Return to Left Curve no. 21 Table of Contents
by
Ralph M. Coury
The following paper treats four social theories or broad theoretical positions that have profoundly influenced Western scholarship and culture since World War II. Part I, which is largely based upon Jeffrey C. Alexander's "Modern, Anti, Post & Neo,"[1] presents a summary of these theories, of the context in which they arose, and of their grounding in binary distinctions between the good and the bad; and Part II seeks to show how advocates of "neo-modernization," the latest of the four theories to have appeared, display a penchant to conceptualize Arab nationalism and, more especially, Islam and Arab/Islamic culture, as the antithetical, bad other, against which the neo-modern is juxtaposed.
I.
From Modernization to Neo-Modernization
The four theories or theoretical positions (we are not necessarily speaking of a single formulation) are:
1) modernization theory, which was particularly influential from the late 40's until the mid 60's;
2) radical theory, which was influential from the late 60's until the late 70's, and whose cognitive achieve-ments remain "hegemonic"[2] in contemporary social science;
3) post-modern theory, which has been influential from the late 70's until the present, and
4) neo-modernization theory, which emerged in tan- dem with post-modernism but which was given a great boost in the late 80's with the collapse of communism.
Modernization theory, the first of the four posi-tions, was characterized by the following assumptions:
1) that societies are coherently organized systems;
2) that there are two types of social systems, the modern which is good and the traditional which is bad;
3) that the modern is defined in terms of very specific Western societies which are characterized as being individualistic, democratic, capitalist, scientific, secular and stable; 4) that historical progress is incremental, and
5) that the entire world is evolving towards modernity.
The weaknesses of the theory were many:
1) Neither Western or traditional societies could be conceptualized as internally homogeneous;
2) The concept of traditional society did not provide for historical specificity;
3) There was no ground for optimism that modernization would succeed. Change was not always developmental. It could be abrupt, with murderous results, and historical regression was always possible.
If modernization theory was marked by such weaknesses, why did it gain such popularity? It provided Western intellectuals, and particularly Americans, with an identity and mission that fitted their post-war needs. Massive suburbanization, the decline of culture-bound urban communities, the reduction of ethnicity in American life, the lessening of conflict between labor and capital in an age of prosperity, and the collapse of the kind of millenial hopes that had been generated in the 30's and 40's, all contributed to modernization theory's popularity and resonanc.[3] Progress was defined in deflationary terms. It was not revolutionary. It referred to individuals and not groups, and to individuals who were encouraged to understand life in terms of the complex and ambiguous. At the same time, the Cold War provided liberals and the right with a sense of collective heroism as they promoted the modern to a Third World tempted by revolutionary solutions.[4]
Radical theory, which redefined the modern as the capitalist and the bad, gained ground in the mid 60's, and tended to invert the previous binary code. Instead of emphasizing modernity as democratic and individualistic, it emphasized its repressive and bureaucratic nature. Instead of speaking of the free market and the contractual, it spoke of capitalism. Instead of dwelling on modernity as rational and liberating, it stressed its anarchy and oppression. In the Third World liberal democracy and capitalism were seen as guaranteeing underdevelopment. Capitalist societies were the source of ethnic conflict, fragmentation and alienation. The goal was no longer the welfare state. It was humanistic socialism.[5]
The development of this radicalism should also not be seen as the product of pure scholarship apart from a wider context. On the one hand, modernization theory was not able to explain certain realities, including the persistence of poverty at home and its increase in the Third World, or the revolutions and wars outside of the West, or the dictatorships and command economies established in many newly independent states, or the new counter-culture and religious movements that opposed science and technology. On the other hand, new social movements in the West, including women's liberation and Black and Chicano nationalism, stimulated the imagination for the collective.[6]
Nevertheless, by the end of the 70's, postmodernism had appeared upon the scene. If the radicals had emphasized the public, the heroic, the collective and universal, and grand narratives of the struggle against capitalism and imperialism, these very qualities were condemned or cast under suspicion by the postmodernists.[7] The postmodernists were to sing the praises of the playful, the hybrid, the nomadic, the migratory, the contingent, and of a multiple, diffuse, and decentered self. Here, again, one can seek an explanation in wider realities. As Terry Eagleton writes, these features of postmodernism are, at one and the same time, a reflection of the success of late capitalism, and of the political displacement and defeat that can be associated with this success. Difference, hybridity, heterogeneity and restless mobility are native, he argues, to an advanced capitalist mode which emphasizes the subject as a consumer who is mobile, ephemeral and constituted by unstable desires. Moreover, in a world in which many progressive, centralized, mass and creative political movements have been crushed, is it not natural to demonize the dominant and the mass? If the capitalist system seems to have cancelled all opposition to itself, is it not natural to come to believe that all systems are oppressive or that they no longer matter or even exist?[8]
Postmodernism remains very much alive but in recent years it has had to share the stage with neo-modernization theory, which also emerged in the late 70's but which received an enormous boost by the collapse of communist and other dictatorships and by the positive successes of aggressively capitalist market economies in Europe and Asia.[9] Neo-modernism assumes that there are indeed grand and global narratives after all, and that the institutions of the entire world are converging. Two key factors are looked upon as necessary in the transition to democratic happiness -- an emancipatory market that brings liberation through privatization, contracts, monetary inequality and competition; and, secondly, a civic society -- an informal, non-state, non-economic, political zone, in which citizens compete in the market place of ideas,but in terms of a common empirical point of reference that defines the good and the bad.[10]
As I have said, the above summary is largely based on Jeffrey Alexander's "Modern, Anti, Post and Neo."I have no major objections to the essential features of Alexander's portrayal of these theoretical approaches. He has, more particularly, made a significant contribution in effectively identifying the difficulty that the neo-modernist has had in conceptualizing the bad. I would, however, disagree with certain aspects of his discussion of the solution that neo-modernists have tended to formulate in respect to this difficulty, and this brings me to the role that the Arabs and Islam are playing among some of these theorists.
II.
Arab Nationalism and Islam as the Bad
Given what is taken to be the onrush of markets and democracy, and the rapid collapse of their opposites, how do the neo-modernists formulate an enemy? Is there a geo-political force that is fundamentally dangerous, that is a world-historical threat to the good? If the good is defined as much by its opposite as by itself, then an opposite is needed. Alexander believes that nationalism is coming to represent the principal challenge to the newly universalized discourse of what is good, and he argues that fundamentalism has failed as a candidate for this role inasmuch as the existence of fundamentalism in the West makes it difficult for Western intellectuals to cast it outside the pale of the West's democratic life. Moreover, the post-communist societies in the West are not fundamentalist or threatened by fundamentalism.[11]
Although Alexander is correct in recognizing that nationalism has become a prime candidate for evil in the neo-modernist scheme, and although he is also correct in observing that the presence of fundamentalism in the West problematizes the conceptualization of fundamentalism as this evil, he fails to recognize that a number of the neo-modernists have in fact evolved strategies that allow them to have their cake and eat it too with respect to both nationalism and fundamentalism. They are able to do so by differentiating between a civic and democratic nationalism that is in keeping with their values, and a bad nationalism that denies them; or by differentiating between contemporary religions which may or may not breed minority fundamentalist movements, and a contemporary religion to which fundamentalism is inherent. And, in both cases, whether one speaks of bad nationalism or bad religion, the Arabs and Islam provide convenient and obvious demons.
The case of Liah Greenfield, whose theoretical and methodological assumptions place her squarely within the neo-modernist fold, and whose work on nationalism has been widely noted, provides a telling example. After discussing the nationalism of Russia, Germany, Romania, Syria, Iraq, and the Khmer Rouge in a 1994 article which appeared in Theory and Society, she and co-author C. Chirot write, "The cases we discuss here show that the association between certain types of nationalism and aggressive, brutal, behavior is neither coincidental nor inexplicable. Nationalism remains the world's most powerful, general and primordial basis of cultural and political identity. Its range is still growing, not diminishing, throughout the world. And in most places it does not take an individualistic or civic form."[12]
There are places, however, and it will not come as a surprise to discover that the United States is one of them, where nationalism is benign in its civility and democracy. "The ability to compromise," Greenfield writes in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, a 1995 book of over 500 pages, "is one of the distinguishing characteristics of this intensely idealistic American nation. The uniqueness of the American nation is that it has come closest to the realization of the principles of individualistic, civic nationalism. It stands as an example of its original promise -- democracy."[13] Those who cannot differentiate between the bad and the good in this respect are, she contends, the victims of a "naive" American idealism. "There is no greater -- and graver -- mistake, " she tells us later in her book, "than to regard all nations as created equal. Men are created equal but nations are not. Some are created as compacts of sovereign individuals and emphasize the freedom and equality of men; some are created as beautiful great individuals who may feed on man and preach racial superiority and submission to the state."[14]
Apart from reinforcing American chauvinism vis-a-vis imperial rivals, such arguments about nationalism recoup old and broader Cold War attitudes of modernization theorists towards potential Third World enemies. As Tom Nairn has recently written, "Third Worlders were allowed some nationalism but were expected to be careful what they did with it." Otherwise, he continues, "All collective or national expressions of the great [post World War II] ferment were ruled out. They were decreed anachronistic and backward looking..." In our own day, Nairn observes, it is almost as if the universal threat of this evil nationalism were being welcomed. "The medieval hell-promise of nuclear war has gone. But don't feel too lost, things still are not good either -- look, mini-hells all over the place."[15] Nothing of the sort has in fact developed, not, certainly, as the result of the kind of bad nationalism to which the neo-modernists refer. Such imaginings are to a large extent metropolitan fantasies, based on only two situations of the early 90's, Yugoslavia Rwanda.
There are, to be sure, many candidates from the past or the present, and apart from the cases of Yugoslavia and Rwanda, that lend themselves to the constructions of scholars such as Greenfield and Chirot. However, the fact that two of the six societies mentioned in their Theory and Society article are Arab is not incidental to this type of theorizing."[16] The existence of Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria, and of Qaddafi's regime in Libya (despised by many in reality more for their resistance to Western and Israeli domination and for their socialistic character than for their dictatorships or lack of civic society), the more general strategic anxieties of the United States, Europe, and Japan in respect to the control of oil, the power of Zionism, especially in the United States, and the long history of animosity to the Arabs and Islam in the West -- all of these factors combine to cast the nationalism of these and other Arab states in the quite natural role of the evil other.
When we turn to the issue of fundamentalism, the role of the Islamic religion as the polluting other has, for certain theorists, become absolutely essential. In contrast to the strategy employed in discussing nationalism, many of the neo-modernists do not differentiate between good and bad fundamentalism. Rather, they differentiate between fundamentalisms that are looked upon as incidental to the various faiths from which they spring, and an Islamic fundamentalism that is taken to be inherent to the Islamic faith. In Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, the eminent social theorist Ernest Gellner writes, "Apparent exceptions to the trend towards secularization in the world as a whole turn out on examination to be special cases, explicable by special circumstances. But there is one very real, dramatic and conspicuous exception to all this: Islam. To say that secularization prevails in Islam is not contentious. It is simply false. Islam is as strong now as it was a century ago. In some ways it is probably much stronger."[17] And, in his Encounters with Nationalism, in which both Arab nationalism (implicitly) and the Islamic religion are denigrated, we read: "There is a kind of Consumerist International of developed or semi-developed societies, united in placing production over coercion or honour or, at any rate, seeking power through production rather than force, and having both disassociated glory from territory, and abjured faith in a unique and obligating salvation, no longer inclined to go to war against each other. But they share the planet with other regions, in which there are societies which exemplify either the role of honour-committed coercers, or which take an abolutist Faith seriously and literally, or both of these conditions at once."[18] The absolutist Faith, he makes clear, is Islam.
Gellner is, as I have said, an eminent social theorist but his assumption that there is a good, and ultimately humane secularism, and a corresponding resisting and bad Islam, is widespread in contemporary intellectual life, and not simply among intellectuals of Western origin. In an article entitled "Our Universal Civilization," published in early 1991, the prominent Trinidadian novelist and critic V.S. Naipaul praises the "universal" civilization of the West for its energy, individualism, love, and the pursuit of happiness, and identifies Islam as the civilization that stands opposed to everything that the West holds dear.
According to Naipaul, Islam is an Arab invention, imposed on the majority of Muslims in a colonization that has left them spiritually and intellectually incapacitated. When visiting Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, he sees himself among peoples who have been converted to an alien faith. "I was traveling among people who had to make a double adjustment -- an adjustment to the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and an earlier adjustment to the Arab faith. You might also say that I was among people who had been doubly colonized, doubly removed from themselves... It was an article of the Arab faith that everything before the faith was wrong, misguided, heretical. There was no room in the heart or mind of the believers for their pre-Mohammedan past... The faith abolished the past. And when the past was abolished like this, more than an idea of history suffered. Human behavior and the ideal of good behavior could suffer... Now traveling among non-Arab Muslims I found myself among a colonized people who had been stripped by their faith of all that expanding intellectual life, all the varied life of the mind and senses, the expanding cultural and historical knowledge of the world, that I had been growing into on the other side of the world."[19]
There are, again, factors that work to cast Islam in this role. Islamic movements (dubbed fundamentalist in the West) obviously exist, as do the Western economic and strategic interests and policies, the influence of Zionism, and the long history of enmity to which I have already referred. One should, however, also mention the populist, racist bigotry that exists in Europe vis-a-vis the Islamic immigrant communities. In respect to this bigotry, but also in respect to anti-Arab and anti-Muslim attitudes more generally, one is struck by the extent to which the expressions of contempt by the "refined" and the "popular," the "high" and the "low," the "official" and the "unofficial," converge. We have just heard the relatively polite Gellner and Naipaul but here is the angrier and cruder Conor Cruise O'Brien: "Arab and Muslim society is sick and has been sick for a long time. At the heart of the matter is the Muslim family, an abominable institution. It looks repulsive because it is repulsive."[20] Or here is Sir Alfred Sherman, a former personal advisor to Margaret Thatcher: "The gradual Moslem colonization of Western and central Europe owes much to social and spiritual disorientation there."[21] Or there is the U.S.'s own Pat Buchanan in 1992: "For a millenium, the struggle for mankind's destiny was between Christianity and Islam; in the 21st century it may be so again. For, as the Shiites humiliate us, their coreligionists are filling up the countries of the West."[22]
The dichotomizing between a Western civic nationalism that is inherently peaceful and a non-Western, and more particularly, Arab organic nationalism that is inherently violent, and the corresponding dichotomizing between a non-Muslim religiosity that is open to secularization and an Islamic religiosity that is closed to it, cannot bear serious scrutiny.
Even if one were to assume, as Gellner and Greenfield obviously do, that the market is not violent and coercive, or that corporate culture could not ultimately lead to a kind of "friendly fascism" in which freedom of thought and political action are profoundly circumscribed, objections to the celebration of the benign nature of the metropole's civility readily come to mind. In the first place, the characterization of political community in the so-called civic nations as the rational and freely chosen allegiance of individuals to a set of political principles is false. As Bernard Yack has noted, political principles do not in themselves define the United States or other "civic" nations. These nations may have come to be associated with certain political principles but they took shape because of an inherited cultural baggage that was contingent to their particular histories and that served as the basis of their discreet identities. Moreover, even if these nations were based solely on a shared commitment to political principles, there is still the possibility that they might exclude those suspected of rejecting these principles. "After all," Yack writes, "American citizens have been denounced and persecuted for clinging to un-American political principles as well as their foreign background."[23] It is, of course, when one comes to the history of atrocities committed against the non-Western other that the myth of the peaceful and humane nature of metropolitan civility is perhaps the most vulnerable. It was not the Baath Party, after all, that brought us the extermination of the American Indian, or the devastation of Vietnam, or the massacre of tens of thousands of East Timorians, or the embargo against Iraq that has resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi children since 1990. All of this was bought to us by that naive country that has remained "loyal to its democratic idealism" and that "seeks power through production rather than force."
As far as Islam is concerned it is simply absurd to think of its many socio-political and cultural realities as a single phenomenon. This basic argument has been made by many a critic of Orientalism but few have done it as forcefully or effectively as has Fred Halliday in his recent Islam and the Myth of Confrontation. To treat Islam as an undifferentiated whole, Halliday argues, is historically simplistic, whether we are speaking of "fundamentalism" and secularism or a myth of confrontation. Most Muslims are not supporters of Islamic movements and do not seek to impose a political program derived from their religion on their societies. Islam has, in fact, been as variant, flexible and open to new interpretations as any body of religious thought. But, apart from religious thought in and of itself, if we want to know why most Muslims hold the views they do about economics, democracy or the position of women, it is not Islam as such that can explain it to us. More particularly, the Islamic movements do not reflect some general, transhistorical phenomenon. They are responding to issues faced by Islamic societies, including the intrusion of the state into everyday life, the evolution of legal codes, external and internal political and economic domination, large growing gaps between rich and poor, rapid urbanization, and fierce competition for educational and employment opportunities. The inability of states to meet the political, economic and cultural aspirations of their people has provided the context in which the Islamic movements have developed. And these movements are in no way a significant large-scale threat. The combined strength of the Islamic world is far less than that of the West even if this world could act in unison. In reality, Islamic states pursue individual nation-state interests and have often fought one another. To be sure, an Islamic country with a nuclear device could cause great damage but so could China or Israel. In any case, any such usage would be small in comparison to that which opponents could inflict upon it.[24] "The myth of an Islamic Threat," Halliday summarizes, "is part of the rhetorical baggage of political struggle, of those who wish to remain in power or those who aspire to power."[25]
What can be said of the uses to which neo-modernization theory puts the Arabs and Islam can be said of neo-modernization theory itself. It does not pass the test of reality. Its emphasis upon the linear globilization of the market and civil society, with its assumption that most of the world's institutions may converge for the good, does not do justice to the continuing relevancy of vast differences between the First and Third Worlds. To be sure, the independence of the nation in the contemporary world is circumscribed by the global offenses of capital, and imperial formations are marked by the increasing interpenetrations of capitals. However, at the apex of the world system, as Aijaz Ahmad has recently pointed out, the nation state is still strong, and particularly in the form of the U.S., Japan and Germany. It is American power, more especially, that contributes to maintain the profound inequalities engendered by imperialism.[26] In the so-called Gulf War, which could have been prevented if the U.S. government had not decided to destroy Iraq's military and economic infrastructure, the allied coalition had about 350 military casualties and Iraq had between 70,000 and 150,000.[27]
This inequality of political and military power continues, very broadly, to be paralleled by social and economic inequalities of great significance. As Michael Mann points out, through manufacturing imports from the South have increased they still represent a tiny part of total manufactured goods. Furthermore, almost all the so-called multinational corporations are still owned overwhelmingly by nationals in their homeland countries, and their headquarters and research development activities are still concentrated there. International patterns are still dominated by geography and tradition. Most trade and cross-ownership occurs between long-standing allies, like Britain and the U.S. Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden remain the most international countries, the U.S. remains quite national, Japan remains among the most nationally insulated. Indeed it is doubtful whether, in some respects, capitalism is more transnational than it was before 1914, except for the European Union. This is hardly a base on which to ground any generalizing theories of the end of the nation-state or of the emergence of a post-modern society. Nor has capitalist globalization transformed the relation between most nation states. The OECD North, including, to be sure, Japan, still accounts for 85 percent of world production and trade and that proportion is increasing. Moreover, for the last 20 years, the world economy, East Asia apart, has been in near stagnation. Since basic commodity prices have fallen greatly, many countries of the South have experienced absolute economic decline.[28] The contrast between Southern reality and the aspirations of all ideologies of development could hardly be starker. Twenty million men, women and children are dying every year of hunger and curable diseases. Some wealthy nations have an 80 year life expectancy while others have hardly 40.[29]
In light of all of this one must ask where the erroneous ideas of neo-modernization come from. In 1982, Anthony Giddens asserted that modernization theory was based upon false premises, that it was an ideological defense for the domination of Western capital over the rest of the world.[30] For all the differences of circumstances, of which Alexander makes much, I believe that Gidden's explanation is not inappropriate to modernization's neo-modern successor.
Notes
1. Alexander, Jeffrey C., "Modern, Anti, Post, Neo," New Left Review, no. 210, March/April, 1995, pp. 63-101.
2. Ibid., pp. 67-75.
3. Ibid., pp. 71-72.
4. Ibid., p.72
5. Ibid., pp. 75-79.
6. Ibid., pp. 76-78.
7. Ibid. pp. 80-84.
8. Eagleton, Terry, "Where Do Post-Modernists Come From?",
The Monthly Review, vol. 47, no. 3, July-August, 1995, pp. 59-70.
9. Alexander, op. cit., pp. 84-86.
10. Ibid., pp. 84-90.
11. Ibid., pp. 90-96.
12. Greenfield, L. & Chirot, C., "Nationalism & Aggression," Theory & Society, vol. 23, no. 1, 1994, quoted in Alexander, op. cit., p. 95.
13. Greenfield, Liah, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Harvard, 1992, p. 484.
14. Ibid., p. 490.
15. See Nairn, Tom, "Breakwaters of 2000: From Ethnic to Civic Nationalism", New Left Review, no. 214, November/December, 1995, pp. 91-103.
16. Even a scholar such as Edward Said, a pioneer in the critique of Orientalism, has more recently spoken as if universal values were inherently at odds with Arab nationalism. In January, 1991, in the course of attacking the United States' war against Iraq, he wrote that "A new world order has to be based on authentically general principles. not on the selectively applied might of one country. " However, Said went on to argue that "the traditional discourse of Arab nationalism, to say nothing of the quite decrepit state system, is inexact, unresponsive, anomalous, even comic." Said has elsewhere recently made it clear that he means to differentiate between the particular ineffective and unattractive incarnations of Arab nationalist thought and practice in the contemporary period, and an idea of Arab nationalism that is imminently humane and progressive. Nevertheless, the statement critical of Arab nationalism at the time of the Gulf War, which was accompanied by a renunciation of a "remorseless Arab propensity to violence and extremism," could certainly be taken as evidence for what Alexander calls "the virtual disappearance of Third Worldism." See Alexander, op. cit. pp. 92-93. The quotation from Edward Said is taken from "A Tragic Convergence", New York Times, January 11, 1991.
17. Gellner, Ernest, Postmodernism, Reason & Religion, London, 1992, p. 5.
18. Gellner, [DEMO], Encounters with Nationalism, Oxford, 1994, p. 180.
19. V.S. Naipaul, "Our Universal Civilization," New York Review of Books, 31 January 1991, pp.4-7.
20. O'Brien, Conor Cruise, The Times, May 11, 1989, quoted in Ahmed, Akbar S., Postmodernism & Islam, London, 1992, p. 188.
21. Sherman, Sir Alfred, Bulletin of the Jerusalem Institute for Western Defense, [DEMO], no. 3, October, 1993, quoted in Information About Yugoslavia, Nov. 10, 1993, quoted in Halliday, Fred, Islam & the Myth of Confrontation, London, 1996, p. 184.
22. Buchanan, Pat, in "Rising Islam May Overwhelm the West," New Hampshire Sundav News, Aug. 20, 1989, quoted in Halliday, op. cit., p. 183.
23. Yack, Bernard, "The Myth of the Civic Nation," Critical Review, vol. 10, no. 2, Spring 1996, p. 208.
24. The above arguments are a synopsis of the arguments presented in "Threat of Islam or Threat to Islam?", Halliday, op. cit., pp. 107-132.
25. Halliday, op. cit., p. 6.
26. Ahmad, Aijaz, "Politics, Literature & Post-Coloniality", Race & Class, no. 36 (January-March 1995), pp. 1-20.
27. Finkelstein, Norman G.; "Middle East Watch & The Gulf War," Z Magazine, September, 1992, pp. 15-19.
28. Manning, Michael, "As the Twentieth Century Ages," New Left Review, no.214, November/December, 1995, pp. 116-120.
29. Castro. Fidel, Speech to the UN General Assembly, October 22, 1995, reproduced in Covert Action Ouarterly, Winter, 1995-1996, no. 55, p. 40.
30. Gidding, Anthony, Sociology: A Brief but Critical Introduction, London, 1982, p. 144, quoted in Alexander, op. cit., p. 96.
Ralph M. Coury is an Associate Professor of History at Fairfield University of Connecticut.