November 13, 2010
INDEED, YOU HAVE TO BE EUROCENTRIC TO BE DISCOURAGED:
Spheres of Influence: FACTS ARE SUBVERSIVE: Political Writing From a Decade Without a Name By Timothy Garton Ash (George Packer, NY Times Book Review)
The discouraging facts of the past decade don’t lead him to abandon the idea, but they complicate it. Velvet revolutions don’t belong exclusively to the West, but “the best chances are to be found in semiauthoritarian states that depend to a significant degree, politically, economically and, so to speak, psychologically, on more democratic ones — and most especially when the foreign states with the most passive influence or active leverage on them are Western democracies.” Garton Ash, now in his mid-50s, remains an idealist with his feet on the ground: “Whether velvet revolution has a future as well as a past will depend, in the first place, on the will and the skill of people in the places concerned; but it will also depend, in smaller measure, on us.”Garton Ash’s previous collections, “The Uses of Adversity” and “History of the Present,” covered Europe during the hopeful 1980s and the muddled 1990s. Europe is his abiding passion as well as his area of expertise, and there are several essays in “Facts Are Subversive” on the potential for peaceful, democratic Europe to serve as a model for the world, one that Europeans themselves seem determined to squander. But the nature of the European Union is not the stuff of high literary-political drama. History’s center of gravity has moved elsewhere: the major events of the recent decade have forced Garton Ash outside the realm he knows best, into the Islamic world and the United States.
Inevitably, perhaps, these essays lack the fingertip feel of his other work, the sure touch that comes from years of consideration. “Islam in Europe” landed Garton Ash in controversy when it was published in 2006. He sticks the label “brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist” on the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and in doing so he seems to classify her as the equivalent opposite of the radical Islamists who have put her under a death threat. In a subsequent debate with Hirsi Ali before the Royal Society of Arts in London, Garton Ash claimed that he had been misunderstood, abjured both the phrase and any ill or condescending intent, and announced that when it comes to the principles of a free society, he is himself a fundamentalist. The essay, though, makes it clear that his critics did not misunderstand him.
Why doesn’t Garton Ash see in Hirsi Ali a figure of conscience like his friends from the Iron Curtain days? Because her scathing denunciations of what is cruel and unfree in Islam are not “showing the way forward for most Muslims in Europe, at least not for many years to come.” This is true, but it isn’t the most important truth. Hirsi Ali isn’t a youth leader or social activist with a responsibility to show European Muslims “the way forward.” She’s a dissident from the world of Islam who has been driven by personal suffering, and also by her treatment in liberal, multicultural Europe, to a radical rejection of any compromise between her former faith and the secular society she has embraced.
“Writers are not diplomats,” Garton Ash says in another essay. But he wants to live in a Europe where millions of believing Muslims feel welcome so that they don’t turn to jihad, and Hirsi Ali’s exacting standard makes it harder. This is a complicated matter, and Garton Ash is honestly working his way through it. That doesn’t make him a weak-kneed appeaser of Islamist ideology — there is plenty of evidence, in this essay and others, that Garton Ash has a keen sense of the threat and will not abandon his liberal convictions in the hope that it might disappear. But he doesn’t feel the oppressiveness of Islamic societies in his bones, as Hirsi Ali does, and as he felt it of Communism. He is, first and last, a European.
Consider that Mr. Packer believes that a decade in which states like India, Turkey, Brazil, and Indonesia (to pick the four biggest and most important) have liberalized/Westernized rapidly--and done so almost entirely peacefully--to have been a disappointment. Then add the progress towards self-determination and self-government that has been accomplished somewhat by force or the influence of force in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, The Lebanon, Palestine, etc. (and within formerly Islamicist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood) and look at where they all were at the end of the 20th century. The ability to look at these results and be discouraged requires a deep skepticism about liberal democracy itself--similar to the despair of many anti-Communists during the Cold War--and the likelihood that it will prevail in the long run. Importantly, it also depends on the belief that non-European peoples are so fundamentally different that they will not eventually organize their societies around the well-established pillars of the End of History--democracy, capitalism, protestantism--even though it is the only metastructure under which they will thrive. It is at least odd to find this commonality between the Decent Left and the Right.
MORE:
The Islamists Are Not Coming: Religious parties in the Muslim world are hardly the juggernauts they've been made out to be. (CHARLES KURZMAN, IJLAL NAQVI, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010, Foreign Policy)
