Before the G8 leaders concluded their June 2004 summit at Sea Island, Georgia, they posed with their Middle East guests for a commemorative photograph to capture the moment and document an event depicted as “epoch–making”.
Everything in the snapshot is natural and rational – the lake, the green grass, the trees, the leaders, the platform they stand on and the clothes they choose for the occasion. However, the three Middle East leaders are conspicuous in being the only ones who decide not to appear in western attire – trousers, shirt and jacket – but who rather opt for what is usually described as “traditional” dress. They are the Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, the new Iraqi president Sheikh Ghazi Ajil Yawer, and the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. The three leaders’ clothes are neither unnatural nor irrational. Yet they are something of a anomaly within the picture – like the incongruity of a man in jeans in a photo of a tribe in the heart of the Arabian desert, or a blonde woman posing amidst black Africans, or a man wearing a sombrero among a group of turbaned mullahs in Qom or Najaf.
TV channels broadcast the arrival of presidents Karzai and Yawer in Sea Island wearing their “traditional” dress. But when the microphones were placed in front of them for a press briefing they spoke in English. They – and their United States hosts – wanted to say that the traditional structures and societies they come from can embrace modernism…and speak English. In doing so, they were migrating into a world of universal values. Their peculiarity of adornment aside, their use of language symbolised a crossover to genuine, inevitable and perhaps compulsory integration.
The politics of the exotic
The western “recipient” of such gestures is well–versed in developing a cultural sense acquired through colonial experience, Orientalism, the information revolution and dreams of multiculturalism. He has come to see in the anomalies they reveal possibilities for a diversity that may escape the norms that otherwise seem to encase them.
In this light, and for a moment, the Sea Island picture could seem like those taken by western tourists when they visit the non–western world – sometimes called the “third world”, sometimes the “underdeveloped countries”, and at other times the “south”. This world seems to them a huge ethnic museum. The snapshots document their first–hand experience of this incongruous, exotic world in relation to the exemplary, normative west: what these people wear, what they eat, how they beautify themselves, their greeting gestures, how they perform their rituals of joy or grief.
What ensues is a mental mosaic combining the Indian yoga with the Arab camel, Chinese mystical rites with the Turkish hookah, the Iranian chador with African dancing – a composite picture, in short, burdened by ethnic concern inherited from the culturalist astonishment characteristic of the west’s romantic perception of the east.
The photo at Sea Island can appear, then, as purely culturalist, another piece of the mosaic. But the anomalies in the picture have a meaning other than ethnography’s portrayal and documentation of the richness of diversity. The “cultural” diversities in this photo can also be understood within a modern system of political values. The rupture it opens, the diversity it reveals, and the culture it transmits are all politicised.
This aspect of the picture is most bizarrely represented in the presence of the two presidents who had been designated as such by the United States: the Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the Iraqi president Ghazi Yawer. They joined the G8 to show what the US has achieved and built in these two countries in just two years.
It is as though President Bush wanted to introduce his two sons, his two puppets, his two men or the two fruits of his labour. It was as though he wanted to say to a western recipient weaned on culturalist astonishment and colonialism: “these two leaders are preserving their culture…look at their dress, and yet we have made democrats of them…we are the ones who have made democrats of them”. (Democracy has really become an ideological term!)
Whose diversity, what integration?
There may be an element of coincidence in the fact that both Afghan and Iraqi presidents could wear “traditional” dress. What if Iraq’s presidency had gone to the western–attired Adnan Pachachi? What if Hamid Karzai had not worn his familiar, traditional Afghan (Pashtun) dress, and donned western clothes instead? But this very coincidence – captured and politicised by the Sea Island picture – reveals the solution America is working out at present: diversity is ever–present, but it is possible for the peculiar to be fused in the universal. The diverse may keep its specificity but diversity has limits we must accept and delineate.
America is torn between two impulses: faith in value and cultural universality, and oppositional plurality. Giving a free rein to pluralism has proved disastrous but restriction contravenes the country’s democratic sensibility. The same dilemma is experienced by “the other” when this other comes to believe in the values of political modernity as it rises from the depths of culturalist astonishment that identifies him with primitiveness and abnormality.
In the Sea Island picture lies a solution to America’s contradiction. It is quite possible for plurality and diversity to be confined to the surface, to the outer shell, the façade, to the exterior. It may be embodied in a dress, a dance, a local dish, a piece of jewellery, a poem. But once its outer forms are discarded, it enters the sphere of the real discourse which “everybody” seems to believe in. This is, after all, the sphere and space of hegemony itself, which of its nature is an instrument of the “universal” system of power and its conventions.
That is how the philosophy of integration takes shape in its more explicit meaning. That is how the United States thinks in all the clarity of its self–belief. It wants integration as a partnership of unequals; it wants Islam according to its whims in order to accommodate it; it wants a malleable Europe in order to coexist with it; it wants an opponent tailored to fit its criteria.
