"NEO-SOCIAL DEMOCRATS"
Penn Kemble: I want to say something about Social Democrats, USA, and about the purposes that led us to bring this group together this weekend. I'm pleased that Jim Pinkerton is here, who can claim credit for giving currency to the term “new paradigm” during the Reagan Administration. We flirted with using that term in convening this meeting.
Instead, I proposed the term "neo-social democrats." This caused some disquiet among my colleagues, who felt it smacked too much of other neo-named movements, and might confuse our image. We even considered “Neo-Social Democrats: The Matrix Reloaded,” especially because the hero of that action film is named “Neo.”
I was told such pop culture allusions would trivialize a very serious subject.
So you'll see a short document on the back table, with the inoffensive title "The New Social Democrats." I encourage you all to take a look at it. (The document can be found at www.socialdemocrats.org.) It's not yet an official statement of SD-USA, it's intended to encourage discussion among our friends and members and whatever wider public we can engage. We think it is time for a new discussion about social democracy. Our paper focuses just on two things: the role of the labor movement in the United States and other modern countries, and the importance of international support for democracy in many countries of the world –with a special focus on the Middle East.
My name is Penn Kemble, by the way. I happen to be a Senior Scholar at Freedom House. But I want to make very clear that the views I'm expressing here are views of a group of Social Democrats, of whom I'm one, and not those of Freedom House. Freedom House is a broad, nonpartisan organization which includes a lot of people –even people with eccentric views like mine.
Our paper tries to bring together some interests that perhaps in today's climate seem incongruous. It touches on the importance of a strong trade union movement, and also on the importance of resisting anti-Americanism in the wider world, sometimes even in our own society. It addresses the importance of a proper understanding of the role that social democracy plays vis-à-vis that other great component of our society and many others, the capitalist market.
Perhaps the touchstone for today's discussion is the difficulty trade unionism finds itself in. This provides a special role for people such as ourselves, who can reach out beyond labor to other elements in society to help develop greater understanding about the importance of unionism and greater support for the efforts by workers to form unions.
When we discussed the situation of labor yesterday at our meeting, one of our colleagues said “That's the hardest thing to sell in our whole program.” We are hardly unaware that trade unionism is not the most stylish subject in American public life today. There are a lot of people who think that trade unions are waning institutions, simply waging a rearguard struggle against global trends that will make them wither into insignificance.
We have two points to make about that proposition--they're both sketched out in our paper. One, if it is true, it is something that is going to have a profound effect on American social and economic life. So profound that many people who may casually accept it now will in due course be shocked. The decline of the labor movement is going to affect not only our politics and our economy, but our culture.
It is easy to underestimate the extent to which so much that is fair and decent in this society rests on the accomplishments of trade unions. These are the bedrock independent organizations that give support to an enormous array of the social programs, public institutions and civic organizations that uphold decency in our national life. We all know the list that is so often repeated-– Medicare, Social Security, minimum wage, and so forth.
But there are lots of other things that don't so readily come to people's minds. Those of us in this room know the critical importance the labor movement played in our civil rights struggle. Labor influences the composition of our courts. It looks out for the effective enforcement of laws that are put on the books in some moment of public outrage, but need watchdogs to ensure that they are enforced. The whole of our middle class culture, as it's so often called, owes a great deal to the existence of unions. This is particularly true of many of the features of American society that are celebrated by our conservatives. The fact that ordinary people have the means to raise their families decently, to pursue education, to take time off when there are problems, to be Scoutmasters or choir masters or whatever. These are things that in no small way are the result of the labor movement.
And if labor continues to decline, it will have a profound effect on our society and on our culture. Our intellectuals, our political leaders, even our business leaders have not begun to consider these consequences. This is a discussion that we have to help generate. It's very difficult for unions to do it themselves, because they're dismissed as self-interested. They need a wider community of understanding and support.
But, second, we shouldn't be too readily convinced that the decline-ist premise about unionism is a valid one. I don't have such a long memory about the labor movement, but even I can remember times when academics and journalists agreed that the labor movement was on its way out. There have been other times in American history when the decline in the strength of unions has been precipitous, when the proportion of the unionized workforce has been smaller, and yet unions have come back.
We need discussion about the various ways in which unionism might be revived and strengthened. Again, a discussion like that can't go on only within the labor movement. Naturally, elected labor leaders are the people who have to decide what practical steps to take. We all know that labor leaders are sensitive about other people who presume to speak on behalf of unions, and with good reason. If there's been any group in recent history that has had to fend off all kinds of outsiders who presumed to speak in the name of its members, it was the labor movement. So labor leaders are right to guard their role.
But labor needs all sorts of links to the wider world, both so it can hear from people in other sectors, and so it can get its views out.
Another reason not to assume the inevitability of labor's demise: there are things going on in union organizing or in the organization of groups that are in many ways like unions that are quite fascinating. Given the trends we see in health care, in the collapse of the high-tech bubble and the culture that surrounded it, in the continuing process of globalization and in the insecurity and turmoil in our employment practices and labor markets, it wouldn't surprise me to see the pendulum of unionism swing back again. There needs to be conversation about when that might happen, and how to help it come about.
A key reason for the organization of this meeting was our sense that labor needs new allies. There has to be new thinking, not just within the labor movement, but in the wider community that must give unionism the support that it deserves.
But if we are going to help unionism, we not only need to have a clearer understanding of the role that unions play in our society, we need to have a better understanding than left in the United States has had so far about capitalism. And about the relationship between social democracy and capitalism. We have a section in our discussion paper on this that gave rise to some lively conversation. It says quite flatly we don't see social democracy as a movement or an idea that intends, in ever how gradual or Fabianesque a way, to undo and overturn capitalist markets.
One of the challenges that people with our views and values have always had is how we define ourselves vis-à-vis capitalism. It has come to be the view of many of us that you can actually improve your prospects of being able to persuade people, especially workers, of the importance of unions if you make it very clear that you are not interested in destroying or undermining or doing away with their employers.
Our tradition, of course has a long experience with criticism of capitalism. But we sometimes aren't appreciative of other strains in American life that are also very antagonistic to business and capitalism. The populist tradition. The trial lawyers. (One doesn't think of trial lawyers as people who have an ideological hostility to capitalism, and most probably don't. But they're constantly recruiting clients on the basis of some real or alleged abuse of big business, and they nurture the impression that business is mainly about irresponsibility and exploitation.)
So a kind of vintage Marxism combined with populism, New Leftism, consumerism, environmentalism and the tort bar generate a sort of mist, a cultural environment which allows people in the business world to feel that there are a whole lot of people out there trying to do them in.
This affects attitudes of many people in our business-dominated society. This brings us back to some things Richard Bensinger was saying this morning. Many employees have some conflicts with their employers, but they don't really want to put them out of business. They don't want our economy to falter or fail. All this is on their minds when they think about joining a union.
They may ask themselves, what do union people really want? Do they want to help us bring home better wages and benefits? Or is there some other purpose which involves political and social changes that are not likely to be achieved or won't work and or could even hurt our real interests?
That is why some of us argue that it is helpful for a group such as ours to make it clear that we're not interested in doing away with capitalism. We understand that markets, business, investment and all of that is a part of the kind of society that we accept and support. We just want to make it more fair. We want to provide certain kinds of security and benefits that companies won't --or by themselves, can't--provide. We want to make sure that consumers are protected. We want to make sure that capitalists don't become so greedy or deceptive that capitalism won't work.
One of the things that has been vividly demonstrated again in the last year or two is that capitalists themselves are not faithful to the capitalist system. Whenever they get a chance, too many of them will override the rules for their own short-term benefit in ways that can be extremely destructive to the longer-term functioning of the system. The scandals at Enron, the bending of the accounting standards, the watering of stock, all these things were extremely destructive from the point of view of the capitalist system. Investors pulled out of the markets. People weren't comfortable buying public offerings because they felt that what they were being told about companies was not true -- many were distracted by a raft of law suits and suspicions.
Without external forces –publicly-accountable forces–regulating capitalist markets, they simply don't work. You don't get effective regulation unless you have institutions that are not dependent on business and can demand that government to do its duty. Individual stockholders can't do it. Accounting firms can't do it. Isolated government officials can't do it. There is no other institution with the strength to impose vigorous durable regulation of the market than a strong trade union movement. You wouldn't have a Paul Sarbanes in the Senate without labor. You wouldn't have members of Congress and other watchdogs groups clamoring for an independent SEC if you didn't have an institution like the labor movement, saying that capitalism can't be just left to the capitalists.
A clearer understanding of the way labor and a social democratic public sector can help strengthen capitalism could help in convincing people to join and support unions. When the public sees that you're not trying to undermine the system, you're trying to make it work better, they're going to be more receptive to the notion that unions should be permitted to recruit members, to hold elections under decent conditions, and all the other things that were talked about this morning.
Foreign policy is another major theme that we want a revived SD to address, and it's the second major theme of our paper. Our approach to these two theme is consistent, even though in today's climate it may not be immediately apparent to everyone. How can anyone argue that what goes on in the administration of our national labor law is a scandal in terms of fair and democratic process, if labor is not seen as a movement that has a deep commitment to democracy not only here in our own country, but elsewhere?
The argument that has to be made to change the public climate about unionism in this country is in no small measure an argument about democracy. Of course the arguments to be made to prospective union members themselves will also be about benefits, wages, relationships with specific employers and such matters. But for the wider society, it is bound to be helpful in persuading people about the importance of labor unions to the functioning of our own democracy to be seen as strong advocates of democracy in international affairs. So there is a natural harmony of concepts here. We're for democracy at home, we're for democracy abroad, and labor unions are a part of it in both places
Our statement invites people to discussion about these matters. There are likely to be aspects of it that some of you may find provocative. But it's a time to be provocative and we think our argument has relevance and appeal.
There's one area in which a group like this could make a contribution. Much of the current debate about modernizing and improving government is conducted at a very high policy level by people who have a rather technocratic spirit and who sound like social engineers. One sees this both in the British publications as well as in our own Democratic Party discussions.
Coming from where we do, we have some understanding that the kind of society we want has to be built in some measure from the bottom up. It requires solidarity. It requires a kind of spirit that you don't find in all the other “neo” groups. This creates an opportunity for us.
A group such as Social Democrats, USA, has the experience, the culture, if you will, to make a difference that desperately needs to be made. Donna Brazile was exactly right this morning when she said that a key challenge we face in the progressive movement is reaching out to young people. There are many young people out there who have an impulse to work in unions or other social activity. There's not much that is sensible going on that brings these young people together and provides them the sense of community and moral spirit for doing the difficult work that has to be done. Here we can play a role.
So, I encourage you, take a look at our statement. On the back of it you will find a coupon welcoming you to join SD-USA. It's really very cheap. You will get a lot out of it: an occasional email newsletter, an invitation to events like this. But it will also give you an opportunity to become part of a group that has a rich history, a deep feeling about issues that you care about, and that now has a remarkable opportunity to make a contribution that no other group is trying to make.
Any questions?
Andy Smith: To what extent is what you are talking about something that you see being adopted by Democrats? To what extent do you see it as being accepted by people across the spectrum?
Penn Kemble: There is certainly a need for this kind of discussion in Democratic Party circles. But I also agree with Richard Bensinger: this isn't about the Democratic Party. If you cast it in those terms, you really diminish it. This is about fundamental issues of the organization of our society. I think there probably are Republicans who, faced with a serious presentation, would find themselves open to what we're talking about. I think of course, if you got some embrace of these ideas in the wider public, then you'd see the Democrats come flocking. But my sense would be that this should not be presented initially as a strategy for the Democrats.
Sam Leiken: I was thinking about the reform of the labor movement in the UK. Many of the positions that John Monks and the TUC advocated over a period of time eventually became popular, and are not dissimilar from those in your paper. But we have an imperfect trade union movement that has not shown itself to be particularly open to change, or to the influence of outsiders. In your comments I heard nothing about modernizing the labor movement. What is SD's view of that problem?
Penn Kemble: My concern is that we not bungle the opportunity created by changes in the wider environment by opening the discussion with a lot of criticism. What we are seeing in the wider world is also being seen by a lot of people in the labor movement, and other places. There's an opening here for us to show that we can make a contribution. It's that kind of positive approach that makes the most sense to me.
In the labor movement you're dealing with a community that has been subjected to an almost constant stream of belittlement and criticism. I'd like us to start with the kinds of positive statements that are made in our paper about the role of the labor movement in American public life, and see where it takes us.
In a lot of academic and policy discussion about the labor movement there is the assumption that we know what's best, and if only these hodcarriers or whatever would listen, we would soon have a modern and effective labor movement. That's both false and foolish. We need to approach our dialogue in a very different spirit.
Robert Pickus: The kind of peace movement we've had since Vietnam is all about resisting the use of American power. It has given very little thought to how power can be widely used to promote peace.
How would you address how this country could get a public effort for peace that deserves the name?
Penn Kemble: One of the main arguments we set out in our discussion paper is that the expansion of democracy in the world is related to security. Labor historically has had a huge role to play in the expansion of democracy in the world, and will have to continue that role if democracy is to continue to grow stronger. The audiences abroad that we have to reach are frequently audiences that accept dialogue with trade unionists in the United States, but are somewhat uncomfortable with government or the corporate world or whatever.
One of the things that will be addressed in our final panel is the importance of what we used to call public diplomacy. By that I don't mean public relations, but working with key constituencies in foreign countries to help them understand America, America's purposes, and trying to persuade them to cooperate with us, even in circumstances where their governments may be reluctant.
The labor movement historically was one of the most important instruments of American public diplomacy. It ought to play that role again. It can only play such a role when it's got a clear grip on what's valuable in our society and why it's important to defend American democracy against certain kinds of attacks that are made on it. The role of labor in foreign policy is extremely important.
One might say similar things about an American social democratic group. We're a member of the Socialist International. We have access to many people. We can talk about what life in this country is really like, which, you know, is preposterously caricatured in many countries.
As the American public awakens to the depth of the challenge we face in dealing with these dysfunctional and authoritarian societies, particularly in the Middle East, we may find that people from our ranks are welcomed into the process of building the worldwide political and intellectual community that's going to be needed to deal with them.
Bruce Miller: I want to add to what you said. The effectiveness of anti-Americanism depends upon what the ultimate result is in Iraq. If Iraq can be developed into a democratic society, a lot of that agitation will disappear. Or at least the people who take the anti-American position will be very uncomfortable. So it's certainly in everyone's interest to help determine what that outcome is there.
But I don't trust many of the people who are responsible for carrying out this kind of work in Iraq. We social democrats need to become involved in this process.
The trade union movement has an interest in a secure and democratic Middle East. People in labor who would sabotage or might sabatoge this effort should be challenged. This is an important issue for trade unions, and we can help.
Penn Kemble: One of the things that makes this a time of opportunity is the debate about Iraq. While it has been discouraging in some aspects, it did show that there are people on the left who are willing to challenge “national sovereignty” where governments are engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction or in massive human rights abuses. Such people looked at the debate in the United Nations with dismay and a realization that the United Nations is not up to dealing with these problems. Even though there was discomfort about some aspects of the way the Bush administration conducted itself, there was also a recognition that the go-to-the-UN reflex was pointless. This opens doors for people with our views.
Male Speaker: Could you say something about the role of labor unions in homeland security?
Penn Kemble: One of the depressing things about the homeland security debate is that anyone who watched New York pull itself together after September 11 saw the esprit de corps and competence of union members -- in the protective services, emergency relief, in the construction industry. You saw the competence and pride of union workers.
New York City probably has the highest proportion of union workers of any big city in the country. These people stepped up– they're the ones who ran into the burning buildings.
So the way that the debate over the Homeland Security Act turned into an attack on the rights of workers to join unions was particularly perverse. It should have been an opportunity to educate Americans about the positive role that unions play in our life. That opportunity was missed.
Homeland security will be a big issue in our domestic debate. I'm a little uncomfortable with, the emphasis being put on it because my own sense is that you're going to have to deal with terrorism with an offensive strategy. The nature of the terrorist threat makes it impossible to deal with it through a largely defensive strategy. We'd have to sacrifice our free way of life. That's where I think the notion of preemptive war, preventive war or whatever, has some merit.
Andy Smith: There has been a significant change in attitude toward immigration since 9/11. For example, the deal about a Mexican worker program didn't happen, for a lot of reasons. Has there been a change in the trade union movement on the issues in recent months?
Penn Kemble: Well, immigrant workers in the United States ought to be able to join unions. If employers threaten to turn them in if they try, that's disgraceful. I don't know much about the legal particulars of what can be done about it.
But there's a strong case to be made that unions and social democrats should stand up for a principled idea of citizenship. America should be a society that welcomes immigration. We should have fair immigration policies. But we shouldn't have a casual attitude about illegal immigration, because it involves lawbreaking. Yes, it involves lawbreaking on the part of the poor people who come here out of desperation, and that's a painful dilemma. More importantly, it involves lawbreaking on the part of a lot of people who encourage and help immigrants come under circumstances that are unjust both to them and to other Americans.
The idea of citizenship is something that social democrats have to take very seriously. Economic citizenship is something that we want to insist upon. That is, people in our society do have certain economic rights, one of them being the right to join a union if they so choose. If you start getting careless about the idea of citizenship, you can undermine one of the important justifications for trade unions.
Being a trade union member means you can't be a free rider. It means you've got to exercise some discipline in support of your union. It means that you've got to accept a majority vote sometimes when you don't agree with it. The same principles that you have to follow to be a good trade unionist are principles that you ought to follow in other aspects of your civic activity.
Hugh Schwartzberg: Many of us praised Lane Kirkland for the position he took in favor of allowing the Indochinese refugees to come here from the camps in the Pacific. Some of us thought it was one of the great acts of the AFL-CIO. But it made some American workers angry. Do you think it was right?
Penn Kemble: That was an orderly procedure, where legal process was followed. It was a public policy decision. But I worry that a casual attitude toward illegal immigration can arouse a backlash that will force us to curtail access for people who face very difficult circumstances and need asylum. Immigration policy is a delicate area. The casualness with which it's sometimes treated is dangerous.
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Session IV: The Middle East: Terror and Liberalism
Herbert Magidson:
It's no surprise that this morning's speakers indicated that European anti-Americanism is driven to some extent by U.S. positions in the Middle East, particularly our support for Israel. Therefore this afternoon's discussion, which is titled "Middle East: Terror and Liberalism," is particularly important and follows logically from our earlier discussion.
I'd like to introduce the topic by quoting a very short bit from today's program, which says, "The doors are opening to democracy in the Middle East, a momentous opportunity. The road ahead is beset by terrorists, extremists, repressive governments and an anti-Americanism that cannot be adequately explained by any of our country's shortcomings. Nevertheless, this is a time of promise."
It's a time of promise because the fundamental question with which we are dealing is itself positive. That is, how do we influence and assist the development of a democratic and free Middle East? There are many theses about the causes and solutions to problems in the Middle East. But there are very few analysts who are so insightful that they're able to establish a basic framework and context for our discussions. Our speakers are really very special in that regard.
Joshua Muravchik is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He's an adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute of Near East Policy. He has just written an important book, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.
Saad Ibrahim is a very special human being, to whom we are much indebted. He is an internationally renowned scholar and a passionate advocate of democracy and human rights, who has been jailed for a number of years because of his passionate support for what we all hold dear.
Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism, and we have chosen the title of his book as the title of our session. On the jacket of that book, it reads, "The terror war is not an imperialist war, nor is it a clash of civilizations. The terror war is a new phase of the war that broke out in Europe more than 80 years ago and has never come to an end." Certainly this puts our discussion in the largest of contexts.
We let me begin by introducing Paul Berman.
Paul Berman: I'll make three general points as an opening for a larger discussion.
The first point is to frame our current predicament by looking back 150 or 200 years. A belief arose in the late 18th century that grew in the 19th century, a belief that the secret of human progress had been found. That secret was the notion that society ought to be divided into separate spheres, that society ought not to be a single granite block that was theological, political, sociological, economic all at once.
Society ought to be broken into the spheres of public and private, the secular and the sacred, the governmental and the social, the governmental and the economic. Likewise one's own thinking could be broken down into separate spheres. In one part of your mind it would be perfectly possible to be religious in a traditional manner, yet in another part of your mind you could be scientific in the modern manner. You could sustain these different spheres of thinking at the same time.
The correct word to describe this larger idea is liberalism. I mean Liberalism not in the European sense of laissez-faire capitalism, and not in the American sense of the left side of the political spectrum, but liberalism in the largest, most philosophical sense.
In the course of the 19th century, a belief in this set of ideas that I'm describing as liberalism was shared widely by many thinkers and schools of thought, almost always in a less than perfect version. That is, every version was internally contradictory. Thus, by my reading, Karl Marx grasped a portion of this idea, but faltered in other ways, and was unable to think it through politically.
Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, had a very pure notion of this idea, but was unable to square it with his ideas about human slavery. You can go through one thinker after another and show how they had some aspect of this idea but couldn't quite carry it through.
This idea was pretty much accepted throughout what we think of as the Western world, and gained adherents ever more widely. So even in the regions of the world that had been colonized by Europe or a little later to a lesser degree by the United States, there was a notion that this liberal concept was going to lead to human progress for everyone.
But this idea also engendered revulsion or opposition from the very start. The opposition was aroused by a conviction that the liberal concept was false. It was hypocritical. It overlooked some dimension of life. You can see this opposition growing up at the beginning of the French Revolution, but you can see it even more clearly in Romantic poetry. You find it in Victor Hugo, Balzac, or Baudelaire. This feeling of revulsion produced a rebellion against the liberal concept, a rebellion that was both a rebellion for liberty, but also a rebellion for crime. In some poetry, even murder and suicide were embraced as rebellious acts.
Of course, this was a literary posture. Writers posed this kind of rebellion for the transgressive thrill that we get from it. When you read Baudelaire, you do get this transgressive thrill. This notion of rebellion against liberal society, which is for liberty on one hand and for crime on the other hand, also has a religious dimension. It's rebellion in the name of Satan.
Late in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, the religious character of this idea takes on a slightly different form. A whole series of writers begin to refer to something which isn't satanic but in fact derives from the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine in the Christian Gospels, the last and weirdest of the New Testament books.
In my interpretation these ideas, which are originally strange literary postures, take hold at around the beginning of this century in whole series of mass political movements, all of which tell the story of the Book of Revelation.
There is a people of God. The people of God are afflicted and oppressed by polluting forces from within, who reside in Babylon. The polluting forces from within are corrupting the morals of the people of God -- the whore of Babylon. They're corrupting the morals by being traders and merchants, and they are diabolical. They are infesting the people of God, in what is called the synagogue of Satan.
At the same time, the people of God are afflicted by cosmic enemies from abroad who are also satanic and who are attacking from abroad. But the people of God are going to rise up against both their internal enemies and their cosmic enemies from abroad. They're going to defeat them in a war of extermination -- Armageddon -- which is going to take one hour. At the end of this war of extermination, the perfect society is going to be established. The perfect society is going to be solid, rock-like, granite, perfect – and therefore unchanging. It will last one thousand years. It will be the reign of Christ.
These were ideas that had been slowly percolating through the 19th century in European literature, and sometimes in American literature. You can find a hint of this in Poe. After the First World War, they begin to infuse mass political movements. The categories from the Book of Revelation are transformed into political actors.
Thus, who were the people of God? They are in one version the proletariat. They are in another version the children of the Roman wolf. They are in another version the warriors of Christ the King in Spain. They are in still another version the Aryan race. Who were the polluting forces from within society? They are the bourgeoisie, the kulaks, the Masons, the Jews, sometimes the Communists.
Who were the cosmic forces from abroad? They are the forces of capitalist encirclement, or what Heidegger called the pincer forces of American and Soviet technology, pressing down on the Aryan race. Or they were the forces of Anglo-American imperialism. What is the war of extermination that's going to defeat these internal forces and cosmic foes from abroad? Is it going to be the class war, or is it going to be the fascist revolution, or is it going to be the new crusade that Franco spoke about, the crusade of the warriors of Christ the King? Or is it going to be the biological war and the Final Solution?
What is the new society that's going to be established at the end of this? Is it going to be the Reich of a thousand years, or is it going to be communism, or is it going to be the perfect fascist society, or is it going to be the new Middle Ages of Franco?
In each of these versions, whether communist, Italian fascist, Spanish fascist, or Nazi -- and actually I could go around the rest of Europe divining versions in the rest of the countries -- in each of these versions, the new society was pictured as a leap into the ancient past, and at the same time a leap into the modern future.
Thus in the communist perspective, communism was going to recreate the perfect communist society of a primitive people or of the Russian folk, the Russian peasants. At the same time, of course, was going to be a leap into sci-fi modernity. In the Italian fascist version, Mussolini marched on Rome for the purpose of resurrecting the Roman Empire, but the resurrected Roman Empire was also going to be a modernist Roman Empire, as exemplified by the kind of architecture he built up. Same thing with Franco's new Middle Ages, it would also be modern. Of course the Third Reich was going to be a resurrection of the Roman Empire, which was going to be entirely modern.
So the vision was a leap into the past and a leap into the future. But in any case, it was a vision creating the perfect society that was unchanging, granite-like and would last forever. Such a society that would have none of the separation of spheres that you see in liberal society. It would free the mind of the weight of having to divide one's own thoughts into separate spheres also.
In short, out of the mood of revulsion that arose in the 19th century we got poetry--some of the greatest writers of the times. Out of this disillusionment arose the series of political rebellions after World War I that we now know—their literary to use Mussolini's word-- as totalitarianism.
The movements which arose in Europe were not merely European. All of the European movements arose in a period of fifteen years or so after World War I. But during this same period, similar movements arose in the Muslim world. What arose was a particularly Muslim totalitarianism. I don't want to say that in the Muslim world only a Muslim totalitarianism arose, because communism also proved quite popular and effective there. But my point is that a specifically Muslim version of this European phenomenon arose.
In this specifically Muslim version, the people of God were either the true Muslims or the Arab nation -- either way. They were afflicted by internally polluting forces, who were either hypocritical Muslims, or Jews native to the Muslim world, or Masons. They were also afflicted by cosmic forces from abroad, Western imperialism or Zionism. There was going to be a final revolutionary war, which was going to be either the Arab revolution or the March to Jerusalem or the jihad.
Finally, the new society was going to be established, and the new society was going to be a modern society, which embraced modern science and technology but at the same time was going to be a leap into the ancient past. The leap into the ancient past was going to be the 7th century caliphate established in the years after the Prophet Muhammad.
This Muslim totalitarian idea, as I interpret it, has taken two principal forms. One of those forms is described as secular, although that may not be entirely accurate. It is represented best by the Baath Party. The Baath version is secular in the sense that the new caliphate is not going to be led by religious people, but by secular leaders. So it's a dream of reestablishing the 7th century caliphate, with an emphasis on the aspect of the caliphate that was the Arab empire.
The other principal version of this totalitarian idea is Islamism. Islamism as a political movement must be carefully distinguished from Islam, the religion. The Islamist political movement has the same idea-- establishing the 7th century caliphate-- but emphasizes sharia, or Quranic law.
Both of these movements arose in the period from 1920 to 1940. The original modern Islamist organization in the Arab world is founded in 1928. Six years after Mussolini marched on Rome to resurrect the Roman Empire, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt to reestablish the caliphate of the 7th century.
What lessons can we draw from this? First, the true origin of these kinds of movements lies in a cultural crisis. It's a cultural crisis within modern civilization, within Western civilization. Whatever political or economic or sociological factors can be pointed to, ultimately the crisis is cultural. Second, the solution to this crisis is also cultural. That is, it has to do with the world of ideas and of cultural attitudes.
I have myself been in favor of the military action that the United States has taken in the last 18 months or so. But I think that the military action is not, in fact, the ultimate solution to these problems. That solution lies in the field of ideas and cultural action. Here I worry about what our government is doing, because it strikes me as utterly inadequate. But then the war of ideas is a field in which many people can participate who are not in the government. Many people who are not in the government had better participate. I'll stop there. Thank you.
Saad Ibrahim: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. I thought people like you had completely disappeared from the American scene. I have been here for months, and I haven't heard anything from my old friends from the Sixties, except lamentation about the crisis of the Democratic Party and all those who move around its margins.
When I was asked me to speak at this forum, I was skeptical. As you may know, I've been out of circulation for three years, and I haven't kept up with the avalanche of literature. When I read Paul Berman's book, however, I was gratified. For a change, I thought, an American gets it. I don't know what his background is. He writes with extreme sincerity, not only about events in America, but also about trends in Europe and beyond. That surprised me. Because often, when I read American authors writing about other parts of the world, they seem simply to be area specialists. In this book I found the breadth and width and lucidity that, if you will excuse the romantic analogy, compares to a symphony. This book is a symphony.
I didn't think that anybody understood Islamic militancy, Islamic activism in the 20th century, more than I did. I have spent 25 years studying these people as a sociologist, not as an activist. Yet I couldn't have written about them better. Paul Berman has been able to draw parallels and analogies that make the Muslims part of world history, that make our region part of the globe. That is what it is what it should be, and that is what it will continue to be. And, because everything is globalized-- terrorism is globalized, business is globalized communications is globalized -- the solutions have to be globalized.
I read the statement drafted by this group and it gave me added gratification. You are aware of the crisis of the social democrats in America. I am not sure of the solutions—I've been out of circulation. But let me nevertheless say four or five things.
First, if I have any criticism of the book, it is this: The crisis which gave rise to the social movements of fascism, Nazism, communism, it couldn't have arisen only from a cultural crisis. There is also a class dimension. Why did certain circles in European society respond more readily to the simplistic solutions offered by the prophets of totalitarianism? That is a question that I felt was not adequately examined. If you are to be more than a nostalgic social democrat, that question should be addressed very boldly with the same insight you gave to the cultural dimension. I felt, throughout my own work on our totalitarianism, that there was a multifaceted crisis. There was a cultural crisis, but also a political crisis, an economic crisis, a class crisis. It is because of the convergence of these multiple crises that totalitarianism can find willing foot soldiers, foot soldiers in search of a utopia.
The definition of utopia is always a paradise on earth that doesn't require much intellectual labor-- or any labor. All it takes is conviction, and willingness to die. Thus is what produces the prophets of totalitarianism as well as the foot soldiers of totalitarianism. This dimension should have been explicated more strongly, because it enables us to find the answer to the eternal question: What is to be done? What is to be done is always the question that seizes us when we have a crisis.
In my part of the world the Muslim brotherhood was created in 1928 in reaction to multiple crises, some of which you did not experience in the West - such as colonialism. You did not experience colonialism because you were the colonialists. The West was the colonialist. This was an added element that gave religious movements an edge over the purely political forces. The colonialists were easily portrayed in the image of the Crusades of the Middle Ages. From the 10th century to the 12th century the Crusades dominated our part of the world, so it was easy to exploit that analogy in order to create the religious passion that is necessary to make people die for what they believe.
We have suffered from totalitarianism probably as much as any others have suffered from it -- the Russians, the Italians, the Germans. The Russians suffered for a long time, but for the Italians and the Germans, it was short-lived. It was a historical blip, very quick-- ten, twenty, thirty years. For the Russians, the suffering lasted longer. In our part of the world, it lasted as long as communism lasted in Russia, or the Soviet Union.
The price has been nearly the same --very high, with one important difference. Our totalitarian regimes are also failed regimes, but when they fail, they do not depart quietly. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was without a single bullet-- without a war, without mass destruction, without mass killing. Our brand of totalitarian regimes, when they see the writing on the wall, they try to drag the world down with them. They take us to the brink of war. That has happened in our region many times in the last thirty years, the last time in Iraq. True, that was ended quickly, but it was dangerous. Suppose Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction? What could have happened? Just imagine.
My last comment is about what to do. My solution for this globalized crisis, for globalized terrorism is the globalized cry for freedom. It is the globalized cry for democracy, the globalized cry for justice. We have to bring these three components together as a new dream. It is is not utopia, it is not perfect – but with these three things a group like yours can offer a better atlternative for the 21st century. Thank you.
Joshua Muravchik: It is an honor to be on a panel with such distinguished fellow panelists. It is also a perfect occasion to be here, as today is the Sabbath when we read the section of the Torah called Bihar. This concerns itself with the jubilee year, and is the section of the Old Testament, as it's called, that cuts most sharply against the idea of private property. It's a fitting occasion for a simple Jew to be back among the socialists.
I want to welcome Paul Berman on board. It seems that in every big conflict we reap some important new recruits. In the wars of Central America, we reaped the Radoshes and the Leikens. There were some more after Bosnia. Now the war against terrorism has brought us Hitchens and Berman -- very nice indeed.
Of course this begs the question, who is the us? That's worth thinking about. The us, to me, would start with Churchill and his lonely fight against appeasing Hitler. He counseled that Hitler could not be appeased, he could only be fought. Churchill had an even lonelier fight in the war cabinet in 1917-1918. He begged for a serious military invasion of Russia to destroy the Bolshevik regime in its cradle. What a happier and better world it would have been had he been heeded.
The “us” extends from Churchill to the band of Cold Warriors who recognized that the Soviet Union and world communism had to be fought tooth and nail, that this system was not simply at odds with us out of mutual misunderstanding. The “us” also includes those who appealed over the long three years from 1992 to 1995 for our government to do something to bring an end to the bloodletting in Bosnia, as well as those who appealed in vain for something to be done to stop the genocide in Rwanda. It includes those who today have lent their swords or voices or whatever they have to offer to the war against terrorism. That may not get us very far in defining who the “us” is, but it's a beginning.
Let us try then to describe who it is we are fighting against in all of these battles. I think it is too easy to call them totalitarian -- not all of the adversaries I've mentioned are totalitarian movements or forces. Not all of them were terrorists. One of the many virtues of Paul's book is his attempt to probe for the deeper common denominator of these terrible forces, and his realization that little differentiates Islamism and Baathism.
The only word to categorize or explain what it is that we are against is evil. In a fascinating essay in Encounter about twenty-odd years ago, two British social scientists whose names I don't recall made the case that the meaning of Orwell's work was the attempt to rehabilitate evil as a meaningful category in modern political discourse. Presidents Reagan and Bush have done a wonderful service in reintroducing that category in modern political discourse. So the us is, in a sense, those people who recognize evil for what it is and also recognize the importance of being prepared to fight by all necessary methods against evil.
Of course, the objection will immediately come: aren't we the ones who are evil? Saddam said it, bin Laden says it. Isn't this a very slippery term and how do we know who is really evil -- that it's them and not us?
A fair enough question, but let's not be too intimidated by it. Our opponents have turned moral terms upside down throughout our struggles. Hitler said again and again that it was the Jews who wanted war. The Soviets said that they were the democratic camp and the peace camp, and that we were the war mongers and imperialists. But those claims were false because one really can know who is evil and who is not. How? Ye shall know them by their deeds. The the most important of evil deeds is the taking of innocent life--as distinct from the taking of life in the course of self-defense or wars of self-defense. It is the act of murder carried out because of its useful effect-- or even, as Paul explains in his book, just for the orgasmic joy of murder. This is how we can identify who is really evil.
By saying who the “us” is, we can develop an idea of who is the not-us. The not-us are those who on the one hand refuse to recognize evil for what it is, and indeed rush forward with excuses for it. Those like Kofi Annan and others who told us in the wake of 9/11 that we had to concern ourselves with the root causes of terrorism, and that the root causes of terrorism are to be found in poverty and deprivation. Yet as many people have noticed, the leader of the terrorists, Mr. bin Laden, knew very little poverty and deprivation in his life. Paul Berman does us the useful service of affixing the label of plutocrat to him.
There does need to be an attack on the root causes of terrorism. But they have little to do with poverty and deprivation. The roots are at least two. The most important root cause of terrorism are the terrorists. We must attack them as effectively and relentlessly as we can.
The second root cause of Middle Eastern terrorism is the sick political culture of that part of the world, a political culture of tyranny, violence, extremism, paranoia, fantasy. The prospect of trying to change that culture presents us with an immense challenge. By the political culture of the Middle East, I of course do not mean Islam or even Islamism, because it's only recently that the terrorists who are attacking us have done so in the name of a severe or orthodox form of Islam. Until very recently, the fanatical Middle Eastern terrorists killed us in the name of secularism, a democratic secular Palestine or a popular front for the liberation of whatever. The work of trying to transform this political culture is primarily political work, although it is not only political work. It also must include the willingness on our part to resort to force.
This bring me to the other way of looking at those who are not-us, those who refuse to recognize the need to fight against evil in a tough-minded and strong-willed manner. These are those who say, when we try to squeeze some evil regime by applying sanctions against it --oh no, sanctions will hurt innocent civilians. Then when we propose to deal with an evil regime by use of military force, they say to us, “Oh no, let's try sanctions.” While the fight against terrorism, which is the form of evil we're up against at this moment, will have to be primarily a political rather than a military fight, it must include military components.
Here I cannot resist making a slight demurral from something Paul wrote, I think in his book or in some writing that relates to it -- Paul downplayed the self-defense component of our reasons for going to war in Iraq in favor of stressing the democratizing component.
While I agree that is essential that we do everything we can to succeed at democratizing Iraq, I would emphasize that we never have the right to resort to war to democratize another country. As long as there's no threat to the peace to ourselves or to others, then the tools we must use in our efforts to democratize must remain peaceful. But when there is a threat to the peace or to ourselves, we do have a right and often a need for recourse to arms.
Finally, a word further about Paul's book. I had to read it at a rush to get ready for this afternoon. As I was rushing through it, I realized that it is so good, so beautifully written and so full of interesting insights that I must give myself the chance to go back and read it at the measured pace it deserves. So Paul, Comrade, welcome. Welcome to what exactly, I'm still not sure. Perhaps we should try calling ourselves the League of the Just.
DISCUSSION
David Twersky: My question is to Mr. Ibrahim, and either Josh or Paul Berman if they'd like to weigh in. Clearly one of the things that's been very scary for everyone who's interested in democracy in the Arab world is the notion that the most possible democratically- elected replacements for the existing autocratic regimes are Islamist political parties, as almost happened in Algeria. What if Egypt, for example, went into a more open democratic political style, and opened itself up? Wouldn't they elect people who then cancel all further elections? What is the likelihood of a true democratic alternative and not just an Islamist force that is democratically elected?
Saad Ibrahim: I'm glad you raise that question—it is on the mind of everybody I have seen on this trip. My answer is no. I am a secularist and I am not afraid, because I'm a democrat first. I believe in democracy, I believe in the rules. I believe we should be consistent. We should have staying power. We should be willing to take some risks. All change in history involves some risk.
But more concretely, we have never really tested this proposition. There has been this fear, but it was never tested. In the few cases where it has been tested, the outcome was not so scary after all. Take Algeria: it was never tested. Those who won the election were never given the chance to show us whether it would be one man, one vote, one election -- or not.
But we have seen the next-door neighbors in Morocco. They had their election about three or four months ago, and another election before that in which Islamists ran for parliament, and won a few seats. They won more seats in the last election, but nothing terrible has happened. Turkey is another good example, as is Indonesia at the other end -- from Morocco to Indonesia, the far ends of the Muslim world. Concern seems to be focused on the countries in the center of that arc of crisis (as Brzezinski described the Muslim world), that extends from Indonesia to Morocco. At the very ends of the arc we find examples of Islamists competing for parliament and winning sometimes, losing sometimes. But the world has not caught fire.
Here's what I believe is happening-- not as an activist, but as a social scientist. Many of the Islamic activists have moderated over the years. Like any social movement, the first generation is very militant. As they either grow older, like yourselves, or more experienced, or because they have lost so many times or been beaten so many times, they revise, they revisit their ideas, their practices. They see what scares people, and they moderate. When you run for office, you need votes. When you need votes, you don't only speak to the converted, to your narrow small constituency. You don't get elected this way. So you have to expand. If you expand then ideology recedes into the background, pragmatism comes to the foreground.
That's exactly what happened in Turkey. Look from Erbakan to Ecevit. Fifteen years. The tune, the language of discourse, the clothes, the willingness to deal with the United States. He was on the left in parliament in terms of cooperation with the United States. Again, this is the will of public opinion. He was willing to give the United States the use of the Turkish airspace and to allow them the use of military bases in Turkey. He gets voted out on both, he tried twice to do that. When he failed, he did it anyhow in a very discreet manner. His roots are Islamist, but he saw the national interest of Turkey as superseding narrow ideological Islamism. So I don't share the fear--what we should encourage as leftists, as democrats, is the evolution of Islamic movements in Middle Eastern countries. Get them to play the democratic game, to moderate, to put Christian Democrats forward as their model. That would be my hope.
Joshua Muravchik: I find that quite persuasive. The risk is considerably attenuated if the United States continues to have a policy of intolerance toward the nexus of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and continues to be willing to make its presence in the region felt in a robust way. If we do that, it seems to me that the harm that Islamist parties might be able to achieve, were they to win an election, would be considerably circumscribed.
Paul Berman: First, to Saad Ibrahim, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your comments. To Josh Muravchik, I'd say that I'm very grateful that after many years of disagreeing with me he's come to agree with me.
The question was raised, how is it that totalitarianism comes to prosper, and why have some people over the years failed to struggle against it more effective? Here I want to throw out a kind of muddying political point, which is that in trying to draw up a list of the us and the not-us, I run across many difficulties. The us versus the not-us is a hard line to find, to trace with any accuracy. I agree with everything that's been said, totalitarian movements prosper because of various contingencies. But they arise from complicated cultural origins. Part of their cultural origin is the inability of other people, the people who wish not to be totalitarian or who are against totalitarianism. These other people just don't recognize totalitarianism for what it is. One reason these movements prosper is because everyone else is thrown into confusion. All you have to look back is on the history of the rise of Nazism. Why didn't the anti-Nazis struggle against it more effectively? It was because there were people on the right who couldn't understand it properly and there were people on the left who couldn't understand it properly.
I remind everyone to ask ourselves, why was the United States caught blind on 9/11? What was the reason for that? In my book, I describe some of the errors and naivetes that can be found on the left. But they're not just on the left. Why was it that the CIA fell down so badly, the FBI? We've heard about bureaucratic glitches and errors in getting the word from the field back to the higher-ups in the main office and this kind of thing. But really I think that everybody, right and left, was guilty of a conceptual error: not being able to believe that large and powerful movements exist, with irrationalist motives that are capable of acting in a pathological manner.
To my mind, the most shocking failure of 9/11, which hasn't been examined publicly, was the revelation that the Pentagon had no plan to defend the Pentagon. How could that be? It was not because the Pentagon consists of drippy leftists like me. It was because the Pentagon was somehow unable to grasp that somebody would do something so crazy as to fly a plane into their building. That was just a simple failure of imagination. If you keep that failure of imagination in mind, you can look back through the history of totalitarianism in Europe and elsewhere and see it replicated a thousand times.
We have to ask ourselves, what failures of imagination might we be committing right now? Here I would remind everyone that some of the struggle exists not in the Middle East. Some of the struggle exists in the United States and in Britain or France, like the two Brits mentioned earlier, who went to Israel two weeks ago to commit suicide terrorism. People who'd grown up in a British world. We have to ask ourselves, what state of alertness have we ourselves achieved? In what way are we actually struggling against these forces in our own world?
The extent of our failure is really astonishing. I'll just give one example. I was at an excellent conference just this past week on anti-Semitism, in which a variety of speakers spoke about the difficulties in prying out of the Vatican the documents on Vatican anti-Semitism. This is a very serious and important struggle, and they had some successes and some failures.
But not one of the scholars of anti-Semitism participating in this conference was addressing themselves to Islamist anti-Semitism. A great deal of energy has been devoted to searching out the errors of the Vatican, but who engaged in this research in regard to Islam? Who is addressing the intellectual leaders of radical Islamism? Who is actually making this fight?
In the division between the us and the not-us, the people who we're describing as us are not making this fight. The us might turn out to be the not-us. This is something that we have to interrogate ourselves about.
Rachelle Horowitz: I'm going to make an effort to have a question at the end of this statement. I find the notion of trying to define this as the fight against evil, as opposed to a fight against totalitarianism, to be very disturbing. George Bush lost support when he failed to emphasize that we were fighting for democracy against totalitarianism. I would even more disturbed if that a group of neo or post or social democrats abandoned that concept.
It is extremely important that the concept be something that is political and that is definable, not something that is so vague and general that it's easy to change the definition. That totalitarianism has a specific meaning.
Paul Berman and Saad Ibrahim do you two agree with me?
Saad Ibrahim: I do agree. I am disturbed by the same word, evil. I couldn't define it. Nobody can define it. Totalitarianism is very well defined. I know how to fight totalitarianism, dictatorship. These are political systems that are to be fought by political means. Hopefully peaceful means, but if necessary, military means.
Joshua Muravchik: There may be something faintly totalitarian in spirit in making an attack on one panelist and asking t the other two panelists to respond. I spent a lot of years and words attacking totalitarianism and I'm still eager to attack it where I can find it. The problem is that the Bosnian Serbs were not a totalitarian force in any meaningful sense of that word. Still less were the Hutu genocidists. If someone can come up with a better generalization for what this force is, I'm all for it. I did not leave evil completely undefined. I defined it as the wanton taking of innocent life, not the accidental taking of innocent life. I'm perfectly ready and eager to listen to anyone who can perfect the definition.
Paul Berman: I have some sympathy with the question. I agree with Josh's definition of evil in this instance. But I do think that the struggle has to be defined in political and recognizable terms. I'll be very frank in saying I think that Bush has done a disastrous job in doing this. His language of evil has been part of the problem, because the language of evil has come coupled with Christian piety. He's actually finished some of his addresses, which are not just to the nation but to the world, by saying, “God bless America” and invoking his own Christianity. This kind of thing muddies the issue completely. If we are engaged in a struggle of Christianity versus Islam, in that case I'm a neutral. Many other people will want nothing to do with it. We in America understand that a certain language of Christianity goes well with the language of American democracy. It can be a Christianity of the right or a Christianity of the left-- so we have our Pat Robertsons and our Martin Luther Kings. We understand what this is and what its limitations are. But the same language converted into the European languages sounds like the language of Franco. This is something that the Administration in its parochial ignorance is just really unaware of.
I would argue that the degree of America's isolation in Europe has been in some large fashion unnecessary. It's incredible, that faced with a genuine menace to the world like Saddam Hussein, we ended up going to war only with a handful of allies. This was something that I believe was absolutely unnecessary. It wasn't built-in structurally to the situation.
I would like to also offer a comment in regard to Bush's definition of the war against Iraq as a war to remove weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction are terrifying. It's also the case that we can be threatened badly by people with nothing more than box cutters.
The problem with identifying the war as having to do with the weapons of mass destruction is that Bush lost an opportunity to present to the world the political issues at stake. He gave very little reason for the Arab or Muslim world to support this struggle. If it was to remove weapons of mass destruction which might be turned against the United States -- well, people in the Muslim world, out of their own humanitarian decency, might well hope that those weapons would be found and destroyed. But such a struggle was not one that involved them.
He should have been able to do enlist people in the Arab and Muslim world by saying this was a struggle that was for us, but also for them. That it was a struggle that the whole world ought to embrace because in this war, self-defense and the liberty of other people turn out to be the same thing. This was something that, to be honest about Bush, he did say in some of his speeches. But he was never able to say it consistently. The message that he finally got out was the one about weapons.
This is another way in which the war has been going very well militarily, but very badly politically. It's been going very badly politically largely because Bush has not presented a coherent or consistent justification. But then, neither have the rest of us. Bush has done it in his way. People on Bush's left have essentially called for the United States to do less, out of fear of American imperialism. So we have a battle between an inarticulate, military response versus no response at all.
And the third position of trying to promote liberal democratic ideals as a method of self-defense, which is also a democratic revolutionary expression of solidarity for other people. This alternative way of looking at the whole thing has gone basically unexpressed or at least hasn't been made audible.
Jeffrey Herf: About this issue of what to call these regimes: for liberal politics in the United States to use the language of evil, a Manichean language, is self-defeating. There is no way in which liberals can succeed politically by wearing religion on their sleeve that way. One of the most disturbing trends in American politics in the last twenty years is the erosion of the separation between church and state and the willingness of politicians to present themselves as representing God's will.
Paul is right on the money when he says it's also profoundly disturbing to many people in Europe who do not bear ill will toward the United States. One aspect of the history of totalitarianism is to think about politics in a Manichean way, dividing the world into the children of light and the children of darkness.
Secondly, talking about an axis of evil or to describing regimes as evil, even though it's empirically accurate, doesn't say much about what we should do about them. It's a statement of what we think about them morally, but it doesn't say what kind of policy we should pursue. Preemption, containment, deterrence, patience, impatience - it doesn't tell us what to do.
That kind of language reminds me of critiques that Josh has written for many years about Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter -- about a tendency in American foreign policy to assume that making a moral statement is a policy. Josh has written about this a great deal, so I'm not giving him lessons about it, because he's had great insight about it. But I do think it's dangerous.
Again, I refer to Tony Blair, who found a language and a discourse to describe these morally despicable governments and why we should go to war against them. If our government continues to speak in this language, we will antagonize people who otherwise would not feel antagonistic toward us.
Michael Allen: Two quick points. The Cato Institute recently issued a report called "The Empire Strikes Back or the Empire Strikes Out," in which it described what it called the worrisome consensus emerging between internationalist hawks of left and right--as it described them. Is there such a consensus? If so, what should its strategic and practical priorities be in engaging in a war of ideas-- given that it's difficult to engage a war of ideas against an obscurantist theology?
Secondly, Josh's comments are gracious and welcome, but I think they are based on a historical oversight. Those on the left who are from the social democratic tradition can perhaps recall who were their forebears being beaten to death on the streets of Berlin by both Nazis and communists at a time when many on the right had reached the strategic accommodation with both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Many on the right had, if not an overt sympathy, at least a degree of ambivalence about that particular species of totalitarianism. Those of us from the social democratic tradition could perhaps have welcomed the right on board when they joined the Cold War thirty years after we started fighting it.
Joe Ryan: One of the concerns I have about the struggle against terrorism that democratic societies that may employ very harsh methods in responding to terrorism. This happens when terrorism is used by so-called national liberation movements, whether it was the French versus the Algerians, the British versus the IRA, or the Israeli government versus the Palestinians. What do we say about the tension that's created between democratic values and civil liberties of our society society when it is trying to attack terrorism, and may be employing very harsh methods in doing so?
Joshua Muravchik: Michael, I think you've come into this discourse recently and may misconstrue where I'm coming from. But let me go to Jeff Herf. As for Manichaenism, we used to hear so relentlessly during the Cold War that those of us who were cold warriors were Manichean, or were presenting the conflict in Manichean terms. The inescapable reality was that it was a Manichean conflict. It was a conflict between good and evil. It was a conflict between the most free, just, humane, decent societies that human beings have yet succeeded in creating, on the one side, and on the other side the most murderous, barbarous, repressive societies that human beings had created.
It was greatly clarifying to have it explained that way, and it was muddying for people to talk about shades of gray. In that sense, Niebuhr, for all his greatness in some respects, did a lot of mischief with his children of light and darkness.
You said some kind things about what I've written about Jimmy Carter and Woodrow Wilson. Let me say that, in the case of Wilson, I wrote with great admiration and approval and still feel that.
Finally, I assume most of the people in this room are not Bush supporters. I didn't vote for George Bush. Maybe he's made some mistakes. But to argue, as Paul and Jeff have, that the problem we're having in Europe is because of something that happened with George Bush is to tightly close our eyes to the fact that this tide of anti-Americanism in Europe was riding strong before George Bush was elected. It was very much present in the sour reactions of some Europeans to the process of NATO enlargement. Statements by one after another leading European representative warned that they had to be on guard against the United States using NATO to drag them into all of our imperial ventures. We had to have a principle in NATO that there could be no non-Chapter V actions without the authorization of the UN Security Council. One after the other European leader argued that the reason for instituting a common currency was so that America would no longer be able to call all the shots. There were flat-out statements by French Foreign Minister Vedrine that the main goal of French foreign policy was to change the world from a unipolar one to a multipolar one. Remember the willingness of French heads of state and foreign ministers to go to summit meetings in Beijing and issue communiqués decrying hegemony and talking about the joint French-Chinese struggle for a multipolar world.
You're entitled to criticize President Bush, and there are grounds for criticizing him. Paul alluded to the particularly important ground that there has been a complete failure to carry out the war of ideas, although Bush declared its importance, both in his national security strategy paper of September and in his strategy against terrorism statement of this past November. So far we've had the Charlotte Beers joke, and very little else. I guess we have Radio Sawa now. There are valid grounds for sharp criticism here.
But we let the Europeans off the hook much too easily and undeservedly if we chalk up their abysmal behavior –for example, the vast wave of anti-Semitism and virulent hatred of Israel that has spread across Europe -- to George Bush?
Saad Ibrahim: I hope that Joshua didn't really mean to describe a whole society, as he did, as evil or as repugnant. You can describe regimes this way. You cannot describe the Russian people or the German people or the Europeans in these terms. Otherwise we would be again on a very slippery ground that does not enable us to have a humane, intelligent discourse.
European anti-Americanism has appeared in a very pronounced way because of what I consider to be American foreign policy arrogance, the American foreign policy impulse toward unilateralism. You have countries like the Scandinavians, like the Italians, like the Spaniards-- people who generally don't have, as the French may, some kind of built-in cultural envy.
Evil -- this is a vocabulary that I feel very uncomfortable with. We are in a political discussion. Let us keep our vocabulary at least confined to what we are discussing. In the public opinion polls I've seen, it was not anti-Americanism, it was anti-American foreign policy on particular issues. These were demonstrations in all the capitals of the world. Don't tell me that the whole world is infected by something evil, and therefore it has a built-in hatred for America. It doesn't.
America envokes all kinds of images, some of which are very positive, as testified by long lines in front of every American embassy everywhere in the world, whether to come visit or to study or to migrate or to work. It is not true that there is that built-in hatred for America, regardless of its foreign policy. It's the foreign policy in a particular situation, in a particular time and place, that troubles so many people.
Unless we see this clearly, we will not be able to answer the question, what is to be done? The point I have been emphasizing during this recent trip is multilateralism. Multilateralism doesn't have to be with France and the Soviet Union or China. There are all kinds of countries in the world that you can work with. I'm talking as a Third Worlder. There are many countries that you can work with and without creating the perception that you are the Big Joe that will do everything, the giant, the superman. Of course, this shows that part of the problem borders on the psychological, rather than the political.
The point is, let us see where we can get with measured responses to measured dangers. I am against Saddam Hussein, I was calling for bringing him down by any means. So in that score, I found myself in agreement with the effort to bring him down. However, I cannot ignore the sentiments around the world against unilateralism.
Adrianne Dougherty: I'm with the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center. My question is for Dr. Saad Ibrahim. We've been watching some news about the hospital workers in Iraq and reading reports that there are supposedly some unions are there. We know about the Baathist Party and what it did to unions. What advice, what do you have about what it is we should be doing in Iraq? Is it really possible that there are Vaclav Havels and Lech Walesas to work with there?
Saad Ibrahim: America prepared for war so meticulously, so elaborately, and so efficiently, but it did not plan for the day after the war. This is very clear -- the National Museum, the failure of utilities, electricity, water, hospitals and so on. People simple cannot accept the answer that America does not have enough troops to maintain law and order. That we do not have enough technical power to restart the electricity and the other utilities --and so on. It may be true, but the world does not believe that the superpower that can project all of this firepower is unable to protect a museum. All right, this is now in the past. It is behind our back.
What can we do in the future, the immediate future? There are some countries -- not France, there seems to be a visceral thing about France in America today – but what about the Scandinavians? What about some of your more moderate friends in the Middle East, like the Jordanians? Rely on them for a police force, for electricity, for utilities. These are countries that have a very distinguished civil service. They can offer something. The go it alone attitude of America is really what's generating the discontent that gradually becomes true anti-Americanism. This is the best way to analyze the situation, instead of with categories such as evil and the like. The situation is concrete. It requires concrete solutions, and the concrete solutions are noble and doable.
Paul Berman: Of course the success of our hopes depends on the existence of Vaclav Havels throughout the region. We're honored to be in the presence of a Vaclav Havel right now, Saad Ibrahim. Our failure until now has been not to be acting in relation to the Arab world and the larger Muslim world in the same way that we did in relation to Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, I'll remind some of the more right-leaning sectarians here, there was quite a broad consensus to support the dissidents. In the 1980s, I made my living working at the Village Voice, where, for part of the time, I was in the theater department. We gave theater prizes to Vaclav Havel. Those theater prizes meant an immense amount to him. He lists them in his biography as among his achievements, that he won prizes from the Village Voice. He was in prison, and yet the Village Voice was giving him prizes. This, in fact, gave him some degree of protection and some degree of prestige where he was.
We all remember that through the '70s and '80s different sectors of American society were doing this -- people on the right, people on the left, in their different ways. But can we really look back over the last 20-30 years, not to mention 50 years, and say that we've done the same thing for the Arab Muslim worlds? The reality is, our efforts have really been pathetic, and it had better change.
Joshua Muravchik: I agree, Saad, that the problem of hostility to America is very widespread, in varying degrees universal. But I don't think that unilateralism is a meaningful explanation. I don't even understand what the term means. Part of it stems from what seems like a wildly unfair distribution of blessings -- that one country is the richest, the most powerful, the most influential and so on. Being a huge sports fan myself, I always root for the underdog, and I really don't enjoy a game as much if my team is favored. So it's natural that people are going to have of resentment towards us. Some feeling of resentment also arises from U.S. policies. There is no doubt that America's support for Israel is one of the things that contributes to America's unpopularity. The problem is that America is the only country in the world that has a decent policy in the Israel-Arab conflict, which demands support for Israel. Decent people everywhere should share it, and it is a disgrace that there are so few of them in Europe who do.
Finally, we have on our shoulders the greatest burden of the peace of the world, as well as a large part of the burden of the defense of human rights and democracy around the world. This means that we have to do things that get us into certain unpleasant situations. You know, the Swedes from their Olympian heights can look down upon us because they don't really have any responsibility. We do things that do a lot of good for the world, like getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and other people stand by and have the luxury of saying, tut-tut.
Moderator: I want to give two important thank you's. First, to Josh Muravchik, Saad Ibrahim and Paul Berman for an extremely stimulating panel. Second, as I give Dick Wilson and Penn Kemble the microphone back, I thank Penn and Dick and Vicki Thomas all the other people who helped to put together an extraordinarily helpful day. Thank you so much.
Penn Kemble: Let me close by thanking you all for coming. I thought the level of the discourse here was really excellent. You rarely have a meeting like this in Washington without a kind of coarse partisanship creeping into it. You rarely have a public meeting that you've advertised openly where strange characters don't show up and behave in untoward ways. I think it's really astonishing that we avoided both those things and yet we had a very lively and substantive give and take, with disagreement about some important issues.
What we had here vindicated our judgment that there is an opening for our kind of discourse. Many of may want to continue this kind of dialogue, to continue to see one another and may be prepared to shell out a little bit to make it possible. We have a coupon on our statement. We've just passed a constitution -- the shortest constitution, Dick Wilson tells me, in the history of movements like this. It's only two pages long, the revision of an earlier constitution that I fell asleep reading many evenings. One of its provisions is that one can become a paid member, fulfilling one's civil duty to this organization, with only a small contribution of $50 for an adult, $75 for a couple and $25 for a student. I think we still include the category of unemployed, with a bow to the battle of the 1930s. Thanks to all the speakers, in particular to Dr. Ibrahim, who may have gotten a little of the flavor here of the controversies in American politics today.
Saad Ibrahim: It's wonderful. I missed this.
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