The return of both China and Islam in world history after a three-century-long eclipse has been the defining feature of the international stage since 1979.
In the first decade afterwards, the West was simply too focused on the “second Cold War” against the Soviet Bloc to ponder the meaning of the revolutions engineered by Den Xiao Ping in China and Khomenei in Iran. In the second decade, a victorious West, indulging in rhetorical self-intoxication, mistook the most recent stage of a century-old globalization process for the end of history and even geography.
Throughout the 1990s, this infatuation with globalization and a “time-space compression” in the virtual world led most Westerners to ignore the twofold epochal change taking place in the real world: the transfer of the center of gravity of the world economy from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with “three billion new capitalists” poised to put an end to three centuries of Euro-Atlantic economic primacy; and the rise of a “second nuclear age” in Asia and with it, the concomitant end of three centuries of Western military superiority.1
The year 2001 could have been an eye-opener but the West, too traumatized by the Islamist attack on America, failed to notice an equally important, if less spectacular, development: the creation by China of a coalition, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, including Russia and Central Asia as members, Iran as a silent partner, and India and Pakistan as observers. It took another five years for Western foreign policy experts to realize that this emerging SCO was, for all practical purposes, an OPEC with nukes, which had the potential to develop, over time, into a full-fledged “NATO of the East.”
At the NATO summit in Riga in November 2006, a little-noticed transatlantic revolution of sorts finally occurred when the Atlantic Alliance acknowledged that it would have to “go global” in order to remain relevant. Divided, America and Europe will fall; united, they can retain the lead. But all manners of “going global” are not equal, and the coming globalization of NATO is as much full of promises as it is fraught with perils. [...]
History on the move again
Two hundred years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte, who knew a thing or two about epochal change, remarked: “When China awakens, the world will tremble.” China is awakening, all right, and promoting worldwide authoritarianism all the more successfully that the spectacle of Western democracies lately has not been exactly edifying. If the Chinese promotion of “Asian values” has a global, rather than regional, historical significance, it is because Confucius today speaks with a very strong German accent: that of Carl Schmitt. While Western pundits were enrolling Kojève for their musing on the “end of history,” the Chinese were translating nine books by Schmitt to philosophically buttress their return in history. The future of liberal authoritarianism has never looked brighter.39
The return of China alone would be enough to make the West “live in interesting times.” To make things even more interesting, Islam too is back, this time in the form of a totalitarianism which manages to combine an ideological comprehensiveness (Salafism) unseen since Communism and an existential nihilism (jihadism) worthy of Nazism. A generation ago, the post-Vatican II Catholic world finally espoused the 20th century, and the Church went on to play a critical role in the collapse of communism; meanwhile, under the increasing influence of Wahhabism, the Muslim world was going in the opposite direction, and this great leap backward brought them back to the 14th century.40 If the Saudi caliphate does not soon undertake its own Vatican II, chances are the Muslim world will never make it back to the 21st century.
It is time for the Transatlantic chattering class to realize that there is a time for problematizing, and a time for strategizing—and that its first order of business should be to stop mistaking a simple transatlantic time lag for a metaphysical problem. In the wake of 9/11, there was an extreme disconnect between an America that had just experienced its first continental aggression since the “second war of independence” (the war of 1812) and a Europe convinced that the then-imminent opening of the Brussels constitutional convention was, if not the beginning of universal peace, at least the world’s most important event since the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.
Hence the temptation in certain quarters to reify this temporary disconnect into a Mars/Venus gap. But the most cursory examination of twentieth-century history shows that transatlantic time lags have always been the rule rather than the exception. The First World War began in 1914, the U.S. only joined in 1917. The Second World War began in 1939, the U.S. only joined in 1942. The Cold War began in 1947, and it took Europe a full two years to give up the temptation of neutrality and side with the U.S. Since the Long War is of an asymmetric kind, it is no surprise if it took longer than usual for America and Europe to synchronize their chronopolitical watches.
There are still too many talking heads today whining about the fact that Americans are still too much from Mars, Europeans too much from Venus. You still have a metaphysical problem with that? Get over it. As Javier Solana reminded us in his inimitable way, Mars himself was from Mars, Venus was from Venus, and that sure did not prevent those two from getting down to business: “I seem to recall that it was only in the arms of Venus that Mars found peace. And was their beautiful daughter not the goddess Harmonia?”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/08/the_revolution_in_transatlanti.html
