After 9/11

Cultural Dimensions of American Global Power

Richard Crockatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134163274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is a readable and incisive analysis of American foreign policy and international politics since the end of the Cold War.

It is organized around two key themes, the role of culture in international politics and the changing nature of American power. Richard Crockatt addresses such key issues as:

• the relationship between US power and the post-Cold War international system
• US relations with Europe and Islam
• the intensity of anti-American feeling after September 11th
• the rebirth of American nationalism
• the war in Iraq and its aftermath.

After 9/11 is a much-needed balanced account of the most significant political questions of the twenty-first century

1 Anti-Americanism and the clash of civilizations

America is a nation with a mission and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs.

(George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 20 January 2004)

‘Civilization’ resurgent

Among the most striking features of post-Cold War debate about international politics has been the revival of talk about ‘civilization’ and ‘civilizations’. Much of it has been stimulated by the publication of Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations?’, first in article form in 1993 in the influential periodical Foreign Affairs and three years later as a book.¹ His argument was both simple and provocative. ‘It is my hypothesis’, he wrote, ‘that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among mankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.’ Nation-states would continue to be important but ‘the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations’.² Commentary on Huntington’s argument has reached almost biblical proportions. There are few studies of post-Cold War international politics which do not address Huntington’s views, and discussion of his theory has extended well beyond the academy.³ The authors of the Bush administration’s ‘National Security Strategy’, for example, felt it necessary to point out that ‘the war on terrorism is not a clash of civilizations’, indicating that Huntington’s formulation had become common currency.⁴

Civilization-talk has also appeared in other guises, however, which are not related directly to the Huntington debate. Since September 11 George W. Bush has repeatedly declared that ‘this [the war on terror] is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight.’ ‘The civilized world’, he observed in a speech to Congress on 20 September 2001, ‘is rallying to America’s side.’ In his 2002 State of the Union Address he declared that ‘the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers’ and, speaking of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), that ‘this is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world’. In his introductory statement to the ‘National Security Strategy’ issued in September 2002, Bush noted that that ‘the allies of terror are the enemies of civilization’. ‘America’s purpose’, the president declared in his 2003 State of the Union Address, ‘is more than to follow a process – it is to achieve a result: the end of terrible threats to the civilized world’. A year later he reminded his audience that ‘families and schools and religious congregations’ were ‘unseen pillars of civilization’ which must remain strong in America and be defended.⁵ Such rhetoric is to be found in many of president Bush’s major speeches since September 11 and is associated with a heavily freighted moral and religious rhetoric.

Moral and religious rhetoric in itself is nothing new in American history. The sense of mission expressed in the epigraph to this chapter can be matched by reference to any number of presidential speeches over the last two centuries. However, the moral dimension of the Bush administration’s approach to policy is particularly explicit and salient, exceeding arguably even that of the Reagan administration in intensity and consistency. Furthermore, the explicit invocation of ‘civilization’ and ‘civilizations’ appears to strike a novel note, suggesting a heightened sense of crisis and of a shift in the very categories of thinking about global politics. Significantly, such rhetoric was also current in the first years of the Cold War at the beginning of a historical phase which ended in the early 1990s. Arnold Toynbee’s Civilization on Trial (1948) captured a widespread sense of being at a momentous historical turning point and also of being challenged by new forces which were at once ideological, moral, and political. Among these the spectre of communism loomed large. Toynbee’s Study of History, an abridgement of which had appeared to great acclaim the previous year, was widely regarded as a warning of the likely fate of Western civilization, should it fail to rise to the challenge of communism. The vogue for Toynbee occurred at a time of maximum tension and anxiety. A Study of History appeared the year ‘Cold War’ entered the vocabulary and Truman’s doctrine of ‘containment’ was announced.⁶ While Huntington’s essay predated the year of greatest crisis in post-Cold War global politics – 2001 – his formulation was widely held to define the unfamiliar outlines of the post-Cold War world, and for many, the terrorist attacks of 2001 fully confirmed his thesis of the primacy of cultural conflict. For the moment the issue is not the correctness or otherwise of his thesis but rather the unusually wide currency it gained. In this respect, the reception of his writings was comparable with that of Toynbee. A further point of comparison is Huntington’s adoption of ‘civilizations’ as the basic unit of analysis. In this, both Toynbee and Huntington were working in a well-established grand tradition of historical theorizing going back at least to the eighteenth century. ‘Civilization’ is one of those words bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, though the idea goes back much further, having roots in any situation in which one society claimed superiority over ‘savages’ or ‘barbarians’. ⁷ Huntington’s scheme of analysis draws heavily on Toynbee and one can assume that the popularity of both was due to the sense they were able to convey, in part through the language they employed, of a depth of historical perspective and weightiness of theme.⁸

It will be clear from the above examples that there is an important distinction to be made between different usages of the terms civilization and civilized. At one end of the spectrum of meaning civilization is a neutral, scientific term indicating a certain kind of society or stage of growth which a society has reached; it is employed in the main by historians and historical sociologists as a means of categorizing various forms of social organization. In such instances the reference is to a particular civilization or civilizations.⁹ At the other end of the spectrum civilization is a politically and ideologically charged abstract noun conveying a partial and self-interested notion of what constitutes ‘civilization’. As Huntington himself observed, ‘every civilization sees itself as the centre of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history’.¹⁰ To the extent that the West is dominant in today’s world, there is always the suspicion among non-Westerners that the West equates ‘civilization’ with ‘Western civilization’. Such terminology in the mouth of an American president can hardly therefore be regarded as being value-neutral. In between these two extremes of usage are any number of intermediate positions, but it is easy for apparently value-neutral uses of the term to spill over into loaded or normative usages. The opening sentence of Charles and Mary Beard’s seminal The Rise of American Civilization (1929) neatly encapsulates both meanings: ‘The history of a civilization may, if intelligently applied, be an instrument of civilization.’¹¹ Civilization is evidently, as the social scientists like to say, an ‘essentially contested concept’ whose meaning will always be a subject of debate and controversy, depending on who is using it and how it is being used.¹²

There are several reasons for being interested in this phenomenon. My concern here is with the degree to which it indicates shifts in attitudes in America since the end of the Cold War and in the way America is viewed from abroad. I am less interested in Huntington himself and the fate of his thesis than in the wider phenomenon of ‘civilization-consciousness’ in the United States.¹³ To anticipate my conclusion, I propose the following: that the international conditions of the post-Cold War world in general and the post-September 11 world in particular have inclined many Americans to accentuate their ‘Americanness’, to enhance and even exaggerate their sense of the nation as unique and exceptional. The times have reinforced a reassertion of America’s core values and a heightened sense of the nation’s distinctive destiny and global role. More particularly, the American right has promoted civilization-consciousness as part of its armonry in the effort to reshape American foreign policy. The anti-Americanism which we see around the world is in part a response to this heightened ‘civilization-consciousness’ and the political and military actions which are prompted by it.

Events, furthermore, it will be argued, have served to reinforce the argument Huntington put forward: that cultural conflict is a major and increasing source of global conflict. It is not necessary, however, to follow Huntington the whole way. There are, as we shall see later, certain serious criticisms to be made of his thesis, but they are not sufficient to reject out of hand the notion that culture was a major source of conflict in the post-Cold War world, even if the conclusions he draws from the prevalence of cultural conflict are not the only conclusions which can flow from his premise. The task here is to rescue a cultural interpretation of global conflict both from those who have attacked it and from those who have most forcefully advocated it.

Before proceeding it is necessary to address the meaning and usage of the terms ‘culture’ and ‘cultural conflict’. Is it useful or even possible to distinguish cultural from other sources of conflict? How precisely does cultural conflict differ from political, ideological or economic conflict? In most definitions culture is associated with language, ethnicity, ‘way of life’ and above all religion and shared meanings and values.¹⁴ Cultures may, but often do not, coincide with national boundaries. A defined culture may be as small as a village or locality or as large as a ‘civilization’, which Toynbee defined as ‘the largest intelligible field of historical study’ and Huntington called ‘the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes human life from other species’. A civilization is, then, ‘a culture writ large’.¹⁵ Another way of distinguishing between cultural and other forms of conflict is according to the ways in which conflict is expressed. Characteristically cultural conflicts revolve round issues of identity rather than interests, values rather than material needs, and arise from non-rational levels of experience and behaviour. Furthermore, cultures generally change and develop at a slower rate than do ideologies or political systems. Needless to say, such distinctions cannot be hard and fast; they help to identify family resemblances between different fields of human experience rather than rigid boundaries. It is important, for example, to avoid the trap of assuming that cultures are unchanging essences or that the differences between cultures are always or necessarily more important than common features which they share. Cultures, like political systems, change and evolve; some apparently primordial cultural institutions were created or invented at particular moments in time for particular purposes. Furthermore, fruitful cultural interaction, no more so than in the global age, is at least as important as cultural conflict. ¹⁶ The necessity of making such qualifications, however, is not a reason for abandoning the attempt to distinguish between cultural and other forms of conflict or interaction. Often in any particular situation the ascription of one term or another will be a matter of emphasis rather than of absolute difference. Nevertheless, it is important to maintain such distinctions. To collapse all facets of human experience into each other is no less distorting than to separate them from each other.

Civilization-consciousness and its meaning

What is meant by ‘civilization-consciousness’? I believe that three claims are being made by those who invoke civilization, not all of them obviously compatible. The examples given here are illustrative only and are in keeping with the exploratory nature of this inquiry. The first claim rests on the identification of civilization with America and is therefore an act of appropriation by America. It expresses a sense of America’s distinctive identityas a nation and a culture. This is as old as America and is often called ‘American exceptionalism’ or ‘Americanism’ or in its more strident forms ‘100 per cent Americanism’. But more than this is implied. These ideas rest on the notion that America has the capacity to be a world unto itself, that America itself constitutes a ‘civilization’. Historically such notions have been as common on the left as on the right. Charles and Mary Beard’s history of the United States, as we have seen, was called The Rise of American Civilization. Max Lerner’s magisterial study of the United States, published in 1957, was entitled America as a Civilization. ‘Like a person’, he wrote, ‘a civilization is more than the sum of its parts. . . . When you have described its people, armies, technology, economics, politics, arts, regions and cities, class and caste, mores and morals, there is something elusive left – an inner civilizational style.’ In answer to the question ‘Is America a civilization?’ he answered resoundingly yes: ‘to be American is no longer to be only a nationality. It has become, along with communism and in rivalry with it, a key pattern of action and values.’ Furthermore, he concluded, ‘America represents . . . the naked embodiment of the most dynamic elements of modern western history’.¹⁷

The argument for an American civilization as distinct from Western civilization has received a great fillip recently in the hands of the New Right in America and in particular in the context of strained relations between America and ‘old’ Europe. In Robert Kagan’s eyes ‘it is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world’. On major strategic and international questions ‘Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus: They agree on little and understand each other less and less.’ Nor was this a superficial or transitory phenomenon: ‘when it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways’.¹⁸ Kagan presents an array of arguments which explain the outcome he identifies, but it is worth pointing out that the notion that Europe and America were different worlds is as old as the United States itself. Indeed, the perception that the Old World and the New were incompatible, most forcefully presented by Tom Paine in Common Sense (1776), was what tipped the scales in favour of the argument for a declaration of independence. ‘It is evident’, Paine wrote, ‘that [England and America] belong to different systems. England to Europe: America to itself.’¹⁹ What is clear is that since the end of the Cold War such perceptions have become prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic. Will Hutton’s The World We’re In makes another powerful argument, in this case from the point of view of the liberal left, for regarding America and Europe’s ‘inner civilizational styles’ as being distinct.²⁰

What these arguments come down to is the view, shared by many outsiders as well as Americans, that America is a special kind of nation, a nation of nations as Whitman termed it, granted a special destiny stemming from its uniquely fortunate situation, with claims to be a civilization on its own terms, whether or not the word itself is used. As George W. Bush put it in his 2004 State of the Union Address, ‘America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs.’²¹ Civilization-consciousness at one level is thus America’s peculiar version of nationalism.²² It expresses claims both to uniqueness and universalism of values, and promotes the argument that America contains within itself all the world’s possibilities because it contains elements of all the world’s populations and because of the nature of its founding revolution which was at once unique and exemplary. America is, as one scholar has put it, the ‘universal nation’.²³ With such claims to specialness came assumptions of special responsibility. That American exceptionalism is a central feature of the Bush administration is evident in the writings of neoconservatives whose ideas have been such an important influence on his policies. In calling during the mid-1990s for a ‘neo-Reaganite’ foreign policy, leading neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan observed that ‘it is worth recalling that the most successful Republican presidents of this century, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, both inspired Americans to assume cheerfully the new international responsibilities that went with increased influence and power’. Moreover, ‘both celebrated American exceptionalism’.²⁴

This posture is at once inclusive and exclusive, outwardlooking and deeply chauvinist, internationalist and nationalist. Furthermore, this stance expresses something of the effort involved in asserting an American consensus. To make a single entity of all that diversity inevitably involves doing some violence to diversity, setting some limits to difference. One would think that the United States would be well placed to deal with ethnic and cultural diversity, but in fact the opposite has often proved to be the case. ‘Nativism’ has a long history in the United States, particularly at times when American society is perceived to be under pressure from external threats or largescale immigration.²⁵ Precisely because it is so diverse, a premium has been placed on unifying institutions, values, and symbols, no more so than at times of national crisis such as the early years of the Cold War and the terrorist attacks of September 11. The expression of those unifying elements has characterized much governmental rhetoric and policies from the passage of the Patriot Act to the key political and military moves in the war on terror. Significantly, Samuel Huntington followed up The Clash of Civilizations with a study of the challenges to American national identity resulting from new waves of immigration from Latin America and Asia.²⁶

The second claim implicit in ‘civilization-consciousness’ has to do with leadership and in particular the sense that, in all meanings of the term, America is ‘bound to lead’:²⁷ bound in the sense that it is the natural role for a nation of America’s size and power and bound in the sense that the role is forced on America whether it wants it or not. America is, from this point of view, inevitably leader of the civilized world.

This is a much more complicated issue for Americans than most non-Americans acknowledge. Outside observers of America in the last half century have often assumed that America has been determined to spread its influence and to intervene overseas wherever and whenever it had the opportunity to do so. In fact, American policy has been more cautious than such views would suggest, and American public opinion was and still is ambivalent about most overseas ventures.²⁸ Indeed, for some, America is not decisive enough in the international arena. For all the discussion of ‘American empire’ at the turn of the millennium, there are those like British historian Niall Ferguson who note, and bemoan the fact, that ‘America has acquired an empire but Americans themselves lack the imperial cast of mind. They would rather consume than conquer.’²⁹ As leader of the ‘civilized’ world the United States is generally expected and expects to assume certain responsibilities, and the range of economic and strategic interests has increasingly extended the net of commitments. Intervention, however, is rarely automatic, not least because of the well-documented reluctance in the post-Vietnam years of the American taxpayer to accept costly openended commitments of substantial number of American troops, to say nothing of possible casualties. Indeed, this constraint was present during the Vietnam War itself: witness the stealth with which Johnson increased the number of troops and his reluctance to admit the true cost of the war to the American people, which would have meant raising taxes and/or taking funds from his cherished Great Society programme, ne...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• After 9/11
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Anti-Americanism and the clash of civilizations
• 2 The role of culture in international relations
• 3 No common ground?
• 4 Americanism
• 5 What’s the big idea?
• 6 The emperor’s clothes
• 7 The Bush administration and the idea of international community
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography