War is a time for absolutes: good and evil, right and wrong, us and them. The pressure to conform to these binary oppositions to absorb them not just into our language but into our very thought processes is especially great in wartime. The war against global terrorism launched by the US, UK, and other coalition governments in the aftermath of 11 September has been full of this language of moral certainty.
In itself this is a familiar pattern, which needs to be critically discussed for as Mary Midgley says in this issue of openDemocracy, the world is not conveniently divided into the white hats and the black ones. But it is also becoming clear that this particular war is entangled with other political-emotional binaries, and identifying them is a key to understanding the realities behind the rhetoric of political leaders.
The weapon of gender
The gendered focus of the current situation is most obviously seen in the overwhelmingly masculinist way that the war is presented and promoted at all levels. But it is also apparent in the symbolic use of women as markers of cultural, religious and national difference. The rights of women in Afghanistan have now been severely violated, oppressed and excluded from the public domain for many years. Yet it is only after 11 September that the plight of Afghan women has become a battle-cry of the West.
In the past, this has not prevented the US from supporting the Taliban against the Soviet Union; nor does it now dissuade them from aiding Northern Alliance forces similar in their approach to womens rights. Significantly, in the western discussion on the post-Taliban government in Afghanistan, there is constant mention of the West insisting on multi-ethnic participation in this government as a precondition for establishing democratic rule in Afghanistan. However, there is virtually no mention or insistence that the women of Afghanistan would constitute part of this political process from which they have been excluded by the present regime.
The gendering of the war is thus apparent not only in what is happening in Afghanistan, but also in the way that these events are processed even by western liberals. For example, it is one of the habits of multicultural discourse to focus on the atavistic practices in relation to women of cultures conveniently distanced as other. These may be the wearing of the veil or burqah, child marriage, or expelling women from school or the labour market.
Often, however, there is no real concern for the conditions of the women concerned. Rather, as is obviously the case in this war, western interest is a device for ranking the men of the other community as inferior, according to their deviation from a putatively normal western standard.
Versions of otherness
The inferiorisation of the other here is also a statement about its society, or rather group of societies, as a whole. And it operates not just in the context of the war, but through a global order characterised by further dichotomies post-colonial and cultural.
The sense of witnessing a global society caught emotionally and politically in the throes of these two dichotomies came to me strongly when I attended the UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, at the end of August. Two versions of binary otherness were tangible there. The first was post-colonial, between (on the one hand) people who come from countries, and indeed ethnic communities, that are identified as the ex-colonised; and (on the other hand) the present neo-colonised and dispossessed. The second was cultural, between the West and the rest; and the salient rest was Islamic.
At the WCAR conference, the intersection of these dichotomies passed through the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In many ways, the Palestinian cause has become a unifying symbol to all those victimised by western hegemony in these two very different ways. On the one hand, inheriting the position South Africa used to have under Apartheid as an extreme case of oppression, dispossession, discrimination, and in this case also refusal to let refugees to return. On the other hand, being seen as the guardian of vital Muslim interests in the religious as well as political conflict over the control of Jerusalem and sites sacred to all three main monotheistic religions.
Since 11 September, however, the lineaments of the first dichotomy have been largely invisible. The post-colonial world Africa, Latin America, indigenous peoples has for the most part been deafeningly silent.
Sympathy for the victims of the attack on the World Trade Centre, in which many people from many nationalities were murdered, was not enough to overcome the emotional resentment towards the USA. In these days of a uni-polar post-Cold War world, this resentment is probably stronger than ever before, even if political prudence has prevented any explicit expression of this sentiment.
Instead, a clash of civilisations narrative of the relationship between the West and Islam has occupied centre stage, constructing the world as unbridgeable between these two blocs, religiously, politically and culturally. The bombing of Afghanistan and the civilian casualties only reinforces these boundaries of polar belongings, in spite of the vehement denial that this is the case by the heads of governments responsible for the attacks.
If there is no challenge to the clash of civilisations the term used in Samuel Huntingtons popular book delineating the state of the world in the post-ideological Cold War period further violations of human rights would be legitimated under the cover of identity politics. At the WCAR conference, many questions of racism, sexism, and corruption that are occurring inside many third world countries were neglected as all energies were directed outwardly, to the bi-polar confrontation between the rest and the West. Since 11 September and the declaration of the global war against terrorism, there are signs that it is also being used to over up many violations of human and civil rights, especially towards migrants and refugees..
Beyond Huntingtonism
It is not widely known that 2001 has been officially designated by the UN as the year of Dialogue among Civilisations. Interestingly, this was initiated by President Khatami of Iran, who wanted the UN to promote a counter-ideology to Samuel Huntingtons.
On the whole, however, the notion of the dialogue promoted by Khatami and the UN does not challenge the reified notion of civilisation as a bounded and homogenic entity upon which this doctrine rests. Kofi Annan, in a conference on the subject that took place just before WCAR, did register some reservations in viewing civilisations in this way. But the UN priority as a whole has been a defensive one: to establish a dialogue as a preventative measure against a clash. This might be one of the main reasons why the US and the UK decided not to ask the UN to back their decision to bomb Afghanistan. In this way, they played directly into the hands of Osama bin Laden and those like him who (unlike Khatami) are not interested in a dialogue but want, rather, an Islamic fundamentalist jihad. The inevitable death of civilians in the bombings, and the acceleration of the humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, contribute to those whose interest is in dichotomy rather than dialogue.
The war underway in Afghanistan is clearly linked to the patterns of global capitalism oil, drugs, the arms trade, the movement of peoples as much as to any clash of civilisations. Resolving the issues that underlie it is a long-term task. What is clear is that we need neither a dialogue among civilisations, in which a simple cultural relativism operates, nor a one-dimensional evolutionary model that posits civilisation as the sole property of the West. Rather, we need a dialogic political culture in which we recognise differences of experience, identity and cultural heritage among people yet which enables us also to establish the shared elements of emancipation within every living, human value system.
