Disillusionment over Europe

One of the texts we're going to read this spring is a brief essay by Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of the Rest", wherein he encourages Americans to embrace, rather than fear, the inevitable loss of global hegemony we face in this era of globalization (and economic crisis). We face grim economic times and the wealth gap in our country hasn't been so wide since the 1920s. What does that mean for a people who are accustomed to so much material wealth? What's more, a decade of war has drained our treasury and undermined our self-confidence. How could it be that we're bogged down Afghanistan, with no conventional "victory" in sight? At what cost? Finally, we now go begging to the Chinese, pleading with them to liberalize their currency. They ignore us.

From New York Review of Books

In "The Fading Dream of Europe", Orhan Pamuk seems genuinely melancholy to be waking from his "rose colored dream" of Europe. He reflects on his own childhood, when he and his Turkish classmates studied the history of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when their teachers emphasized the central importance of separating religion and the state. In the 50s and 60s, Turks wanted to adapt to Europe and assume its successful institutions, not to mention its growing prosperity. Now, however, fewer Turks (and my extension--non-Western peoples more generally) look to Europe as an ideal.

In accounting for his disillusionment, he points at European support for Bush's "illegitimate and cruel war" in Iraq (surprising since most Americans believe that the Europeans [France and Germany mostly] turned their backs on us) and the fact that France spearheaded an effort to block the Turks from joining the EU. The greatest source of frustration for Pamuk, however, is his belief that Europe is "destroying " its own "core values" by rejecting multiculturalism and embracing anti-immigration politics, policies, and prejudices.

Suicide Bombing in Stockholm

It appears that the suicide bomber in Sweden was a second generation Iraqi immigrant who had received his education in Britain.

Nazis? Again?

I suppose that it should come as no surprise that there are already two posts related to German neo-Nazi agitation on (in?) the blog. In this course, we're going to explore ethnic nationalism and its power to inspire terrible instability. Tony Judt writes that it is war, "not racism or ethnic antagonism or religious fervor" that results in atrocity and genocide, but I assert that all too often it is ethnic antagonism that inspires war, and that ethnic difference often serves as an easy means of dehumanizing the enemy.

Samuel Huntington Dies

Just read in Spiegel Online: Samuel Huntington, best known for his 1993 article "The Clash of Civilizations" died today at age 81. I teach his thesis in my sophomore Western Civilization course, alongside Francis Fukuyama. It's likely I'll be including it in GSS as well.

Huntington argues that modernization is ultimately unrelated to westernization, and that civilizations are essentially differetiated by religion and language. In the wake of 11/1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall and the symbolic end of the Cold War), when neo-conservatives began to trumpet the triumph of American-style free-market capitalism as historically inevitable, Huntington's thesis struck many as pessimistic and even reactionary. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, however, seemed to validate his world-view.

Here's an interesting visual guide to Huntington's understanding of future alignments between the major world civilizations. The thicker the line, the greater the friction between cultures.