Making Our Enemies

Lee Harris has some fascinating comments on how the liberal West constructed the Islamic threat in his recent book, Civilization and Its Enemies. Harris points out that the early modern state developed in a kind of Darwinian political world, where only the powerful states could survive. A state was defined in terms of a centralized power that could fight off threats, and those states (such as Poland) that did not achieve this were parcelled out among those who did. In more recent decades, however, "state" has become a mere honorific term, such as when it is applied to the hypothetical Palestinian state. Western powers, which actually are states in the classic sense of the term, prop up honorific states out of a sense of fair play or out of a religion of democracy and self-determination. Were we still operating on the classic model of state sovereignty, the problem of Palestine would have long been solved �EIsrael would have driven its enemies into the sea.

There is also the fact that many of the powers of the Middle East have never had to grapple with reality. Saudi Arabia became fabulously rich as a sheer accidental combination of geography, natural resources, and Western demand for petroleum. Also, since honorific states exist only because of the assistance of real states, the honorific states have never had to struggle to establish their supremacy or sovereignty. They have never been forced to reckon with the realities of politics and power.

As Harris summarizes: "the modern liberal world system has permitted the grown of power in the hands of those who have not had to cope with reality in order to acquire this power. Power has simply been given to them, out of the sense of fair play prevalent among Western liberal societies. Iraq was paid for its oil, which in turn paid for its weapons, and both were produced by use, to be used against us. Tragically, this genesis has had the unintended consequence of diminishing the value of the sense of realism in the eyes of those who have thus acquired their power and wealth - a fact just as much in evidence in the behavior or Saudi Arabia as in that of Iraq. . . . We have nourished their fantasies instead of forcing them to face the facts of life."

Harris also discusses the "fantasy ideologies" that result from this, but that will have to await another post.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, April 21, 2004 at 05:26 PM

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