Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations

Mark B. Salter

Description

The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington have led to popular conceptions of Muslims as terrorists. Some commentators have harked back to the 'Clash of Civilizations' argument outlined by Samuel Huntington which argued that, after the collapse of the Cold War, culture would become the main axis of conflict for civilisational alliances.



Mark Salter takes issue with Huntington's theory and explains how the terms of his argument are part of an imperialist discourse that casts other civilisations as essentially barbarian.



Although many commentators have engaged with Huntington's claims, few have pursued the political implications of his argument. Barbarians and Civilisation offers a decisive exploration of the colonial rhetoric inherent in current political discourse. Charting the usefulness of concepts of culture and identity for understanding world politics, Salter brilliantly illustrates the benefits and the limitations of the civilised/barbarian dichotomy in international relations.
1. Introduction

2. Civilization And Barbarians

3. Empire Of Barbarians

4. A Civilized/Barbaric Europe

5. New Barbarians

6. Decolonizing The Discipline: Forgetting The Imperial Past And The Imperial Present

7. New Barbarians, Old Barbarians: Post-Cold War IR Theory 'Everything Old Is New Again'

8. Conclusion: The Return Of Culture, Identity, Civilization And Barbarians To IR.

9. Epilogue: New Barbarians, New Civilizations, And No New Clashes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• International Relations
• Political Science

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849641487
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations

Mark B. Salter

LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2002 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling VA 20166-2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Mark B. Salter 2002

The right of Mark B. Salter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1902 5 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1901 7 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Salter, Mark B. Barbarians and civilisation in international relations/Mark B. Salter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–1902–5 (hbk.) – ISBN 0–7453–1901–7 (pbk.) 1. International relations and culture. 2. World politics—1989– I. Title. JZ1251.S25 2002 303.48’2—dc21 2002001236

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Replika Press Pvt Ltd, Delhi, India Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, England

To: my family, old and new

Contents

Acknowledgements

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Introduction

Civilization and Barbarians

Empire of Barbarians

A Civilized/Barbaric Europe

New Barbarians

Decolonizing the Discipline: Forgetting the Imperial Past and the Imperial Present

New Barbarians, Old Barbarians: Post-Cold War IR Theory. ‘Everything Old is New Again’

Conclusion: The Return of Culture, Identity, Civilization and Barbarians to International Relations

Epilogue: New Barbarians, New Civilizations and No New Clashes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my family for their continuous and univocal support. When I asked forNeorealism and its Criticsfor Christmas in my junior year, my mother rightly guessed that I wasnotgoing to become a lawyer. My family has been the anchor for my many travels, and I could not have done this without their love and support. My West Coast family took me in as one of their own. My family has expressed constant optimism throughout the entire process, and I cannot express my gratitude. Thank you Stuart, Mary, Patricia, Hunter and Kay. My grandparents slipped me food, train fare and the benefit of their wisdom. My siblings kept me grounded. I would also like to thank the ‘best people’, Meredith Browne, Adrianne Gaffney, Sara Levin and Kaley Walker, for their close friendship. The bulk of the research for this project was made possible through the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would also like to thank the Department of Political Science and the Institute of International Relations at the University of British Columbia. I have presented versions of chapters 3 and 9 at the International Studies Association, which provided a much needed airing of some of these ideas. I was extremely lucky to have a superlative doctoral committee. Professor K a l H o l s t i p r o v i d e d e s s e n t i a l f e e d b a c k a n d c o n s u m m a t e professionalism in his supervision. Professor Rob Walker provided intellectual guidance on those occasions when the project seemed too vast. Professor Brian Job provided essential direction in negotiating the process of finishing a doctoral dissertation. At UBC, Professor Sam Laselva was an invaluable source of inspiration and inquisition. I would also like to thank Simon Dalby for his help and support at the end of this project. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Jacinta O’Hagan were excellent sounding boards for the project. I would also like to thank Eddie Keene, who was the Editor at Millennium during my year at LSE. I also owe a great debt to J.P. Sewell for his early encouragement. I would like to thank Roger van Zwanenberg at Pluto Press for his faith in this project.

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Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations

I would like to thank Pamela Ritchie for her work formatting the typescript at a busy time. For a thousand things, my wife Kate deserves a thousand thanks. She is the best partner anyone could hope for, and I am fortunate beyond reckoning.

Cairo, 2002

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Introduction

On the Corniche, along the Nile, just outside the Luxor temple, is a traffic sign that reads ‘Obeying the traffic light is a sign of civilization’. After five years of noting each invocation of the discourse of ‘civilization’, the traffic sign – in English – seemed to illustrate the end of the road. This exhortation, directed at the English-speaking tourists rather than the Arabic-speaking inhabitants, seemed to signify exactly what was at stake in the ‘clash of civilizations’ debate in International Relations. What I found in Luxor was not only the assertion of an Islamic identityagainstthe continual flow of Western influences or the rejection of globalization. Rather, at Luxor, I found refutation of the inevitable ‘clash’ of civilizations, cultures or Islam and the West. Luxor is a site that has gained prominence several times in its history. Luxor temple in particular is an excellent example of civilizational dialogue: it was started by Amenhotep III (1414 BC), added to by the Tutankhamun (1333–23 BC), defaced by the famous Ramses II (1290–24 BC), invaded by the Assyrians in the seventh century BC, and later by Alexander the Great (332–23 BC). Copts converted the inner sanctum into a church, defacing the hieroglyphics with Christian iconography in AD 200–300. After the Muslim invasion, a mosque was built into the structure of the pharaonic temple in the thirteenth century. And the temple is the source of the obelisk that now stands in the heart of Paris, the Place de la Concorde. More recently, in 1997, Luxor was the site of a terrorist attack against tourists at the temple of Queen

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Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations

Hatshepsut. Currently, one might point as signs of globalization to the obligatory McDonald’s, innumerable cruise boats continuing the flow of tourists that began with the French invasion and Thomas Cook, or the multilingual shopkeepers hawking copies of the artifacts that grace the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum. What is notable in Luxor (and in Egypt generally) is their complex relationship to the West and to Islamic extremism. Let me start with the present. The terrorist attack, which killed 68 Western tourists and Egyptians, seemed to prove Samuel Huntington’s construction of a violent Islamic revival. Because of popular and academic constructions of the Muslim as terrorist, supplemented by the image of the PalestinianIntifada, Western media interpreted this attack as a ‘natural’ or ‘typical’ manifestation of the ‘fundamentalist’ backlash against Western domination and/or globalization. Tourism, on which the local Luxor economy depends, dried up for nearly three years. Cut off from the global networks of capital and the consumerist culture that accompany it, Luxor was economically devastated. There were several attempts to disavow the attack. The Egyptian authorities tried to dispel the image of danger with a ‘funeral ceremony’ at the temple one week later, complete with Verdi’s 1 Tears of Angerand candles. The popular press blamed Islamist extremists for the attacks and the government for their failure to 2 deal with the root causes of social alienation. As one commentator argued, ‘The only way to describe the perpetrators of the Luxor 3 incident is that they are traitors [to the nation of Egypt].’ The group that claimed responsibility for the attack,AlGama, said through a spokesperson that the terrorists acted without organizational 4 approval. Particularly interesting, in view of Western perceptions of this attack, is the disavowal by Islamic religious authorities: ‘The Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar [Egypt’s leading University/Mosque] Mohamed Sayed Tantawi said, “This is a criminal act. This act is 5 opposed to the precepts of Islam.”’ The government of Egypt recruited nearly 30,000 new police and instituted security measures to protect not Egyptians, monuments or heritage, but wealthy tourists. However, the claimed goal of the attack was the release ofAlGama’s leader Sheik Omar Abdel-Rhaman, who is ‘jailed in the United 6 States for conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993’. While this raises interesting questions concerning globalization, tourism geography and political Islam, I want to focus on this site