Globalization, nationalism, religion

[The Madame X]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities ... 12616&R=ED


Return of the Tribes
The resistance to globalization runs deep.
by Ralph Peters
09/04/2006, Volume 011, Issue 47


© Copyright 2006, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights
Reserved.


Globalization is real, but its power to improve the lot of
humankind has been madly oversold. Globalization enthralls and binds
together a new aristocracy--the golden crust on the human loaf--but the
remaining billions, who lack the culture and confidence to benefit from "one
world," have begun to erect barricades against the internationalization of
their affairs. And, from Peshawar to Paris, those manning the barricades
increasingly turn violent over perceived threats to their accustomed
patterns of life. If globalization represents a liberal worldview, renewed
localism is a manifestation of reactionary fears, resurgent faiths, and the
iron grip of tradition. Except in the commercial sphere, bet on the
localists to prevail.

When the topic of resistance to globalization arises, an
educated American is apt to think of a French farmer-activist trashing a
McDonald's, anarchist mummers shattering windows during World Bank powwows,
or just the organic farmer with a stall at the local market. But the
swelling resistance to globalization is far more powerful and considerably
more complex than a few squads of drop-outs aiming rocks at the police in
Seattle or Berlin. We are witnessing the return of the tribes--a global
phenomenon, but the antithesis of globalization as described in pop
bestsellers. The twin tribal identities, ethnic and religious brotherhood,
are once again armed and dangerous.

A generation ago, it was unacceptable to use the word tribes.
Yet, the tribes themselves won through, insisting on their own
identity--whether Xhosa or Zulu, Tikriti or Barzani, or, writ large, French
or German. In political terms, globalization peaked between the earnest
efforts of the United Nations in the early 1960s and the electoral defeat of
the European constitution in 2005 (the French and Dutch votes weren't a
rebuff, but an assassination). In Europe, which was to have led the way in
transcending nationalism, the European Union will stumble on indefinitely,
even making progress in limited spheres, but its philosophical basis is
gone. East European laborers and West European farmers alike will continue
to exploit the E.U.'s easing of borders and transfers of wealth, but no one
believes any longer in a European super-identity destined to supplant one's
self-identification as a Dane or Basque.

Far from softening, national and other local identities are
hardening again, reverting to ever-narrower blood-and-language relationships
that Europe's dreamers assumed would fade away. Who now sees himself as
fundamentally Belgian, rather than as a Fleming or Walloon? Catalans deny
that they are Spaniards, and the Welsh imagine a national grandeur for
themselves. In the last decade, the ineradicable local identities within the
former Yugoslavia split apart in a bloodbath, while a mortified Europe
looked away for as long as it could. The Yugoslav disaster was written off
as an echo from the past--anyway, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Kosovars were
"not our kind"--but the Balkan wars instead signaled a much broader popular
discontent with pseudo-identities concocted by political elites. The
collapse of Yugoslavia hinted at the future of Europe: not necessarily the
bloodshed, but the tenacity of historical identity.

Even as they grabbed from one another in Brussels, European
elites insisted that continental unification was desirable and inevitable.
Until the people said no.

Now, in 2006, we see one European state after another enacting
protectionist measures to prevent foreign ownership of vital industries
(such as yogurt-making). France paused, as hundreds of thousands of its best
and brightest protested the creation of new jobs for the less-privileged in
a spectacular defense of the ancien régime. And a new German chancellor has
called for saving the European project by destroying it--or at least by
hewing down the massive bureaucracy in Brussels that alienated the
continent. The future of Europe lies not in a cosmopolitan version of the
empire of Charlemagne, but in a postmodern version of the feudal
fragmentation that succeeded the Frankish empire. Brussels may be the new
medieval Rome, its bureaucratic papacy able to pronounce in limited spheres,
but there is ever less fear of excommunication.

Elsewhere, the devolution of identity from the state to the clan
or cult is more radical, more anxious, and more volatile. In Iraq,
religious, ethnic, and tribal identities dictate the composition of the
struggling national government--as they do in Lebanon, Canada, Nigeria, and
dozens of other countries (we shall not soon see a Baptist prime minister of
Israel--or a Muslim Bundeskanzler, despite those who warn of Eurabia). Even
in the United States, with our integrative genius, racial, religious, and
ethnic identity politics continue to prosper; we are fortunate that we have
no single dominant tribe (minorities might disagree).

Still, the success of the United States in breaking down ancient
loyalties is remarkable--and anomalous. While the current American bugbear
is Hispanic immigration, most Latinos establish worthy lives in the American
grain, just as the Irish and Italians, Slavs and Jews, did before them.
American Indians may still think in tribal terms (especially when casino
profits are involved), and there is no apparent end to the splinter
identities Americans pursue in their social and religious lives, but not
even Rome came remotely so close to forging a genuinely new, inclusive
identity.

Our peculiar success blinds us to failures abroad. Not only have
other states and cultures failed to integrate Einwanderer or to agree upon
composite identities, they do not desire to do so. The issue of who and what
a Frenchman or German is appeared to idealists to have been resolved a
century ago. It wasn't. Now, newly forged (in both senses of the word)
identities in the developing world are dissolving in fits of rage.

European-drawn borders have failed; European models of statehood
and statecraft have failed, and, in global terms, European civilization has
failed. Unable to see beyond those models, the United States fails to exert
influence commensurate with its power, except in the field of popular
culture (even Islamist terrorists like a good action flick). With the end of
the colonial vision and the swift crack-up of postcolonial dreams--not
least, of a socialist paradise--there is a worldwide vacuum of purpose that
the glittering trinkets of globalization cannot fill. From the
fear-mongering of our own media to the sermons of Moktada al-Sadr, the real
global commonality is the dread of change. Whether in Tehran or Texas, the
established orders have gone into a defensive crouch.

Men dream of change, but cling to what they know. Far from
teaching the workers of the world to love one another (or at least to enjoy
a Starbucks together), the economic and informational effects of
globalization have been to remind people how satisfying it is to hate.
Whether threatened in their jobs, their moral code, or their religion, human
beings dislocated by change don't want explanations. They want someone to
blame.

The new global aristocracy

There is, indeed, a globalizing class, and hundreds of millions
of human beings share the consumer tastes that announce their membership:
Prada handbags for the striving women of Tokyo and Manhattan; the
poverty-born music of Cesaria Evora for well-off fans from Frankfurt to San
Francisco; the Mercedes sedan and the credit card; voyeuristic leftism for
professors in Ann Arbor, Buenos Aires, and Vienna; computers for the
literate and solvent from Budapest to Bangalore; wine from the
region-of-the-week for London suburbanites or Shanghai's nouveaux riches;
media conglomerates that eschew patriotism; and, for the platinum specks on
that golden crust of humanity, private jets and $30,000-per-week vacation
rentals when they weary of their own three or four homes.

Such people may well be more at home with foreigners of their
own cultural stratum than with their less-fortunate countrymen. For the
upper-tier of these new aristocrats of globalization, place of residence and
citizenship are matters of convenience, tastes, and tax codes. This is a
nobility with no sense of responsibility to the serfs, and its members are
shielded as never before from life's inconveniences.

For the billions remaining, globalization and its consort, the
information revolution, merely open a window into an exclusive shop they are
not allowed to enter. A second-hand Pittsburgh Steelers shirt on a Congolese
beggar isn't globalization, but only the hind end of global trade. The new
awareness of the wealth of others is hardly pacifying. On the contrary, it
excites the conviction (which local demagogues are delighted to exacerbate)
that they can only be so rich because they stole what was ours.

The uneven ability to digest the feast of information suddenly
available even in the globe's backwaters doesn't bring humanity together
(even if Saudi clerics and American bureaucrats visit the same online porn
sites). Rather, it disorients those whose lives previously had been ordered,
and creates a sense simultaneously of being cheated of previously unimagined
possibilities while having one's essential verities challenged. Feeling
helpless and besieged, the victim of globalization turns to the comfort of
explanatory, fundamentalist religion or a xenophobia that assures him that,
for all his material wants, he is nonetheless superior to others.

The confident may welcome freedom, but the rest want rules. The
conviction that a new man freed of archaic identities and primitive
loyalties can be created by human contrivance is an old illusion. Rome
believed that the new identity it offered not only to its citizens, but also
to its remote subjects, must be irresistible. Yet imperial Rome faced no end
of revolts from subject tribes, from Britain to Gaul to Palestine. In the
end human collectives with stronger, undiluted identities conquered the
empire. From the brief, bloody egalitarianism of the French revolution,
through socialist visions that promised us the brotherhood of man and an end
to war (a conviction especially strong in 1913), to the grisly attempt to
create Homo Sovieticus and export him to the world, there has been no
shortage of visions of globalization.

Even the most powerful attempts to unite humanity failed: the
monotheist campaigns to impose one god.

One god, one way, one world

Monotheism replaced Rome's law codes with the law of God. The
first near-success of globalization was the bewildering survival and spread
of Christianity, the transitional faith between the exclusive tribal
monotheism of Judaism and the universal aspirations of Islam. Beginning as a
cult uncertain of the legitimacy of proselytizing among those of different
inheritances, Christianity quickly developed a taste for salesmanship,
adapting its message from one of local destiny to one of universal
possibility. Furthermore, its message to the poor (a constituency
contemporary globalization ignores) had as exemplary an appeal among the
less-fortunate of the bygone Mediterranean world as it does today in
sub-Saharan Africa. Christianity was an outsider's religion co-opted by
rulers, while Islam meant to rule--and include--all social classes from the
years of its foundation.

Globalization really got moving with the advent of Islam. Open
to converts from its earliest days, Islam moved rapidly, in just a few
centuries, from voluntary through coerced to forced conversions. While the
latter were never universally demanded, they were frequent (as were forced
conversions to Christianity elsewhere). The immediate and enduring conflict
between Christianity and Islam involved different visions of globalization,
a competition of quality, design, and power (think of it as Toyota vs. Ford
in a battle for souls). Those Christian and Muslim visions continue to
experience drastic mutations in the battle for new and local loyalties,
having now reached every habitable continent. Their success has blinded us
to their weakness: Neither religion has been able to subdue their old
antiglobalist nemesis: magic.

When we speak of religion--that greatest of all strategic
factors--our vocabulary is so limited that we conflate radically different
impulses, needs, and practices. When breaking down African populations for
statistical purposes, for example, demographers are apt to present us with a
portrait of country X as 45 percent Christian, 30 percent Muslim, and 25
percent animist/native religion. Such figures are wildly deceptive (as
honest missionaries will admit). African Christians or Muslims rarely
abandon tribal practices altogether, shopping daily between belief systems
for the best results. Sometimes, the pastor's counsel helps; other times
it's the shaman who delivers.

The Anglican priest in South Africa decries witchcraft, but
fails to see that his otherworldly belief system offers no adequate
substitute for solving certain types of daily problems. Quite simply, Big
Religion and local cults are inherently different commodities. From Brazil
to Borneo, local Christians don't see imported and traditional belief
systems as mutually exclusive, any more than a kitchen fortunate enough to
have a refrigerator should therefore be denied a stove.

There's an enormous difference between Big Religions--Islam,
Christianity, Hinduism, and the others--and the local cults that endure long
beyond their predicted disappearance. This distinction is critical, not only
in itself, but also because it is emblematic of the obstacles that local
identities present to globalization as we imagine it. Big Religion interests
itself in a world beyond this world, while the emphasis of local faiths has
always been on magic (bending aspects of the natural world to the will of
the practitioner of hermetic knowledge). Magic affects daily life in the
here and now, and its force and appeal can be far more potent than our
rationalist worldview accepts: What we cannot explain, we mock. (An
advantage Christianity enjoys among the poor of the developing world is the
image of Jesus the Conjure-Man, turning water into wine and walking on
water--he's a more-promising shaman than Muhammad.)

Another aspect of identity that we, the inheritors of
proselytizing world religions, fail to grasp is that local cults are
exclusive. They not only do not seek new members, but can't imagine
integrating outsiders (the politicized tribal beliefs of the Asante in Ghana
are a limited exception, since they were devised to confirm the subjugation
of neighboring tribes). Cult beliefs are bound to the local soil, the trees,
the waters. Tribal religions are about place and person, an identity bound
to a specific environment. While slaves did take voodoo practices with them
to the new world, the rituals immediately began to mutate under the stress
of transplantation. Tribal religions form an invisible defensive wall, as
local practices do today, from the Andes to the Caucasus.

Even ancestor worship, one of the commonest localist practices,
supposes the intervention of the dead in the affairs of living men and
women. Built on bones, local religions are cumulative, rather than
anticipatory. While both Big Religions and local belief systems proffer
creation myths, universal faiths are far more concerned with an end-of-times
apocalypse (in the Hindu faith, with recurring apocalypses), while local
cults rarely see beyond the next harvest. The great faiths lift the native's
heart on one day of the week, while local beliefs guide him through the
other six.

What we lump together under the term "religion" is better
divided into the distinct categories of religion and magic. The reason that
so many local cults, from Arizona to Ghana, persist under Christianity or
Islam, and why they remain a source of endless frustration to Wahhabi and
evangelical missionaries alike, is that they answer different needs. Big
Religion is about immortal life. Magic is about acquiring a mate, avoiding
snakebite or traffic accidents, gaining wealth. African tribes, as well as
the indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere, can accept a global
faith with full sincerity, while seeing no reason to abandon old practices
that work.

Even as they change their names, the old gods live, and our
attempts to export Western ideas and behaviors are destined to end in
similar mutations. Our personal bias may be in favor of the frustrated
missionaries who try to dissuade the Christians of up-country Sulawesi from
holding elaborate, bankrupting funerals with mass animal sacrifices (death
remains far more important than birth or baptism), but the reassuring
counter is that in the Indonesian city of Solo, where Abu Bakr Bashir
established his famed "terrorist school," the devoutly Muslim population
drives Saudi missionaries mad by holding a massive annual ceremony honoring
the old Javanese Goddess of the Southern Seas. Likewise, Javanese and
Sumatran Muslims go on the hajj with great enthusiasm (on
government-organized tours), but continue to revere the spirits of local
trees, Sufi saints, and the occasional rock.

In Senegal, I found local Muslims irate at the condescending
attitudes of Saudi emissaries who condemned their practices as contrary to
Islam. With their long-established Muslim brotherhoods and their beloved
marabouts, the Senegalese responded, "We were Islamic scholars when the
Saudis were living in tents."

From West Africa to Indonesia, an unnoted defense against
Islamist extremism is the loyalty Muslims have to the local versions of
their faith. No one much likes to be told that he and his ancestors have
gotten it all wrong for the last five centuries. Foolish Westerners who
insist that Islam is a unified religion of believers plotting as one to
subjugate the West refuse to see that the fiercest enemy of Salafist
fundamentalism is the affection Muslims have for their local ways. Islamist
terrorists are all about globalization, while the hope for peace lies in the
grip of local custom.

Uninterested in political correctness, a Muslim from Côte
d'Ivoire remarked to me, "You can change the African's dress, you can
educate him and change his table manners, but you cannot change the African
inside him." He might have said the same of the Russian, the German, or the
Chinese. By refusing to acknowledge, much less attempting to understand, the
indestructible differences between human collectives, the 20th-century
intelligentsia smoothed the path to genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan,
as well as to the age of globalized terror. Denied differences only fester;
ignored long enough, the infection kills.

Our insistence that human beings will grow ever more alike
defies the historical evidence, as well as practical and spiritual needs.
Paradoxically, we make a great fuss of celebrating diversity, yet claim that
human values are converging. We, too, have our superstitions and taboos.

Magic vs. jihad

The spread of Islam into Europe and Africa struck very
different, but equally potent, barriers in the north and south. In Europe,
it could not overcome a rival monotheist faith with its own universalist
vision. In West Africa, Islam stopped, roughly five centuries ago, when it
left the deserts and grasslands to enter the African forest, that potent
domain of magic.

It should excite far more interest than it has that a warrior
faith with an unparalleled record of conquest and conversion dead-ended when
it reached the realms of illiterate tribes that had not mastered the wheel:
In the forests of sub-Saharan Africa, Islam could not conquer, could not
convert, and could not convince. On their own turf, local beliefs proved
more powerful than a faith that had swept over "civilized" continents.

Forests are the abodes of magic. Look to forested areas for
resistance to innovation. Even European fairy tales insist on the forest's
mystery. Islam, with its abhorrence of magic, had nothing to offer African
forest tribes to replace the beliefs that enveloped them. In northern
Europe, too, monotheism faced its greatest difficulty in penetrating
forested expanses, and the persistence of essentially pagan folk beliefs in
the forested mountains of eastern Europe can startle a visitor today.

The forest, with its magic, is the opponent of globalization.
Unlike the monotheist faiths with their propulsive desert origins, it only
menaces those who insist on entering it. Now the worrisome question is
whether the vast urban slums of the developing world are the world's new
forests--impenetrable, exclusive, and deadly. From Sadr City to Brazil's
favelas, slum-dwellers are converting the great monotheist religions back
into local cults, complete with various forms of human sacrifice. Far from
monolithic, both the Muslim and Christian faiths are splintering, with
radical strains emerging that reject the globalization of God and insist
that His love is narrow, specific, and highly conditional. The great faiths
are becoming tribal religions again.

The limits of globalization

After approximately a century of Christian expansion inward from
its coasts, Africa remains a jumble of faiths: Muslim in the north states
such as Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Sudan, or Kenya, while Christian in
the south--and persistently fond of local beliefs throughout. Christian
televangelists (the real advance guard of globalization) rail against
traditional practices in Ghana, while, at the continent's other extreme, on
remote islands off the coast of Mozambique, the population remains strictly
Muslim by day, but brings out the drums and incantations at night.

The attitude of missionaries, Christian or Muslim, is that such
beliefs and practices are a combination of bad habits, naive superstitions,
and general ignorance. But the conviction has grown in me as I travel that
the missionaries themselves are--willfully--ignorant of systems they cannot
respect and so refuse to understand. Religions are like businesses in the
sense that they must provide products that work with sufficient regularity
to keep customers coming back. Results matter. The psychological comfort and
beyond-the-grave promises of Christian ity and Islam function
transcendently, but leave immediate needs unanswered.

In developed societies, civil, commercial, and social
institutions fill the gap; elsewhere, magic must. Magic endures because
local populations experience sufficient evidence of its power. This is hard
for Westerners to accept, but, whether training African militaries or
running an aid program in Peru, those who ignore the role of magic in the
lives of others will always fall short in their results: When Global Man
goes home, the shaman returns.

We laugh at this "mumbo-jumbo" from the safety of our own
parochial worlds, but the hold of magic remains so tenacious that it
continues to inspire human sacrifice in up-country Ghana and self-mutilation
from New Mexico to Sulawesi. One way to read the grave discontents of the
Middle East is that Sunni Islam, especially, annihilated magic, but, unlike
Western civilization, failed to substitute other means to satisfy human
needs. There is a huge void in the contemporary human experience in the
Islamic heartlands: no reassuring magic, no triumphant progress. Islam in
the Sunni-Arab world--the incubator of global terror--is all ritual and no
results, while even modern, Western Christianity imbues its rituals with
satisfying mysticism, from the experience of being "born again" to the
transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood.

What if magic--ritual transactions that address spiritual,
psychological, and practical needs--is a strategic factor that we've missed
entirely? We would not wish to send our troops anywhere without good maps of
the local terrain, but we make no serious effort to map the spiritual world
of our enemies or potential allies. Even if magic and local beliefs are
merely a worthless travesty of faith, our convictions are irrelevant: What
matters is what the other man believes.

The power of local beliefs and traditions will continue to
frustrate dreams of a globalized, homogenized society beyond our lifetimes.
If we can recognize and exploit the power of local customs, we may find them
the most potent tools we have for containing the religious counterrevolution
of our Islamist enemies. If, on the other hand, we continue to deny that
local traditions, beliefs, and habits constitute a power to be reckoned
with, we will lose potential allies and many a well-meant assistance project
will falter as soon as we remove our hand.

As for the potential for violence from insulted local beliefs,
consider this statement: "They can preach holy war, and that is ever the
most deadly kind, for it recks nothing of consequences."

This doesn't refer to mad mullahs and postmodern suicide
bombers. It's a quotation from a historical novel by Rosemary Sutcliff, The
Eagle of the Ninth. Published half a century ago for adolescents, it
describes a Druid revolt against the Romans in Britain.

Globalization isn't new, but the power of local beliefs, rooted
in native earth, is far older. And those local beliefs may prove to be the
more powerful, just as they have so often done in the past. From Islamist
terrorists fighting to perpetuate the enslavement of women to the Armenian
obsession with the soil of Karabakh--from the French rejection of
"Anglo-Saxon" economic models to the resistance of African Muslims to
Islamist imperialism--the most complex forces at work in the world today,
with the greatest potential for both violence and resistance to violence,
may be the antiglobal impulses of local societies. From Liège to Lagos, the
tribes are back.

Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer, is the author of 21 books,
including, most recently, Never Quit the Fight. He has traveled extensively
in Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Indonesia.