In similarly heated rhetoric, France’s president and Al Qaeda’s founder recently chastised nations that dare to think the U.S. might have a point in holding Saddam Hussein’s feet to the fire. When some smaller countries of Eastern Europe backed the American position, Jacques Chirac labeled them “badly brought up” and said they had missed “an opportunity to keep quiet.”
In his latest tape, Osama bin Laden denounced Muslim countries that don’t toe his mark as “tyrannical and apostate regimes, which are enslaved by America.” What is fascinating isn’t so much the logic of those outbursts, or its absence. It is the shared poetry with which a French statesman and a Muslim terrorist expressed themselves. Theirs was a chorus of the also-rans, a dirge of the has-beens.
Now, To be sure, there are more polite ways to describe them. For the sake of clarity, let’s set euphemisms aside to state a problem confronting our nation. We are caught between friends and enemies who have yet to come to grips with some basic facts of contemporary life.
Once upon a time, France was the epicenter of Western civilization.
It no longer is.
Earlier still, Islamic civilization dwarfed its Western counterpart.
It no longer does.
That alone would be enough to bruise egos. But there is more salt rubbing the psychic wounds of cultured Frenchmen and Muslim fanatics. Much as they’d like to, they can’t deny that all the cards–military and economic power, scientific and artistic creativity, a virtual monopoly over popular culture worldwide–are held by Americans, of all peoples.
To self-conscious heritors of age-old civilizations, that’s got to seem like history making a cruel joke at their expense. The French wouldn’t have liked it had the Germans or English become top dogs. But at least they were prepared for the contingency; their armies and navies had slugged it out for control of Europe and the colonial world beyond.
Western philosophy long was a debate between German Hegelianism and French Cartesianism. The only American accorded the status of genius by habitues of Paris cafes was Jerry Lewis.
That gives you an idea of the cultural scale against which we are measured on the Boulevard St. Germain.
From Europe to America
Every French schoolchild learns that French thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau authored the Enlightenment, the 18th Century intellectual revolution that established the modern mentality. French was the language of learning and culture for all peoples. At the time, Americans were too preoccupied with chopping farmsteads out of the forests of North America to worry about poetry or philosophy.
In the early 19th Century, Napoleon made most of Europe a province of France. Later that same century and into the next, Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso made modern art synonymous with French art. When American young people dared to feel their creative juices, they likely high-tailed it for Europe. Henry James, one of our first notable novelists, felt more at home in London than in Boston. American doctors trained in German medical schools.
Then the decisive role of American might in the two world wars changed that. On the morrow of the second conflict, New York replaced Paris as the capital of the art world. American universities became a magnet for students from all continents. American films came to dominate movie screens everywhere. Bluejeans became the universal uniform of youth. Imagine how a smartly turned out Parisian boulevardier must have felt to see French young people preferring the garb of an American cowboy.
In fact, we have a measure of how tough it was. The recent protests against President Bush’s Iraq policy are not the first time the European intelligentsia has been willing to give a bloody dictator the benefit of the doubt while thumbing its nose at Uncle Sam.
The U.S. as enemy
At the height of the Cold War, the French literary and artistic community was dominated by Marxist loyalists. Picasso accepted the Soviets’ Lenin Prize, explaining that painting is “an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.” For him and other Old World intellectuals of the 1950s and ’60s, the enemy was the U.S., not Kremlin autocrats whose deadly power rested upon gulags. There were massive marches against U.S. bombers and A-bombs. The demonstrators’ posters didn’t mention Soviet missiles.
For the Islamic world, America’s dominance is even tougher to digest. Notice how bin Laden’s ultimate insult is to call us “crusaders.” That is because when Western knights came to the Holy Land in the 11th Century, it marked the first time Muslims had to confront the possibility that their cultural dominance might not last forever.
For 400 years before that, Islamic civilization sparkled like a jewel while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. Commerce and learning having virtually vanished in Christian lands, their cities were little more than crossroads hamlets. But the Muslim cities of the Near East, North Africa and Spain prospered on trade and gloried in scholarship. Under its Arab caliphs, Cordova had a major university centuries before Paris did. Baghdad was the capital of the Islamic world–as bin Laden noted while recently exhorting Muslims to defend to the death its current ruler.
Western visitors to medieval Baghdad could scarcely believe their eyes. “People come thither with merchandise from all lands,” gushed Benjamin of Tudela. “Wise men live there, philosophers who know all manner of wisdom.”
So great was the disparity between Western and Islamic cultures that the first crusaders went native. They set aside their rough garments for the silken luxuries of Arab dress. They delighted in the food, redolent with herbs and spices unknown in the monotonous cuisine of their homelands. In fact, so completely were many crusaders captured by Islamic culture that they were suspected of secretly abandoning Christianity.
Sticking with tradition
Muslims didn’t follow suit when the relative standing of the two civilizations was reversed. From the Renaissance on, Western culture came to value experiment and change. Islamic culture stood fast for tradition. Abdul-Wahhab, founder of the fundamentalism that inspires contemporary Muslim militants, was roughly a contemporary of Rousseau and Voltaire. They predicted a better future. He taught that glory days were in the past.
As a result, the balance of power swung westward–first to Europe, then to the United States. There is not much we can do about religious hatreds bred of that grudging realization except to forcefully demonstrate that we are not going to be a punching bag for anyone’s resentments.
Yet we can do something about the parallel hard feelings of longtime friends turned harping critics. Not necessarily for their sake, but to make it a little easier on ourselves. There has been much talk in anti-war circles about us arrogantly assuming the right to enforce a Pax Americana.
If we could pull it off, it wouldn’t be a bad goal. The prototype, the Pax Romana, provided the world with 200 years of peace. Partially, Caesar and Cicero’s descendants were able to do so because they knew it is better to flatter allies than jibe them.
The Romans learned the hard way: by having to fight a costly civil war against Italian allies they had needlessly ignored and insulted. Now, reluctant Europeans are hardly a military threat. But perhaps we could avoid time-consuming wars of words by holding our collective tongues when phases like “old Europe” come to mind.
It would be better to follow the advice of Cicero, who knew whereof he spoke. As a young man, he fought in the Romans’ bitter civil war.
“The higher we are placed,” Cicero observed, “the more humbly we should walk.”
