Western civilisation is under threat, but not just from terrorism
At the height of the Cold War, at the start of the fateful 1980s, Jean-Francois Revel wrote his classic How Democracies Perish, a bitter, bleak, trenchant book that saw the West losing the Cold War against Soviet communism.
Revel was wrong. Western democracy triumphed in the end. But for much of the Cold War it was a desperately close-run thing. Nation after nation in the Third World became communist. In the scathing assessment of Revel, democracies lacked the strength of will to prevail.
But then Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II emerged as the embodiment of Western will, leaders of moral authority and clarion conviction. But the West’s triumph grew out of much more than their leadership, indispensable though that was.
The West vanquished communism for two reasons. The economic and political model was so superior and this resulted in a massive disparity in economic growth and economic power between the West and the sclerotic communist bloc. Not unrelated to this, the communists themselves then suffered a system-wide crisis of conviction, made starkly evident when Polish soldiers refused to fire on Polish citizens to maintain a regime in power.
The Paris terror attacks indicate a new level of threat to Western democracies. Is it wrong to call this an existential threat, as Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Attorney-General George Brandis have done?
There is a serious argument for seeing terrorism as just a kind of terrible criminality that can never prevail. The benefit of this analysis is that it is reassuring. And it doesn’t serve the terrorists’ propaganda by inflating their status.
But ultimately that analysis doesn’t hold water. It simply doesn’t correspond with reality.
The Paris attacks should be seen in the light of a multiplying and interlocking series of threats the West faces. At the same time, far from its model demonstrating superiority, the West is gripped by a double crisis of belief, and of governance.
The age of terror does, in fact, represent an existential threat to the West, but it does so in complex ways through its interaction with other threats.
Let’s enumerate them.
First, there is terrorism itself. This exists now in all Western societies and in all Muslim societies. This jihadist ideology is based on a coherent if extreme world view in which Islam is persecuted by the West and the drive is to achieve the implementation of a pure and fundamentalist Islam.
In Western societies, such as France or Britain or the US or Australia, most terrorists may represent pathology more than coherent belief, disturbed or alienated people preyed on by entrepreneurs of identity. But there is also a cohort of quite successful people who are drawn to the intensity of the Islamist belief.
In the Middle East and across North Africa there are tens of thousands of such people. This indicates the failure of the West since 9/11.
Western intelligence agencies have prevented terrorists from acquiring nuclear materials and have prevented a mass casualty attack in the West on the scale of 9/11. But the Islamists have been successful beyond their wildest dreams.
Like the communists before them, but more successfully than the communists, they have established a constituency for their basic paradigm amid a substantial number of people in Western societies and the Middle East.
More than that, they share in common with many non-violent Muslims a great deal of a common narrative that focuses on resentment and paranoia.
The Grand Mufti in Australia should not be demonised for his foolish comments in response to the Paris attacks. He is not remotely a supporter of justifier of terrorism. But when he nominates causes of the terror attacks as “racism, Islamophobia, curtailing freedoms through securitisation, duplicitous foreign policies and military intervention”, he validates the paranoid and exaggerated sense of Muslim grievance on which the extremists thrive.
Everybody has their grievances. There are 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. Most of them are Hispanic. Many are Mexican. Mexicans could have a quite serious historical grievance about territory lost to Texas. Hispanics, legal and illegal, can well feel alienated in the US and picked upon in public debate. Yet there is no Mexican or Hispanic terrorist threat in the US.
Western Muslim leaders sometimes take refuge in arguing that because terrorism does not represent real Islam, it has nothing to do with Islam. Yet this ignores the obvious reality that this terrorism emerges from Islamic communities and, at least, from an interpretation of Islam.
So the first big threat to the West is the growing domestic terrorism threat. In time, the terrorists will become more sophisticated.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has talked of information suggesting terrorists in France have planned terror attacks with chemical weapons. If the terrorist movement continues to spread, the chances are that eventually it will acquire some nuclear or radioactive material. That may not happen for a long time but the terrorist intent to do this is evident.
This threat is subject to a massive force multiplier in the Middle East. Islamic State controls a big chunk of territory in Syria and Iraq. Calls for more assertive Western military action against Islamic State are mistaken. The calibrated air attacks were necessary to preserve the Iraqi state. But what is clear from the unfolding of the Syrian civil war is that the defeat of Islamic State is not the top priority of the Middle East’s resident powers, who see Iraq and Syria much more through the prism of the Sunni-Shia conflict than through the Western terrorism prism.
At the same time, the appalling human suffering of the Syrian civil war has sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from Syria and heading ultimately towards Europe.
Two critical books, The French Intifada, by Andrew Hussey, and Reflections on the Revolutionin Europe, by Christopher Caldwell, detail the overwhelming failure of integration of North African and Middle Eastern Muslim populations in France and in Europe generally.
The picture is, of course, complex. Most European Muslims are law-abiding. But Europe, unlike the US, Canada and Australia, has never had a successful ethos for integrating large numbers of immigrants from foreign cultures.
However, there is a deeper structural problem for the West here. All Western societies have become substantially post-industrial and services-oriented. The parts of their economies that are industrial are very hi-tech. Up until at least the middle of the past century, Western societies could provide masses of jobs for unskilled migrants, even if they did not speak the language of the new society. In Australia, migrants could work in the car plants, and the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and in the white goods industries, and many other places without much formal education and, indeed, even without much English.
Now such jobs simply do not exist. Unskilled immigrants with language problems typically spend years and years without a job. They are humanely supported by the welfare system. But this is a toxic recipe long term.
Even though the European welfare system itself is a massive attraction, and one of the reasons almost no Middle East refugees seek asylum in the Arab Gulf countries, over time welfare dependency breeds alienation and resentment. It feeds perfectly into the Islamist narrative of Western oppression.
The West cannot leave the Middle East to its own devices. The political culture of the Middle East generates hatred of the West routinely and finances Islamist extremism around the world.
More than that, when terrorists control territory, as Islamic State does, and as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, and possess even rudimentary tools of statehood, their ability to threaten the West is amplified. The conflict in Syria magnifies the terrorist threat in the West in an obvious fashion. Perhaps 30,000 foreign fighters have flocked to Syria to join Islamic State and similar groups. Thousands of these people come from the West. They will return to the West and conduct acts of terrorism, as we saw in Paris.
However, it is wrong to think that Islamist terrorism is the only, or perhaps even the main, strategic threat the West faces. But by entangling the West, especially the US, in the Middle East, to some extent exhausting US strategic resolve in the Middle East, and by making Americans loath to engage in security actions around the world, the total security order of the West is gravely weakened.
Opportunist states use American weakness to test the limits. Russia invades Ukraine. China claims and occupies disputed territories in the South China Sea. Iran fools Washington with a fake nuclear deal and powers on towards nuclear weapons. The system is beset with entropy. The centre cannot hold. The interaction of the terror threat with traditional geo-strategic issues makes both much more difficult for the West to manage. At the same time, the West is undergoing a genuine civilisational crisis of belief and of governance. This is the first generation in Western history that, substantially, is not sustained by any transcendent beliefs. The death of God is also in the West the death of purpose and, for many, the death of meaning.
Can a civilisation really sustain itself on the basis of an ideology of self-realisation and entitlement liberalism? If so, it will be the first time in history. Not only that, even if the model was internally sustainable, can it really produce a society vigorous enough to defend itself against these multiplying security challenges.
George Orwell once remarked that the English sleep easy in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do rough things on their behalf. Every soldier, every police officer, is ultimately prepared to sacrifice their life for an idea, a set of principles, a set of values, that they believe transcends their own experience and even their own mortality.
Western society is moving ever further away from the idea that anything beyond the individual can demand such sacrifice. The internal liberalism has never been more oppressive, while the ability to stand seriously against enemies is very much in question.
Straws in the wind even in Australia demonstrate grotesque elements to our civilisation. The Catholic Archbishop of Hobart is to be hauled before a thought police tribunal for the crime of propounding traditional Catholic sexual morality. Meanwhile, we rejoice in televised cage fights between women, which even our parents, much less our grandparents, would have regarded as the essence of barbarism.
At the same time demonstrators can march through the streets calling death to Israel, or even denouncing the evil of the Jews, without attracting legal penalty.
If a society has lost strong beliefs, can it really excite the transcendent loyalty of its own citizens, or of people who join it through migration?
At the same time there is well-documented crisis of governance across the Western world. No Western nation can balance its expenditures with its revenues. All are caught up in an entitlements crisis. Health and welfare spending are ballooning, so are unsustainable deficits. The prestige of democracy is under severe attack. For most of the Cold War, millions of people in the Third World, and in communist societies, yearned to live in nations governed as well as those of the West. It is a hard argument to make to a young banker or IT worker in Shanghai now that they would be better off if their government had the resolve and technical skill of Greece or Spain.
Put this all together and it’s not quite yet a full-blown crisis of a civilisation. But there’s a great deal of trouble ahead.
