The narrative and discourse disseminated in the United States and Europe about regime change and the promotion of human rights in the Middle East and North Africa won’t be better assessed unless they are associated with the decision-makers’ political culture, shaped over the last thirty years. History matters. Indeed, many aspects highlighted in the strategic and security domains date back to colonial penetration in the Middle East and Africa.
However, geopolitical concerns are raging now because policymakers and strategic planners have no exit strategy to fix the mess their predecessors brought about in these regions since the end of WWII and the Cold War. Worse, the stereotypes caused by the COVID pandemic have made the security and strategic chessboard more complex.
Thus, when Bernard Lewis screamed “What went wrong?” in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States of America, he inaugurated a sequence of short-sighted paradigms, hoping they would eventually help understand what was going on. Then, expressions such as “Why do they hate us?” became the leitmotif for commentators and political analysts to make amends.
A Late Wake-Up Call
All of which led Martin Kramer, for example, to wonder in a 2001 polemic: “Why think tanks dedicated to the study of the Middle East have failed to predict the rise of political Islam and the impotence of the politically tolerated opposition to address issues in their own societies, so the West, with the United States at the top of the list, would be forever safe and secure?”
These questions, very legitimate back then, were put up in line with Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” paradigm and Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis.
In fact, these authors and policymakers raised serious existential questions that expressed a need for a cultural revolution to stir up the Western mindset’s laziness and enable them to properly deal with foreign societies they wrongly take for granted—and even describe them as culturally underdeveloped.
Scholars and political analysts focused on the United States and curiously ignored Europe, whose intelligentsia nonetheless shared the same shallow perceptions about societies in the Middle East and North Africa. They underestimated the impact of culture on their perception of international politics and the power shift and rotation between major actors in the international and regional systems.
In this context, a certain division of labor was decided, allowing some public figures to promote ideas rooted in the culture of human rights while, in fact, they serve the interests of a handful of countries to which they belong.
This applies to Bernard Kouchner and Henry-Bernard Levy, who respectively promoted slogans such as “the humanitarian right of intervention” in sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Libya, and Burma. And now everyone knows how the chaos and disillusions that this humanitarian right of intervention created in the countries the West claimed needed saving. As such, a distinction ought to be made between the Americans and the Europeans. The Americans manage somehow to adapt and recognize when their assessment is wrong. The Europeans would never do it unless they were summoned.
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What would be the secret to understanding both behaviors? And why are we even asking this question, given that the West presumably shares the same values and concerns when it comes to dealing with other cultures and civilizations?
I think that the question is legitimate because the whole issue is about the perception and misperception of reality in the international system, mainly in the context of the confrontation between the so-called hegemonic West and the rest of the world.
Suffice it to say that the Americans’ policymakers have somehow learned how to adjust without giving up on their main strategic interests. Take a look at the way they have handled political Islam in Algeria, Egypt, Afghanistan, the South and North Caucasus, and Central Asia.
On the other hand, the Europeans did nothing of the sort. They made Islamic symbols like the veil or traditional ways of worship a big issue for domestic political purposes. Worse, the Europeans have never accepted being left aside by the Americans.
They keep feeling that the American influence in the international system should be theirs in the first place. That is why they worked hard to create and sustain the European Union and attempted to have an independent defense policy far from American control.
Besides, the Europeans didn’t learn how to evolve and concede that they can’t catch up with the Americans. The Americans learned from the Vietnam War and the Korean War, as well as from their military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Europeans learned very little, if anything at all. They couldn’t get rid of their colonial past or accept that the rules of the geopolitical game have changed.
We are going to put this argument forward by referring to the same questions asked above. Let us start with the first interrogation: “What went wrong?” What went wrong was that the ideas of the Enlightenment, for example, which had shaped people’s mindsets in the West for two centuries, were not meant to be soundly implemented in the rest of the world.
All colonial conquests were planned by people sent undercover with the questionable “noble mission” of educating people and bringing them from darkness to light, as condescendingly suggested in Joseph Conrad’s famous 1899 novel, “The Heart of Darkness.” We know how the main character in that novel ended up at the end of his journey. These people are called pioneers in their own countries. In the countries conquered, they are fingerprinted as invaders and criminals.
Furthermore, when we think about the Human Rights and Citizen Declaration incepted by the French Revolution, we find out that its promoters didn’t bother to violate its principles and prepare for the colonial conquests. Indeed, the Declaration was used as a pretext for European powers to invade other continents and divide lands.
Later, in order to make amends, intellectual circles sparked a debate about Orientalism. As E. W. Said cogently demonstrated in his decisive book on the matter, European intellectuals framed their orientalism in terms of mythology, based on the ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident.
This perception is still applied to the western perception of eastern societies. Curiously, the studies on Orientalism conducted during the Soviet era are not taken into consideration, not to mention a few important contributions by scholars from developing countries themselves.
It is now an open secret that studies on the Enlightenment and Orientalism were always linked to military ethnography, which was at the root of colonialism. Despite the fact that a slight difference in the casting process can occasionally be detected, this perception has not changed.
Part II of this analysis will appear on Saturday, February 11.
