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Is Bin Laden a Postmodern Transnationalist by Steve Sailer UPI, September 18, 2001 |
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Before the vast resurgence in American patriotism that followed the 9.11 atrocities, nationalism had largely fallen out of fashion among elites in the Western world. For example, with exquisitely bad timing, ex-President Bill Clinton told an Australian audience the day before the sneak attacks that he believed in "the ultimate wisdom of a borderless world." Even thinking of the U.S. and Mexico as two separate nation-states had become passe. Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "Our common border is no longer a line that divides us, but a region that unites our nations, reflecting our common aspirations, values, and culture." Although this assumption that that the Western world was inevitably moving from the modern age of nationalism into a postmodern era of "transnationalism" appears to have been literally exploded, its long grip on intellectual discourse has made it hard to fully understand Osama bin Laden. This "venture capitalist of terrorism" seems postmodern because he too is resolutely transnational. He recruits Sunni Muslims from across Islam, not just the Arabic-speaking countries. For example, Afghanistan, his long-time base, is not an Arab country. Yet, bin Laden's transnationalism grows out of his fanatical medievalism. He hopes to overthrow the governments of many moderate Islamic states and reestablish the early theocratic Caliphate that once ruled all of Islam. "These countries belong to Islam and not to the rulers," bin Laden has said. Of course, there is little new about transnationalism in the West, either. Although the Catholic Church seldom exercised temporal power as directly as the Caliphate, as the successor to the mighty Roman Empire, it united medieval Europe religiously and culturally and enjoyed considerable political influence across the continent. The struggles between the Catholic Church's political allies, such as the sprawling Holy Roman Empire, and the rising "nation-states" such as England helped mark the transition between the universalist medieval Europe and the nationalist modern Europe. (A nation-state is one government ruling one relatively sizable self-aware people. They might be united by genealogy, language, or simply by what Abraham Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave...") The rise of local European languages to dominance, replacing Latin even among most Churchmen, doomed the Catholic Church's ambitions for continued control. In contrast, Arabic plays an even more central role in Islam than Latin did in Catholicism. It is the original language of the Koran. The faithful believe Arabic is Allah's own sacred language, in which the divinity dictated the Koran to Mohammed. This tenet encouraged the spread of Arabic to newly Muslim lands. Hence, Arabic is now spoken from Morocco to Iraq. Since all of these people can understand each other, the notion of permanently settled boundaries dividing them is less politically appealing than in other parts of the world where language diversity encourages local solidarity and broad-scale distrust. National borders work to quarantine chaos. The lack of borders widely recognized by Middle Easterners to be fully legitimate contributes to the region's instability. Within the Muslim world, it has largely been the nationalists - such as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the secular Republic of Turkey in 1923; and Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who made peace with Israel at Camp David in 1978 - who have been forces for international stability. Meanwhile, the men who have spread anarchy abroad - such as bin Laden; Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian demagogue who died in 1970; Libya's Moammar Gadhafi; and Iraq's Saddam Hussein - have tended to believe in the ultimate wisdom (or at least the convenience to themselves) of an effectively borderless world. Some of the transnationalists have indeed been motivated by utopian idealism, whether Islamic, Arab-ethnic, or socialist. (Others, like Saddam Hussein, have had a harder time disguising their simple rapacity.) Nasser, for example, merged Egypt with Syria into a single jerry-rigged state called the "United Arab Republic." It lasted only from 1958-1961, but the United Arab Republic continues to puzzle novice stamp collectors who wonder what it was and where it went. In contrast, Sadat's great accomplishment was to redirect Egypt's foreign policy away from Nasser's pan-Arab ideology, which required constant conflicts with Israel to incite Arab unity. Sadat rebuilt Egypt's foreign policy around the realization that Egypt, for all of its language ties to other Arab-speaking lands, was the first and oldest of nation-states, blessed by geography and its 5,000 year history with the ability to largely stay aloof from the quarrels of other nations beyond the burning sands. Sadat attacked Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 in order to restore Egyptian national pride by winning a single battle. Henry Kissinger wrote, "Egyptian forces had drilled for years to perfect the technique of crossing the Suez Canal; beyond it they had no operational plan except to hang on…Sadat fought a war not to acquire territory but to restore Egypt's self-respect and thereby increase its diplomatic flexibility." The Egyptian patriot could then honorably end his nation-state's pointless and debilitating struggle with Israel. Similarly, Ataturk's Turkish nationalism set the template that has kept non-Arabic Turkey out of the international trouble that otherwise seems endemic to the Middle East. Of course, Turkey has waged a long, brutal internal war upon its Kurds. (The unlucky Kurds are one of the largest nations without a state.). Western governments, though, largely choose to ignore what Turkey does within its borders, so long as it remains a peaceful neighbor. In much of the rest of Islamic world, however, there are few organic nation-states like Egypt and Turkey. Many societies have not evolved past medieval transnationalism into modern nationalism. Winston Churchill noted that while the founding of empires sometimes leads to much bloodshed, their collapse always does. Pakistan, which is now trying to play a delicate balancing act between the demands of the adamant Americans and the bluster of its Taliban allies who have sheltered bin Laden in neighboring Afghanistan, is an artificial and fragile state attempting to govern 142 million fractious Muslims. Its roots go only as deep as the violent 1947 collapse of Britain's vast Greater Indian empire. Many worry that it will be torn apart by the stresses of the new war. Both the British and Soviet Empires pummeled Afghanistan, but never found the place valuable enough to make it worth permanently conquering its furious tribesmen. It is not much of a nation-state, partly because it is not at present a functioning state, with the Taliban being only the most important warring faction. But it also has seldom been a unified nation at the emotional level. Except when being invaded, Afghan loyalties seldom rise far above their extended families. Churchill, who fought in a punitive campaign against Pathan tribesmen on the Afghan frontier in 1897, noted the disunity of the place, "Every family cultivates its vendetta; ever clan, its feud. The numerous tribes and combination of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid… The life of the Pathan is thus full of interest…" The Arab-speaking states were regions within the Ottoman Empire until Turkish rule collapsed after its defeat in World War I. Within the Ottoman Empire's Arabian lands, loyalties centered on extended families. In the classic movie "Lawrence of Arabia," the British guerilla leader T.E. Lawrence, sent to foment rebellion in the Turkish-ruled desert, tries to inspire Arab nationalism by telling his squabbling hosts, "So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people." Transnationalism appeals to Arabs in part because so many see their states as under assault from more economically and militarily powerful nations such as Israel and the U.S. Uniting the Arabs seems like a rational solution, just as the American Revolutionary War made it sensible for the Thirteen Colonies to unite more closely. This urge is greatest in times of stress. Americans and Canadians can understand each other perfectly well, but few North Americans spend much time plotting bin Laden-style to terrorize the Washington and Ottawa regimes into merging into one English-speaking North America Caliphate. That's because the current state of affairs is quite satisfactory. On the other hand, if Americans and Canadians lived in poverty, under self-serving autocrats, and felt a sense of dread that malevolent outsiders were undermining our way of life, there would be calls to unify the two states.. Once aroused, however, 20th Century Arab nationalism tended to swell in conception to include expanses too boundless to be administered by one state. Sometimes the Arab nation was defined to cover all of the Semitic lands of Southwestern Asia. Sometimes it was thought to be synonymous with all the Arabic-speaking lands, even Morocco on the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes it broadened even to include all Muslims, who can be found as far away as some of the Philippine Islands in the Pacific. This has made the actual internationally recognized borders of Arab states seen petty, unheroic, and arbitrary. While the aspirations of Arabs have tended to focus on the impossibly grandiose, their working loyalties have continued to revolve around their extended families, clans, and tribes. The Arab states have been stuck in the unloved middle - too small to satisfy universalist ideals, too remote to serve family interests. Unfortunately for the Arabs, in the modern world the nation-state, for all its faults, has proven itself the right-sized organization for winning large-scale battles. Because they have states but not nation-states, modern Arab mass armies have performed miserably on their own desert battlefields, where the self-preserving hit-and-run tactics generally preferred by tribal cultures have been rendered obsolete by airpower and mobile armor. Perhaps even more embarrassing than the notorious Arab fiascos in Desert Storm and the Israeli wars was the 1987 destruction of oil-rich Libya's tanks by dirt-poor Chad's fleet of armed Toyota pick-up trucks. Arabs' lack of respect for international borders contributes to the Middle East's high levels of international violence. For example, Syria justifies its long history of meddling in Lebanon in part on the grounds that the borders of the two nations were simply arbitrary lines drawn by European powers within living memory. Who is to say, Syrian supporters ask, that Lebanon should not have originally been given to us? Iraq, the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, might seem on paper to be as natural a nation-state as Egypt. Yet, it has never quite felt that way to Arabs. One reason was the continual movement of Arab clans around Southwestern Asia. T.E. Lawrence described in his memoirs how population growth in Yemen in the deep south of Araby habitually drove farmers into the desert where after generations of wandering northward as nomads, they would eventually settle down again as Baghdad city-dwellers. Thus, Saddam Hussein's apologists could argue with some veneer of plausibility that his conquest of Kuwait wasn't truly an attack on a separate nation like Hitler's invasion of Poland was, but more like a violent and unwelcome version of Hitler's "Anschluss" with German-speaking Austria. After all, invaders and invadees alike all spoke Arabic. Since the legitimacy of Arabs national borders is honored by decades, not centuries, Hussein could portray himself as the great unifier of the Gulf Arabs. The tragedy of Palestine represents the worst of both nationalism and transnationalism. There was relatively little Palestinian national sentiment before Zionist Jews began moving in a century ago. The region was simply a dusty outpost of the Ottoman Empire, with little political self-consciousness above the clan level. Then, however, Jewish nationalism catalyzed the growth in turn of local Palestinian nationalism. The partial ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the late 1940's presented a crucial question for the Arab states to answer. Were the Muslim and (to a lesser extent) Christian peoples indigenous to Israeli-occupied lands best thought of as fellow Arabs or as Palestinians? The Arab governments decided that for the purpose of having a reason to hate Israel, the refugees were blood-brothers whose treatment was a mortal insult to Arab national honor. On the other hand, for the purpose of deciding whether to welcome the refugees into their lands as permanent citizens, the Arab states decided they were Palestinians, not Syrians or Iraqis or Saudis, and seldom let them settle outside of their gritty refugee camps. Since pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism are such potent rallying cries for revolution, the national regimes in this part of the world tend to be highly repressive for their own survival. The moderate governments often turn to the U.S. for support against their transnationalists. Since the U.S. is Israel's best friend, the imam in the street in turn tends to believe that his own government is the lackey of a Jewish-American cabal. This encourages more unrest, which leads to more repression, and so on in a classic vicious cycle. In short, while transnationalism may or - as the events of 9.11 suggest - may not be the wave of the near future in the postmodern West, much of the Islamic world has yet to fully extricate itself from a medieval dream of a universal theocracy and evolve into the modern world of nationalism. Steve Sailer (www.iSteve.com) is a columnist for VDARE.com and the film critic for The American Conservative.
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