The day the earth didn’t change forever

It has been observed that those who lack the imagination of disaster are doomed to be surprised by the world. Until September 11 such a lack was very prevalent in the Western world. While it was particularly characteristic of US left-liberals, with their belief in progress and perfectibility, it was by no means confined to them.

Indeed, in retrospect, the emergence of a species of optimistic conservatives – a term that until our time had been close to being an oxymoron – may come to be seen as a distinguishing feature of the last decades of the 20th century.

In any case, many people of many political and temperamental stripes were taken by surprise by the awful disaster of September 11. That they were was clearly evidenced by the widespread insistence that the acts of terror in Manhattan and Washington marked the beginning of a new era, that the world would never be the same again, that everything was changed and changed utterly.

With all due respect, this was and is nonsense. It reflects not the reality of the matter but the difficulty that intellectuals habitually have in distinguishing between the state of their minds and the state of the world. It also reflects what philosopher John Anderson termed the "parochialism of the present", a condition resulting from a combination of ignorance of history and an egotistical insistence on exaggerating the importance of events that more or less directly involve oneself.

Horrifying and atrocious as the acts of terror were, it should be remembered that they have happened at a time when people who experienced the Somme and Verdun, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, are still alive.

Far from marking a sharp break with the world in which we have been living for the past decade, this act of terror was an event with which that world had long been pregnant, and there had been many urgent and well-informed warnings of its imminent delivery. Nor were the reasons for such warnings hard to discern.

Once the discipline imposed by the superpower rivalry of the Cold War ended; once the authority and control of many nation-states began to be seriously undermined by transnational and subnational forces; once the movement of people became easy and virtually unmonitored in an increasingly "borderless" world – and all these things happened in the past 10 years – the opportunity for terror increased greatly.

And as globalisation – which is to say, the Westernisation of the world – proceeded rapidly, producing both fear and powerful resentment as it undermined traditional cultures and authority, the motive for terrorism also strengthened greatly.

The point has often been made that terrorism is the weapon of the weak, of the losers. In this case, terrorism has been employed by members of some (not all) other civilisations who – on religious and cultural grounds, and because the bases of their authority and power are threatened – furiously reject and oppose the triumph of Western ideas, values, institutions and enterprise. Unable either to compete with the West or to hold it at bay, they vent their hatred and despair by terror. Again, the likelihood of this happening was clearly foreseen, notably, though by no means exclusively, by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington.

What happened in September was not that the world changed in some fundamental manner, but that, in the most dramatic way, a group of ideas and assumptions about the world that had come to prevail among large sections of Western elites was shown to be at best inadequate and at worst utterly false.

First and foremost, there was the assumption that the world was moving rapidly and surely toward a benign, market-driven interdependence; that a positive-sum game was in progress in which all would benefit and friction would be smoothed away.

With the triumph of the West, too, there came the belief that liberal democracy was destined to triumph rapidly and more or less universally.
There was also the complementary belief that traditional power politics had become old hat. As that human weathervane, William Jefferson Clinton, proclaimed: "The cynical calculation of pure power politics simply does not compute. It is ill-suited to the new era."

It was asserted that "geo-economics" had allegedly displaced geopolitics, and that economic wealth and "soft" power were replacing violence and coercion as the ultimate currency of "the global village".

There was, too, the long-standing liberal belief, given a new lease on life by the end of the Cold War, that enmity between peoples was the result of misunderstanding and ignorance rather than of genuine conflicts of interest. Once these were removed by education and increasing contact in a multicultural world, it was assumed, harmony would prevail.

In the US the ideas outlined above usually go under the label "Wilsonianism", after the President who so vigorously promoted them. They are not, then, exactly newly minted and, indeed, they were already pretty shop-soiled when Wilson took them up. The "universal interdependence of nations" was proclaimed by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848.

And long before that the belief that proximity and interaction would promote harmony was sufficiently prevalent for Rousseau to feel obliged to contradict it, observing of the states of Europe in the 18th century that their condition was such that they "touch each other at so many points that no one of them can move without jarring all the rest; their variances are all the more deadly, as their ties are more closely woven". As for the alleged obsolescence of power politics, that is a belief that was widely subscribed to a century ago, on the eve of World War I.

Especially at a time when American faith in these ideas has received a body blow, it is worth bearing in mind the remarkable durability of such notions. Unfortunately, there is truth in the remark that a truly bad idea never really dies. One can predict with great confidence that these beliefs will survive the present setback and before long will again be advanced as exciting new truths.

But for the immediate future the Wilsonian set of assumptions is not going to be convincing or useful.

The belief that conflict is due to ignorance and misunderstanding has been exposed yet again for the nonsense it is. (In today's world, no two groups understand each other more fully than the Israelis and the Palestinians, unless they be the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland.)

Far from being adequate for dealing with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, "soft" power was partly instrumental in creating them. Military power of the old-fashioned kind, as well as intelligence and technical knowledge, which have always been important sources of power, has been needed to destroy them.

So far from ushering in a new epoch in world history, September 11 has meant a return to an older, more sober, and above all more realistic state of mind about the world.
Owen Harries is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. This is an edited extract from his chapter in Blaming Ourselves: September 11 and the Agony of the Left (Duffy & Snellgrove), which was launched last night at the American Club in Sydney.
 

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About the Author:
Owen Harries, a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, was Editor of The National Interest in Washington from 1985 to 2001.