"So far, the 21st century has been a rotten one for the western model,” according to a new book, The Fourth Revolution, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. This seems an extraordinary admission from two editors of the Economist, the flag-bearer of English liberalism, which has long insisted that the non-west could only achieve prosperity and stability through western prescriptions. It almost obscures the fact that the 20th century was blighted by the same pathologies that today make the western model seem unworkable, and render its fervent advocates a bit lost. The most violent century in human history, it was hardly the best advertisement for the “bland fanatics of western civilisation”, as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhrcalled them at the height of the cold war, “who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence”.
Niebuhr was critiquing a fundamentalist creed that has coloured our view of the world for more than a century: that western institutions of the nation-state and liberal democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and that the aspiring middle classes created by industrial capitalism will bring about accountable, representative and stable governments – that every society, in short, is destined to evolve just as the west did. Critics of this teleological view, which defines “progress” exclusively as development along western lines, have long perceived its absolutist nature. Secular liberalism, the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen cautioned as early as 1862, “is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this”. But it has had many presumptive popes and encyclicals: from the 19th-century dream of a westernised world long championed by the Economist, in which capital, goods, jobs and people freely circulate, to Henry Luce’s proclamation of an “American century” of free trade, and “modernisation theory” – the attempt by American cold warriors to seduce the postcolonial world away from communist-style revolution and into the gradualist alternative of consumer capitalism and democracy.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption. But the shock to naive minds only further entrenched in them the intellectual habits of the cold war – thinking through binary oppositions of “free” and “unfree” worlds – and redoubled an old delusion: liberal democracy, conceived by modernisation theorists as the inevitable preference of the beneficiaries of capitalism, could now be implanted by force in recalcitrant societies. Invocations of a new “long struggle” against “Islamofascism” aroused many superannuated cold warriors who missed the ideological certainties of battling communism. Intellectual narcissism survived, and was often deepened by, the realisation that economic power had begun to shift from the west. The Chinese, who had “got capitalism”, were, after all, now “downloading western apps”, according to Niall Ferguson. As late as 2008, Fareed Zakaria declared in his much-cited book, The Post-American World, that “the rise of the rest is a consequence of American ideas and actions” and that “the world is going America’s way”, with countries “becoming more open, market-friendly and democratic”.The collapse of communist regimes in 1989 further emboldened Niebuhr’s bland fanatics. The old Marxist teleology was retrofitted rather than discarded in Francis Fukuyama’s influential end-of-history thesis, and cruder theories about the inevitable march to worldwide prosperity and stability were vended by such Panglosses of globalisation as Thomas Friedman. Arguing that people privileged enough to consume McDonald’s burgers don’t go to war with each other, the New York Times columnist was not alone in mixing old-fangled Eurocentrism with American can-doism, a doctrine that grew from America’s uninterrupted good fortune and unchallenged power in the century before September 2001.
A world in flames
The atrocities of this summer in particular have plunged political and media elites in the west into stunned bewilderment and some truly desperate cliches. The extraordinary hegemonic power of their ideas had helped them escape radical examination when the world could still be presented as going America’s way. But their preferred image of the west – the idealised one in which they sought to remake the rest of the world – has been consistently challenged by many critics, left or right, in the west as well as the east.One event after another in recent months has cruelly exposed such facile narratives. China, though market-friendly, looks further from democracy than before. The experiment with free-market capitalism in Russia has entrenched a kleptocratic regime with a messianic belief in Russian supremacism. Authoritarian leaders, anti-democratic backlashes and rightwing extremism define the politics of even such ostensibly democratic countries as India, Israel, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Turkey.
Herzen was already warning in the 19th century that “our classic ignorance of the western European will be productive of a great deal of harm; racial hatred and bloody collisions will develop from it.” Herzen was sceptical of those liberal “westernisers” who believed that Russia could progress only by diligently emulating western institutions and ideologies. Intimate experience and knowledge of Europe during his long exile there had convinced him that European dominance, arrived at after much fratricidal violence and underpinned by much intellectual deception and self-deception, did not amount to “progress”. Herzen, a believer in cultural pluralism, asked a question that rarely occurs to today’s westernisers: “Why should a nation that has developed in its own way, under completely different conditions from those of the west European states, with different elements in its life, live through the European past, and that, too, when it knows perfectly well what that past leads to?”
The brutality that Herzen saw as underpinning Europe’s progress turned out, in the next century, to be a mere prelude to the biggest bloodbath in history: two world wars, and ferocious ethnic cleansing that claimed tens of millions of victims. The imperative to emulate Europe’s progress was nevertheless embraced by the ruling elites of dozens of new nation-states that emerged from the ruins of European empires in the mid-20th century, and embarked on a fantastic quest for western-style wealth and power. Today, racial hatred and bloody collisions ravage the world where liberal democracy and capitalism were expected to jointly reign.
Robert Kagan, writing in the Wall Street Journal at the start of September, articulated a defiant neoconservative faith that America is condemned to use “hard power” against the enemies of liberal modernity who understand no other language, such as Japan and Germany in the early 20th century, and Putin’s Russia today. Kagan doesn’t say which manifestation of hard power – firebombing Germany, nuking Japan, napalming Vietnam – the United States should aim against Russia, or if the shock-and-awe campaign that he cheerled in Iraq is a better template. Roger Cohen of the New York Times provides a milder variation on the clash of civilisations discourse when he laments that “European nations with populations from former colonies often seem unable to celebrate their values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law”.This moment demands a fresh interrogation of what Neibuhr euphemistically called “the highly contingent achievements of the west”, and closer attention to the varied histories of the non-west. Instead, the most common response to the present crisis has been despair over western “weakness” – and much acrimony over what Barack Obama, president of the “sole superpower” and the “indispensable nation” should have done to fix it. “Will the West Win?” Prospect asks on the cover of its latest issue, underlining the forlornness of the question with a picture of Henry Kissinger, whose complicity in various murderous fiascos from Vietnam to Iraq has not prevented his re-incarnation among the perplexed as a sage of hardheaded realism.
Such diehard believers in the west’s capacity to shape global events and congratulate itself eternally were afflicted with an obsolete assumption even in 1989: that the 20th century was defined by the battles between liberal democracy and totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism and communism. Their obsession with a largely intra-western dispute obscured the fact that the most significant event of the 20th century was decolonisation, and the emergence of new nation-states across Asia and Africa. They barely registered the fact that liberal democracies were experienced as ruthlessly imperialist by their colonial subjects.
History’s long-term losersFor people luxuriating at a high level of abstraction, and accustomed to dealing during the cold war with nation-states organised simply into blocs and superblocs, it was always too inconvenient to examine whether the freshly imagined communities of Asia and Africa were innately strong and cohesive enough to withhold the strains and divisions of state-building and economic growth. If they had indeed risked engaging with complexity and contradiction, they would have found that the urge to be a wealthy and powerful nation-state along western lines initially ordered and then disordered first Russia, Germany and Japan, and then, in our own time, plunged a vast swath of the postcolonial world into bloody conflict.
The temptation to imitate the evidently triumphant western model, as Herzen feared, was always greater than the urge to reject it. For many in the old and sophisticated societies of Asia and Africa, chafing under the domination of western Europe’s very small countries, it seemed clear that human beings could muster up an unprecedented collective power through new European forms of organisation like the nation-state and the industrialised economy. Much of Europe had first learned this harsh lesson in political and military innovation from Napoleon’s all-conquering army. In the century after the Napoleonic wars, European societies gradually learned how to deploy effectively a modern military, technology, railways, roads, judicial and educational systems and create a feeling of belonging and solidarity, most often by identifying dangerous enemies within and without.
As Eugen Weber showed in his classic book Peasants into Frenchmen (1976), this was a uniformly brutal process in France itself. Much of Europe then went on to suffer widespread dispossession, the destruction of regional languages and cultures, and the institutionalisation of hoary prejudices like antisemitism. The 19th century’s most sensitive minds, from Kierkegaard to Ruskin, recoiled from such modernisation, though they did not always know the darker side of it: rapacious European colonialism in Asia and Africa. By the 1940s, competitive nationalisms in Europe stood implicated in the most vicious wars and crimes against religious and ethnic minorities witnessed in human history. After the second world war, European countries – under American auspices and the pressures of the cold war – were forced to imagine less antagonistic political and economic relations, which eventually resulted in the European Union.
But the new nation-states in Asia and Africa had already started on their own fraught journey to modernity, riding roughshod over ethnic and religious diversity and older ways of life. Asians and Africans educated in western-style institutions despaired of their traditionalist elites as much as they resented European dominance over their societies. They sought true power and sovereignty in a world of powerful nation-states – what alone seemed to guarantee them and their peoples a fair chance at strength, equality and dignity in the white man’s world. In this quest China’s Mao Zedong and Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as much as Iran’s democratically-elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh followed the western model of mass-mobilisation and state-building.
In the 21st century that old spell of universal progress through western ideologies – socialism and capitalism – has been decisively broken. If we are appalled and dumbfounded by a world in flames it is because we have been living – in the east and south as well as west and north – with vanities and illusions: that Asian and African societies would become, like Europe, more secular and instrumentally rational as economic growth accelerated; that with socialism dead and buried, free markets would guarantee rapid economic growth and worldwide prosperity. What these fantasies of inverted Hegelianism always disguised was a sobering fact: that the dynamics and specific features of western “progress” were not and could not be replicated or correctly sequenced in the non-west.By then European and American dominance over “the world’s economies and peoples” had, as the Cambridge historian Christopher Bayly writes in The Birth of the Modern World, turned a large part of humanity “into long-term losers in the scramble for resources and dignity”. Nevertheless, the explicitly defined aim of Asia and Africa’s first nationalist icons, who tended to be socialist and secular (Atatürk, Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, Mao, and Sukarno), was “catch-up” with the west. Recent ruling classes of the non-west have looked to McKinsey rather than Marx to help define their socioeconomic future; but they have not dared to alter the founding basis of their legitimacy as “modernisers” leading their countries to convergence with the west and attainment of European and American living standards. As it turns out, the latecomers to modernity, dumping protectionist socialism for global capitalism, have got their timing wrong again.
The enabling conditions of Europe’s 19th-century success – small, relatively homogenous populations, or the ability to send surplus populations abroad as soldiers, merchants and missionaries – were missing in the large and populous countries of Asia and Africa. Furthermore, imperialism had deprived them, as Basil Davidson argued in The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, of the resources to pursue western-style economic development; it had also imposed ruinous ideologies and institutions upon societies that had developed, over centuries, their own viable political units and social structures.
Recklessly exported worldwide even today, the west’s successful formulas have continued to cause much invisible suffering. What may have been the right fit for 19th-century colonialists in countries with endless resources cannot secure a stable future for India, China, and other late arrivals to the modern world, which can only colonise their own territories and uproot their own indigenous peoples in the search for valuable commodities and resources.
The result is endless insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, wars and massacres, the rise of such bizarre anachronisms and novelties as Maoist guerrillas in India and self-immolating monks in Tibet, the increased attraction of unemployed and unemployable youth to extremist organisations, and the endless misery that provokes thousands of desperate Asians and Africans to make the risky journey to what they see as the centre of successful modernity.
The atrocities of this summer have plunged political and media elites in the west into stunned bewildermentIt should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes. The political and economic institutions and ideologies of western Europe and the United States had been forged by specific events – revolts against clerical authority, industrial innovations, capitalist consolidation through colonial conquest – that did not occur elsewhere. So formal religion – not only Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and the Russian Orthodox Church, but also such quietist religions as Buddhism – is actually now increasingly allied with rather than detached from state power. The middle classes, whether in India, Thailand, Turkey or Egypt, betray a greater liking for authoritarian leaders and even uniformed despots than for the rule of law and social justice.
But then western ideologues during the cold war absurdly prettified the rise of the “democratic” west. The long struggle against communism, which claimed superior moral virtue, required many expedient feints. And so the centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, brutal exploitation, and genocide were suppressed in accounts that showed how westerners made the modern world, and became with their liberal democracies the superior people everyone else ought to catch up with. “All of the western nations,” James Baldwin warned during the cold war in 1963, are “caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and the west has no moral authority.” The deception that an African-American easily divined has continued, nevertheless, to enjoy political support and intellectual respectability long after the end of the cold war.
Understandably, history has to be “balanced” for Davos Men, who cannot bear too much reality in their effervescent prognoses of “convergence” between the west and the rest. But obscuring the monstrous costs of the west’s own “progress” destroys any possibility of explaining the proliferation of large-scale violence in the world today, let along finding a way to contain it. Evasions, suppressions and downright falsehoods have resulted, over time, in a massive store of defective knowledge – an ignorance that Herzen correctly feared to be pernicious – about the west and the non-west alike. Simple-minded and misleading ideas and assumptions, drawn from this blinkered history, today shape the speeches of western statesmen, thinktank reports and newspaper editorials, while supplying fuel to countless log-rolling columnists, TV pundits and terrorism experts.Thus the editors of the Economist elide in The Fourth Revolution the history of mass slaughter in the west itself that led to the modern nation-state: the religious wars of the 17th century, the terror of French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, the Franco-Prussian war and the wars of Italian unification, among others. Mainstream Anglo-American writers who vend popular explanations of how the west made the modern world veer between intellectual equivocation and insouciance about the west’s comparative advantage of colonialism, slavery and indentured labour. “We cannot pretend,” Ferguson avers, that the “mobilisation of cheap and probably underemployed Asian labour to grow rubber and dig gold had no economic value.” A recent review in the Economist of a history explaining the compact between capitalism and slavery protests that “almost all the blacks” in the book are “victims”, and “almost all the whites villains”.
The price of progress
Some parts of the west had achieved some reduction in material inequalities, due to a market economy which produced both desirable goods and the means to acquire them; organised labour, which made it possible for workers to demand higher wages; and political liberty, which made the rulers accountable to the ruled. And some western countries had also, however brutally, got the sequencing broadly right: they had managed to build resilient states before trying to turn peasants into citizens. (“We have made Italy; now we must make the Italians,” the Italian nationalist Massimo d’Azeglio famously proclaimed in 1860.) The most successful European states had also accomplished a measure of economic growth before gradually extending democratic rights to a majority of the population. “No European country,” Aron pointed out, “ever went through the phase of economic development which India and China are now experiencing, under a regime that was representative and democratic.” Nowhere in Europe, he wrote in The Opium of Intellectuals, “during the long years when industrial populations were growing rapidly, factory chimneys looming up over the suburbs and railways and bridges being constructed, were personal liberties, universal suffrage and the parliamentary system combined”.A faith in the west’s superiority has not always been an obstacle to understanding the tormented process of modernisation in the rest of the world, as the French anti-communist Raymond Aron demonstrated in books like Progress and Disillusion (1968) and The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955). Aron believed the west made the modern world with its political and economic innovations and material goals, but did not flinch from examining what this fact really augured about the modern world. As he saw it, the conflicts and contradictions thrown up by the pursuit of modernity had been hard enough to manage for western societies for much of the last century. Industrial societies alone had seemed able to improve material conditions, and bring about a measure of social and economic equality; but the promise of equality, which staved off social unrest, was increasingly difficult to fulfill because specialisation kept producing fresh hierarchies.
Countries outside the west, however, faced simultaneously the arduous tasks of establishing strong nation-states and viable economies, and satisfying the demands for dignity and equality of freshly politicised peoples. This made the importation of western measures and techniques of success in places that “have not yet emerged from feudal poverty” an unprecedented and perilous experiment. Travelling through Asia and Africa in the 1950s, Aron discerned the potential for authoritarianism as well as dark chaos.
Aron was no vulgar can-doist. American individualism, the product of a short history of unrepeatable national success, in his view, “spreads unlimited optimism, denigrates the past, and encourages the adoption of institutions which are in themselves destructive of the collective unity”. Nor was he a partisan of the blood-splattered French revolutionary tradition, which requires “people to submit to the strictest discipline in the name of the ultimate freedom” – whose latest incarnation is Isis and its attempt to construct an utopian “Islamic State” through a reign of terror.There were not many political choices before societies that had lost their old traditional sources of authority while embarking on the adventure of building new nation-states and industrial economies in a secular and materialist ethos. These rationalised societies, constituted by “individuals and their desires”, had to either build a social and political consensus themselves or have it imposed on them by a strongman. Failure would plunge them into violent anarchy.
The state under siege
Applied to the many nation-states that emerged in the mid-20th century, Aron’s sombre analysis can only embarrass those who have been daydreaming since 1989 about a worldwide upsurge of liberal democracy in tandem with capitalism. Indeed, long before the rise of European totalitarianisms, urgent state-building and the search for rapid and high economic growth had doomed individual liberties to a precarious existence in Japan. Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and South Korea went on to show, after 1945, that a flourishing capitalist economy always was compatible with the denial of democratic rights.
Turkey, however, may have been relatively fortunate in being able to build a modern state out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire. Disorder was the fate of many new nations that had been insufficiently or too fervidly imagined, such as Myanmar and Pakistan; their weak state structures and fragmented civil society have condemned them to oscillate perennially between civilian and military despots while warding off challenges from disaffected minorities and religious fanatics. Until the Arab spring, ruthless despots kept a lid on sectarian animosities in the nation-states carved out of the Ottoman empire. Today, as the shattering of Iraq, Libya and Syria reveals, despotism, far from being a bulwark against militant disaffection, is an effective furnace for it.China has more recently achieved a form of capitalist modernity without embracing liberal democracy. Turkey now enjoys economic growth as well as regular elections; but these have not made the country break with long decades of authoritarian rule. The arrival of Anatolian masses in politics has actually enabled a demagogue like Erdoğan to imagine himself as a second Atatürk.
Countries that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist revolutions – such as China, Vietnam, and Iran – look stable and cohesive when compared with a traditional monarchy such as Thailand or wholly artificial nation-states like Iraq and Syria. The bloody regimes inaugurated by Khomeini and Mao survived some terrible internal and external conflicts – the Korean and Iran-Iraq wars, the Cultural Revolution and much fratricidal bloodletting – partly because their core nationalist ideologies secured consent from many of their subjects.
Since 1989, however, this strenuously achieved national consensus in many countries has been under siege from a fresh quarter: an ideology of endless economic expansion and private wealth-creation that had been tamed in the mid-20th century. After its most severe global crisis in the 1930s, capitalism had suffered a decline in legitimacy, and in much of the non-western world, planned and protected economic growth had become the chosen means to such ends as social justice and gender equality. In our own age, feral forms of capitalism, which after the Depression were defanged by social-welfarism in the west and protectionist economies elsewhere, have turned into an elemental force. Thus, nation-states already struggling against secessionist movements by ethnic and religious minorities have seen their internal unity further undermined by capitalism’s dominant ethic of primitive accumulation and individual gratification.
China, once the world’s most egalitarian society, is now even more unequal than the United States – 1% of its population owns one-third of the national wealth – and prone to defuse its increasing social contradictions through a hardline nationalism directed at its neighbours, particularly Japan. Many formally democratic nation-states, such as India, Indonesia, and South Africa, have struggled to maintain their national consensus in the face of the imperative to privatise basic services such as water, health and education (and also, for many countries, to de-industrialise, and surrender their sovereignty to markets). Mobile and transnational capital, which de-territorialises wealth and poverty, has made state-building and its original goals of broad social and economic uplift nearly impossible to achieve within national boundaries.
The elites primarily benefitting from global capitalism have had to devise new ideologies to make their dominance seem natural. Thus, India and Israel, which started out as nation-states committed to social justice, have seen their foundational ideals radically reconfigured by a nexus of neoliberal politicians and majoritarian nationalists, who now try to bludgeon their disaffected subjects into loyalty to a “Jewish state” and a “Hindu nation”. Demagogues in Thailand, Myanmar, and Pakistan have emerged at the head of populations angry and fearful about being deprived of the endlessly postponed fruits of modernity.
Identified with elite or sectarian interests, the unrepresentative central state in many countries struggles to compete with offers of stability and order from non-state actors. Not surprisingly, even the vicious Isis claims to offer better governance to Sunnis angry with the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. So do Maoist insurgents who control large territories in Central India, and even drug-traffickers in Myanmar and Mexico.
A shattered mirror
Fukuyama, asserting that the “power of the democratic ideal” remains immense, claimed earlier this year that “we should have no doubt as to what kind of society lies at the end of History”. But the time for grand Hegelian theories about the rational spirit of history incarnated in the nation-state, socialism, capitalism, or liberal democracy is now over. Looking at our own complex disorder we can no longer accept that it manifests an a priori moral and rational order, visible only to an elite thus far, that will ultimately be revealed to all.
How then do we interpret it? Reflecting on the world’s “pervasive raggedness” in the last essay he wrote before his death in 2006, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz spoke of how “the shattering of larger coherences … has made relating local realities with overarching ones … extremely difficult.” “If the general is to be grasped at all,” Geertz wrote, “and new unities uncovered, it must, it seems, be grasped not directly, all at once, but via instances, differences, variations, particulars – piecemeal, case by case. In a splintered world, we must address the splinters.”
Such an approach would necessarily demand greater attention to historical specificity and detail, the presence of contingency, and the ever-deepening contradictions of nation-states amid the crises of capitalism. It would require asking why nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq failed catastrophically while decentralisation helped stabilise Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, after a long spell of despotic rule supported by the middle class. It would require an admission that Iraq can achieve a modicum of stability not by reviving the doomed project of nation-state but through a return to Ottoman-style confederal institutions that devolve power and guarantee minority rights. Addressing the splinters leaves no scope for vacuous moralising against “Islamic extremism”: in their puritanical and utopian zeal, the Islamic revolutionaries brutally advancing across Syria and Iraq resemble the fanatically secular Khmer Rouge more than anything in the long history of Islam.
A fresh grasp of the general also necessitates understanding the precise ways in which western ideologues, and their non-western epigones, continue to “make” the modern world. “Shock-therapy” administered to a hapless Russian population in the 1990s and the horrific suffering afterwards set the stage for Putin’s messianic Eurasianism. But, following Geertz’s insistence on differences and variations, the ressentiment of the west articulated by nationalists in Russia, China, and India cannot be conflated with the resistance to a predatory form of modernisation – ruthless dispossession by a profit-driven nexus of the state and business – mounted by indigenous peoples in Tibet, India, Peru and Bolivia.
In any case, the doubters of western-style progress today include more than just marginal communities and some angry environmental activists. Last month the Economist said that, on the basis of IMF data, emerging economies – or the “large part of humanity” that Bayly called the “long-term losers” of history – might have to wait for three centuries in order to catch up with the west. In the Economist’s assessment, which pitilessly annuls the upbeat projections beloved of consultants and investors, the last decade of rapid growth was an “aberration” and “billions of people will be poorer for a lot longer than they might have expected just a few years ago”.
The implications are sobering: the non-west not only finds itself replicating the west’s violence and trauma on an infinitely larger scale. While helping inflict the profoundest damage yet on the environment – manifest today in rising sea levels, erratic rainfall, drought, declining harvests, and devastating floods – the non-west also has no real prospect of catching up with the west.
How do we chart our way out of this impasse? His own discovery of the tragically insuperable contradictions of westernisation led Aron into the odd company of the many thinkers in the east and the west who questioned the exalting of economic growth as an end in itself. Of course, other ways of conceiving of the good life have existed long before a crudely utilitarian calculus – which institutionalises greed, credits slavery with economic value and confuses individual freedom with consumer choice – replaced thinking in our most prominent minds.
Such re-examinations of liberal capitalist ideas of “development”, and exploration of suppressed intellectual traditions, are not nearly as rousing or self-flattering as the rhetorical binaries that make laptop bombers pound the keyboard with the caps lock glowing green. Barack Obama, who struggled to adhere to a wise policy of not doing stupid stuff, has launched another open-ended war after he was assailed for being weak by assorted can-doists. Plainly, Anglo-American elites who are handsomely compensated to live forever in the early 20th century, when the liberal-democratic west crushed its most vicious enemies, will never cease to find more brutes to exterminate. The rest of us, however, have to live in the 21st century, and prevent it from turning into yet another rotten one for the western model.
• This article was amended on 17 October 2014. An earlier version stated that “No less than the World Bank admitted last month that emerging economies … might have to wait for three centuries in order to catch up with the west”. In fact it was the Economist, analysing IMF data, which said that last month.
新移民如何撼动老欧洲核心?_《参考消息》官方网站(全文)_网易新闻
【延伸阅读】瑟伦:瑞典多元文化主义误入歧途 《国际先驱导报》文章
美国盖特斯通研究所网站5月24日刊发,作者瑟伦·谢恩系该研究所高级研究员。
在瑞典首都斯德哥尔摩市郊的穆斯林聚居区,数百青年穆斯林从19日起连续多天发动骚乱。此事件对于瑞典失败的多元文化模式来说是预料之中的后果,这种移民政策没有鼓励穆斯林移民融入瑞典社会,而是长期以来任由穆斯林建立平行的独立社会。瑞典采取全世界最慷慨的开放避难政策,为伊斯兰国家的战争难民提供庇护,为新移民提供免费住房和社会福利,因而成为大量穆斯林难民的首选国。但是他们大都缺乏教育难以就业,结果与瑞典社会相割裂,聚居成独立社区,他们还要求给予特别待遇。越来越多的瑞典人开始怀疑这种多元文化主义和大规模移民是否能长期持续下去,移民部长最近表示瑞典需要收紧避难政策以削减新移民数量,而反移民的保守政党已获得大量选民支持。但骚乱表明损害已经造成。
(2013-06-03 10:23:05)
【延伸阅读】特朗普再次呼应白人民族主义者 四成美国人支持弹劾总统
参考消息网8月19日报道 路透社8月17日报道称,美国总统特朗普17日公开反对拆除南北战争时期支持奴隶制的南部邦联的遗迹,在一场已经加剧了种族紧张关系的争议中,与白人民族主义者遥相呼应,引起来自共和党同僚们的强烈指责。
由于白人民族主义者举行反对拆除一尊南部邦联塑像的抗议,12日在弗吉尼亚州夏洛茨维尔发生了暴力事件。特朗普在事件发生后发表的言论引起共和党人、企业领袖及美国盟友的不满,导致市场下跌,并引发白宫高官可能辞职的传言。
参议院外交委员会主席、共和党人罗布·科克对特朗普的治国理政能力表示质疑。曾被特朗普当作国务卿人选的科克说:“总统未能表现出取得成功所需的能力和才干。”科克称特朗普需要作出“彻底改变”。
在17日的一系列推特发文中,特朗普对两名共和党参议员杰夫·弗雷克和林赛·格雷厄姆发起攻击,从而重新引发人们对于他能否与本党国会议员合作以便争取让自己包括减税和基础设施投资在内的立法议程获得通过的怀疑。
特朗普把矛头指向了全国一长串拆除或考虑拆除南部邦联塑像或纪念碑的地区,其中包括加利福尼亚、佛罗里达、佐治亚、肯塔基、路易斯安那、马里兰、纽约、北卡罗来纳、马萨诸塞、密苏里、蒙大拿、田纳西、弗吉尼亚、得克萨斯等州的城市以及华盛顿特区。
特朗普不愿让这场争议过去。他在推特上写道:“遗憾地看到,随着我们美丽的塑像和纪念碑被拆除,我们伟大国家的历史和文化遭到撕毁。你无法改变历史,但你能从历史中吸取教训。”他还写道:“罗伯特·李、斯通韦尔·杰克逊——下面该是谁了,华盛顿、杰斐逊吗?太愚蠢了!”他指的是1865年结束的南北战争中的两位邦联将领,以及最早担任美国总统的乔治·华盛顿和托马斯·杰斐逊,他们都曾拥有奴隶,但他们的功绩得到人们极大的景仰。
反对者称这些塑像是腐朽的种族主义象征,而支持者则认为它们是对美国历史的致敬。
特朗普还否认自己谈起过白人至上主义者、新纳粹及三K党与夏洛茨维尔的反种族主义激进分子之间的“道德等价关系”。
由于围绕白宫的混乱削弱了投资者对于特朗普雄心勃勃的经济议程将会成为现实的信心,美国股市17日遭遇了3个月来的最大跌幅。
在这种论战的氛围下,白宫否认了特朗普的经济顾问加里·科恩可能辞职的传言。16日特朗普宣布解散两个颇具知名度的企业顾问委员会,此前多名企业高管因为他就夏洛茨维尔事件发表的言论而辞去了在这两个委员会中的职务。白宫官员周四称,特朗普已经放弃了设立一个基础设施顾问委员会的打算。
英国《独立报》网站8月17日报道称,一项新的民意调查显示,现在有多达40%的美国人支持弹劾总统特朗普。
美国社会宗教研究所进行的这项调查表明,40%的美国人——其中包括近75%的民主党人和7%的共和党人——支持弹劾特朗普并将其免职。
据美国全国广播公司报道,这与今年2月30%的美国人支持弹劾总统相比,升幅明显。
社会宗教研究所的调查从本月2日持续到8日——在12日发生白人民族主义者在弗吉尼亚州夏洛茨维尔集会之前。
特朗普表示,白人至上主义者、新纳粹主义分子和其他仇恨团体不应该为造成32岁的希瑟·海尔死亡的这起暴力事件承担百分之百的责任。这一言论招致了民主、共和两党的广泛批评。
社会宗教研究所的调查表明,民主党人和无党派人士越来越支持弹劾特朗普,而支持将特朗普免职的共和党人的比例仍保持在个位数。
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资料图片:洛杉矶的示威者8月17日手举海报参加支持弹劾特朗普的集会。(法新社)
(2017-08-19 10:38:32)
【延伸阅读】独家:极端民族主义推动一战爆发
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一战期间,德国市民向奔前线的士兵献花。(资料图片)
参考消息网7月10日报道 美国学者卡尔顿·海斯指出:“欧洲把1914年的大战舞台准备就绪,而在一切道具中,泛拉丁主义、泛条顿主义和泛斯拉夫主义十分引人注目。”反思百年前空前惨烈的第一次世界大战,一种巨大的推动力不容忽视,那就是极端民族主义。一战前夕,疯狂的极端民族主义者挥舞着这把利剑,慷慨激昂、义无反顾地冲向了战场。他们都忘记了,这是一把失去控制、伤人害己的悲情之剑。
民族主义注入“铁和血”
民族主义是一种以民族特征、民族意识、民族情感和民族利益为基础的意识形态和社会实践运动。它在冲破中世纪神权桎梏、催生民族国家方面发挥了重要作用。但随着自由资本主义向帝国主义过渡,欧洲民族主义逐渐走向极端,蜕变为列强对外扩张、争夺霸权的理论依据和精神动力。
德意志人自视为“纯种”雅利安人的后代,强调自身血统的纯洁和高贵,认为自己的民族光荣而伟大。在德意志人眼中,一山难容二虎、一个欧洲不能有两个霸主。随着普法战争中强大的法国陆军被击败、法皇拿破仑三世被俘、普鲁士军队高奏凯歌进入巴黎、德皇威廉一世在凡尔赛宫宣布德意志帝国成立,德意志人的民族主义意识更加强烈。
随着第二次工业革命的发展,统一后的普鲁士德国经济迅速崛起。到19世纪末,德国经济实力已经超过法国,成为欧洲大陆头号经济强国。此时的德国可以说是头颅高扬、傲视一切,但作为一个姗姗来迟的角色,举目四望却发现在瓜分欧洲和世界的盛宴上已经没有了自己的位置。1897年,德国外交大臣比洛声称:“让这个邻邦或那个邻邦瓜分大陆和海洋而我们自己则满足于欣赏蔚蓝色天空的时代一去不复返了。”于是乎,原本推动国家统一的民族主义被注入了“铁和血”的变异基因,成为帝国争取“阳光下的地盘”的助推器,其首要目标就是彻底击垮法兰西和阻止泛斯拉夫主义的竞争与扩张。
作为德国冤家对头的法国,其民族复仇主义情绪极其强烈,形成了沉痛的“法国人的记忆”。普法战争的惨败、巨额的赔款和领土的割让,强烈地刺激着每一个法国人。曾经的“高卢雄鸡”,欧洲文明和时尚的中心,威风凛凛的欧洲大陆霸主,现在却在德国这把达摩克利斯之剑下面战战兢兢。随着1893年与俄国军事协定的生效、1904年与英国协约的签订,以及1907年英俄协约的签订,英法俄三国协约形成,法国认为实现对德复仇的时机已经为期不远了,复仇的利剑随时等待着出鞘,重夺欧洲霸权的野心再度膨胀。
当时欧洲东部存在的以俄罗斯为首的泛斯拉夫主义,则大力宣扬斯拉夫民族优越论,宣称其他欧洲文明已经枯竭,未来属于以俄罗斯为代表的斯拉夫人。泛德意志主义和泛斯拉夫主义展开了激烈的竞争,俄德关系迅速恶化。难怪时任德军总参谋长小毛奇在1913年指出:“欧洲大战迟早会爆发,焦点将是日耳曼民族与斯拉夫民族之间的斗争。”
与泛斯拉夫主义紧密相连的是大塞尔维亚主义、大保加利亚主义、大罗马尼亚主义等。交织纠缠在一起的各种极端民族主义,在舆论界的疯狂鼓吹和政府的操纵利用下,在民众的喧嚣声中,导致欧洲日趋癫狂,局势逐渐失控。
思想舆论界摇旗呐喊
小毛奇说,要让民众做好牺牲的准备,就“需要先激发民众的热情”。一战爆发前,欧洲各国思想界、理论界迎合广大民众的心意,充分发挥自己的独特优势,纷纷成立民族沙文主义团体,与国家政权结成联盟,不断发出极端民族主义的呼声。
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极端民族主义者鼓吹的一战吞噬了近千万士兵的生命。图为凡尔登战役中遭炮火袭击的法军士兵。(资料图片)
在德国,1894年改组成立的泛德意志同盟,可以算作德国“所有沙文主义宣传机构的一个总领导机构”,在国内外有27个下属组织,包括海军协会、殖民地协会、德国东部边境学会等。其成员除了大垄断资本家、政府官员、军官与知名议员、律师、牧师外,还包括所有主要报刊的主笔和大量知名教授,重点宣传极端民族主义,同一切阻碍民族发展的流派进行斗争;在所有邦国中大力培植支持德意志极端民族主义者,呼吁一切德意志人为维护民族特性而斗争;支持政府在欧洲和海外推行强有力的扩张政策。
在其引导下,德国极端民族主义言论不断涌现,为沙文主义、军国主义的“合法性”寻找外衣。他们认为,德意志民族“在精神方面所创造和拥有的一切都具有世界意义,德意志的衰落意味着全部文明不可弥补的损失”。一位德国科学家对美国记者欧文·科布说:“我们德国人是欧洲最勤劳、最诚挚、最有教养的民族。德国文化将照耀全球,战后不会再有其他文化了。”
此时的法国,民族复仇主义也进一步活跃,竭力利用阿尔萨斯和洛林问题在民众中煽动对德复仇情绪。作家巴雷斯等也创作了数部挑动民族主义情绪的小说。中国人耳熟能详的都德的《最后一课》,在当时拨动了无数法国人的心弦。一批极端民族主义者主张强硬外交政策,攻击法国政府在摩洛哥问题上对德妥协的态度,鼓吹对德战争。
俄罗斯极端民族主义者则宣扬,所有斯拉夫人应当只使用一种语言——俄罗斯语,只有一种信仰——东正教,只存在一个国家——俄罗斯,只有一个领袖——沙皇。代表性人物米哈伊尔·波戈金要求所有斯拉夫地区的国家必须绝对服从俄国,只有那些扛起沙皇旗帜并接受俄罗斯语言、法律和东正教的斯拉夫人才会被俄罗斯当做兄弟。
国家机器鼓动民众
欧洲各国统治者看到极端民族主义可资利用的价值,除了煞费苦心地利用和操纵思想界、舆论界的宣传,诱使民众集合在民族沙文主义的大旗之下,拥护和支持帝国主义战争,还直接走到台前来,亲自摇旗呐喊。
1912年,带着强烈复仇情绪的洛林人普恩加莱担任法国总理,提出法国的首要任务就是准备对德战争,对德国绝不能姑息,积极推行旨在对德复仇的强硬外交政策,大肆鼓吹民族观念、“建立强大的法兰西”,利用德国的挑衅加紧扩军备战。在他的带动和影响下,民族复仇的宣传甚嚣尘上。
在德国,被丘吉尔形容为“昂首阔步,装腔作势”的德皇威廉二世,把“德国人的气质将会再次使世界复兴”作为口头禅,视未来的战争是“斯拉夫人与日耳曼人的最后决战”。德国骑兵将军哈蒂也鼓吹“战争是万事之父”。
俄国政府同样看到泛斯拉夫主义在自己建立庞大的斯拉夫帝国中的好处,沙皇尼古拉二世认为国家发展到这个阶段有必要鼓动民族的“爱国主义”舆论,有必要进行一场战争使民众忘却日俄战争的灾难。
在统治者的操纵和利用下,在思想家和舆论界的大肆宣扬下,各个阶层的民众都在走向疯狂,都认为用火和剑去剿灭异族是天经地义的。
在德国,许多普通民众声称,要把对法国人的仇恨教给儿子,教给民族的下一代。战争爆发前夕,“寡妇已把最后一个儿子送上了前线;每个年轻的姑娘带着骄傲的眼泪和痛苦离开了她亲爱的人。……所有的人都希望去训练、武装自己,为祖国而战斗和牺牲”。德国统一时激动人心的一幕仿佛再现了!在运送德军的火车上到处写着“去巴黎吃早饭!”“一刺刀挑死一个法国人!”
在法国,阿尔萨斯—洛林几乎成了有魔力的赌注,“用一切手段争回阿尔萨斯和洛林”的口号响彻整个法兰西。大量狂热的民众兴高采烈地走向前线,运兵车上到处写着“圣诞节回家”的口号,新招募的士兵脸上带着微笑,“枪上插着鲜花”,把这次军事行动当做“仅仅是巴黎—柏林之间的令人振奋的旅行!”
政府失去回旋余地
在欧洲各国首都,在成千上万的城市和村庄,极端民族主义的狂热情绪越来越高涨,民众几近疯狂,煽动起这种情绪的政府此时却在某种程度上失去了控制力,为这种狂热所裹挟,失去了最后的回旋余地。
在法国,在极端民族主义势力的攻讦下,实行和平外交方针的约瑟夫·卡约被迫在1912年辞去总理职务,复仇主义的代表普恩加莱继任总理,1913年又当选为总统。在巴黎,宣传和平主义的社会党领袖、议员饶勒斯,由于一再呼吁欧洲所有的社会党人团结起来反对战争,竟于1914年7月31日被一个法国极端民族主义狂热分子刺杀。
在德国,德意志同盟成为直接影响政府决策的“社会力量第二体系”。早期在德国大学生联合会等影响下成长的新一代极端民族主义者,战前也几乎遍布一切政治派别,充斥于帝国的众多领导岗位。1911年11月的国会论辩中,极端民族主义者发泄了各种愤怒和失望,民族主义协会甚至还公开攻击仅在个别问题上略显“迟疑”的德皇,迫使国会对英法俄作出更加“强硬回答”。1914年战争爆发前夜,首相霍尔韦格出于德国的利益考虑担保了奥匈帝国与塞尔维亚之间的战争“计划”(当然后来奥匈帝国并未遵循),劝说奥匈帝国暂时不要对沙俄宣战,极端民族主义者竟将其视为“使人扫兴的人”,甚至放肆地攻击他是“帝国的掘墓人”。
在极端民族主义的推动下,一套完整的“走向毁灭的政治机制”在欧洲建立了。复杂的盟约网络造就的两大军事集团,政治上以邻为壑、相互攻讦,外交上谎言与权谋齐飞,军事上疯狂扩军备战。双方势成骑虎,一切都在向战争狂奔!
百年悲情的历史告诫
百年前,极端民族主义泛滥,将人类拖入了一场史无前例的世界大战,并“开启了持续30年之久的残暴和愚蠢”。广大民众被极端民族主义所蛊惑,投身战争,而最终承受生命与财产损失痛苦的,也正是这些满怀“民族自豪感”的人们。
百年后,有人说,“民族主义的幽灵在东亚徘徊”。日本自明治维新以来,披着民族主义外衣的军国主义给亚洲人民造成了巨大的灾难。近年来,日本军国主义又有重新复活的迹象。安倍政府打着民族主义旗号,否定战争罪责,频频参拜靖国神社,为军国主义招魂,极力突破和平宪法,强行解禁集体自卫权,妄图恢复“政治大国”、“军事大国”地位,不能不引起中国人民和全世界爱好和平的人们的警惕。
历史反复告诫我们,极端民族主义是导致战争的强大推动力。民族主义一旦蜕变到极端,将会造成一国民众集体唯我独尊,盲目仇外排外,要求本国政府为了微小的利益对外强硬,甚至不惜大动干戈,轻率地把国家和民族推向苦难的战争深渊。
百年一战,百年悲情。狂热的极端民族主义决不可放任,否则当年欧洲国家所犯的错误就有可能再现。这正是我们回顾一战百年历史所得的重要启示。(作者为军事科学院军史百科部军事百科专业研究室主任金立昕、军事科学院军史百科部军事百科专业研究室助理研究员李新伟)