It is this amazingly persistent set of master stories that the newly organised and mobilised American information effort (especially in the Arab and Islamic worlds) is designed by hook or crook to spread. What gets deliberately obscured in the process are the stunningly obstinate dissenting traditions -- America's unofficial counter-memory that stem in large part from the fact that this is an immigrant society -- that flourish alongside, or at the interior of this handful of narrathemes. Few commentators abroad take much notice of this forest of dissent, alas. These clumps of both the progressive or regressive kind provide and to a trained observer make visible linkages between the master narrathemes that are normally not in evidence. If one were to examine the components of the impressively strong resistance to the proposed Bush war against Iraq, for example, a very different, highly mobile picture of America emerges, one that is much more amenable to foreign cooperation, dialogue and significant action.
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Is America indeed united behind this president, his bellicose foreign policy, and his dangerously simple-minded economic vision? This is another way of asking whether American identity has been settled once and for all and whether for a world that has to live with its far- reaching military power (there are American troops now in dozens of countries) there is something monolithic that the rest of the world that isn't willing to be quiescent can deal with as a sort of fixed entity lurching all over the place with the full support of all 'Americans'. I have tried to suggest another way of seeing America as indeed a troubled country with a more contested actuality than is usually ascribed to it. I think it is more accurate to apprehend America as embroiled in a serious clash of identities whose counterparts are visible as similar contests throughout the rest of the world. America may have won the Cold War, as the popular phrase has it, but the actual results of that victory within America are very far from clear, the struggle not yet over. Too much of a focus on the American executive's centralising military and political power ignores the internal dialectics that continue and are nowhere near being settled. Abortion rights and the teaching of natural evolution are still issues of unsettled contentiousness.
The great fallacy of Fukuyama's thesis about the end of history, or for that matter Huntington's clash of civilisation theory, is that both wrongly assume that cultural history is a matter of clear-cut boundaries or of beginnings, middles and ends, whereas in fact, the cultural- political field is much more an arena of struggle over identity, self-definition and projection into the future. They are fundamentalists when it comes to fluid, turbulent cultures in constant process, trying to impose fixed boundaries and internal rules of order where none really can exist. Cultures, specially America's, which is in effect an immigrant culture, overlap with others, and one of the perhaps unintended consequences of globalisation is the appearance of transnational communities of global interests, as in the human rights movement, the women's movement, the anti-war movement and so on. America is not at all insulated from any of this, but one has to excavate beyond the intimidatingly unified surface to see what lies beneath, so as to be able to join in that set of disputes, to which many of the people of the world are a party. There is hope and encouragement to be gained from that view.