Global Realignment?

The transition we are undergoing now is not only a shift in the world powerbalance. It is also a potential global realignment, and that's what isfrightening about it. Shifts in the world power balance are fairly common,although serious enough to cause significant concern: the Russian and Chineserevolutions, and the onset and termination of the Cold War, were 20th centuryexamples of such shifts. These events were the results of vast inequalities,wars, and insurgencies. They produced further instabilities and sufferings, andoccasioned new wars.

Yet decisive asthese occurrences were, the possibility of a global realignment is even moremonumental. We are dealing here with a crisis of modernity, a challenge to thedomination of the world by the powers usually labelled "the West," butalso sometimes seen as "the North": the wealthy, generally white,industrialized nations.

The last globalrealignment was the rise of Europe. This was an epochal shift that took a coupleof centuries to accomplish (roughly from 1450 to 1650). It involved theorganization of capitalism, the consolidation of European nation-states, thecircumnavigation of the globe, the establishment of the African slave trade, thegenocide of the indigenous American populations, and the launching of seaborneempires in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The rise of Europe also signalled thedawn of the Enlightenment culture that even today supports our beliefs in a"disenchanted" way of knowing the world: the modernity we take forgranted in science, law, history, and art.

Do you think ourleaders are aware of the amplitude of the historic wave they are riding? 

Do you think GeorgeBush the Second, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, or for that matter TonyBlair, have any concept of what occurred on September 12, 1683, when KaraMustapha, commander of a Turkish army of about 150,000 men, was defeated in theBattle of Vienna by a combined Polish and Austrian army commanded by JanSobieski? That struggle on the Danube represented the final defeat of Islam inEurope. It culminated a series of wars that had been going on since the battlesof Covadonga (722 CE) and Tours (732 CE), that had included the EuropeanCrusades and their bloody but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to conquerPalestine, and that had also led to the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from theIberian peninsula in 1492.

Well, maybe, justpossibly, Tony Blair knows a bit of history. He went to Oxford, after all. ButGeorge Bush, the "robotic president," the proud C student at Yale? Hehas no idea. What's he thinking about? Getting re-elected in 2004. Protecting US(and US corporations') access to the oilfields, not only of the Middle East, butalso of the southern regions of the former USSR: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan,Uzbekistan. Sure, he'd like to capture Osama bin Laden.

Capturing Osama,desirable as that is from a criminal justice point of view, wouldn't accomplishthat much in terms of forestalling global realignment. There is too muchinjustice in the world; that's what is driving discontent with"Western" rule, with "Northern" rule. IsGeorge Bush thinking about that? Not a chance. This is the guy who wants toconcentrate even more wealth in the hands of the rich, both at home and abroad.This is the Texas oilman who relates just fine, as his father did before him, tothe corrupt and repressive Saudi oil sheiks. He's the one who denounced the UNWorld Conference on Racism.

Have you heard oneword from George Bush about the world's poor, the "wretched of theearth"? Has he ever so much as acknowledged that the Israeli settlements inthe West Bank and Gaza are illegal under international law? Is he at allconcerned about the billions of people around the world who can't get cleanwater, can't educate their kids, can't get health care (much less AIDSmedicine), but are still required to pay their onerous debts to the IMF, WallStreet, Washington, London, Tokyo, and Zurich?

There you have it:the force that's driving global realignment. It's not a "clash ofcivilizations," as some have claimed, because every country in today'sworld is a mixed bag of modernity and backwardness, secularism andfundamentalism. The US today is full of modern Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, andBuddhists. Europe too is thoroughly pluralized religiously and racially. TheMiddle East, South Asia, China, and Africa are still waiting for modernity to arrive,in the form of development, democracy, and women's rights. Don't you thinkmillions, hundred of millions, long for that?

Even inAfghanistan, where repressive anti-modern rule has reached obscene heights underthe Taliban, the courageous women of the Revolutionary Association of the Womenof Afghanistan (RAWA) are runningclandestine schools for girls, providing health care, and documenting Talibanabuses of women. These women are another kind of heroes, a kind we don't hearenough about, who are taking enormous risks for the sake of modernity and humanrights.

And meanwhileterrorism is alive and well in the "West," where as elsewhere it seeksto set up theocracy, to curtail women's rights, and to deny the pluralism andequality that democracy is supposed to guarantee. Jerry Falwell and PatRobertson's stupid statements in the wake of the September 11th attacks weresimply the most public evidence that there's a radical Christian right in the USwhich longs for theocracy and holds no brief for pluralism and democracy. Theyhave their murderers as well: people who bomb and shoot up abortion clinics andassassinate doctors. Oh, sometimes they bomb government buildings too, though sofar they've only killed hundreds, not thousands like Osama's guys did. Jews alsohave their theocrats and their terrorists: do the names Meir Kahane, Yigal Amir,and Baruch Goldstein ring a bell?

If we want to avoidthe terrors of global realignment, though, it's not these terrorists -- Muslims,Christians, or Jews -- whom we have to worry about most, though I admit thatthey are worth worrying about. Rather, we should be concerned about the blindand short-sighted officials who occupy positions of leadership in our country,and in the "coalition" it seeks to assemble to fight a "waragainst terrorism." That war is but an excuse to deny the benefits ofdemocracy and development to the nations of the world that are not"Western," not "Northern."

The terroristattacks we have already experienced, heinous and cruel as they were, were stillcriminal acts, not acts of war. Their strategic aim was to provoke us into amuch wider war, an aim which has already been achieved in part as our planesroam the skies over Afghanistan. Those who authored the September 11 attacks,those particular terrorists (presumptively Osama and his gang), have openlydeclared their purposes: to mobilize the Islamic world -- where nuclear weaponscan be had -- for a global confrontation with the "West," a waragainst modernity.

If the US "waragainst terrorism" is extended much further, if it is generalized to othercountries in the region, if it is used as an excuse to punish rather than assist"the wretched of the earth," then Osama and his fundamentalists willhave achieved their goal: they will have prompted a global realignment. Thecasualties then will number in the millions, not the thousands. Nor willdemocracy or even modernity survive such a cataclysm.

(Howard Winant isProfessor of Sociology at Temple University, USA. His most recent book is TheWorld Is A Ghetto: Race And Democracy Since World War II (Basic Books)