'The West' and 'The Other'

The respected international relations theorist and former United States Department of State employee Samuel Huntington explains the significance of the West as agent of civilisation:

“The West has, in short, become a mature society entering into what future generations, in the recurring pattern of civilizations, will look back to as a “golden age,” a period of peace resulting in... “the absence of any competing units within the area of the civilization itself, and from the remoteness or even absence of struggles with other societies outside.””[1]

Leaving aside the accuracy of Huntington’s statement, implicit in it is an assumption that the “absence of struggle” is a product of the intrinsic nature of “the West” and its “commitment to democratic and pluralistic politics”[2] which other societies have at present proven incapable of fully realizing. For Huntington this incapacity is not explained by a failure of tactics or strategy on the part of other “civilizations”. Rather, other civilisations seek hegemony on terms that are either totally or generally antithetical to democracy and pluralistic politics. The West therefore is the exception to an otherwise still chaotic world, a world in which acts of genocide are perpetrated. But where the West is concerned it is an exception that proves the rule, the rule being that international peace and order cannot be realized unless the centre of civilisation, the West, takes a leading role. While Huntington goes further to lament the inevitable demise of the West as the hegemonic world civilisation,[3] he does not view as inevitable that future hegemons will reproduce the West’s “golden age” because they have not hitherto demonstrated the necessary capacity for lasting stability along democratic and pluralistic lines. Implicit in this is a belief that, matters of politics apart, the West retains a moral responsibility to remain hegemonic so that it may continue to be the paramount expression of human civilization.

In strikingly similar terms, Mahmood Mamdani relates a dominant expression of the distinction between civilised West and uncivilised others:

“…the world we live in is divided in two: between those modern and those pre-modern. It is said that those modern make their culture; they have a reflexive attitude to it; they can separate the good from the bad, build on the good and correct the bad; their culture develops historically; and the story of that historical development is what we call progress. The pre-modern peoples, in contrast, are said to be born into a culture; they are said to have a tendency to internalize their culture rather than have a critical attitude to it. Rather than make their culture historically, they seem condemned to live it uncritically, and content to pass it on from one generation to another. Pre-modern peoples are said to wear culture as a badge, or to suffer from it, like a twitch, even a fever.”[4]

Mamdani here is speaking of the manner in which two key American public intellectuals understood the cultural boundaries of the current United States War on Terror. But his assessment also resonates with the historical colonial distinctions between civilised and uncivilised, the West and the Other, modern and pre-modern.

The distinction between those with the capacity to civilise and those who require civilising is significant for a number of reasons. For our purposes there are two in particular that warrant further consideration. Firstly, it reminds us of the moral dimension of colonialism. If colonialism represents a power relationship, then it is a relationship where the colonial power believes it has the moral authority to intervene in the affairs of the peoples they wish to subordinate. Secondly, as contemporary literary theorists like Edward Said have shown, representations that reproduce a relationship of subordination endure even after formal representations of decolonisation have been obtained.[5] The international law of genocide is no exception in either of these respects.

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Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, London: Simon & Schuster (2002), at p. 302.

Ibid.

Ibid, at p 91.

Hobhouse Memorial Lecture, London School of Economics, London, 8 March 2007. Text of speech available at: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/LSEPublicLecturesAndEvents/pdf/20070308_HobhouseMemorial.pdf. Accessed 18 May 2007.

Edward Said, Orientalism London: Penguin Books, 2003, at pp. 284-328 generally and pp. 295-297 specifically.

This is an excerpt from a paper I delivered at the International Law and Society Conference in Berlin, Germany 28 July 2007. If you would like a copy of the paper please leave your email address in the comment box.