Цветан Тодоров: СТРАВОТ ОД ВАРВАРИТЕ

Beyond the clash of civilization

Introduction

BETWEEN FEAR AND RESENTIMAN

The twentieth century was dominated, in Europe, by the conflict between totalitarian regimes and liberal democracies. Following the Second World War, after the defeat of Nazism, this conflict took the shape of a global Cold War, intensified on the margins by various limited ‘hot’ confrontations. The actors in these were clearly identified. On the one side, the bloc of the Communist countries, extending from East Germany to North Korea, initially dominated by the Soviet Union. On the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ around these countries lay the West, the ‘free world’, essentially comprising the countries of Western Europe and North America, under the leadership of the United States. Outside this antagonism there was a third actor, a varied assortment of non-aligned countries, politically neutral, called the third world. The Earth was thus divided up on political criteria, even if other characteristics played a role too: the Third World was poor, the West rich, while in Communist countries the army was rich and the population poor (but not allowed to point out this discrepancy).

This situation lasted for over half a century. I was especially aware of it since I was born in Eastern Europe, in Bulgaria, where I grew up before going to live in France when I was twenty-four. It seemed to me that this division of the countries of the world would last forever – or at least until the end of my life. This may explain the joy I felt when, around 1990, the European Communist regimes collapsed one by one. There were no longer any reasons for setting East against West, or for competing in the struggle for world domination: and all hopes were permitted. The old dreams of the great liberal thinkers would finally come true. War would be replaced by negotiation; a new world order could be established, more peaceable than the previous world of the Cold War. I do not think I was alone in placing my faith in this desirable development.
Only twenty or so years later, it has to be admitted that this hope was illusory; it does not seem that tension and violence between countries will disappear from world history. The great confrontation between East and West had relegated various kinds of hostility and opposition to the background: these soon started to re-emerge. Conflicts could not just vanish as if by magic, since the deep reasons for their existence were still there; indeed, they were quite possibly becoming even more influential. The world population is continuing to grow rapidly, while the territory on which it lives remains the same size as before, or, indeed, is shrinking, eroded by deserts and threatened by floods. Worse, vital resources – water, energy – are diminishing. In these circumstances, competition between countries is inevitable – and this implies that those who have less will become increasingly aggressive towards those who have more, and the latter will become increasingly worried about preserving and protecting their advantages.

These are permanent features of the landscape, but some new developments have also been occurring. Even though numerous hot spots are still found across the world, sometimes exploding into violence, their action remains limited in space, and no global conflict comparable to the Second World War has broken out for over sixty years. This absence of any major confrontation has enabled a veritable technological revolution to happen peacefully right in front of our eyes; and the latter, in turn, has greatly contributed to the strengthening of contacts between countries in the process known as globalization.
This technological shake-up has affected several different domains, but some advances have had a particularly strong impact on international relations. The most evident concerns communication, which has become incomparably more rapid than in the past, and is also taking many channels. Information is instantaneous, transmitted by both words and images, and it can reach the whole world. Television (and no longer just radio), mobile phones, email, the Internet: once we might have complained about being short of information, but now we are drowning in it. One of the consequences of this change is that the different populations on our planet are spending more time with each other. Words and images are making people more familiar with one another, standardized products circulate across the entire world, and people too are travelling more than ever before. The inhabitants of rich countries go to the lands of the poor to do business or enjoy a holiday; the poor try to reach the lands of the rich to find work. If you have the means, travel has become much faster.

The intensity of communication and the ever-accelerating familiarity between countries and people have positive and negative effects; but one other technological innovation is a source of nothing but apprehension. This is the ease of access to weapons of destruction, in particular explosives. Anyone and everyone, it now seems, can procure them without difficulty. They can be miniaturized and carried around in your pocket; they are so sophisticated that they can kill tens, hundreds or thousands of people in a single instant. Bomb-making instructions are easily available on the Internet, the products needed to make them are sold in supermarkets, and a mobile phone is all you need to set off an explosion. This ‘democratization’ of weapons of destruction creates a completely new situation: it is no longer necessary to resort to the power of a state in order to inflict heavy losses on your enemy, since a few highly motivated individuals with even a minimum of financial resources are enough. ‘Hostile forces’ have completely changed their appearance.

These major technological achievements have had consequences for people’s lifestyles, but they have not entailed the immediate disappearance of the old world – obviously, they could never have done so. What they have produced, however, is a juxtaposition of contrasts, in which the archaic is found cheek by jowl with the ultramodern. This simultaneous presence of opposites can be found within a single country, as well as between countries. The Russian or Chinese peasant is just as far removed from the way of life found in Moscow or Shanghai as the peasants of the Rif and Anatolia are from the inhabitants of Paris and London. The world of the former is dominated by a ‘vertical’ communication, ensuring the transmission of traditions; that of the latter, in contrast, is characterized by the force of ‘horizontal’ tradition, between contemporaries permanently linked to a network. What is striking here is the fact that the two worlds are not unaware of each other: images from both worlds circulate across the whole planet. And they do more than just see each other: ruined peasants leave their lands and make their way to cities in their own countries or, preferably, to cities in rich countries. Global metropolises, found in every continent, contain populations of different origins and, naturally, of extremely varied customs and manners. And thus it is that a niqab (veil covering the whole body) can be seen next to a G-string. (But both are forbidden in French schools!)

It is easy to guess at the results this collision between widely differing traditions might well lead to. In some people, it engenders envy, or rejection, or both at once; in others, it inspires contempt, or condescension, or compassion. The former have the superiority of numbers, and of a sense of anger, on their side; the latter have technology and sheer might on theirs. The mixture is explosive, and the number of conflicts is on the increase. The map of these conflicts, however, is not the same as that imposed just after the Second World War.

These days, we can separate out the world’s countries into several groups, depending on the way they are reacting to these new circumstances. However, they can no longer be distinguished on the basis of political regime, as at the time of the confrontation between Communism and democracy; nor by big geographic divisions, as, for example, between North and South (since Australia is in the South and Mongolia in the North); nor between East and West (since China and Brazil often turn out to be similar); and even less between civilizations. In the eighteenth century, discussing the human passions that stir a society, Montesquieu introduced a notion that he called ‘the principle of government’: virtue in a republic, for instance, and honour in monarchies. These days, too, a dominant passion or social attitude imbues government decisions as well as individual reactions.
I am fully aware of the risks one runs in schematizing things this way and freezing situations that are necessarily forever changing. Several social passions are always acting together at any one time, and none affects all the members of a population; their very identity is mobile and does not assume the same appearance from one country to another. In addition, the hierarchy between them is forever evolving, and one country can easily pass, in the space of just a few years, from one group to another. And yet their presence is undeniable. To describe this division, I will start out from a typology recently suggested by Dominique Moisi, filling it out a little and adapting it for my own purposes, without forgetting the simplifications it will necessarily entail.

I will call the predominant passion of a first group of countries appetite. Their population often feels that, for various reasons, it has missed out on its share of wealth; today its time has come. The inhabitants want to benefit from globalization, consumption and leisure – and they will not skimp on the means needed to achieve this. It was Japan which, several decades ago, first went down this path, and it has been followed by several countries in South East Asia and, more recently, by China and India. Other countries, and other parts of the world, are now setting off down the same road: Brazil, and, possibly in a not too distant future, Mexico and South Africa. For several years, Russia seems to have been following the same route, turning its defeat in the Cold War into an advantage: its development no longer has to be reined in by ideology; nor does the enrichment of its citizens. The country no longer needs to take part in the competition for world hegemony.

The second group of countries is that in which resentment plays an essential role. This attitude results from a humiliation, real or imaginary, allegedly inflicted on it by the countries with the most wealth and power. It has spread, to various degrees, across a good part of the countries whose population is mainly Muslim, from Morocco to Pakistan. For some time, it has also been endemic in other Asian countries or in some countries in Latin America. The targets of this resentment are the old colonial countries of Europe and, increasingly, the United States, held responsible for private misery and public powerlessness. Resentment towards Japan is strong in China and Korea. Of course, it does not dominate everyone’s minds or all activities; nonetheless, it helps to structure social life, since, like the other social passions, it characterizes an influential and highly active minority.

The third group of countries is distinguished by the place occupied in them by the feeling of fear. These are the countries that make up the West and that have dominated the world for several centuries. Their fear concerns the two previous groups, but it is not of the same nature. Western, and in particular European, countries fear the economic power of the ‘countries of appetite’, their ability to produce goods more cheaply and thus make a clean sweep of the markets – in short, they are afraid of being dominated economically. And they fear the physical threats that might come from the ‘countries of resentment’, the terrorist attacks and explosions of violence – and, in addition, the measures of retaliation these countries might be capable of when it comes to energy supplies, since the biggest oil reserves are found in these countries.

Finally, a fourth group of countries, spread across several continents, might be designated as that of indecision: a residual group whose members risk falling thrall, one day, to appetite or resentment, but who for the time being are not so affected by these passions. Meanwhile, the natural resources of these lands are being pillaged by nationals originally from the other groups of countries, with the active complicity of their own corrupt leaders; ethnic conflicts spread desolation among them. Certain strata of their population, often wretched, try to gain access to the ‘countries of fear’ which are wealthier than their own, in order to enjoy a better standard of living.

I am not really competent to describe in detail each of these groups of countries. I live in France, within the European Union, so in the group designated as being dominated or in any case marked by fear; it is also the only one which I know from inside. I am going to restrict my subject even more, and limit myself to just one of the relations that can be observed here: the relation with countries and populations marked by resentment. My reason for attempting to analyse this particular passion is that it often seems to have disastrous results. The point that I would like to develop can be summed up in just a few words. Western countries have every right to defend themselves against any aggression and any attack on the values on which they have chosen to base their democratic regimes. In particular, they must fight every terrorist threat and every form of violence vigorously. But it is in their interest not to be dragged into a disproportionate, excessive and wrong-headed reaction, since this would produce the opposite results to those hoped for.

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(Tzvetan Todorov The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations : Excerpt from pages 1–12 of The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations by Tzvetan Todorov, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2010 by The University of Chicago.)