“This is not a clash of civilizations,” John Kerry declared on November 16, 2015, standing before a world shaken by the November 13 Islamic State-coordinated attacks on Paris. The Secretary of State, speaking at the American embassy in Paris, argued, “This is a battle between civilization itself and barbarism, between civilization and medieval and modern fascism both at the same time.” The attacks, the deadliest France has seen since World War II, killed 130 people and injured hundreds more less than a year after an al-Qaeda branch orchestrated the lethal shooting of staff at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Western capitals are attacked in order for the terrorists to perpetuate the notion of “Islam versus the West,” to threaten the free speech of organizations such as Charlie Hebdo, and, in the Islamic State’s case, to employ asymmetric warfare as a counter to territorial losses in Iraq and Syria.
Describing the perpetrators as “psychopathic monsters,” Kerry’s remarks were aimed at reinforcing the Obama administration’s continued plea not to identify radical Islamic terrorists as true representatives of the religion and the Muslim world as a whole. Indeed, one will never hear the president use the word “Islamic” to describe the terrorists, preferring instead the term “violent extremists.” The administration’s strategy has been to deny the legitimacy sought by the Islamic State. Hoping to work with Muslim leaders in a global counterterrorism effort, the White House carefully communicates with the intention to avoid an alienation of Muslims both in the West and abroad. More narrowly, Kerry sought to dispel comments made regarding the Paris attacks by GOP presidential hopefuls, such as then-candidate Senator Marco Rubio’s explicit statement, “This is a clash of civilizations.”
On this point, Kerry is right. Civilizations are not “clashing,” but values are. No matter how powerful its terrorist network grows, the Islamic State cannot claim to represent an entire civilization based on its warped version of Islam. What it can do is sustain a globalized attack on the West’s way of life and the values it champions. Making matters worse, the terrorists strike Western societies precisely at a vulnerable political moment when Western politicians make isolationist cases for leaving alliance structures at the core of the post-1945 order. In the face of external and internal threats, it is imperative for Westerners to reinvigorate their belief in shared values and defend Western unity and resolve. The international community is in dire need of a values-based order.
What are Western Values?
How should Western values be defined? This author’s definition would include but not be limited to individual liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of association, the rule of reason, the rule of law, equality of opportunity, religious liberty, democracy, and private property. Their product is the model of liberal democracy the political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously termed “the final form of human government” in his 1989 piece “The End of History?”
Perhaps one of the best articulations of Western values worth quoting at length were the remarks made by the Muslim apostate and author Ibn Warraq at an Intelligence Squared debate on Western values hosted in 2007:
The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, equality before the law, freedom of conscience and expression, human rights, liberal democracy—together constitute quite an achievement, surely, for any civilization. This set of principles remains the best and perhaps the only means for all people, no matter what race or creed, to live in freedom and reach their full potential.
In an interview with the HPR, Harvard professor of comparative religion Diana Eck offered an additional dimension to what constitutes Western values: “courage, a sense that we do shape our world and our destiny … It’s to some extent individual, but it is also nurtured by society and education.” Human advancement is a common endeavor, and it is in the vein of the ideas expressed by Warraq and Eck that Western values could be understood as universal.
Unfortunately, Fukuyama was incorrect to predict that the post-Cold War world would feature “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy.” Instead, it has been incumbent upon the West to deal with a global ideological competition precipitated by radicalization and what U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power calls “problems from hell.” In some cases it has risen to the occasion, and in others dithered. But it is in the West where the values it cultivated are best defended, and why they cannot yet be spoken as truly “universal.”
A Void of Meaning
Today is far from the only period in which the West has had to stand up for its values in opposition to those of its enemies. Disaffected youth and those left out of the West’s economic and social fabric latched onto the values of competing systems in geopolitical struggles such as the Cold War. Populations in regions ranging from Latin America to Southeast Asia accepted and even voted in communist governments in search of independence from real or perceived Western imperialism.
The choice in their minds stood as one between exploitative Western-imposed capitalism and revolutionary socialism. For example, Vietnamese independence leader Ho Chi Minh (who even cited the American Declaration of Independence in his 1945 proclamation of Vietnamese independence) used communism as the vehicle through which to liberate his nation. Even within leading democracies one could find rebellious teenagers embracing notable Marxist figures such as the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara in popular culture.
In the post-Cold War world, with communism discredited as a rival system by the fall of the Soviet Union, an ideological vacuum emerged. Despite China’s economic miracle through its use of a state-capitalist model, the post-Deng Chinese model’s ideological allure does not manifest itself at the grassroots. The late former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez seemed to present a cult of personality-based leftist alternative for Latin America, but the “Chavismo” bubble burst once oil prices decreased and Chavez himself passed away.
Yet even without a challenger, liberal democracy has lost its shine to many Westerners. The Soviet collapse tarnished socialism, and it seemed only logical to double down on capitalism. Yet the heightened marketization of the West in some respects undermined Westerners’ faith in their way of life. As Harvard government professor Michael Sandel argues, markets do not by themselves create an adequate moral framework for human activity. Nevertheless, markets and governments increasingly controlled by special interests are exactly the mechanisms through which modern Western societies shape behavior. As Sandel wrote in The Atlantic, the West’s overuse of markets and their “nonjudgmental stance toward values…has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy.”
A deficiency of historical self-understanding, too, has catalyzed an ideological hollowing out of the West. As Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson argued in his 2011 book Civilization, the failure of educators to effectively teach “the foundational texts of Western civilization” (written by authors ranging from William Shakespeare to Isaac Newton) has contributed to the West’s greatest foe: its own citizens’ “pusillanimity” fueled by a pernicious case of “historical ignorance.” It is a hopeless pursuit to stand up for shared civilizational values if a society no longer has faith in their contemporary relevance.
Add the decades-long secularization of the West, and one has a recipe for self-doubt. A 2015 Gallup survey found that Americans’ “confidence in the church/organized religion” hit an all time low of 42 percent. With religion fading, yet another dimension of public life with the capability to provide meaning to citizens’ lives has been diminished. Struck with disfavor of religion, market-driven institutions, and the great works and figures of their history, Westerners are plagued by a void of meaning—one that the Islamic State has viciously seized upon.
Countering the Ideological Insurgency
What has filled the ideological vacuum is a radical jihadist interpretation of Islam. As CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria points out, today’s terrorist “has chosen the path of terror as the ultimate act of rebellion against the modern world.” Radical Islam serves as the “off-the-shelf ideology” he or she latches onto for the practical purposes of violent extremism. It provides the ideological ammunition behind the attacks in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, and other cities struck by jihadists.
“This is not an existential threat to the future of the universe,” former British Ambassador to the United States Sir Peter Westmacott told the HPR. However, he said, “this is a challenge to our way of life,” and there remains a “need to work together with all the different faiths and communities to try to ensure that young people are not seduced by this poisonous kind of rhetoric.” Defending free societies from the ideological insurgency of radical Islam continues to be a common problem for the West and its allies.
Leadership through values is possible. As Eck told the HPR, the expression of values through policymaking is apparent today in Germany: “You see them coming out in some of the ways in which Angela Merkel addresses the immigrant refugee crisis, something that is deeper than simply the convenience of Germany but that does have to do with that very deep sense of human dignity and the responsiveness to human need.” Hopefully Merkel’s example at the national level can inspire more vigorous international cooperation on constructing policies shaped by values.
That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles
Domestic politics in the West exhibits a bleak future for the strong network of alliances necessary for the assembly of a values-based order. In the most powerful country on Earth, the United States’ constitutionally enshrined values are under siege. Republican candidate Donald Trump and his campaign staff both figuratively and physically assault the press, propose banning foreigners from entering the country based on their religion, and denounce the people’s right to protest. Is there any better textbook case of a political figure seeking to undermine Americans’ First Amendment rights—one of the best institutional expressions of Western values?
Not only do nationalist figures such as Trump trash values, they also reject the international institutions that can uphold them. As Trump suggests the United States leave NATO, France’s right-wing National Front leader Marine Le Pen calls for her country to leave both NATO and the European Union. The two also vow to clamp down on free trade and to forcibly restrict immigration. As Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum notes, “we are two or three bad elections away from the end of NATO, the end of the European Union and maybe the end of the liberal world order as we know it.”
Order Through Values
The West must revitalize its alliance structures, not rid itself of them. NATO in particular provides vital intelligence sharing efforts and military coordination in fights against common enemies such as the Islamic State. Moreover, it contributes to combating radicalization by helping to defend shared values. As NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently told Foreign Affairs, “NATO is based on some core values: human rights, individual liberty, and democracy.”
As jihadists wage ideological warfare and nationalist demagogues propagate fear mongering and isolationism in the West, a values-based order is needed more than ever. Secretary of State John Kerry may be right about the lack of “clashing civilizations,” but he and other Western leaders must spearhead efforts to strengthen their nations’ alliance structures and employ a counter-extremism strategy capable of protecting liberal democracy from both internal and external threats. The post-1945 order can be revamped for the challenges of the twenty-first century, and it should be based upon the values that bring out the best in humanity.
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