bottom perpetuated through the Orientalist discourse of the decadent, alien, and inferiorLittle 08(Douglas Little, Professor of History and International Relations at Clark University., "American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 ", University of North Carolina Press, 3rd edition, 2008, DMW)

Few parts of the world have become as deeply embedded in the U.S. popular imagination as the Middle East. The Puritans who founded “God’s American Israel” on Massachusetts Bay nearly four centuries ago brought with them a passionate fascination with the Holy Land and a profound ambivalence about the “infidels”— mostly Muslims but some Jews — who lived there. Raised on Bible stories and religious parables laced liberally with a fervently Christian sense of mission and a fiercely American Spirit of ’76, the citizens of one of the New World’s newest nations have long embraced a romanticized and stereo- typic vision of some of the Old World’s oldest civilizations. The missionaries, tourists, and merchants who sailed from America into the Eastern Mediter- ranean during the nineteenth century were amazed by the Christian relics and biblical landscapes but appalled by the despotic governments and decadent societies that they

encountered from Constantinople to Cairo. The diplomats, oil men, and soldiers who promoted and protected U.S.

interests in the Middle East during the twentieth century converted these earlier cultural assumptions and racial stereotypes into an irresistible intellectual shorthand for handling the “backward” Muslims and the “headstrong” Jews whose objectives frequently clashed with America’s. That intellectual shorthand, reflected in everything from feature films and best-selling novels to political cartoons and popular magazines, has had a profound impact on

Main Street and in the nation’s capital. Over the years the public and policymakers in the United States have frequently employed what historian Michael Hunt has termed a “hierarchy of race” in dealing with what used to be called the Third World. As early as 1900, Hunt argues, Anglo- Saxon racism and Social Darwinism had fused in the collective mind of Amer- ica to generate a powerful mental map in which , predictably, the “civilized” powers—the United States and Western Europe—controlled a descending array of underdeveloped, even “primitive” Asians, Latinos, American Indians, and Africans. Although Hunt discusses the Middle East only in passing, his brief references

suggest that U.S. policymakers tended to place Arabs and Jews nearer the bottom than the top of the hierarchy of race.1 More than a decade ago Columbia University’s Edward Said suggested why this should have been so. Borrowing

from intellectual history, literary criticism, and classical philology, Said showed how eighteenth-century British officials embraced “orientalism,” a self-serving view of Asians, Africans, and Arabs as decadent, alien, and inferior, a view that Whitehall later used to ra- tionalize its own imperial ambitions from the Indian subcontinent to the banks of the Nile. For British orientalists, Ottoman despotism, Islamic obscurantism, and Arab racial inferiority had combined to produce a backward culture that was badly in need of

Anglo-Saxon tutelage. With the waning of Britain’s power and the waxing of America’s after 1945, something very like Said’s orientalism seems subconsciously to have shaped U.S. popular attitudes and foreign policies toward the Middle East.2 More recently anthropologists Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins have suggested how orientalism made its way into U.S. popular culture. Utilizing insights from postmodern social theory, photojournalism, and cultural anthropology, Lutz and Collins trace the process through

which orientalist images of the Middle East and other parts of the Third World were generated and disseminated by one of the most widely circulated magazines in the United States , National Geographic. The subliminal messages encoded in the magazine’s eye- catching photos and intriguing human interest stories seem clear. The Arabs, Africans, and Asians who grace the pages of National Geographic are backward, exotic, and occasionally dangerous folk who have needed and will con- 10 orientalism, american style tinue to need U.S. help and guidance if they are successfully to undergo political and cultural modernization.3

Once the orientalist mindset of imperial Britain insinuated its way into the White House, the Pentagon, and Foggy Bottom during the late 1940s, and once the orientalist worldview epitomized by National Geographic found its way onto

America’s coffee tables and movie screens during the early 1950s, U.S. policies and attitudes toward the Middle East were shaped in predictable ways. Influenced by potent racial and cultural stereotypes, some imported and some

homegrown, that depicted the Muslim world as decadent and inferior, U.S. policymakers from Harry Truman

through George Bush tended to dismiss Arab aspirations for self-determination as politically primitive, economically suspect, and ideologically absurd. Meanwhile, Zionist pioneers were ineluct- ably transforming the dream of a Jewish state into Middle Eastern reality through blood, sweat, and tears. Both the dream and the reality soon prompted most Americans to shed their residual anti-Semitism and to regard the children of Isaac, now safely more Western than oriental, as a strategic asset in America’s increasingly nasty confrontation with the children of Ishmael. As the twentieth century drew to a close, Hollywood confirmed that orientalism American style had sunk deep roots into U.S. popular culture. In 1992 Disney Studios released Aladdin, the latest in a long line of animated classics, which opens with a Saddam Hussein look-alike crooning “Arabian Nights.” The lyrics evoke long-standing sinister images of the Muslim world punctu- ated by an orientalist punch line: “It’s barbaric, but hey it’s home.” Two hundred years earlier, Americans familiar with the Middle East would not have disagreed.

The Middle East and Muslim world is constantly characterized as the orient that Us policy makers perpetuate the orientalist conceptionLittle 08(Douglas Little, Professor of History and International Relations at Clark University., "American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 ", University of North Carolina Press, 3rd edition, 2008, DMW)

In short, as the Truman administration drew to a close, officials from the bottom to the top of the policymaking pyramid were convinced that the peoples of the Muslim world were an unpredictable lot whose penchant for political and religious extremism constituted a grave threat to U.S. interests in the

region. Indeed, most U.S. policymakers would likely have seconded the orientalist assessment that Britain’s ambassador to Iraq forwarded to London in late 1952. The Iraqi, like most Arabs, “is embittered, frustrated and fanatical,” Sir John Troutbeck cabled Whitehall on 31 October. “Seeing little but squalor and stagnation around him, he will not admit even to himself the obvious answer, that

he belongs to a peculiarly irresponsible and feckless race.”75 The man who replaced Harry Truman in the Oval Office in January 1953 was equally comfortable with such orientalist stereotypes of the Middle East . Dwight

Eisenhower’s view of the Muslim world was colored by his wartime experiences in North Africa, where a decade earlier he had tried unsuccess- fully to bridge the gap between French colonialists and Algerian nationalists. “Arabs are a very uncertain quantity, explosive and full of prejudices,” he remarked privately in November 1942. “Many things done here that look queer are just to keep

the Arabs from blazing up into revolt.”76 Eisenhower’s close encounter with the Arabs during the 1950s did nothing to soften his earlier assessment. Despite Britain’s “modern program of independence for countries once part of the Empire,” Ike complained in his memoirs, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had unleashed a crusade of “virulent nationalism and un- reasoning

prejudice” in which there was “evidence of Communist meddling.”77 Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal during the summer of 1956 reinforced Eisenhower’s belief that the Arabs were irrational, resentful, and dangerous to Western interests. “Nasser,” Ike observed on 31 July, “embodies the emotional demands of the people of the area for independence and for ‘slapping the White Man down .’”78 When Eisenhower sent U.S. marines to Lebanon two years later to shore up a pro-American regime besieged by pro-Nasser dissidents, he reminded the National Security Council (nsc) that “the

underlying Arab thinking” remained deeply rooted in “violence, emotion and ignorance.”79 As his term drew to a close, Ike complained that

Nasser and like-minded nationalists were little more than oriental despots. “If you go and live with these Arabs, you will find that they simply cannot understand our ideas of freedom or human dignity,” he told the nsc in June 1959. “They have lived so long orientalism, american style 27 under dictatorships of one form or another, how can we expect them to run

successfully a free government?”80 Eisenhower’s top advisers echoed the president’s growing frustration with the Arabs. Shortly after taking over at Foggy Bottom, for example, John Fos- ter Dulles took a two-week fact-finding trip to the Middle East that confirmed all of his Presbyterian fears of the Muslim infidel. Following visits to Cairo and other Arab capitals in May 1953, Eisenhower’s secretary of state pronounced Nasser and like-minded Arab nationalists “pathological” in their suspicion of the Western powers and “naive” in their trust of the

Kremlin.81 It is no surprise that in private conversations with U.K. officials in early July, Dulles described Iran’s anti-Western prime minister,

Mohammed Mossadegh, as “a wily oriental.”82 When anti-Western violence rocked Baghdad, Beirut, and Amman five summers later, White House troubleshooter Robert Murphy un- dertook a “twenty-nine-day Magic Carpet tour of the fabled East” at the be- hest of Eisenhower, with whom he had worked to curb “the restiveness of the indigenes” in Muslim North Africa during the Second World War. After vis- iting “Godforsaken stretches of Iraq,” where “mobs whose violence surpassed all expectations” held sway, he informed his boss in August 1958 that

little had changed since the early 1940s.83 U.S. diplomats stationed in the Middle East helped reinforce the orientalist views of Eisenhower, Dulles, and Murphy. When Ambassador Henry Villard found himself mired down in endless negotiations over a U.S. air base in June 1954, he cabled Washington that the tactics of Libyan officials were “tanta- mount to blackmail and

show[ed] little change from [the] barbary pirate tradition.”84 Two years later Henry Byroade, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, confirmed that Nasser and his followers were volatile, unpredictable, and quixotic. “Arabs are quite capable of getting completely beside themselves” on matters

related to Israel, Byroade warned Dulles on 14 March 1956, “because by nature they [are] inclined to fight windmills.”85 A White House study completed four years later reiterated the importance of “psychological” factors in U.S. relations with the Middle East. American officials, the

drafters of nsc-6011 pointed out in July 1960, must understand that “the Arabs’ experience with and fear of Western domination” had generated hostility and suspicion that were in turn exacerbated by “their belief that the United States is the special friend and protector of Israel.”86

BDS/Israel Palestine linkBDS LINK:Nuclear proliferation rhetoric perpetuates a perception of nuclear apartheid, a particular instance occurs in US intervention in American intervention in the Israeli conflictGusterson 99


Noam Chomsky (1982) has suggested that the arms race between the superpowers was not really "about" the U.S.-Soviet rivalry at all but was a convenient way to assure the subjugation of smaller countries in the Third World under the guise of superpower competition. One does not have to swallow whole simple reductionism of this

argument to accept that there is obvious connection between the nuclear stockpiles of some developed nation hand and the political client ship and economic underdevelopment World nations on the other . Just as

some nations have abundant a while others do not, so some nations are allowed plentiful supplies of the ultimate weapon while others are prevented by elaborate treaties an police activities from obtaining it . Without devising rigidly deter els connecting economic power and nuclear weapons-models th as Japan and Germany obviously would not fit-one can at lea broad contours of this generalization: the nuclear underdevelopm veloping world is one fragment in a wider and systematic pat

disempowerment that ensures the subordination of the south.'9 The discourse on nuclear proliferation legitimates this system of domination while presenting the interests the established nuclear powers obtaining their nuclear monopoly as if they were equally beneficial to all the nations of the globe . And, ironically, the discourse

on nonproliferation these subordinate nations as the principal source of danger in the another case of blaming the victim. The discourse on nuclear proliferation is structured around a rigid segregation of "their" problems from "ours ." In fact, however, we are link ing nations by a world system, and many of the problems that, w these nations ineligible to own nuclear weapons have a lot to do w and the system it dominates. For example, the regional conflict and Pakistan is, in part at least, a direct consequence of the divide cies adopted by the British raj; and the dispute over Kashmir, id Western commentators as a possible flash point for nuclear war, h not so much

in ancient hatreds as in Britain's decision in 1846 to install a Hindu maharajah as leader of a Muslim territory (Burns 1998). The hostility between Arabs and Israelis has been exacerbated by British, French, and American intervention in the Middle East dating back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. More recently, as Steven Green points out, "Congress has voted over $36.5 billion in economic and military aid to Israel, including rockets, planes, and other technology which has directly advanced

Israel's nuclear weapons capabilities. It is precisely this nuclear arsenal, which the U.S. Congress has been so instrumental in building up, that is driving the Arab state to attain countervailing strategic weapons of various kinds" (1990).

Anti-Semitism and Palestinian liberation are constantly defined in a relation of opposition structured through orientalism, Roosevelts politics provesLittle 08(Douglas Little, Professor of History and International Relations at Clark University., "American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 ", University of North Carolina Press, 3rd edition, 2008, DMW)

Americanizing the Middle East The Middle East began to loom larger on America’s diplomatic and cultural horizon during what Mark Twain called “the Gilded Age,” not only because U.S. missionaries sought to save more souls but also because U.S. merchants sought to expand trade. By the 1870s American entrepreneurs were buying nearly

one-half of Turkey’s opium crop for resale in China while providing the Ottoman Empire with everything from warships to kerosene. “Even the

sacred lamps over the Prophet’s tomb at Mecca,” one U.S. diplomat gloated in 1879, “are fed with oil from Pennsylvania.”19 Meanwhile a new

generation of American missionaries made their way to Armenia, Syria, and other corners of the Ottoman realm, spreading not only the gospel

but also subversive New World ideas. Indeed, by the 1890s two institutions of higher learning established by U.S. missionaries three decades

earlier —Robert College just outside Constantinople and the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut — had become notorious anti-Turkish hotbeds,

where Arabs, Kurds, and Armenians began to dream of and scheme for national independence.20 “Quite without intention,” British orientalist

and adventurer T. E. Lawrence observed a generation later, these two colleges had actually “taught revolution” to subject peoples throughout the

Turkish empire.21 While most U.S. observers seem to have agreed that the Christians of Ar- menia and Syria might profit enormously from these

lessons, few churchmen or diplomats expected such revolutionary teachings to spell anything but disaster in the Muslim world. When angry

mobs of Iranian students and peas- ants toppled the royal government and forced the shah to proclaim a constitutional monarchy in August

1906, for example, Ambassador Richmond Pearson offered a bleak forecast laced with orientalism: “History does not record a single instance of

successful constitutional government in a country where the Mussulman religion is the state religion.”22 Ambassador John Leish- man, Pearson’s

counterpart in Constantinople, was no more sanguine about the prospects for constitutional rule in Turkey, where reformist military officers

—“the Young Turks”— staged a coup and curbed the sultan’s powers in July 1908. “The fanatical element” among Muslim students, soldiers,

and mullahs, Leishman reported nine months later, had triggered antigovernment riots, an army mutiny, and “a reign of terror and a succession of

murders.”23 President Theodore Roosevelt, who had appointed both Pearson and Leish- man, was even more skeptical about the possibility of reform and progress in the Middle East. A firm believer in a hierarchy of race in which “civilized na- 14 orientalism, american style tions” like the United States must shoulder “the White Man’s Burden” and attempt to westernize the “benighted” peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer- ica,

Roosevelt confessed privately in 1907 that “it is impossible to expect moral, intellectual and material well-being where Mohammedanism is supreme.” The Egyptians, for example, were “a people of Moslem fellahin who have never

in all time exercised any self-government whatever.” Britain’s Lord Cromer, Roosevelt added, “is one of the greatest modern colonial administra-

tors, and he has handled Egypt just according to Egypt’s needs”— military oc- cupation, foreign tutelage, and Christian patience.24 If Roosevelt ranked Muslims near the bottom of his hierarchy of race, he placed Jews closer to the top.

To be sure, like many other members of the pa- trician elite that still ruled America at the turn of the century, Roosevelt har- bored some patronizingly offensive stereotypes of Jewish Americans.25 But he was also highly critical of the wave of anti-

Semitism that swept Turkey and Russia during the First World War, and he was an early supporter of the idea of establishing a Jewish state in the

Holy Land. The United States and its allies, Roosevelt observed in July 1918, should “pledge themselves never to make peace until the Turk is

driven from Europe, and . . . the Jews [are] given control of Palestine.” It seemed, he added two months later, “entirely proper to start a Zionist

State around Jerusalem.”26 As the war to end all wars drew to a close, the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine had become a goal widely shared on both sides of the Atlantic . Famous mainly for its biblical ruins and

its fruit exports, Palestine had until very recently remained little more than a sleepy backwater controlled by the dying Ottoman Empire.

Overwhelmingly Muslim, Palestine had counted just 25,000 Jews among a total population of 300,000 as late as 1880.27 Fifteen years later,

however, Theodore Herzl, a thirty-five-year-old Jewish lawyer-turned-journalist born in Budapest, published what might be called the first

Zionist manifesto. Outraged by the pogroms in Russia and Poland and appalled by the resurgence of anti-Semitism farther west in France, Herzl warned his brethren in the pages of The Jewish State that only by establishing a national home in Palestine could they be safe from persecution. Working tirelessly, Herzl brought together Jews from

seventeen countries, including the United States, in Basel, Switzerland, where in August 1897 they founded the World Zionist Organization

committed to accelerating Jewish immigration to Palestine by purchasing land from the Arabs. Zionist efforts bore fruit in short order and helped swell the Jewish community in Palestine to 85,000, 12 percent of the total population, on the eve of

the First World War.28

American intervention in the conflict over Palestine privileges pits the contested notion of Jewish orientalism in opposition to the Arab oriental Little 08(Douglas Little, Professor of History and International Relations at Clark University., "American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 ", University of North Carolina Press, 3rd edition, 2008, DMW)

As enthusiasm for a Jewish state in Palestine faded at the White House and at Whitehall during the 1920s, an

upsurge of nativism eroded support on Main Street for the Zionist dream. From Atlanta to Anaheim the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses and staged

rallies to intimidate African Americans, Cath- olics, and Jews, while on the banks of the Potomac Congress was erecting re- strictive quotas to

stem the flow of Jews and other “undesirable” groups from Eastern Europe. Fearful that a Zionist success in Palestine might inadvertently call into question the loyalty of the entire Jewish community in the United States, influential American Jews such as New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger distanced themselves from lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. By the early 1930s membership in the Zionist Organization of America, an orientalism, american style 19 umbrella agency founded by Brandeis and Wise a generation earlier, had plum- meted from a postwar high of

175,000 to just 25,000, convincing the State De- partment’s elitist and sometimes anti-Semitic Middle Eastern experts that they could safely

ignore this first Jewish foray into interest group politics.44 By late 1936 the State Department’s Wallace Murray had convinced his supe- riors to do nothing that might “entangle us in any other way in the most del- icate problem of Palestine.”45 Murray’s brief for U.S. noninvolvement could not have come at a worse time for American Zionists or their comrades in Europe. Claiming that the influx of 250,000 European Jews during the decade and a half since the First World War was more than the overloaded Palestinian economic and political system could bear, in 1936 the Arabs launched a violent revolt to resist Zion- ism. While Palestinian

militias battled the Haganah, the Jewish underground army, in the streets of Jerusalem and the foothills of Nablus, even more omi- nous events

were unfolding in Germany, where Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies were growing ever more blatant. Since coming to power in early 1933 the

Nazi dictator had tarred German Jews with the brush of communism, stripped them of their civil rights, and branded them scapegoats for the

Third Reich’s economic woes. After Nazi tanks rolled into Vienna in March 1938 and after Hitler’s storm troopers went on an anti-Semitic

rampage in Berlin eight months later, thousands of German and Austrian Jews sought refuge abroad, some in Britain and America, but most in

Palestine.46 At the time when European Jewry was most desperate for a safe haven in a national homeland, however, the British government moved to reduce Jewish immigration to Palestine sharply. Having just

completed a costly two-year campaign to suppress the Arab revolt, Whitehall issued a White Paper on 17 May 1939 limiting the total number of

Jewish refugees permitted to enter the Holy Land to just 75,000 during the next five years; after that, all further immigration would be subject to

Palestinian approval. Among the most outspo- ken critics of the 1939 White Paper was fifty-three-year-old David Ben Gu- rion, the charismatic

unofficial leader of the Yishuv, as the 350,000-member Jewish community in Palestine was now known. Convinced that persuading Whitehall to

rescind the White Paper would prove an exercise in futility, Ben Gurion and his comrades hoped American Zionists might be more successful at

the White House, where Franklin D. Roosevelt was preparing to seek an unprecedented third term with support from Jewish liberals.47 Long sympathetic to the aims of the Balfour Declaration, fdr was clearly troubled during the late 1930s by signs

that Britain intended to repudiate its commitment to a Jewish homeland. “I was at Versailles,” he recalled in 1938, “and I know that the British

made no secret of the fact that they promised Palestine to the Jews. Why are they now reneging on their promise?”48 Bri- 20 orientalism,

american style tain’s actions during the spring of 1939 only raised more questions. “I have read with interest and a good deal of dismay the

decisions of the British Gov- ernment regarding its Palestine policy,” he told Secretary of State Cordell Hull in mid-May. “This White Paper,”

Roosevelt hastened to add, “is something that we cannot give approval to.”49 During the following eighteen months well-connected Zionists such

as Stephen Wise and Felix Frankfurter, whom fdr had recently tapped to fill Brandeis’s seat on the Supreme Court, quietly encouraged the

president to press Whitehall to honor its commitments regarding Palestine. At the State Department, however, Hull and his advisers insisted

that U.S. meddling would only serve to undermine the U.K. position in the Middle East at a time when Britain, in the wake of the fall of France in

June 1940, was the sole remaining barrier to complete Nazi domination of Eu- rope. Judging geopolitical considerations to be more important

than domestic politics, Roosevelt kept his doubts about the White Paper to himself and still managed to win a third term by a healthy margin.50

Thousands of European Jews unable to find refuge abroad would soon be among the earliest victims of the Holocaust. During 1939 and 1940 the

Nazis had targeted the Jewish population of occupied Europe for relocation to concentration camps in Poland. After the German invasion of the

Soviet Union in June 1941, agents of the Gestapo, Hitler’s secret police, began systematically to murder all Russian Jews who fell into their

hands. By the time that Ger- many’s Japanese allies attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, rumors of the Gestapo’s anti-Semitic butchery

were already filtering into the United States. In January 1942 Hitler formally approved a “final solution for the Jewish problem” and authorized

the Schutzstaffel, or SS, an elite corps of the German army whose commanders spoke with the voice of Cain, to begin the wholesale

extermination of hundreds of thousands of Jews then imprisoned at Ausch- witz, Buchenwald, and other concentration camps. During the next

three years nearly 6 million Jewish men, women, and children would die.51 The unspeakable slaughter unfolding in Nazi-occupied Europe

removed any remaining doubts among most American Jews about the importance of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In May 1942, 600 American

Zionists gathered at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City and passed a unanimous resolution de- manding “that Palestine be established as a

Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.” While insiders such as Stephen Wise sought to win White House

support for the Biltmore declaration, outsiders like Abba Hillel Silver, a fiery Cleveland rabbi born in Lithuania and educated at Hebrew

Union College, founded the American Zionist Emergency Council, whose 200 local chapters funneled a half-million dollars into national

headquarters to finance a lobbying effort in Washington.52 Nineteen forty-four was an election year, and U.S. advocates of a Jewish orientalism, american style 21 homeland in Palestine worked tirelessly to gain bipartisan endorsements for their plans.

Ukraine[insert some Russiaphobia links from files]

Ukraine is positioned in a unique positions that constantly fluctuates between the East and West and this fluid change allows the Habova 18, Yevhenjia Habova, Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 2018, “EAST-WEST DICHOTOMY IN THE CONTEXT OF UKRAINIAN CONFLICT RESOLUTION,” accessed 7/11/19, https://periodicals.karazin.ua/cognitiondiscourse/article/view/12270/11672 sfrrpt

Introduction In the trying times of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, it is natural to expect that Ukraine will seek support from more powerful partners. However, the reaction of international partners to the conflict is increasingly unenthusiastic, despite most recent aggravations in the Azov Sea. A growing awareness of the so-called ‘Ukrainian fatigue’ among international partners invites Ukrainian decision- and policy-makers, as well as general public, to reflect on Ukraine’s own resources, self- support and self-reliance. Alongside the necessity to find an optimal course of development, these issues have become increasingly important as the conflict shows no end. One of the arguments surfacing in this debate is that the East-West division within Ukraine may become internalized and impact the relations within the country, in the present and in the future. As such, analysis of images and narratives on East vs. West within Ukraine may assist in informing and fine-tuning a dialogue in the country and help to seek out compromises and roadmaps for reintegration of the occupied territories. This analysis also asks if

the notions of East and West influence how Ukraine sees its neighbours and the wider world. The ultimate aim of this paper is to identify the imaginary geography of Ukraine and trace Ukraine’s place on the mental map of the world within the coordinates from East to West and in the context of the ongoing conflict . This ‘mental mapping’ is argued to be instrumental in understanding images of external Others as well as images of Self. The data are collected from the interviews of Ukrainian elites – decision-, policy- and opinion- makers – representing different policy fields including media, culture, politics, civil society and business. The semi-structured interviews with Ukrainian elites, conducted face-to-face by pretrained researchers, were held in 2016-17 as a part of the Jean Monnet Network “Crisis, Conflict and Critical Diplomacy: EU Perceptions in Ukraine, Israel and Palestine” (C 3EU) led by the National Centre for Research of Europe, University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand) in cooperation with nine international partners (https://jeanmonnet.nz/c3eu/, see also Chaban and Zhabotynska 2018 in this Issue). In the analysis provided below, the respective references are "Media", "Culture", "Civil", and "Business" followed by a number of the interview, as it is registered in the C 3EU data; for example, Civil5. The questionnaires for the interviews focused on the perceptions of the EU in the context of conflict and crisis in Ukraine. The interviews were conducted in Ukrainian and Russian with responses transcribed verbatim and later translated into English. This paper uses quotations from the English version as a purely linguistic approach is not the goal in this case

study. Due to Human Ethics regulations, all responses will remain fully anonymous, and only the cohort will be identified when the words are quoted. While the questionnaire did not explicitly ask about “East vs. West” images, the interviewees often referenced and compared East vis-à-vis West, typically in order to highlight the differences between Ukraine and other actors. Following this empirical observation, this article sets to trace if there was a clear placement of Ukraine in these “mental mappings”. Where exactly is Ukraine’s place on the imaginary map of the world? Can the opposition “East vs. West” be explained by the influential theory of orientalism [Said, 1978]?

The theory hypothesizes a negative connotation assigned by the West to the East. The article respectively explores if the narrative of unconquerable discrepancies between Ukraine’s East and West regions exist in the imagination of the Ukrainian movers and shakers. The article also aims to map the imaginary geography in terms of “East-West” divide outside the country’s borders. 94 The theoretical framework section describes the theories behind the research, sets the focus of studying Ukraine’s vision of East, West and self. Said’s orientalism and Huntington’s clash of civilizations hypotheses inform the theoretical framework of this study. The analysis is also guided by a set of concepts developed by the scholars of Eastern Europe – Wolff [1994], Pittaway [2003], and Todorova [2009] among others – in highlighting the similarities and differences in the images of East vs. West in neighbouring countries. These theorisations are instrumental to explain the perceptions among Ukrainian elites (traced through the data collected from the interviews and discussed in

detail in the Findings section). The images are categorized into two main frames of “outside Ukraine” and “inside Ukraine” with several sub-categories – a conceptual architecture that explicates an elaborate and complex mental mapping of the world by Ukrainian policy- and decision-makers. The Conclusions section outlines how the

tested theories were partially disproved, showing that the East is not necessarily weak or exotic in Ukraine’s elite perceptions, and that the East vs. West opposition within the country’s borders is not internalized by the interviewed stakeholders. 2. Theoretical frameworks According to the theory articulated by Edward Said in his book Orientalism [1978], the pattern of dissecting the world into East and West has been present since the ancient times. One of the most influential works on the imaginary geography of the post-colonial world, Said’s analysis had become the trend-setter. It invited a generation of scholars to launch into further investigation how the East is perceived by the West and vice versa. Receiving a fair share of criticism for its historical inaccuracies and author’s personal bias, Orientalism nevertheless sparked an ongoing discussion that has only grown since the first edition of the book. This article is informed by Said’s theory of ‘strong West

vs. weak East’ -- as the result of inaccurate cultural representations. In his work, he claims that Orient not only was constructed by the West but also “has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience”

[Said, 1978: 13]. He also suggests that for centuries the Orient has been “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” [Said, 1978: 2]. Using Ukraine’s experience, this paper explores how these claims have stood against time and the

https://periodicals.karazin.ua/cognitiondiscourse/article/view/12270/11672

effects of globalization, if their viability has suffered over the last four decades. Referencing a later work by Huntington -- the much debated Clash of Civilizations [1993] -- Ukraine may be described as one of the ‘cleft countries’ [Huntington, 1993: 30]. On the one hand, it belongs to the so-called Orthodox civilization. On the other, it has a large number of people who are identifying with a different, neighbouring civilization. In Ukraine’s case, the “other” civilisation may be located in the Western regions of the country that are predominately Eastern Rite Catholic or Ukrainian Greek Catholic . It is also possible to speculate whether Ukraine is a Huntington’s ‘torn’ country, i.e. a country that has made a drastic turn to change its civilizational path. Huntington [Huntington, 2013: 44] outlines three requirements for a country to redefine its civilizational identity in a major way: support of its own political and economic elites, approval of the public, and acceptance of the elites of the given civilization that a country is striving to join. So far, it is not clear if conflicted Ukraine can fully become a ‘torn’ country in Huntington’s sense, with EU membership not being on the agenda and without a transparent response on that matter from the West. However, Ukraine’s Association Agreement with the EU may be seen as a sign of at least a beginning of the acknowledgement of Ukraine as a country that belongs with the Western civilization. The image of the West and the Self in Ukraine have been scrutinized by scholars prior to Maidan and the following conflict [Gritsay & Nikolko, 2009; Tarasenko, & Ivanenko, 2004; Yavorska & Bogomolov 2010]. These works reported the emergence of the narrative of the ‘desired yet distant’ Europe and the importance of this narrative in the formulation of the national identity narrative in Ukraine. For Ukraine, Europe has been a desired and seemingly unreachable 95 destination for a long time, the perfect example to follow [Yavorska & Bogomolov, 2010: 86]. The image of Europe is mythological and mostly blended into the image of the West in general [Gritsay & Nikolko, 2009: 176]. Following the dramatic events on Maidan in 2013-14 and the later conflict in the East and annexation of Crimea, literature in the field debates the reasons underlying the Ukrainian crisis [Black et al., 2016; Merry et al., 2016]. While some researchers imply outside influence, including Russian propaganda, as one of the main causes [Kolstø & Blakkisrud, 2018], others point out to internal origins of the problem. Importantly, the latter group of scholars often cites crucial cultural and historical differences between Eastern and Western regions in Ukraine [see e.g. Besier & Stokłosa, 2017]. This article questions whether there is ground to these assumptions and tests them empirically. In this, the article innovatively adds to the discussion on Ukraine’s self-visions and identity in the post-Maidan period. Studying the perceived differences between East and West is by no means a novelty among historians, sociologists, economists, etc. Attempts to define borders within Europe and debating their existence brings a new perspective on putting Ukraine on this “philosophical map”. Norman Davies has set the precedent in the historical studies of shifting the focus from the predominantly Western-centered view of the European history and drawing more attention to the role of the Eastern and Central European countries in shaping the modern Europe [Davies, 2006]. He claims that the so-called East Europe is an inherent part of the Western civilization and should not be seen as subordinate. Mark Pittaway on the other hand goes even further, suggesting that both the internal and external borders of Europe are fluid [Pittaway, 2003] and cannot be defined. He also states that the “former socialist states are both part of outside Europe” [Pittaway, 2003: 156],

which includes Ukraine as a region that previously was on the other side of the “iron curtain”. Using evidence from maps, travellers’ memoirs and works of literature Wolff argues that the imaginary division between Eastern and Western Europe has been present since the Enlightenment and still determines not only the perception of the East as the “other” but the image of self in eastern countries. [Wolff, 1994; 16]. The complex and diverse Balkan region especially has been the focus of several studies in the context of new countries joining

the EU [Bideleux & Jeffries, 1998; Petrovic, 2014; Todorova, 2009]. Ukraine’s case, however, may bring an even more profound insight into the matter of these perceived divisions, especially at such a turbulent period of fighting the Russian aggression and striving to find support from its European partners, when finding its own place and stance is vital. 3. Findings Among the first observations is that the imagined geographical positioning of Ukraine in general seems to be very often identified vis-à-vis Russia. This place on the map of the world is seen to be problematic, as it means for Ukraine difficulties in avoiding conflict in the present and securing a peaceful future. A media professional comments, “Ukraine has such a geographical position that places it between the EU and Russia, … a very powerful country, both on the economic and political levels…” (Media7). This geographical position is seen by some to be a trap for Ukraine: ‘You cannot escape Russia, of course. We are just surrounded’ (Civil5), or ‘…we cannot get rid of geography, that is why Russia is important for us’ (Civil9). Yet, some see Ukraine on the move away from the East: ‘We announced the [European] vector, we are leaving. We are still Europeans in our mentality and can not belong to the eastern regions, that want to swallow us, to return us’ (Civil2). Others believe that being a country on the edge of two civilizations may be actually advantageous for Ukraine and the West. This presents Ukraine with an opportunity to play an important role on the international arena. One cultural elite compared Ukraine to a “stumbling block on the way of the eastern and southern and northern hordes” (Culture1). Another representative of the cultural circle stated: 96 Ukrainians are the “resource” for the EU as a civilized, cultural and educated workforce, especially for Eastern Europe - for Poland and Czech Republic. The thing is that Ukrainians have moved to Italy, France, Spain and Portugal earlier and this migration wave is at present moving towards Poland, Czech Republic, a bit less to Hungary. But still nobody denies the logistic importance of Ukraine (Culture7). Perceptions of the notions “East” and “West” among the interviewed elites may be grouped into two main categories: ‘outside Ukraine’ and ‘inside Ukraine’. 3.1. Perceptions of the East: Outside perspective If we consider the “outside Ukraine” perspective, the imaginary geography of East vs. West does not necessarily correspond to the real world mapping conventions, where Europe and Asia are divided by the Ural Mountains. Instead, geopolitical and cultural issues guide the construction of the perceived borders in the imagination of our respondents. Ukraine’s struggle in general is “the issue of us quitting to be part of Asia and moving to Europe” (Media2). The ‘East’ outside Ukraine has its own subdivisions in the eyes of Ukrainian elites: ‘Asia’, ‘Russia’, ‘Eastern Europe’ and ‘Eastern Partnership’ with the latter not a geographical, but a sociopolitical concept that is rather visible in the interviews. The notion of ‘Asia’ of the ‘outside East’ is comprised in the imagination of Ukrainian policy- and decision-makers of China, Japan and Turkey, while other Asian actors are largely invisible (e.g. “Eastern countries, we’ll name China, and perhaps even others - Japan and the like” (Civil2); “I would say, East - I mean Japan, China and Singapore” (Politics6)). The three visible actors are seen as rapidly developing countries that may potentially offer an alternative pattern of progress if Ukraine’s struggle to be accepted in Europe, or more generally ‘the West’, fails. A civil society representative, for example, argues that instead of relations with the EU, he would rather be talking about some closer relations with Turkey” (Civil4). A politician echoes, “Turkey is just one of the major players in the Black Sea region. ...It is clear that, maybe we need to establish or attempt to establish relations with China, because China is becoming a serious player…” (Politics3). Russia is seen as one of the key representatives of the ‘outside East’. It is often described as one of the great powers, an influential actor in the region along with the EU and the US: (“[...] other serious subjects which are the USA, Russia” (Media1)). Unsurprisingly, its image is ambiguous -- it is both an enemy and a former significant partner. As one media elite argues ‘From the state policy perspective, they [Russia] are our enemies, but from the people’s perspective… we have a million of relatives there, here and there, and they cannot be our enemies.” (Media3). Despite these connections, the path is seen to be changing for Ukraine: “previously, we tried to follow … how it should be in Russia. At present, we try to follow the West.” (Culture9). Another actor in the mental space of the ‘East’ is ‘Eastern Europe’. The interviewees often mentioned Eastern Europe as an important partner for Ukraine. It is typically represented by Poland and the three Baltic states. Consider a rather typical response by a civil society representative: “[They] are our partners on borders with Eastern Europe: it is Poland, the Baltic States, and partly Romania” (Civil9). These states are seen to have historical and cultural ties to Ukraine but at the same time belong to the ‘outside West’ represented by the EU. However, Eastern Europe is seen in a position not dissimilar to Ukraine - they belong to the West, but are not fully accepted there as its rightful members. This is despite having their status of EU member states. Moreover, this region is sometimes seen to be excluded from the very definition of Europe: “The reference of the notion "Europe" in most of its usage does not include the Eastern Europe, many parts. And [certainly] not Ukraine” (Civil5). East European countries are also viewed as advocate for Uk 97 be on their own, not always abiding by the EU rules. In this case the placement of these countries on the imaginary map is particular - regions located to Ukraine’s West are placed in the East and not just by the name, but by cultural proximity. Although the name itself is also seen as an issue. Business respondent comments, “I am very happy that they [young EU MSs like Poland and the Baltic States] are already named not “Eastern Europe”, but “Northern Europe” -- what they actually are” (Business5). Importantly, Ukraine is seen within the circle of the actors of “Eastern Europe”. On the one hand, Ukraine’s people are now a part of the societies in Eastern Europe: “Ukrainians are the “resource” for EU as a civilized, cultural and educated workforce, especially for Eastern Europe - for Poland and Czech Republic” (Culture7). On the other hand, Ukraine is an equal partner to Eastern European countries when it comes to security and defence matters: “[Ukraine is] in the military block of Eastern European countries, and, as a matter of fact, there is also an exchange of experience there. It is like a ‘micro NATO’, let’s call it that” (Business8). Another ‘inverted’ perspective surfaced in the imagining the ‘Eastern Partnership’. It was discussed in the interviews as a tool that is supposed to bring Ukraine closer to the West, but at the same time puts it among the countries that are not yet accepted by the EU as verified partners. The Eastern Partnership in fact is seen as not facilitating the relations with the EU, but making them vaguer and unclear. It is even implied that the very reason for its creation was “that its member countries could never be accepted to the EU (Media7)”. On the whole, ‘Eastern Partnership’ along with ‘Eastern Europe’ is seen to create a connection with the West: “the EU also had deep enough relationship with Ukraine within this Neighbourhood Policy, in the Eastern Partnership framework so it would not be acceptable for them to leave this game completely, well, to ignore the problem” (Civil4). Importantly, the EU’s Eastern Partnership is seen as policy that is designed to make its member “not members, but close friends, close partners” (Politics7) and Europe continues to “co- work with countries, organizations, with institutions … in other countries of Eastern Partnership” (Civil9). Yet, some respondents are less enthusiastic about the policy: “what is to be done with the East Partnership countries…(with) these six countries…[is] absolutely unclear” (Politics4). 3.2. Imagining East: Perspectives inside Ukraine Now, we are turning in our analysis to images of the space “inside Ukraine”. Naturally, war-torn Eastern Ukraine has a high profile in the discussions about the Ukrainian crisis and the EU’s involvement in the

peacemaking process. One of the important observations here was that naming the conflict was problematic in itself for a number of interviewees. Some disagreed strongly with the usage of the term ‘conflict’: “Overall role of the EU in the war of Russia against Ukraine - and not a conflict! - Requires increased pressure on Russia and the rejection of double standards of the EU itself” (Culture2). Other descriptors were ‘what we have now going on in the East’ (Civil2), ‘the events’, ‘problems’ (Politics3), ‘the war’ (Media6), ‘attacks of Russia’ (Culture8), ‘warfare or outbreaks’ (Politics6). The situation in Ukraine’s East is frequently mentioned alongside another geographical indicator – the Crimea, or just South in general. Ambiguity of Russia’s image reminds how Huntignton used Ukraine-Russia conflict of 1991 over Crimea as an example of tensions within the same civilization: “Such conflicts, however, are likely to be less intense and less likely to expand than conflicts between civilizations. ...If civilization is what counts, however, the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each other for centuries” [Huntington, 1993: 38]. For some of the interviewees Russia is still a part of the same civilization as Ukraine, but current situation shows, that the conflict is not de-escalating, which may indicate that Ukraine is almost forced to become a “torn country” through this conflict. To sum up, none of the perceptions of the East, inside and outside of the country, appear to support Said’s orientalism theory. Apart from the perception of “Eastern Partnership”, that is seen as ambiguous and sometimes negative, the rest of the images contradict the negative “othering” of the East. Still, Ukraine is a part of the Eastern Partnership which makes it a self-image to a degree. 98 3.3. Perceptions of West: Imagining “Outside West” Diverse responses were observed when interviewees reflected on the concept of West. The West is general is frequently named as an important actor in the region. Yet, it is not seen as infallible and omnipotent. In the eyes of the elite respondents, it lacks integrity when it comes to dealing with external problems. Similarly to the notions of East, the perceptions of the West belong to two general groups: views of the ‘Outside West’ and ‘Western Ukraine’. The former notion has turned out to be a much more complicated and diverse one. With the interviews designed to investigate the image of EU in Ukraine, the ‘outside West’ is seen to be comprised of the EU (often represented as “Europe” or separate EU countries, such as Germany and France), the USA, and sometimes NATO. The notion of the West, however, is typically associated with the USA, and only then with Europe: “the so-called West, metaphorical one, because we are talking about the EU and about America and Canada [...] The West is primarily America.” (Civil4). Importantly, the West is seen to possess “its own values which it tries to disseminate in Ukraine” (Civil 9). One of the most typical visions of the ‘outside West’ was the one of an example for Ukraine to follow. The interviewees also felt that Ukrainians are supposed to belong to the Western society, but are not accepted by it yet because of the current state of events, and internal issues with corruption and slow reform implementation process. The ‘move’ towards the West is recognised in a paradoxical way – it is both inevitable yet seemingly fruitless at the same time. The West is believed to be not ready for Ukraine’s bureaucracy, poverty and territorial disputes. Nevertheless, many elites do not see other alternatives to Ukraine’s orientation towards the West: That is a lot of things are inherent in Western civilization, which unfortunately we do not have, that either they were not here or they were destroyed in totalitarian conditions [...] It is becoming more and more attractive to all those territories to want to return, so that they would fought to return. Just like East Germans fought for a return to West Germany. And I do not see and do not want it any other way (Civil4) Being an important actor, a supporter of Ukraine, the West is not seen to be willing to exert much power to help it or maintain its own interests nonetheless. Still, the interviewees understand the complexity of the situation and do not accuse the EU or the US – as the main representatives of the imagined West – of being neglectful. Still, there is a sentiment shared among elites that the West is not using sanctions or other measures against Russia to the full extent because that would disadvantage the West. These statements are often accompanied by reflections on the necessity of self-reliance and self-dependence, etc. Typical examples of such responses are below: ...the West could have achieved much more than with military force, because it is a tremendous economic power, and it could certainly ... find arguments both for Russia and China in order to persuade them to accept some compromise. ...the West has so many powerful cards that could be used, but for various reasons they are not … used (Civil4) At the same time, the West does not intervene, does not violate the sovereignty of the Russian Federation, but very significantly restricts its economic, political, and diplomatic abilities, because they (Russians) violate human rights. So the West remains holding the position, and the world, the civilized world remains holding the position that human rights are above all (Civil9) 3.4. Perceptions of West: Internal Perspectives Considering the “internal to Ukraine” interpretation of the “West”, Western Ukraine is seen as a link between the country and the ‘outside West’, as well as a region that responds to the European influences more eagerly: “The western region, Western Ukraine is more responsive to the European 99 Union” (Culture1). This is the region which is seen to be well linked with the ‘Eastern European’ part of Europe: “in Western Ukraine a certain image of Poland has already been formed, and the relations are clear there, they, nevertheless, began to understand that the same things should be done in the east of Ukraine” (Culture4). Western Ukraine is not mentioned as often as the East of Ukraine, which can be explained by the general context of the interviews that had specific questions about the conflict. It is mentioned only occasionally, either as a contrast to the East, or in a completely unrelated setting. A political interviewee argues, “we have a pro-European population, it mainly resides in Western and Central Ukraine, and certainly there are people who live under the pressure of Russian propaganda and that more are on the eastern Ukraine” (Politics7). Since the focus of the interviews was on the conflict in the East of Ukraine, it is understandable that Western Ukraine was mentioned less frequently. Still, the interviews materials point to a particular framing of this regions of Ukraine. Unlike the East, it appears to be closer to Europe not only geographically, but in terms of common history. The region is seen to become a basis for cooperation and more involvement than with the countries of Central and Western Europe. Some researchers of Ukrainian crisis point out to the discrepancies between its Western and Eastern regions as one of the underlying causes of the conflict [Black et al. 2016; Hahn 2017; Olchawa 2017]. Other speculate that it has been an issue even before the Orange Revolution of 2004 [Portnov2013: 241]. Comparing the perceptions of East vs. West within the country in the responses of interviews in our case does not support this premise. Only one of fifty interviewees, who also happens to be from the East of Ukraine, insisted on ‘Westerners’ being the ones to blame for the conflict in Donbass and justified the separatists’ actions with deeply rooted cultural differences: “many [in Eastern Ukraine] wanted federalization precisely for this reason, because they understood that this is a foreign culture for us, strange values for us, and that once they came to power by armed means, for us it was unacceptable” (Business1), at the same time rejecting Western values decisively: “I do not see a single value that we should have adapted and would be useful for us, not one.” (Business1). This point of view is not shared by other respondents. Moreover, some are rather sarcastic about these sorts of opinion: for some parts of society, particularly under the influence of Russian propaganda, it can also have a different interpretation, namely that ‘that darned EU, darned West started the fire, we used to live so well, peacefully, amicably, had a loving relationship with Russia and suddenly here they spoiled it all’ (Civil4). Regarding the image of the West in all of its variety, empirical findings seem to suggest that Ukraine is indeed a “cleft country”, yet not a “torn country”, as described by Huntigton. Without a clear approval from the imagined “outside West” in form of EU membership or substantial and decisive support in the conflict with Russia, Ukraine does not seem to be able to overcome the perceived limitations imposed by imaginary borders. At the same time, the vision of the West, embodied mostly by the EU, partially goes in line with Said’s “strong West” narrative. Nevertheless, the image of “strong Asia”, discussed earlier in this paper, makes the orientalism hypothesis inconclusive. 4. Conclusions This study traced the images of the East vs. West emerging in the interviews with Ukrainian elites about the image of the EU in the context of the ongoing conflict and crisis in Ukraine. Importantly, the questionnaire did not ask specific questions about the ‘imagined geography’ of Ukraine, and future studies may choose to focus on this research objective exclusively. This article presents an initial attempt to outline the mental map of the world along the East/West divisions in the eyes of Ukrainian people (in this case Ukrainian decision- and policy-makers). It is necessary to stress out 100 that both the notions of East and West are imaginary and their relations are complex and sometimes perplexing. The results can be grouped into two levels: “external frames” and “internal frames”. The “external frame” includes the notions of “East” represented by Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe and Eastern Partnership. The image of Asia has a definitively positive connotation and this finding contradicts Said’s orientalism hypothesis. In addition, Russia – a country to the East of Ukraine -- has an ambiguous image, albeit with an inclination to negativity. This finding does not fully correspond to the image of the exotic and demonised “Other”, proposed by Said. The notion of “Eastern Europe”, on the other hand has mostly positive connotations and is, to an extent, a part of Ukraine’s self-image. The image of “Eastern Partnership” supports Said’s theory, featuring negative associations attached to the notion of the East. These are also partially a component of Ukraine’s self-image. The image of the “Outside West” is complex and does in part resonate with Said’s concept of the ‘strong West’, however from Ukraine’s perspective, the strength remains unrealized due to lack of stern action in dealing with the conflict. The “internal frame” includes two main images - “East of Ukraine”, heavily associated with the conflict in the country, and “Western Ukraine”, seen being closer to Europe not just in a geographical manner. None of these notions is described either as better or worse, or stronger or weaker. While their images are contrasted to a minor extent, they are not seen as rivals or competitors. The basic contours of the ‘imaginary map’ of Ukraine traced through the responses of Ukrainian elites partially dismiss Said’s orientalism maxim of ‘West is strong; East is weak’. In the eyes of the Ukrainian respondents, countries in the Far East were seen as models of economic growth and development in contrast to Europe’s slow but noticeable decline. Moreover, they were seen as a source of alternative models for Ukraine to follow, in case its European orientation does not work out. The interviews were conducted during the period when the visa liberalisation regime for Ukraine had not been implemented yet. At that time, no-visas regime was believed to be unobtainable due to poor fulfilment of reforms on Ukraine’s side and reluctance on the EU’s side. The controversy surrounding the visa-free issue was viewed in the context of Ukraine’s relations with the EU, and more generally with the West. Indeed, it had a symbolic meaning of transcending the borders and getting closer to the West, or rather getting away from the East, and from being the ‘no man’s land’ between the two sides. From the elites’ point of view, the country is not yet a ‘torn’ country in Huntington’s sense, as it lacks the approval and acceptance from the symbolic West -- the EU continues to deny EU membership for Ukraine. But it is indeed seen as a ‘cleft’ country with the growing ties to the West, that are spreading further into Ukraine’s East. The world in the East-West coordinates is not multipolar, but is stretched between two opposing, equally distant epicenters of power, namely the US and China. There is very little visibility to the notions of Center, North or South. These were hardly mentioned in the interviews, and if mentioned then exclusively in the “outside frame”. Notably, Russia seems to have “moved” to the East since the beginning of the conflict: previously it often used to be referred as “the Northern neighbour” of Ukraine, but the interviewees seem to be inclined to associate it with the East (partially supporting Said’s theory). Notably, Ukraine is not the only country that is seen having a marginal status. Countries of Eastern Europe were seen to belong to the same group. While being Western in the definition by geography textbooks, they are not seen to be fully accepted by the West as an intimate part of it. Further research is needed for the perceptions of the imaginary geography of several most mentioned countries, such as Poland, Russia, China and the USA. They had a high visibility in the interviews even though they were not the main focus of them. The fluidity of Europe’s ‘imaginary borders’ provides an opportunity for Ukraine to overcome the perceived differences and to use the historical and cultural ties as an advantage in building new 101 and more far-reaching connections with the EU. Both the current conflict in the East and common history with many Eastern and Central European countries create a potential for fostering even closer mutual relations. However, there is a danger of crossing even those imaginary lines and creating unnecessary tensions, which is more that possible if there are no palpable guidelines. Perhaps the most important conclusion is that the data gathered in the interviews demonstrated that the East-West dichotomy is not fully internalized in Ukraine. Despite some historical discrepancies, in the eyes of Ukrainian elites there is no innate perceived opposition between Eastern and Western regions of the country. This finding is of critical importance to Ukraine. Considering limited external influences, a peaceful dialogue within Ukraine is possible through accentuating common ideals and values.

Orientalism is a process by which Western societies construct ‘Eastern’ cultures as backward and primitive - Ukraine as the backward ‘Other’ is associated with Russian politics Lyubchenko 17, Olena Lyubchenko,, University Karlovy Department of Political Studies Faculty of Social Sciences, 2017, “The Ukrainian Crisis: A Case of ‘New Orientalism’, accessed 7/11/19, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&profile=ehost&scope=site&authtype=crawler&jrnl=18041302&AN=122705982&h=40SlBFAqkbLMjD5umVtsaujTuQ%2FyQH6K6PxJOOE%2B12IRQNznaRLzd3jkUvPcPoK8EKAgBiAKZISJGVFwfQX5tg%3D%3D&crl=c sfrrpt

Abstract: During the 2013 Ukrainian Euromaidan uprising and in its aftermath, many politicians, journalists, as well as academics diagnosed the Ukraine Crisis to be a manifestation of middle-class aspirations for a total social, political, and economic integration with the EU. Although correct in part, this account overlooks the

heterogeneity of the Euromaidan participants and the role played by radical right and nationalist groups. This paper examines the problematic coalition between liberalism and the radical right factions in the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine . More

specifically, it suggests the liberal project that is taking place in Ukraine depends on a specific form of the friend-enemy distinction of ‘New Orientalism’. By doing so, this paper presents a reading of Euromaidan through Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. The discussion concludes with suggesting a political economy analysis of separatism in the Donbass region. Key words: Euromaidan; Ukraine crisis; liberalism; liberal democracy; far right; Donbass; new orientalism; Carl Schmitt; political economy Introduction The ongoing Ukraine crisis raises political issues that we thought were long buried in history. The post-communist state model is on trial once again. During the 2013 Ukrainian Euromaidan uprising and in its aftermath, many politicians, journalists, as well as academics2 diagnosed the Ukraine Crisis to be a manifestation of middle-class aspirations for a total social, political and economic integration with the European Union (EU). In a way, the story being told is of the completion of the bourgeois revolution that started in 1991 in the midst of the Soviet Union breakdown and was carried through with the 2004 Orange Revolution. This popular narrative follows the basic trajectory of the modernization theory: capitalism leads to democracy.3 Many academics and commentators claimed that with the end of the Cold War era and its competing worldviews, the spread of liberal democracy would create political homogenization and eliminate social conflict.4 The current Ukraine Crisis appears to be an example of the latter, transitioning Ukraine into a truly European liberal democratic and capitalist society. However, without much theoretical and historical analysis, the terms ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’ and ‘nationalism’ have been employed 1 Olena Lyubchenko is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science, York University, Toronto. Contact: [email protected] 2 E.g.: Wilson 2014; Riabchuk 2013; Snyder 2015; Gershman 2015. 3 E.g.: Rostow 1956; Lipset 1959; Almond and Coleman 1960; Smelser 1964; Huntington 1968; Inglehart and Welzel 2005. 4 E.g.: Fukuyama 2011; Hoffmann 1987; Friedman 2007. 2017 | Vol. 9 | No. 1 46 interchangeably over the past two years, and the struggle for ‘liberal democracy’ continues to be framed as the ‘Ukrainian nationalist project’. The task of this paper is to demystify and complicate the mainstream narrative of Euromaidan as an organic democratic development. In the context of the Ukraine Crisis, the notion of ‘democracy’ was used rather vaguely. It tended to be associated with the notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ of the ‘Ukrainian people’; however, none of these terms was properly defined. This paper intends to interrogate the assumed unproblematic convergence between the social forces of liberal democracy5 and those of radical nationalism in the strife for Ukraine’s inclusion into the EU. I suggest that the alliance between the proEuropean liberal forces and the radical right was

enabled by the definition of a common enemy — the external, as well as internal, Russian hegemony. The European homogenization process involves (1) an ideological distancing from Russia and (2) a declaration of an internal enemy, via defining a section of Ukraine’s society as backward people. This has materialized in the ongoing civil war.6 Following Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism in The Concept of the Political (1976), i.e. that liberalism merely appears to nullify the friend-enemy distinction, I argue that the political has emerged in Ukraine. The current liberal project in Ukraine relies on a specific form of the friend-enemy distinction, namely that of ‘New Orientalism’: a relational construction of ‘transnational bourgeois identity’, counterposed to an internal ‘Oriental Other’. In this struggle, Ukrainian nationhood has been defined politically and economically as essentially ‘European’ and liberal-democratic; whereas, the ‘Other’, the Donbass separatists in the Eastern-most regions, have been defined in negative terms, as distinctly Russian, Soviet, Asiatic, backward, corrupt, and, ultimately, Oriental. The focus of this paper is one-sided because my motivation is to deconstruct what has gained global currency as a popular example of grassroots democracy by problematizing the ‘democracy’ and the far right’s seemingly comfortable participation in its development. I am interested in discursive, ideological, but also starkly material use of Euromaidan and so attempt to highlight the ultimate contradictions that it is premised upon. Thus, this paper covers a lot of ground – from theories of democratization and transitions from authoritarianism, to critiques of liberalism in political theory, to the knowledge production analysis of the current nationalist discourse, and in connection, a political economy analysis of separatism in Donbass. This paper’s objective does not imply the embrace of the official Russian state politics. Such an adoption of the friend-enemy terms, albeit from the other side, would be counterintuitive to the main theme of this paper. In fact, I hold that “in trying to reify ethnic boundaries by imputing negative political meanings to ethnic and linguistic identities, the Ukrainian far right – ironically – shares the same goal as the Russian government” (Giuliano 2015: 520). For a more complete picture of the history and the causes of the Ukraine Crisis, 5 In this essay, I use ‘liberal’ and ‘neoliberal’ interchangeably. I justify this use historically; I take it to be that ‘liberal democracy’ as a system was first introduced in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union in its already ‘neoliberal’ form through various ‘shock therapy’ economic, social, political policies. This, some could point out, limits my analysis because the differentiation between liberalism and neoliberalism might lead to different results in terms of their construction of an ‘Other’ and possible partnership with the radical right. 6 Although possible, to fully account for the ‘cause’ of the civil war would mean to go over a long history of Ukrainian nation-building, which is not the purpose of this paper. I merely propose to understand the discourse of friend-enemy that has emerged and is becoming mainstream in Ukraine today. 47 The Ukrainian Crisis: A Case of ‘New Orientalism’ a similar analysis ought to be undertaken with regards to the ‘Russian’ side and its specific constructions of Russian nationalism. The Ukraine Crisis and Its Discourse On November 21, 2013, then Ukrainian President

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Victor Yanukovych refused to sign a free trade agreement with the EU that would signal a step towards Ukraine’s eventual EU membership, and instead agreed to a $15 billion partnership offer from Russia that signified closer cooperation with Ukraine’s neighbour and potential membership in Russia’s Eurasian Customs Union. This act came to be interpreted as anti-democratic and corrupt by the majority of Western media sources and Ukrainian citizens, who saw Yanukovych as advancing a Russian political and economic agenda over the national interests of Ukraine (The Economist 2013a: 59-60; Greene 2014; Balmforth 2013). It is instructive to look at how Yanukovych’s decision, and the Ukraine Crisis more broadly, has been framed thus far by the mainstream media and scholarship in very pro-European terms that naturalize Western liberal-democratic values. Particularly instructive is (a) the definition and use of ‘democracy’ and (b) the way in which the involvement of the far right among pro-Western forces has been defined as democratic, downplayed, and/or suppressed. By rejecting the trade agreement with the EU, the editors of The Economist wrote, Yanukovych “appeared to hand victory to Vladimir Putin in a struggle with the EU over Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation” (The Economist 2013b: 13). Corruption was defined as ‘anti-Western’, and Ukrainian national interests as the interests of the EU. On November 30, 2013, The Economist wrote that the protests were about a desire for Western values and governance: “[…] standing in temperatures of minus 13C, ready to be beaten up, the people on Maidan were defending something far greater than an association agreement with the EU, which was the initial cause. They were standing in the way of a police state, defending fundamental European values and defying the post-Soviet order imposed by Russia.” (2013a: 59) Ukraine’s political path was framed as a choice between two opposites – towards future progress with the EU or back to the corrupt Soviet past with Russia. The outburst of Ukrainian nationalism was represented as the desire to live in Europe under liberal-democratic values. The general response in academia, albeit limited due to the recent nature of the events, has been similar and can be divided into two commonplace views. In the first, scholars downplayed or obscured the role of the radical right at Euromaidan. For example, Olga Onuch approached the Euromaidan phenomenon along the lines of modernization theory. She asked: how can we account for such a popular uprising within the context of struggling democracies everywhere that suffer from low voter turnout and general popular apathy (2014:44)? For Onuch, the popular appeal of Western-style democracy serves as evidence that the liberal subject has developed in Ukraine, despite the Ukrainian state lagging behind. Therefore, the average protester was a liberal subject who revolted against the current state-form in order to achieve the predominance of liberal-democratic European 2017 | Vol. 9 | No. 1 48 values and economic prosperity (Onuch 2014: 48). Meanwhile, the radical-right protester was portrayed as an irrelevant minority (Onuch 2014:46-47). Similarly, Mykola Riabchuk states that what mobilized the protesters was: “their hope for a ‘normal life in a normal country’ which the agreement had envisaged and come to symbolize. Now, as the government had stolen that hope, [people] feel deceived – it’s not just about this single incident, but about their whole lives, the whole development of the country stuck for 22 years in a grey zone between post-Soviet autocracies to the East and increasingly democratizing and prosperous neighbours to the West.” (2013) Here, the West-East dichotomy mirrors the difference between normal and abnormal government and society. Where does the radical right fit into this story of good versus bad? In Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West, Andrew Wilson (2014) gave Maidan a ‘truly democratic’ progressive legitimacy by placing it alongside the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring (Ishchenko 2014: 154). While Wilson could not outright deny the presence of radical nationalism, he represented its forces at the Maidan as marginal, the argument being that since these far-right parties did not win in the subsequent parliamentary elections, they do not represent a credible threat or significant political faction (Wilson 2014: 86-88, 171-172). In fact, he wrote that “a torch-lit march through Kiev in honour of the World War Two Ukrainian Nationalist hero Stepan Bandera on 1 January was such a stupid idea, it had to be a provocation” (Wilson 2014:86). A Kyiv-based sociologist, Volodymyr Ishchenko, has come to criticize Wilson’s (and others’) view as near-sighted, pointing to the determining role of political groups such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Svoboda Party7 , and Praviy Sektor (the Right Sector) in the movement (Ishchenko 2014: 13). The second general response of academia to the Ukraine Crisis accepts in theory and declares in practice the benefits of the partnership between the radical-right and liberal forces in Ukraine but does so uncritically. Jennifer J. Carroll argues that the beauty of Maidan lies precisely in its unifying nature: the mobilization of elements across class divisions and ideological affiliations – both on the left and the right – through the idea of a nation striving for a European, liberal-democratic future (2014: 9-10, 12). She argues that academics must put semantics aside when analysing the radical-right forces. Instead of analysing the content of radical-right banners (Svoboda and Right Sector), they must remark on the fact that their members were fighting for the same cause as the rest of Ukrainians, i.e. “wanting things to be Ukrainian” (Carroll 2014: 12). While obviously condemning radical-right ideals in themselves, Carroll does not shy away from suggesting that they were useful for the Euromaidan cause in general by radicalizing popular grievances through the idea of the nation. In other words, we can forgive their slogans so long as they support a European Ukraine against Eastern separatism and Russian encroachment. Carroll notes that: “many dedicated members of these so-called ‘radical groups took up arms in cooperation with so-called ‘ordinary’ Ukrainians against a common enemy 7 The literal translation of ‘svoboda’ (‘свобода’) is ‘freedom’. 49 The Ukrainian Crisis: A Case of ‘New Orientalism’ that threatened the very dignity and livelihood of the Ukrainian nation […] numerous protestors told me that radical groups ‘[did] the necessary work of radicalizing ordinary Ukrainians against their oppressors’ and ‘[made] the nation visible, so that people know what they are fighting for’” (2014: 12). In a sense, Carroll tries to sanitize the radical right by fitting it into the bourgeois revolution interpretation of Ukrainian Euromaidan. Thus, her analysis is not too far off from that of Onuch, Riabchuk, and Wilson. However, what Carroll makes explicit is that in the case of Ukraine the project of the radical right and the project of European liberal-democratic integration are not contradictory. Democratization Before turning to the analysis of the far right, I want to address the simple view of ‘Euromaidan’ as a project of completion of the ‘bourgeois revolution’, or a full transition to liberal democracy that began with the fall of the Soviet Union through the 2004 Orange Revolution. It is necessary to pose the question, what is the relationship between the transition to capitalism and the development of democracy? The debates within democratization and democratic transitions scholarship that are often informed by modernization theory have focused on: (a) the ways in which transitions occur and democracies are consolidated, but also (b) around the similarities and differences between the various ‘waves’ of democratization – in Southern Europe, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Indeed, Euromaidan itself has been presented as another ‘wave’ of democratic transition in Ukraine. Philippe Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl (1994) maintain that in the post-communist states democratization has, in part, been a strategic politico-economic project with an international dimension. They write: “the regime changes in eastern Europe triggered a major collapse in intraregional trade and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Into this vacuum moved an extraordinary variety of western advisors and promoters binational and multilateral. To a far greater extent than elsewhere, these external actors have imposed political ‘conditionality’ upon the process of consolidation, linking specific rewards explicitly to the meeting of specific norms or even to the selection of specific institutions’.” (Schmitter, Karl 1994: 182) Echoing Schmitter and Karl, Valerie Bunce (1995) notes that in Eastern Europe democratic transition implied a number of inter-related processes of restructuring, both economic and political: the role of the state with regards to its citizens as well as the international system, liberalization of economy and foundations of a capitalist society, re-definition of citizenship via creation of a new capitalist class system (1995: 120-121). Thus, democratization in the post-communist era was not just a political regime change but one based on certain economic preconditions. This view is remnant of the modernization theory model, which suggests a causal relationship between capitalism and democracy. 2017 | Vol. 9 | No. 1 50 Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter (1986), Gerardo Munck (2011) as well as Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996) assume a normative value of minimalist democracy. They differentiate between liberalization and democratization in a manner where economic liberalization can occur without democratization, whereas democratization usually follows, entails, and depends on economic liberalization, but on a wider, more political scale. Their conception of democracy is not very different from Robert Dahl’s “polyarchy”, which refers to an electoral, representative democratic regime only, following the development of a competitive market-oriented economy, not a “true democracy”, which perhaps is more of an ideal than an achievable reality (Dahl 1989:251). This analysis shows that ‘democracy’, and its ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ is a relative concept. Because the protests at the Maidan have been interpreted in terms of Ukrainian nation’s fight for freedom from totalitarianism, for equality, and for liberal democratic, European values, it is the task of political scientists to demystify those very ideas. A ‘transition’ to a democracy defined as polyarchy might result in establishment of valuable political institutions, but it might not answer all the political and socio-economic demands of the people who protested at the Maidan and in Eastern Ukraine. Far Right The role of the far right was central to the victory of the Maidan and since then has become infiltrated into the new Ukrainian government in Kyiv and its policy-making. The far right was most active in the setting up of self-defence units, as well as attacking and occupying government and administrative buildings, police headquarters and getting access to armament. As Ishchenko clarifies, Maidan

participants were not middle-class proper (which, if our criterion is based on consumption patterns, makes up about 10-15 % of the Ukrainian population) but individuals with nothing to lose, largely, “a movement of dispossessed workers” (2014: 11, 19). Peculiarly, their grievances were expressed not in terms of social and economic demands but acute nationalism; aligning with ultra-nationalist and radicalright movements. In this sense, as Ishchenko points out, Svoboda became what we may call a popular, democratic, grassroots party of the Maidan (Ishchenko 2014: 12). Svoboda, originally founded after the fall of the Soviet Union, was officially entitled the Social-National Party of Ukraine (Ishchenko 2014: 14). After the three-month struggle at the Maidan, Svoboda emerged not only as one of the official opposition parties with direct influence over policy-making but also as a party whose members serve as ministers in government. Currently, “Svoboda holds a larger chunk of its nation’s ministries (nearly a quarter, including the prized defense portfolio) than any other far-right party on the [European] continent. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister represents Svoboda (the smaller, even more extreme ‘Right Sector’ coalition fills the deputy National Security Council chair), as does the prosecutor general and the deputy chair of parliament.” (Foxall and Kesslermarch 2014) 51 The Ukrainian Crisis: A Case of ‘New Orientalism’ To be more explicit, Andriy Parubiy was appointed the new secretary of Ukraine’s security council; also a co-founder of Svoboda, his deputy, Dmytro Yarosh, is the leader of the Right Sector, and the highest-ranking right-wing extremist is Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych, who is also a member of Svoboda (Hughes 2014). Moreover, Western recognition of Svoboda as a legitimate political player has been common in the aftermath of the Euromaidan: “In December, shortly after protests began against Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, U.S. Senator John McCain shared a platform and an embrace with Svoboda chief Tyahnybok at a mass rally in Kiev, assuring demonstrators, ‘The free world is with you; America is with you.’ In February of this year, France and Germany oversaw a peace deal between Tyahnybok, two other opposition leaders, and Yanukovych (though soon after, protests forced Yanukovych to flee to Russia). And in early March, the U.S. State Department published a debunking of Putin’s ‘False Claims About Ukraine,’ assuring Americans that Ukraine’s farright ‘are not represented’ in parliament.” (Foxall, Kesslermarch 2014) In terms of the concrete influence of the far right over government policy, the magazine Foreign Policy reports that “one of [Svoboda’s] chief demands – that all government business be done in Ukrainian – was passed into law, instantaneously marginalizing the one-third of Ukraine’s citizens (and 60 % of Crimeans) who speak Russian. Then for good measure, the party launched a push to repeal a law against ‘excusing the crimes of fascism’” (Foxall and Kesslermarch 2014). Regardless, the radical right’s greatest success is not its participation in the government but rather that its ideological discourse has come to dominate the conversation around Ukraine’s present and future. This discursive triumph has influenced a general right-wing shift in Ukrainian politics as well as in mainstream and academic thinking, to which Carroll’s piece itself serves as a prime example. For instance, the ideological symbols and slogans such as “Glory to the Nation! Death to the Enemies!” and “Glory to Ukraine! To heroes, glory!” which before the outbreak were traditionally expressed exclusively in ultra-nationalist circles, were transformed into common, quite mainstream parlance (Ishchenko 2014:15; Luhn 2014). On the Memorial Day of the Victims of Repression, the leader of Svoboda, Tyahnybok, proclaimed (in a rough English translation): “For us, the nationalists, it is not enough that Parliament because of certain political situation, of necessity, finally adopted anti-communist laws. By the way, from the first days of its foundation ‘Svoboda’ constantly stressed the need to adopt similar legislation. But now it is absolutely essential these laws take an effect in Ukrainian state. It is also important that psychology of all Ukrainians was turned to Ukrainian manner and every Ukrainian looked at the world in the light of Ukrainian’s view but not through bolshevik-communist-Kremlin glasses. Because, unfortunately, nowadays anti-Ukrainian and Moscow’s influence is largely maintained in 2017 | Vol. 9 | No. 1 52 Ukraine. It is important to remember our true heroes, honour their memory, especially in such places like this Memorial complex.” (Svoboda 2015) At the same time, on its official website, Svoboda is also described as: “a modern political party, which is open to cooperation. In our international activities we are looking for those supporting traditional European values, human rights, the rights of nations, respect their sovereignty and oppose imperialism; those partners, whose vision concerning Ukraine, European and global challenges has something in common with our own point of view.” (Svoboda 2015) There appears to be a contradiction of tone between the first and the second statement. With regard to the second statement, we sense the apprehension about the risk of being perceived as a far-right party, and hence, the desire to establish itself as liberal and European and truly legitimate. Whereas, in the first statement, which reveals an organic, naturalistic view of a nation, Tyahnybok places the idea of the ‘nation’ above liberal-democratic values, such as individual freedom of choice and association. On the one hand, the official economic rhetoric of the opposition parties, including Svoboda, has been one of striving for a bourgeois identity, for a ‘European’, globalized Ukraine with open markets, and adoption of the EU’s current neoliberal austerity policies. The new neoliberal government “accepted all the credit conditions imposed by the IMF – increasing public utility tariffs, freezing wages, cutting a whole range of benefits […] that would put the burden of the economic crisis on the poor” (Ishchenko 2014: 22). On the other hand, the underlying ideology of the economic regime has become the radical-right nationalism: freedom for the Ukrainian nation and the right of self-determination of the ‘Ukrainian’ people, based on their ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and historical distinction from the ‘Russian’ nation. The Solidarity Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, the majority party in government, relies for its legitimacy on the Maidan revolution as a victory against both internal and external aggression against Ukraine, against what it calls the “enslavement” of the Ukrainian people (The Solidarity Bloc 2014). Here, enslavement is invoked selectively and excised from socio-economic conditions. What are we to make of this contradictory marriage between liberalism and nationalism? Between, on the one hand liberal universalism and, on the other, Ukrainian national exclusivity? One explanation for this coalition has to do with tactics: the (neo)liberal economic and political Ukrainian elite needed to align themselves with ultra nationalism. The radical-right forces were critical in representing popular sentiments. As Ishchenko points out, “part of the reason why the intelligentsia didn’t take a distance from the far-right may have been that they knew they were objectively weak, and thought that dissociating themselves from Svoboda and Right Sector would mean being sidelined from the movement altogether; the alliance was too important to them” (2014: 16). Thus, the politicians and the intelligentsia adopted radical nationalism as the only successful way to argue for a European Ukraine. An explanation of the local interests should be situated within the global context. Such an account can highlight that the political and economic agenda of Ukraine is partly enforced by powerful 53 The Ukrainian Crisis: A Case of ‘New Orientalism’ external interests, where Ukrainian elites potentially represent global rather than national interests and use nationalist rhetoric to legitimate a global economic and political agenda.8 In line with this interpretation, others suggest that far-right nationalisms in post-Soviet states often perform a compensatory function for those who are the economic ‘losers’ of the transition to a neoliberal capitalist order. They argue, “it is the ‘transition losers’ […] who experience a sense of insecurity, are frustrated with the democratic experience, and seek refuge in nationalist values” (Häusermann and Kriesi 2011). This analysis suggests that in Ukraine, neoliberalism – in its global and local form – relies on the far right’s nationalist discourse for legitimation in lieu of substantial economic security. I return to the political economic analysis after a reading of Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism that helps to conceptualize events in Ukraine. Schmitt: The Political In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt characterizes liberalism as a movement for universal pacifism, which negates the political-fundamental status of man – the friend-enemy distinction and a natural inclination to war. There are two dimensions to his critique of liberalism. First, Schmitt shows that the liberal project aims to universalize the human condition, deny and neutralize the political. Liberal democracy, Schmitt writes, appears as “a completely pacified globe, […] without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics” (Schmitt 1976: 35). The liberal-bourgeois individual: “rests in the possession of his private property, and under the justification of his possessive individualism he acts as an individual against the totality. He is a man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichment and above all in the total security of its use. Consequently, he wants to be spared bravery and exempted from the danger of a violent death.” (Schmitt 1976: 62-63) Secondly, and more importantly, Schmitt unmasks power, or the political enmity from under liberal pacifism. It serves to reproduce his thoughts verbatim: “the concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism […] To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.” (1976: 54) 8 For a critical account of the history of global capitalism, and specifically the discussion of ‘empire by invitation’, please see Panitch and Gindin (2012). 2017 | Vol. 9 | No. 1 54 Thus, depoliticisation defined as universal humanism is an ideology that covers the true intentions of those who use it for their own (economic or national) advantage. By presenting their values as universally valid human values, the proponents of liberalism first dehumanize their opponents only to then legitimately destroy them as enemies of humanity. For example, in calling the League of Nations an imperialist “alliance” of states, Schmitt

argues that international political bodies do not eliminate war. Rather, they legitimize and sanction them against those enemies that could not be incorporated or suppressed (1976: 55-56). In the next section, I attempt to show how the current liberal project in Ukraine (for now) supports Schmitt’s diagnosis. Bringing together a discursive and a political economic analysis, I suggest that the declaration of the ‘enemy’ in the Ukraine Crisis has taken the form of a ‘new Orientalism’. ‘New

Orientalism’ Discourse and Its Critique The term ‘Orientalism’ was first coined by Edward Said to describe a process by which Western societies constructed ‘Eastern’ colonized cultures as backward and primitive, and in doing so named themselves developed, modern, and rational. Anthropologist Michal Buchowski and feminist scholar Sedef Arat-Koc augment Said’s analysis to understand a new phenomenon in Eastern Europe where ‘Orientalist’ thinking is applied internally, to the post-Soviet ‘losers’ of globalization. By using their framework of ‘New Orientalism’, I argue that in Ukraine, as part of the process of homogenization with Europe, we see a construction of a new identity. The ‘Other’ in this context is what Buchowski terms the ‘homo-Sovieticus’, whose existence occurs within national borders but by definition is seen as anachronistic. Whereas previously all of Eastern Europe in Western eyes appeared “as ‘neither fish, nor fowl’, semi-oriental, not fully European, semi-developed, and semicivilized,” in the process of Western incorporation of Eastern Europe after 1989, there has been “a restructuring of the perception of social inequalities by the hegemonic liberal ideology” (Buchowski 2006: 464). Buchowski explains, “the degree to which various countries, authorities, social groups and individuals have embraced the free market and democracy – evaluated by those powerful who set rules of the game – has become a yardstick for classifying different regions, countries and groups as fitting more or less into the category of ‘us’ i.e. ‘(post)modern-Western-liberals’.” (2006: 464-465) No longer geographically defined, those who have not embraced ‘Europe’ for ideological or socio-economic reasons are deemed irretrievably backward and, virtually, ethnically different. Arguments from essentialised cultural standpoints dismiss and delegitimize any disagreement about political and economic development. Arat-Koc highlights how ‘culture’ is used to hide political economic issues: “as neoliberal hegemonies exclude theories that demonstrate failure as central and integral to the functioning of capitalism and inevitable, as social, economic, and historical explanations for failure are excluded from 55 The Ukrainian Crisis: A Case of ‘New Orientalism’ hegemonic discourses, ‘culture’ (as a reductionist, essentialized, shrunk, caricatured version of what the term could otherwise mean) becomes the ‘only’ accepted ‘explanation’ in mainstream discourse.” (2014: 329) Echoing Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, this reveals the very undemocratic nature of the ‘liberal-democratic’

project in general and in Ukraine, in particular. In the case of Ukraine, the backward ‘Other’ is ideologically associated with Russian politics, culture, and language, both inside and outside the nation-state. Due to the history of Western and Eastern imperialism, the ideological but nonetheless real and material border between West and East in Ukraine demarcates people by language, culture, ethnic affiliation and even political ideology, i.e. liberalism in the progressive West and socialism in the backward East. As evident from Tyahnybok’s statement above, communism and the working-class movements have been associated with Russian political culture and history, and therefore viewed as a Russian imperial imposition both from within and from without. The oversimplified identification of present-day Russia with the Soviet Union, as well as with communism itself, is ahistorical. First, it obscures the history of Ukraine, as nineteenth-century Ukrainian nationalism was openly leftist, not to mention that it maintained a strong anarchist tradition that was born in central Ukraine under Nestor Makhno (Ischchenko 2014: 16-17). Secondly, that Russian nationality and language, and socialism have become synonymous is wildly inaccurate, since Russia is no longer (and presumably never has been) a socialist state: its economy is now quite obviously structured by capitalist social relations, even if at variance (i.e. the prominent role of ‘oligarchs’ and patrimonialism) with Western models of capitalism. Studies of the local population’s agency in self-determination movements in the Donbass region have been scarce. In order to dismiss Eastern-Ukrainian concerns as illegitimate, the use of ‘New Orientalist’ discourse by politicians, academics, and reporters helps present them as irrational and dehumanized compared to the civilized ‘ethnic’ Western-Ukrainians advocating for proper Western institutions and values. If we look at yet another one of Tiahnybok’s statements, we find another demarcation along friend-enemy lines of ‘civilized’ versus ‘uncivilized’: “In Donbas, gangs of armed terrorists are shouting separatist slogans and – with the support of the Kremlin – carry out physical destruction of the Ukrainian nation. They are, de facto, beginning an ethnic cleansing – people get killed for saying ‘Glory to Ukraine!’, for speaking Ukrainian language and/or wearing ‘vyshyvankas.’9 People are kidnapped just because they are Ukrainians. Three of Svoboda’s representatives have also been abducted. This mess must stop – the state has a duty to its citizens, thus should eliminate terrorism and guarantee security of the people.” (Svoboda 2015) 9 ‘Vyshyvanka’ is a colloquial term for an embroidered peasant blouse in Ukrainian traditional costume. In the aftermath of the Euromaidan, it has been used as a symbol of Ukraine’s freedom, worn in the mainstream, and popularized by the fashion industry in Ukraine and in the West. 2017 | Vol. 9 | No. 1 56 Evidently, the centre of the focus is not the protesters’ practical demands but their ‘character’ and nationality. In fact, there has been a “spread of dehumanizing rhetoric against the movement in Eastern Ukraine […] after the Odessa massacre on 2 May, when thirty people were burned to death in the Trade Union building, [and] some Ukrainian nationalists were exultant” (Ishchenko 2014: 32). The materiality of the shift of the official discourse to the right is striking. While ethnic, cultural, and language differences have been employed to explain the politics of separatism in the East, the three are not so easily discernible into separate and sovereign ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘Russian’ identities. Elise Giuliano explains, “Cultural boundaries between Russians and Ukrainians are fuzzy and faint, as

indicated by the high rate of inter-ethnic marriage there. Russians and Ukrainians share, for the most part, a common religion – Eastern Orthodoxy, or a secularism inherited from the Soviet era; a common language (Russian), very similar languages (Ukrainian and Russian), or a mixture of the two (Surzhyk); and a host of social practices and cultural expectations based on their shared experience as Soviet and post-Soviet citizens [...] In general, the porosity of cultural boundaries suggests that ethnic identity by itself provides little information about why many people in the east feel alienated from the Ukrainian state.” (2015: 516-517) Much evidence indicates that cultural and linguistic essentialism have been constructed by and used in favour of a certain political-economic project. However, the association of language and support for separatism has not been a static one throughout Ukraine’s history. For instance, in the Donbass region those citizens who have reported that their national language is Ukrainian still voted for Yanukovych in the 2012 presidential elections (Ibid.). Even after language became politicized in the aftermath of the Maidan by the political elites (via Ukraine’s interim government’s annulment of language law making Russian an official language of the Ukrainian state that was passed under Yanukovych in 2012), residents of the Donbass region did not see it as the main reason behind separation. Giuliano provides statistical evidence: “In an International Republican Institute (IRI) poll, 74% of respondents in east Ukraine (Donestsk; Dnepropetrovsk; Kharkhiv; Luhansk) answered either ‘definitely no’ or ‘not really’ when asked: ‘Do you feel that Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine are under pressure or threat because of their language?’ A majority of ethnic Russians also answered ‘definitely no’ (49%) and not really (17%).” (2015: 518) Instead, in agreement with both Giuliano and Ishchenko, I propose that it is more useful to understand the alienation experienced by the population in the Donbass region from the new Ukrainian government and Euromaidan in political-economic terms. The Donbass region is the most industrialized and urbanized area of Ukraine. The older Soviet enterprises 57 The Ukrainian Crisis: A Case of ‘New Orientalism’ in the area – mostly coal industry and metallurgy – were a central production hub in the USSR and after its fall; it produced for Russia as its biggest trading partner (Ishchenko 2014). The local economy and social relations, due to a close geographic proximity, are tied to Russia’s. Thus: “in the estimations of ordinary people, joining the Customs Union would maintain trade ties with Russia and other post-Soviet states and therefore preserve jobs and the status quo. A shift in economic orientation toward Europe would bring uncertainty to the region. Such a change, moreover, would affect large numbers of workers since Donetsk and Luhansk are overwhelmingly urban (90% and 10%).” (Giuliano, 2015: 518-519) The region opposed Ukraine’s EU association out of a practical prediction of losing jobs through privatization or shutting down of national enterprises and industries, which are central to employing the urban population and sustaining their lives. The strategic-economic interests of the Donbass region are dismissed as ideological and cultural, as if Eastern Ukrainians must automatically disagree with EU association and values by virtue of being labelled ethnically ‘Russian’ by Western Ukrainians. In connection to the political economic question, Giuliano (2015) emphasizes the political-symbolic alienation of the Donbass residents from the Euromaidan movement and the new Ukrainian government, due to their conception of nationhood in ethnically exclusivist terms. Giuliano explains, “[…] some Ukrainian elites articulated an interpretation of Ukrainian history that, put in stark terms, viewed the past through Stalin’s crimes such as collectivization which produced the Great Famine of 1932 (the Holomodor). In this view, Ukraine is a victim of the imperialist Soviet Union which perpetrated genocide and destroyed Ukrainian language and culture. More extreme versions of this view celebrate Stepan Bandera and factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – a group that fought the Soviets during World War II in part by making common cause with the Nazis. Advocates of these ideas identify postSoviet Russia and ethnic Russians with the Soviet Union […] Their ideology fit in with a strand of ultranationalist discourse that, over the years, had scapegoated ethnic Russians for the country’s problems and identified them with the Soviet Union and Russia. After Maidan, Ukraine’s interim government did not criticize ultranationalist discourse, but instead appointed a former leader of a neo-fascist party, Andriy Parubiy, to the important post of head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council [...] More dangerously, as the violence heated up, Kiev allowed semi-private paramilitary groups—such as the far right, neo-Nazi Azov Battalion – to fight in east Ukraine.” (2015: 519-520) 2017 | Vol. 9 | No. 1 58 In concluding this section, I want to bring together the discursive and the political economic analyses. The very history of Ukraine, its language, and culture has been reinvented in Western, liberal terms. Aside from the evident materiality of the civil war, which reproduces and reflects certain narratives of national ethnicity as well as global political economic interests, Ukraine is a contemporary example of how knowledge production is a political economic issue. Conclusion Revealing the discourse around the Ukraine Crisis in terms of a ‘New Orientalism’ helps explain the relationship between liberalism and nationalism that became ‘common sense’ at Euromaidan and, currently, in the larger Ukraine Crisis. The modernization school of thought claimed that with the end of the Cold War era of ideology, the spread of capitalist social relations and consequently the transitions to liberal democracy would create political homogenization and render ethnic conflict irrelevant. At a first glance, the current Ukraine Crisis fits this vision as an example of homogenizing political and economic forces at work, transitioning Ukraine into a ‘true’ liberal democratic capitalist society. It was not the purpose of this paper to deny that Euromaidan is a popular, democratic phenomenon. The purpose of this paper was, first, to interrogate what is meant by ‘democracy’ – and whether or not its institutionalization will fulfil the demands of protesters and second, to complicate the romanticized story of a fight for liberal, European values in light of the radical right’s participation in Euromaidan and advance into the new Ukrainian government. In Ukraine, as part of the process of homogenization with Europe, we see a process of the invention of the Ukrainian nation in ethnic, exclusivist terms, which defines a section of Ukraine’s society as a backward ‘ethnicity’. This distinction has concretely manifested in the ongoing violent conflict between the Donbass region and Western and Central Ukraine. Following Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, I argue that the Ukrainian Crisis reveals how liberalism, in this specific historical and geopolitical context, relies on a certain friend-enemy distinction for the advancement of its supposed universalist project. As a way of moving beyond the New Orientalist discourse, I suggest that we understand the political-economic reasons for the separatist politics in Eastern Ukraine, which might point in a useful direction of the re-evaluation of the official Ukrainian as well as the general European political, economic, and social policies.

CHINAFears of the rising power of China are rooted in a techno-Orientalist discourse that justifies colonial violence in the name of the OtherMathur, R. 2018. [Department of Political Science, University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), San Antonio, TX, USA], Techno-Racial dynamics of denial & difference in weapons control, Asian Journal of Political Science, 1–17. doi:10.1080/02185377.2018.1515640. EC

In an effort to generate critical self- reflexivity on practices of Orientalism and Occidentalism there has been a proliferation of discourses on ‘strategic Orientalism’, ‘techno Orientalism’ and ‘military Orientalism’ as discussed below. Keith Krause and Andrew Latham (1998) argue that

practices of ‘strategic orientalism’ constitute the ‘foundation of Western security culture’ (Krause & Latham,

1998, p. 41). They assert that strategic orientalism is premised on the ‘pervasive and axiomatic belief that the West (or occasionally the United States) as a civilization has a special role to play in global security affairs’’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, pp. 41, 37). This is based on ‘a reading of the politico-strategic objectives and purposes of Third World states that is informed more by Western fears and prejudices than by the realities of politics in these states’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, p. 38). The deep-rooted fear of the attacking Asian hordes and their ability to industrialize and develop sophisticated weapons reinforces twenty-first century concerns about the ‘Rising East’. This ‘phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo-or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse’ is understood as ‘techno-Orientalism’ (Roh

et al., 2015, p. 2). Practices of techno-Orientalism driven by ‘imperial aspirations’ and ‘appetites of consumerist societies’ are ‘infused with the languages and codes of the technological and futuristic’ and in ‘digital spaces abound with reinscribed racial tropes and stereotypes ; these are sites in which racialization is more likely reinforced than challenged’ (Roh et al., 2015, p. 14). Scholars developing the concept of techno-Orientalism observe its ‘growing prevalence in the Western cultural consciousness’ and suggest that the ‘US techno Orientalist imagination has its roots in the view of Asian body … as a form of expendable technology’ (Roh et al., 2015, pp. 7–11). Nevertheless they insist that the scope of techno-Orientalism is ‘expansive and bi-directional’ and ponder on the ‘danger that Asian and Asian American creators … might internalize techno Orientalist patterns and uncritically replicate the same dehumanizing model’ (Roh et al., 2015, pp. 3, 7). But unlike strategic Orientalism and techno-Orientalism, Military Orientalism is described as an exercise undertaken to investigate the mental baggage of Western consciousness accumulated from an interest in ‘non-

Western warfare’ (Porter, 2013, pp. 16–17). The endeavor of military Orientalism is to unpack the ‘range of assumptions and myths through which Westerners gaze on the military East and engage in a critical dialogue with our own preconceptions’ (Porter, 2013, pp. 16–17). It encourages Westerners to voice their own ‘fears about themselves, their survival, identity and values, through different visions of non-Western warfare’ (Porter, 2013, p. 21). Military Orientalism issues a warning against reducing

military history to a morality play (Porter, 2013, p. 75). But it is open to the idea that our common experiences of suffering can help cultivate a ‘source of critical self-reflection to perhaps nurture some understanding of the ‘intimacy of the relationship’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 187; Nandy, 1983). In investigating the intimacy of a relationship it might be possible to glean and ‘retrieve recessive images and practices’ that have been historically constituted through a network 4 R. MATHUR of social relations and processes (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 191). These might present creative opportunities to move beyond ‘policing boundaries of self as an exclusive and homogenous space’ and instead ‘appreciate and claim the self that exists as part of the other beyond those boundaries’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 204). Porter insists on ‘the interactive and power-political nature of war, which has a culture of its own that can change all

parties to a conflict’ (2013, p. 55). Porter claims that, ‘paradoxically, war can drive cultures closer together’ (2013, p. 33). This is because, ‘war … is not simply a clash of Others, made possible by an ignorant horror of difference. The warrior looks out at the enemy and sees men who are, in crucial respects, recognizably like himself’ (Porter, 2013, p. 34). He

also argues that an engagement with, ‘the foreign “Other” can be treated as a superior model to inform self-examination’ (2013, p. 108). But this hopeful promise of Military Orientalism has not stemmed the tide of populist discourses deploying the dynamic of difference between ‘The West and the Rest’ in the aftermath of the Cold War to wage and perpetuate a global War on Terror.

On the contrary it is possible to argue that there is deliberate and contingent deployment of a ‘decivilizing rhetoric that blends irrational, aggressive, rigid, paranoid and exceptionalist discourses to demonize Other-ness’

and give ‘unwarranted authority and autonomy’ to ‘militarist and imperialist discourses of national security’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 670). There is ‘sustained use of decivilizing imagery’ that ‘represents the United States as a virtuous nation reluctantly but legitimately fulfilling its divine mandate to use civilized reason and superior force’ vis-a vis ‘nuclear capable and aspiring nations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East’ depicted in a ‘racist, sexist language that reproduces colonial ideology. As such it rejects the authority and legitimacy of these nations as potential possessors of nuclear weapons and solidifies continued dominance by the United States of the nuclear strategic environment’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 685). The strength of these populist discourses reinforcing a dynamic of difference and denial is exhibited with the contemporary ‘malpractice’ of the Trump administration

to not respect the nuclear deal negotiated with Iran (Kimball, 2018). Nuclear weapons have long been regarded as ‘a new technological deity’ and ‘a divinely offered gift that endorsed American exceptionalism and imbued its creators

with God-like power and the mission to restore order and justice in a fallen world.’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 677). Gabrielle Hecht (2012) defines nuclear exceptionalism as ‘insistence on an essential nuclear difference – manifested in political claims, technological systems, cultural forms, institutional infrastructures, and scientific knowledge’ and insists ‘nuclear exceptionalism could be made, unmade, and remade’ as ‘for all efforts at making nuclear things exceptional, there were opposing attempts to render them banal’ (Hecht, pp. 6– 8). It is important to bear this in mind as this pernicious dynamic of difference and exceptionalism becomes even more acute with current US President Donald Trump’s everyday populist declarations. He is on record for stating that the US will be at the ‘top of the pack’ ‘until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes’ (Holland, 2017). In his recent visit to Poland ‘to summon the courage and the will to defend our

civilization’ Trump (2017) claims ‘there are dire threats to our security and our way of life’ and argues, ‘the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.’ There is little doubt in his mind of the ‘triumph’ of the West (Holland, 2017). It is therefore helpful to pause in this tumultuous ‘history of the present’ and suggest that ‘every identity owes a debt to alterity’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 8). Thus it is ASIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE 5 interesting to observe how the existing literature on ‘dynamic of difference’ between Orientalism and Occidentalism has expanded its arsenal with a more complex conceptual apparatus of Strategic Orientalism, Techno Orientalism and Military Orientalism to helps us grasp the everyday practices of techno-racial

dynamic of differences that cultivate and nurture techno-racial stereotypes. These stereotypes more often than not dictate modes of behavior that make the Other ‘a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed … an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only’ (Schmitt, 2007). It is this ‘dynamic of difference’ with its persistent desire to annihilate the Other , makes one wonder, whether it is not a complementary sub-text for an increasingly alarming and growing superstructure of a ‘dynamic of denial’ in weapons control? A dynamic of denial so petulant that it casts its shadow in celebrating the recent success of a Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty (2017).

US emphasis on Chinese noncompliance presents the image of a “lawless” China to justify the rightful role of the US in the SCSSu-Mei Ooi and Gwen D’Arcangelis. February 8, 2018. [Butler University USA; Skidmore College, USA], Framing China: Discourses of othering in US news and political rhetoric, Sage Journals. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2059436418756096#_i5. EC

To cheat and thief, we can layer the trope of lawlessness, readily employed in media representations and political rhetoric over maritime territorial and EEZ disputes involving China and its neighbors in the Western Pacific. China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea are largely historical in nature and do encroach on the 200 nautical miles EEZ of neighboring countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) does not expressly prohibit land reclamation in the sea as long as due notice is given to other concerned states and due regard to the rights of other states (Art. 60.3, 56.2, and 56.3) is taken into account, while the obligation to protect and preserve the marine environment is observed (Art. 192). Parties to a dispute are also obligated to refrain from acting in a manner that would jeopardize or hamper a final agreement resolving the dispute (Art.

74.3 and 83.3). The frantic building of artificial islands to enhance the legality of China’s claims, unilateral installations, and skirmishes in the disputed areas are thus amenable to interpretation as lawless bullying. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled “Calling Out China’s Lawlessness; The US Points Out that Beijing’s Claims

to the South China Sea Don’t Stand Up,” describes the “sketchy legality of its [Beijing’s] actions” and claims that “China is

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changing the status quo in the South China Sea with force and the threat of force” (“Calling Out,” 2014). This characterization in the media is consistent with political rhetoric. US Secretary of State John Kerry was reported to have said in May 2014 that China’s “introduction of an oil rig and numerous government vessels in waters disputed with Vietnam was provocative” (Ives & Fuller, 2014). Eliot Engel of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee framed China’s actions in skirmishes with Vietnam as “needless provocations”

(Engel, 2014). At the same time, media representations and political rhetoric have tended to obscure the fact that China’s regional neighbors all built airstrips and outposts on the claimed islands long before China ever did. China also displays inconsistent behavior in that it has reached agreements with Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin and South Korea in the Yellow Sea to divide fisheries equally and carry out joint enforcement patrols in keeping with international law.3 Indeed, China has in land

disputes signed “fair and balanced” treaties with 13 out of 14 neighbors in keeping with international legal principles (Kraska, 2015). These instances have not, however, drawn any significant media attention. Instead, the emphasis on China’s non-compliance with international law in the South China Sea disputes has served to recapitulate China in Orientalist terms as uncivilized and, moreover, as a fully awakened “sleeping giant” that bullies its neighbors and is unsuited to replace the US as regional leader. US political rhetoric and media representation has also obscured the vagueness of international law when applied to the East China Sea dispute as it would be inconsistent with the image of China as a lawless bully in the South China Sea. The UNCLOS appears to have a straightforward framework that gives states maritime jurisdiction over resources 200 nautical miles from their coastal baseline, but it says nothing about how overlapping maritime jurisdictions are to be resolved. In the case of the East China Sea, the area of dispute is only 360 miles across at its widest point. At the heart of the territorial dispute between China and Japan is the “territorial acquisition” of the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands, but there is no convention on how states acquire sovereignty over disputed territories.4 The flexibility of applicable principles in international customary law

have instead allowed both China and Japan to invoke the law to justify their claims to sovereignty (Ramos-Mrosovsky, 2008). China’s refusal to have the dispute adjudicated by an international body reflects the unpredictability of outcomes and not necessarily China’s lawlessness, especially when viewed, in light of a similar disinterest on the part of the Japanese. The essentialization of China as lawless, despite the malleability of international law and dissimilar behavior in other disputes, has the potential to drive a wedge between China and her neighbors , thus “containing”

China’s growing influence in the region. Indeed, the depiction of China as a lawless bully plays up the insecurities of its immediate—and in many cases, much weaker—neighbors, whose heavy reliance on international law to constrain hegemonic behavior is palpable. The breaking of norms has been identified as a crucial signal that heightens threat

perception (Farnham, 2003). In the context of long-standing maritime territorial disputes, playing up an image of China as a lawless bully also suggests that the United States continues to be a necessary power broker in the region. The notion that there is an overbearing bully in the neighborhood that could care less about the rules of the game returns the United States to the role of protector in the post–Cold War period—its ostensible “manifest destiny.” Since the late 1990s, titles such as “Spratly Spat Heats up over Chinese ‘Bullying’” (Lamb, 1998) or “Asian Nations Support US Silently” (Wiseman, 2001) demonstrate how constructing China as a lawless bully serves to reinforce this purpose. Indeed, a recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal makes this link explicit in the text: Washington’s hesitant response has allowed controversy to build around freedom-of-navigation missions that should be routine. Beijing’s strategy in the South China Sea is to bully its neighbors and achieve regional hegemony through coercive means short of war. Turning peaceful naval patrols into diplomatic hot potatoes is exactly the sort of change Beijing seeks. (“A 12-Mile,” 2015) Here, China’s behavior is portrayed as incorrigibly belligerent, in distinct contrast to genteel US diplomacy. One Wall Street Journal article makes this point clear in its title alone: “Chinese Diplomacy Off Course; By Overreaching in the South China Sea, Beijing has Drawn the US Irrevocably into the Debate” (Wain, 2000).

This article embodies the dominant narrative that assumes implicitly the rightful role of the United States to dole out proper diplomacy and take on any transgressors to maintain world peace . A Wall Street Journal article describing China’s “increasingly powerful—but highly opaque—military and its more assertive stance [towards the

South China Sea]” emphasize China’s military as an inherent threat to world order but construct the US military according to a different standard, again assuming the righteousness of US military intervention

(Page, 2011). In this regard, it is important to note that US grand strategy consists of preventing the development of any regional power capable of obstructing US access to Eurasia—where most of the world’s resources and economic activity are located. This long-term security goal has informed the Obama administration’s much-touted Pacific Pivot policy, which many have viewed as a “China containment policy.” A Congressional Report notes that although U.S. policymakers have not often stated this key national strategic goal explicitly in public, U.S. military (and diplomatic) operations in recent decades—both wartime operations and day-to-day operations—can be viewed as having been carried out in no small part in support of this key goal. (O’Rourke, 2014) China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea cover about 90% of the area that could potentially allow China to deny the United States such access. As China continues

with the modernization of its naval and air capabilities, US apprehension has increased that the disputed land features in the South China Sea are being used to bolster military and coast guard forces that can monitor and respond to the activities of US allies, deny the US navy access to these waters, and ultimately check US naval dominance in the region. It is for this reason

that the United States has insisted on freedom of navigation and innocent passage—protected by UNCLOS—through these contested waters, although tensions with China have ratcheted up considerably as a result. As direct conflict

between the United States and China has become a real possibility, and as the United States has not ratified the UNCLOS, the United States has attempted to base its actions on firm legal principles, and in turn, to frame China’s behavior in the region as lawlessness. Through US portrayals of China as a lawless bully, China incurs reputational costs in the global and regional community that have the potential to exert pressure on China to stand down . The guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen was thus sent in October 2015 on a “freedom of navigation” patrol within 12 nautical miles of islands

artificially built by China in the Spratly chain, which the United States insists is in compliance with international law.5 The United States revealed this aim in another dispute on whether China has an international legal right to regulate foreign military actors operating within China’s 200-nautical-mile EEZ. The United States’ view, which China disagrees with, is that China has a right to restrict military and surveillance activities only within 12 nautical miles of its territorial waters. Tensions reached new heights when China announced in November 2013 an East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that not only covered her territorial waters but extended into its EEZ and thus, the contested areas in the East China Sea. US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel responded in a press statement that “We view this development as a destabilizing attempt to alter the status quo in the region. This unilateral action increases the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculations,” yet the United States followed shortly by flying two B-52 bombers through the zone (Harlan, 2013). Certainly, there have been media analyses that characterize China’s behavior as motivated by normal national self-interest or that point out that US actions to curtail China are “hypocritical” and “hegemonic” (see, for example, Denyer, 2015; Wu, 2005).

However, many more choose to reprise long-standing debates about whether China is a military threat or not, with titles such as “US Starting to View China as Potential Enemy” (Mann, 1995) and “Weakening Yet Still Aggressive, China Poses Test for

U.S. Presidential Candidates” (Sanger, 2015). None take seriously China’s claims that its actions in the region have been defensive in nature. Even with a wide range of opinions on the matter, by focusing on the issue of China’s military buildup,

these news articles only serve to heighten this perceived threat by inferring threatening intent from growing military capabilities.

Portrayal of China as a malicious actor juxtaposes the role of the benign US in cyber warfareSu-Mei Ooi and Gwen D’Arcangelis. February 8, 2018. [Butler University USA; Skidmore College, USA], Framing China: Discourses of othering in US news and political rhetoric, Sage Journals. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2059436418756096#_i5. EC

The construction of China as potential enemy Other takes on an additional hue when we look at the depictions of China’s cyber activities—China moves from cheat to a more malicious cousin, the thief. The United States first focused on issues of “cyber warfare” in the mid-2000s to late 2000s, but at the time, the trope associated with China was not

necessarily that of thief. In the mass news media, a militaristic lens framed much of the discussion, depicting China as a rule breaker flouting international norms and thus posing a security threat. For example, a Los Angeles Times article highlighted that “China in the last year has developed ways to infiltrate and manipulate computer networks around the world in what U.S. defense officials conclude is a new and potentially dangerous military capability, according to a Pentagon report” (Barnes, 2008). China is

even placed in relation to al-Qaeda: “Cyber-attacks and cyber-espionage pose a greater potential danger to U.S. national security than Al Qaeda and other militants that have dominated America’s global focus since Sept. 11, 2001, the

nation’s top intelligence officials said Tuesday” (Dilanian, 2013). This juxtaposition with al-Qaeda only served to heighten the military valence of China’s cyber activities, and a push to prepare for such a threat . Indeed, in the words of Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL): “The threat, to be sure, is real—and, we cannot allow ourselves to grow complacent …” (Nelson 2008). Snowden’s revelations of US spying on China in June of 2013 drastically changed the shape of the discussion however. Snowden demonstrated that the NSA (1) had two data centers in China from which it had been inserting spy software into vulnerable computers; (2) targeted the Chinese University of Hong Kong, public officials, businesses, and students; (3) hacked mobile phones; and (4) in 2009, hacked the Pacnet headquarters in Hong Kong, which runs one of the biggest regional fibre-optic networks. In response to Snowden’s revelations, a spate of articles compared the United States’ and China’s hacking, displaying a range of attitudes from journalists—some espoused that both countries demonstrate

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equivalent transgressive behavior, while others argued that China has crossed the line into more aggressive hacking that goes beyond the United States’ more benign “preemptive” hacking . The latter attitude indicates the resilience of tropes of the Yellow and Red Perils, a China whose inherent ideological and cultural differences with the West makes it a threat. The different lenses through which journalists and pundits viewed China’s spying in comparison with that of the United States further invoke this Orientalist demarcation. An article in The Washington Post thus contrasts China’s behavior against that of the United States, which merely seeks “to examine huge amounts of communication metadata around the world to

look for trends” and “to preempt some threat against the U.S.” China’s spying is described, however, as “infiltrating almost every powerful institution in Washington, D.C.,” “breaking into major news organizations,” “stealing sensitive military technology,” and “stealing so much intellectual property that China’s hacking has been called the ‘greatest transfer of wealth in

history’” (Fisher, 2013). Drawing in particular on incendiary words like “stealing” and “infiltrating,” this article distinguishes China as a sneaky thief. US journalists and pundits, in charging China with stealing economic resources, have further solidified the demarcation of China as an inferior and dangerous Other . A well-circulated quote by national security pundit Adam Segal stated, “The problem is we’re not talking about the same things … We’re trying to make a distinction between cyber economic espionage and normal political-military espionage. The Chinese don’t make that same distinction” (Bengali & Dilanian, 2015). By portraying China as unable to grasp the fundamental distinction between economics and national security, Segal suggests China’s thievery is connected to a more fundamental character flaw—China is unable to grasp proper civilized norms. Similarly, US official response has been that China’s view of data collection as a sovereign right has rendered them essentially different from the United States and by implication, the civilized world. That Chinese governmental espionage involves the collection of economic intelligence that is shared with Chinese companies further departs from civilized norms. Michael Rogers, Director of the National Security Agency thus explained that “they clearly don’t have the

same lines in the sand, if you will, with that regard” (Bennett, 2015). Historically, US depictions of China as uncivilized have occurred whenever China has gained power or threatened US interests. The narrative of China as a sort of child following in the United States’ footsteps on the path to modernity has proven exceedingly popular since

World War II and frames the US approach to China as a potential ally and resource who at the same time may never be civilizable (Kim, 2010; Vukovich, 2012). In this Orientalist narrative, China’s journey to modernity is always understood as precarious and, moreover, subject to US vigilance as to whether it meets the appropriate benchmarks. The title of an editorial in The Washington Post epitomizes current iterations of this sentiment and the ease with which

Orientalist imagery can be invoked to portray China’s path to modernity as needing US guidance when China falls out of line: “The US Needs to Tame the Cyber-Dragon: Stronger Measures are Need[ed] to Block China’s Economic Espionage [emphasis mine]” (“The U.S. Needs to Tame,” 2013). In reality, US vigilance can be attributed to the concern since the end of the Cold War, that

a “sleeping giant” able to challenge US global hegemony is awakening (Kim, 2010). Thus, the cultural work done by portrayals of China as unable to adhere to civilized norms serve to bolster the image of China as perpetually unprepared to be a responsible member of the international community. In fact, this narrative of China’s thievery serves to persuade the American public that China is a threat to the international community. One Wall Street Journal journalist perfectly echoes this sentiment: A China that leads the world in the theft of intellectual property, computer hacking and resource nationalism will prove extremely destabilizing. If it continues on this course, Beijing should not be surprised if other countries begin to band together to collectively counter some of the more harmful implications of China’s rise. A better outcome for all will be for China to embrace its responsibilities to help

lead the world … (Metzl, 2011) This article, although hopeful that China may at some future point become a responsible global actor, even

leader, ultimately reifies the notion that an increase in China’s global power is always suspect.

Chinese threat construction created the American imagination of the Chinese Other – fuels the us vs them dichotomyPan 4Chengxin Pan, June 2004, Associate Professor of International Relations, Faculty of Arts and Education, SHSS Arts & Ed, Geelong Waurn Ponds Campus, Graduate Certificate of Higher Education, Deakin University, 2008, Doctor of Philosophy, Australian National University, 2005, Bachelor of Arts, Peking University, 1995, Master of International Studies, Peking University, 1995, Master of Arts, Peking University, 1995 Alternatives 29 (2004), 305-331, The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics //jazmyn

China and its relationship with the United States has long been a fascinating subject of study in the mainstream U.S. international relations community . This is reflected, for example, in the current heated debates over whether China is primarily a

strategic threat to or a market bonanza for the United States and whether containment or engagement is the best way to deal with it.1 While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means . For example,

after expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that

"it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world."2 Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment."3 Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers" Department of Political Science and International Relations, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia.

Chengxin.Pan@anu. edu.au 305 306 The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination and that their studies of China are neutral, passive descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of "what the United States is." That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own "observation" of "where China is today," nor to join the "containment" versus "engagement" debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly

significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature. More specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China threat" into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the "China threat" problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the "China threat" literature—themes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions. These themes are of course nothing new nor peculiar to the "China threat" literature. They have been identified elsewhere by critics of some conventional fields of study such as ethnography, anthropology, oriental studies, political science, and international relations.4 Yet, so far, the China field in the West in general and the U.S. "China threat" literature in particular have shown remarkable resistance to systematic critical reflection on both their normative status as discursive practice and their enormous practical implications for international politics.5 It is in this context that this article seeks to make a contribution. I begin with a brief survey of the "China threat" argument in contemporary U.S. international relations literature, followed by an investigation of how this particular argument about China Chengxin Pan 307 is a discursive construction of other, which is predicated on the

predominant way in which the United States imagines itself as the universal, indispensable nation-state in constant need of absolute certainty and security. Finally, this article will illustrate some of the dangerous practical consequences of the "China

threat" discourse for contemporary U.S.-China relations, particularly with regard to the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis and the 2001 spy-plane incident. The "China Threat" Argument That China constitutes a growing "threat" to the United States is arguably one of the most important "discoveries" by U.S. IR scholars in the post-Cold War era. For many, this "threat" is obvious for a variety of reasons concerning economic, military, cultural, and political dimensions. First and

foremost, much of today's alarm about the "rise of China" resolves around the phenomenal development of the Chinese economy during the past twenty-five years: Its overall size has more than quadrupled since 1978. China expert Nicholas Lardy of the Brookings Institution suggested that "the pace of China's industrial development and trade expansion is unparalleled in modern economic history." He went on: "While this has led to unprecedented improvements in Chinese incomes and living standards, it also poses challenges for other countries."6 One such challenge is thought to be job losses in the United States. A recent study done for a U.S. congressional panel found that at least 760,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs have migrated to China since 1992.7 Associated with this economic boom is China's growing trade surplus with the United States, which, according to Time magazine journalists Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, increased nearly tenfold from $3.5 billion in 1988 to roughly $33.8 billion in 1995. This trade imbalance, as they put it, is a function of a Chinese strategy to target certain industries and to undersell American

competition via a system of subsidies and high tariffs. And that is why the deficit is harmful to the American economy and likely to become an area of ever greater conflict in bilateral relations in the future.8 For many, also frightening is a prospect of the emergence of socalled "Greater China" (a vast economic zone consisting of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). As Harry Harding points out, "Although [Greater China] was originally intended in [a] 3 0 8 The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination benign economic sense,... in some quarters it evokes much more aggressive analogies, such as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or Greater Germany."9 In this context, some believe that China's economic challenge inevitably gives rise to a simultaneous military threat. As Denny Roy argues: "A stronger, wealthier China would have greater wherewithal to increase its arsenal of nuclear-armed ICBMs and to increase their lethality through improvements in range, accuracy, and survivability. If China continues its rate of economic expansion, absolute growth in Chinese nuclear capabilities should be expected to increase."10 Furthermore, U.S. Congressman Bob Schaffer claimed that China's military buildup, already under way at an alarming rate, was aimed at the United States.11 In addition to what they see as a worrying economic and military expansion, many U.S. China scholars believe that there exist still other dimensions to the "China threat" problem, such as China's "Middle Kingdom" mentality, unresolved historical grievances, and an undemocratic government.12 Warren I. Cohen argues that "probably the most ethnocentric people in the world, the Chinese considered their realm the center of the universe, the Middle Kingdom, and regarded all cultural differences as signs of

inferiority."13 As a result, it is argued, the outside world has good reason to be concerned that "China will seek to reestablish in some form the political and cultural hegemony that it enjoyed in Asia during the Ming and

early Qing dynasties."14 At another level, from a "democratic peace" standpoint, a China under the rule of an authoritarian regime is predisposed to behave irresponsibly. As Bernstein and Munro put it: If the history of the last two hundred years is any guide, the more democratic countries become, the less likely they are to fight wars against each other. The more dictatorial they are, the more war prone they become. Indeed, if the current Beijing regime continues to engage in military adventurism—as it did in the Taiwan Strait in 1996—there will be a real chance of at least limited naval or air clashes with the United States.15 Subscribing to the same logic, Denny Roy asserts that "the establishment of a liberal democracy in China is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future. . . . Without democratization within, there is no basis for expecting more pacific behavior without."16 However, for other observers, even if China does become democratized, the threat may still remain. Postulating what he calls the "democratic paradox" phenomenon, Samuel Huntington suggests Chengxin Pan 309 that democratization is as likely to encourage international conflict as it is to promote peace.17 Indeed, many China watchers believe that an increase in market freedom has already led to an upsurge in Chinese nationalism, the only thing that allegedly provides the glue to hold contemporary China together.18 It is argued that such nationalist sentiment, coupled with memories of its past humiliation and thwarted grandeur, will make China an increasingly dissatisfied, revisionist power—hence, a threat to the international status quo. t Furthermore, some point out that what is also troublesome is an entrenched realpolitik strategic culture in traditional Chinese thought. Harvard China expert Alastair Iain Johnston, for example, argues that Chinese strategic culture is dominated by the parabellum (prepare for war) paradigm. This paradigm believes that warfare is a relatively constant feature in international relations, that stakes in conflicts with the adversary are zero-sum in nature, and that the use of force is the most efficacious means of dealing with threat.19 From this, Warren Cohen concludes that if Johnston's analysis of China's strategic culture is correct—and I believe that it is—generational change will not guarantee a kinder, gentler China. Nor will the ultimate disappearance of communism in Beijing. The powerful China we have every reason to expect in the twenty-first century is likely to be as aggressive and expansionist as China has been whenever it has been the dominant power in Asia.20 Apart from these so-called "domestic" reasons for the "China threat," some commentators arrive at a similar conclusion based on the historical experience of power realignment as a result of the rise and fall of great powers. China, from this perspective, is regarded as the most likely candidate to fill the power vacuum created by the end of U.S.-Soviet rivalry in East Asia. This, according to Kenneth Lieberthal at the University of Michigan (and formerly of the U.S. State Department), "will inevitably present major challenges to the United States and the rest of the international system since the perennial question has been how the international community can accommodate the ambitions of newly powerful states, which have always forced realignment of the international system and have more often than not led to war."21 For this reason, the rise of China has often been likened to that of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan on the eve of the two world wars. For example, Richard K. Betts and Thomas J. Christensen argue: 310 The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination Like Germany a century ago, China is a late-blooming great power emerging into a world already ordered strategically by earlier arrivals; a continental power surrounded by other powers who are collectively stronger but individually weaker (with the exception of the United States and, perhaps, Japan) ; a bustling country with great expectations, dissatisfied with its place in the international pecking order, if only with regard to international prestige and respect. The quest for a rightful "place in the sun" will, it is argued, inevitably foster growing friction with Japan, "• Russia, India or the United States.22 At this point, it seems there has been enough reason and empirical evidence for the United States to be vigilant about China's future ambition. While there are debates over the extent to which the threat is imminent or to which approaches might best explain it, the "objective" quality of such a threat has been taken for granted. In the words of Walter McDougall, the Pulitzer Prizewinning historian and strategic thinker at the University of Pennsylvania, recognizing the "China threat" is "commonsense geopolitics."23 For Huntington, the challenge of "Greater China" to the West is simply a rapidly growing cultural, economic, and political "reality."24 Similarly, when they claim that "China can pose a grave problem," Betts and Christensen are convinced that they are merely referring to "the truth."25 In the following sections, I want to question this "truth," and, more generally, question the objective, self-evidentiary attitudes that underpin it. In my view, the "China threat" literature is best understood as a particular kind of discursive practice that dichotomizes the West and China as self and other. In this sense, the "truism" that China presents a growing threat is not so much an objective reflection of contemporary global reality, per se, as it is a discursive construction of otherness that acts to bolster the hegemonic leadership of the United States in the post-Cold War world. Therefore, to have a better understanding of how the discursive construction of China as a "threat" takes place, it is now necessary to turn attention to a particularly dominant way of U.S. self-imagination. The "China Threat" in the American Self-imagination American Self-imagination and the Construction of Otherness In 1630, John Winthrop, governor of the British-settled Massachusetts Bay Colony, described the Puritan mission as a moral beacon Chengxin Pan 311 for the world: "For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies [eyes] of all people are uppon us."26 Couched in a highly metaphoric manner, the "city on the hill" message greatly galvanized the imagination of early European settlers in North America who had desperately needed some kind of certainty and assurance in the face of many initial difficulties and disappointments in the "New World." Surely there have been numerous U.S. constructions of "what we are," but this sense of "manifest destiny," discursively repeated and reconstructed time and again by leading U.S. politicians, social commentators, the popular press, and numerous school textbooks, has since become a pivotal part of U.S. self-consciousness. In 1992, Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: America is a remarkable nation. We are, as Abraham Lincoln told Congress in December 1862, a nation that "cannot escape history" because we are "the last best hope of earth." The president said that his administration and Congress held the "power and . . . responsibility" to ensure that the hope America promised would be fulfilled. Today . . . America is still the last best hope of earth, and we still hold the power and bear the responsibility for its remaining so.27 This sentiment was echoed by Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, who once called the United States "the indispensable nation" and maintained that "we stand tall and hence see further than other nations."28 More recently, speaking of the U.S. role in the current war on terrorism, Vice President Dick Cheney said: "Only we can rally the world in a task of this complexity against an enemy so elusive and so resourceful. The United States and only the United States can see this effort through to victory."29 It is worth adding that Cheney, along with several other senior officials in the present Bush administration, is a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, a project designed to ensure U.S. security and global dominance in the twenty-first century. Needless to say, the United States is not unique in ethnocentric thinking. For centuries, China had assumed it was the center of the world. But what distinguishes U.S. from Chinese ethnocentric selfidentities is that while the latter was based largely on the Confucian legacy, the former is sanctioned by more powerful regimes of truth, such as Christianity and modern science. For the early English Puritans, America was part of a divine plan and the settlers were the Chosen People blessed by covenant with God.30 With the advent of the scientific age, U.S. exceptionalism began taking on a secular, scientific dimension. Charles Darwin once argued that "the 312 The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection."31 The United States has since been construed as the manifestation of the law of nature, with its ideas and institutions described not as historically particular but as truly universal. For example, in his second inaugural address in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared that U.S. principles were "not the principles of a province or of a single continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were the principles of a liberated mankind."32 In short, "The US is utopia achieved."33 It represents the "End of History."34 What does this U.S. self-knowledge have to do with the way in which it comes to know others in general and China in particular? To put it simply, this self-knowledge is always a powerful analytical framework within which other societies are to be known. By envisioning a linear process of historical development with itself at its apex, the United States places other nations on a common evolutionary slope and sees them as inevitably traveling toward the end of history that is the United States. For example, as a vast, ancient nation on the other side of the Pacific, China is frequently taken as a mirror image of the U.S. self. As Michael Hunt points out, we imagine ourselves locked in a special relationship with the Chinese, whose apparent moderation and pragmatism mirror our own most prized attributes and validate our own longings for a world made over in our own image. If China with its old and radically different culture can be won, where can we not prevail?35 Yet, in a world of diversity, contingency, and unpredictability, which is irreducible to universal sameness or absolute certainty, this kind of U.S. knowledge of others often proves frustratingly elusive. In

this context, rather than questioning the validity of their own universalist assumptions, the people of the United States believe that those who are different should be held responsible for the lack of universal sameness. Indeed, because "we" are universal, those who refuse or who are unable to become like "us" are no longer just "others," but are by definition the negation of universality, or the other. In this way, the other is always built into this universalized "American" self. Just as "Primitive .. . is a category, not an object, of Western thought ,"36

so the threat of the other is not some kind of "external reality" discovered by U.S. strategic analysts, but a ready-made category of thought within this particular way of U.S. self-imagination. Consequently, there is always a need for the United States to find a specific other to fill into the totalized category of otherness. Chengxin Pan 313 In the early days of American history, it was Europe, or the "Old World," that was invoked as its primary other, threatening to corrupt the "New World."37 Shortly after World War II, in the eyes of U.S. strategists, the Soviet Union emerged as a major deviance from, hence an archenemy of, their universal path toward progress via the free market and liberal democracy. And after the demise of the Soviet Union, the vacancy of other was to be filled by China, the "best candidate" the United States could find in the post-Cold War, unipolar world. Not until the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington had China's candidature been suspended, to be replaced by international terrorism in general and Saddam's Iraq in particular.38 At first glance, as the "China threat" literature has told us, China seems to fall perfectly into the "threat" category, particularly given its growing power. However, China's power as such does not speak for itself in terms of an emerging threat. By any reasonable measure, China remains a largely poor country edged with only a sliver of affluence along its coastal areas. Nor is China's sheer size a self-evident confirmation of the "China threat" thesis, as other countries like India, Brazil, and Australia are almost as big as China. Instead, China as a "threat" has much to do with the particular mode of U.S. self-imagination. As Steve Chan notes: China is an object of attention not only because of its huge size, ancient legacy, or current or projected relative national power. . . . The importance of China has to do with perceptions, especially those regarding the potential that Beijing will become an example, source, or model that contradicts Western liberalism as the reigning paradigm. In an era of supposed universalizing cosmopolitanism, China demonstrates the potency and persistence of nationalism, and embodies an alternative to Western and especially U.S. conceptions of democracy and

capitalism. China is a reminder that history is not close to an end.39 Certainly, I do not deny China's potential for strategic misbehavior in the global context, nor do I claim the "essential peacefulness" of Chinese culture.40 Having said that, my main point here is that there is no such thing as "Chinese reality" that can automatically speak for itself, for example, as a "threat." Rather, the "China threat" is essentially a specifically social meaning given to China by its U.S. observers, a meaning that cannot be disconnected from the dominant U.S. self-construction. Thus, to fully understand the U.S. "China threat" argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature. 314 The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination Indeed, the construction of other is not only a product of U.S. self-imagination, but often a necessary foil to it. For example, by taking this particular representation of China as Chinese reality per se, those scholars are able to assert their self-identity as "mature," "rational" realists capable of knowing the "hard facts" of international politics, in distinction from those "idealists" whose views are said to be grounded more in "an article of faith" than in "historical experience."41 On the other hand, given that history is apparently not "progressively" linear, the invocation of a certain other not only helps explain away such historical uncertainties or "anomalies" and maintain the credibility of the allegedly universal path trodden by the United States, but also serves to

highlight U.S. "indispensability." As Samuel Huntington puts it, "If being an American means being committed to the principles of liberty, democracy, individualism, and private property, and if there is no evil empire out there threatening those principles, what indeed does it mean to be an American, and what becomes of American national interests?"42 In this way, it seems that the constructions of the particular U.S. self and its other are always intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Some may suggest that there is nothing particularly wrong with this since psychologists generally agree that "individuals and groups define their identity by differentiating themselves from and placing themselves in opposition to others."43 This is perhaps true. As the Swiss

linguist Ferdinand de Saussure tells us, meaning itself depends on difference and differentiation.44 Yet, to understand the U.S. dichotomized constructions of self/other in this light is to normalize them and render them unproblematic , because it is also apparent that not all identity-defining practices necessarily perceive others in terms of either universal sameness or absolute otherness and that difference need not equate to threat. The Discursive Construction of China as Other in the "China Threat" Literature Having examined how the "China threat" literature is enabled by and serves the purpose of a particular U.S. self-construction, I want to turn now to the issue of how this literature represents a discursive construction of other, instead of an "objective" account of Chinese reality. This, I argue, has less to do with its portrayal of China as a threat per se than with its essentialization and totalization of China as an externally knowable object, independent of historically contingent contexts or dynamic

international interactions. In this sense, the discursive construction of China as a threatening other cannot be detached from (neo) realism, a positivist, Chengxin Pan 315 ahistorical framework of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo)realism is not a transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on the modernist Western identity, which, in the quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the sovereign territorial nation-state. This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity, disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as (neo) realists argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the other,"45 and "All other states are potential threats."46 In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably pursue power or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical articulation of relations of universality/particularity and self/O then"47 The (neo) realist paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new crop of China experts "are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or international relations than China itself."48 As a result, for those experts to know China is nothing more or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions such as how China will "behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global balance of power, with a particular emphasis on China's

military power or capabilities. As Thomas J. Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military power compared with that of the United States and other East Asian regional powers."49 Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute other and a threat thanks to this (neo) realist prism. The (neo) realist emphasis on survival and security in international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. self-imagination, because for the United States to define itself as the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James Chace and Caleb Carr note, "for over two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed as central to an effective American foreign policy."50 And this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of not only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as threats. For example, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability. The enemy is instability."51 Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result?"52 316 The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination Thus understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and Munro believe that "China's political unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a state of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a source of danger.53 In like manner, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If the PIA [People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of relief? Not entirely. . . . Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of economic

consequences. . . . U.S. efforts to create a stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under certain circumstances, but certainly not all.54 The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty for peace, it must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat. In the same way, a multitude of other unpredictable factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been labeled as "threats" to U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold War environment, China represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more democratic, and more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China,"55 argues Samuel Kim. And such an archetypical uncertainty is crucial to the enterprise of U.S. self-construction, because it seems that only an uncertainty with potentially global consequences such as China could justify U.S. indispensability or its continued world dominance. In this sense, Bruce Cumings aptly suggested in 1996 that China ^as a threat) was basically "a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has lost its bearings and that requires a formidable 'renegade state' to define its mission (Islam is rather vague, and Iran lacks necessary weights)."56 It is mainly on the basis of this self-fashioning that many U.S. scholars have for long claimed their "expertise" on China. For example, from his observation (presumably on Western TV networks) of the Chinese protest against the U.S. bombing of their embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, Robert Kagan is confident enough to speak on behalf of the whole Chinese people, claiming Chengxin Pan 317 that he knows "the fact" of "what [China] really thinks about the United States." That is, "they consider the United States an enemy— or, more precisely, the enemy. . . . How else can one interpret the Chinese government's response to the bombing?" he asks, rhetorically.57 For Kagan, because the Chinese "have no other information" than their government's propaganda, the protesters cannot rationally "know" the whole event as "we" do. Thus, their anger must have been orchestrated, unreal, and hence need not be taken seriously.58 Given that Kagan heads the U.S. Leadership Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is very much at the heart of redefining the United States as the benevolent global hegemon, his confidence in speaking for the Chinese "other" is perhaps not surprising. In a similar vein, without producing in-depth analysis, Bernstein and Munro invoke with great ease such all-encompassing notions as "the Chinese tradition" and its "entire three-thousandyear history."59 In particular, they

repeatedly speak of what China's "real" goal is: "China is an unsatisfied and ambitious power whose goal is to dominate Asia. . . . China aims at achieving a kind of hegemony. . . . China is so big and so naturally powerful that [we know] it will tend to dominate its region even if it does not intend to do so as a matter of national policy."60 Likewise, with the goal of absolute security for the United States in mind, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen argue: The truth is that China can pose a grave problem even if it does not become a military power on the American model, does not intend to commit aggression, integrates into a global economy, and liberalizes politically. Similarly, the United States could face a dangerous conflict over Taiwan even if it turns out that Beijing lacks the capacity to conquer the island. . . . This is true because of geography; because of America's reliance on alliances to project power; and because of China's capacity to harm U.S. forces, U.S. regional allies, and the American homeland, even while losing a war in the technical, military sense.61 By now, it seems clear that neither China's capabilities nor intentions really matter. Rather, almost by its mere geographical existence, China has been qualified as an absolute strategic "other," a discursive construct from which it cannot escape. Because of this, "China" in U.S. IR discourse has been objectified and deprived of its own subjectivity and exists mainly in and for the U.S. self. Little wonder that for many U.S. China specialists, China becomes merely a "national security concern" for the United States, with the "severe 318 The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination disproportion between the keen attention to China as a security concern and the intractable neglect of China's [own] security concerns in the current debate."62 At this point, at issue here is no longer whether the "China threat" argument is true or false, but is rather its reflection of a shared positivist mentality among mainstream China experts that they know China better than do the Chinese themselves.63 "We" alone can know for sure that they consider "us" their enemy and thus pose a menace to "us." Such an account of China, in many ways, strongly seems to resemble Orientalists' problematic distinction between the West and the Orient. Like orientalism, the U.S. construction of the Chinese "other" does not require that China acknowledge the validity of that dichotomous construction. Indeed, as Edward Said point out, "It is enough for 'us' to set up these distinctions in our own minds; [and] 'they' become 'they' accordingly."64 It may be the case that there is nothing inherently wrong with perceiving others through one's own subjective lens. Yet, what is problematic with mainstream U.S. China watchers is that they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the inherent fluidity of Chinese identity and subjectivity and try instead to fix its ambiguity as absolute difference from "us," a kind of certainty that denotes nothing but otherness and threats. As a result, it

becomes difficult to find a legitimate space for alternative ways of understanding an inherently volatile, amorphous China65 or to recognize that China's future trajectory in global politics is contingent essentially on how "we" in the United States and the West in general want to see it as well as on how the Chinese choose to shape it.66 Indeed, discourses of "us" and "them" are always closely linked to how "we" as "what we are" deal with "them" as "what they are" in the practical realm. This is exactly how the discursive strategy of perceiving China as a threatening other should be understood, a point addressed in the following section, which explores some of the practical dimension of this discursive strategy in the containment perspectives and hegemonic ambitions of U.S. foreign policy. The "China Threat"

Discourse and the New U.S. Containment Policy The discursive construction of the U.S. self and the "Chinese threat" argument are not innocent, descriptive accounts of some "independent" reality. Rather, they are always a clarion call for the practice of power politics. At the apex of this power-politics agenda Chengxin Pan 319 is the politico-strategic question of "what is to be done" to make the United States secure from the (perceived) threats it faces. At a general level, as Benjamin Schwarz proposes, this requires an unhindered path to U.S. global hegemony that means not only that the United States must dominate wealthy and technologically sophisticated states in Europe and East Asia— America's "allies"—but also that it must deal with such nuisances as Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and Kim Jong II, so that potential great powers need not acquire the means to deal with those problems themselves. And those powers that eschew American supervision—such as China—must be both engaged and . contained. The upshot of "American leadership" is that the United States must spend nearly as much on national security as the rest of the world combined.67 This "neocontainment" policy has been echoed in the "China threat" literature. In a short yet decisive article titled "Why We Must Contain China," Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer insists that "containing China" and "undermining its ruthless dictatorship" constitute two essential components of "any rational policy toward a rising, threatening China." Not only is a policy other than containment considered irrational, but even a delay to implement it would be undesirable, as he urges that "containment of such a bully must begin early in its career." To this end, Krauthammer offers such "practical" options as strengthening regional alliances (with Vietnam, India, and Russia, as well as Japan) to box in China; standing by Chinese dissidents; denying Beijing the right to host the Olympics; and keeping China from joining the World Trade Organization on the terms it desires.68 Containing China is of course not the only option arising from the "China threat" literature. More often than not, there is a subtle, business-style "crisis management" policy. For example, Bernstein and Munro shy away from the word containment, preferring to call their China policy management.69 Yet, what remains unchanged in the management formula is a continued promotion of controlling China. For instance, a perusal of Bernstein and Munro's texts reveals that what they mean by management is no different than Krauthammer's explicit containment stance.70 By framing U.S. China relations as an issue of "crisis management," they leave little doubt of who is the "manager" and who is to be "managed." In a more straightforward manner, Betts and Christensen state that coercion and war must be part and parcel of the China management policy: 320 The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination In addressing the China challenge, the United States needs to think hard about three related questions: first, how to avoid crises and war through prudent, coercive diplomacy; second, how to manage crises and fight a war if the avoidance effort fails; third, how to end crises and terminate war at costs acceptable to the United States and its allies.71 This is not to imply that the kind of perspectives outlined above will automatically be translated into actual China policy, but one does not have to be exceedingly perceptive to note that the "China threat" perspective does exert enormous influence on U.S. policy making on China. To illustrate this point, I want now to examine some specific implications of U.S. representations of the "China threat" for U.S.-China relations in relation to the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis and the "spy plane" incident of 2001. Theory as Practice 1: The Taiwan Strait Missile Crisis In the eyes of many U.S. China watchers, China's approach to the Taiwan question is a microcosm of its grand strategy to dominate Asia. The argument is that nowhere is the threatening ambition more palpable than in China's saber-rattling missile tests near Taiwan's coast in 1995-1996, in addition to its long-standing refusal to renounce the use of force as a last resort to settle the dispute.72 While the 1995-1996 missile crisis has been a favorite "starting point" for many pundits and practitioners to paint a frightening picture of China and to justify U.S. firm response to it, what is often conveniently overlooked is the question of how the "China threat" discourse itself had played a constitutive role in the lead-up to that crisis. Limits of space forbid exploring this complex issue here. Simply put, the Taiwan question was created largely as a result of widespread U.S. perceptions of China as a "Red Menace" in the wake of the "loss of China" and the outbreak of the Korean War. To thwart what it saw as an orchestrated Communist offensive in Asia, the United States deployed the U.S. Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait as part of its Cold War containment strategy, thereby effectively preventing the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China. While the United States abandoned its containment and isolation policy toward China in the 1970s and the two countries established full diplomatic relations in 1979, the conventional image of the "Red Menace" lingered on in the United States. To manage such a "threat," the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act shortly after the normalization of U.S.-China relations, renewing U.S. commitment to Taiwan's defense even though diplomatic ties with the island had been severed.73 Chengxin Pan 321 This confrontational policy serves not only to shore up Taiwan's defense capabilities but also to induce its independent ambition and further complicate cross-strait relations. As former U.S. defense official Chas Freeman remarked, "U.S. arms sales to Taiwan no longer work to boost Taipei's confidence that it can work out its differences with Beijing. Instead, they bolster the view that Taiwan can go its own way."74 For instance, amid growing sympathy from the Republican-dominated Congress and the elite media as well as the expanded ties with the United States, Taiwan responded coolly to Beijing's call for dialogue in January 1995. In June 1995, Taiwan's flexible diplomacy, designed to burnish its independent image, culminated in its president Lee Teng-hui's high-profile visit to the United States. This in turn reinforced Beijing's suspicion that the real U.S. intention was to frustrate its reunification goal, leaving it apparently no other choice but to prepare militarily for what it saw as a worst-case scenario. All this constituted the major context in which the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile exercises took place. For most Chinese, the carrying out of these military exercises, well within their own territory, had little to do with attacking Taiwan, much less with challenging U.S. security interests in the western Pacific. Rather, it was about China's long-cherished dream of national unity, with its "sabre rattling" tactics serving merely as a warning to the United States, as well as to Taiwan. However, interpreting such exercises as China's muscle-flexing with direct security implications for the region, with "an almost 19th-century display of gunboat diplomacy,"75 the United States dispatched two nuclearpowered aircraft carriers to the region of Taiwan. While not denying the potential security repercussions of China's missile tests for the region, I suggest that the flashpoint of Taiwan says as much about the danger of this U.S. approach to China as about the threat of Beijing's display of force itself. "Had Bill Clinton projected a constancy of purpose and vision in China policy .. . in 1993-1994," David M. Lampton argues, "he might not have been challenged in the Taiwan Strait in 1995-1996 with missile exercises."76 Indeed, it was primarily in the context of this U.S. intervention that Zhongguo keyi shuo bu (China can say no), one of the most anti-U.S. books ever produced in China, emerged and quickly became a best-seller in the Chinese reading world.77 Meanwhile, some Chinese strategic thinkers were so alarmed by the U.S. show of strength that they told Helmut Sonnenfeldt, one of Henry Kissinger's close associates, that they were rereading the early works of George F. Kennan because "containment had been the basis of American policy toward the Soviet Union; now that the United States was turning containment against China, they wanted to learn how it had started and evolved."78 322 The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination If such a scary interaction between the United States and China remained somehow obscured here, it would soon be manifested again in another standoff in U.S.-China relations; namely, the spyplane incident of 2001. Theory as Practice 2: The 2001 Spy-Plane Incident Following the 1995-1996 missile crisis, mainstream China observers have continued to take the Taiwan question as a purely geopolitical or security issue, which accordingly should be understood and dealt with simply from the time-honored balance-

of-power, zero-sum game perspectives. For example, Bernstein and Munro insist that Taiwan's reunification with the mainland "will leave China in possession of yet another immense economic prize. . . . Complete Chinese reunification, in other words, would further upset the balance of power and vastly enhance China's economic and strategic strength."79 Commenting on this typical way of representing the Taiwan question, the Taiwan-based scholar Chih-yu Shih suggests that the national security analysis may seem to be a more tangible approach to dissecting the rationale behind Beijing's "policy of coercion" and, because it appears sensible to us, can alleviate our need to pursue Beijing's motivations more deeply. Not only can we thus camouflage our embarrassment at not really knowing China, but also Beijing's discomforting behavioural patterns become comfortably familiar.80 Clearly, the practical implications of this kind of representation go far beyond that. After perceiving a power imbalance in the Taiwan Strait in favor of China, James Lilley (former U.S. ambassador to China) and Carl Ford proposed: "The name of the game for Taiwan, then, is deterrence," which means that the United States must help Taiwan's military maintain "a qualitative edge over the PRC."8i The 2002 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Security Review Commission reached similar conclusions, recommending, among other things, "deterring China attacking Taiwan" and "supporting Taiwan's ability to defend itself without outside assistance." In its formal conclusion, the review commission, made up of well-known U.S. China experts as well as influential policymakers, vows to continue monitoring China in every aspect relating to "our national security concerns."82 In fact, U.S. monitoring activity, such as conducting reconnaissance flights along Chinese borders, had always been part of its China policy. So went the rationale: Chengxin Pan 323 The Chinese say they have the right to use force to reclaim Taiwan because it belongs to them, and they regularly practice for an invasion. This threat of force is why on April 1st [2001], the U.S. Navy's EP-3 surveillance plane was in the area to monitor China's military preparations.83 Yet it turned out that the EP-3 spy plane collided with a Chinese navy fighter jet that was tailing it over the South China Sea, some fifty miles from the coast of China's Hainan Province. The Chinese jet crashed into the waters below, while the crippled spy plane landed on Hainan island. Washington demanded immediate return of its crew and plane, while Beijing insisted that the United States bear the responsibility for the midair collision and apologize for the incident. Rather than reflecting on how their new containment policy might have contributed to this incident in the first place, many U.S. realist analysts hastily interpreted it as further objective proof of the long-suspected "China threat." As Allen S. Whiting put it, the collision "focused attention anew on Beijing's willingness to risk the use of force in pursuit of political objectives."84 It was as if the whole incident had little to do with U.S. spying, which was seen as "routine" and "normal." Instead, it was the Chinese who were said to be "playing a dangerous game," without regard to the old spy etiquette formulated during the Cold War.85 For other observers, China's otherness was embodied also in its demand for a U.S. apology. For example, Merle Goldman, a history professor at Boston University, said that the Chinese emphasis on apologies was rooted in the Confucian value system: "This kind of internalized consensus was the way China was ruled for thousands of years."86 From this perspective, China's request for an apology was preordained by a fixed Chinese tradition and national psyche and had nothing whatsoever to do with the specific context of this incident in which China was spied on, its sovereignty violated, and one of its pilots lost. Thus, even in the face of such a potentially explosive incident, the self-fulfilling effect of the "China threat" discourse has not been acknowledged by mainstream U.S. China analysts. To the contrary, deterring and containing China has gained new urgency. For example, in the aftermath of this standoff, neoconservative columnists Robert Kagan and William Kristol (chairman of the Project for the New American Century) wrote that "not only is the sale of Aegis [to Taiwan] . . . the only appropriate response to Chinese behavior; We have been calling for the active containment of China for the past six years precisely because we think it is the only way to 3 2 4 The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination keep the peace."87 Although the sale of the Aegis destroyers was deferred, President George W. Bush approved an arms package for Taiwan that included so-called "defensive" weapons such as four Kidd class destroyers, eight diesel submarines, and twelve P-3C submarine-hunting aircraft, as well as minesweeping helicopters, torpedoes, and amphibious assault vehicles. On this arms sale, David Shambaugh, a Washington-based China specialist, had this to say: "Given the tangible threats that the Chinese military can present to Taiwan—particularly a naval blockade or quarantine and missile threats—this is a sensible and timely package."88 Given the danger and high stakes involved, some may wonder why China did not simply cooperate so that there would be no need for U.S. "containment." To some extent, China has been cooperative. For example, Beijing was at pains to calm a disgruntled Chinese public by explaining that the U.S. "sorry" letter issued at the end of the spy-plane incident was a genuine "apology," with U.S. officials openly rejecting that interpretation. On the Taiwan question, China has dropped many of its previous demands (such as "one China" being defined as the People's Republic). As to the South China Sea, China has allowed the ASEAN Regional Forum to seek a negotiated solution to the Spratly Islands dispute and also agreed to join the Philippines as cochairs of the working group on confidence-building measures.89 In January 2002, China chose to play down an incident that a presidential jet outfitted in the United States had been crammed with sophisticated satellite-operated bugs, a decision that, as the New York Times puts it, "illustrates the depth of China's current commitment to cultivating better relations with the United States."90 Also, over the years, China has ratified a number of key nonproliferation treaties and pledged not to assist countries in developing missiles with ranges that exceed the limits established under the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). More recently, China has collaborated with the United States in the war on terrorism, including issuing new regulations to restrict the export of missile technology to countries usually accused by the United States of aiding terrorists. Indeed, as some have argued, by any reasonable measure China is now more responsible in international affairs than at any time since 1949.91 And yet, the real problem is that, so long as the United States continues to stake its self-identity on the realization of absolute security, no amount of Chinese cooperation would be enough. For instance, Iain Johnston views the constructive development of China's arms-control policy as a kind of "realpolitik adaptation," rather than "genuine learning."92 From this perspective, however Chengxin Pan 325 China has changed, it would remain a fundamentally threatening other, which the United States cannot live with but has to take full control of. I have argued above that the "China threat" argument in mainstream U.S. IR literature is derived, primarily, from a discursive construction of otherness. This construction is predicated on a particular narcissistic understanding of the U.S. self and on a positivist-based realism, concerned with absolute certainty and security, a concern central to the dominant U.S. self-imaginary. Within these frameworks, it seems imperative that China be treated as a threatening, absolute other since it is unable to fit neatly into the U.S.-led evolutionary scheme or guarantee absolute security for the United States, so that U.S. power preponderance in the post-Cold War world can still be legitimated. Not only does this reductionist representation come at the expense of understanding China as a dynamic, multifaceted country but it leads inevitably to a policy of containment that, in turn, tends to enhance the influence of realpolitik thinking, nationalist extremism, and hard-line stance in today's China. Even a small dose of the containment strategy is likely to have a highly dramatic impact on U.S.-China relations, as the 1995-1996 missile crisis and the 2001 spy-plane incident have vividly attested. In this respect, Chalmers Johnson is right when he suggests that "a policy of containment toward China implies the possibility of war, just as it did during the Cold War vis-à-vis the former Soviet Union. The balance of terror prevented war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but this may not work in the case of China."93 For instance, as the United States presses ahead with a missiledefence shield to "guarantee" its invulnerability from rather unlikely sources of missile attacks, it would be almost certain to intensify China's sense of vulnerability and compel it to expand its current small nuclear arsenal so as to maintain the efficiency of its limited deterrence. In consequence, it is not impossible that the two countries, and possibly the whole region, might be dragged into an escalating arms race that would eventually make

war more likely. Neither the United States nor China is likely to be keen on fighting the other. But as has been demonstrated, the "China threat" argument, for all its alleged desire for peace and security, tends to make war preparedness the most "realistic" option for both sides. At this juncture, worthy of note is an interesting comment made by Charlie Neuhauser, a leading CIA China specialist, 326 The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination on the Vietnam War, a war fought by the United States to contain the then-Communist "other." Neuhauser says, "Nobody wants it. We don't want it, Ho Chi Minh doesn't want it; it's simply a question of annoying the other side."94 And, as we know, in an unwanted war some fifty-eight thousand young people from the United States and an estimated two million Vietnamese men, women, and children lost their lives. Therefore, to call for a halt to the vicious circle of theory as practice associated with the "China threat" literature, tinkering with the current positivist-

dominated U.S. IR scholarship on China is no longer adequate. Rather, what is needed is to question this un-self-reflective scholarship itself, particularly its connections with the dominant way in which the United States and the West in general represent themselves and others via their positivist epistemology, so that alternative, more nuanced, and less dangerous ways of interpreting and debating China might become possible.

Russia

Fear of loose nukes circulates a Cold War discourse of Russian threat and inferiority

FROST 2005 (Robin, teaches political science at Simon Fraser University, British Colombia, “Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11,” Adelphi Papers, December)

In general, at least some of the concern about loose Russian weapons may stem from an unconscious but pervasive belief that Russians cannot possibly be as responsible and effective as the Americans, the French, or the British in safeguarding their nuclear arsenal, an attitude reminiscent of the demonising mythology of the Cold War, which simultaneously exaggereated the capabilities of the Soviet military, while denigrating the professionalism and competence of its members. Granted, with the near-collapse of the Russian state there was indeed a severe

rise in criminality that did not exclude the armed forces, and which persists to this day. However, it is one thing to acknowledge disorder in a society simultaneously released from decades of authoritarian rule and subjected to the severe stress of economic failure; it is another altogether to allege a general abeyance of morality . Consider this excerpt from a RAND Corporation briefing paper on nuclear terrorism, which discussed the Japanese sect Aum Shinrikyo’s failure to obtain nuclear weapons or technology from Russia: ‘even enterprising Russian officials and scientists may have feared the implications of transferring nuclear technology, knowledge, or material to a religious organization based in a foreign state…Aum’s contacts may have been good, but not good enough to secure the transfer of such sensitive capabilities’ (emphasis

added). The default assumptions appear to have been that ‘enterprising Russians’ might normally have been expected to transfer nuclear weapons or technology to an apocalyptic religious cult without considering the consequences (in other words, that they would have lacked ordinary standards of morality and responsibility); that there most likely were people in positions to do so who would indeed have handed nuclear weapons over to a cult,

if only its contacts had been good enough; and that evidence to the contrary was worthy of special note, to be expressed in a tone of faint but distinct surprise.

Russiaphobia is bad policy education and turns the case (READ THIS AS AN EXTENTION OF THE FIRST CARD)

LIEVEN 2001 (Anatol, Senior Associate for Foreign and Security policy at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Against Russophobia,” World Policy Journal, Winter, http://www.worldpolicy.newschool.edu/journal/lieven.html)

Ever since the Cold War ended, Western officials and commentators have been telling the Russians how they need to grow out of their Cold War attitudes toward the West and Western institutions, and learn to see things in a "modern" and "normal" way. And there is a good deal of truth in this. At the same time, it would have been good if we had subjected our own inherited attitudes toward Russia to a more rigorous scrutiny. For like any other inherited hatred, blind, dogmatic hostility toward Russia leads to bad policies, bad journalism, and the corruption of honest debate-and there is all too much of this hatred in Western portrayals of and comments on Russia. From this point of view, an analysis of Russophobia has implications that go far beyond Russia. Much of the U.S. foreign policy debate, especially on the Republican side, is structured around the belief that American policy should be rooted in a robust defense of national interest-and this is probably also the belief of most ordinary Americans. However, this straightforward view coexists with another, equally widespread, view that dominates the

media. It is, in Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's words, that "the United States stands taller than other nations, and therefore sees further." The unspoken assumption here is that America is not only wise but also objective , at least in its perceptions: that U.S. policy is influenced by values, but never by national prejudices. The assumption behind much American (and Western) reporting of foreign conflicts is that the writer is

morally engaged but ethnically uncommitted and able to turn a benign, all-seeing eye from above on the squabbles of humanity. It is impossible to exaggerate how irritating this attitude is elsewhere in the world, or how misleading and dangerous it is for Western audiences who believe it. Not only does it contribute to mistaken policies, but it renders both policymakers and ordinary citizens incapable of understanding the opposition of other nations to those policies. Concerning the Middle East, it seems likely that most Americans genuinely believe that the United States is a neutral and objective broker in relations between Israelis and Palestinians-which can only appear to an Arab as an almost fantastically bad joke. This belief makes it much more difficult for Americans to

comprehend the reasons for Palestinian and Arab fury at both the United States and Israel. It encourages a Western interpretation of this anger as the manipulation of sheep-like masses by elites. At worst, it can encourage a kind of racism, in which certain nations are classed as irrationally, irredeemably savage and wicked

Demonizing Russia undermines American influence and credibility

LIEVEN 2001 (Anatol, Senior Associate for Foreign and Security policy at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Against Russophobia,” World Policy Journal, Winter, http://www.worldpolicy.newschool.edu/journal/lieven.html)

An example of how blind hostility toward Russia-and the absence of any comparison to other postcolonial situationscan warp Western reporting may be seen in the following passage from the Economist of last September: "Russia may be using still dodgier tactics elsewhere. Uzbekistan, an autocratically run and independent-minded country in Central Asia, is facing a mysterious Islamic insurgency. Its president, Islam Karimov, said crossly this week that Russia was exaggerating the threat, and was trying to intimidate his country into accepting Russian bases."15 As Sen.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." I do not know of a single shred of evidence or the testimony of a single reputable expert to support this insinuation, which is in any case counterintuitive, given the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan's links to Russia's most bitter enemies. It is a passage reminiscent of the baroque Russian conspiracy theories suggesting, among other things, that the CIA is actually behind the terrorist Osama bin Laden.16 Instead, we would do better to listen to Owen Harries, editor of the National Interest, a conservative who

was a tough anticommunist and is certainly no Russophile: "During the Cold War, a struggle against what was truly an evil empire, there was some justification in maintaining that similar behavior by Washington and Moscow should be judged differently, because the intrinsic moral character of the two actors was so different. But that was due less to the unique virtues of the United States than to the special vileness of the Soviet Union, and even then applying double standards was a tricky business, easily abused. In the more mundane world of today there is no justification for applying one standard to the rest of the world and another to America. Not only does insistence on double standards seem hypocritical to others, thereby diminishing American credibility and prestige, but even more seriously, it makes it impossible to think sensibly and coherently about international affairs. And that is a fatal drawback for an indispensable nation."17 Hatred of Soviet communism helped take me to Afghanistan in 1988 as a journalist covering the war from the side of the anti-Soviet resistance, and then to the Baltic States and the Caucasus in 1990. In the 1970s and 1980s, I was prepared to justify nasty Western crimes as a regrettable part of the struggle against communism. But I never pretended these crimes did not occur, or that the reasons for them did not include a good measure of crude traditional national

power politics. The Cold War was a profoundly necessary struggle, but it was also one in which Western morality suffered and Western soldiers on occasion behaved badly. Westerners greeted their qualified but peaceful victory with overwhelming joy and relief. Ten years after the end of the Cold War, it is time to liberate ourselves from Cold War attitudes and to remember that whether as

journalists or academics, our first duty is not to spread propaganda but to hold to the highest professional standards.

ImpactOrientalism wrecks all potential policyInternational Herald Tribune 07

(International Herald Tribune, 2-20-2007, “US/INTERNATIONAL; ‘Orientalism’ poses policy challenge,” https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/news/20iht-oxan.0220.4656613.html KS)

While the concept of orientalism propounded by Edward Said has inspired constructive debate, it may have inhibited scholarship in cultural and area studies that is useful to policy-makers . However, Said's ideas may also offer promising new avenues for US foreign policy and public diplomacy. By successfully depicting all existing approaches to studying

Middle Eastern and other non-Western societies as premised on 'orientalism', Said forced scholars to be more cautious and rigorous in how they analysed and understood these groups. This approach has profoundly changed the way Western

states deal with the non-Western world. The last three decades have revolutionised the Western view of other peoples. Until the 1960s scholars unselfconsciously described Middle Eastern peoples as 'oriental', an appellation with a variety of

implications. This view is now untenable . However, the demise of this perspective has had important effects on the US policy-making process. The orientalist view drove policy and diplomacy for much of the last century. It sat comfortably with the colonialist assumptions that Western societies struggled to reassert after the Second World War. However, this perspective eventually collapsed as peoples rebelled against

and overthrew colonial powers. Despite repeatedly condemning colonialism, the United States frequently suffered the 'colonialist' label. Washington's leadership in the struggle against the Communist bloc did little to dilute this characterisation by the Left. Western states confront the challenge of better understanding non-Western societies, while avoiding charges of

paternalistic orientalism and 'imperialism'. Certainly the latter charge is inaccurate. However , erasing colonial era influences requires an inter-generational change in attitudes . Much is being done to alleviate these feelings through exchange programmes. The forces driving divisions between Western states and states in which non-Western values are dominant derive in part from enduring legacies of the colonial era. Acknowledging this context, and accounting for it in the policy-making process, could help alleviate deep-seated resentment of the West in certain societies.

Orientalism causes the unneeded exclusion and alienation of the East as a continually studied object (WIP)....Chibber 18(Vivek Chibber, Cambridge University Press, "The Dual Legacy of Orientalism", 2018, https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/sociology/documents/Said%20Paper.pdf KS)

In other words, Orientalism was around far before the modern era, and by virtue of its depiction of the East , it c reated the cultural conditions for the West to embark on its colonial project. That depiction had at its core the urge to categorize, schematize, and exoticize the east, viewing it as mysterious and unchanging, in contrast to the familiar and dynamic West . Hence the West was ordained the center of moral and scientific progress, and the exotic and unchanging East, which was an object to be studied and apprehended, but always alien, always distant

Orientalist logic justifies endless warSaid 3

(Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, “Preface to Orientalism” page 15-16, Al-Ahram Weekly, August 25 2003 KS)

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/news/20iht-oxan.0220.4656613.html

But there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding,

compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars.¶ The major influences on George W Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as

Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think

about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline which only American power could reverse. Today bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threatened the Muslim menace , all of them

written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples. Accompanying such war-mongering expertise have been CNN and Fox, plus myriad evangelical and right-wing radio hosts, innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals , all of them re-cycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as to stir up "America" against the foreign devil. Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like "us" and didn't appreciate "our" values -- the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma -- there would have been no war . So from the very same directorate of paid professional

scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North Africa, came the American advisers to the Pentagon and the White House , using the same clichés, the same demeaning stereotypes, the same justifications for power and violence (after all, runs the chorus, power is the only language they understand ) in this case as in the earlier ones. These people have now been joined in Iraq by a whole army of

private contractors and eager entrepreneurs to whom shall be confided every thing, from the writing of textbooks and the constitution to the refashioning of Iraqi political life and its oil industry. Every single empire, in its official discourse, has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.

AltsSpanos’s book “In America’s shadow” and stuff about Said

[INSERT CONSCIENTIZATION CARDS HERE]

EXILED intellectual

The alternative is to become exiled intellectuals that don’t focus on achieving prizes or recognition but instead analyzes experiences and ideas here and left behind in a contingent manner that is no longer awed by the institution but leads the exiled to a liberated state of discovery that allows one to transcend the life they once livedSaid 93

(Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, “Intellectual Exiles: Expatriates and Marignals”, No. 47 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 112-124, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25007703?origin=JSTOR-pdf&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents, DMW)

so while it is true to say that exile is the condition that characterize the intellectual as someone who stands as a marginal figure outside the comforts of privilege, power, being-at-homeness (so to speak), it is also very important to stress that that condition carries with it certain rewards and even privileges. So

while you are neither winning prizes nor being welcomed into all those self-congratulating honor societies that routinely exclude embarrassing troublemakers who do not toe the party line, you are at the same time deriving some positive things from exile and marginality. One of course is the pleasure of being surprised, of never taking anything for granted, of learning to make do in circumstances of shaky instability that would confound or terrify most other people. An intellectual is fundamentally concerned with knowledge and freedom. Yet these acquire meaning not as abstractions—as in the rather banal statement “You must get a good

education so that you can enjoy a good life”—but as experiences actually lived through. An intellectual is like a shipwrecked person who learns to live in a certain sense with the land, not on it, not like Robin- son Crusoe, whose goal is to colonize his little island, but more like Marco Polo, whose sense of the marvelous never fails him, and who is always a traveler, a provisional guest, not a

freeloader, conqueror, or raider. Because the exile sees things in terms both of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now, he or she has a double perspective, never seeing things in isolation. Every scene or situation in the

new country necessarily draws on its counterpart in the old country. Intellectually this means that an idea or experience is always counterposed with another, sometimes making them both appear in a new and unpredictable light: from that juxtaposition one gets a better, perhaps even more universal idea of how to think, say, about a human-rights issue in one situation as compared to another. I have felt that most of the alarmist and deeply flawed discussions of Islamic fundamentalism in the West have been intellectually invidious precisely because it has not been compared with Jewish or Christian

fundamentalism, both equally prevalent and reprehensible in my own experience of the Mid- dle East. Double or exile perspective impels a Western intellectual to see what is usually thought of as a simple issue of judgment against an approved enemy as part of a much wider picture, with the requirement now of taking a position as a secularist (or not) ‘on all

theocratic tendencies, not just against the conventionally designated ones. A second advantage to the exile standpoint for an intellectual is that you tend to see things not simply as they are but as they have come to be that way. You look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable; look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or

God-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible. ‘The great prototype for this sort of intellectual position is provided by the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who has long been a hero of mine. Vico's great discovery, which derived in part from his loneliness as an obscure Neapoli- tan professor—scarcely able to survive, at odds with the Church and his immediate surroundings—is that the proper way to understand social reality is to understand it as a process generated from its point of origin, which one can always locate in extremely hum- ble circumstances. This, he said in his great work The New Science, ‘means seeing things as having evolved from definite beginnings, as the adult human being derives from the babbling child. Vico argues that this is the only point of view to take about

the secular world, which he repeats over and over again is historical, with its own laws and processes, not divinely ordained. This entails respect, but not reverence, for human society. You look at the grandest of powers in terms of where it came from and where it might be headed; you are not awed by the august personality or the

‘magnificent institution, which often compels silence and stunned subservience from a native, someone who has

always seen (and therefore venerated) the grandeur but not the perforce humbler human origins from which it derived. The intellectual in exile is ily ironic, skeptical, even playful—not cynical. ; aS any real exile will confirm, once you leave your home, you cannot simply take up life wherever you end up and become just another citizen of the new place. Or if you do, there is a good deal of awkwardness involved in the effort, which scarcely seems worth it.

You can spend a lot of time regretting what you lost, envying those around you who have always been at home, near their

loved ones, living in the place where they were born without ever having to experience not only the loss of what was once theirs but above all the torturing memory of a life to which they can never return. On the other hand, as Rilke once said, you can

become a beginner in your circumstances, and this allows you an unconventional style of life and, above all, a different, often very eccentric career. For the intellectual an exilic displacement means being liberated from the usual career, in which “doing well” and following in time-honored footsteps are the main milestones. Exile means that you are always going to be marginal, and that what you do as an intellectual has to be invented because you cannot follow a prescribed path. If you can experience that fate, not as a deprivation and as

something to be bewailed, but as a sort of freedom, a process of discovery and doing things according to your own pattern, as various interests seize your attention and as the particular goal you set for yourself dictates, that is a unique pleasure.

The state of the Exile is not a social and moral untouchable but is a median state that is not completely a new or completely the old setting Said 93


. "There has always been an association between the idea of exile and the terrors of being a leper, a social and moral untouchable. During the twentieth century, exile has been transformed from the exquisite, and sometimes exclusive, punishment of special individuals—such as Ovid, who was banished from Rome to a remote town

on the Black Sea—into a cruel punishment of whole communities and peoples, often as the inadvertent result of impersonal forces such as war, famine, and disease. In this category are the Armenians, who lived in large numbers throughout the Eastern Mediterranean (Anatolia especially), but who, after genocidal attacks by the Turks, flooded nearby Beirut, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Cairo, only to be dislocated again during the revolutionary upheavals after World War Two. I have long been deeply drawn to those large expatriate or exile communities who peopled the landscape of my youth in Palestine and Egypt. There were many Armenians, of course, but also Jews, Ital- ians, and Greeks who, once settled in the Levant, had grown productive roots there—these communities after all produced prominent writers like Edmond Jabés, Giuseppe Ungaretti, ° stantine Cavafy—that were to be brutally torn up afte Nick establishment of Israel in 1948 and after the Suez war of 1yov. Foreigners who symbolized the new aggressivity of European postwar imperialism to new nationalist governments (in Egypt and Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world) were forced to leave, which, in the case of many old communities, was a particularly nasty fate.

Some of these people were acclimatized to new places of residence, but many were, in a manner of speaking, reexiled. There is a popular but wholly mistaken assumption that to be exiled is to be totally cut off, isolated, hopelessly separated from your place of origin. If only that surgically clean separation were possible, because then at least you could have the consolation of knowing that what you have left behind is, in a sense, unthink- able and completely irrecoverable. The fact is that for most exiles the difficulty consists not simply in being forced to live away from home, but rather, given today’s world, in living with the many reminders that you are in exile, that your home is not in fact so far away, and that the normal traffic of everyday contemporary life keeps you in constant but tantalizing and unfulfilled touch with the old place. The exile therefore exists in the median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half involvements and half detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another. Being skilled at survival

becomes the main imperative, with the danger of becoming too comfortable and secure constituting a threat that is constantly to be guarded against.

Saviorism da: The USFG produces a saviorism complex in which the it positions itself as providing refuge for intellectuals who have fled the western world Said 93


my con-cern here is more with the largely unaccommodated e: , like Palestinians or the new Muslim immigrants in continental Europe, whose

presence complicates the presumed homogeneity of the new societies in which they live. The intellectual who considers him- or herself to be a part of a more general condition affecting the displaced national community is therefore likely to be a source not of acculturation and adjustment but rather of volatility and instability. This is by no means to say that exile doesn’t also produce mar- vels of adjustment. The United States today is in the unusual position of having two extremely high former officers in recent presidential administrations—Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski—who were (or still are, depending on the observer's

outlook) intellectuals in exile, Kissinger from Nazi Germany, Brzezinski from communist Poland. In addition, Kissinger is Jew- ish, which

puts him in the extraordinarily odd position of also qualifying for potential immigration to Israel, according to its Ba- sic Law of Return. Yet both Kissinger and Brzezinski seem, on the surface at least, to have contributed their talents entirely to their adopted country, with results in eminence, material rewards, and national (not to say worldwide)

influence that are light-years away from the marginal obscurity in which Third World exile intellectuals live in Europe or in the U.S. Having served in government for several decades, the two prominent intellectuals are now con- sultants to corporations and other governments. Brzezinski and Kissinger are not perhaps as socially exceptional as one would assume, if it is recalled that the European theater of World War Two was considered by

other exiles—such as Thomas Mann—as a battle for Western destiny, the Western soul. In this “good war” the U.S. played the role of savior, also providing refuge for a whole generation of scholars, artists, and scientists who had fled Western fascism for the metropolis of the new Western imperium. In scholarly fields like the humanities and social sciences a large group of emigré scholars, some of them such as Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach extremely distinguished, enriched American universities with their talents and old-world experience. Others, among them scientists like Edward Teller and Werner von Braun, entered the Cold War lists as new Americans dedicated to winning the arms and space race against the Soviet Union. After the war, this concern

was all-engrossing: it has recently been revealed how well-placed American intellectuals in the social sciences managed to recruit former Nazis known for their anticommunist credentials to work in the U.S. as part of the great crusade.

The postion of exile is metaphorical as it is those individuals at odds with society which in the metaphysical sense is the restless and constantly unsettled existence as an outsiderSaid 93


an intellectual may work out an accommodation with a new or emergingly dominant power in several ways, including the rather shady art of political trimming, a technique of not taking a clear position but surviving handsomely nonetheless. But what I want to focus on here is the

opposite: the intellectual who because of exile cannot or, more to the point, will not make the adjustment,

preferring instead to remain outside the mainstream, unaccommodated, uncoopted, resistant. There are some preliminary points that need to be made. One is that while it is an actual condition, exile is also for my purposes a metaphorical one. By that I mean that my diagnosis of the intellectual in exile derives from the social and political history of dislocation and migration I discussed earlier, but is not limited to it. Even

intellectuals who are lifelong members of a society can, in a manner of speaking, be divided into insiders and outsiders: those on the one hand who belong fully to the society as it is, who flourish in it without an overwhelming sense

of disso- nance or dissent, those who can be called yea-sayers: and, on the other hand, the nay-sayers, the individuals at odds with their society and therefore outsiders and exiles so far as privileges, power, and honors are concerned.

The pattern that sets the course for the intellectual as outsider, which I believe is the right role for today’s intellectual, is best exemplified by the condition of exile, the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by natives (so to speak), tending to avoid and even dislike the trappings of accommodation and national well-being. Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others . You can’t go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation. Second—and I find myself somewhat surprised by this observation even as I make

it—the intellectual as exile tends to be happy with the idea of unhappiness, so that dissatisfaction bordering on dyspepsia, a kind of curmudgeonly disagreeableness, can become not only a style of thought, but also a new, if temporary, habitation. The intellectual as ranting Thersites perhaps. A great | historical prototype for what I have in mind is a powerful eighteenth-century figure, Jonathan Swift, who never got over his fall from influence and prestige in England after the Tories left office in 1714, and spent the rest of his life as an exile in Ireland. Swift was an almost legendary figure of bitterness and anger— saeve indignatio, he said of himself in his own epitaph—furious at Ireland, yet defending it against British tyranny, a man whose tow- ering Irish works Gulliver's Travels and The Drapier’s Letters show a mind flourishing, not to say benefiting, from such productive anguish.

The intellectual is in permanent exile in a state of in betweenness whose consciousness is constantly developing against the discourse of successSaid 93


happen before our eyes, as if to say not only that the intellectual is a being set apart from parents and children, but of life, his procedures of engaging with it, are necessarily allusive and can be represented realistically only as a series of discontinuous performances. Adorno’s Minima Moralia seems to follow the same logic, although after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the onset of the Cold War, and the triumph of America, representing the intellectual honestly is a much more tortuous thing than doing what Turgenev had done for Bazarov a hundred years earlier.

The core of Adorno’s representation of the intellectual as a permanent exile, dodging both the old and the new with equal dexterity, is a writing style that is mannered and worked over in the extreme. It is fragmentary, jerky, discontinuous; there is no plot or predetermined order to follow. It represents the intellectual’s consciousness as unable to be at rest anywhere, constantly on guard against the blandishments of success, which, for the perversely inclined Adorno, means trying not to be understood easily and immediately. Nor is it possible to retreat into complete privacy since, as Adorno says much later in his career, the hope of the intellectual is not that he will have an effect on the world but that some- day, somewhere, someone will read what he wrote exactly as he wrote it, One fragment, number 18 in Minima Moralia, captures the sig- quite perfectly. “Dwelling, in the proper sense,” says Adorno, “is now impossible. The traditional residences we have grown up in have grown intolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the musty pact of family interests.” So much for the prewar life of people who grew up before Nazism. Socialism and American consumerism are no better: “people live if not in slums, in bungalows that by tomorrow may be leaf-huts, trailers, cars, camps, or the open air.” Thus, Adorno states, “the house is past lie. over]. . . . The

best mode of conduct, in face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one. . . . It is part of morality not to be at home

in one’s home.” Yet no sooner has he reached an apparent conclusion than Adorno reverses it: “But the thesis of this paradox leads to destruction, a loveless disregard for things which necessarily turns against people too; and the antithesis, no sooner uttered, is an ideology for those wishing with a bad conscience to keep what they have. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” In other words, there is no real escape, even for the exile who tries to remain suspended, since that state of inbetweenness can itself become a rigid ideological position, a sort of dwelling whose falseness is covered over in time and to which one can all too easily become accustomed. Yet Adorno presses on. “Suspicious prob- ing is always salutary,” especially where the intellectual’s writing is concerned. “For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.” Yet even so—and this is Adorno’s final touch—there can be no slackening of rigor in self-analysis:

WE must break from the logic of the contemporary intellectual in our attempt to keep moving and represent change without becoming stagnate and static, this does not mean duplicating past destinies of exiles but using a logic that moves away from maintaining things by authorities but rather is motivated through risk and innovationSaid 93


Most of us may not be able to duplicate the destiny of exiles like or C.LR. James, but their significance for the contemporary intellectual is nevertheless very pertinent. Exile is a model for the intellectual who is tempted, and even beset and overwhelmed, by the rewards of accommodation, yea-saying, settling in. Even if one is not an actual immigrant or

expatriate, it is still possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate in spite of barriers, and always to move away from the centralizing authorities toward the margins, where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the conventional and the comfortable . Furthermore, a condition of marginality, which may seem irresponsible and unserious, at least frees you from having always to proceed with caution, afraid to overturn the applecart, anxious about upsetting fellow members of the same corporation. No one is ever free of attachments and sentiments, of course. Nor do I have in mind here the so-alled free-

floating intellectual, whose technical competence is on loan and for sale to anyone. I am saying, however, that to be as marginal and as undomesticated as someone ‘who is in real exile is for an intellectual to be unusually responsive not to the potentate but to the traveler, not the captive of habit and what is comfortably given but attracted to the provisional and sporty, committed not to maintaining things by an authority we have always known but to innovating by force of risk, experiment, innovation. Not the logic of the conventional but the audacity of daring, and moving, moving, moving, representing change, not standing still.

General criticism

Criticism of Orientalism is the only way to have meaningful debates and achieve education about politicsSaid 3

(Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, “Preface to Orientalism”

page 19-20 Al-Ahram Weekly, August 25 2003 KS)

All this was obviously undermined and destroyed in Germany by National Socialism. After the war, Auerbach notes

mournfully, the standardization of ideas, and greater and greater specialization of knowledge gradually narrowed

the opportunities for the kind of investigative and everlastingly enquiring kind of philological work that he had represented, and, alas, it's an even more depressing fact that since Auerbach's death in 1957 both the idea and practice of humanistic research have shrunk in scope as well as in centrality. Instead of reading in the real sense of the word, our students today are often distracted by the fragmented knowledge available on the Internet and in the mass media . Worse yet, education is threatened by nationalist and religious orthodoxies, often disseminated by the mass media as they focus ahistorically and sensationally on the distant

electronic wars that give viewers the sense of surgical precision, but in fact obscure the terrible suffering and destruction produced by modern warfare. In the demonization of an unknown enemy for whom the label "terrorist" serves the general purpose of keeping people stirred up and angry, media images command too much attention and can be exploited at times of crisis and insecurity of the kind that the post-9/11 period has produced.

FEM-ORIENTALISMWestern civilization depends upon the disposability of brown women by depending on their bodies for coherence through their Orientalist mindset; the brown is bad therefore the white is good. This theory of power functions as a superiority complex which allows us to determine who to deem as Godly and who to deem as the shoytan. The resolution and all policies that follow is built off the dead, dying, and poor bodies of the brown female flesh to best create the mechanism that is far from the bad brown but close to the good white. Roksana Badruddoja -Rutgers , The State University of New Jersey-International Review of Modem Sociology, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring) 2006 “WHITE SPACES AND BROWN TRAVELING BODIES: A PROJECT OF RE-WORKING OTHERNESS” Orientalism, then, is not the difference in cultural practices, but rather, it is a construct imputed with notions of power and difference or hierarchy which is used as a lens to interpret cultures. Dallmayr (1996) boldly states, Orientalism intensifies... cultural divisions and fissures, especially the fissure between hegemonic culture (of Western origin) and the array of not-yet assimilated and perhaps unassimilable [sic] indigenous cultures (135). And, within this binary, mutually-exclusive Oriental framework, "western culture tends to enjoy a cushion of complacency provided by its hegemonic position" (135). Herein lays the root of today's Orientalist discourse: its gaze is less than evenly distributed across populations, it legitimizes America's presence in the Orient as the democratic West who will help them become good citizens, and it flattens all heterogeneity in a single all-encompassing category - Middle East to South Asia (Bonikowski, 2005: 17). Category work which includes a regulatory gaze and a homogenization process helps to shape collective and individual narratives of not only migrants and their children in America, but it also shapes the narratives of hegemonic Americans. The process of creating an imagined Orient in turn constructs the very identity of the Occident. Said (1979) writes, [Orientalism is] not only a positive doctrine about the Orient that exists at any one time in the West; it is also an influential academic tradition, as well as an area of concern defined by travelers, commercial enterprises, governments, military expeditions, readers of novels and accounts of exotic adventure, natural historians, and pilgrims to whom the Orient is a specific kind of knowledge about specific places, people, and civilizations (203). That is, American Orientalism assumes a central prominence in defining what it means to be an American. I now turn to the U.S. immigration laws of 1965 as yet another instance of Orientalist practice.

The Western world portrays Eastern women as “Exotic Oriental Women” who function as “machine-like creatures” in order to fulfill the European man’s sexual desires- This representation of Eastern Women only works to dehumanize them and mark them as “Inferior” to the Eurocentric view of a “desirable women”Shabanirad 15

(Ensieh Shabanirad, PhD Candidate in English Language and Literature, University of Tehran, Iran Associate Professor, 2015 “Edward Said’s Orientalism and the Representation of Oriental Women in George Orwell’s Burmese Days”)

European travel writers created a series of self-confirming stereotypical images of the East – as alien, timeless, jealous, irrational, cruel, lethargic and lascivious – designed to codify, comprehend and ultimately rule over the Orient. In Kabbani’s view, the depiction of Eastern women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries objectified them as exotic creatures who epitomized and promised the assumed excessive sexual delights of the Orient . Women, that is to say, were part of the goods of empire, the living rewards available to men . They were there to be used sexually, and if it could be suggested that they were inherently licentious, then they could be exploited without misgiving . Orientalism makes assumptions about gender. Similarly, popular gendered stereotypes circulated such as the sexually promiscuous exotic Oriental female . The exoticised Oriental female, often depicted nude or partially- clothed in hundreds of Western works of art during the colonial period, was presented as an immodest, active creature of sexual pleasure who held the key to a myriad of mysterious erotic delights. In Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Meyda Yegenoglu points out that, “… when Said discusses the ways in which the Oriental woman is represented in Flaubert's works, he alludes to the uniform association established between the Orient and sex”. (Yegenoglu, 1998: 25) In the following few lines Said argues that, Woven through all of Flaubert's Oriental experiences, exciting or disappointing, is an almost uniform association between the Orient and sex. In making this association Flaubert was neither the first nor the most exaggerated instance

of a remarkably persistent motif in Western attitudes to the Orient . . . Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies, is something on which one could speculate... Nevertheless one must acknowledge its importance as something eliciting complex responses, sometimes even a frightening self-discovery, in the Orientalists, and Flaubert was an

interesting case in point. As Said notes, when Flaubert slept with an Egyptian courtesan, Kuchuk Hanem, he wrote to Louise Colet that “the oriental woman is no more than a machine; she makes no distinction between one man and another man”. (Said, 1978: 187) In so doing (and in his subsequent novels) he “produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman”.(Ibid. p: 6) But within this influential narrrative, “she never spoke of herself, never represented her emotions, presence or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was typically Oriental ". (ibid) We can imagine how different her own account might indeed have been. Flaubert's situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient that it enabled. Said’s work has been immensely important and has given rise to a wealth of studies of how colonial discourse constructs the Other. (Young, 2001: 379) Young’s remarks refer directly to native women. In contrast to the popularity of George Orwell and his books, especially in the third world countries, as a rebel for a just cause and a freedom fighter, there exists a duality in the way he treats his subject matter in Burmese Days. It does much to demonstrate Orwell’s attitude towards the Burmese women and their negative representation. One of the first descriptions in this novel is that of Burmese children; there are plenty of naked native children who crawl about performing any bodily function openly. As there are no British children present in the novel, the sheer number of native children produces a negative reaction towards the Burmese women. It seems as if

they breed like rabbits. They are perceived reductively as reproductive subjects. Native women are also represented as sexual objects and mistresses. Like most of the single British men, Flory had taken a young Burmese woman, Ma Hla May, as a mistress. He had “bought her from her parents…for three hundred

rupees.” (Orwell,31) He had no feelings towards her but simply used her for sex and otherwise treated her with distaste. Burmese women are merely objects of sexual pleasure for Flory. Native women in Burmese Days are fully described and are usually compared with animals while the beauty of English women attracts Orwell’s attention to the extent that he focuses on their faces to suggest their beauty. He also follows the conservative middle class propriety by not describing the body of the British women, while he does not follow their code of conduct for the Burmese women. In this vein, Ma Hla May is most of the time represented as a kitten and a mare. The point about Ma Hla May is that her status as a Burmese peasant’s daughter makes her childishly easy to objectify. The sense that Flory has stripped her of her autonomy comes across especially strongly in some early descriptive passages, which rely heavily on the iconography of prostitution. Unlike the compassionate, defiant and sweetly practical women whom Orwell’s protagonists fall in love with in his other novels, Ma Hla May is a mass of hard lines and angular gestures. Her body is as International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 60 27 ‘contourless as a bas-relief carved upon a tree’(30), her hair is ‘coiled like a tight black cylinder’(ibid.), her skin is the ‘colour of new copper’(ibid.). Her

only interests in life seem to be acquiring trinkets and flaunting herself in front of her fellow villagers. The third person narrator of Burmese Days elaborates on the hatefulness of the Burmese women by bringing the views of Elizabeth, a white Englishwoman, “These Burmese women repelled Elizabeth more than men; she felt her kinship with them, and the hatefulness of being kin to creatures with Black faces”. (71) John Flory is not above exploiting Burmese women and his special status as a European man, when such

exploitation suit him. The way Flory treats Ma Hla May and ruins her indicates that a Burmese woman is of little worth for him. By appearing Elizabeth, he has to end his clandestine sexual relationship with Ma Hla May and this little worth for Ma Hla May vanishes for good. According to Sardar: “Power is an essential ingredient of Orientalism. For amongst the fascinations of the relationship with the iconic Oriental woman is the use of power to be cruel and inflict punishment” . (Sardar, 1999:10) Flory enjoys referring to and thinking of Ma Hla May as a slave, a slave being one to whom one can be cruel, that one can punish with impunity and whose function by

definition is to be humiliated. This is how imperial powers saw their subject people, a slave being one to whom one can be cruel, that one can punish with impunity and whose function by definition is to be humiliated. This is how imperial powers saw their subject people .

Eastern Women are forced to deal with ‘a double colonization’ where they are doubly oppressed by colonialism and a patriarchal society- this dooms them to an abyss of perpetual inferiority. Shabanirad 15, (Ensieh Shabanirad, PhD Candidate in English Language and Literature, University of Tehran, Iran Associate Professor, 2015 “Edward Said’s Orientalism and the Representation of Oriental Women in George Orwell’s Burmese Days”)

By both colonizing and indigenous cultures, it will be clear that under colonialism native women are doubly oppressed and exploited by colonization . McLeod in Beginning Postcolonialism explains that the term ‘a double colonisation’ refers to the ways in which women have simultaneously experienced the oppression of colonialism and patriarchy. Women are subject to representation in colonial discourses in ways which collude with patriarchal values. Thus the phrase ‘a double

colonisation’ refers to the fact that women are twice colonized ─ by colonialist realities and representations, and by patriarchal ones too. ( McLeod, 2000:175). In Imperial Fictions, Rana Kabbani looks at the production of the

Eastern female as a figure of licentiousness, and Western heterosexual male desires, in travel writing and paintings of the ‘Oriental’ woman and the harem. Kabbani shows how representations of women , constructed by writers like Burton, reflected a standard Victorian prejudice, namely that all women were inferior to men; and that oriental women were doubly inferior, being both women and orientals. She shows how in reading these representations we must be aware of the mutually supportive processes of colonialism and patriarchy which produce Eastern women in eroticized terms . Colonialism operated very

differently for women and men, and the ‘double colonization’ that resulted when women were subject both to general discrimination as colonial subjects and specific discrimination as women needs to be taken into account in any analysis of colonial oppression. Leela Gandhi points out that some postcolonial theorists regard “ the third-world woman as victim par excellence ─ the forgotten casualty of both imperial ideology, and native and foreign patriarchies”. (Gandhi, 1998: 83) Thus the double oppression suffered by native women should be underscored. For they are in Lois Tyson’s words “the victims of both colonialist ideology, which devalues them because of their race and cultural ancestry, and patriarchal ideology, which devalues them because of their sex. Sadly, these women have suffered patriarchal oppression not only at the hands of colonialists, but within their own patriarchal cultures as well”. ( Lois Tyson, 2006: 421) Within the colonized societies, where male domination also occurs, the women are further viewed as a subgroup by their own men, which in turn justifies their continued subservient status. Burmese Days, as a colonial novel, includes some highly relevant passages about the exploitation of native women by both European and native males in the colony and puts the females into a subaltern situation. In other words, the novel

tells us the story of the subordination of Eastern women and the domination and exploitation of European and non-European males over the native women. Postcolonial studies increasingly emphasize gender roles, especially when dealing with the impact of the colonial process on the women. That women in the colonized society suffer from exploitation by both colonized and indigenous power structure is well understood. For example, in his definitive study of colonialism Postcolonialism Robert Young points out the double exploitation of women by the patriarchal structures of both colonial power and colonized indigenous societies: For women, the problem centered on the fact that the conditions

against which they were campaigning were the product of two kinds of oppression which put the antagonists of the nationalist struggle in the same camp: patriarchal systems of exploitation were common to both colonial regimes and indigenous societies. Women therefore had to fight the double colonization of patriarchal domination in its local as well as its imperial forms.

The patriarchic world operates through a lens of masculinity that predominates how come to know the Orient women- this form of domination over the woman further intrenches a cycle of dehumanization.

Shabanirad 15,

(Ensieh Shabanirad, PhD Candidate in English Language and Literature, University of Tehran, Iran Associate Professor, 2015 “Edward Said’s Orientalism and the Representation of Oriental Women in George Orwell’s Burmese Days”)

Ma Hla May is double colonized by Flory as a male and as an agent of the empire. In Burmese Days, rape becomes an unquestioned privilege and by-product of masculine colonial ambivalence, a fact of life as banal and unremarkable as the corruption in the jails and hospitals. As Nancy Paxton asserts in Writing Under the Raj, the masculinist world of this text remains “devoid of honor, admiration or love, a world in which rape is evacuated of its symbolic meanings ” (Lazaro, 2001: 258). All of the male characters, native or English, enjoy the right to rape women . The Burmese villain U Po Kyin is widely known as a rapist of young girls; Tom Lackersteen, Elizabeth’s uncle, hires Burmese prostitutes whenever he is stationed away from his wife; Maxwell, the Divisional Forest Officer, carries on with a Eurasian woman named Molly Pereira; and the protagonist John Flory has had countless affairs with ‘aged Jewish whores’ (38), with Eurasian women, and with a ‘full hundred’ (120) Burmese prostitutes whose faces and names he cannot recall. The narrator of Burmese Days glosses over the ramifications of the male characters’ unrestricted sexual access, leaving unconsidered and unchallenged an enormous network of sexual and cultural power-struggles. Flory’s relationships with his mistress Ma Hla May reveals his physical and moral inertia. Flory feels guilty about Ma Hla May, whom he literally owns after buying her from her parents. She is presented as a mercenary, disloyal and exploitative woman who has no affection for Flory, and uses him to acquire status and money. After the sordid encounter with her in chapter 4, Flory walks several miles into the jungle and bathes in a clear pool, a cleansing ritual which temporarily washes away his guilt. When Ma Hla May and the young Englishwoman meet for the first time, she immediately sees her disadvantage as a Burmese woman when pitted against an Englishwoman for the attentions of an Englishman . By contrast, Elizabeth has the luxury of not even being certain that Ma Hla May is female ; moreover, she could never conceive of a Burmese woman as a threat to herself. Elizabeth is used to being the standard by which conventions of femaleness are judged. The thought of competing with a Burmese woman for Flory’s attentions or for anything else, for that matter, would be completely beyond and, to her mind, beneath her. It is when Flory intercedes in this meeting that we see an example of his exploitation of his position of superiority for his own aims. In response to Ma Hla

May’s inquiry about the identity of the Englishwoman, Flory “answered casually, as though giving an order to a servant: ‘Go away this instant. If you make any trouble I will afterwards take a bamboo and beat you till not one of your ribs is whole’” (52). Once Ma Hla May heeds his coldblooded warning and leaves, Flory lies to Elizabeth by telling her that the woman who has just left 28 Volume 60 is “[o]ne of the servants’ wives, I believe”. (ibid.) In this incident, Flory exploits his privilege as an Englishman by threatening a Burmese woman. An interesting detail appears in Orwell's depiction of Ma Hla May. "She believed that lechery was a form of witchcraft, giving a woman magical powers over a man, until in the end she could weaken him to a half-idiotic slave. Each successive embrace sapped Flory's will and made the spell stronger… this was her belief" (32). In the scene in which she begs Flory to take her back, to let her live in his house even if he marries Elizabeth, this motive again appears: "Perhaps even now she thought that with her arms around him and her body against his she could renew her power over him" (95). We see the situation only from his point of view, which includes the usual wretched admission of guilt, after he casts her out. Since Flory's viewpoint predominates, the reader is invited to consider Ma Hla May as, in fact, a money-grubbing prostitute from beginning to end. There is a scene when Flory asks Elizabeth to explain why she snubbed him that morning, Elizabeth clings to the pretext that she has discovered he was keeping a Burmese woman. And now, though Flory thinks the accusation isn't even true (since he had recently thrown out Ma Hla May), he recognizes his guilt: He had not even the heart to be angry any longer. For he had perceived, with the deadly self-knowledge and self-loathing that come to one at such a time, that what had happened served him perfectly right. For a moment it seemed to him that an endless procession of Burmese women, a regiment of ghosts, were marching past him in the moonlight. Heavens, what numbers of them! A thousand no, but a full hundred at the least.... Their heads turned towards him, but they had no faces, only featureless discs.... The gods are just and of our pleasant vices (pleasant, indeed!) make instruments to plague us. He had dirtied himself beyond redemption, and this was his just punishment. (120) But Flory's awareness, as this passage shows, is deeply flawed. He, in effect, feels guilty about the wrong thing: He has "dirtied himself beyond redemption" (ibid) the very words suggest the sahib's view of a dangerous social descent and the possibility of contamination whenever he engages in sexual relations with native women. Flory's failure to accept responsibility for his action is evident when Ma Hla May suddenly appears and corners him, just as he had cornered Elizabeth. She demands money and threatens to make a scene, and Flory's guilt at once changes into anger and the desire to humiliate her. Flory deliberately throws on the ground the money and the cigarette case she has extracted from him. In this scene Ma Hla May is described as a wretched woman following him ''like a disobedient dog" (121). There is an inevitability about Flory's interactions with her that is in sharp contrast to Orwell's critique of imperialism. The patriarchal and colonial struggles are more obvious in the relationships between European men and native women. European men who cannot sufficiently manifest their masculine exploitations on European women can easily carry out this masculine exploitation of native women. Therefore, while European women are exploited once, native women are exploited twice. Civilized European men who are honourable, modest, and polite to European women become cruel, brutish and sadistic to native women. Native women are often exploited or abused sexually, and in short they cannot speak.

Afro-Orientalism

The Law continuously establishes exclusionary policies- rendering nonwhite people doomed to endless oppression; strengthening white supremacy and Western Imperialism- It’s key for people of color to act in opposition to orientalism and color lines. Kim 10,

(Nami Kim, Ph.D. Chair, Associate Professor at Spellman College, Philosophy and Religious Studies, “Engaging Afro/black-Orientalism: A Proposal”, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion Volume 1, Issue 7 (June 2010))

In her study of black attitudes toward the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 through analysis of black newspapers in the nineteenth century, Helen H. Jun shows how Orientalist discourses of Chinese cultural difference facilitated the “assimilation of black Americans to ideologies of political modernity and consolidated black identification as U.S. national subject” while reifying the Orientalist logic of the anti-Chinese movement.18 For instance, she quotes historian Arnold Shankman who observed that, “from 1880-1935 almost every time the Chinese were mentioned in the black press, it was in connection with intrigue, prostitution, murder, the sale of opium or children for money . . . superstitious practices, shootings or tong wars.”19 As Jun argues, it was crucial for black Americans to emphasize the “Christian formation of the black national subject in explicating black qualification for citizenship, which, consequently, Orientalizes, or discursively disciplines the Chinese and Indian as inadequate to political modernity.”20 Although black Orientalist discourse on Chinese difference was employed to articulate the “Americanness” of black people in opposition to “Asians,” whose religious and cultural differences rendered them unfit to be considered “Americans,” black Americans realized that when federal legislation excludes one group of people based on race it could do the same to them, thus negatively affecting their own collective endxeavor to claim the full rights of U.S. citizenship.21 Many black Americans protested the Chinese Exclusion Act as a result.22 This legacy of Afro/black-Orientalism illustrates the following points. First, uncritical adherence to “Americanness” would not help racial/ethnic minority groups in their claiming of full U.S. citizenship. Second, Christianity became a double-edged sword—one that challenged white supremacy and another that reinscribed American Orientalism. Last, black political support of Chinese immigration was not based on racial identification with the Chinese, whose gendered racial and immigrant formations were different from those of African Americans, but based on a common political struggle against white supremacist nationalism that had excluded racial/ethnic minority groups from claiming the full rights of citizenship in the United States. The Bandung Conference, often referred to as the Asian-African Conference , was held in Bandung,

Indonesia, in 1955, with the leaders of twenty-nine independent Asian and African nations participating.24 The strategy of Asian and African nations in the conference was to “ strengthen their independence from Western imperialism while keeping the Soviet bloc at a comfortable distance .”25 The creation of this strategic bloc, comprised of significant portions of the so-called third world, was the beginning of what came to be known as the “nonaligned” movement. According to Richard Wright, one of two African Americans who observed the conference from the beginning, Bandung was an indictment of Western racialism, which had been the cornerstone of Western justification for colonial exploitation and promotion of the idea of white Western racial superiority.26 Wright also wrote that the Bandung Conference stressed economic cooperation among the Asian and African powers. Along with the desire for economic cooperation among the participating countries, the Bandung Conference represented postcolonial nationalists’ call for the renewal of the ancient Asian and African cultures and religions that had been interrupted during the past centuries.27 In other words, Bandung characterized postcolonial nationalists’ emphasis on reviving traditional cultures and religions . Although many attempts to restore often-nostalgic notions of tradition and culture were problematic as carried out in postcolonial societies during their nation-building processes, examining them helps us understand the ongoing role of “religion” in colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial power struggles.28

New forms of racism continue to endlessly reproduce domestically and internationally- Afro-Orientalism is key to address this unending cycleKim 10


Yet, as black feminist Patricia Hill Collins stresses, the racial hierarchies Du Bois observed a century ago continue to exist not only on a local level but also on a global scale.32 We now face what Hill Collins calls “new racism,” which is “transnational” due to the global market economy and global mass media.33Racialized and gendered globalization continues to produce color lines in the twenty-first century . Also, while admitting that the “excavations of AfroAsian solidarity might be nostalgic and anachronistic,”34 Prashad nonetheless maintains that the “epistemological and historical archive of solidarity” and “memory of the interactions” must be brought to light.35 In a similar vein, Mullen states, “AfroAsian solidarity needs a constant reorientation to itself. The constant threat of historical erasure of the coalition building of ethnic communities necessitates an urgent, disciplined commitment to a ‘useable’ AfroAsian past.”36 By challenging white supremacy, which has persistently pit one racial/ethnic minority group against another, Afro/black-Orientalism may shed new light on the forgotten history of interactions and coalitions among African, African Americans, and Asians and Asian North Americans in their concerted efforts to resist racism, colonialism, and U.S. imperialism . 37 Engaging Afro/black-Orientalism is not a naïve attempt to romanticize the relationship between people of African descent and Asian descent when the relationship between these groups has been strenuous if not totally hostile as shown in incidents such as the Los Angeles Riot of 1992 and the ongoing plight of biracial children between African American fathers and “Asian” mothers on U.S. military bases in Asia. Rather, engaging Afro/black- Orientalism needs to be understood as an effort to underscore the “political solidarity” that has characterized various forms of Afro-Asian connections and coalition, including black American protests against the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory U.S. immigration policies . In turn, this helps disrupt the black and white racial binary that has characterized racism and racial formations in mainstream U.S. culture. In what follows, I will briefly discuss some of the implications of engaging Afro/black-Orientalism for doing interdisciplinary religious/theological studies from an Asian Pacific North American feminist perspective by highlighting shared interests between the two.in the midst of ongoing U.S. war against Iraq, feminist scholar in religion Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza calls for a critical analysis of American capitalist nationalism as a structure of domination.39 The end goal of such analysis, however, is not just to critique and analyze American nationalism and national identity. Rather, as Sharon D. Welch has rightly put it, what is equally needed is to articulate “ alternative forms of national identity and global order and responsibility .”40 In her response to Schüssler Fiorenza’s urgent call to engage acritical analysis of American nationalism as a structure of domination, Welch defines “critique” as a form of “patriotism and an affirmation of a complex identity as national and global citizens.”41 Such critique is found in the works of Du Bois and other African American intellectuals, who understood their fate under U.S. racist domestic policy in relation to others who suffer under Western imperial exploitation. For instance, when Du Bois talked about “the world problem of the color line” in 1914, he was linking the fate of African Americans to the race problem in the world. Likewise, African American anti- colonial activists of the 1940s strongly argued that their struggles against Jim Crow were inseparably bound to the struggles of African and Asian peoples for independence from colonialism. 42 As Penny M. Von Eschen puts it, African Americans’ critique of American empire was closely related to their critique of colonialism elsewhere, and offering a critique of American empire did not preclude them from being in solidarity with other colonized people.

Afro Orientalism represents itself as a critical trajectory of thought in opposition to the way the western world has inflicted oppression upon Blacks and Asians- it allows an ideological approach towards solidarity that is not based on racial difference; rather racial coalition. Kim 10

http://two.in/


Bill V. Mullen defines Afro-Orientalism as a counterdiscourse that “at times shares with its dominant namesake certain features but primarily constitutes an independent critical trajectory of thought on the practice and ideological weight of Orientalism in the Western world.”8 Asian American studies scholar Helen H. Jun notes that although black Orientalism has no singular meaning or manifestation, it encompasses “an entire range of black imaginings of Asia that are in fact negotiations with the limits and disappointments of black citizenship.”9 Whether it is limited to the discourse of black citizenship in relation to U.S. policy on Asian immigrants, or to the discourses of antiracism and anti-imperialism, Afro/blackOrientalism, as Mullen puts it, is a “signifying discourse on race, nation, and global politics constituting a subtradition in indigenous U.S. writing on imperialism, colonialism, and the making of capitalist empire.”10 As such, Afro/black-Orientalism acknowledges not only the problems of Orientalism, Western imperialism, and capitalism but also the extent to which such problems have affected African Americans, Asian Americans, Africans, and Asians, sometimes in paralleled ways and sometimes through different trajectories. Hence, Afro/black-Orientalism, as Jun puts it, is “not employed as an accusatory and reductive condemnation that functions to chastise black individuals or institutions for being imperialist, racist, or Orientalist.”11 Rather, Afro/black-Orientalism is employed as an important site where a crude opposition between blacks and Asians can be contested, where the parallel courses of Western imperialism through Asia and Africa can be explored, where the experiences of African Americans and Asian Americans as slaves and indentured servants in the Americas, respectively, can be compared, and where cross-racial, cross-ethnic, and trans-Pacific political solidarity that is not based on racial identification can be sought out. Exploring instances of Afro/black-Orientalism in various historical contexts illuminates not only the importance of race but also how crucial it is to explore how gender, sexuality, and religion intersect with race and class in the face of ongoing racism, sexism, heterosexism, militarism, and class exploitation. Many (mostly male) African American political activists and intellectuals in the United States in the early twentieth century hailed Japan as a role model that challenged white supremacy, rejoicing in the news that Japan had defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. W. E. B. Du Bois, known as the American founder of Pan-Africanism, was among many AfricanAmericans who saw the beginning of the end for white supremacy in Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905.12 Ironically, however, Du Bois’s pro-Japanese stance resonated with Japan’s colonial rhetoric of “saving Asia from the Western imperialism.” For instance, he stated, “The idea of Japan was to invoke war and force--to drive Europe out of Asia and substitute the domination of a weak Asia by a strong Japan.”13 Although some African American political activists considered Japan’s “victory” in Asia as a positive sign that white supremacy could be overcome, Japan’s imperialism reinscribed another form of racial hierarchy in the Asian Pacific region. Even when Japan invaded Manchuria, instead of criticizing Japan, many African Americans criticized the denunciation of the Japanese invasion in China in the mainstream U.S. press, which they considered as hypocritical in light of the fact that the mainstream U.S. press did not condemn the white supremacy that Europe and the United States had imposed on Shanghai.14 Hence, Japan’s invasion of Nanjing—the Nanjing massacre in particular—did not minimize African American intellectuals’ pro-Japanese stance. According to David Levering Lewis, Du Bois said in reference to the Nanjing massacre that the Japanese neither invented nor perfected “killing the unarmed and innocent in order to reach the guilty,” by pointing out terrible instances of European conduct drawn from South Africa, the Punjab, and Guernica.15 Du Bois summed up the thoughts of many African Americans when he posed this question upon arriving in China in the 1930s: “Why is it that you [the Chinese] hate Japan more than Europe when you have suffered more from England, France, and Germany, than from Japan.”16 At the same time, despite his support of Japanese imperialism (while criticizing European imperialism), his romanticization of “Asia,” and his idealization of China under communism, Du Bois was one of the most vigorous critiques of the “Yellow Peril” in racial theories and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. He was also a leading proponent of anticolonialism in Africa and Asia, and an untiring critic of U.S. white supremacist nationalism and capitalism. For him, full emancipation meant freeing “the majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and black.”17 After realizing the cruelty and aggression that Japanese imperialism had wrought in Asia, Du Bois asserted that imperialism by any race was unconscionable. For him and many other African American intellectuals and activists, anti-colonialist struggle meant not only vigorous opposition and critique of white supremacy but also denouncement of imperialism and racial hierarchy in any form. Finally, engaging Afro/black-Orientalism can help us explore the ways in which the parameters of struggle are defined in

religious/theological studies, whether the struggle is against racism, sexism, heterosexism, or imperialism. In other words, engaging Afro/black-Orientalism can assure that oppression needs to be conceptualized in ways that one form of oppression is not prioritized over another based on identity politics, or that racial/ethnic conflict among minority groups is not looked at simply as a matter between the two without dealing with white

supremacy. This way of conceptualizing oppression and forming strategic coalitions based on such conceptualization becomes especially significant given the recent development of transnational alliances of Christian Right with antifeminist perspectives and practices that cut across national borders, extensively affecting and altering people’s lives. What we can inherit from Afro-Asian connections, especially from the Bandung Conference, is that the core struggles that have rendered “third world” as oppositional consciousness. Although the spirit of the Bandung has vanished, rearticulated notion of third-world oppositional consciousness that is not based on geography nor based solely on shared experiences of oppression can be useful . As Chandra Mohanty has rightly put it, thirdworld oppositional consciousness and struggle is defined as “the way we think about race, class, and gender--the political links we choose to make among and between struggles.”53 Such understanding of oppositional consciousness and struggle can help provide a platform where new ways of understanding oppression can be articulated , and where anti-racist, anti-sexist, antiheterosexist, and anti-imperialist transnational feminist alliances can be articulated and formed.

Afro-Orientalism opens up a space for women of color across the globe to be in solidarity transnationally against the patriarchal Western World. Kim 10,


In his opera Warrior Sisters: The New Adventures of African and Asian Womyn Warriors, Fred Ho, a contemporary composer, baritone saxophone player, and political activist against racism and sexism, narrates transhistorical, transnational, and cross-racial journey of four

revolutionary women. They are Fa Mu Lan, a cross-dressing female warrior during the Boxer Rebellion in China; Ashante warrior queen Nana Yaa Asantewa; Sieh King King, a community organizer who entered the U.S. “illegally” when U.S. immigration law prohibited Chinese women from entering the country; and Black Panther leader Assata Shakur. In this opera, these four women from different historical times and different

geopolitical contexts journey together toward a new territory where patriarchal conceptions of color, power, sexuality, and empire are no longer present.54 This imaginative retelling of four women’s journey in the

genre of opera is a creative attempt to continue the legacy of Afro-Asian connections that have been antiracist, anticolonialist, and anti-imperialist by incorporating anti-patriarchal struggle. I hope that engaging Afro/black-Orientalism can not only provide insights, ideas, and strategies to combat global color lines, but also open the floor for the further discussions on the issues that people continue to struggle with, such as sexism, heterosexism, neo-colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and “Christian privilege,” by taking into account gender, sexuality, and religion as constitutive of one another in forming not only one’s identity but also strategies for coalitions. For this task, “excavating” useable Afro-Asian connections must continue

AFF ANWSERS

PERMPERM CARD:Critiques of orientalist scholarship ignores that there cannot be a true representation of anything and that representation is intertwined with other ideas and concepts, means the permutation is the best analysis of orientalism through other contextsWarraq 07

(Ibn Warraq, Founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society and Vice-President of the World Encounter Institute, “Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism”, DMW)

“ORIENTALISTS' COMPLICITY IN IMPERIALISM

One of Said's major theses is that Orientalism was not a disinterested, scholarly activity but a political one, with Orientalists preparing the

ground for and colluding with imperialists: "To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact" (p. 39). The Orientalist provides the knowledge that keeps the Oriental under control: "Once again, knowledge of subject races or Orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control" (p. 36). This is combined with Said's thesis,

derived from the Coptic socialist thinker Anwar Abdel Malek, that the Orient is always seen by the Orientalists as unchanging, uniform, and peculiar (p. 98), with Orientals reduced to racist stereotypes and seen as ahistorical "objects" of study "stamped with an otherness ... of an essentialist character" (p. 97, quoting

Malek). The Orientalists have provided a false picture of Islam: "Islam has been fundamentally misrepresented in the West"

(p. 272). Said adds Foucault to the heady mix; the French guru[“convinced Said that Orientalist scholarship took place within the ideological framework he called "discourse" and that "the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or ” “whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the `truth,' which is itself a representation" (p. 272). It takes little thought to see that there is a contradiction in Said's major thesis." If Orientalists have produced a false picture of the Orient,

Orientals, Islam, Arabs, and Arabic society-and, in any case, for Said there is no such thing as "the truth"-then how could this false or pseudoknowledge have helped European imperialists to dominate three-quarters of the globe? "Information and control," wrote Said, but what of "false information and control"?” “To argue his case, Said very conveniently leaves out the important contributions of German Orientalists, for their inclusion would destroy-and their exclusion does indeed totally destroy-the central thesis of Orientalism, that all Orientalists produced knowledge that generated power, and that they colluded and helped imperialists found empires. As we shall see, German Orientalists were the greatest of all scholars of the Orient, but, of course, Germany was never an imperial power in any of the Oriental countries of North Africa or the Middle East. Lewis wrote, "[A]t no time before or after the imperial age did [the British and French] contribution, in range, depth, or standard, match the achievement of the great centers of Oriental studies in Germany and neighbouring countries. Indeed, any history or theory of Arabic studies in Europe without the Germans makes as much sense as would a history or theory of European music or philosophy with the same omission."48 Would it have made sense for German Orientalists to produce work that could help only England or France in their empire building?” “Those omitted are not peripheral figures but the actual creators of the field of Middle Eastern, Islamic, and Arabic studies: scholars of the standing of Paul Kahle, Georg Kampffineyer, Rudolf Geyer, E Giese, Jacob Barth, August Fischer, Emil Gratzl, Hubert Grimme, Friedrich Schulthess, Friedrich Schwally, Anton Baumstark, Gotthelf Bergstrasser; others not discussed include G. Wustenfeld, Alfred Von Kremer, J. Horovitz, A. Sprenger, and Karl Vollers. Though Theodor NOldeke, Johann Fuck, G. Weil, Carl Heinrich Becker, E. Sachau, and Carl Brockelmann are mentioned, their work and significance are not discussed in any detail; Noldeke, whose Geschichte des Qordns (1860) was to become the foundation of all later Koranic studies, is considered one of the pioneers, along with Goldziher, of Islamic studies in the West.”

Perm do both – Engaging the state is key - policy-making should be viewed as creating sites for potential realities away from Western eurocentrism Gerard 15 Kelly Gerard, School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia, “Explaining ASEAN’s Engagement of Civil Society in Policy-making: Smoke and Mirrors” Globalizations, 2015 Vol. 12, No. 3, 365 –382, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2015.1016304 //jazmyn

*CSO = Civil Society Organizations

*ASEAN = Association of Southeast Asian Nations

Following the regional financial crisis of 1997 – 1998, leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) began promoting the idea of a ‘people-centred’ community in Southeast Asia and, towards this end, widening policy-making to include civil society organisations (CSOs). ASEAN first signalled this shift with its Vision 2020, released in December 1997, that committed member states to creating a ‘community of caring societies’ where ‘civil society is empowered’ (ASEAN, 1997). This participatory agenda was restated in subsequent Correspondence Address: Kelly Gerard, School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia. Email: [email protected] # 2015 Taylor & Francis Globalizations, 2015 Vol. 12, No. 3, 365 –382, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2015.1016304 agreements,

and with the decision to design the ASEAN Charter, the term ‘people-centred’ became even more ‘en vogue’ (Morada, 2008). Consulting with civil society thus became a consistent part of ASEAN rhetoric. Accompanying this rhetorical shift was the emergence of two new forms of participation for CSOs in ASEAN. Since 1979 an affiliation system has operated where CSOs can apply for affiliation, which brings with it some participatory functions. However, since 2005 CSOs have been consulted by multiple ASEAN bodies, the most high-profile being the consultations conducted for the ASEAN Charter. Since 2006 CSOs have also participated in ASEAN through three annual sectoral forums on Migrant Labour, Social Welfare and Development, and Rural

Development and Poverty Eradication, organised to facilitate dialogue between officials and CSOs. This widening of policy-making to include CSOs was an abrupt shift from ASEAN’s previous style of regional governance, characterised by closed-door meetings and tacit agreements among leaders. This shift was not a stand-alone endeavour, but emerged alongside the market-building reform programme that ASEAN embarked on after the regional financial crisis. ASEAN’s conspicuous absence from the recovery process prompted criticisms, advanced by ‘a bolder and bettereducated middle class challenging the paternalistic order of the past’ (Ahmad & Ghosal, 1999, p. 767), amidst a rising wave of populism and domestic political upheavals—most acutely in Indonesia with the collapse

of the Suharto regime. In response to criticisms regarding its practices and purpose, ASEAN rapidly intensified regional economic integration through the creation of an integrated and liberal market—the ASEAN Economic Community—to facilitate states’ efforts to compete for global capital flows. To further these market-building reforms,1 regional governance was organised around a regulatory framework where state actors collaborate through regional networks to harmonise domestic policies (Gerard, 2014b). As noted by Jayasuriya, regulatory regionalism ‘should not be viewed as a departure from the disciplines of the global economy, but as an attempt to

instantiate the disciplines of neoliberalism within a regional framework’ (2003, p. 206). This shift in regional governance mirrored regulatory transformations in statehood across members and their embedded ‘politics of competitiveness’, where ‘the orientation of these regimes reflects national trajectories that have seen the outflanking or defeat of more radical class and developmental projects by enthusiastic proponents of capitalist development’ (Cammack, 2009, p. 269; see introduction to this special issue by Carroll & Jarvis). ASEAN is but one example of the broad trend of regional and global governance institutions widening policy-making to include CSOs. This trend emerged in the 1970s and increased in intensity from the 1990s. A rich empirical literature documents this trend and raises various questions such as why governance institutions have shifted to engage these disparate

interests and how, and the limitations of this process. This article harnesses political economy analysis to explain the inclusion of CSOs in regional and global policy-making, and explores this trend through the lens of the ASEAN case, drawing on 54 interviews conducted with ASEAN officials and CSO representatives. The first section outlines the limitations of mainstream International Relations (IR) approaches in accounting for this trend before describing the political economy approach

used here, drawn from the framework of Jayasuriya and Rodan (2007) that considers modes of participation as the unit of analysis. The application of this framework—novel to the study of civil society participation in regional and global policy-making—acknowledges that different systems of structuring civil society participation produce varying opportunities for CSOs to influence policy. In the second section I apply this analytical framework to ASEAN’s participatory channels.2 Focusing on the questions of who can participate and how, and the struggles that 366 K. Gerard have accompanied the establishment of these new modes of

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2015.1016304

participation, I describe and explain the boundaries of civil society participation with reference to underlying political economy relationships. This article demonstrates that ASEAN’s participatory mechanisms are structured to include particular interests amenable to its reform agenda and marginalise non-compatible groups. It asserts that ASEAN’s ‘people-centred’ agenda is intended to address some of the social forces that have organised around issues arising from the rapid and predatory mode of capitalist development prevalent in the region, demonstrating that participatory policy-making is not implicitly democratising. A Political Economy Approach to Understanding CSOs’ Participation in Policy-making ASEAN’s shift to engage CSOs parallels the trend seen in many, if not most, regional and global governance institutions. This practice can be traced back to the founding of the United Nations; however, it has grown in intensity in recent decades. A rich empirical literature documents this trend and limitations of space do not warrant a comprehensive review. However, while describing the expanding presence of CSOs in regional and global policy-making, these studies also highlight the substantial differences that exist across institutions in the participatory mechanisms that have been established, and the forms of participation they subsequently enable. For example, the EU’s Citizen’s Initiative permits CSOs to propose agenda items for meetings of the European Commission (European Commission, 2010). However, CSOs seeking to lobby the WTO are limited to attending the Plenary Meetings of the Ministerial Council that are broadcast over the internet and participating in ad hoc public symposia where the agenda is set by the WTO (van den Bossche, 2010). Regional and global governance institutions regulate civil society access in a range of forms, creating varying opportunities for CSOs to influence policy-making. Justifications for why these institutions open their political structures to include these disparate interests also vary across institutions. Empirically, claims of the

benefits of civil society engagement are highly contested. Scholars and practitioners argue that civil society involvement in regional and global policy-making provides a partial solution to issues arising from the ‘democracy deficit’ that relevant institutions struggle with. Problematically, arguments for the accountability and legitimacy benefits of civil society participation assume that CSOs represent the interests of those that would otherwise be disenfranchised (cf. Verweij & Josling, 2003, p. 13), and that CSOs are, and remain, independent of the influence of states, donors, and private interests. The question of CSOs being consulted in policy-making is also distinct from whether CSOs shape political outcomes through such consultations , underscored by Betsill and Corell’s (2008) assessment of the scholarship on civil society participation in environmental governance which highlights that while CSOs promote

particular policy frameworks, little evidence exists demonstrating their influence on policy outcomes. Furthermore, CSOs and governance institutions are highly complex and diverse entities, creating significant logistical issues in establishing some form of collaborative relationship. Scholte (2011) highlights qualitative problems encountered during consultations, noting that CSOs may be consulted only towards the end of the policy cycle once the policy direction is decided; meetings may be convened at short notice, with little preparation or follow-up with participants; consultations may serve simply as public relations exercises during high-level meetings or ‘tick-the-box’ affairs; and finally, officials may consider consultations as a one-way rather than a two-way dialogue, disseminating information rather than hearing CSOs’ views. Thus, institutions’ inclusion of CSOs in policy-making has not been unproblematic or uncontested. These various issues raise questions regarding the overall impact of CSOs’ inclusion on political outcomes. ASEAN’s Engagement of Civil Society 367 Recognising the limitations of this process, scholars have called for caution in advancing civil society engagement in regional and global policy-making, recommending various prescriptions to advance this process in a manner that raises accountability, legitimacy, and representation in policy-making. For example, Scholte asserts: ‘In a word, what is wanted in the period ahead is more, more inclusive, more competent, more coordinated, and more accountable civil society engagement at the heart of policy processes on the full range of global governance processes’ (2007, p. 316).While these accounts highlight the limitations of this process, scholarly analysis should shift beyond recommending improvements to explaining how and why this process is constrained. Theoretically, dominant IR approaches are limited in accounting for why and how regional and global institutions engage CSOs and the limitations of this process. The shortcomings of realist approaches in accounting for this trend require little elaboration: realists conceive of states as unitary actors in pursuit of their interests, making power the only mediating factor in international politics. Liberals consider the shift to include CSOs in policy-making as a means of increasing efficiency, needed to deal with the ever-growing complexity of regional and global policy-making (Florini & Simmons, 2000; Slaughter, 2004). However, it is not readily apparent that CSOs’ participation increases the efficiency of policy-making, given that CSOs are another voice to be added to already crowded deliberations. Additionally, many institutions direct significant resources towards supporting CSOs’ engagement, such as the UN’s NonGovernmental Liaison Service. Beyond acknowledging CSOs as sources of information and conduits for publicising policy decisions, liberals also do not elaborate how CSOs participate. Slaughter posits that networks of non-state actors can support government networks in addressing the growing complexities of governance (2004, p. 33). However, the liberal framing of civil society consultations as directed towards problem-solving and consensus-building assumes that CSOs interact with officials in a non-conflictual manner. Liberals assume that these disparate actors are united by a common purpose that subsumes the politics that accompany this process, overlooking issues such as the unequal distribution of power that creates the potential for decisions to be imposed, rather than bargained (see Peters & Pierre, 2004). While constructivists place greater emphasis on the role of CSOs in global politics, these accounts offer only a partial explanation for this trend. On the question of why these institutions widen policy-making to include CSOs, constructivists assert this can be explained through the concept of norm diffusion, as argued by Collins (2013) and Ru¨land (2014) in the ASEAN case and Saurugger (2010) in the EU case. However, constructivists acknowledge that this framework provides little in elaborating why actors that internalise a norm fail to exhibit the desired behaviour—what is termed ‘partial norm socialisation’ (Checkel, 2005; Risse, Ropp, & Sikkink, 1999; Saurugger, 2010). In her examination of the flawed implementation of the participatory norm in the EU, Saurugger (2010) observes that norms are rhetorically embraced when deemed necessary and later violated when doing so is feasible. However, this observation does not explain this trend according to the constructivist paradigm. Constructivists have attempted to account for cases of partial norm by extending the norm diffusion logic to instances of institutional normative change, termed ‘mimetic adoption’ (Katsumata, 2011). In the ASEAN case constructivists have argued that officials sought to emulate regional integration processes in the EU or global norms as a legitimising tool; however, their embrace of these new ideas is superficial, directed only towards deflecting unwanted attention, which has created a gap between rhetoric and practice. These accounts explain ASEAN’s participatory agenda and its limitations through interpretations of existing norms (Collins, 2013; Ru¨land, 2014), emphasising the role of extant ideas, known as an 368 K. Gerard actor’s ‘cognitive prior’ (Acharya, 2009), in shaping ASEAN’s responses to new ideas. However, by explaining this process principally through ideational change, these accounts overlook the role of social conflict in this process, failing to systematically account for why some issues have been deemed suitable for civil society consultations in ASEAN (e.g. rural development and poverty eradication) and others have not (such as land evictions), nor why some CSOs are excluded and the rules governing how they can participate. Constructivism does, in fact, account for instances of partial norm socialisation in constructivists’ assertion that ‘ideas matter’—to the extent that the shift to embrace a new idea will eventually produce the desired behaviour. Wheeler draws from Skinner in arguing this point: whether the actor is sincere or not is beside the point since what matters is that, once an agent has accepted the need to legitimate his behavior, he is committed to showing that his actions ‘were in fact motivated by some accepted set of social and political principle’. (2000, p. 9; citing Skinner, 1988) Similarly, Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) ‘boomerang effect’ argues that in cases where

actors embrace a norm for strategic reasons, they will be pressured to alter their behaviour accordingly and non-compliance will become increasingly difficult, leading to the norm being ‘embedded’. Constructivists thus assert that an actor will alter their behaviour in accordance with a norm they embraced only for strategic reasons to demonstrate the authenticity of their shift to accept that idea. However, state actors frequently rhetorically embrace new ideas, while simultaneously seeking to reduce their commitments (Naidoo, 2010, p. 28). In the case of ASEAN’s commitments to engage CSOs, officials have found it rather straightforward to rhetorically embrace civil society consultations while constraining participation in practice, described below. By considering norms as explanatory variables, where norms themselves are understood to generate the appropriate change in behaviour, constructivism is impoverished in explaining why an actor that adopts a norm does not alter its behaviour, and more so over time, as seen in the ASEAN case. In light of the limitations of dominant IR theories in explaining how and why governance institutions consult CSOs, this study harnesses political economy analysis to explain this trend. Recognising that different systems of structuring civil society participation produce varying opportunities for CSOs to shape policy, this article applies the framework of Jayasuriya and Rodan (2007), where modes of participation serve as the unit of analysis. A mode of participation is the ‘institutional structures and ideologies that shape the inclusion and exclusion of individuals and groups in the political process’ (Jayasuriya & Rodan, 2007, p. 774). This framework recognises that institutions structure the form politics can take, making particular forms of participation acceptable. As such, modes of participation organise conflicts because they determine which conflicts are ‘expressed, mediated or marginalized’ (Jayasuriya & Rodan, 2007, p. 779). In analysing modes of participation, this approach is concerned with the questions of who is represented within these sites, what forms of participation are deemed permissible, the struggles that have taken place to establish these spaces, and whose interests are furthered through their creation. In examining who can participate and how, the key consideration is whether participation enables CSOs to contest policy, defined as the articulation of views that challenge institutional policy. This analytical focus is crucial because participation that entails representation but not contestation functions in legitimating prevailing interests, without providing a channel for CSOs to deliberate policy, thereby marginalising the conflicts CSOs have organised around. The modes of participation framework is drawn from the work of social conflict theorists, considering institutions, markets, and states not as unitary, independent, and coherent entities but as social structures, meaning they are defined by conflicts among competing social forces. ASEAN’s Engagement of Civil Society 369 Recognising that civil society consultations do not emerge independently but are shaped by struggles between competing social forces, this framework acknowledges these struggles as significant in determining how CSOs participate in policy-making. This framework thus enables analysis of the relationship between the structure of these spaces and the interests they privilege. Hence, this framework not only describes modes of participation as being more or less useful for activists’ agendas, but explains why, with reference to underlying political economy relationships. This article extends the modes of participation framework from Jayasuriya and Rodan’s (2007) application to domestic regimes to examine the relationship between CSOs and regional and global governance institutions. This extension of this framework is based on recognition that state borders do not constitute a boundary for political power, and actors will employ strategies to advance their interests across governance scales (Jessop, 1990). Each territorial scale, whether local, subnational, national, regional, or global, has a specific configuration of actors, resources, and political opportunities, and actors subsequently seek to rescale the governance of an issue in accordance with their interests (Hameiri & Jones, 2012). Consequently, the governance of a single territorial scale cannot be examined in isolation from others—domestic political projects are intricately bound up with the form and trajectory of regional and global governance institutions. Jayasuriya and Rodan’s interest in modes of participation was drawn from their examination of the emergence of a paradoxical trend in Southeast Asia where increasing political representation has been accompanied by a decline in opportunities for political contestation. They argue that the narrowing of opportunities for political contestation is linked to efforts to co-opt, marginalise, or exclude social forces that have emerged around issues associated with the rapid and predatory mode of capitalist development prevalent in the region, such as groups focusing on environmental conservation, social justice, and public sector reform. The Southeast Asian civil society sector is one such social force. Activism has grown in response to governments’ pursuit of a ‘growth at all costs’ agenda, carried out through authoritarian state behaviour. Issues that have been the consequence of this approach to state management, such as the commercialisation of endangered species, the mismanagement of shared resources, poor working conditions, child trafficking, and sex tourism, have increasingly been addressed by CSOs. Meanwhile, the common circumstances that these issues arose from across countries have provided fertile ground for CSOs to organise at the regional level. The regionalisation of activism is evident in the establishment of regional networks targeting ASEAN and the development of ASEAN-focused activities in existing networks (such as by having a staff member or ‘desk’ responsible for tracking ASEAN developments), seen in the Southeast Asian Committee for Advocacy (SEACA), the Southeast Asian Women’s Caucus on ASEAN, FORUM-ASIA, and the Asian Partnership for the Development of Human Resources in Rural Asia (AsiaDHRRA), to name a few. Leaders of regional networks have come together to form the Solidarity for Asian People’s Advocacy (SAPA) network that spearheads advocacy targeting ASEAN (Gerard, 2013). CSOs’ activities targeting ASEAN include SAPA’s annual organisation of the ASEAN Civil Society Conference, held since 2005, as well as various issue-specific collaborations in the form of workshops, publications, and seminars. ASEAN’s reform programme has prompted CSOs to pursue engagement and vocally criticise ASEAN’s policies. CSOs have also targeted ASEAN in response to its claims that it is becoming more ‘people-centred’. Prior to ASEAN’s claims that it was widening participation to include CSOs, many activists did not seek to interact with ASEAN, instead ‘[paying] much more attention to the threats posed by international organizations’ (Chandra, 2006, p. 74). 370 K. Gerard While some CSOs have increasingly made ASEAN a target of their advocacies, not all have embraced this change. A vast spectrum of views regarding the value of targeting ASEAN exists, from those that view engaging ASEAN as equivalent to their co-optation to those that consider engagement beneficial and devote resources to encouraging other CSOs to do the same. Many CSOs choose not to pursue their claims directly by participating in spaces established by ASEAN and instead seek to contest policy through activities outside of these spaces, such as through participation in the ASEAN Civil Society Conferences, the publication and dissemination of critical knowledge, or organising protests alongside ASEAN meetings (Gerard, 2013, 2014a). In explaining the form and function of ASEAN’s shift to include CSOs in policy-making, the following section examines who is represented within these sites, what forms of participation are deemed permissible, the struggles that have taken place in establishing these modes of participation, and their implications for relevant interests. CSO Participation in ASEAN-Established Channels CSO Affiliation The system of affiliation dates back to 1979, when ASEAN first certified the Federation of ASEAN Public Relations Organizations and the ASEAN Bankers Association (ASEAN, 2009). The system operates by groups that meet particular criteria being granted affiliation, which brings with it the opportunity for some forms of participation. The guidelines governing the affiliation system were first agreed in 1979 and revised in 2006 and again in 2011, with the current version adopted by the Committee of Permanent Representatives (CPR) on 5 November 2012. Affiliation is granted only to those organisations that meet stringent requirements. According to the 2012 guidelines, affiliated CSOs must be non-profit organisations committed to achieving the aims of ASEAN, with membership confined to member states. In their application for affiliation, CSOs must disclose their reasons for applying, details of their activities and membership, their constitution and registration papers, and background information on staff. All applications for affiliation must receive the approval of all member states, through the CPR. Additional to these formal criteria, officials noted that it is preferred if applicants conduct their activities across all member states, and do not operate outside of Southeast Asia or have extensive links (through funding and/or staff) with international organisations or non-ASEAN governments.3 These rigorous criteria are beyond the reach of many Southeast Asian CSOs, frequently lacking financial and decision-making reporting systems (Chong, 2011, p. 14). These criteria bias the affiliation system towards those organisations with formalised and legalised systems of operation, privileging middle-class organisations, and groups that are linked to states or other national (but not external) financiers. The additional informal criterion that organisations operate across all member states adds an extra tier to the hurdles of obtaining affiliation, given that some Southeast Asian states adopt a hostile approach to civil society operations, while the discretionary rejection of ties between accredited CSOs and international organisations or foreign governments further narrows the range of CSOs that fit this mould. Despite the hurdles that must be passed for an organisation to gain affiliation, the forms of participation that are granted through this mechanism are not remarkable. Accredited CSOs can use the name ‘ASEAN’, display its flag and emblem, and play the ASEAN anthem; they ASEAN’s Engagement of Civil Society 371 can submit written statements to their nominated sectoral body; and the ASEAN Secretariat provides them with ASEAN publications each year. Affiliated CSOs can apply to receive Third Party funding for relevant projects, attend meetings of its sectoral body, initiate programmes of activities for consideration by its sectoral body, access relevant ASEAN documents for

research, and use the ASEAN Secretariat facilities in Jakarta (ASEAN, 2012). The only form of participation that is guaranteed through affiliation is the ability to submit written statements to the CPR—all other forms of participation must be requested in writing, and there are no procedures to question a decision if an application is rejected. Furthermore, there are no processes to ensure the transparency of decision-making associated with affiliation applications or requests for particular forms of participation. CSOs were hopeful that the most recent review would create a more participatory system.4 However, officials indicated that the review was intended only to change the wording of the guidelines such that they align with the structural changes in ASEAN that were endorsed with the Charter, rather than marking an entirely new mode of engagement.5 The 2012 guidelines do, however, include an additional obligation for affiliated CSOs, namely that their activities comply with the national laws of relevant countries (ASEAN, 2012, article 8). The 2012 guidelines also stipulate that the CPR conduct a review every three years of affiliated CSOs, and revoke affiliation for any organisation that does not meet their obligations or undertakes activities that are contrary to ASEAN and member states’ aims (ASEAN, 2012, articles 10 – 11). CSOs can appeal the CPR’s decision to revoke their affiliation; however, their appeal must be directed to the CPR, and ‘upon appeal, the decision of the CPR shall be final and binding’ (ASEAN, 2012, article 13), thereby aligning the appeals process with the interests of the CPR, rather than CSOs. Affiliation may increase CSOs’ access to ASEAN officials; however, this access continues only if CSOs do not challenge policy. This is because to maintain their affiliation CSOs must retain the favour of the CPR, as part of the review process conducted every three years. This can limit CSOs’ range of possible responses to ASEAN policies, reducing the incentive for affiliated organisations to challenge policy. This was recognised by Land Watch Asia, in its pamphlet titled Engaging the ASEAN: Towards a Regional Advocacy on Land Rights. When describing the affiliation system this pamphlet advises, ‘NGOs need to assess whether ASEAN views them as a partner or merely as a consultative body; that is, whether NGOs can define their own agenda or simply adopt ASEAN’s own agenda’ (Land Watch Asia, n.d.). The limited scope for participation that is engendered through the affiliation system has meant that it includes only one CSO that is widely respected in the activist community, namely AsiaDHRRA. The list of affiliated CSOs is dominated by professional bodies, such as the ASEAN Bankers Association and the ASEAN Cosmetics Association, and the inclusion of the ASEAN Kite Council and the ASEAN Vegetable Oils Club has made it a source of ridicule for critics, such as Suryodiningrat (2009) who argues it displays ‘the intent by which ASEAN perceives its subjects: with ridicule and condescension’. Ad hoc Consultations The ad hoc consultations with CSOs that have been conducted by some ASEAN bodies provide an insight into the limited forms of participation permitted in ASEAN policy-making and, importantly, the struggles between conflicting interests in defining how these consultations should be structured. 372 K. Gerard The inaugural occurrence of this mode of participation took place in July 2005, when the Secretary-General at the time, Ong Keng Yong, demonstrated an interest in holding a dialogue with CSOs. A meeting was subsequently held between Secretariat officials and representatives of three high-profile CSOs, namely AsiaDHRRA, SEACA, and FORUM-ASIA (Ramirez, 2008). At this meeting, officials encouraged the representatives of these three CSOs to jointly organise in seeking to engage ASEAN, and indicated that their contributions to regional policy-making would be welcomed. At this time, support among officials for the notion of consulting CSOs was at an all-time high, evident in the in-principle support officials granted to the holding of the first ASEAN Civil Society Conference alongside the Leaders’ Summit in December 2005 in Kuala Lumpur (Gerard, 2013). Representatives of these three CSOs agreed to collaborate in their efforts to engage ASEAN. They subsequently held a meeting in October 2005 with other CSOs, where they agreed they would collaborate in organising the ASEAN Civil Society Conference. This first meeting between high-level Secretariat staff and representatives of three CSOs created an important precedent that was taken up by other ASEAN bodies. The next ad hoc consultation was held during the drafting of the Charter in 2006, led by the Eminent Persons Group (EPG) on the ASEAN Charter. The EPG comprised one representative from each member state that was nominated by their respective governments, generally comprising ministers or diplomats, with some retired and others serving (ASEAN, 2006). They were given the task of ‘[putting] forth bold and visionary recommendations on the drafting of an ASEAN Charter’ (ASEAN, 2005). This expansive mandate was reflected in the EPG’s terms of reference, which noted the EPG could conduct ‘region-wide consultations of all relevant stakeholders in ASEAN in the ASEAN Charter drafting process, especially representatives of the civil society’ (ASEAN, 2005, section 4). This recommendation did not specify the extent of consultation to be undertaken, but it provided latitude for the EPG to meet with CSOs. Hence, alongside ASEAN’s customary consultations with business groups and the ASEAN – ISIS think-tank network, the EPG also invited representatives of the SAPA network to a meeting from 27 to 29 June 2006 on the drafting of recommendations for the ASEAN Political-Security Community. While it was not invited to subsequent meetings, SAPA submitted its views on the Economic Community on 28 June in Singapore, and on the Socio-Cultural Community and Institutional Mechanisms on 10 November in Manila, and then submitted a final set of seven recommendations through the Philippine EPG representative that reiterated its previous submissions (Solidarity for Asian People’s Advocacy, 2006). The SAPA submissions recommended incorporating environmental sustainability, human rights, and human security into the Charter, among other proposals regarding reforming institutional practices of consensus and non-interference. Chandra (2005) notes that only three EPG members were active in responding to SAPA’s submissions, namely Tan Sri Musa Hitam of Malaysia, Ali Alatas of Indonesia, and Fidel Ramos of the Philippines—notably most of ASEAN’s post-authoritarian members who faced a stronger imperative to respond to claims for reform from domestic CSOs. While the EPG report included some of SAPA’s recommendations—

importantly, its call for civil society consultation to be institutionalised—it emphasised CSOs’ role as raising ASEAN’s profile among Southeast Asian citizens, rather than in informing policy.6 The High-Level Task Force (HLTF) drafted the final version of the Charter and, like the EPG, comprised a representative from each member state, appointed by state leaders. However, while the EPG comprised a mix of retired and serving officials, 9 of the 10 HLTF representatives were serving officials, making them ‘speak for their governments and related ministries and nobody ASEAN’s Engagement of Civil Society 373 else’ (Chongkittavorn, 2007). The Terms of Reference of the HLTF did not specify any form of consultation to be undertaken, with the exception that the HLTF could consult members of the EPG if necessary (ASEAN, 2007c). However, the Philippines and Thai representatives pushed for a meeting with CSOs, which took place on 27 March 2007 in Manila, with 60 representatives of Southeast Asian CSOs (ASEAN, 2007b). At this meeting SAPA representatives again reiterated their three submissions on each of the proposed ASEAN communities, some of which had been included in the EPG report. However, these contributions were not included in the final version of the Charter.7 The Charter mentions the term ‘civil society’ only once and in reference to the role of the ASEAN Foundation, which would collaborate with CSOs ‘to support ASEAN community building’ (ASEAN, 2007a). The ASEAN Foundation’s interactions with CSOs, however, are limited to its provision of IT training courses—this interaction, therefore, not creating the opportunity for political participation.8 The Charter did not expand civil society participation beyond the limits of the affiliation system: it specifies that entities that support the ASEAN Charter may engage with ASEAN; however, this same section then refers to an Appendix detailing the list of affiliated CSOs, thereby limiting participants to those with affiliation. The Charter thus codified civil society participation in ASEAN as being limited to the affiliation system. The language of ASEAN’s proclaimed ‘people-focus’ also changed with the Charter. The EPG used ‘people-centred’ in its report; however, the Charter used ‘people-oriented’, this being a weaker version of the first. The decision to include ‘people-oriented’ rather than ‘people-centred’ in the Charter signalled a subtle downgrading of ASEAN’s participatory agenda from previous pronouncements, given reservations among officials regarding the latter term’s greater inclusivity (Chandra, 2009, p. 10; Nesadurai, 2011, p. 173). Through the consultations conducted by the EPG and the HLTF on the Charter, opportunities were created for CSOs to contribute their views to this important document. However, the relevant ASEAN bodies set the terms of these consultations and created space for CSOs’ views to be represented but not advanced through their inclusion in the Charter. When Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan commenced his appointment on 1 January 2008, he made known his support for civil society engagement from the outset by speaking at the SAPA Annual General Forum in Bangkok on 4 February 2008 where he ‘showed an openness to civil society advocacies and stressed opportunities for cooperation’ (Lopa, 2009). Pitsuwan held a meeting with CSOs and Secretariat officials on 5 March 2008 that ‘explored windows of ASEAN engagement for civil society and laid down civil society plans for engaging the ASEAN’ (Lopa, 2009). He then led the organisation of a conference, from 23 to 25 February 2009, to explore processes of stakeholder engagement in other regional organisations. It was attended by ASEAN and state officials, officials from other regional organisations, and representatives from 18 Southeast Asian CSOs. Pitsuwan also pushed consultations with CSOs on the sensitive issue of human rights. Article 7.1 of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights’ (AICHR) Terms of Reference states that the Secretary-General may ‘bring

relevant issues to the attention of the AICHR’ (ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, 2009). To inform his recommendations to the AICHR, Pitsuwan sought to meet with representatives of regional human rights organisations. He first proposed a meeting in 2009 and, anticipating that such a meeting would be opposed by some member states, he approached an ASEAN – ISIS think tank, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta, to ask for their assistance in facilitating the meeting. In the lead-up to the meeting, news of its occurrence reached the CPR and some responded with harsh criticisms.9 Pitsuwan nonetheless went ahead with the 374 K. Gerard meeting where CSOs presented him with a statement of their concerns that they wanted him to raise with the AICHR; however, he asked participants not to publicise the dialogue’s occurrence.10 The following year, CSOs were informed that a similar meeting would not be possible because of the Secretary-General’s hectic schedule; however, in 2011 Pitsuwan again approached the CSIS to assist in organising a meeting with regional human rights organisations. Again, in the lead-up to the meeting word of its occurrence spread among officials. However, this time some officials from ASEAN’s post-authoritarian states indicated their desire to attend. Their attendance heightened the meeting’s significance; however, classifying it as ‘informal’ meant that the consensus of member states was not necessary in order for it to proceed. These two meetings created space for human rights organisations to dialogue with

officials on this highly sensitive topic. The struggles over its establishment highlight the opposition among officials to engaging CSOs in policy-making, particularly on the contentious issue of human rights—an issue that conflicts with the interests of some officials. These meetings did not, however, advance the claims of CSOs regarding ASEAN’s human rights commitments, seen in the persistent ineffectuality of the AICHR (Solidarity for Asian People’s Advocacy Working Group on ASEAN and Human Rights, 2012). The other ASEAN body that has held consultations with CSOs is the ASEAN Committee on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC). The ACWC was formed in 2010 following the birth of this idea in the Vientiane Action Programme in 2004 (article 1.1.4.7), as well as all member states ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It comprises two representatives from each ASEAN member state, one concerned with women’s issues and the other with children’s issues. There is some support among ACWC representatives for consulting CSOs regarding its policies, given that some of its representatives previously or currently are employed in the civil society sector.11 The ACWC first held a consultation with CSOs on the drafting of its Terms of Reference on 29 April 2009 where a civil society representative spoke about relevant civil society activities and potential areas for collaboration with the ACWC (FORUM-ASIA, 2010). CSOs that had shown an interest in meeting with members of the ACWC, whether by having contacted the Chair or the Committee’s national representatives, were invited to attend. The ACWC has subsequently held a number of informal consultations with CSOs, with participation open to all organisations wishing to contribute. Some ACWC representatives were opposed to meeting with CSOs, so the preference has been to keep meetings informal so that discussions cannot be publicised and ACWC representatives’ attendance remains optional. One ACWC representative reported that there has been increasing enthusiasm and willingness from representatives to meet with CSOs: ‘At the beginning it was very informal ... those who felt like engaging did ... This time around, we were all there, and we all had to say something about what we did. I think that was very productive.’12 ACWC representatives also reported that they regarded these informal meetings to be an improvement on their previous encounters with activists. One ACWC representative noted activists would hang around when we have formal meetings, they wait for you in the lobby or they follow you to the restroom. Always they would know where I’m staying, they are so good at spying on where I’m staying. In the middle of the night they are knocking on the door.13 Structured informal consultations with CSOs thus were attractive to ACWC representatives by overcoming such issues. ASEAN’s Engagement of Civil Society 375 It is evident that the efficacy of the ad hoc consultations for CSOs depends on whether these interactions are classified as formal or informal. When regarded as formal, such as the consultations for the Charter, they require the approval of all member states, which functions in delimiting civil society participation. When classified as informal, a much freer dialogue has taken place. However, the informality of such interactions also limits their potential to shape ASEAN policy, as consensus among all member states is needed to endorse any proposed policy changes. Meanwhile, the personalities at the helm of ASEAN organs that have pursued consultations with CSOs have been instrumental in ensuring these interactions have taken place, and hence their continuation cannot be guaranteed. As such, these ad hoc consultations have functioned in creating spaces for dialogue between officials and CSOs, but they have not prompted changes to ASEAN policies in accordance with CSOs’ agendas. GO-NGO Forums The third participatory mechanism established by ASEAN for CSOs are the annual GO-NGO forums that have been established by the ASEAN bodies for Migrant Labour, Social Welfare and Development, and Rural Development and Poverty Eradication (‘GO-NGO’ referring to government organisation/non-governmental organisation). These forums are held prior to the annual meeting of the relevant sectoral ministers’ meeting and they are intended to create the opportunity for officials and CSOs to engage in a dialogue. These forums generally comprise a number of panels, after which participants divide into discussion groups that put forward recommendations based on their discussions. A drafting team made up of moderators, rapporteurs, and forum organisers then consolidates these recommendations, which are presented to participants in a plenary session for debate. Finally the recommendations are submitted to the relevant ministers for discussion at their annual meeting. In the case of the Social Welfare and Development forum, it was first held from 7 to 9 September 2006 in Bangkok. The forum rotates annually among ASEAN states, and its organisation is shared between the Social Welfare Ministry of the host country, the ASEAN Secretariat and the International Council on Social Welfare, which is a global network of social welfare organisations. The organisation of the migrant labour forum is shared between the Labour Ministry of the host country, the ASEAN Secretariat, and the International Labour Organisation. It provides a forum for dialogue between government officials, workers’ and employers’ organisations, CSOs, and relevant international organisations such as the International Organisation on Migration. The first was held in Manila from 24 to 25 April 2008 and was organised as a follow-up meeting to the ASEAN Leaders Declaration on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers that was signed at the 12th ASEAN Summit in Cebu in January 2007. The Senior Officials’ Meeting on Rural Development and Poverty Eradication then decided to hold an equivalent forum, with the first held in Da Nang on 12 June 2012. It was organised by the ASEAN Secretariat in collaboration with the state host, the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, and attended by relevant ASEAN officials, CSOs, and representatives of the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, the United Nations Development Programme, and the Asian Development Bank (AsiaDHRRA, 2012). Across these GO-NGO forums, civil society participants are invited to attend rather than participation being open to those that wish to participate. While the list of invited participants extends beyond those that are affiliated with ASEAN, an informal system of selecting participants whose interests are deemed to align with ASEAN operates.14 In this informal system of 376 K. Gerard selecting participants, each country compiles a list of organisations they wish to invite. Each list is considered by members of the CPR and if any of the nominated invitees are deemed contentious by a member state, they will be removed from the list, as noted by an ASEAN official: ‘We never know, some organisations are blacklisted in some countries. So as long as all 10 member states are agreeable to engage with certain organisations, although they are not affiliated, that should be fine.’15 The invitees remaining on the list are subsequently asked to participate. Given that all participants must receive the endorsement of all member states, ASEAN closely regulates which CSOs can participate in the GO-NGO forums. Many of the participants of these forums are GONGOs (government-organised non-governmental organisations), these being groups that are established and/or maintained by states. While the distinction between a GONGO and an independent CSO varies across countries, as does the extent of governmental control over their activities, organisations with a more contentious agenda and grassroots groups are generally not represented in the GO-NGO forums. Participation is largely restricted to nationally accredited CSOs, which, like the affiliation system, is biased towards organisations with formalised and legalised systems of operation and groups that do

not contest national policies and maintain the favour of their governments. Through this system of regulating who can participate, these forums function in embedding prevailing institutional interests by creating a veneer of inclusiveness through dialogues between CSOs and officials, while ensuring that those groups that do not support these prevailing interests cannot attend. Additionally, these forums provide a site for the representation of interests that are aligned with ASEAN’s market-building reforms or particular state objectives. One example is the 192 recommendations that were put forward by the SAPA Task Force on ASEAN and Migrant Workers in May 2009, just prior to the 2nd ASEAN Forum on Migrant Labour in July (Southeast Asia Regional Cooperation in Human Development [SEARCH], 2010). A regional migrant workers advocacy organisation, SEARCH, noted that three out of the four government delegations that comprised the Drafting Committee of the ASEAN Committee on Migrant Workers used this document as their primary source of information (SEARCH, 2010). More significantly, however, of these three governments, the Indonesian and Philippine delegations adopted approximately 60 per cent of the recommendations into their initial bargaining positions (SEARCH, 2010). The alignment of the interests of the Indonesian and Philippine delegations with more than half of the recommendations put forward by the SAPA task force reflected the status of these two states as two of the three major intra-region sending countries for migrant workers, the third being Myanmar. These countries’ views on the promotion and protection of the rights of migrant workers frequently conflict with those of recipient countries, the three largest in Southeast Asia being Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. This is because sending countries advocate for recipient countries to improve oversight of the working conditions of migrant workers employed in these states, and recipient states bear the cost of these regulations. Thus, through participation, CSOs in this instance provided information; however, it was only adopted by those states whose interests it supported, while the conflicts between states over the regulations governing migrant workers meant that CSOs’ views were not incorporated into regional policy. More generally, through the selection of which CSOs can participate and the limited influence their contribution has on regional policy, these participatory mechanisms function in legitimating ASEAN policy by sustaining its participatory rhetoric, while ensuring that groups cannot challenge policy or advance alternative ideas through these spaces. ASEAN’s Engagement of Civil Society 377 Conclusion:

Modes of Participation in Evaluating CSOs’ Influence in Policy-making Like many regional and global governance institutions, ASEAN has committed to widening policy-making to include CSOs. Through ad hoc consultations and the GO-NGO forums, ASEAN has established two new participatory mechanisms in support of its ‘people-centred’ approach to regional integration, alongside the existing affiliation system. Using the modes of participation framework to explain their form and function, this article has examined these participatory channels. These three modes of participation share three characteristics that function in preventing CSOs from using these channels to contest policy or advance policy alternatives. First,

regulations over who can participate in these spaces ensure that CSOs working on contentious issues and groups that vocally criticise policy are excluded. This is evident in two of these three opportunities, namely the affiliation system and the GO-NGO forums, being structurally biased towards the inclusion of organisations that are well-resourced, have formalised systems of operation, and do not vocally criticise ASEAN or state policy. Given that the CPR determines which CSOs can participate in these two spaces, dissenting voices are readily excluded. The ad hoc consultations conducted by various ASEAN bodies remain outside the control of the CPR, and consequently provide the opportunity for participation by groups seeking to contest policy. However, the informal status of the ad hoc consultations, which permits the inclusion of such groups, also ensures that these deliberations are unlikely to have any impact on policy, given that all policy decisions require the endorsement of all member states. Second, strict controls over the nature of participation in these channels narrow the possible contributions by participants. The only form of participation guaranteed by the affiliation system is the ability to submit written statements to the CPR, restricting the potential for affiliated organisations to influence, or even deliberate, policy. The GO-NGO forums hold opportunities for participants to contest policy. However, the actual reform of policy relies on any recommendations gaining the full support of member states. As described in the case of the SAPA Task Force on ASEAN and Migrant Workers, while some of its recommendations for ASEAN’s policy regulating the rights of migrant workers received the support of labour source countries, these were not supported by labour recipient countries, resulting in no substantive change to regional policy according to the agendas of CSOs. For the ad hoc consultations, the restrictions governing participation are shaped by whether a consultation is regarded as formal or informal. Formal gatherings remain tightly controlled affairs where opportunities for CSOs to deliberate policy are minimised, such as in the case of the Charter consultations. As informal meetings do not require the approval of the CPR, a more open and deliberative dialogue can take place, such as in the case of the meetings initiated by Pitsuwan on human rights. However, again, the informal nature of such consultations means they are unlikely to prompt policy reforms in accordance with CSOs’ objectives. Meanwhile, their occurrence has also been heavily influenced by the personalities at the helm of the relevant ASEAN bodies and hence their continuation is not assured. Third, the issue in question shapes the boundaries of all three participatory mechanisms, as outlined by one ASEAN official: If we are talking about poverty reduction or social welfare of vulnerable groups, I think those are soft issues, no hesitation from member states. But when we touch upon some sensitive issues, like for example human rights ... then the interaction with civil society is different.16 Those issues deemed ‘sensitive’ by officials are those where CSOs’ advocacy challenges the interests and priorities of dominant social forces. These issues do not fall within the remit of 378 K. Gerard concerns that are open for discussion between officials and CSOs, because doing so would create channels for the representation of dissenting views, supporting CSOs’ claims for reform. However, consultations with CSOs on non-contentious issues permit officials to harness the contribution of organisations in support of its market-building reforms. The issue-specific nature of ASEAN’s approach to engaging CSOs is evident in the GO-NGO forums, where ASEAN has designated specific sectoral concerns for dialogue between officials and civil society representatives, namely migrant labour, social welfare and development, and rural development and poverty eradication, all of which are relevant to ASEAN’s programme for economic integration. However, effective regional human rights protections are one concern that does not align with this project, demonstrated in the opposition encountered by Pitsuwan in attempting to meet with human rights CSOs. Conspicuously absent from all opportunities for civil society participation are issues deemed even more contentious by officials, given that they directly oppose powerful interests, such as land evictions in Cambodia or political reform in Myanmar. These issues, and the relevant CSOs, are excluded from all spaces established by ASEAN for civil society participation. These three features of ASEAN’s approach to engaging civil society demonstrate how ASEAN’s ‘people-centred’ shift

functions in furthering prevailing institutional interests. Permitting some organisations to participate but limiting their ability to contest policy, these participatory mechanisms are structured to legitimise policy as testimony to ASEAN’s ‘people-centred’ commitments while excluding dissenting social forces. ASEAN engages CSOs in this manner because its post-crisis engagement with civil society is directed towards boosting its legitimacy and furthering its narrow reform agenda, rather than creating opportunities for CSOs to contest this political project. As argued by Carroll in his examination of the World Bank’s engagement practices, inclusive rhetoric is ‘more than just spurious lingo or clever spin’ (2010, p. 7, emphasis in original). Such rhetoric is designed to create legitimacy, in this instance, for ASEAN’s political project. This inclusive rhetoric creates legitimacy because it is attached to the mechanisms that ASEAN has established to engage CSOs. However, these mechanisms are structured to include those groups that can advance ASEAN’s set of narrow reforms, while circumscribing the participation of non-amenable interests. In doing so, ASEAN’s approach to engagement functions in silencing its dissenters, who have become increasingly organised and vocal. The limited means for CSOs to assert

their claims for reform through spaces established by ASEAN supports the decision of some CSOs to avoid engaging ASEAN altogether and pursue their agendas outside of such channels, where they contest the limited formal opportunities for their participation. Applying the modes of political participation framework to the ASEAN case has permitted a systematic analysis of ASEAN’s approach to engaging CSOs, and revealed how participatory channels are structured to support its market-building reforms. This framework draws into the analysis the conflicts that define relations between CSOs and governance institutions, and the role of

prevailing institutional interests in structuring participatory channels. Claims that participatory policy-making addresses ‘democracy deficits’ must be considered in light of how participatory channels are structured—specifically, whether through participation CSOs access not only opportunities for representation, but also the means to contest policy or advance policy alternatives. As this article has demonstrated, the broader shift to engage CSOs in regional and global policy-making should be viewed as creating sites for contestation rather than being implicitly democratising.

Its try or die for the perm – not all knowledge of the West is unreliable - awareness of orientalism is key before effective engagement Hamid 08’ Hamid Kbiri, Major, Royal Moroccan Air Force, “The Influence of Orientalism on American Perceptions and Policies in the Middle-East, April 2008, accessed 7/14/19, http://www.scribd.com/doc/12070695/The-Influence-of-Orientalism-on-American-Perceptions-and-Policies-in-the-MiddleEast - sfrrpt

In sum, Western perceptions of the Middle-East are largely informed by Orientalism both as a cultural mode of thought and an academic discipline. Depictions of Islam, the dominant religion, as a unitary and aggressive civilization have reinforced such frightening ideas as the clash of civilizations between a civilized West and an enraged Middle-East. Orientalism as a long-standing tradition has played an important role in shaping how the public, the Media and leaders, be they military or civilians, have made sense of the Middle-East in America. Views that Middle-Easterners are monolithic people thinking and responding in monolithic ways conditioned by the teachings of a monolithic Islam have influenced the policies and measures pursued by America in this critical region. After all, leaders like scholars may “attempt to reach a level of relative freedom from … brute, everyday reality, but they can never quite escape or ignore their involvement as human subjects in their own circumstances.” 193 While historians are just beginning to explore the debilitating effect that cultural assumptions have had on diplomatic relations with the Middle-East, 194 growing emphasis on cultural awareness in the US military seems to translate a consciousness that the traditional Orientalist perception paradigm has reached its limits. However, pinning the hope of achieving an accurate understanding of Middle-Eastern peoples and their culture exclusively on books that are in large part responsible of the existing confusion –and that continue to feature on top of Military recommended readings- might not be very helpful in achieving an accurate assessment of the situation and therefore devising appropriate military strategies or measures. Now, Orientalist driven behaviors or attitudes may just as well contribute to a sort of perception dilemma (by analogy with security dilemma.) In27 such a dilemma, Orientalism and Occidentalism 195 (Orientalism in reverse) would nurture one another to culminate in the self-prophesized “Clash of Civilizations” – that

would be better named the “Clash of Perceptions.” Recommendations: Of course, not all the knowledge produced by academic Orientalism is unreliable. There are certainly elements of truth in this knowledge, but one has to be at least aware of the bias and the imperfections of its approaches. Many of its methodologies are marred by epistemological flaws and inconsistencies. The shortcomings of the Orientalist framework of interpretation include foregrounding aspects and ignoring others and blaming socio-economic realities on religious or racial defects. 196 While the Orientalist expertise should not be taken nor rejected wholesale, there is a need to enlist the expertise of other social science disciplines which have kept up with scientific and technological development. Many Middle-East Studies researchers have indeed adopted modern empirical tools such as surveys, statistics and case studies to provide scientifically evidenced explanations of what is going on in the Middle-East. 197 Orientalists’ authority should not be a free pass to issue overarching statements about the Middle-East based only on their mastery of some of its language and their ability to decipher a collection of dusty medieval texts. The raging academic debate in Middle-East Studies is indicative of the existence of contending visions of the Middle-East. To feed officials or

military leaders just one version of “the Middle-East” is to limit their ability to effectively come to terms with the realities they might encounter on the ground. Curricula aimed at heightening cultural awareness of this region should therefore include the works of equally authoritative if not more serious and rigorous academics 198 presenting different approaches to this region. Based on OIF,decision makers should not ‘slavishly’ embrace Orientalists’ pronouncements but rather take a28 critical distance from their expertise. Awareness, at least, of the existence of the Orientalist prism is a key step to successfully engaging this increasingly important region in the world’s great political and economic affairs. It is time to challenge the conventional wisdom infused by Orientalism. It is time to think outside the Orientalist box.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/12070695/The-Influence-of-Orientalism-on-American-Perceptions-and-Policies-in-the-MiddleEast

http://www.scribd.com/doc/12070695/The-Influence-of-Orientalism-on-American-Perceptions-and-Policies-in-the-MiddleEast

AUTHOR INDITESThe pretentious use of language in Said’s Orientalism renders his work meaningless his theory of orientalism becomes nonsenseWarraq 07


“FROM PRETENTIOUSNESS TO MEANINGLESSNESS There are, as I shall show, several contradictory theses buried in Said's impenetrable prose, with its endless postmodern jargon ("a universe of representative discourse," "Orientalist discourse" [p. 71]-and some kind editor really ought to have explained to Said the meaning of "literally"

[pp. 19, 87, 93, 138, 179, 218, 307] and the difference between scatalogical and eschatological [p. 68]), and pretentious language that often conceals some banal observation, as when Said talks of "textual attitude" (pp. 92-93), when all he means is "bookish" or "bookishness." Tautologies abound, as in "the freedom of licentious sex" (p. 190).” “ Or take these comments: Thus out of the Napoleonic expedition there issued a whole series of textual children, from Chateaubriand's Itineraire to Lamartine's Voyage en Orient to Flaubert's Salammbo, and in the same tradition, Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and Richard Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Meccah. What binds them together is not only their common background in Oriental legend and experience but also their learned reliance on the Orient as a kind of womb out of which they were brought forth. If paradoxically these creations turned out to[…]” “be highly stylized simulacra, elaborately wrought imitations of what a live Orient might be thought to look like, that by no means detracts from their strength of their imaginative conception or from the strength of European mastery of the Orient, whose prototypes

respectively were Cagliostro, the great European impersonator of the Orient, and Napoleon, its first modern conqueror. (pp. 87-88) What does Said mean by "out of the Napoleonic expedition there issued a whole series of textual children,"

except that these five very varied works were written after 1798? The pretentious language of textual children issuing from the Napoleonic expedition covers up this obvious fact. Perhaps there is a profound thesis hidden in the jargon, that these works were somehow influenced by the Napoleonic expedition, inspired by it, and could not have been written without it. But no such thesis is offered. This arbitrary group consists of three Frenchmen, two ” “Englishmen-one work of romantic historical fiction, three travel books, and one detailed study of modern Egyptians. Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand's Itineraire (1811) describes superbly his visit to the Near East; Voyage en Orient (1835) is Alphonse de Lamartine's impressions of Palestine, Syria, and Greece; Salammbo (1862) is Gustave Flaubert's novel of ancient Carthage; Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) is a fascinating firsthand account of life in Egypt, particularly Cairo and Luxor, written after years of residence there (first 1825-28, then 1833-35); Richard Burton's account of his audacious visit to Mecca was first published in three volumes between 1855 and 1856. Lane and Burton both had perfect command of Arabic, classical and colloquial, while the others did not, and both, particularly Lane, made contributions to Islamic studies, but not the three Frenchmen.” “What do they conceivably have in common? Said tells us that what binds them together is not only "their common background in Oriental legend and experience but also their learned reliance on the Orient as a kind of womb out of which they were brought forth." What is the background of Oriental legend that inspired Burton or Lane? Was Flaubert's vivid

imagination stimulated by "Oriental legend," and was this the same legendary material that inspired Burton, Lane, and Lamartine? "Learned reliance on the Orient as a kind of womb" is yet another example of Said's pompous way of saying the obvious, namely, that they were writing about an Orient of which they had some experience and intellectual knowledge. “Why are these disparate works "imitations"? Take Lane's and Burton's works: They are both highly accurate accounts based on personal, firsthand experience. They are not imitations of anything. James Aldridge in his study Cairo (1969) called Lane's account "the most truthful and detailed account in English of how Egyptians lived and behaved."3 Burton's observations are still quoted for their scientific value in such scholarly works as F. E. Peters's The Hajj.4 Said also says of Lane, "For Lane's legacy as a scholar mattered not to the Orient, of course, but to the institutions and agencies of his European society" (p. 164). There is no "of course" about it, Lane's Arabic Lexicon (5 vols; 1863-74) is still one of the first lexicons consulted by any Muslim scholars wishing to translate the Koran into English; scholars such as Maulana Muhammad Ali, who began his English translation in 1909 and refers constantly to Lane in his copious footnotes, as does A. Yusuf Ali in his 1934 translation. What is more, the only place where one can still buy a reasonably priced copy of Lane's indispensable work of reference

is in Beirut-the edition published by the Librairie du Liban.” “What profound mysteries are unraveled by Said's final tortuous sentence? Count Alessandro Cagliostro was a Sicilian charlatan who traveled in Greece, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, Rhodes, and Malta. During his travels he is said to have acquired considerable knowledge of the esoteric sciences, alchemy in particular. On his return to Europe, Cagliostro was involved in many

swindles and seems to have been responsible for many forgeries of one kind or another, but he found time to establish many masonic lodges and secret societies. He died in prison in 1795. He did not contribute anything whatsoever to the scientific study of the Near or Middle East, either of its languages or of its history or culture. He was not a distinguished Orientalist in the way Lane was. Indeed, apart from his "Letter to the French

People" (1786), I do not think Cagliostro ever wrote anything worthy of being called scientific, or of scholarly value. Cagliostro, according to Said, was the prototype of "[the above five authors'] imaginative conception." Is he suggesting that they, too, fabricated their entire knowledge of the Egypt, the Near East, and Arabia? If that is what Said means, it is false, for reasons discussed above. For Said[…]”“ Napoleon was the prototype of the "strength of European mastery of the Orient," since he was the Orient's first modern conqueror. This would be fine as a metaphor-Lane and Burton mastered Arabic in the way Napoleon mastered Egypt-but unfortunately, in the rest of his book Said seems to suggest something far

more literal and sinister in the complicity of Orientalists with the imperial powers. “Orientalism is peppered with meaningless sentences. Take, for example, "Truth, in short, becomes a function of learned judgment, not of the material itself, which in time seems to owe its existence to the Orientalist" (p. 67). Said seems to be saying that "truth" is created by the experts or Orientalists, and does not correspond to reality, to what is actually out there. So far, so good. But then "what is out there" is also said to owe its existence to the Orientalist. If that is the case, then the first part of Said's sentence makes no sense, and if the first part is true then the second part makes no sense. Is Said relying on that weasel word "seems" to get him out of the mess? That ruse will not work either, for what would it mean to say that an external reality independent of the Orientalist's judgment also seems to be a creation of the Orientalist? That would be a simple

contradiction. “Here is another example: "The Orientalist can imitate the Orient without the opposite being true." (p. 160). Throughout his book, Said is at pains to point out that there is no such thing as "the Orient," which, for him, is merely a meaningless abstraction concocted by Orientalists in the service of imperialists and racists. In which case, what on earth could "The Orient cannot imitate the Orientalist" possibly mean? If we replace "the Orient" by the individual countriessay, those lying between Egypt and India-do we get anything more coherent? No, obviously not: "India, Egypt, and Iran cannot imitate the Orientalists l ike

Renan, Bernard Lewis, Burton, et al." We get nonsense whichever way we try to gloss Said's sentence.”

Said’s conception of Orientalism is inherently contradictory rendering it meaningless Warraq 07


“At times, Said seems to allow that the Orientalists did attain genuine knowledge of the Orient-its history, culture, languages-as when he calls Lane's work Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians "a classic of historical and anthropological observation because of its style, its enormously intelligent and brilliant details" (p. 15); or when he talks of "a growing systematic knowledge in Europe about the Orient" (p. 39), since Said does not have sarcastic quotation marks around the word "knowledge," I presume he means there was a growth in genuine ”

“knowledge. Further on, Said talks of Orientalism producing "a fair amount of exact positive knowledge about the Orient" (p. 52). Again, I take it Said is not being ironical when he talks of "philological discoveries in comparative grammar made by

Jones" (p. 98). At one point, Said mentions Orientalism's "objective discoveries" (p. 203). Yet these acknowledgments of the discoveries made by Orientalists are contradicted by Said's insistence that there is no such thing as "truth" (p. 271), or when he characterizes Orientalism as "a form of paranoia, knowledge of another kind, say, from ordinary historical

knowledge" (p. 73). Or again, "it is finally Western ignorance which becomes more refined and complex, not some body of positive Western knowledge which increases in size and accuracy" (p. 62). At one point Said seems to deny that the Orientalists had acquired any objective knowledge at all (p. 122), and a little later he also writes, "the advances made by a `science' like Orientalism in its academic form are less objectively true than we often like to think" (p. 202). “ It is true that the last phrase does leave open the possibility that some of

the science may be true, though less than we had hitherto thought. Said also wholeheartedly endorses Abdel Malek's strictures against

Orientalism and its putatively false "knowledge" of the Orient" (p. 96-97). In his 1994 afterword, Said insists that he has "no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are" (p. 331). And yet he contradicts this outburst of uncharacteristic humility and modesty when he claims that "[the Orientalist's] Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized" (p. 104), for such a

formulation assumes Said knows what the real Orient is. Such an assumption is also apparent in his statement that "the present crisis dramatizes the disparity between texts and reality" (p. 109). In order to be able to tell the

difference between the two, Said must know what the reality is. This is equally true when Said complains that "[t]o look into Orientalism for a lively sense of an Oriental's human or even social reality ... is to look in vain" (p. 176).”

Said’s work is rooted within a method of self-pity that ignores his position of privilege to discuss the orientWarraq 07


“SELF-PITY, POSTIMPERIALIST VICTIMHOOD, AND IMPERIALISM In order to achieve his goal of painting the West in general, and the discipline

of Orientalism in particular, in as negative a way as possible, Said has recourse to several tactics. One of his preferred moves is to depict the Orient as a perpetual victim of Western imperialism, dominance, and aggression. The Orient is never seen as an actor, an agent with free will or designs or ideas of its own. It is to this propensity that we owe that immature and unattractive quality of so much contemporary Middle Eastern culture, self-pity, and the belief that all its ills are the result of imaginary Western-Zionist conspiracies." Here is an example of Said's own belief in such conspiracies taken from The Question of Palestine: "It was perfectly apparent to Western supporters of Zionism like Balfour that the colonization of Palestine was made a goal for the Western powers from the very beginning of Zionist planning: Herzl used the idea, Weizmann used it, every leading Israeli since has used it. Israel was a device for holding

Islam-later the Soviet Union, or communism-at bay."16 So Israel was created to hold “Islam at bay! As for the politics of victimhood, Said has "milked it himself to an indecent degree."" Said wrote: My own experiences of these matters are in part what made me write this book. The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental . The web of, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come

to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny. (p. 27) Such wallowing in self-pity from a tenured and much-feted professor at Columbia University, where he enjoyed privileges that we lesser mortals only dream of (and a decent

salary), all the while spewing forth hatred of the country that took him in and heaped honors on him, is nauseating. As Ian Buruma concluded in his review of Said's memoir, Out of Place, "The more he dwells on his suffering and his exile status,

the more his admirers admire him. On me, however, it has the opposite effect. Of all the attitudes that shape a memoir, self-pity is the least attractive.""

Said’s work is flawed from obscuring diversity and complexity, essentalization, lack of historical evidence, pretentious language, contradictory claims, misrepresenting the work of scholars, and misrepresenting the WestMart 15,

[BA, Selcuk University, Faculty of Education, English Language Teaching, Konya, 1999 MA, Fatih University, English Language and Literature, Istanbul, 2010 PhD, International Black Sea University, Educational Sciences, English Language Teaching]

In Defending the West, Ibn Warraq demonstrates that Said is guilty of the major intellectual errors he ostentatiously decries in the twenty-fifth anniversary edition preface: obscuring the diversity and complexity of lived experience by falsely ascribing essential features to peoples and civilizations; and rendering categorical moral and political judgments without the adequate historical knowledge on which responsible judgment depends. He shows that Said routinely produces pretentious, meaningless, and contradictory speech. Most notably, in the fashion of the more glib postmodernism, Said stresses that "the Orient" does not exist but is rather the paranoid construction of Western scholars. This, however, does not prevent him from blatantly contradicting himself by positing that two centuries of study by scholars in Europe and the U.S. have produced "a growing systematic knowledge in Europe about the Orient" and "a fair amount of exact positive knowledge about the Orient." Nor does it stop Said from decrying Orientalists because contrary to his insistence that a real Orient does not exist and contrary to his acknowledgment that the Orientalists have gained substantial knowledge of it — they have "‘no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are.' Said’s case against the West is seriously flawed. Warraq accuses Said of not only willfully misinterpreting the work of many scholars, but also of systematically misrepresenting Western civilization as a whole. Charles Paul Freund in his article “The end of the Orientalist critique” argues that Said in his book Orientalism was a harsh interpretation of the West's attitude toward just these matters, and the critique he established has since dominated the intellectual appraisal of the West's political and cultural relationship to the Muslim world and other peoples of the East. What was Orientalism? Said identified it in his foundational work as the political, cultural, and intellectual system by which the West has for centuries "managed" its relationship with the Islamic world. The central stratagem of this process has been reductionist misrepresentation. In brief, according to Said and the army of intellectual critics and journalists who have come in his wake, Orientalism transforms the East and its people into an alien "Other." That Other—usually a Dark Other—was in every way the inferior of the West: unenlightened, barbarous, cruel, craven, enslaved to its senses, given to despotism, and, in general, contemptible. Having established an Eastern Other in these degrading terms, the West emerged at the center of its self-serving discourse as, by obvious contrast, enlightened and progressive.

Alt FailsOrientalism limits the possibility of self-examination for Muslims and the Arab orient and functioned as a form of intellectual terrorism that accuse Orientalists of being complicity with power Warraq 07


“And yet, ironically, what makes self-examination for Arabs and Muslims, and especially criticism of Islam in the West, very difficult is the totally pernicious influence of Edward Said's Orientalism.2 The latter work taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity-"were it not for the wicked imperialists, racists and Zionists, we would be great once more"-encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam, and even stopped dead the research of eminent

Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslim sensibilities and who dared not risk being labeled "Orientalist." The aggressive tone of Orientalism is what I have called "intellectual terrorism," since it seeks to convince not by arguments or historical analysis, but by spraying charges of racism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism from a moral high ground; anyone who disagrees with Said has insult heaped upon him. The moral high ground “; anyone who

disagrees with Said has insult heaped upon him. The moral high ground is an essential element in Said's tactics. Since he believes his position is morally unimpeachable, Said obviously thinks he is justified in using any means possible to defend it, including the distortion of the views of eminent scholars, interpreting intellectual and political history in a highly tendentious way-

in short, twisting the truth. But in any case, he does not believe in the "truth." Said attacks not only the entire discipline of Orientalism, which is devoted to the academic study of the Orient and which Said accuses of perpetuating negative racial stereotypes, anti-Arab and anti-

Islamic prejudice, and the myth of an unchanging, essential "Orient," but he also accuses Orientalists as being a group complicit with imperial power and holds them responsible for creating the distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority, which they achieve by suppressing the voice of the "Oriental" and by their antihuman tendency to make huge, but vague, generalizations about entire populations that in reality consist of millions of individuals. In other words, much of what was written about the Orient in general, and Islam and Islamic civilization in particular, was false. The Orientalists also stand accused of creating "the Other"-the non-European, always characterized in a negative way, as, for example, passive, weak, and in need of civilizing by the advanced West (contrasting Western strength with Eastern weakness). But "Orientalism" is also more generally "a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between `the Orient' and (most of the time) `the Occident"' (p. ” “2).

Thus, European writers of fiction, epics, travel, social descriptions, customs, and people are all accused of "Orientalism." In short, Orientalism is seen "as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." Said makes much of the notion of a discourse derived from Michel Foucault, who argued that supposedly objective and natural structures in society, which privilege some and punish others for nonconformity, are in fact "discourses of power." The putative "objectivity" of a discipline covered up its real nature; disciplines such as Orientalism participated in such discourses. Said continues, "[W]ithout examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage-even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period" (p. 3).”

Orientalism as a theory makes totalizing claims about the motives of western civilization, rather it is the western intellectual inquisitiveness that lead the east to rediscover their past and identityWarraq 07


“MISUNDERSTANDING OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION The golden thread running through Western civilization is rationalism. As Aristotle said, "Man by nature strives to know." This striving for knowledge results in science, which is but the application of

reason. Intellectual inquisitiveness is one of the hallmarks of Western civilization. As J. M. Roberts put it, The massive indifference of some civilisations and their lack of curiosity about other worlds is a vast subject . Why, until very recently, did Islamic scholars show no wish to translate Latin or western European texts into Arabic? Why, when the English poet Dryden could confidently write a play focused on the succession in Delhi after the death of the Mogul emperor Aurungzebe, is it a safe

guess that no Indian writer ever thought of a play about the equally dramatic politics of the English seventeenth-century court? It is clear that an explanation of European inquisitiveness and adventurousness must lie deeper than economics, important though they may have been. It was not just greed which made Europeans feel they could go out and take the world. The love of gain is confined to no particular people or culture. It was shared in the fifteenth ” “century by many an Arab, Gujarati or Chinese merchant. Some Europeans wanted more. They wanted to explore 39 Marxists, Freudians, and anti-imperialists, who crudely reduce all human activities to money, sex, and power, respectively, have difficulties in

understanding the very notion of disinterested intellectual inquiry. European man, by nature, strives to know. Science undoubtedly owed some of its impetus to finding ways of changing base metal into gold and to attempts to solve practical problems, but surely science owes as much to the desire to know, to get at the truth. This is the reason philosophers like Karl Popper have called it a spiritual achievement. Hence, the desperate attempts by Said to smear every single Orientalist with the lowest of motives are not only reprehensible but also fail to give due weight to this golden thread running through Western civilization. ” “One should also have reminded Said that it was this desire for knowledge on the part of Europeans that led the people of the Near East to recover and discover their own past and their own identity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia, ancient Syria, ancient Palestine, and Iran were carried out entirely by Europeans and, later, Americans. The disciplines of Egyptology, Assyriology, and Iranology, all of which restored to mankind a large part of its heritage, were the exclusive creations of inquisitive Europeans and Americans-whereas, for doctrinal reasons, Islam deliberately refused to look at its pre-Islamic past, which was considered a period of ignorance.40”

Orientalism essentializes the west as racist, imperialist, and ethnocentric this pushes western writers and scholars out of the discussion Warraq 07


In a disingenuous 1994 afterword, Said denies that he is anti-Western and that the phenomenon of Orientalism is a synecdoche of the entire West. He claims that there is no such stable reality as "the Orient" or "the Occident," that there is no enduring Oriental reality and even less an enduring Western essence , and that he has no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are (pp. 330-33). But a close reading of Orientalism

is enough to show Said's anti-Westernism. While he does occasionally use inverted commas around "the Orient" and "the Occident," the entire force of Said's polemic comes from the polar opposites and contrasts of the East and the West, the Orient and Europe, Us and the Other, which he himself has crudely set up.” “Said wrote, "I doubt that it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries that was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact [of imperialism]-and yet that is what I am

saying in this study of Orientalism" (p. 11; emphasis in original). Here is Said's characterization of all Europeans: "It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost ” “totally ethnocentric" (p. 204). In other words, not only are all Europeans racist, but they must necessarily be so. Said claims he is explicitly antiessentialist, particularly about "the West." But here is Said again: "Consider first the demarcation between Orient and West. It already seems bold by the time of the Iliad. Two of the most profoundly influential qualities associated with the East appear in Aeschylus's The Persians, the earliest Athenian play extant, and in The Bacchae of Euripides, the very last one

extant.... The two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of European imaginative geography. A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant" (pp. 56-57). As Keith

Windschuttle comments on that passage:” “These same motifs persist in Western culture, [Said] claims, right down to the modern period. This is a tradition that accommodates perspectives as divergent as those of Aeschylus, Dante, Victor Hugo, and Karl Marx.

However, in describing "the essential motifs" of the European geographic imagination that have persisted since ancient Greece, he is ascribing to the West a coherent self identity that has produced a specific set of value judgements-"Europe is powerful and articulate: Asia is defeated and distant"-that have remained

constant for the past 2,500 years. This is, of course, nothing less than the use of the very notion of "essentialism" that he elsewhere condemns so vigorously. In short, it is his own work that is essentialist ” “and ahistorical. He himself commits the very faults he says are so objectionable in the work of Orientalists." And here is another example to prove Said's anti-Western essentialism: "The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be `Oriental' in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be-that is, submitted to being-made

Oriental" (p. 6). Here we have Said's reductionistic absurdity: the "average nineteenth-century European." A part of Said's tactic is to leave out Western writers and scholars who do not conform to his theoretical framework . Since, for Said, all Europeans are a priori racist, he obviously cannot allow himself to quote writers who are not . Indeed, one could write a parallel work to Orientalism made up of extracts from Western writers, scholars, and travelers who were attracted by various aspects of non-European cultures, which they praised and contrasted favorably with their own decadence, bigotry, intolerance, and bellicosity.”

Said’s Orientalism fails to analyze the interactions between cultures and instead singles out Europe’s failure to offer anything other than imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism this leads to an eschewing of materialist analysis and provides a flawed critic of the middle east.Mart 15,


Said in Orientalism never really tackles the problem of the proper approach to "other" cultures and a sense of ambiguity and unresolved dilemma persists with the reader. Said sidesteps the issue by saying that his purpose is not to displace the old system of representations with a new one but simply to describe the context for the rise and development of Orientalism and its consequences. At one point, however, Said writes that "human societies, or at least the most advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism in dealing with 'other' cultures." Now, if all "advanced cultures" (including the developing Oriental ones) share this basic tendency, why single out Europe's failure to rise above it unless one assumes that because of its intellectual superiority and cultural achievement the West should have been able to overcome this natural human tendency. Said never says so outright, but one gets the feeling that he is judging Europe not in terms of its own historical reality and intellectual development, but in terms of the claims it makes for itself as the arbitor and guardian of humanity's highest values. And that is perhaps fair enough, since within the Western intellectual tradition, modern Orientalism in a sense represents a dinosaur, an outdated, fossilized theoretical edifice using language and concepts better suited to the nineteenth century (Rassam 1980: 508). If you study a culture or group of cultures having the character of the "Oriental," your study, as Edward Said's book points out, is itself open to analysis as a manifestation of "Western" culture. A book which indicates, as his does, that "Western" representations of the East (beginning with the notion of the East itself) have purposes which relate to purely Western needs and projects can be seen in its turn as a representation of Orientalism having purposes of its own, such as the furtherance of Arab political causes. A review which points these things out is itself asking to be reviewed in terms of its own representations and purposes Said, eschewing materialist analysis, sought to apply literary critical methodology and to offer an analysis specific to something called 'the Orient';

the result is that the issue of Orientalism, as debated in the Anglo-Saxon world over the past decade and a half, has had relatively clear battle lines, familiar to you all. On the one hand, the book of Edward Said advanced a comprehensive critique of Western, particularly English, French and American, writing on the Middle East, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, and encompassing literature, history, political and other sciences. Under the influence of Said's critique a range of work has been produced, criticizing academic and other writing on the region as, in various terms, Eurocentric, imperialist, racist, essentialist, and so forth. On the other hand, a range of writers on the region, most notably Bernard Lewis, have rebutted Said's charge and argued for an approach which falls, to a greater or lesser extent, into the 'Orientalist' category (Halliday 1983: 148). Said would seem to engage in an injudicious elision namely, that treatment of texts produced within the social sciences and in related activities such as journalism or travel writing, and literature. Of course, there are similarities and mutual influences; but while one is a necessarily fictional activity, without controls in reality or direct links to the acts of administration, domination, exploitation, the former is so controlled. To assume that the same critique of discourses within literature can be made of those within social science is questionable; it may indeed reflect the hubris, rather too diffuse at the moment, of theorists deriving their validation from cultural studies. This brings an area of difficulty with the critique of Orientalism, namely its analysis, or rather absence thereof, of the ideas and ideologies of the Middle East itself. Said himself has, in his other writings, been a trenchant critic of the myths of the Middle East and of its politicians, and nowhere more so than in his critique of the poverty of the intellectual life of the Arab world: while the rulers have constructed numerous international airports, he once pointed out, they have failed to construct one good library. But the absence of such a critique in his Orientalism does allow for a more incautious silence, since it prevents us from addressing how the issues discussed by the Orientalists and the relations between East and West are presented in the region itself

Orientalism scholarship ignore the genuine contribution westerns have made to eastern cultures, holds a perception that only the west does these things to the east which ignores how societies interaction, and homogenizes the East and middle eastMart 15,


Because Orientalism exists we have a world where reality is differently perceived, expressed and experienced across a great divide of mutual misunderstanding. To discuss Orientalism one has to urge people to go beyond this misunderstanding and see what has been made invisible: to distinguish a different outline in a picture that has been distorted by centuries of myopic vision . There is nothing about Orientalism that is neutral or objective. By definition it is a partial and partisan subject. No one comes to the subject without a background and baggage. The baggage for many consists of the assumption that, given its long history, somewhere within or about this subject there is real knowledge about the Orient; and that this knowledge can be used to develop an understanding of the cultures East of the West. The task of this book is to undermine this assumption. While Orientalism is real, it is still, nevertheless, an artificial construction. It is entirely distinct and unattached to the East as understood within and by the East. There is no route map, no itinerary locked within the subject to bridge that divide. Said's account contains many factual, methodological and conceptual errors. Said ignores many genuine contributions to the study of Eastern cultures made by Westerners during the Enlightenment and Victorian eras . Said's theory does not explain why the French and English pursued the study of Islam in the 16th and 17th centuries, long before they had any control or hope of control in the Middle East. Critics have noted Said ignored the contributions of Italian, Dutch, and particularly the massive contribution of German scholars. Lewis claims that the scholarship of these nations was more important to European Orientalism than the French or British, but the countries in question either had no colonial projects in the Mideast (Dutch and Germans), or no connection between their Orientalist research and their colonialism (Italians). Said's theory also does not explain why much of Orientalist study did nothing to advance the cause of imperialism (Lewis 1982: 52) The critique of Orintalism raises several genuine questions. A point made by several critics is that the guiding principle of these studies is expressed in the dictum “knowledge is power” and that

Orientalists were seeking knowledge of Oriental peoples in order to dominate them, most of them being directly or objectively in the service of imperialism. Another charge leveled against the Orientalists is that of bias against the peoples they study, even of a built-in hostility to them. The most important question least mentioned by the current wave of critics – is that of the scholarly merits, indeed the scholarly validity, of Orientalist findings. And Said has hardly touched on this question and has indeed given very little attention to the scholarly writings of the scholars whose putative attitudes, motives, and purposes form the theme of his book Irwin's argument is that the field of European research into Middle Eastern language, culture, and history was by no means so tightly linked to Western imperial ambitions as Orientalism suggests. He is also very skeptical of the value of analyzing Orientalist scholarship alongside Western literary texts devoted to the East— evading the distinctions between kinds of texts by treating them all as manifestations of a colonialist discourse. While acknowledging the great influence of Orientalism on postcolonial theory since its publication in 1978, George P. Landow - a professor of English and Art History at Brown University in the United States - 2nd International Symposium on Sustainable Development, June 8-9, 2010 Sarajevo 371 finds Said's scholarship lacking. He chides Said for ignoring the non-Arab Asian countries, non-Western imperialism, the Occidentalist ideas that abound in East towards the Western, and gender issues. Orientalism assumes that Western imperialism, Western psychological projection, "and its harmful political consequences are something that only the West does to the East rather than something all societies do to one another." Landow also finds Orientalism's political focus harmful to students of literature since it has led to the political study of literature at the expense of philological, literary, and rhetorical issues Landow points out that Said completely ignores China, Japan, and South East Asia, in talking of "the East," but then goes on to criticise the West’s homogenisation of the East. Furthermore, Landow states that Said failed to capture the essence of the Middle East, not least by overlooking important works by Egyptian and Arabic scholars. In addition to poor knowledge about the history of European and non-European imperialism, another

of Landow’s criticisms is that Said sees only the influence of the West on the East in colonialism. Landow argues that

these influences were not simply one-way, but cross-cultural, and that Said fails to take into account other societies or factors within the East. He also criticises Said’s "dramatic assertion that no European or American scholar could `know` the Orient." However, in his view what they have actually done constitutes acts of oppression. Moreover, one of the principal claims made by Landow is that Said did not allow the views of other scholars to feature in his analysis; therefore, he committed “the greatest single scholarly sin” in Orientalism.

ALT FAILS Orientalism is inevitableHübinette- 03’ orientalist expert- has written many scholarly articles relating orientalism and Western Dominance (Tobias, “Orientalism Past and Present”, 9/7/03, http://www.tobias hubinette.se/orientalism.pd)//

Since the end of the 1970s, most academic institutions in the West have more or less accepted the critique on classical orientalism and tried to distance themselves from their predecessors. Instead, it is in the form of popular orientalism that the discourse has managed to survive in the West as a romantic and colonial nostalgia reproduced in arts, movies and literature. This kind of popular orientalism is for example extremely well-represented in commercials here in Sweden. So finally there is a time to ask ourselves- is there a way out of orientalism , and can we imagine a world beyond orientalism? can we imagine a world beyond orientalism? Well, my personal guess is that orientalism will always exist in one or another form as long as the West has hegemonic power. Orientalism is strongly intertwined with the Western self-image to such an extant that if orientalism goes, then Western world power or even the West itself must also go. And isn´t that what we are seeing

http://www.tobias/

today, a slow but unstoppable power shift from the West towards East Asia with China and Japan in the forefront, maybe also South Asia with India as a leading nation, while the academic world itself is undergoing of a rapid Asianization, giving way to a more or less higher competence of higher diaspora Asians in the subjects involved.

Orientalism’s reductionism fails – no empirical data or foundationWarraq 2007 (Ibn, Secularisation of Islamic Study Institute founder, “Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism,” )

Edward Said's Orientalism gave those unable to think for themselves a formula. His work had the attraction of an all-purpose tool his acolyteseager, intellectually unprepared, aesthetically unsophisticated-could apply to every cultural phenomenon without having to think critically or having to conduct any real archival research requiring mastery of languages, or research in the field requiring the mastery of technique and a rigorous methodology. Said's Orientalism displays all the laziness and arrogance of the man of letters who does not have much time for empirical research, or, above all, for making sense of its results. His method derives from the work of fashionable French intellectuals and theorists. Existentialists, structuralists, deconstructionists, and postmodernists all postulate grandiose theories, but, unfortunately, these are based on flimsy historical or empirical foundations. Claude Levi-Strauss, with just a few years of field work in Brazil, constructed a grand theory about the structures of the human mind. As Edmund Leach put it in his short monograph on Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist never bothered to learn the native languages, never spent more than a few weeks in one place; the subsequent model, peppered with Marxist jargon, that he concocted on such meager empirical foundations is "little more than an amalgam" of his "own prejudiced presuppositions." Leach continues, "Levi-Strauss ... is insufficiently critical of his source material. He always seems to be able to find just what he is looking for. Any evidence, however dubious, is acceptable so long as it fits with logically calculated expectations; but wherever the data run counter to the theory Levi-Strauss will either bypass the evidence or marshal the full resources of his powerful invective to have the heresy thrown out of court.... [H]e consistently behaves like an advocate defending a cause rather than a scientist searching for ultimate truth."' This tradition was carried on by Michel Foucault, surely one of the great charlatans of modern times. Said, influenced by Foucault, Marx, and the French intellectual tradition, refuses to acknowledge

evidence that does not fit into his already prepared Procrustean bed; evidence such as the work of German Orientalists or the evidence of Indian Orientalists who praise the scholarly contribution of their European colleagues. Generally speaking, Said's thinking can be characterized as "ideological." An ideologue is immune to argument; he believes his ideas about man, history, and society to be self-evident, and anyone opposing them to be either stupid or malevolent. He cannot lose since his interpretation has already been determined in advance of observations. His attitude is immune to facts or reality, and no argument will ever disprove him.' The ideology is a way of interpreting the world: I can shut out recalcitrant data, I can shut my eyes if necessary.' Ideology is a method of substituting sweeping structural explanations for empirical investigation; for the ideologues, all the failings of his target group are the systematic products of its core identity. In cultures already immune to self-criticism, Said helped Muslims, and particularly Arabs, perfect their already well-developed sense of self-pity. There is a kind of comfort and absolution in being told that none of your problems are of your making, that you do not have to accept any responsibility for the ills besetting your society. It is all the fault of the West, of infidels. There is no need even to take responsibility for selfdetermination, it is easier to accept money from the Western donors and to treat it as one's rightful due from them, that is, a kind of jizyah. The attraction of Said's thesis for third-world intellectuals is thus easily understandable. But why was it so successful among Western intellectuals? Post-World War II Western intellectuals and leftists were consumed by guilt for the West's colonial past and continuing colonialist present, and they wholeheartedly embraced anytheory or ideology that voiced or at least seemed to voice the putatively thwarted aspirations of the peoples of the third world. Orientalism came at the precise time when anti-Western rhetoric was at its most shrill and was already being taught at Western universities, and when third-worldism was at its most popular. Jean-Paul Sartre preached that all white men were complicit in the exploitation of the third world, and that violence against Westerners was a legitimate means for colonized men to re-acquire their manhood., Said went further: "It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric" (p. 204). Not only, for Said, is every European a racist, but he must necessarily be so. As I have argued, Western civilization has been more willing to criticize itself than any other major culture. These self-administered admonishments are a far cry from Said's

savage strictures, and yet they found a new generation ready to take them to heart. Berating and blaming the West, a fashionable game in the 1960s and 1970s that impressionable youth took seriously, had the results we now see when the same generation appears unwilling to defend the West against the greatest threat that it has faced since the Nazis. When shown that Said is indeed a fraud, his friends and supporters in academia sidestep the criticisms and evidence, and pretend, as did several reviewers of Robert Irwin's book on Said, that Said may indeed have got the "footling details" wrong but he was, nonetheless, onto a higher truth. Said's influence, thus, was a result of a conjunction of several intellectual and political trends: post-French Algeria and post-Vietnam tiers mondisme (third-worldism); the politicization of increasingly postmodernist English departments that had argued away the very idea of truth, objective truth; and the influence of Foucault. In effect Said played on each of these confidence tricks to create a master fraud that bound American academics and Middle East tyrants in unstated bonds of anti American complicity' In Said's works there is no room for historical comparisons. The West alone stands, tried on the basis of a few examples taken out of historical context, judged and condemned as the source of all evil. There was slavery in the West, but, as pointed out above, the West itself took the first steps to actually abolish it. Indeed, abolitionism, as Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau reminds us in his pathbreaking comparative study,' was an Occidental concept that did not resonate in either black Africa or the Islamic world. In his study of the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, Ehud R. Toledano wrote, "Accepted by custom, perpetuated by tradition and sanctioned by religion, slavery was an integral part of Ottoman society." He further adds that no abolitionist movement ever emerged in the Ottoman Empire. On the contrary, Ottoman politics can be characterized as a continual resistance of varying intensity to British abolitionist pressure. Slavery was taken for granted and abolitionism was considered a foreign, English idea-barely understood, let alone accepted.' Turkish historian Y H. Erdem confirms Toledano's findings; there was no organized abolitionist movement in the Ottoman Empire, no abolitionist tracts popularizing the subject and bringing home the suffering of the slaves.Moreover, in modern Turkey, continues Erdem, the abolition of slavery is not a part of the educational curriculum, and there is no specific date for abolition that could have been used as a point of departure for such a study.9

The alternative’s rejection of Orientalist discourse prevents ongoing capitalist reinvigoration of Orientalism.Vukovich 12 (professor of critical and cultural theory as well as postcolonial and China studies at Hong Kong University, Daniel, “China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC,” pg. 150, 2012)//

But as noted above, Marx wisely insists on raising the question of other “historically determined modes of production”; thinking this way can arrest the reifying powers of socially “objective” categories of thought. I have suggested that we can expand the “mode” concept to include social space and productive activity;37 this is further warranted by the expansion of capitalism (and knowledge production) itself since Marx’s time, including the commodification of discourse. This brings us to the question of China in space, so to speak. Let us begin with a perennial but still-useful truth from classical Sinology: the thing about China is that it is very big and very old. Which is a way of saying that it is an exceptionally dense and diverse space. Much of it is no doubt capitalist space, including most obviously its economy (much of it), its urban centers, and the results and artifacts of its epochal growth, from art house cinema to liberal intellectual discourse and consumerism. These are the sites of most China–Western exchanges and flows, overwhelmingly the urban centers and the rich, southern and coastal belts of the land. This is the social, global space that is represented by the “China” that experts and observers travel to and produce knowledge about. It should not be controversial to describe this as specifically capitalist. Within such contexts and spaces, then, Sinological-orientalism functions as a “socially valid, therefore objective” form of thought. Its detail, applicability, explanatory and “objective” powers (such as they may be) in some sense derive from these places. They are not pure fantasy or only false consciousness. These qualities and the discourse/knowledge itself are a result of the encounter there between Chinese and Western/postcolonial spaces, discourse, and realities. It can still be unpacked through critical analysis. But of course the above are not the contexts and social spaces of all of modern Chinese history (let alone the longue durée), nor of the Mao or revolutionary era. There are other histories, temporalities, social imaginaries, discourses, and spaces at work. (China is not fully capitalist to the degree that the U.S. or UK or Hong Kong are.) Understanding this helps one see the discursive violence of Sinological-orientalism vis-à-vis China’s past as well as the places and people that have not benefited from the “era of reform and opening up.” Even within one urban center – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, anywhere – there are layers of social space and history at work, counter-factuals and differences that resist, contradict, or escape normative Sino-orientalist codings. To take

an obvious but symbolically significant example from southern Henan: Nanjiecun, the neo-Maoist, collectivized village of 12,000 people that is a site of red tourism, a bane of liberal intellectuals, and an actually existing market- socialist and re-distributive enterprise dating from the mid-1980s.38 I am not speaking of local “color” or differences, or individual Chinese self-understandings that are at odds with the orientalism I have examined (though these are important). When we follow Marx’s point that thought categories are historical and economic we can better see the non-capitalist and non- or differently global aspects of China. We can discern systematic or otherwise abundant other-messages about the meanings, realities, and “signi cations” from within China and between it and the rest of the world. These are not “in the true” of China studies and the knowledge of China produced within Western, now global intellectual– political culture.

Orientalism critiques are dogmatic – turns all scholarship into truisms that only affirm self interestsJustin 12Eric T. Justin, February 24, 2012, Eric T. Justin is a writer for The Crimson, “Blind to Occidentalism, The theory of “Orientalism” is now no more than an antiquated dogma” Crimson Middle East politics editorial executive, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/24/justin-orientalism-occidentalism/ date accessed: 7/14/19 //jazmyn

For the last thirty years, Edward W. Said’s book “Orientalism” has dominated—suffocated would be the less polite word—scholarship on the Arab

world. According to his devotees, Said “proved” that the West collectively and systemically fictionalized the Arab world and the third world in general, in order to affirm its own ostensibly superior identity and delegitimize and dehumanize the “Orient.” He coined the term “Orientalism” to describe this phenomenon. With the inception of the Arab Spring (or whatever you want to call it), that term has returned to popular language. Protesters around the Arab world have screamed kifaya (enough!) to dictatorial rule

and Orientalism’s tyrannical influence on scholarship and punditry deserves a similarly clamorous denunciation. As a work of social science, Said’s followers interpret “Orientalism,” with accidental irony and fragile evidence, as an argument that systematically delegitimizes all prior and current Western understandings of the Arab world. As a critique of Western historical scholarship on the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Orientalism has elements of truth. However, in the field of social science, what became known as “Orientalism” simply replaced Orientalism with— if

you will allow me—Occidentalism. In rebutting the formation of one generalizing “other,” Said set the ground for the production of a second “other.” Today, “ Orientalism” is a crux for attacking any opinion or presentation of facts that displays skepticism toward anything in the Arab world. An editorial on the Huffington Post is emblematic of this ruse: “A classical orientalist construction would be equating Islam with terrorism…Rather than acknowledge the heterogeneity of thought and behavior among Muslims.” Of course, one can both acknowledge that heterogeneity and attribute some piece of modern terrorism to Islam. But, like Orientalism itself, “Orientalism” creates for its believers a fictional foe in order to affirm their own identities. The authority of “Orientalism” in the social sciences, in particular those related to Middle Eastern studies, is difficult, if not impossible, to underestimate. Most studies on the modern Middle East, and some in the social sciences in general, begin, and often revolve around, the ideas made famous by Said. This influence reaches far beyond the university gates and extends through media into the very center of narratives on social justice, international relations, and their intersection. Newspapers, assorted journals, and seemingly every editorial on Al-Jazeera all indicate that Said is more or less the Paul R. Krugman of Middle Eastern studies—you don’t have to agree with him, but you do have to read him. Fortunately, the impetus for removing Said’s Occidentalism from the heart of Middle Eastern studies can actually be found within Said’s work

itself. Said’s “Orientalism” represents an idealistic rejection of greed and wealth as motivating factors in intellectual pursuit. In “Orientalism” and other works, he chronicled how European artists, scholars, and

intellectuals of the nineteenth and early twentieth century created a reality that served their countries’ imperial interests. Excusing for a moment the thickness of the brush Said paints with to prove his point, any thinker should concur with Said on the dangers of a marriage between academia and moneyed interests. But the pernicious proliferation of Said’s theory demonstrates that academia’s inertia and magnitude can be as influential and debilitative as colonial interests. Ideas follow not only the interests of money, but also the internal interests of scholars who thrive in academia by gratifying and expanding its existing assumptions and theories . As is often the case in the

softest of sciences, when the theory of Orientalism entered the ivory tower to rabid applause and hastily unfurled red carpets, it quickly transmogrified into dogma. When an idea is accepted as a truism, it quickly becomes a platitude that every generation of scholars passes on to the next as a piece of collective identity. Academia may be where great ideas originate, but it is also where bad ideas live far beyond their use or truth. We should reject “Orientalism” for the same reason Said rejected Orientalism— it is a false reality sustained only by self-affirming interests. Like all non-scientific dogma, “Orientalism” is a truth within itself without truth . I do not intend to make Said’s mistake; I recognize that “academia” is not monolithic and that no system of thought can be truly all encompassing . Of course, scholars produced and continue to produce critiques of “Orientalism,” but, in general, those critiques are undermined while Said’s theory remains relatively unchallenged in comparison. Nor do I intend

to imply that stereotypes about Muslims and Arabs are not horribly reprehensible, but they are not unique, either. All cultures identify themselves by collectively dehumanizing others, but Orientalism, the theory, does that far more frequently than any vestigial clusters of Orientalism itself. One valuable conclusion of Orientalism is that any social theory should be met with fierce skepticism in both its substance and its sources. Said’s acolytes would do well to remember that.

Policy making is uniquely key to the alt – influencing policy and enables real world changeOxford Analytica 7 Oxford Analytica February 21 2007, 6:00 am, “Orientalism Poses a Policy Challenge” https://www.forbes.com/2007/02/20/orientalism-edward-said-biz-cx_0221oxford.html#74fa039b75b0 date accessed: 7/15/19 //jazmyn

While the concept of orientalism propounded by Edward Said, the influential Columbia professor who died in 2003, has inspired constructive debate, it may have inhibited scholarship in cultural studies and other areas that are useful to policymakers. However, Said's ideas may also offer promising new avenues for U.S. foreign policy and public diplomacy. By successfully depicting all existing approaches to studying Middle Eastern and other non-Western societies as premised on "orientalism," Said forced scholars to be more cautious and rigorous in how they analyzed and understood these groups. This approach has profoundly changed the way Western states deal with the non-Western world. The last three decades have revolutionized the Western view of other peoples. Until the 1960s,

scholars unselfconsciously described Middle Eastern societies as "oriental," an appellation with a variety of implications. This view is now untenable. However, the demise of this perspective has had important effects on the U.S. policymaking process. The orientalist view drove policy and diplomacy for much of the last century. It sat comfortably with the colonialist assumptions that Western societies struggled to reassert after World War II. However, this perspective eventually collapsed as peoples rebelled against and overthrew colonial powers. Despite repeatedly condemning colonialism, the United States frequently suffered the "colonialist" label. In the struggle against the Communist bloc, for instance, Washington's leadership did little to dilute this characterization by the left. The idea of the Western world as a pool of prejudice about "oriental peoples" and their countries exploded in 1978 with the publication of Said's Orientalism: --Scholarly Impact. The book offered a searing critique of Western scholarly views of the Arab world. It also struck a fatal blow to "oriental studies." --Post-Colonial Studies. Said's analysis had an enormous influence on scholarly research and public debate. He argued that the conceptions of Middle Eastern and North African societies developed in oriental studies presaged and assisted colonial conquest. This spawned the idea of "post-colonial" studies. --Widespread Acceptance. Said's analysis was largely apposite. He captured the persistence of colonial attitudes and prejudices among Western elite views. Although his argument suffered serious critical assaults, the core idea remains essential. --Policy Influence. Anthropologists, in particular, stung by the accusation that their profession was a handmaiden of colonial institutions, have broadly accepted Said's critique. Therefore, professional anthropologists have largely resisted acting as expert advisers to governments. There are two current arguments concerning the effect of Said's ideas on the Iraq war: --The relative absence of Arabic-speaking scholars among the U.S. administrative elite seemed, to some critics, continuing evidence of unrequited orientalist mindsets. --A less controversial argument posits that Said's influence may have contributed to cutbacks in area studies programs in many Western universities. This may have abetted Washington's failure to understand Iraqi society. Western states must confront the challenge of better understanding non-Western societies, while avoiding charges of paternalistic orientalism and "imperialism." Certainly, the latter charge is inaccurate. However, erasing colonial-era influences requires an inter-generational change

https://www.forbes.com/2007/02/20/orientalism-edward-said-biz-cx_0221oxford.html#74fa039b75b0

https://www.forbes.com/2007/02/20/orientalism-edward-said-biz-cx_0221oxford.html#74fa039b75b0

in attitudes. Much is being done to alleviate these feelings through exchange programs. Said's critique exposed the limits of Western societies' understanding of the end of colonialism. Many societies continue to feel ignored or denigrated by the West, which feeds deep-seated negative attitudes toward the United States. This suggests remedial policy and public diplomacy measures: --Hazards Of 'Democracy-Building.' Non-Western states cannot be treated as apparent appendages of their former colonial masters without generating resentment. --Toned-Down Rhetoric. Overwrought language concerning a "clash of civilizations" should be abandoned. --Reconciling 'Core Values.' Washington could address how Western and non-Western societies best discuss such complex concepts as "evil" and "good." --'War On Terror' Approaches. Western and non-Western societies both must invest in the necessary language and country studies to improve cross-cultural understanding. The forces driving divisions between Western states and states in which non-Western values are dominant derive

in part from enduring legacies of the colonial era. Acknowledging this context, and accounting for it in the policymaking process, could help alleviate deep-seated resentment of the West in certain societies.

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