Book Reviews & Citations
(07/17/05) Three Billion New Capitalists reviewed in the Washington Post
War of the Worlds
Reviewed by Anne-Marie Slaughter
SANDS OF EMPIRE
Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition
By Robert W. Merry
Simon & Schuster. 302 pp. $26
THREE BILLION NEW CAPITALISTS
The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East
By Clyde Prestowitz
Basic. 321 pp. $26.95
THE CUBE AND THE CATHEDRAL
Europe, America, and Politics Without God
By George Weigel
Basic. 202 pp. $23
In Sands of Empire , Robert W. Merry frames history as a debate between
those who believe in progress and those who believe in cycles. The
progress camp -- think Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Woodrow Wilson and Thomas
L. Friedman -- is firmly Enlightenment modern; the cycle camp -- think
Oswald Spengler and Samuel P. Huntington -- is pre- or post-modern, or
perhaps just "unenlightened." Merry identifies himself firmly as part
of the cycle camp, arguing that Western civilization, led by the United
States, is about to get rolled by Islam unless we get our priorities
straight.
George Weigel agrees in his new book, The Cube and the Cathedral ,
although he sees the coming clash more as a replay of the Ottoman
Empire vs. Christian Europe. Clyde Prestowitz, meanwhile, sees doom
approaching from farther east, in the form of Asian cheap labor. In
Three Billion New Capitalists , he warns of a coming tsunami but
attributes its power less to the indelible features of a specific
civilization than to the logic of the market. (Indeed, Prestowitz is
really in the progress camp but, like his fellow modernists, believes
progress needs a helping hand from time to time.) All three authors
offer prescriptions for heading off disaster: a healthy dose of foreign
policy realism, in Merry's case; religious renewal, according to
Weigel; and for Prestowitz, a new New Deal. Readers disinclined to
think that the sky is falling are in for an unpleasant jolt.
Merry's chief target is what he sees as the idealistic tradition of
American foreign policy, currently embodied in the Bush
administration's push to reform the Middle East. He argues that we in
the West have been misled by the idea of "progress" into thinking that
Western values of individualism and democracy represent some sort of
ultimate standard for all civilizations. Instead, each civilization is
unique and bound to remain so, competing against the others for global
dominance.
And if we are fated to clash with the world's other civilizations,
Merry reasons, why waste time trying to make them over in our image?
Make no mistake, the war on terror is not a war for democracy or a war
against a small group of evildoers. Merry, following Huntington, has a
much more straightforward answer: "The enemy is Islam."
Thinking we can bring democracy to Islam is Eurocentric and foolhardy,
although, as Merry laments, it is a strategy that currently commands
the support of both neoconservatives and liberal internationalists.
Merry's preferred foreign policy is "conservative interventionism,"
another name for Kissingerian realism. Specifically, he argues, we can
win the war on terror only if we are ready to side with all those who
oppose radical Islamic fundamentalism, even autocratic regimes.
Certainly the debate here is cyclical; remember all the arguments for
why we had to support Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the generals
in Argentina in the 1970s?
Merry's prescriptions for the home front are more sinister still. "It
is naive," he tells us, "to believe that the country can assimilate and
protect itself from large numbers of Muslims entering the country as
the civilizational war continues." The answer, in his view, is
immigration restrictions for Muslims. At this point the civilization we
are supposed to be defending becomes difficult to recognize.
Weigel is similarly worried about a war of civilizations, although,
focusing on Europe, he fears that the West's defenders are not so much
distracted as dispirited and feeble. He describes a Europe in profound
spiritual and demographic crisis: two sides, in his view, of the same
secular coin. His basic argument is that if Europeans fail to cast off
the "atheistic humanism" that led to the horrors of the 20th century
and rediscover their Christian, specifically Catholic, roots, their
future could be bleak.
Weigel offers several possible scenarios. His "nightmare scenario" is
titled "1683 reversed," a reference to the year when the Ottoman defeat
at the gates of Vienna saved Europe from becoming a Turkish
protectorate. As he imagines it: "Most of western Europe [would become]
Islamicized . . . in the sense of being drawn into the civilizational
orbit of the Arab Islamic world. . . . Non-Muslim western Europeans
become dhimmis , second-class citizens with no effective role in public
life." But even the "muddling through" scenario sounds rather grim.
Quoting the historian Niall Ferguson, Weigel projects: "A youthful
Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to
colonize -- the term is not too strong -- a senescent Europe."
This is strong stuff. Weigel sees Christianity as the moral foundation
of Europe's traditions of democracy, human rights and freedom. He is
certainly right that Christian morality played a role in the European
Enlightenment and the development of the concept of human dignity. But
Christian morality also played a role in the Inquisition and the Thirty
Years War, in which fighting between Catholics and Protestants killed a
far larger percentage of the European population than did the world
wars. And to argue that secularism is responsible for the Holocaust is
breathtaking on its face; the European church, whether Catholic or
Protestant, did precious little to protect Europe's Jews or to stand up
for the human dignity of any of Hitler's victims.
Worse still, Weigel seems to believe with Merry that Islam and
democracy are fundamentally incompatible. Only Turkey, in his view, has
succeeded in becoming a "pluralistic democracy," and then only by
forcefully taking "Islam out of public life." This is no accident, he
believes; "it reflects the deep theological and doctrinal structure of
Islam."
Weigel would do well to reread his American history; Massachusetts Bay
colony was a theocracy if ever there was one. Indeed, the American
journey from Plymouth Rock to the First Amendment was marked precisely
by the realization that we could achieve a pluralist democracy only by
taking Christianity, or any other religion, completely out of public
life. If Turkey has successfully followed the European and American
path, why should the way be barred for the Middle East and North
Africa?
What unites Merry and Weigel most fundamentally is their insistence on
seeing the world through a civilizational lens, one that assumes a
predisposition to a particular kind of politics. Yet at what point does
this "civilizationism" become racism? In America's contemporary culture
wars, even to raise the "r" word is to invite countercharges of
political correctness and an unwillingness or inability simply to face
reality. Arguments about the inevitable clash of civilizations,
however, have an ugly essentialist quality, running directly counter to
the American creed that liberty, democracy and human dignity are
universal values. Our founders, after all, held it "self-evident" that
all human beings, regardless of religion, are created equal and are
equally entitled to self-government.
This is not American idealism, as Merry would charge; it is the
cornerstone of American identity. To argue, as Weigel does, that Europe
cannot be Europe if it is full of Muslims, or, as Huntington does in
his most recent book, Who Are We? , that America cannot be America if
it is full of Hispanics, betrays the deepest values of the
Enlightenment and the tolerance and individualism that are the West's
greatest strengths.
Compared with the doomsday scenarios of Merry and Weigel, Prestowitz's
economic wake-up call seems downright calm, though the crisis it
foretells will likely have far larger effects than the war of
civilizations the other authors imagine. Three Billion New Capitalists
makes the case, familiar to readers of any major newspaper or magazine,
that the entry of hundreds of millions of cheap, highly skilled workers
is profoundly restructuring the global economy. Simply put, Americans
must learn to compete against Chinese and Indian workers who will
accept a fraction of U.S. wages to do the same jobs -- and perhaps even
do them better.
Prestowitz's Friedman-esque synthesis of anecdotes, statistics and
metaphor is engaging, though it has appeared unfortunately close to the
publication of the New York Times columnist's The World Is Flat . Many
of Prestowitz's recommendations are familiar -- a more proactive
industrial policy in Washington, more investment in research and
development, better education in science and math (where the United
States trails the industrial world) -- but some are eye-openingly bold.
For example, he advocates a national system of education financing,
national health care and a national consumption tax in place of the
current income tax. Prestowitz also recommends developing NAFTA into a
European Union-like entity that would extend beyond North America to
include Japan in a common trade and currency area.
These suggestions are not likely to advance far in a country currently
struggling to approve a free trade agreement with the tiny economies of
Central America. Still, they are perhaps not unexpected from an author
who, when he was a U.S. trade official, reputedly kept a baseball bat
in his office so that he could illustrate the smashing of trade
barriers on hapless desktop items.
But even if they are not politically viable, Prestowitz's suggestions
are at least constructive. They are aimed at riding the cycles of
history comfortably, if not rising completely above them. America
sorely needs such thinking at a time when the triumphalism of our
rhetoric is increasingly undermined by the apocalyptic visions of
authors such as Merry and Weigel. America's historic strength is the
ability to look, however imperfectly, beyond religion, culture,
language, ethnicity and tradition -- all the elements that define a
civilization -- to see individual men and women seeking to create the
best possible lives for themselves and their children, both at home and
abroad. Better in the end to keep our values and lose our place in the
world, like Britain before us, than to keep our place and lose our
soul. ·
Anne-Marie Slaughter is dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.