What does 'the West' mean? The answer is the founding members of NATO. North America and Western Europe are at the heart of NATO. It has recently been extended to Eastern Europe. Japan and South Korea have American bases and thus are part of the West as are Australia and New Zealand. However, if NATO can't force project in the South China Sea, or if Europe decides to do a separate deal with Russia and China, then our notion of the West may change. Perhaps it will dwindle to the '5 Eyes' alliance- at least for English speakers. But that day is yet distant. For now, the West means the dominant military and economic alliance in the world today. That's it. That's the whole story.
It is foolish to suggest that While the West belonged to a European geography, its name meant something.
This is nonsense. America is not in Europe. It is to the west of Europe. The Germans may have briefly considered themselves 'Occidental'- indeed, they may have dreamed of dominating Europe, but after the First World War Oswald Spengler gained world fame for admitting that the West meant nothing if it only meant something to do with Europe's own geography.
Now it is a vague invocation, laden with fear.
Devji's people were of Indian origin but settled in Zanzibar. They paid a lot of money to emigrate to the West. Why? Because they were afraid of what might happen to them if they remained in the 'Mashriq' East.
People do fear a 'decline of the West'. We can see on TV what is happening in Afghanistan. We are alarmed that the French are upset by the US Australia nuclear sub deal. We hope NATO will weather the storms caused by Trump's irresponsible trumpetings and Biden's incontinent bumblings.
But- unless we are a Professor of a shite subject besieged by 'woke' snowflakes on an elite campus- we understand that the West means NATO & that, simply so as to survive, we need to be very clear that what weakens NATO imperils our relative Economic Security and Democratic way of Life.
In an article titled 'What is 'the West'' published by Aeon, the always facile Feisal Devji writes-
In his manifesto of 1909 called Hind Swaraj or ‘Indian Home Rule’, the future Mahatma had described imperial Britain’s desire to spread Western civilisation not as hypocritical so much as suicidal.
This is not true. Gandhi was endorsing a book by Edward Carpenter- who had gained some fame in India- attacking technological civilization. So this was merely a case of the West talking bollocks about the West.
Gandhi did not say Britain wanted to 'spread Western Civilization' because he was writing for people from a part of the world where the Brits were preserving indigenous culture and religion. You had to shell out a lot of money if you wanted 'Western Civilization'. Even so, if you wanted to practice Law or work in the Civil Service in India, you'd have to learn Indian languages and Indian laws and customary practices.
Facile is pretending that Gandhi predicted that technological civilization would spread to the East and that this would threaten Western hegemony. Gandhi said nothing of the sort. He thought the English would follow Edward Carpenter and give up factories and urban life. Then the Japanese would see sense.
For he thought that this civilisation was threatened by the very effort to replicate it using the means of industrial capitalism, in much the same way as European commodities were mass-produced for colonial markets.
This is false. Gandhi was predicting that the Europeans would decide that Edward Carpenter was right. They'd voluntarily give up machinery and go back to eating 'home made bread and some vegetables' twice a day.
‘It is a civilisation only in name. Under it the nations of Europe are becoming degraded and ruined day by day,’ he said. ‘Civilisation seeks to increase bodily comforts, and it fails miserably even in doing so.’
Gandhi believed that modern food was poison, modern medicine was poison, modern education was poison, and as for the notion of women going out of the house to get an education or to follow a profession- that was nothing but Satanic WHOREDOM! House of Parliament is nothing but brothel! Every few years Members of Parliament are giving themselves shamelessly to a new Prime Minister! Gandhi does not mention which orifice Black Rod is inserted into but his audience could read between the lines.
Gandhi believed that the Europeans would not let the East industrialize- indeed, this was one reason money was available for the 'Swadeshi' agitation back in India- burning British cloth etc- which reversed the partition of Bengal.
What Gandhi called the modern civilisation of industrial capitalism sought to multiply the manufacture, desire for and consumption of its commodities the world over:
They wish to convert the whole world into a vast market for their goods. That they cannot do so is true, but the blame will not be theirs. They will leave no stone unturned to reach the goal.
The purely mechanical expansion of this process, Gandhi argued, would destroy Western civilisation in the very effort to spread it. Why? Because capitalism belonged to no particular people or history, and could be owned by anyone. Modern civilisation, in other words, was a kind of parasite that would grow strong and spread via its European host. Europe would enable it to globalise and attack other parts of the world. Its driving logic was not European domination: that was just a means to an end.
What did Gandhi actually write? Let us see-
Gandhi is saying 'Japan won a war over Russia because the Brits secretly helped them. Why did the Brits do so? It was so as to start selling more and more stuff to the Japanese. Thus they will become poor. Already they are part of the British Empire in all but name.'Reader : Will you now tell me how, they are able to retain India?
Editor : The causes that gave them India enable them to retain it. Some Englishmen state that they took and they hold India by the sword. Both these statements are wrong. The sword is entirely useless for holding India. We alone keep them. Napolean is said to have described the English as a nation of shopkeepers. It is a fitting description. They hold whatever dominions they have for the sake of their commerce. Their army and their navy are intended to protect it. When the Transvaal offered no such attractions, the late Mr. Gladstone discovered that it was not right for the English to hold it. When it became a paying proposition, resistance led to war. Mr. Chamberlain soon discovered that England enjoyed a suzerainty over the Transvaal. It is related that someone asked the late President Kruger whether there was gold in the moon. He replied that it was highly unlikely because, if there were, the English would have annexed it. Many problems can be solved by remembering that money is their God. Then it follows that we keep the English in India for our base self-interest. We like their commerce; they please us by their subtle methods and get what they want from us. To blame them for this is to perpetuate their power. We further strengthen their hold by quarrelling amongst ourselves. If you accept the above statements, it is proved that the English entered India for the purposes of trade. They remain in it for the same purpose and we help them to do so. Their arms and ammunition are perfectly useless. In this connection I remind you that it is the British flag which is waving in Japan and not the Japanese. The English have a treaty with Japan for the sake of their commerce, and you will see that if they can manage it their commerce will greatly expand in that country. They wish to convert the whole world into a vast market for their goods. That they cannot do so is true, but the blame will not be theirs. They will leave no stone unturned to reach the goal.
Other Asian and African thinkers upheld the distinction between Europe’s particularity and the universal history of modernity.
But large parts of Europe were as industrially and technologically backwards as parts of Africa or Asia. Thinkers read about it in geography text-books.
They claimed modern industrial capitalism as a human inheritance for which the West was merely a midwife.
A midwife helps bring a baby into the world. That baby belongs to its Mummy and Daddy. It isn't the 'inheritance' of the rest of humanity.
This allowed them to adopt it without any sense of civilisational risk or inferiority,
Thinkers didn't adopt shit. Business men set up factories. The Government could help by providing capital, protective tariffs, encouraging technical education etc, etc.
Indian industrialists had their grievances against the Brits which is why they gave Gandhi lots of money. But those industrialists had been tech savvy before Gandhi was born.
and in Gandhi’s day such men often pointed to Japan as an example of the fit between an Asian culture and modern civilisation understood in a technical way.
This is foolish. Some Indian mercantile clans had, through Dutch connections- e.g. Titsing- been trading with Japan before the Meiji revolution. The first Indian trade settlement in Japan dates back to 1872. The Tatas opened a branch in Japan in 1891. Indians were ahead of Japan industrially and technologically but had to admit that Japan had overtaken India by the time Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj. However, it was Herbert Spenser, not his Indian followers, who thought Japan should make haste slowly when it came to Westernization. This is because every Western country, except France- which was politically dysfunctional- conserved aspects of its traditional political culture- e.g. monarchs, a hereditary aristocracy with some legislative functions, an Established Church etc, etc.
Facile is either utterly ignorant of History or he is simply telling lies.
After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, modernisation theory, now delinked from European civilisation, continued to promote capitalist development.
Nonsense. There had been free capital flows before the War but, under the Bretton Woods system, foreign direct investment had to be at the Government level. Thus 'modernisation theory' only came into existence in the Fifties as International Development Aid ramped up. But, it shat the bed immediately and thus nobody bothered with it except some crappy academics. Modernization only happened where export led growth of an entrepreneurial type occurred. Guys getting rich decide what modernization will look like. Academics are laughed at.
More recently, the ferociously anti-Western Ayman al-Zawahiri, who led al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden, made the same point in 2008 when justifying his use of modern technology.
WTF?! The guy is a surgeon like his dad before him. Why is Facile pretending the guy was a troglodyte? I suppose the silly man is referring to Zawahiri's 'Town Hall' Q&A where he told extreme Salafis who wanted to fight with swords while riding horses not to be so silly.
Still, it is interesting that Facile's febrile mind hops straight from Gandhi to al-Zawahiri.
The Mahatma, however, considered the apparent universality of modern civilisation to be its most dangerous form.
Gandhi was saying that England would keep its factories and use them to bankrupt the Indian artisan. This was convenient. He was soon to get a lot of money from the Tatas. Indian industrialists wanted their foreign competition to be eliminated. Gandhi was convenient coz he was pretending that this had something to do with getting 'Swaraj' or 'Azadi'.
He wrote that ‘there is no end to the victims destroyed in the fire of civilisation. Its deadly effect is that people come under its scorching flames believing it to be all good.’ Gandhi saw Japan as being in thrall to the very forces of violence he thought were undermining Western civilisation, claiming that it might as well be the British flag flying over Tokyo.
No. The cretin thought the actual British flag was flying over Tokyo. This was a silly story put forward by some Racists according to which the Brits had disguised themselves as Japs and slaughtered the Rooskis coz King Teddy is soft on kikes.
His compatriot and contemporary, the philosopher and poet Muhammad Iqbal, sought to rescue the European ideals both men often associated with Christianity from the destructive grip of capitalism.
But both Gandhi and Iqbal saw Christ as Asian, not European. This is coz they had to study Geography at skool. Iqbal- following Shurawardy's 'Ishraqi' philosophy, equated the Orient with spiritual illumination. He cautiously dabbled in Ibn Arabi's notion of 'barzakh' as an illuminationist method of showing previous Prophets and Sages as asymptotically approaching the 'limit' of Muhamaddiya ideology which Iqbal later equated with a type to theocratic 'socialism'.
For Iqbal, these included Christendom itself as an arena for the universal ethics of Jesus.
No. Iqbal was influenced by Nietzsche. He believed in a trans-valuation of all values. Ethics was not 'universal' because the highest value consisted in seeking for higher value yet.
Gandhi suggested that colonised countries should not achieve their freedom copying or adopting the technological prowess and institutions of the West.
No. He was saying something far more shocking. Indians should burn foreign cloth and fill up the jails so that the guys who paid him could grow their industrial enterprises at the expense of the Brits.
Instead, they should repudiate the path of the United States and Japan in favour of the true idealism of a nonviolent struggle.
So Tatas and Birlas and Sarabhais and Bajajs would get both Pax Brittanica and a captive home market. This was why they financed that toothless freak.
If they did so, the freedom of the colonised world might even redeem the West by returning it, through the force of Asian and African example, to a better way of life.
Birla did appoint Tegart- who crushed Jugantar- a Director of his London holding Company after the Second War. The Tatas, of course, have bought lots of nice British companies at an inflated price. Gandhi did well by his financiers.
Therefore, rather than following the European or American example, as in modernisation theory, the nonviolent struggles of colonised peoples should inspire the West to recall its own lost ideals.
Coz being colonized by Huns or Mongols or whatever was the lost ideal which the West kept yearning for.
In other words, the Mahatma was not arguing for the superiority of Asian as opposed to European civilisation, but thought that the former could liberate the latter into its own truth.
Which was to be a gimp in an S&M dungeon- right?
Indeed, apart from the Japanese who imitated Europe’s modernity, the West has never faced any foe identifying itself as belonging to the East.
The Ottomans ruled a big chunk of South. The homeland of Huns, Magyars, Turks etc was certainly to the East of Europe.
The problem with modern civilisation and its vision of universality was that it inevitably escaped the West’s own grasp, as the expansion of Japan’s economy and empire demonstrated in Gandhi’s own day.
How can a thing which is within your grasp be a 'problem'? Problems only arise when something escapes your grasp.
Europe’s imperial powers
disappeared at the end of the First World War.
understood the risk posed by the universality of their claims,
Coz the Tzar was making universal claims- right?
since they routinely denied their colonial subjects had achieved modernity by arguing that they
hadn't yet killed them and raped their women and taken over their fancy offices and residences.
were not yet ready for self-government by reason of their poverty and illiteracy as much as customs and mutual antipathies. This was the argument the British used to deny India self-government even within the empire from the end of the First World War until the close of the Second,
Gandhi unilaterally surrendered in 1922 just when Egypt and Ireland and Afghanistan got independence.
when the decision was taken out of their hands. The colony, for Europe, thus became a school of civilisation to which non-Europeans must be enrolled in perpetuity.
Unless it can't turn a profit.
Anti-imperialists recognised the hypocrisy of this reasoning but often sought independence only so as to complete the destruction of native society.
In the opinion of a cretin who thinks it is okay to say 'native' society.
Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, who went on to become India’s first prime minister after independence, argued that Britain was incapable of modernising India because it was too reliant upon the support of Indian aristocrats and other conservatives who had no interest in it.
But Nehru had to keep quiet and follow Gandhi because he believed that most Indians didn't want modernization at all. It wasn't till Congress won big in the first election under universal franchise that Nehru could ditch his Gandhian baggage.
Only a democratic government, he claimed, would have both the determination and legitimacy to extend education, reduce poverty, abolish noxious customs and bring internecine conflicts to an end.
But Nehru backed off from universal education and land reform- both of which the Americans wanted him to do- because Nehru believed that the Indian villagers wanted to be backward and stupid.
In this way, he and other newly independent leaders proved Gandhi’s point about how anyone in the world could, in principle, fulfil modern civilisation’s universal promise.
Sadly modern education's universal promise could not be fulfilled in the case of Facileji.
If European imperialism represented the first effort to spread Western civilisation abroad, preceded though it sometimes was by Christian missionary activity,
The guy teaches History but hasn't heard about Alexander who got to the Punjab and in whose wake Greek kingdoms were established in India.
it also signalled the first crisis of the West as an idea.
Between 1914 and 1945 some 50 million Europeans met violent deaths. That's why Europeans don't think there was any fucking crisis of 'the West as an idea'.
Imperialism made the West into a mobile figure for the first time,
Thanks to Alexander, there were Indo-Greek rulers in India centuries before Christ. Sadly nobody told Prof of History at Oxford, Facile Devji.
by expanding its geography well beyond Europe to include settler colonies in the Americas and Australasia.
Describing the way in which the British Empire became de-territorialised in its expansion, the German jurist Carl Schmitt quoted the Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s recommendation in one of his novels that the Queen move to India should Britain be threatened.
This notion had its origin with the notion that the Princes of Orange might open the dykes over their lands and sail off to Batavia. Schmitt like Feisal knew no better.
For, in doing so, she would only follow the precedent of the Portuguese crown, which moved to Brazil during the Napoleonic Wars. Schmitt saw such mobility as being made possible by the industrial technology that Gandhi had recognised as lying at the basis of modern civilisation.
So, Schmitt knew shit about European history.
In his book Land and Sea (1942), Schmitt reflected on the way in which the ship, as the most important technology of Britain’s maritime empire, represented modern civilisation in miniature. The ship, he pointed out, subordinated all its crew’s relations and activities to technical or instrumental ones. It could tolerate no principle but pure functionality, with all other ideals reduced to lower forms. The imperialist expansion of the West, therefore, entailed the diminution of its own historical and spiritual ideals in as suicidal a way.
The stupid cunt didn't get that there had been vast maritime networks- e.g. Phoenician colonies or Polynesian settlements- long long ago.
Like Gandhi, Schmitt had understood
absolutely nothing. The man was a fool. But Gandhi got famous coz Hindu industrialists found it worthwhile to finance his publicity machine.
that the aptly named ‘ship of state’ was not merely a machine in which individuals were reduced to cogs, but that it was mobile and replicable, and so could never be the inalienable property of any one people or history.
The reverse is the case. No maritime colonial network has been replaced by one with the same technology. The cultural 'software' is as important as the hardware. This was as true of the Phoenicians, the Vikings, the Polynesians as it was of the West Atlantic Europeans.
In this sense, the strength of national identity in such states represented nothing more than a desperate attempt to possess the country as a distinctive piece of collective property. But, like all capitalist property, its alienation was always possible in an economy defined by the universality of exchange.
Property can be lost or stolen whether it is Capitalist or Communist. On the other hand 'universality of exchange' does not exist. This is because barriers of space and time and identity exist.
As long as the West belonged to a European geography, its name possessed some meaning. But with its globalisation in empire, terms such as the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ had to be reinvented. Schmitt saw the implications of the West’s globalisation in his book The Nomos of the Earth (1950).
Schmitt was pretending that there had been a jus publicum europaeum- i.e. Europe had been under the Rule of Law- though there was no evidence for any such thing. Still, one could see why a guy from a defeated and divided country might want to pretend otherwise.
European empires brought settler colonies in different parts of the world into the fold of the West, but it was the US that made the West into a properly political category.
Sadly 'properly political categories' are shit which only shitheads teaching shitty non-STEM subjects gas on about.
Empires like Britain’s, which were scattered across the world, had no geographical integrity,
Yes they did. Schmitt's Germany did not.
and so could not be politically divided into Eastern and Western domains.
But Vietnam and Korea were so divided. Vietnam was re-united after the Americans were defeated. China may yet take Taiwan are thus get re-united. Everything depends on whether Biden can build up the countervailing naval power of a 'quad' which may be expanded from just India, Japan and Australia to South Korea, Vietnam and New Zealand.
Thus, today more than ever, the 'idea of the West' is still what it was in 1950- viz NATO plus places where there are American bases or regimes with strong military alliances with America. Currently, China is testing the resolve of states in its neighborhood. It remains to be seen whether Biden can prevent China overtaking the West on his watch.
Devji does not know that Spain continued to rule Cuba and Britain ruled the West Indies and Guyana and Canada while the Russians owned Alaska.Instead, with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, an American president split the globe in half to place one hemisphere under his country’s undisputed sway.
Called the Western Hemisphere, this domain had the Americas at its centre and excluded Europe along with its Asian and African empires as part of the Eastern Hemisphere. For the first time, Europe was displaced from the West and separated from its former American colonies, in whose affairs it was no longer permitted to interfere.
Wow! This guy holds a Canadian passport but doesn't know that Britain was interfering plenty in Canadian politics even after 1867.
First enunciated in President James Monroe’s 7th annual message to Congress on 2 December 1823, the doctrine distinguished a despotic and monarchical Europe forever engaged in internecine and colonial wars.
Actually it was Canning, not Monroe, who called 'the New World' into existence to balance an Old World where France might dominate Spain and Portugal.
The new home of freedom was in the Americas.
which was still importing slaves.
Monroe claimed that ‘the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonisation by any European powers.’
But it was Canning and the Brits who were doing the heavy lifting.
He described Europe in much the same way as its imperial powers did their Asian and African colonies, albeit with the promise not to interfere in their internal affairs. The US also took on an imperial role in South and Central America.
Teddy Roosevelt launched a war against the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines. America had begun to intervene against 'Banana Republics' from the end of the Nineteenth Century. But there still was European 'gun boat diplomacy' involving taking over the customs house of defaulting countries.
The rise of the US led directly to the West’s crisis, to its doubling and displacement both as a geographical location and a political or civilisational category.
This may be the German view. It is not the British or French view. The rise of the US led directly to Germany's defeat in two world wars.
This crisis has since been integral to the idea of the West. It is always in crisis and flux, and often in motion.
You might believe this if you are a stupid Nazi like Schmitt. But the Germans were far more terrified of the Soviets than they were of America.
The end of the Second World War and the decolonisation in Asia and Africa required changing the meaning and location of the West again.
Nonsense! Nothing of the sort happened.
It now included both ends of the Northern Atlantic Ocean, to exclude the Soviet Union and its Asian allies as part of the East in a new, Cold War division of the globe into rival hemispheres. And so the West was now NATO-claimed sovereignty, while the East was the Warsaw Pact.
For English speakers the US has always been part of the West.
Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) signalled the latest crisis of the West with the end of the Cold War.
Rubbish! It was Kojeve's warmed up sick.
The West had emerged victorious against communism. The grand conflict, and therefore the ideological as well as the civilisational narratives of historical rivalry, had come to an end.
But everybody already thought that 'Political Theory' was stupid shit.
Henceforth, all politics would become a kind of internal mopping-up operation within a liberal world order no longer divided into East and West and so made safe for capitalism.
The liberal world order was Western. It excluded the Communist zone.
Politics was to be subordinated to economics,
Because politics turned to shit if this was not done. Even the Soviet Union had a 'stabilization of the cadres' and China got rid of its 'gang of 4'.
and the global triumph of neoliberalism represented this vision of the world made safe for the market and its mechanisms.
A triumph does not have to represent itself. It is itself.
Eastern Europe’s colour revolutions notably made no calls for equality.
Because equality was shitty.
It was as if Gandhi’s vision of the parasite taking over its host had been fulfilled.
Gandhi had no such vision. He said Civilization was bad. Everybody should live in a small autarkic village growing a little food and spinning a little cotton.
There was something paradoxically Soviet about Fukuyama’s argument, which seemed to mimic Vladimir Lenin’s idea about the victory of communism leading to the replacement of politics by what, citing Friedrich Engels, he called the administration of things.
Fukuyama had been introduced to Kojeve's Hegelian shite by Leo Strauss. Also the fucker had been reading Nietzsche.
This notion was part of Lenin’s theory about history ending with the withering away of the state as an instrument of capital to be replaced by popular self-governance.
Which comes from Hegel via Marx and Engels.
However, Fukuyama’s move from political history to neoliberal governance simply foregrounded the problem posed by the newly internal, rather than traditionally external, enemies of a new world order no longer divided into East and West.
What fucking internal enemy? Some stupid Leftist professors of shite subjects?
In his bestseller The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Samuel Huntington argued against Fukuyama that this enmity, and so politics or history, was unlikely to vanish into the problems of governance. Rather, politics would reappear in battles defined by culture and civilisation that were not controlled by states. In this new iteration, the West, newly reattached to its religious roots in Judaism and Christianity, was engaged in a civilisational struggle with forces such as Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism.
Coz Buddhists keep crashing planes into buildings in New York, right? Anyway, Buddhists and Hindus have reason to hate Islamic terrorists. This was not obvious at that time.
Here, states and even geographies would play a lesser role.
With the terrorist attacks on the US of 11 September 2001, Huntington’s focus on non-state actors and religion took on urgent meaning. The French historian Michel Foucault had written extensively about the devolution of power from the sovereign and top-down politics to everyday institutional procedures of discipline and regulation that normalise children, students, soldiers, prisoners or patients into good citizens. He showed how, in this genealogy, the enemies of society were not foreign countries but internal foes such as sexual deviants, criminals and, of course, religious fanatics and terrorists.
Sadly, everybody already knew that rapists and murderous thugs were an internal enemy. That's why Batman and Superman spend so much time fighting crime.
In our own day, it is terrorism and Islam that play the role of such an enemy,
Because Islamic terrorists keep trying to kill us.
one that is threatening because, like the race or class enemy of old, it is both internal and external to Western societies.
The vast majority of Muslims in Western Societies want to see those nutters killed or locked up. But so do most Muslims in Eastern Societies.
Attempts are made to deny the interconnections between the West and its new enemy by externalising the latter through wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, restrictions on immigration, the surveillance of mosques and the criminalisation of practices such as veiling or ritual slaughter.
But restrictions on immigration and the surveillance of mosques are 'internal' not 'external'.
Yet Islam is internal to Western societies not through immigration or conversion but because the varied trajectories of non-state militancy disallow us from defining it geographically as belonging to the non-West.
Rubbish! If there are no Muslims in your country then Islam is not 'internal' at all. It doesn't matter whether some stupid Professor is left scratching his head over geographical definitions of the non-West.
The terrorist’s familiarity with jihad in Syria can coexist with his ignorance of that country and its language, while being quite at home in Europe.
Cool- so long as that home is a prison cell.
There is no foreign power to which he can betray the West in which he belongs.
Sure there is. Iran which is where a lot of al Qaeda guys- including some family members of Osama's- hid out. Pakistan was a less reliable ally.
Having been smashed with the closing of the Cold War, it is no longer possible to put the Humpty Dumpty of bipolar conflict between East and West back together again.
This guy hasn't heard that Putin and Xi have gotten awfully cozy. Iran too is on side- as Pakistan may be too.
If Islam has appeared as a new kind of civilisational foe in the 21st century,
Terrorists aint a 'civilizational foe'. They are evil bastards. We want them killed.
that is also because it can no longer play the role of a geopolitical rival.
Because it is too weak. However, there could be an anti-West Chinese alliance of Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Shia Iraq, Hezbollah controlled portions of Lebanon, Alawi controlled portions of Syria, Houthi controlled portions of Yemen, as well as parts of Africa which have become dependent on China.
What if China emerges as the peace-maker of the region? They have already proposed Beijing as an alternative to Camp David such that the Israelis can strike a deal with Hamas. The Chinese may achieve hegemony by brokering pragmatic deals and letting 'human rights' go hang.
Dispersed among groups and individuals all over the world, it takes as its target not countries, but a global arena defined by flows of finance, commodities and migration.
But that 'global arena' can strike back against this disapora- confiscating their assets and targeting them for drone strikes.
This post-Cold War world can be understood as a marketplace that has turned politics into a set of competing efforts by states and other actors to regulate or deregulate it.
The same thing could be said about the pre-Cold War world. Markets have always had to find ways to get political forces to protect them.
The goods subjected to such competition range from natural resources such as oil and fish, manufactures such as weaponry and nuclear technology, and individual rights such as that to life, privacy, free speech and the liberty of movement.
Goods are not rights. Devji is talking nonsense.
Like their enemies if also against them, Muslim militants want to regulate some of these goods and deregulate others for a global marketplace.
What do they want deregulated? Is there a 'global marketplace' for tickets to Paradise? Do these guys have a genuine religion or are they engaged in Simony? Not even the most Islamophobic fanatic has suggested that these guys want to buy and sell Salvation like a commodity.
But rather than defining their activities in the economic terminology of self-interest, they seem willing to sacrifice both their bodies and societies in death and destruction to achieve their ends.
This is also true of any violent insurrectionary movement.
Islamic terrorism poses no existential threat to any state;
Ashraf Ghani may beg to differ.
rather, what makes it important is its promise of civil strife as an internal threat.
No. Either it causes mayhem of there is no 'internal' threat. My own terrorism does not pose an existential threat to Ireland- which I am demanding be renamed Iyerland and handed back to me- because my most vicious terrorist act so far has consisted only of farting noisily after having drunk a pint of Guinness. I'm lying. I actually drink Coca-Cola in a Guinness pint glass coz I want to look less of a sissy.
Even the ‘Islamic state’ founded by ISIS in Iraq did not serve to define its war geographically since militants continued to attack targets in different and disconnected parts of the world.
This is silly. ISIS did control valuable territory. Sadly fracking fucked up their finances. Then everybody ganged up on them and bombed them to shit.
Its militancy crucially includes the apparently nihilistic repudiation of self-interest as the economic rationality that governs human behaviour.
Sadly, militants stop being militant after they have been bombed to shit.
The sacrificial form taken by Islamic militancy has led not just to attempts at opposing it but also to surprising imitations of its ethic.
Really? Did America start enslaving captured ISIS girls and selling them to sexual perverts?
Among these is the return of the West as a civilisational category now set explicitly against Islam.
Fuck off! The vast majority of Muslims are good, decent, people who condemn terrorism as against Religion and Morality. Anyway, the 'war on terror' is over. The West's real enemy is a Chinese led Eurasian block which might also be gaining ground in Africa.
But rather than representing the universalisation and technical rationality of modern civilisation that Gandhi had criticised,
relying on the work of some English dude who had inherited a good sum of money but who was miffed coz his Society was pretty nasty to Gay peeps
the West, as Huntington had argued, has returned in a specifically cultural and even theological incarnation.
Then it went away again and returned in an anti-China incarnation.
Pioneered in the war on terror, this can now be seen in the populist or ultranationalist repudiation of a universal, ‘rules-based global order’ with its freedoms of movement and standardisation.
It will be news to people in Asia and Africa that there was ever 'freedom of movement' for them into Europe or North America.
Growing in strength all over Europe and the US, this view constitutes nothing less than a refusal of the West itself in its neoliberal incarnation as a free market for goods and labour.
Does Devji really not know that the West kept darkies out?
Brexit illustrated this form of sacrifice or repudiation.
Because the Brits, very foolishly, had not taken advantage of EU rules which would have permitted them to curb migration.
Its votaries are willing to accept economic and other losses to regain what they see as their sovereignty from the European Union as if imitating the struggles of their own former colonies.
Right! Farage was constantly reading Gandhi. Bo Jo is spinning cotton on his chakri. OMG! I now understand why Priti Patel is Home Secretary! She led Brexit Satyagraha- innit? I vividly recall her Dundee Salt March when she along side millions of Gujarati speaking Britishers made salt from the sea in defiance of the Commissars from Brussels!
While not explicitly rejecting the principle of self-interest,
In other words, BoJo promised us we'd be better off after Brexit
they have stepped away from a vision of the post-Cold War world as a neoliberal marketplace of goods and ideas in which it can flourish.
Devji still does not get that 'neo-liberalism' wasn't about welcoming darkies from shit-hole countries to migrate to Europe or North America.
This sudden if disavowed identification with colonial subjects from Britain’s own past has been repeated all over Western Europe,
in the mind of a cretin who thinks Farage is doing Yoga and spinning cotton while chanting 'Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram'.
where Right-wing parties and governments claim to be fighting for their sovereignty and culture against the EU as much as the colonising potential of immigration, Islam and other forms of globalisation.
But Europe had always had political movements of this sort. The UK imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration 115 years ago. Incidentally, this was supported by the only Gujarati M.P at that time. He was a Tory, just like Priti Patel.
Does this strange historical reversal represent a perverse fulfilment of Gandhi’s prediction that the civilisation of modern capitalism would be decoupled from the West?
No. It fulfils his prediction that the Brits would give up 'Civilization' and would go back to living in small villages growing their own food and spinning yarn for their clothes.
Like the modern civilisation Gandhi had criticised, the West’s effort to achieve global hegemony in the war on terror has been overtaken by the universalisation of its procedures, which have legitimised authoritarian states all over the world.
What legitimizes an authoritarian state is the spectacle of those who don't accept its legitimacy being killed or incarcerated. The West had global hegemony, but threw it away because it got distracted from China's rise.
From Turkey and Russia to India and China, the war on terror is no longer a Western project
Russia was killing Muslims and conquering Turkic territory hundreds of years ago. So was China. India was under Muslim control but, by the Eighteenth Century, it was turning the tables on the Muslims wherever Hindus were the majority. Turkey dealt severely with Kurdish terrorists. But there was no religious angle to it.
but has been deployed to join market-friendly economics with political repression.
Sadly, minorities get short shrift even in market-unfriendly economies. Mao dealt with the Uighurs even more harshly than Chairman Xi.
And so, the last project to reconfigure the West has also escaped its reach.
This is because these 'projects' only exist in the minds of shitheads teaching shitty non-STEM subjects.
Concomitantly, we have seen a tearing apart of the West’s institutional forms, whether in Donald Trump’s departure from alliances and agreements, or with Brexit and the reimposition of border controls in parts of the EU.
We have seen no such thing. The West does not have 'institutional forms'. Schmitt may have thought there was a jus publicum europaeum but this was a figment of his own imagination. Sovereign states can't bind themselves in perpetuity.
These fraying bonds, however, have been complemented by a veritable rediscovery of the West as a civilisational entity, as if by way of compensation.
But it isn't compensation at all. Fuck is the point of belonging to the same entity if you get conquered but other guys don't?
Either America will be able to get the West to unite against China and to partner with an expanded 'Quad' in the or else China and its chums will dictate terms to more and more countries currently part of our 'civilizational entity'. This winter, Putin may withhold gas to turn the screws on Europe. This could be the thin edge of the wedge. Imagine a Europe dependent on Russian Gas and Chinese 5G and other such infrastructure. What would follow? 'Self censorship' for the Media? A Chinese veto on who can or can't be given a Government contract or a Cabinet level job?
Either the West must hang together or it will hang apart.
Or are we indeed seeing a return of the West as a spiritual, rather than political or economic, phenomenon?
West has come back as evil spirit. Devji is right. Turns out West was located on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground. That is why all sorts of weird shit is happening- e.g. Priti Patel leading Dundee Salt March and Nigel Farage prancing around in a diaper. Devji is a Professor of History at Oxford University. He is not a cretin at all.
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