The Best of Worlds (book review)

The Post-American World (2008)
Fareed Zakaria



Caveat: The following book review is very long. It is probably a longer treatment than the work really deserves. However, I came to political consciousness at the same as I was reading the weekly columns of Fareed Zakaria and so I think I felt a certain need to deal with the subject once and for all. The review serves as a fairly thorough exploration of a very self-consciously "universal" version of the American ideology as adopted by a prominent liberal American intellectual of South Asian extraction.

You can also see Zakaria's lecture at LSE (scroll down to June 2009) on his book, which I attended. At the fifty-second minute I made a joke relevant given the earlier conspiratorial questions on Zakaria's attending Bilderberg conferences and nervously asked a question (which unfortunately he forgot to answer until I approached him later at the book signing). I hope the review does not seem too harsh, however, real criticism of someone's public life and work should not be shied away from when it is warranted.

***

It was reported during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign that Barack Obama was reading a book entitled The Post-American World. This might seem a less than promising sign for a future of Chief of State. Fareed Zakaria’s book, however, is not so much concerned with the end of America as the rise of the "Rest," that is, of the end of the Third World's underdevelopment and impotence. The meaning of this is not predetermined. We live in a time of particularly fractious identities. Whether it is wealthy Russian expats getting an education in elite Western universities or the descendants of poor West Indian immigrants in the streets Paris and London, questions of belonging, of which world to inhabit, of learning how to act in different social and national contexts, and of deciding what cultural values one will adopt (if any) are unavoidable. And while these "Third Culture Kids" form a small minority, they have a disproportionate impact on the world. They include both Obama with his celebrated (ad nauseum) background and Zakaria, an Indian immigrant and naturalized American. Thus, in reading and writing The Post-American World, each could ascribe whatever values they wished, from cheering the long overdue return to economic equality of the (darker-skinned) peoples of the South to fearing a development boding ill for the power and future of the West, and of the United States in particular.

In his book, Zakaria emerges as a kind of synthesis of two prophets of new order. He is Francis Fukuyama in signaling and praising the triumph of Western capitalism and liberal democratic ideals across the world. But there is also, counter-intuitively, Frantz Fanon in saluting the rise of the postcolonial South from wretched poverty and thereby ending 500 years of Western cultural, economic, political and military hegemony. The book is useful both for its own analysis and as an expression of a prominent Establishment commentator's thoughts. These assets are unfortunately obscured somewhat by the style of writing. There isn't exactly self-censorship but one has the distinct impression that Zakaria writes as he imagines his decidedly middlebrow audience of Newsweek readers would like him to. Numerous appallingly bad expressions, inaccuracies and metaphors (which a good editor really would have spotted) also detract from the text. His noted description of Burma as "tiny" (the country is the size of Texas) is only the tip of iceberg

Zakaria identifies "the rise of the Rest as the great story of our times." In a few paragraphs, he skillfully dismisses the neurotic obsession with Islamic terrorism and the imagined struggle with the "Islamofascist" tide. These are both rather annoying distractions. And indeed, it is the economic developments of the past forty years that have been revolutionary. Between 1870 and 1970, the economically and technologically advanced countries of the world remained concentrated in North America, Europe, Britain's White Dominions, and Japan. A few small, wealthy countries were added in the form of the postwar Asian Tiger economies while Argentina (once as rich as the U.S.) ingloriously fell back into the fold of the "underdevelopment". Today, most of the world's growth is outside the developed world and particularly strong in China. "The Rest" have hardly reached parity, and most of their new wealth is concentrated in an insecure minority of their populations, but their collective weight nonetheless has made them capable of negotiating with what used to be called "the North" on more equal terms. The G7's replacement by the G20 is the institutional manifestation of this shift.


World leaders at a G20 summit.

Zakaria sees the economic rise of the South as the ultimate logical consequence of the West's own rise that began five centuries ago. He offers a plausible theory of economic development in Asia being constantly crippled by "strong states". Societies were dominated by princes and warlords who were interested in building palaces and monuments to their own glory and would often seize the assets of those who got too wealthy. Zakaria writes that "Asian rulers largely fit the stereotypes of the Oriental tyrant." Indeed, "Most countries in Asia had powerful and centralized predatory states that extracted taxes from their subjects without providing much in return." He compares them to the Soviet Union, both equally obsessed with prestige projects like the Taj Mahal and space exploration. He also notes how the egalitarian poverty of peasant societies from Russia to China were often scornful of merchants, placing them at the bottom of the social ladder in terms of honor if not wealth. China's was a continent-country where the centralization of power was such that the Emperor could at a whim cut off the funding of the explorer Zheng He, who had traveled to much of the rest of Asia as a sort of prelude to Columbus. Zakaria's damning assessment: it was "the expression of a civilization's stagnation".



Into this static historical order came the West with its vast technological and economic power. By 1919, the Europeans and their descendants controlled 85% of the world's landmass and dominated China indirectly too. This spread European ideas (or at least political vocabulary): while the first generation of colonial subjects wanted the West's power, the second wanted also its ideal whether in the form of liberalism or Marxism. In particular, under the twin "hegemonies" of Great Britain and the United States, there spread limited and rational government, constitutionalism, free trade, capitalism and so forth. For Zakaria, it is the long-delayed embrace of Western (American) ideals by the Third World that has allowed it (finally) to begin to overcome Western superiority.

Zakaria is not entirely positive about the (neo)colonial experience. But besides the White supremacy, wars of pacification and occasional genocide, he sees this as on balance a laudable development. Still, only because the Western hegemony would end. All is not perfect in the world dominated by what Winston Churchill called "the English-speaking peoples". For example, Zakaria discusses one of the legacies of that world with an uncustomary (and welcome!) bite. World financial institutions continue to have the curious tradition of always appointing an American to the head of the World Bank and a European to the International Monetary Fund. Zakaria responds: "This 'tradition,' like the customs of an old segregated country club may be charming and amusing to insiders,but to outsiders it is outrageous and bigoted." Fanon could not have written with a more acid tongue! But this sort of comment is rare and Zakaria does not dwell on past injustices because "The natives," he writes, "have gotten good at capitalism."

Zakaria brings no real insight as to why capitalism began to succeed in the tropics where it had failed for 200 years. He is rather better as to the consequences. Modernization will change gender relations and threaten "the hierarchy of age, religion, tradition, and feudal order." Global civilization will no longer be the monopoly of European culture. Many new "regional CNNs" like Al Jazeera, TeleSUR, France 24, and Russia Today provide new lenses through which to see the world. American mass culture maintains its exceptional influence in the world but we also see the proliferation of film and music industries in India (Bollywood), Nigeria (Nollywood) and parts of the Arab world. There are a few shallow ruminations on what this means for the future (will culture become "modern" or Western"?) but Zakaria also moves to the meat: "The great shift taking place in the world might prove to be less about culture and more about power." And here, we have another Fanonian word, this time in a darkly prophetic mode as he talks of the leaders outside the West: "They have read the Goldman Sachs BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China] report. They know that the balance of power has shifted." So whereas the first wave of global civilization was under Europe's boot, this new one will emerge with a certain equality between peoples.

Zakaria deals in anecdote and generalization. He has almost nothing to say specifically about the futures of the Middle East, Latin America, Africa or the former Soviet Union. Europe and Japan are mentioned mainly to cite their terminal demographic decline. Zakaria is distinctly uninterested in the European Union, which is perhaps surprising given its economic weight (slightly greater than North America) in the economically-obsessed world he describes. Nor is he interested in dealing with it as an attempt at transnational governance complementary to globalization, a model for other regions, or indeed even something to be discredited. Zakaria limits himself to national portraits of India and China, which he clearly clearly sees as the two new emerging powers to be contended with. We have two chapters replete with facts, vignettes and stereotypes. While both are useful, neither is really satisfactory.


China's GDP.

China's chapter (entitled "The Challenger") is the better of the two. We find many useful facts and amusing asides. Whereas Zakaria has the (apocryphal?) quote of Napoleon Bonaparte that "when China wakes,she will shake the world," he also juxtaposes this with the mentality of the American missionaries and capitalists that penetrated China in the nineteenth century: "1 billion souls to save, 2 billion armpits to deodorize." Has there been a better expression of the Spirit of the Age? We are treated to a plethora of statistics on the Industrial Revolution in China since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping: 9% growth a year for three decades, 400 million people lifted out of poverty, a sevenfold increase in personal income. China's success, of course, doesn't square particularly well with the "spread of Western ideas/free markets" narrative, at least in its more extreme form. For while Deng's reforms did reintroduce a form of capitalism to China, it remains extremely statist. Besides the authoritarian polity, the economy remains protectionist (like the Asian Tigers before it) and monetary manipulation (an undervalued Yuan) is used to boost exports, while Zakaria notes that state-owned enterprises form half the economy. The author guards himself from making ill-advised predictions. He notes the growing environmental damage and increasing number of protests in China, but does not see democracy as an immediate necessary outcome. Despite the chapter title, he does not predict a U.S.-Chinese confrontation. Rather, the U.S. will remain militarily superior for decades. America and China remain inevitable bedfellows through a kind of economic M.A.D., one needs the market, the other the debt, this happy circumstance appearing indefinitely sustainable...

There is however also the inevitable absurd Zakarian phrase. Responding to a poll saying that 72% of Chinese believe one does not need to have belief in God to be moral, he says of this: "The point is not that [China] is immoral—in fact all hard evidence suggests quite the opposite—but rather that in [China] people [do not] believe in God. This might shock many in the West [...]." How earnest! I cannot comment on the "hard evidence" suggesting the Chinese are not more evil than other peoples. From Europe, however, not wholly godless but well-acquainted with concepts of "secular humanism," one can only wonder wonder what "West" he is talking about.

The chapter on India (imaginatively entitled "The Ally"), while also filled with useful tidbits, is actually a fairly dire failure. It often borders on total incoherence. I don't know if this is the written manifestation of the struggle between Zakaria's Muslim Indian background (which he scarcely mentions in his writings) and his adoption of American citizenship (with the zeal of the converted). The chapter is perhaps the most misleading, if not self-deceiving, in that he forces us (and himself) to see an unconvincingly strong natural kinship between the U.S. and India. He sometimes gives the impression the latter country is a really a sort of embryonic, Hindu America that by some accident found itself attached to Asia. He sees a U.S.-India "special relationship" emerging of the sort normally reserved for the United Kingdom and Israel. While this is not an implausible possibility, his evidence his weak. He bases his argument partly on the notion that democratic India is a society which has "asserted dominance over the state." This condition is the subject of Zakaria’s very first book (From Wealth to Power), which quite eloquently explained the rise of the U.S. in the nineteenth century in terms of having a weak state and strong society. (In contrast, again, to the "predatory," warring states of Europe of that time.) He sees Indian-Americans being a bridge between the two countries in a way which (more numerous) Chinese-Americans apparently cannot be. But then problems begin. "The country might have several Silicon Valleys, but it also has 3 Nigerias". It ranks 128th out of 177 in the Human Development Index. Female literacy stands at 48%. We are talking of "a country of rampant poverty, feudalism, and illiteracy." The Indian elite was self-consciously socialist from independence onwards, sporting a very "mixed" economy in every sense, and whose "many intellectuals and journalists [...] are well-schooled in the latest radical ideas - circa 1968, when they were in college."

Yet despite all this Zakaria finds the chutzpah to claim in a single, unqualified statement: "If Indians understand America, Americans understand India." Unfathomable. It seems too absurd to consider that an American society centered on consumption as an end in itself could "understand" a country where abject poverty is not only rampant but, in some cases, held up as a Gandhian ideal. It is not explained how Americans "understand" a country which at once has an extremely diverse population of over 1 billion inhabitants and receives scarce media coverage in America. Certainly American leaders did not "understand" Indians in the decades after independence, when New Delhi adhered to a strict anticolonial line on issues like Indochina and to Moscow-leaning neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, as Republicans tar every opponent with the brush of "Socialism," and Liberals defensively deny they are guilty of such apostasy, can it really be said America can "understand" a country like India which not only has a proud Socialist tradition but indeed has several states (West Bengal, Kerala, Tripura) that still consistently elect Communist governments? Indeed, that Indian democracy is continental, multiconfessional, multilingual (17 languages, 22,000 dialects), featuring "multiple regional elections," not true national ones, suggests greater affinity for (and a vote of confidence in) embryonic pan-European democracy than what exists in the United States. Pace Zakaria, how could we not come to the conclusion that this great Indian-American consanguinity is no more than the imaginative projection of an enthusiastic immigrant's failure to come to terms with his own inevitably fractured identity?

Indian Communists in Kerala pay homage to Soviet socialist realism.

The final parts of the book are dedicated to what America's place in this new "globalized" world of economic equals should be. The discussion is informed first by the tired comparison with the British Empire. And here, Zakaria freely indulges in his penchant for silly phrases and inaccuracies. What does it mean to say that the failed British attempt to keep the Thirteen Colonies of North America over eight years, at a high cost in blood and treasure, was a "strategic masterstroke"? Can it be said of the 1899-1902 Boer War that it "broke of the back of [the British] empire," when that entity continued merrily along for another half-century? Indeed, what to make of the statement that "London played its weakening hand with impressive political skill" during the postwar years? While Britain's decolonization was not as traumatic an experience as that of France, one would have to forget that British "strategy" for managing its decline was more often than not to sloppily flee whatever area got too troublesome - India, Palestine, Greece - often leaving problems that remain with us today. And how can such "impressive political skill" be squared with the humiliation at the hands of the Americans at Suez in 1956?


Typical right-wing American literature (and the two that follow).

Nonetheless, Zakaria's substantive discussion of the future of American power is more insightful. The U.S. will continue its demographic growth through immigration and procreation. Although the Iraq War was the "apogée" of a kind of American power, the country will likely maintain a near monopoly on intercontinental military power for some time to come. America will remain the "indispensable nation," to use Madeleine Albright's phrase, for any question needing international concertation. The problem becomes one of encouraging America's better instincts. That the country not be tempted to use its power for selfish ends. He urges against empire, for an acceptance of rising powers, and recommends behavior like that of Franklin Roosevelt and George H.W. Bush. He cites the ineffectiveness of military force in the asymmetrical fight against terrorism ($1 trillion having been spent on military means and only $10 billion on civilian ones). Hozever, to a nation with military power, the imperial temptation is inevitable: "To a man who has a hammer, every problem looks like nails."



The answers are unclear. Zakaria says we need "(international) legitimacy" on issues from climate change to Darfur which leads to the problem of "how to get people to agree?" In all this hangs ever-heavily the question of the Iraq War. How can a just international system be established given the preponderance of American power, its ability to start wars in regions regardless of its inhabitants' feelings on the subject, and indeed drag numerous European governments along for the adventure despite the protests of their own citizens? He has no answer to this or to his own support for the Iraq War (like so many other "good Liberals," see Hoffmann vs. Zakaria and Tony Judt's "Bush's Useful Idiots"). He limits himself to a long, awkward footnote on his support of the invasion, with retrospective caveats on having a "larger force" and "international sanction". The recommendations and questions are not accompanied by anything on how a less imperial America and a more balanced world might be practically achieved. He does not suggest (say) that the inhabitants of regions affected by the U.S. should have a veto on the policies supposedly done in their name. Zakaria is reduced to pleading against the concept of eternal war in the name of total security: "We will never be able to prevent a small group of misfits from planning some terrible act of terror." He shows incomprehension towards "chest-thumping hysteria" and the fact that "[t]he strongest nation in the history of the world now sees itself as besieged by forces beyond its control." He advises, "the United States must make a much broader adjustment. It needs to stop conveying fear."



But this is only the beginning, for there are two Americas: the one Zakaria thought he joined and the one that exists. He is extremely critical of political realities in the U.S. which might as well be called "decadent". We have an "irresponsible national political culture" that is "proud to be despised abroad". The capital, "D.C., has become a bubble; smug and out of touch with the world outside." A venerable political system has been "captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups." At the same time, Zakaria waxes lyrical about America being "the first universal nation," on account of its acceptance and successful integration of huge numbers of immigrants from all corners of the world (indeed, an impressive feat). In contrast, he sees a defensive, selfish, narrow-minded America emerging. He writes of first moving to the U.S. as an 18-year old student: "America was a strikingly open and expansive country. Reagan embodied it." Yes Reagan, of all presidents, incarnated America's more broadminded and cosmopolitan side! There is something ridiculous in Zakaria's disappointed expectation that as America "globalized the world, it forgot to globalize itself." There is a strange, lame and almost pathetic quality to these observations and pleadings. The book concludes thus:

For America to thrive in this new and challenging era, for it to succeed amid the rise of the rest, it need fulfill only one test. It should be a place that is as inviting and exciting to the young student who enters the country today as it was for this awkward eighteen-year-old a generation ago.

Is one reading of a country, or a man who having married a girl under the intoxicating influence of love, rolls over some time later to discover that she was not without flaws and vices, not the picture of perfection he had imagined? Actually, the triumphs and idiosyncrasies of America are closely linked to it being an insular and indeed extremely parochial nation. But for Zakaria, evidently, "universal nations" speak English (and are wary of the creeping bilinguality from southern neighbors that might one day plague them like their northern neighbor), use only the Imperial System (alone, Zakaria notes, with Liberia and Myanmar), park their SUVs in pleasant suburbs (preferably in California), they don't know what's happening abroad (dramatized by this TED presentation), and "soccer" is certainly not the national pastime of predilection (but any number of sports with little appeal beyond North America can still have the qualitative "world" in the titles of their tournaments). In fact, the more the inhabitants of any country tout its "universality," the more they believe that their own little fraction of humanity is indeed the sum of human existence, the less they feel a need to interest themselves in the affairs and lives of those beyond their borders. Zakaria has forgotten that America is a really existing nation, which is to say a group of people, and not an idea that exists in the sublime abstractions of the mind.


A naturalization ceremony. Also see the 7-minute video Disney produced that U.S. customs shows at international airports.

Ultimately, the book never escapes its contradictions. The first between the "acultural," "universal" America of Zakaria's immigrant imagination (the one made up of lovely words like "democracy," "freedom" and "rule of law") and the America of really really existing human beings with their inevitable flaws, idiosyncrasies and particularities (Black, White, Southern, rural, working class, Establishment, hippie, Baptist...). The second tension, less personal and more conceptual, between Zakaria as a prophet of the triumph of the Third World (Fanon) and of the ideal of Western liberal capitalism (Fukuyama). His love for the ideal means he cannot bring himself to condemn the means for its propagation: centuries of European colonialism and hegemony in the Third World. There is a singular lack of engagement. Read Zakaria and one almost wonders if Indians should thank the British for conquering their land and, though leaving it in the same condition of abject poverty after 100 years of rule, at least in the meantime having taught them the good sense of speaking English (and the worship of melanin-deficiency). Was it beyond the imagination to suggest that the benefits of technical progress from West could (should) have been spread in the rest of the world without being subjugated by that civilization (indeed, following the Japanese example)? In the same vein, for all his talk of the universal interests of mankind, Zakaria has no answer to all the questions posed by the necessarily parochial and self-interested character of American power. His curious conception of national identification (parochial) leads him to total moral abdication (universal): "The Iraq War may be a tragedy or a noble endeavor, depending on your point of view." The latter may be a question of subjective experience but the former is not in doubt.



Not much remains after all this. For if the portraits are clichéd, the generalizations crude, and the critical engagement absent, what is the point of reading Fareed Zakaria? At the least, he has identified the most important development of our time and worked hard to discredit the false and pernicious narrative of the "Long War". In that sense he plays an important role in American political discourse. But he has come rather late. Asia has been "rising" for three decades. Its does only so much good to condemn the War on Terror after singing its praises all the way past the Rubicon. For this book at least, I do not think posterity will judge Zakaria to be much more than a Johnny-come-lately and the uncritical cheerleader of a era, someone who was incapable of asking the hard questions, let alone even beginning to answer them.

An Intellectual and the Boulder of Memory

This article was also published in The Beaver under the title "The boulder of memory".

In 2008, British historian Tony Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disease. Today, he is paralyzed from the neck down and cannot live without a wheezing breathing aid. ALS typically removes mobility but not sensation, a mixed blessing and a strange torture when on the verge of sleep one cannot reach for an itch (see Judt's moving thoughts on the subject in this short video with The Guardian). Last October, despite his paralysis Judt delivered an impassioned, two hour lecture defending welfare state. The sight, of this man under a blanket constantly pausing for air, to share the fruits of a life’s worth of reflection was at once pathetic and heroic. It inspired me to reread some of his works and try to draw out the essence of the man.

I do not want to say that Tony Judt is our greatest historian. He is not a thinker with a grand narrative or an overarching system, but is certainly a man with a method. Why care about history? For Judt, we cannot understand ourselves unless we remember where we came from. Today, we are intellectually lazy. It seems so easy now, as we recite the verses of freedom, democracy, mixed market economies and universalism; all laudable, no doubt, but it forces us to forget why often good, intelligent people became Communists or Fascists or so often chose war over peace. Why would Europeans cheer as they head towards the horrors of the trenches? Why would Russians wage war against themselves in the messianic hope and sheer terror of Communism? Why would Nazis attempt to annihilate and enslave entire races? Judt believes we have duty to remember some of this, to have the beginnings of understanding. To this end he set himself an aim of some ambition: to save the twentieth century – with all its marvels and terrors – from “the enormous condescension of posterity,” to paraphrase E.P Thompson. A man of the Left but unswervingly critical of its failings, he seems a more appropriate voice than most to redeem social democracy and the welfare state.

Though an obsessively European historian, Judt lives in the United States of America. There is something of that other great voice of reason, Stanley Hoffmann, in Judt’s choice to live, teach and write in North America. These are two men who have in part dedicated their lives to explaining Europe to Americans for whom the Old Continent is increasingly of purely touristic interest. This might have placed some constraints on Judt’s writing. He once bemoaned the “middle-brow political acceptability” of the “terribles simplificateurs” that are American public intellectuals. Indeed, one need only read a few of the cartoonish opinion pieces that grace the pages of America’s newspapers of record – those of Thomas Friedman or Charles Krauthammer for example – to understand what is meant and to shudder at what passes for “discourse”.

Yet, Judt never dumbed himself down or pandered to his audience. Many people have come under the withering criticism of his pen. The effect is devastating and memorable. The academic texts on the esoteric Marxism of Louis Althusser’s are “unreadable excursions into the Higher Drivel.” Judt writes of Tony Blair that “He conveys an air of deep belief, but no one knows in quite what.” But he is also not afraid to say things that might make him unpopular in his adopted country. He excoriated the American “Left” in a classic 2006 article on “the Strange Death of Liberal America”. In this work, Judt condemned the stunning array of liberal intellectuals who jumped onto the bandwagon of the War on Terror and the Iraq War, from opportunistic “converts” like Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman to even thoughtful writers like David Remnick and Michael Ignatieff. They were, for Judt, nothing more than “Bush’s useful idiots”.

But if Judt has railed against America’s “liberal armchair warriors”, his entire world view could be described as one of total opposition to the American Right – which has sometimes cost him. It is one thing to extol the virtues of the welfare state or to attack American Cold War triumphalism (notably the “naively self-congratulatory” accounts of the popular historian J.L. Gaddis). It is quite another to criticize Israel. Judt has written on the country’s “dark victory” in the 1967 Six Day War and of the criminal and stupid policy of sending more settlers to live in the West Bank. Characteristically, he was able to write harsher things in the liberal Israeli daily Ha’aretz than in the American media. Where criticism and praise for his work was “more measured” in Israel, in America it was often “hysterical”. Judt has gone so far as to advocate a one-state solution for Israel-Palestine, a position which, whatever its merits, is one that requires great courage to take in America. As a result of this he lost, among other things, his seat at The New Republic’s editorial board.



Still, even as Judt is an engaged intellectual – indeed, one with an agenda – this does not lead him to falsify or exaggerate or mislead. He would rather us merely understand what has occurred. How else can one interpret his magnum opus, Postwar? This brick-like 900-page tome is something of a chronological encyclopedia of European history since the Second World War. Judt could have written, as the title suggests, a triumphant story of how the Europeans came together after total war to achieve peace, prosperity and an embryonic union. Instead, there is no imposed narrative, no theme except the subject itself. The book suffers from this, sometimes seeming like a series of unrelated articles. But it also a sign of the author’s integrity that he cannot distort history in an artificial, preconceived narrative. In such a self-conscious bid to make himself the historian of Europe, he sought to give Europeans a history, a sense of the road they traveled from the abyss that were the years 1914 to 1945. Judt writes as an heir to those “chance survivors of the deluge” who were European intellectuals – among them Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus – who having lived through war, Nazism, collaboration and Communism, had no choice but to write of it. There is something autobiographical when Judt says of these writers that “they were constrained, like Camus’s Sisyphus, to push the boulder of memory and understanding up the thankless hill of public forgetting for the rest of their lives.”

Is the work of Sisyphus futile? One could be excused for having that impression. We need constant reminding that the welfare state was born of the misery of depression, that the desire for peace comes from the horrors of war. And need it be stressed that the paths of both Stalinism and Nazism passed through the industrialized death of the Great War? The work of remembrance never ends. Judt himself has not stopped working, despite the temptation of suicide. And now, even as he is subjected to the quiet torture of his bodily prison, even as this article approaches the tone of the obituary, I cannot help but hope for more words from this most admirable of intellectuals. The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci produced his celebrated Prison Notebooks under the duress and censorship of Mussolini’s jails. The great theorist of postcolonial revolution Frantz Fanon penned the most eloquent lines of his Wretched of the Earth under the feverish pain of the leukemia that would soon kill him. The mind stays even as the body fails. If Tony Judt cannot heal, then let him produce a few lines more.

On American Interventions

This piece was published in The Beaver under the decidedly more imaginative title "Dominance at the drop of presidents’ hats". A few might protest that there isn't nuance or balance in this piece. I can only plead that there is only so much one can do in 900 words, but one can list a few little-known, elementary facts and attempt to draw a truth from them.



The United States of America is the only country today with the ability to independently send large amounts of forces almost anywhere in the world. To those who face the prospect of American bombs and boys in their country, it can be hard to fathom why Washington might choose to intervene in their forlorn corner of the Earth, and not others.

The answer cannot usually be found in terms of “vital national interest”. The most hard-headed “realist” scholars – from Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan on Vietnam to Stephen Waltz and John Mearsheimer on Iraq – have tended to oppose America’s wars in the Third World. The countries of the South are underdeveloped, often fractious and unstable, typically lacking in industry and technology. So, when (as is frequently the case) our American presidents bring up Hitler and Stalin, World War and Cold War, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, we can only be somewhat dubious at the contrast.

American wars of intervention are overwhelmingly “optional”. Prior to waging war in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur had said the peninsula held little strategic value. The “fall” of South Vietnam to Communism could hardly mean that the Viet Cong guerrillas would now swim across the South China Sea to seize Malaysia or Indonesia (Lyndon Johnson once said they would be on the shores of Hawaii). Equally, in places like Rwanda, Bosnia or Kosovo, where “humanitarian intervention” is called upon or practiced, there is rarely a serious American national security interest. One could say the same with Iraq. There was no reason why Saddam Hussein with his little rump state would be more difficult to live with, even if he had nuclear weapons, than Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China.

American interventions occur because American leaders feel like it. But if the idea of war holds a certain mystique, Americans do not like wars. Or, at least, they do not like the cost in youth and taxes. So if American leaders feel like waging a war, it is usually because they think it will be an easy thing. Yet the “Wilsonian”, “universalist” and “liberal democratic” impulses of the American ideology place high standards. Suddenly they expect flowering Republics and economic miracles wherever American boots are, so many countries – whether composed of illiterate peasants or warring ethnicities – promise to become post-war Japans and West Germanies.

The record of past interventions, however, is not very encouraging. In Vietnam, “counter-insurgency” meant the pure and simple removal of the rural population. In Panama, the U.S. invasion of 1989 led to much chaos, looting and death. In Bosnia and Kosovo, huge amounts of international aid and ten and fifteen years of peace have not made Serb, Croat, Bosnian or Albanian any more likely to live in the same democracy. Their economies continue to be extremely weak, with over 40 per cent unemployment. All the disasters in Iraq – human, economic, ethnic, anarchic – were presaged in past interventions. Against this record, the invasion of Iraq can only be attributed to the Bush era national security clique’s inordinate sense of themselves and their power. That they in fact were gods in whose hands the Arabs were only so much malleable putty that they could reshape in their own image.

But we are not there today. We have a new, good, liberal president, one whom Europeans cannot accuse of pandering to religious bigots or of flaunting a crass American nationalism. Yet it is Barack Obama who is sending 30,000 men on a “quick-fix” mission to Afghanistan, as George W. Bush did in Iraq in 2007. Obama goes for political reasons above all. He campaigned relentlessly on this “good war,” largely to avoid the curse of Jimmy Carter. But more than that, it is difficult for any politician to concede defeat after so much effort, particularly in America.

Yet we can be reasonably certain, once the foreigners leave, that Afghanistan will again face “anarchy” and “warlords,” and no doubt a few of the latter will choose the moniker “Islamic” for good measure. The notion that the “Afghan National Army” will be tripled in size in half a decade and will be able to “secure the country” even as the U.S. and NATO are incapable of the task (and the attempt costs several times Afghanistan’s entire GDP every year) is manifestly absurd. Yet Obama must fight.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson chose to begin the movement that would lead to over 550,000 Americans in Vietnam, just so that the Republicans would not be able to accuse him of “losing” 20 million more Asians to Communism. The Vietnam War’s cost was great, wrecking Johnson’s half-fulfilled domestic programs, ruining an endeavor that might have given America a true welfare state. In purely economic terms, the Afghan War is likely to cost at least as much over the next few years as Obama’s vaunted project of universal health insurance. Of course, Johnson did not have the embarrassment of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year in office, only to use the occasion to expound on theories of just war. Those time-tested words return: the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce.

The Suicide of a Ruling Class (book review)

David Halberstam
The Best and the Brightest



History – remembrance of a past – has a strange way of shifting over time. Contemporary history is conceived in the minds of each in the uncertainties of the moment. Our ideas of events are shaped by our limited experience of them, our position in relation to them, the haphazard reports of media. A confused conception exists in the general consciousness. The work of historians destroys this confusion, replacing it not with what occurred, but with the system, the chronology, the morality tale that their years of reflection and writing have brought them to. We hope through this process of filtered and selective memory to be wiser for the triumphs and failures of our predecessors.

David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest is one of those classics that defines events that new generations were unable to experience themselves. It is huge, like all major works dealing with the Vietnam War it needs to be downright Homeric in its scale. It needs to be epic. Here, the Greek tragedy is provided its magnitude by the contrast between the promise and brilliance of a new generation of American leaders, sharply counterpoised with the disaster they caused in Vietnam. It is a vast, sprawling collection of anecdotes and sketches that attempt to show how these people brought up the catastrophe.

The promise is apparent from the beginning. There is the glamour of John F. Kennedy’s “Camelot”. There is a sense that this young, modern, industrial nation might no longer be dominated by the “old White Southerners from small towns” that ran Congress. After Kennedy’s death, the promise paradoxically becomes, if anything, greater. Lyndon Johnson leads the Democrats to a glorious, overwhelming victory in the 1964 campaign. A man who was once the master of the Senate as a legislator, would now pass the great acts to redeem America: desegregating the South, launching the Great Society and the War on Poverty, and putting down the bases for healthcare provision for the neediest and the old.



Though LBJ could never replace the Golden Boy that was JFK, he could console himself with the shining CVs of his cabinet. And indeed it was impressive. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara is a number cruncher who saved Ford Motor Company. He had once been a brilliant student of philosophy and even as Secretary maintained a voracious appetite for fact, so that even as others in government “frolicked, he plowed through the unabridged Toynbee.” General Maxwell Taylor is a politically savvy soldier-scholar and an apparent expert on limited wars and counter-insurgency. Averell Harriman is an old Kremlinologist who – a septuagenarian – can still be said to be ambitious. General William Westmoreland, the man to eventually command 500,000 men in Vietnam, has a brilliant record and could not have a profile more suited for the air of a general than if God himself had chiseled him from marble. We have detailed sketches of all of these men in all their talents, flaws, ambitions and failings. The question becomes: how did these Captains of Industry, Rhodes Scholars, Harvard Deans, Ivy Leaguers and West Pointers – the “best” products of the American ruling class – come to fail so completely?

This is not a book about Vietnam. As such, there will be some difficulty in understanding why U.S. policy failed there, why propping the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem did not succeed, why the Americans had to intervene. Diem is repeatedly and casually described as “feudal” but there is little on how he ruled. We get a sense that the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam, Free Vietnam) is unreal. That the Americans fell to their own illusions as to the solidity of their creation when the CIA established the Diem regime on the corpse of France's puppet "State of Vietnam" in the crucial years of 1954-55. But there is not the verve or color of Halberstam’s descriptions of the Americans. Equally, the war itself is not the subject of this book. And while strategic hamlets, napalm, defoliation and free fire zones are mentioned, Halberstam is concerned with the war's origins, and not its nature.

It is a book about the United States of America and why that nation unleashed all the marvelous terrors of modern, industrial civilization on a small, peripheral peasant country. A country so weak and so marginal, it is hard to conceive why one would fight there at all. It is a book about why the Liberals came to doom themselves and their dreams. And here we are treated to all the crimes of American liberalism and all the complicities with those of American conservatism. It begins early. It is Kennedy who campaigns on a non-existent “missile gap” with the Russians (McNamara proposes adding 950 missiles to the U.S. arsenal for domestic political reasons, not strategic necessity.) It is Kennedy who reappoints J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles to head the FBI and CIA. They would go on, respectively, to spy on domestic leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and JFK himself, and continue hair-brained secret interventions abroad. It is Kennedy who refuses to overturn the irrational policy of not recognizing the government of the most populous country in the world, an absurdity that would last for three decades. It is Robert F. Kennedy who is the most hawkish in the early years. It is Lyndon Johnson who goes to war in South Vietnam, apparently because he could not face the domestic political consequences of “Losing Vietnam” as Harry S. Truman had once “Lost China”.



It is a dour business to see this descent into the bloody abyss. The causes emerge from the text. And here, disaster has many fathers, many necessary causes. Perhaps the most serious is the Liberal tendency to overcompensate for appearing to not be sufficiently “anti-communist”. There were no experts on Asia left in the American government, no people with “real expertise at the operational level.” We have touching portraits of Foreign Service China experts like John Stewart Service and John Patton Davies who were purged in the McCarthy Era merely for predicting the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek. In the 1960s, Foreign Service officers would be more cautious before stepping out of line. We have the United States exporting fears of the Communist Soviet Union to the Third World, describing all Communist national movements as the “new colonialism of a Soviet communist empire”. As though there were no such thing as Titoism, that Russia was now capable of transcontinental domination, that Mao was not capable of independence. There is the preponderant power of the United States itself, deriving from its size, its technology, its economy. If one has power, one will after all be tempted to use it, and Halberstam is on to something when he identifies “the enemy” as “bigness, technology and the government itself.” There is American nationalism, the mythology of the Second World War, and movies with John Wayne. There is finally, and this is eternal and universal, “the escalatory logic of White Crosses.” As one commits one soldier one commits the whole prestige of the nation. As one soldiers dies in an endeavor, it becomes all the more difficult to abandon it, so much easier to sacrifice more soldiers.

It is then, a rather discouraging affair. Ostensibly, it is one that we should learn from. And here we can identify crude parallels. There was the faddism with “counter-insurgency” (now shortened to “COIN”). There were the usual knee-jerk hawkish journalists like Marguerite Higgins and Joe Alsop, always ready to attack the manhood of those who govern if they are not eager for death. There is the temptation by the governing class to mask the war, to hide its costs, to pretend it is not even occurring, lest the people turn against it once they realize the burden this will be for them in blood and taxes. And here, why should we not be pessimistic? That generation of Liberals killed liberalism in America. It has still not recovered. We might question what this means for our own time, as the new “Best and Brightest” with our own prodigal son prove so underwhelming, so banal, so typical of the American State.



Perhaps it is normal. Doves and Good Men do not tend to fare well. They become militarists or are destroyed. Mahatma Gandhi was murdered, as were Anwar Sadat and Jean Jaurès. Léon Blum was tried by Philippe Pétain for treason. The German Social Democrats voted for war credits in 1914. The American Democrats voted for war in 1964 and in 2002. The British "Left," of all things, joined them in the latter year. Nationalism is at fault, an inordinate sense of one’s importance, one’s perspective, one’s abilities in the world. And, make no mistake, the idea of America is infinitely greater than the United States of America could ever be – indeed – greater than anything that could exist on this Earth. So all our Good Men, our Liberals, our Democrats, our Socialists, our Doves govern and they sin. The power destroys and disfigures them, makes the rotten from the inside out. In their later years they might look in the mirror but they can scarcely recognize themselves. Dan Ellsberg had been in the U.S. government during the 1960s escalation but went on to oppose the war and leak the Pentagon Papers. He later bumped into an old acquaintance and was asked: “Are you the Dan Ellsberg I knew in College?” He replied, “I haven’t been for a long time, but I am again.”

A Good Man's Wars (book review)

George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia



George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is the classic account of his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Here Fascists, Revolutionaries, and a tantalizing Utopia all appear. But I was first struck by how the book fit neatly into the usually lighthearted genre of travel writing. Here Orwell, like so many Englishmen, writes of his trip to Spain – as he might be writing of France or Italy – as an escape to stuck up, dour old England. The country is loved, hated, romanticized, as we might expect. The Spaniards are disastrously disorganized – all actions (even vital) are always pushed to mañana – but they are good-hearted. The countryside and towns are splendid, though Orwell only had time to appreciate them after being discharged. He communicates in “Bad Spanish”. He meets Italians, Englishmen and Frenchmen who had also joined the militia (including their wicked accents). One could almost be reading the experiences of an Erasmus exchange student (centered in, of all places, Barcelona, the quintessential student/international Anglo-experience city). One is only brought back to that time by the occasional incongruity, the shocking statement from another world, as for instance when Orwell describes a young Italian militiaman’s face as having “both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors.”

Orwell is here because he is a radical revolutionary and is willing to die for it. Orwell had been a colonial policeman in Burma where he had seen the excesses and humiliations of British imperialism. He had gone to Eton with the offspring of the English ruling class but willingly went into poverty in the slums of London and Paris to see the conditions of the working class. Orwell hated it: the wretched poverty and brutal working conditions of the proletariat combined with that self-satisfied bourgeoisie that guarded its wealth and privileges behind a careful set of norms and prejudices. So Orwell loves Barcelona. He is enthralled with the Revolution. People say “Salud” instead of “Buenas Dias,” they call each other “Comrade” instead of “Don” or “Señor”. They no longer even tip in the restaurants as waiters are now the equals of patrons. He is unconcerned with the fact that all the churches have been wrecked (Orwell assures us, the Catholic Church in Spain “was a racket”). Things are run down, the war means deprivation, but Orwell satisfies himself with symbols: “Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving.” To Orwell there is no doubt: “I recognized it immediately as something worth fighting for. Also I believe that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the worker’s side”.

So Orwell joins the militia and goes to the front. And here one would excuse him if he had become disillusioned. He does not embellish the fighting against Francisco Franco’s hated “Fascists”. Rather, we are constantly torn between war as so demanding on human beings as to reveal their nobler side, and war as at bottom a nasty, meaningless, if not outright boring thing. Orwell spent most of the serving in trenches, sometimes commanding thirty or so men. We meet a motley crew of Spaniards, teenagers and foreigners. They hardly have any weapons, any training or indeed basic equipment (like uniforms). The peasants curse both armies as crops are trampled and go unharvested. There us very little activity for weeks on end as the enemy mostly sticks to its side, the Republicans to theirs. Orwell seems more terrified of the bitter cold of spending a night in a trench in winter (or the occasional, necessary, bathing in a river) than of Fascist soldiers. He is as explicit as he can be about the unglamorous, downright unhygienic side of war. On the irrepressible ability of lice to spread at the front, he says:

I think pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed! In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae – everyone of them had lice crawling over his testicles.

Orwell does participate in a little fighting, including a diversionary offensive. It is mostly graceless, however, and brought to an end by his being wounded. Here too it is a meaningless, empty thing. Orwell is shot in the neck, out of nowhere, and crumples to the ground, convinced it was friendly fire. Obviously he survived the event but it was a close run thing, and he thought he had permanently lost his voice for a time.



Contrasting this is a sense – precisely because war is such a wretched thing – that to fight for a good cause is something noble too. It tugs at him. Orwell notes that wartime naturally turns even liberal regimes into despotic ones, he describes all the discomforts in detail, he warns against the dangers of Spanish hospitals where the nurses will steal your valuables… and yet the war is also a romantic thing. There is camaraderie in shared sacrifice. Orwell notes that whereas the Republican government’s factions of “Trotskyists,” Stalinists and Anarchists were at each others’ throats, at the front the vicious politicking of the cities was did not exist among these groups’ various militias. He even allows himself a little rhetorical flourish, once riding a train and seeing what “was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.” Even lousy, disheveled and maimed, the spirit of 1914 is not yet lost.

There is also, perhaps especially, the internal political war. Here it is of the constant, petty, and dangerous internecine fighting between the Republican government’s various leftwing factions. I cannot pretend to understand the intricacies of the P.O.U.M., C.N.T., F.A.I. and P.S.U.C. Here Orwell sees the decay of his Revolution as (paradoxically) the (Stalinist) Communists gradually take power, so bourgeois dress, norms and hierarchy return. There is almost a civil war within the civil war, as Communists and anti-Stalinists establish barricades in Barcelona, eyeing each other for days in case the tension should flare up into fighting in the streets.

We get a sense of the vicious sectarianism that is so characteristic of the hard left. Orwell spends a great deal of time correcting the “lies” that were spread in much of the Communist European press that described as “Fascist” those parties opposed to the Communist Party takeover in Catalonia. (We also learn something of his fringe status that he felt the need to rebuke what was a rather marginal movement in England.) This is Orwell’s education in totalitarianism. Many of the themes that would later find their way into 1984 are present. Onetime allies become eternal enemies as Communist thugs hurl the epithet “Trotskyist” at their rivals. Orwell’s own friends vanish one by one, held up incommunicado in Spanish prisons, where it seems inevitable they will die of neglect. The war against the Fascists, the real war, becomes a mere background to the internal struggle for supremacy. His Revolution is dying.



Orwell leaves Spain as his membership of a non-Stalinist militia makes him a public enemy. He returns to an England that must have seemed rather unreal. If one is not in the mines, slums or factories, it is not an unpleasant place. Things are secure, timely, predictable. English travelers to Spain write in the papers that things are going fine because they “do not really believe in the existence of anything outside the smart hotels.” Always the sense that safe life in wealthy, stable, English-speaking countries makes one rather aloof and unable to fully understand the experiences of others. While in Spain, he had the inability to “shake off” the British notion that the police could not arrest him so long as he had done nothing wrong. In England the milk bottles, the cricket matches, and Royal weddings are there as they seemingly always have. But such calm in contrast with the war and upheaval of Spain does not bring Orwell peace of mind: “sometimes I fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”

Homage to Catalonia is Orwell’s love letter to a Revolution. We are reminded of Orwell’s radicalism. It is striking how he spends no time at all to addressing the arguments of the Right (by which we mean any capitalist). They are enemies and that is a given. He is solely concerned about the nature and debates of the revolutionary Left. It says something of his priorities even as the radicalism of his legacy is carefully excised from our consciousness. It reminds us to of the banality, the inadequacy of contemporary politics. Who among the Left today would be willing to brave life and limb for their ideals? Our imaginations are shut. We cannot conceive of a better society, of another form of human organization. We dare not even try. And this is perhaps Orwell’s goal above all. To make us understand that there was a moment, however brief, in which he saw a window into another world, that the foundations of this one are not so solid. And if there is another world, that good men must risk themselves if we are to attain it.

The War that Lingers

As part of their “Veterans” mini-series, Al Jazeera English has an excellent, if brief, documentary on the Algerian War. The half-hour video provides a concise narrative of the war that pitted France and its 1-million European settlers in Algeria against the native Arabs and their revolutionary movement, the National Liberation Front (FLN). In addition, there are also interviews (as the title suggests) of those who participated in the war and how haunts their lives still.

The show is particularly good at conveying the complexities of a chaotic situation. This was not merely a war between European and Arab, but also, within both groups. On the one hand, thousands of Harkis, Algerian soldiers who fought on the side of the French, were brutally massacred at the end of the war by the revolutionaries, an action which the French government did nothing to prevent. On the other, the OAS (Secret Army Organization) was a group of hard core French officer and settlers who conspired against their own government when it looked like it was turning towards peace, committing numerous terrorist attacks and making several attempts on President Charles de Gaulle’s life.

It is a good introduction to the Algerian War through its lingering consequences. From the French soldier who still has nightmares from witnessing Algerian prisoners having their throats slit under French orders. To the descendents of Harkis in France where they were put into camps and marginalized by the French and feared reprisals from more recent immigrants from Algeria who still hated them as collaborators. In so doing, the horrors and the moral ambiguities of the war are ably drawn out.

The documentary does not need to draw explicit parallels for it to make us think on today’s controversies. It is still unclear today exactly who in the French government knew about the widespread and systematic use of torture by French forces in Algeria. In 2000, General Jacques Massu, a resister during the Second World War who commanded during the Battle of Algiers and remained to de Gaulle, said torture “was not necessary in time of war” and that they could have “very well gotten along without it.” Another General, Paul Aussaresses, caused controversy in 2000 when he began to make interviews and books defending the torture he himself said he had committed in Algeria. Here the director leaves us on a chilling note, letting the one-eyed nonagenarian Aussaresses sing (!)what he calls “my song,” one by Edith Piaf: “Non, rien de rien, non je ne regrette rien.” Sinister lullaby.

The Economist, Caldwell, and "Eurabia"

Parts of this post were published as letters in The Economist, a response to their review of Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. He held his opening lecture for his book at LSE ("Can Europe be the same with different people in it?"). I was able to attend and ask a question. (See here, search "Caldwell", includes video).

Caveat: Because I am generalizing about Muslims in the whole of Europe, I will not do justice to the fact that there is no one "Muslim community" within Europe, or even within individual European nations. Coming from various nations in sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia, there is a good deal less coherence to "Muslim Europeans" than the term might imply.



Books on Islam's coming takeover of Europe are a veritable cottage industry, of which I think Mark Steyn's puerile sensationalism tops the lot. Caldwell's most recent book, however, is perhaps the most dangerous because it purports to be the most “respectable” version of the “Eurabia thesis” to date. The thesis has many parts, the most prominent being that we will see an “Islamized” Europe because of allegedly relentless Muslim immigration and congenitally high birth rates. It is the nightmare of European anti-immigration parties concerned with those with darker hues walking their streets and the crass fantasy of neoconservatives that effeminate, flaccid, relativist Europe should pay the ultimate price for its Neville Chamberlainism. Let me say a few things.

It would have been good for The Economist to debunk some of the “unremitting pessimism” from Caldwell and others on Europe's “Islamization”. It is at odds with basic facts. In the United Kingdom, immigration from India, the West Indies and non-Muslim parts of Africa means a majority of ethnic minorities are not in fact Muslims at all. In Germany, half a century of “mass” immigration means just over 1 in 20 residents of that country are Muslims. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe with perhaps 6 million, of which Algeria has provided the largest number. According to the CIA and other sources, while France has a fertility rate of about 2 per woman, for Algeria the figure is only 1.8. Cultural essentialism reveals its bankruptcy yet again.

More broadly, It is a grave mistake to portray the problems of Muslims in Europe as chiefly attributable to “culture”. Obviously, the conservatism of some recent arrivals, especially from rural parts of the Third World (not just Muslims, mind you), can be at odds with the post-feminist values of Europe (themselves a relatively recent phenomenon: Swiss women could not vote until 1971, to rape one’s wife only became a crime in England in 1991). For most European Muslims, cultural conservatism is not the issue. Children are quickly socialized to the materialism, consumerism, values and sexual mores that characterize Western society today.

I do not claim that there is a seamless multicultural Utopia in Europe. However, a statement like “a surprising number of immigrants have proved ‘unmeltable’” could only be made by someone with a rather rosy and idealized view of the American “melting pot”. Immigrants to the U.S. have tended to form their own ethnic neighborhoods that can be extremely durable, if not permanent. De facto residential segregation and somewhat defensive identity politics among ethnic groups is the norm in most countries. Muslims in Europe have proven no different. It should not be surprising that these “new Europeans” should maintain their identities as Muslims (or, forth that matter, as Arabs or Turks) while also being British or French. These identities, incidentally, are partly based on the need for community organization and consciousness against the varying degrees of hostility towards Muslims that exist in Europe. The existence of such “hyphen identities” is hardly a sign of failure in itself, any more than is the existence of Hispanic Americans or Malaysian Chinese.

The issue is not so much culture as ethnicity or, to use a good French term, “communitarianism”. The Economist notes that Caldwell “echoes” the warnings of the anti-immigration British politician Enoch Powell’s “warnings all those years ago.” It would have been nice to actually quote those warnings. Powell’s famous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech spoke of a woman who “finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.” The issue for Powell was not “culture” but race. His prejudice was aimed at the presence of Blacks and South Asians in and of themselves (whether Hindu, Christian or Muslim). At the beginnings of mass immigration in the 1950s, the image of the “native” of Africa or Asia was still roughly that of the poems of Rudyard Kipling or of Hergé’s Tin Tin in the Congo: a child and a savage, either comical or dangerous, to be educated and to be disciplined. It never occurred to Europeans that they might live in Europe, with their own lives, viewpoints and rights.

For this reason, it is absolutely ridiculous for The Economist to say that “[f]or the most part European countries have bent over backwards to accommodate the sensibilities of the newcomers.” Ever since Muslims were invited into Europe for economic reasons in the 1950s, they have been subject to hostility and discrimination by the host populations. One example was the Paris Massacre of 1961 where between 40 and 200 peaceful Algerian protesters were killed by French police. This event was officially denied until 1998. Obviously, the unflattering reality of anti-Muslim prejudice was rarely discussed. Moralistic Europeans preferred to think Americans and South Africans had a monopoly on race prejudice. The question of minorities in Europe today is dominated, not by religious practice, but by ethnicity, racism, marginalization, social dysfunction, poor relations with the police, and so forth. This is why relations with other marginalized minorities in Europe (such as non-Muslim Blacks, Gypsies and secular ethnic Albanians) are not noticeably better than with Muslims. The allegedly unchanging essence of “Islam” is about as relevant to the problems of Muslims in Europe today as Catholic theology is to the Northern Irish question.

The question is not whether young girls who choose to cover their hair are destroying Europe. The question is why second and third generation Muslim Europeans are expected to become uniquely good, well-adjusted citizens when they are left to fester in the marginalized, decaying and “containable” ghettos of many of Europe’s major cities. And here, the example of the U.S. is informative.

There is a long history of internal migration of African Americans to cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Americans crammed a brimming population into slums and ghettos, letting the problem fester for decades, until the vicious circles of social decay and state crackdown now seem inescapable. Since the 1980s, the American prison population has quadrupled, with a very large proportion of that expansion being driven by the imprisonment of Black men. The problem is nowhere near so bad in Europe, though the proportion of minorities has steadily grown. Social problems are tackled less by systematic incarceration (often for non-violent crimes) which turns petty crooks into hardened criminals and more by stronger welfare states that provide basic economic security for those at risk. There is cause for optimism.