Fred Halliday, a leading expert on international affairs, says we are still infected by Cold War ills: an arrogant West, shabby dictators, naive protests
Sunday January 30, 2005 The Observer The thinkers and managers of world hegemony met amid the snow in Davos, Swizerland, last week while the anti-globalisation forces convened in the tropical summer of Porto Alegre, Brazil. As they assembled, the international system presented a much clearer picture than that through which the world had moved in the 14 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
In America we can see a President resolute in international bellicosity and a national consensus arrogantly indifferent to external concerns. We can also see the impact, within the US and internationally, of 9/11. The battle lines are drawn. Al-Qaeda does not have the capacity to destroy the West, but it does have the capacity to mobilise for years to come. In Ariel Sharon and George Bush it has found two stalwart recruiting sergeants. More important still has been the consolidated rise of China. After five centuries when the Atlantic was the strategic and economic centre of the world, the focus has shifted to East Asia and the Pacific. This, not Iraq, is the dominant story of 2004.
Last year marked the end of the interregnum following the end of the Cold War, the third chapter in the great European civil war in which the two world wars marked the initial two chapters. Yet this apparent distance between the contemporary world and the Cold War is delusory and dangerously so. The intellectual challenge is how to characterise this condition.
We have had some grand, if preposterous, theories: the New World Order, the New Middle Ages, the End of History, the Clash of Civilisations, now the War Against Terrorism. In an attempt to comprehend the contemporary international system, this article proposes another narrative: the Three Dustbins Theory.
The Three Dustbins Theory rests on the claim that, despite the receding of the Cold War, we remain, in key respects, prisoners of its legacy and will, unless we face up to these questions, remain so. As with all unacknowledged influences from the past, these repositories of conflict and myth are all the more powerful because unacknowledged.
Dustbin Number One contains the legacies of the Soviet and communist periods. Among its contents are: an array of uncontrolled and unmonitored nuclear materials; a set of unresolved, sanguinary inter-ethnic problems inherited from the Soviet period - Bosnia, Kosovo, Transdniestr, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Eritrea-Ethiopia - in all of which the costs of ethnic expulsion and fragmented government have provided a context for entrenched mafioso power; and the consolidation, in nearly all of the former Soviet Union and much of former pro-Soviet Africa (as in the Horn of Africa and Mozambique) of corrupt elites, a transition not to democracy but to post-Marxist kleptocracy.
Most significant of all of these is the political character of the two most important states to have undergone the communist experiment: the neo-authoritarian dictatorship of Vladimir Putin in Russia, and the politically immobile dictatorship of the communist leaders in China. No transition to democracy here and none likely, not least because these two groups of rulers play the coquette to Washington in the matter of their 'wars' against Chechen and Sinkiang opponents.
The Second Dustbin is that of the West, and the US in particular. One of the costs of winning the Cold War is that the West has failed to rethink its assumptions about the conduct of international relations. Instead, and above all with the Bush administration, we have seen the recycling, often by veterans of the confrontations with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, of policies that were as wrong then as they are now: the fabrication of threats, accompanied by dire warnings about how time 'is running out', about hostile states; the repetition ad nauseam of platitudes about the role of force in international affairs that no first-year student could get away with; a suspicion, if not disdain, for international institutions, notably the UN and international law; a facile, historically short-sighted and grossly exaggerated set of claims about how many states conform to an acceptable model of democracy (the 'Free World' of the 1950s and 1960s recycled).
Of the cruel, and intellectually bankrupt, certainties of neo-liberalism, which has undermined the social provision and regulation roles of the state across the world, there is no need to say more. Meanwhile, US neo-conservative family planning policy, by blocking the use of contraception and abortion, is in league with the patriarch of St Peter's Square, condemning millions to avoidable death.
However, the greatest, and least acknowledged, legacies of the Cold War on the Western side lie in two other domains. Here pervasive denial, compounded by self-righteous declamation, reign supreme. One such legacy concerns the origins of the terrorist threat itself: al-Qaeda and its like did not arise suddenly in 2001, or from the subconscious of the Islamic or Arab minds, but from the Cold War, in particular the financing, training and arming of tens of thousands of jihadi militants by the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. That war was to the early 21st century what the Spanish Civil War was to the mid-20th, the devils kitchen in which the criminal practices later unleashed on the world were first brewed.
It is the greatest, if not the only, solecism of Bush's anti-terrorist campaign that he is incapable, as is American public opinion as a whole, of recognising how far the US helped to prepare this movement, as it did the Unita murderers in Angola, the Contras in Nicaragua, and, at one remove, Renamo in Mozambique.
The other, now more evident than ever, legacy of Cold War on the Western side is both simple and all-pervasive: the mental attitude accompanying the exercise of power over other peoples, and the discussion of it, by Washington, one predominantly of arrogance, ignorance and instinctive resort to force. This mindset, often decked out with frothing claims about 'imperial burdens' and 'grand strategy', was evident in the Cold War itself, not least in the grotesque continuation of a nuclear arms race over four decades, but also draws in the US, as it does in much of post-imperial Europe, on the unacknowledged cultural legacy of colonialism.
The West has still not learnt to treat the rest of the world on an equal footing, a point most graphically illustrated by the photographs from Abu Ghraib: it is, above all, not because the victims were Muslim, Arab, or even non-white, but because they were from a subordinate people that they were subjected with such levity and sadism to their tortures.
It might be thought prudent to stop the argument there, with a denunciation of the powerful in East and West. But the unacknowledged legacy of the Cold War does not stop there, and is equally to be found among those protesting against globalisation and meeting in Porto Alegre.
The Third Dustbin is that of the contemporary global protest movement, to a considerable degree a children's crusade of intellectual demagogues, recycled 1960s bunkeristas with their fellow travellers in literary circles, dreamers and political manipulators, of the old and new lefts, whose claim to moral and analytic superiority too often masks a set of unexamined, and themselves often recycled, platitudes from the Cold War period and, indeed, from the ideology of the communist world.
It is as if, having appeared to die in Moscow in 1991, the anti-capitalist world movement leapt from the coffin, like James Joyce's corpse Finegan at his Wake, at Seattle in 1999, having learnt nothing at all.
Indeed the contents of this Third Dustbin are familiar enough: a ritual incantantion of 'no war' that avoids any substantive engagement with problems of international peace and security, or reflection on how positively to help peoples in zones of conflict; a set of vague, unthought out, uncosted and often dangerous utopian ideas about an alternative world; a pleasing but vapid invocation of global human values and internationalism that blithely ignores the misuses to which that term was put in the 20th century (for example by Stalin or Mao); a complacent attitude, innocent when not indulgent, towards political violence (witness the cult of Che Guevara, a cruel and dangerous man, and the invitees from Northern Ireland, Palestine and Iran, to name but three at the London Social Summit in October). This was a capitulation, that would have shocked their socialist forebears, to nationalist and religious bigots (as in the reception by the supposedly left-wing Mayor of London of Sheikh Yusif al-Qaradawi, the descendant of a line of Mus lim fascist thinkers). There is also a vapid and politically ineffective attitude to nature, forgetting, as the tsunami should have reminded all of us, that nature can also kill. And all of this is mixed up with a shallow, repetitive critique of globalisation, in the name of what we are never sure, and a naive, uninformed, analysis of the US.
Such a critique applies, in the first place, to the Western and affiliated Third World protest movement. But it applies with even greater force to the murderous vapidities promulgated by the most prominent alternative centre of resistance, that of radical Sunni jihadism, be it of Bin Laden or al-Zarqawi: these people are devoid of any substantive ideas about how to run a modern society, economy or political system.
Here is in essence the Three Dustbins Theory. That unchallenged ideas and political legacies take their toll was familiar to the wise of earlier times. Marx remarked that the legacy of past generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Keynes said that behind the ideas of every politician lay the thought of some dead economist. Freud warned us of the toll taken by the repressed. All would find much that is familiar in the world today.
We can assess the outcome of discussions in Davos and Porto Alegre to see if thinking on the current crises of the world has moved on. Here ideas and policies should meet what I term the 'Vilanova Test', named after the flinty Spanish writer Pere Vilanova, who, on the basis of years of political engagement and debate in Spain and the Arab world, has argued consistently for pensamiento duro, 'tough thinking', in the contemporary world. We certainly have, and may again be treated to, plenty of the other.
· Fred Halliday's 'The International Relations of the Middle East' (CUP) and 'One Hundred Myths About the Middle East' (Saqi) will be published in the spring