Timothy Garton Ash: FROM 9/11 TO 8/8

Místo vlastního textu nabízím komentář TG Ashe, profesora britského Oxfordu a Fellow kalifornského Stanfordu, jednoho z nejvlivnějších světových autorů, v důvěře, že také u nás přispěje k překonávání myšlenkových stereotypů.

The seven years since 9/11 reveal an old truth: problems are usually not
solved, they are just overtaken by other problems. Those of 8/8, for
example. On 8 August 2008, two mighty nations announced their return to
world history. Russia, invading Georgia, did it with tanks. China, launching
the Beijing Olympics, did it with acrobats. The message was the same:
world, we’re back.

Don't get me wrong. A grave threat from takfiri jihadist terrorists,
potentially armed with atomic, biological or chemical weapons, hangs over us
still. They have a faith-based ideology with proven appeal to a minority of
disaffected muslims, especially those living in the West, and the means to
wreak cut-price mayhem are alarmingly easy to find. Even as you read this,
another hard-to-detect groupuscule, working from the backroom of a house
close to you, may have taken the occasion of the 9/11 anniversary to try
again. They won't always be foiled. Protecting us from 'another 9/11', while
not destroying our freedom in order to save it, remains a major challenge to
political leadership in every free country.

What has proved false is the neo-conservative claim that this single threat
defines the whole pattern of world politics in our time; that, as Norman
Podhoretz puts it, the struggle against Islamofascism is World War IV.
Returning to the United States after a year's absence, I'm struck by how
relatively little even the American right is talking about the 'war on
terror'.

Beyond terrorism, two giant changes define the world we're in. Both can, to
a large extent, be traced back to the world-wide spread of marketised
economic development (aka globalisation). The first is the 'rise of the
rest', made manifest on 8/8. Non-western powers challenge the economic
dominance of the West. They are beating the West at the game it invented (as
the English are beaten at cricket), and they are quietly changing the rules
along the way. Analysts at Goldman Sachs predict that by 2040, China, India,
Russia, Brazil and Mexico will have a larger combined economic output than
today's G7. The date matters less than the trend. Even today, the shifts in
economic power are translating into political and military power faster than
many anticipated.

At the same time, worldwide economic development on the basis of the free
movement of goods, capital, services and (to a lesser extent) people is
exacerbating a whole set of transnational problems. Carbon dioxide emissions
that accelerate climate change, mass migration, the risk of pandemics: all
these cry out for international, cooperative responses. The need for liberal
international order has never been greater. Yet by contrast with the 1990s,
when president George H W Bush hoped to replace the cold war with a 'new
world order', the prospects of achieving it no longer look so good. Power is
diffused to too many competing states, many of them illiberal, as well as
elusive networks like Al Qaeda.

So we of the FLIO (friends of liberal international order) must now soberly
confront the prospect of a new world disorder. Or rather old-new, for
disorder rather than order is the more natural condition of international
society. International order, which may also be called peace, is always a
fragile achievement. I hardly need to repeat that in its response to the
9/11 attacks the George W Bush administration has, over these seven lean
years, contributed to the erosion rather than the building of international
order. The Russian invasion of Georgia was, amongst other things, payback
for the American invasion of Iraq.

While order is threatened, liberty is no longer self-evidently on the
forward march. The French refer to their thirty years of economic growth
after the second world war as the trente glorieuses. Future historians may
regard the three decades from Portugal's revolution of the carnations in
1974 to Ukraine's orange revolution in 2004 as a trente glorieuses for the
spread of liberty - in Europe but also in Latin America, Africa and parts of
Asia.

Russia and China are not just great powers challenging the West. They also
represent two alternative versions of authoritarian capitalism, or
capitalist authoritarianism. Here's the biggest potential ideological
competitor to liberal democratic capitalism since the end of communism.
Radical Islamism may appeal to millions of muslims, but it cannot reach
beyond the umma of the faithful, except by conversion. More important, it
cannot plausibly claim to be associated with economic, technological and
cultural modernity. By contrast, the opening ceremony of the Beijing
Olympics, like the skyscrapers of Shanghai, show us authoritarian capitalism
already staking that claim. In the Bird's Nest stadium, the latest
audio-visual hi-tech was placed at the service of a hyper-disciplined
collectivist fantasy, made possible by financial resources that no democracy
would have dared devote to such a purpose. Zhang Yimou, the artistic
director of the Olympics ceremonies, said that only North Korea could have
matched such feats of mass synchronisation.

For close to 500 years, modernity has come from the West to the world. The
historian Theodore von Laue called this The World Revolution of
Westernisation. In twentieth century Europe, liberal democracy faced two
powerful versions of modernity that were western but illiberal: fascism and
communism. Part of these systems' appeal was precisely that they were
modern. ('I have seen the future and it works,' said one enthusiast
returning from Moscow.) Liberal democracy finally saw them both off, though
not without a world war, a cold war, and a lot of help from the United
States.

Now, in China, we glimpse the prospect of a modernity which is both
non-western and illiberal. But is authoritarian capitalism a stable, durable
model? That, it seems to me, is among the greatest questions of our time -
which is still a post-9/11 time, but also a post-8/8 time, and,
ecologically, a 5-minutes-to-midnight time.

As we of the FLIO think about how to respond to this multiple-front
challenge, I have more sympathy than many Europeans do for the notion,
canvassed by American policy intellectuals supporting both John McCain and
Barack Obama, of a 'concert of democracies'. We should look first to those
countries who share our values in the way they govern themselves - and there
are more of them now, after these trente glorieuses. But only with several
vital caveats. First of all, we should not kid ourselves that we can have
only liberal democracies as partners. Our values may pull us that way, but
our interests will necessarily push us to relationships and even
partnerships with currently illiberal states as well. So any
institutionalised League of Democracies, arrayed against an Association of
Autocrats (Robert Kagan's vivid term), is a seriously bad idea - even
assuming you could agree who merits inclusion in the League. Bipolar
disorder would be no improvement on multipolar.

It's also not the smartest idea to identify this vision of a concert of
democracies too emphatically with the West, as in the former French prime
minister Edouard Balladur's proposal for what he calls a Western Union.
Historically, both modernity and liberalism have come from the West. But the
future of freedom now depends on the possibility of new versions of
modernity evolving, whether in India, China or the muslim world, which are
distinctly non-western yet also recognisably liberal, in the core sense of
cherishing individual freedom. I wouldn't bet on this outcome, but working
towards it is the best long-term chance we have. Pessimism of the intellect
must be matched by optimism of the will.

www.timothygartonash.com

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