EXCEPT THAT THE AMERICAN INNOVATION...:

Post-Post-Imperialism (Leon Wieseltier, March 2, 2011, New Republic)

One of the most striking features of the democratic revolts has been the absence from them of any significant anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israeli expressions. The ideas and emotions that animated these uprisings have been inward-looking and inner-directed: the crowds are outraged by what Egyptians have done to Egypt, what Tunisians have done to Tunisia, what Libyans have done to Libya, what Iranians have done to Iran. They blame their own. They do not direct their critical energies, so as to divert them, at others. This reckoning is a self-reckoning—which is to say, it is the end of the post-imperial era in Arab history. The force of the ancient sense of colonial victimization seems to be spent. First imperialism hobbled them, and then the remembrance of imperialism hobbled them. The scar continued to do the work of the wound. It introduced into Arab life a prior anger and a prior despair, which were easily manipulated by autocrats and clerics. The aftermath of oppression is usually a period of hardening and contraction. A grievance is not a basis for progress. But the democratic eruption of recent months marks the advent of a post-post-imperial moment, in which the future is finally allowed a greater claim upon the present than the past. Post-post-imperialism is another term for self-reliance, for an internal renovation, for what an early Zionist writer called “auto-emancipation.” There is no deeper emancipation. The blessing of the post-post-imperial moment is not that the terrible history has been forgotten, but that the lachrymosity it left in its wake, the lowered expectations that derived from the belief that there is only one story and only one enemy, the pessimistic effects of unceasing commemoration, have been dispelled. (For Jews, the establishment of the state of Israel was the post-post-Amalek moment, though Israeli political culture is presently struggling, and not sufficiently, with a revival of post-Amalekism.) It is not ignorance, or treason, to escape the shadow of great pain; it is the condition of a normal life. If the men and women in the streets of Tehran and Cairo and Tripoli and Tunis continue to understand their fate with primary reference to imperialism, why do they implore the American president to help them? Clearly the peril of authoritarianism looms larger for them than the peril of imperialism. Democracy, for these protesting peoples, is no longer defined, or tarnished, by its largely Western provenance. This is a milestone. Indeed, the post-imperialist analysis of the Arab uprisings is now the desperate and hallucinatory work of Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who would suspend all Muslims in eternal grief and eternal rage. They are the losers in the Arab apotheosis. Reality is shattering their conspiracy theories, in a grand historical rebuttal.

The United States and its president should also grasp the post-post-imperialist moment in the Arab world. It ought to transform our own sense of how we may act. No, it is not a neo-colonialist license; and anyway we are not an empire, and those who think otherwise do not grasp the American innovation in internationalism.

..., now universally accepted, was to add a normative component to sovereignty, requiring that government be consensual to be legitimate. Forcing conformity to our standards can certainly be said to be imperialism, provided that one does not automatically assume the term to be pejorative.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2011 7:15 AM