The politics of intolerance

In the heady days of the 1990s, the end of the Cold War produced a number of prophets proclaiming the final victory of liberal democracy. The one most commonly quoted in opening paragraphs like this one is Francis Fukuyama, who stated that the victory of liberal democracy and capitalism over state socialism marked "the end of history". Of course, it didn't quite turn out that way. The late 1990s were spent speculating on what the future of politics would look like now that one end of the Cold War balance of power had imploded. The events of September 11th, 2001, seemed to provide an answer, and I believe they did. But not quite the way you think.

One of the theoreticians of politics to come in the 1990's was Samuel Huntington, whose book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has been lampooned far and wide, mostly by people who haven't read one line of it. One of the things Huntington discusses in the book is the way in which we, as humans, form our identities by associating ourselves with different groups. One can be, for instance, a Londoner, English, British, European and a Westerner. Which level of identity is considered most meaningful varies from one context and time to another; our hypothetical Londoner will no doubt identify himself on a different level when compared to a person from Essex, Scotland, Poland or Canada. The dominant paradigm of politics defines which of these "levels of identity" is of predominant importance. During the Cold War, a Londoner would have been, above all, a Westerner: a citizen of the First World. In a different time, the distinction will be different.

Very broadly speaking, most of human history can be divided into two kinds of periods: those of secular politics and religious politics. Based on what we know, the earliest human polities up to the Roman Empire practiced an exclusively secular kind of politics. The Greeks didn't go to war because they thought Zeus would like it if they killed some barbarians, and the Romans didn't even care what religion their own subjects practiced, let alone what the Persians got up to in their spare time. Their politics were determined by secular imperatives. It didn't really matter what god you believed in as much as where you were from.

The roots of religion as a political force start in the ruins of the Western Roman Empire, when Christianity made its first bid for power. With the rise of the papacy, organized religion started becoming a political force. Politics in early medieval Europe remained mostly secular, however, revolving around feudal lords and kings. Christianity needed an enemy to become truly political, and it got it in Islam.

Contrary to what seems to be common belief these days, the early expansion of Islam started in Muhammed's lifetime was not so much a war of religion as it was one of imperial conquest. Non-Muslims were not forcibly converted to Islam, with the exception of some Christian Arabs who seem to have raised the Prophet's ire. In fact, the very idea that a non-Arab could become a Muslim was a novelty to Muslims themselves, and was only accepted after heavy debate. The historical record amply bears out that to the Christian and Jewish inhabitants of the Middle East and North Africa who fell under Muslim rule, the empire of the Caliphs was simply another imperial conqueror like Rome or Persia. Many Christian sects actually preferred to be ruled by Muslims rather than by Byzantium as late as the eleventh century. This is why many scholars of Islam and the Arabs refer to the wars of the seventh century as the Arab expansion, as opposed to an Islamic expansion.

Muslims and Christians clashed on the battlefield, and Muslim pirates were the terror of the Mediterranean for a long time. Then again, Christians also fought Christians all across Europe, and Muslim pirates were a far lesser menace to most people than Vikings, who also raided as far as the Mediterranean. To Byzantium, the Arab Caliphate was another rival empire. After the Arab expansion reached its limits, there was peace between Islam and Christianity. The event that really changed the paradigm of politics away from the secular toward the religious was the First Crusade. In 1095, pope Urban II called for a crusade to liberate the holy places of Christianity from the "infidels", and the First Crusade managed to capture Jerusalem and found a Latin kingdom in the Middle East. The First Crusade also ushered in the first era of religious politics, where the dominant division was the one between Christians and Muslims. This era continued on into the Reformation, and its signature conflicts are not only the collision of the Arab and Ottoman empires with Christian powers, but also the religious wars of post-Reformation Germany and the Spanish Reconquista.

This is not to say that politics at the time were radically different. In all of the conflicts mentioned above, perfectly secular power politics ruled the day. A statesman of Ancient Rome would have easily and completely understood all of them. The difference lies in the mentality of politics. In a secular political paradigm, wars are fought for political reasons, and differences between factions are usually ones of political ideology or affiliation. This is true of the Napoleonic wars as much as both World Wars and the Cold War. The largest difference between this and the religious paradigm is in the longevity of the conflicts.

The First Crusade largely started the great collision of ideologies between Christianity and Islam. In many ways, it lasted until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War: almost 900 years. The thing is, even a global political conflict like the Second World War or the Cold War doesn't drag on for that long. The two ideologies which were defeated in those conflicts, National Socialism and state socialism, simply ceased to exist apart from a few strange remnants. After 1945, Germany stopped being Nazi Germany; in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and became Russia again. A religious conflict is an entirely different animal, however. A country can give up on a political ideology, but giving up on a religion is another matter altogether.

Here's an example. Less than ten years after France and Britain defeated Germany in the Second World War, they got together and started the process of European integration that eventually led into the EU we have today. The deep political animosity that led them to wage six years of total war was simply gone. In the 2000's, over 500 years after Constantinople fell to the Turks, we're still debating whether it's even possible for Turkey to be counted as a European country and be accepted into the EU. The tension is still there, because although Germany stopped being a Nazi country, Turkey never stopped being a Muslim country.

As a rule, conflicts set in the religious paradigm drag on far longer, and have far more serious and long-term ramifications than those set in a secular paradigm. Again, the crucial question is not whether two parties in a conflict have different religions, but whether the mentality of the conflict is religious or secular.

After the Counter-Reformation, European politics largely returned to the secular model. The Napoleonic wars, both World Wars and the Cold War were carried out in the secular paradigm. Now, however, I believe we may be undergoing a paradigm shift toward religious politics.

The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, had a great many after-effects. Most of them are transitory: the Iraq war is drawing to a close, even if it remains to be seen what the fate of the country will be when Western troops finally withdraw. The war in Afghanistan goes on, but it too shall pass: such is the way of wars. Even the gigantic apparatus of state security the Americans set up after "9/11", eerily reminiscient of a similar system on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain, will be dismantled. In general, whenever an external threat creates something like this in America, it is eventually undone. In the 1950s, the threat of communism brought out McCarthyism, which was eventually and finally demolished by the civil rights movement. Before that there had been anti-Japanese and anti-German scares and other virtual pogroms, all of which have faded into history. The current system of Patriot Acts, phone taps, waterboarding and secret prison camps will, in due time, be perceived across the political spectrum for what it is, a monstrous abuse of civil rights and liberties, and be done away with, as its predecessors were. The War on Terror will eventually end and America will return to "business as usual".

I believe the most long-lasting effect of the September 11th attacks will be the new rise of a religious model of world politics, a model where the dominant political divide is again perceived as one between the West and Islam. This was brought home to me recently when an American acquaintance insisted that Muslims cannot live in a liberal democracy, because the goal of Islam is the creation of a Muslim state. This is a very strange statement, considering that Muslims have been living in Western liberal democracies for as long as they have existed. Indeed, Muslims and Christians have been sharing the same polities for almost 1,500 years. It is odd to imagine that in the 21st century this would suddenly become impossible.

This way of thinking is not, however, the peculiar eccentricity of a single American. Far from it. All over the Western world, failing religious and political movements have latched onto the idea of Islam-as-enemy to revitalize their flagging fortunes. In America, the large majority of these anti-Muslim pundits have been Christians; in Europe, they mostly come from the political right. Anyone who has followed Finnish, French or British politics can think of some, and their counterparts seem to exist in nearly all European countries. Republican presidential candidate John McCain called these people "agents of intolerance", and that is indeed exactly what they are. Their currency is xenophobia, pure and simple.

The fact of the matter is that the war on terror is a secular conflict. Osama bin Laden's terrorist network has a series of perfectly secular, political aims, which they and their imitators are trying to advance. The conflict itself is, therefore, secular, and no different in kind from the vast majority of other conflicts. Bin Laden himself has used the rhetoric of the religious paradigm to justify himself, talking of a holy war against the infidels and so forth. This is a propaganda exercise to justify his political aims. To take bin Laden's talk of a holy war of Muslims against the infidel as the collective opinion of the Muslim world is as absurd as believing that all American Christians approve of bombing abortion clinics. To believe, because of the actions of bin Laden, that there is a fundamental and unresolvable conflict between Islam and Christianity is as idiotic as taking the Northern Ireland conflict as irrefutable proof that Catholics and Protestants cannot live in the same country.

This, however, is exactly what our agents of intolerance would have you believe. It is curious to think that the fervent anti-Islam preachers of the West are basically doing precisely the same thing as bin Laden's propagandists in the Muslim world: trying to convince their flocks that the "others" are their sworn enemies, simply because of who they are. On both sides of the conflict, these people are trying to move our thinking into the religious paradigm, where the defining question is not what faction you belong to or what political belief you subscribe to, but what your religion is.

Political differences can smoulder for decades and even ignite world wars. Conflicts in the religious paradigm, however, are founded on such a deep and irrational intolerance that they go on for centuries. Indeed, this current propaganda offensive on both sides would hardly be possible without the past grievances harbored by each side. In a diplomatic move as astute as a congratulatory telegram from the German Kaiser, President George W. Bush referred to his War on Terror as a crusade: a term sure to bring carry and fuzzy connotations in the Muslim world.

This is the legacy that Osama bin Laden and his Western counterparts, the islamophobes, want to leave us. My fear is that they are succeeding. The attacks of September 11th, 2001, were only a spark. The agents of intolerance in the West are the ones who have taken that spark and made it into a bonfire of hatred and prejudice, and it may burn for decades.

Eight years after 2001, the islamophobic rhetoric in Europe already resembles the McCartyite pogroms of 1950s America. All Muslim immigrants are treated as a fifth column of the enemy who seek to overthrow Western democracy and replace it with an Islamic theocracy. There are calls to purge the political system of (native) politicians who are "too soft" on the immigrant threat. The islamophobes are a vocal minority, but if a faction of "hawks" springs up in the moderate right-wing parties to exploit this phobia of immigrants, it may set European immigration policy and religious tolerance back by decades. One almost expects a loyalty oath drive.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, is it any coincidence that the War on Terror has coincided with the new rise of religion in American politics? Suddenly the theory of evolution is an issue of national politics and election platforms, not science. The grass-roots smear campaign perpetrated against then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was not centered on his left-wing leanings or even his skin colour, some lunatics notwithstanding, but on the bizarre idea that Obama is a crypto-Muslim who only pretends to be a Christian. Clearly this was the ultimate proof that he cannot be allowed to become President; for most of the right-wing maniacs carrying on this campaign, being a Muslim was a far greater sin than being left-wing.

Across the Western world, there are signs of a new religious rhetoric of "us-versus-them" gaining ground. This, in my opinion, is the most far-reaching effect of the 2001 terror attacks. At worst, it may lead us into a new era of religious intolerance and hatred where Christians and Muslims again become convinced that they are each other's natural enemies. If this happens to any significant degree, then the agents of intolerance in our own societies will have proven to be far worse terrorists than al-Qaeda.