Western Exceptionalism

One of the problems I've been having with my cavalcade of new ideas for the blog for 2012 is that I haven't really had any good ideas for going back to the well.  The problem with writing about history is that you need a theme.  All I've had so far is, "Well, maybe I should go back to writing Byzantine Logic."  While that's not a bad thought, it's also somewhat limited in scope and applicability.

Basically, you have to be a history wonk, a religious wonk, and someone who can really, really care about the Eastern Roman Empire and it's various squabbles to get in to that series.  While there is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that such people exist (as I am living proof), I also know that it's necessary to diversify.  The big problem is...how?

Well, I'm glad you asked, ladies and gentlemen.

Ed Brayton posted a fascinating bit on the Arab Spring just today.  It's primarily excerpts from an essay by Turkish author Mustafa Akyol on Muslim liberty.  The part that struck me was this:

My short answer to that big question, which I explore more deeply in my book, is the change in political context: At the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire fell, giving rise to more than a dozen nation-states, almost all of which were colonized by European powers. Colonization inevitably led to anti-colonization, and replaced liberalism with a reactionary collectivism. The question, “How can we be like the West?” got replaced by “How can we resist the West?”

This is a provocative statement.  It also, at least in my mind, conflates the reactionary Muslim attitude known as "Islamism" that has been the driving force behind the reactionary Muslim elements with that other great reactionary "-ism" of the 20th Century: Communism.

Communism as we know it from the mid-20th Century on would be completely unrecognizable to Karl Marx.  That's because it took root not amongst disaffected factory workers in the West like Marx thought, but amongst poor rural farmers in what would become known (thanks to the fight between the USA and USSR) as the Third World.  Why?  Leon Trotsky, basically, and the policies collectively known as Trotskyism.

Communism never took hold in North America and Europe, but it caught on in Latin America and Asia precisely because Trotskyism exported the theory and support of Permanent Revolotion to people for whom revolution was massively important.  Their revolution, however, wasn't that of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, but the colonized against the colonial.  The West, in short, made their own enemies.

Communism did not find fertile soil in large swaths of the former Ottoman Empire, however.  The key motivator there was religion.  Islam offered a rallying cry against Western expansionism that dated back to Saladin rallying the squabbling Muslim kingdoms under the banner of Jihad to throw back the marauding Crusaders.

This, I believe, is something that can define the scope of a big project.  I don't intend to look at Communism as an economic system or Islamism as a form of religion.  I also don't care about the Bolshevik Revolution or Mao's conquest of China that much.  Instead I want to look at Leon Trotsky, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ayatollah Khomeni, Muammar Gaddafi, and, yes, Osama Bin Laden.  I want to look at revolution as a reaction to colonialism.  I also want to look at the Muslim world before colonialism.

That last bit, by the way, will be impossible to do without heavily involving the Ottoman Empire.  Seems that this might just dovetail nicely with a renewed bout of Byzantine Logic...

Comments

[Firedrake]

One might argue something similar with the West's approach to Russia itself, and earlier to Japan - in each case, not so much an explicit "you do what we tell you", but an implicit "we are who we are, and you simply don't measure up against us".

[Brian M]

Sounds cool.