The following excerpts come from William Pfaff’s The Wrath of Nations: Civilizations and the Furies of Nationalism. His work, which you can find at williampfaff.com, is essential reading in foreign policy thought for the lay political thinker.
The character of the Byzantine employment of power across the many “nations” of the empire made the fortunes, interests, and sometimes the survival of the emperor’s subjects dependent upon family, clan, and communal attachments and alliances. Dissimulation, indirection, and pliancy if not obsequiousness in dealing with power were qualities of survival, and certainly of success. The influence of this politico-cultural inheritance is discernible in all the once-Byzantine countries. (As these included Sardinia, Sicily, Corsica, and a part of mainland Italy, there is a sense in which the Mafia can be called a product of Byzantium.)*
*On the other hand, the Sicilian-American Mafia leader Joe Bonanno, in his memoirs, published in 1983, describes the Mafia of the 1930s as a way of life “which precedes the formation of cit-states and later of nations.”
pg 62
Bismarck, Clemenceau, and Gladstone all opposed the imperialist parties in their countries because, as Arendt said, they grasped that imperial expansion “could only destroy the political body of the nation-state,” since the nation state, “based upon a homogenous population’s active consent to its government,” could not integrate a colonial population as the earlier forms of inclusive and non-national empires could. * *This observation obviously is important with respect to the tension experienced in many European countries today as a result of immigration from their former colonies, and it also emphasizes the overall success of the United States in creating a kind of internal, inclusive “empire” in which immigrants have until recently nearly all been successfully integrated. Whether this will continue to be the case in the future is a question of great importance for the United States. There is dispiriting evidence that it may not, and of course there are many now in the United States who say that it should not, that the cultural assimilation of immigrants is a form of cultural aggression. This, in my opinion, is a sentimental and unhistorical opinion, and a threat to the country’s future.
pg 70–71
In his wartime novel Arrival and Departure Arthur Koestler (himself Jewish and Zionist) has one of his characters, a young Nazi diplomat, describe Nazism as “a real revolution and more internationalist in its effects than the storming of the Bastille or of the Winter Palace in Petrograd…Every new, cosmopolitan idea in History has first to be adopted by one particular nation, become a national monopoly as it were, and become formulated in nationalist terms before it can begin its universal expansion.…” The young Nazi speaks of the future integration of Europe’s resources, industries, energy, and transportation, the stripping away of restrictions and abolishing of frontiers, in a way that anticipates what actually has happened since 1945 in the course of Europe’s economic unification and creation of a Single European Market. “[We] are experimenting,” he concludes, “but experimenting on a scale never dreamt of before. We have embarked on something–something grandiose and gigantic beyond imagination. There are no more impossibilities for man now.”
pg. 71
Some of the nationalities of the old empire would today like nothing better than to be reintegrated into the successor to the Hapsburg system. The heir, Otto von Hapsburg, a European Parliamentary deputy, was enthusiastically, even tearfully, cheered when he returned to Budapest after the fall of Communism, to address the Hungarian Parliament in splendid Hungarian. The former Hapsburg nations today urgently press their candidacies for membership in the European Community, the new expression of a lost European universalism. But this new universalism is not linked to German Europe, like that of the Hapsburgs, but to an earlier period of Christian universalism when, as Zamoyski has written, Polish Lutherans took for granted that their sons would study at Wittenberg, and Polish Calvinists in Basel, while Catholics went to Italy.
That was a Europe where Romanesque churches were built from central Norway and Kirkwall in the Orkneys to Palermo in Sicily, and from Santiago on the Spanish Atlantic coast to Krakoów; and Italian architects designed the monumental buildings of Prague and Leningrad as well as those of Dresden and Paris. It was a Europe where Charlemagne had Italian and Spanish as well as German and French advisers. The re-creation of this universalism was the moral purpose of the Franco-German reconciliation solemnly confirmed at Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle’s meeting in the Cathedral of Reims in 1962. The new European universalism is superficially a matter of economic and political integration, but its most important element is the attempt to reassert this cultural unity. In Western Europe this has been a success. However, the ambition (one cannot yet call it a substantial effort) to incorporate, or reincorporate, what in the past was Byzantine and Moslem Europe has as yet been a failure, with ominous implications for what is to come.
pg 104–105
The West’s domination of the world in modern times, exercised through commerce and technological superiority as well as by imperial expansion, disguises from us the scale and continuity of non-western civilization. pg 109
But the United States was also the object of hatred combined with fascination as avatar of a culturally and economically aggressive modern West whose challenge to Islamic society is the fundamental cause of the crisis which existed there before there was an Israel. This is a crises having to do with the capacity of a civilization to respond to historical change. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are the dominant religions of mankind today because they are intellectually alive in ways Hinduism and Buddhism are not. All are combatative, confident, historically intolerant systems of values and ways of life. But for Islam, religious conviction no longer translates into cultural or political confidence.
pgs 118–119
Writing before the Second World War, Arnold Toynbee observed that the Moslems, who some thirteen centuries before had committed themselves to the “proud but unproven belief” that God had given them, in their religion, guarantee of a unique destiny in this world as well as in the next, “and, in the strength of it, performed…mighty deeds in their earlier history, have had time enough to fall on evil days; and the feebleness of their reaction to their latter-day tribulations indicates that Determinism is just as apt to sap moral in adversity as it is to stimulate it so long as the challenges encountered are within the range of an effective response.” Of the plight of “the disillusioned predestinarian” who has discovered that God is perhaps not, after all, on his side, Toynbee quoted (FitzGerald’s) “Rubaiyat” itself:
But helpless Pieces in the Game [God] plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
pg 120
The identification of religion with civilization in Islamic society blocks a solution to its contemporary problems. Chritisanity from the beginning distinguished between religion and the political, secular order. There were “things that are Caesar’s“legitimately due to Caesar, ruler of an autonomous political and social order. Because of this distinction, it was possible for Europe to develop secular knowledge, a secular culture, and, eventually, even largely to cast off the influence of religion. (How complete, or lasting, this abandonment of religion will prove to be is another question. There is, as a Viennese medical theoretician and practitioner greatly influencing this development has said, a return of the repressed.)
pg 123
[American Islamist Bernard] Lewis observes that when Iraq and Iran were at war in the Gulf in the 1980s, propaganda on both sides made ‘frequent allusions to events of the seventh and eighth centuries. There can be little doubt that these references are recognized by the vast majority of people in both countries and indeed elsewhere in the Muslim world, and the force of the allusions is well understood.’ * *The capacity for historical reference of the American political class, not to speak of the American public, risks exhaustion once Munich, Hitler, Holocaust, Cuban missile crisis, and Vietnam are cited. Czeslaw Milosz’s remarks in his 1980 Nobel Prize lecture are worth notice in this respect: ‘Our planet, which grows smaller every year with its fantastic proliferation of mass media, is witnessing a process that defies definition, characterized by a refusal to remember.…In the mind of modern illiterates…who know how to read and write and even teach in schools and universities…history is present but blurred, in a state of strange confusion…[E]vents of the last decades, of such primary importance that knowledge or ignorance of them will be decisive for the future of mankind, move away, grow pale, lose all consistency, as if Friedrich Nietzsche’s prediction of European nihilism found a literal fulfillment…“
pg 126
As the golden age cannot be reclaimed, and the cultural crisis deepens under the assault of westernized consumerism and popular communications, with existing governments incapable of positive response to the western challenge, it is necessary to assume that the Middle Eastern crisis will grow worse. The fundamentalist movement is virtually the only available recourse or consolation, at least for the masses of Islamic society. Intellectuals have the possibility of a personal synthesis of influences, an individual accommodation and transcendence, and even the choice of exile; but that does no good for Islamic society as a whole.
It consequently is difficult to see anything other than continuing internal conflict in the Islamic world, and, for a time, the steady progress of fundamentalism as a means to beat off the West’s threat to the inherited values of Islam. This effort will not succeed, but it is perhaps unimportant that it will not succeed. Islam will make its way through the cultural crisis produced by this failure to develop secular thought and political theory, a modern science, a theology capable of serious dialogue with the post-Enlightenment intellectual society of the West. The violence and sporadic terrorism which accompany the fundamentalist movement will be of consequence chiefly for the Islamic countries.
pg 130
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