Contrapunteo-hispanomagrebí

The great German historian of the 18th century, Leopold Von Ranke, said that “the same facts compel different historians to tell different histories with the same historical situation… On one hand, omission of some facts, and the use of others on the other hand, can make for a clear path to opinion”.

Domingo del Pino Gutiérrez. Published by the monthly magazine Manhattan Med, septiembre 2005

One century before Leopold Von Ranke, Hugo Grotius understood that perceptions, more than the actual facts, were responsible for war and peace among nations. Be it with a vested interest in history or with perceptions, both authors are concerned with one and the same issue called partiality.

By emphasizing some facts-present or past-over others, many North American intellectuals and a good number of the western media have arrived at the conclusion that historically there is a penchant in the Arab/Muslim world to want to fight and destroy the West. Neoterrorism-“catastrophic” terrorism as it is called by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan-would be but the latest variation of that alleged vocation albeit its most extreme.

The media indicate that if Israel or the war in Iraq didn’t exist the Arab world would have found other reasons for resentment because that destructive wish is a structural one. The problem is that Israel and the war in Iraq do exist, like the colonial rule of the Arab world by the European Countries existed and did the mandates after it; so did nine centuries of domination by the Ottomans as well as more than five centuries of confrontations between the Europeans and the Turkish in the Mediterranean; and also Islam’s own “crusades” against Byzantium and the Christian Crusades against Islam during the Middle Ages.

A case in point to prove how correct were the judgments of Von Ranke and Grotius is that of the seven centuries of Muslim rule in the specific case of the Iberian Peninsula, simultaneous with the struggle to re-establish Spain among the Christian Nations, known today as democratic, of Europe, as interpreted by some Spanish historians as “taking back” or “reconquista”, and by others as “First Civil War among the Spaniards”.

Since the onset of the XXth century, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the “double weight-double measure” attributed to the West in its relationship with the Arab world or with Israel, is the Arabs’ and the Muslims’ most significant argument in their explanation of their differences with the West. The Iraq war begun in 2003 has done nothing more than add a new element of importance to the resentment of the West.

Clash or Alliance of Civilizations

Islam’s relationship with the West has been one of conflicts, especially in the XXth century, yet, to call it a clash of civilizations would depend on the evidence shown, one could also qualify it as a temporary alliance between civilizations. Neither one of the two interpretations can aspire to the higher ground over the other, but the North American analysts favor the interpretation of a “clash of civilizations” while the Europeans, and in particular the Spanish Government, with its proposal “alliance of civilizations”, chooses a different interpretation.

The clash has been popularized by the very media-pleasing title of a book by Professor Samuel Huntington1, in which he refers to all civilizations, but underlines for good measure the work of great historian of the Muslim world Bernard Lewis. In his famous article The Roots of Muslim Rage2, Lewis, unlike Huntington, seems to be talking about the Arab-Islamic civilization only.

Since the press has simplified everything, it is worthwhile noting that Huntington has not proclaimed the inevitability of the clash of civilizations. On the contrary, he supports the theory that “clashes of civilizations are the biggest menace to world peace” and that “an international order that is based on civilizations is the best guarantee against a world war”. This point of view would seem to advocate something like the alliance of civilizations proposed by the President of the Spanish Government, JLR Zapatero before the United Nations General Assembly in September 2004.

Bernard Lewis recognizes in the article that we mentioned that “the Muslim world is very far from unanimity in its rejection of the West, nor have the Muslim areas of the Third World been host to the most passionate or extremist hostility”.

The issue is one of conviction: that, like it is recommended in reports coming out of UNDP on Human Development in the Arab-Muslim world, we should persuade the United States to use a more mitigated approach and have a better vision of its attempt to force or speed up the democratization of that group of nations. Arabs see it as unjust as well as an example of an imperialistic view of the world, so as they sanction the West as a whole for it, they don’t seem to make the distinction between the United States and Europe, which has a very different idea about the issue.

A theory that is not very original

Where then is the originality of the theory of “clash” of civilizations? At the end of the XIXth century and the beginning of the XXth, the great scholars of the Islamic world such as the Hungarian Arminius Vambery, and the British Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, A. Le Chatelier, or even important colonial administrators such as the Duke of Cromer, said in their own dated and prejudiced language, exactly the same thing that Professors Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis are saying.

At the time the Arabs had already initiated on their own one of the most important reform movements in recent history. It has been called by some contemporary authors3 as “the golden age of Islam”. The capability of self-reform of Islam was not in question then. That reform movement was frustrated in great part by colonialism.

The reasons for that first vision of the “clash” with the Arab/Muslim world were simple: at the beginning of the XXth century the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire was being prepared by the European countries; now, at the beginning of the XXIst, projections are being made for a forceful democratization that forces the Arab-Muslim world to accept a world order with the rules dictated by the United States.

From a bastion of North American thinking with ever increasing insistence arises the common Judeo-Christian original thought about western civilization, carrying the underlying proposition that we abide by the same moral parameters, legal rights and view of the world, and thus complicity before its problems.

This view calls for two comments and raises one question: there is a great complacency before an analysis of the relationship between the western world and the Arab world that diminishes the importance of the fact that most new terrorist attacks have their origin in an Arab-Islamic environment, involving mostly citizens of those countries.

The first comment is about Judaism as the first spiritual, doctrinal, philosophic and ideological scripture of Christianity, but also of Islam. None of the three “religions with pretense of civilization” questions this syncretism at their common base. Although all three have developed their own canonical, theological and cultural corpus, even hierarchical institutions that didn’t exist in the beginning, the truth is that the euro-mediterranean history owes what it is today to those three religions.

The second comment concerns those aspects of history which, had they not been omitted, would destroy that historical Judeo-Christian complicity and the supposed impossibility of Judeo-Arab understanding. History seems to point to the contrary. While in the West the Jews were expelled from many countries, Spain among them (Sefarad) by the Catholic King & Queen in 1492, and mass exterminated in the Russian pogroms in 1881 or by Nazism beginning in 1938, they were easily integrated into the Muslim world and were welcomed with relative benevolence by the Sultans and the Caliphs.

It is true that the Jewish cultural and scientific contribution to Muslim Spain has no match in the rest of the Muslim world after the expulsion, but it is also true that elsewhere than in Palestine, the Jews can also claim one thousand years of uninterrupted history in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco.

Unlike Europe, the North American world was founded with a Judeo-Protestant base. The cultural influence of Islam there is quite recent and marginal. And its historic relationship with Islam is miles away from the promiscuity that the latter enjoyed with the Christian world in the Mediterranean basin.

Simply conflicts

Neither the Arab-Israeli conflict nor the war in Iraq are fractures of civilization; they simply are conflicts, the origins of which as well as the ways to approach them and deal with them happen to cause deep rifts between the governments and the peoples of the West. There is also another reality campaigning against the theoretical interpretation of a clash of civilizations within the world conflicts: None of the three religions are at peace completely with all human beings or with the societies that sustain them.

In all three religions there is a similar distancing between the church hierarchies and the very questioning of their rigid vision in aspects of form and substance of the religion that those hierarchies profess.

In all three religions there is similar opposition to the defense of the doctrinal stands on morality, family, society, and even on the origin of power. This is posterior to the “revelations”, and quite watered down by oral transmission, and in no case updated.

Islam is the place nevertheless where, almost 500 years too late, the fundamentalists and radicalism in the last 100 years as well as terrorism today wish to impose upon everyone else radical reforms as well as a return to the “founding fathers” (salafiism) for which only they seem to have the key and secret.

Terrorism also affects Arabs

This terrorism affects the West and Islam equally, but the gravest consequences are to be suffered in the Arabic and Islamic societies that have seen their aspiration to attain modernity frustrated first by colonialism and then by autocratic dictators whether they were military, civilian, republican or monarchic, while for the most part they all enjoyed the blessing of the West.

The solution lies, as in more than a century ago with the introduction of reforms in the Islamic world that are respectful of its traditions, that emanate from within and are in a war without quarters against this new terrorism. The “Meijis” in Japan succeeded in this. There are no cultural, racial or other reasons why the Arabs cannot do the same. It seems strange that among so many means that are being considered to effect changes in the Muslim world, no one has thought about the benefit they could derive from the Japanese experience.

It is of paramount importance that the West and the European countries in particular obtain victories in combating terrorism with the active participation of religious institutions as well as the communities and the Muslim associations in Europe, and also the Arab regimes. The clash between civilizations would be the most inappropriate way to achieve this.

North American perplexity

Bernard Lewis, and together with him various other North American intellectuals, have shown in some of their writings a genuine perplexity about the blame that Arabs lay upon the United States. “The most frequently alleged cause for anti-American sentiment among Muslims is”, according to Lewis<>4, “the North American backing of Israel. This backing is certainly an important factor… But in the first years since the establishment of Israel, the United States kept a certain distance, while the Soviet Union recognized her de iure right away, and sent her weapons via a satellite country… In 1956 it was the United States that intervened vigorously and decidedly in order to obtain the retreat of the Israelis, the British, and the French from Egypt, and yet in the fifties and in the sixties the heads of states in Egypt, Syria and Iraq and other states went to the Soviets, not to America, to seek weapons. Later they formed solidarity groups with the soviets at the United Nations and throughout the world in general… If hostility is aimed at imperialism… Why should they include the United States, which, with the exception of a brief period when a small Muslim minority in the Philippines was under its control, has never governed a Muslim population?”

It becomes difficult to comment on this North American perception of the Arab “anti-Americanism”, be it real or supposed. Some authors like Robert Kagan extend it to Europe, but it is not possible to ignore the fact that in the United States, like in Europe, moralistic speeches from politicians carry the same dubious relation to reality and empirical facts. In addition, in the United States, the means of communication, including film and television, have a tendency to evolve within a very narrow margin around what is politically correct.

Be it as it may and with a view to the future, it may be of equal importance as the notion of clash or alliance of civilizations to grasp Robert Kagan’s observation in the first lines of his book about America and Europe in the new world order5: “It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and (North) Americans share a common view of the world, even that they live in the same world”.

Kagan’s view in this issue seems to be that of many North American intellectuals, whether they are in Kagan’s political camp or not. The rainbow seems as diverse in political thought as the difference between Bernard Lewis’ and Jeremy Rifkin’s. The former calls it an anti-Americanism-allegedly incomprehensible-that is spreading throughout the world, and the latter calls it the rise of a European political and social model-he calls it the “European Dream”-competing successfully with the “American Dream” which he considers to be in decline.

A parallel can be drawn with the increasing gap between Europeans-be it Governments, intellectuals, or civil societies-and North Americans, in a real big way, that leads to a dichotomy within the otherwise likeminded global value system and interests of the United States and the European Union, meaning that one’s form of defending these values can fundamentally contradict the interests and the strategies of the other.

From this side of the Atlantic, this dichotomy seems to be an expression of the awe at the difference in points of view between the United States and the European Union, despite the multiple alliances between them, more than the anti-Americanism of which the United States is complaining about, and results in quite different positions on what seems to be so obvious to the Europeans.

A historical divide

The question is: Is this distancing new and circumstantial, or is it historical and fundamentally a structural one? Let’s begin by checking some facts, past and present. The present European Union is not only twenty-five countries and so many languages, but also twenty-five epics and so many stories of the same historic reality. Europe is not the result of one war of independence, but of at least twenty-five different processes equivalent to so many other independence wars.

Europe is also more than one hundred peoples/nations, 61 different languages, about 38 political conflicts involving minorities, and 23 involving separatists; it constitutes a cultural diversity that rests on the legacy of a dozen European civilizations and the promiscuous contact through the centuries with other Mediterranean cultures, mainly the Arab/Islamic, beginning in the VIIth century, resulting in the fact that the latter is neither shocking nor is it new.

This cultural diversity is the distinctive trait of a European Union that, since its beginnings, thought it useful to adopt a European Cultural Convention (1954) encouraging its members in its second article to “promote among its citizens the study of languages, of history, and of cultures of the other signing parties” (extracted from the Convention).

That Convention ended with a Proclamation about Cultural Diversity that was voted by the Council of Europe in the year 2000, when it reaffirmed that cultural diversity has been always a European characteristic and proposed a “new dialog between civilizations to avoid conflict between the cultures”.

The South shore of the Mediterranean is an Arab/Islamic one. Its border on a limited sea makes for cultural similarities within diversity. European States have gone to war and made peace many a time with the countries of this southern region just like the Christian States did among themselves or the Arab States also. If one might play the devil’s advocate, it can be said that it has been a Hobbes-ian common cause directed by a Kantian quest for permanent peace.

The so-called Barcelona process begun in 1995 and to which new impetus will be given on its tenth anniversary in November 2005, is expected to continue with the establishment of a free trade zone that should begin operations in 2010 but that has already begun with treaties of association and partnership that have already been signed between the European Union and Arab countries in the recent decades.

That relationship will have to enter a superior phase with the New European neighbor Policy, which attests to the ancient aspiration of Europe to continue the understanding with the Arab/Islamic world that shares in a historic, social and cultural way a preferential geographic space with Europe.

Unlike the United States, where Democrats and Republicans succeed one another in power without real political differences between them, the countries that make up the EU have come out of a large number of wars and revolutions, political systems, as well as a variety of alliances between families, regions, and ideologies.

A very diversified Europe

Some of the changes have been as diverse as the French Revolution of 1789, the Industrial revolution in England of the XVIIth and the XVIIIth centuries, and the Russian Revolution of 1917; European history goes as far back as Charlemagne and the Papacy, which had such tragic consequences, namely with the Crusade experience, the wars of religion and the great controversies between Catholicism, Protestantism, and reform; or for that matter the presently unattainable European Union.

Europe has known economic and political systems as diverse as the Paris Commune, the individualistic capitalism of Adam Smith, the collectivist communism of Karl Marx, and the present democratic socialism that provides inspiration to the European policies of welfare and social services. The latter being a sort of compromise with communism, which is defeated, and wild and individualistic capitalism, which couldn’t win.

Social Europe is not a definite conquest and pressures are felt from that individualistic capitalism that is inspired on the US experience, making for the significant rejection of the European Constitution, manifested mainly in vast sectors of the French citizenry, while debating arguing whether it marked the end of the social achievements of the Europeans.

Europe was the stage in the last century of a second World War in which fascism and Nazism were pitted against the remaining democratic countries causing 15 million European deaths and six million Jews to be exterminated simply for their being Jews.

Europe lived 12 centuries with ongoing clashes and alliances against Islam, until the abolition of the Ottoman Empire in 1924; also in the Arab/Muslim countries during the period of the mandates as well as the colonization; and beginning with World War II, with the Arab world, which was looking to be emancipated from the colonial metropolises. In Spain a very special Hispanic-Muslim story lasted eight centuries. During that time one of the most unique civilizations arose within Europe, and the Alhambra, one of its grandest architectural achievements, is the most visited historic monument in Europe.

For fourteen centuries of war and peace with Islam around a small geographical space Europeans and Arabs have learned to be familiar with one another and Spain in particular has been vaccinated against that apocalyptic vision of a clash of civilizations. We do not believe in it yet we see how it could happen if this catastrophic terrorism persists together with the will to alter the normal evolution to modernity and democracy of the Arab regimes.

The great European migrations to America

The United States, on the contrary, has only lived a linear history, that of the European dissidents that converged on American soil through massive immigration, in essence since the Homestead Act of 1862, which is at the origin of one of the most important migration stories of modern times. Cold facts give an idea of the human contribution to the formation of the American Nation by the 28 493 000 Europeans who emigrated between 1820 and 1920 to the United States. During the following half century 34 703 000 more Europeans joined the original settlers.

From a purely Spanish point of view it seems odd that out of the huge European contribution, after discounting of the 200 000 Spaniards who migrated to North America at the beginning of colonization in the XVIth century, the American dream could only lure 130 000 additional Spaniards between 1820 and 1978, compared to the almost thirteen million Germans, ten million Italians, nine million Irish and over eight million English.

A possible explanation could be the possible advantage that a common language and culture offered the Spanish who considered migrating to South America. The offerings of land were as vast and rich as in the United States. Another motive could be the Hispanic-North American rivalry on the American Continent, last expressed during the three first wars where the US went beyond its borders, and very much so during the Spanish Cuban American War of 1898, which had very special sentimental importance to Spain.

As a result of these wars Spain lost its last American colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Philippines in the Pacific, and was expelled from the club of great powers of the world for almost a century. However the Spanish imprint was deep in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, where 200 000 Spaniards from the first emigration in the XVIth century founded more than 200 cities.

The truth is that The United States as a nation that began with the late echoes of the Protestant Reform movement and practically remained there, impervious to the shake-ups that Europe experienced in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries with Marxism and Communism, as well as modern socialism. As written by Jeremy Rifkin6 “much time after the religious fervor of Europe would die down in Europe, its flame would endure in the American colonies” adding that “socialism never took on American soil”.

An inherent characteristic of the United States is that it offers an alternative to the European model and has done so since its establishment albeit it is not pitted against Europe. Yet it is different in its internal social organization and in its place in the world.

A lack of syntony with Europe

There is irritation with Europe and a history of anti-European feeling that is evident in the statements to the press by Senator Morgan7 (probably John Tyler Morgan) at the beginning of the Spanish American War in 1898: “We wish to achieve the great end of a young and powerful race. We shall not vacillate nor shall we rest for a moment while we strive to build a great military force and an invincible nation. Within ten years we shall have a fleet superior to that of Britain. We have more than enough money for it… (our objective is) to challenge the selfishness of old and routinary Europe. A hindrance to civilization, with her cardinals in Rome, Anabaptists of London, her dusty generals of the Spree, and her useless wisemen of the Sorbonne”.

There is a great rift between the Europeans and an important sector of academia and way of thinking in the United States that finding ways of appreciating again the North American political, economic, and strategic thinking in all of its complexity, and finding further common points with Europe may be as big a challenge as to find new and efficient ways to combat the new terrorism.

The hope to achieve the necessary understanding rests on the fact that neither in Europe nor in the United States there is, fortunately, only one predominant thought in three key domains-politics, economics and planning-even though some “schools” of thought may seem to enjoy more favor than the others from the government temporarily.

Every nation is convinced of the superiority of its epic history, of its founding myths, and of the universal value of its one particular view on the world. It couldn’t be any different in the case of Europe. One of them is that the European Union not only was able to pacify Europe, but it also created a European model that emanated from the conviction of its leaders that the best way to defeat communism was to establish a system that perfects capitalism with the adoption of the policies of equity and social protection that were promised but not delivered by communism.

The European Dream

The European Union was not only capable of creating more wealth and a better quality of life for its citizens, but it also recognized and guaranteed the rights and the social benefits known as Social Europe, including all of its citizens with solidarity in a system guaranteed by the State. It is the very principle of solidarity that leads the integration of the States within a Union that strives for political, economic and social convergence among all of its members.

The complete defeat of communism may actually have something to do with keeping some of its social achievements in the new European model. The tendency to suppress this argument on the social front, in favor of advocating a more individualistic capitalism like that of the United States, without opposition, is today one of the main reasons for the temporary failure to give Europe a common Constitution.

During the first half of the XXth century the United States held a position against Europe defending the colonized peoples who aspired to emancipation and independence. The question here is not one of analyzing this epoch in history even less to raise any doubt about the North American motivations, nor the dire consequences of colonization for the colonized. It should be noted however that in the Arab/Islamic world, the protectorates were instrumental in the establishment of modern administrative systems, and perhaps with the exception of Lebanon, power structures that were relatively secular and based on the establishment of transitional institutions and checks and balances that are the essence of democratic systems.

Only Communism, Nazism and the Second World War ushered in prolonged period of Atlantic Cooperation that lasted through the whole of the cold war. The fall of communism and the frustration of a Europe that will not see Henry Kissinger’s prophecy of a future world centered around several power centers will put again on the table traditional old rivalries with new themes. The failure to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that of Iraq account for the most current elements of the difference in views about of the world.

The truth is that in the last century and a half it was Europe that deliberately fell victim to the clash of interest of the moment and wrong about its permanent interests. The present battle against terrorism as well as democratic reforms in the Arab/Islamic world emanates from a negative perception of the West in the last 150 years. Let’s be confident though and we shall see that the majority of the Arab citizens also dream and that their dream is quite similar to the American and the European. It is of paramount importance thus to solve the differences between westerners and not to err once again.