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ultural Fragmentation, Globalization and International
Morality
The arrival of the millennium has brought the world new dramas
of international conflict.
As the world becomes smaller and we all bump into each other
more frequently in theprocess called globalization, we begin to
feel our differences with greater force. Through
the haze produced by the dissolution of older world-views, we
have the opportunity tosee things we have ignored for a long time.
And we may begin to see the forms of new
orders.
Bassam Tibi is Professor of International Relations at the
University of Gottingen,
Germany. He is a practicing Muslim. In his book, The Challenge
of Fundamentalism:Political Islam and the New World Disorder, he
argues that "the major trend in currentinternational politics is
the simultaneity of structural globalization and cultural
fragmentation."
In this view of what is going on, Tibi sees the unifying
practices and products of
globalization, from the easily-visible examples of commerce, to
less obviouslegal/political forms such as the international order
of nation-states, as only a thin overlay
on the worlds peoples, one which has little interaction with
their deep and persistent
cultural codes. Eating McDonalds does not make a tribesman a
budding American
consumer. Using the internet does not make one an individualist
advocating the spread of
"human rights." The products of the individualistic Commerce
Culture can exist side byside with local cultural imperative and
not dislodge it.
At the same time the process of globalization has a corrosive
effect on the organizationand exercise of power. Nations have less
importance as prime power players in the new
world of international commerce. Nations hopeful but reactive
policies lag behind the
gyrations of world economic crises. The nation-state itself, a
creation of the the European
Enlightenment, subsequently overlaid on the globe as a useful
basis for world order, acts
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as screen for many of us, blocking out the view of what is
actually transpiring within the
worlds populations.
Our new technologies also empower trans- and supra-national
world actors, whether theybe currency traders or terrorists, cadres
or super-empowered individuals. The wars of
nations are less of a problem than the wars waged by these
"irregulars." The technologiesof war and communication, which the
west created, pass readily into the uses of our
shrinking worlds many cultures, further eroding the power of
states. The western powershave a harder time controlling the
international system of states.
The nation-states irrelevance for the local culture combines
with the power shift
provided by weapons and communications technology to create
cultural fragmentation.Nations attract weak allegiance. Smaller
ethno-cultural groupings hold the hearts.
Into this fray of cultural fragmentation, let us then draw the
big lines. Islamic
fundamentalism challenges Western universalism with its own
universalist claim. The
scriptures of the Prophet are not what moral relativists call an
"alternative," to be livedonly by those who chose to be Muslim.
They are a system for all mankind, a replacement
for the Wests whole kit of individualism, human rights, commerce
and diversity. These
are powerful and conflicting diagonals underlying the
composition we are looking at: the
world picture of cultural fragmentation and structural
globalization.
It is Tibis thesis that political Islams absolutist universalism
is a powerful enzyme in the
chemistry of world conflict. Its effect is to increase conflict
and disorder, multiplying the
force of cultural fragmentation. Political Islam does not have
the organizational power tocreate a trans-national Islamic
political entity. Relying as it does on interpreted scripture
rather than structural systems, it must operate with
totalitarian politics deriving from the
style and conflicts of local strongmen. Its universalist claim
keeps its head in the clouds,but its rejection of both history and
popular sovereignty mean that the action on theground is always
tied to local enthno-cultural conflict. And political Islams
universalist
claim is so complementary to the disenfranchisement felt by
those local ethno-cultural
groups, living in Nations to which they feel little allegiance,
that we can expect it topersist for a long time, magnifying the
cultural fragmentation, increasing the conflicts,
and breeding the "new world disorder."
We may expect that the West will learn from this period of
history that the current
Western order is not some final answer. After all, the
Elightenment ideas that led to thenation-state world order are the
same ones that teach us the value of diversity, of self-
criticism, and of the decentralized proliferation of ideas. Out
of our own self-interest we
must clean our lenses and see what is really happening. If the
nation-state system so illserves such a large number of people, we
must find a way to fix those parts of it that are
such fertile ground for fundamentalism.
And we must also expect that out of the civilization of Islam,
there will be increasing
movement to escape the claustrophobic future envisioned by the
fundamentalists. Tibiimagines the creation of an "international
morality" which will allow the worlds
