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Observations by LAKSHMAN GUNASEKERA

"Global power was humiliated on 11 September because the terrorists inflicted an injury that could not be inflicted on them in return. Reprisals are only physical retaliations, whereas global power had suffered a symbolic defeat," writes contemporary French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in a recent commentary in Le Monde. This revered modern (the post-modern originates in the modern) European thinker, in that essay, reflects on the meaning of the current aggressive reactions of the Western powers to the suicide guerrilla attacks on the USA in September 2001.

Baudrillard writes in a self-critical vein from within the bastions of Western Civilisation and dwells on the violent aspect of Western geo-politics today and the violent response from regions outside the West. His views are an increasingly familiar theme these days in Europe or, 'the Continent' as it is known to the Anglophiles among us. The depth of his socio-political introspection is adequate evidence of the continued richness of the culture of his continent.

What he is insisting on is the need to transcend the old colonial conviction of the universal validity of this culture. While Baudrillard, himself, long ago took that transcendental step, his fellow Continentals are slow in following and, as the philosopher himself fears, may require further violent prompting by sundry "terrorists".

Many non-Western thinkers have a slightly different perception of current global dynamics though, perhaps with the advantages of being 'outsiders'. There is an increasing perception that it is not so much the violent counter-politics that is the cause, but that Western Civilisation is unseating itself from its high pedestal of global pre-eminence. This Third World viewpoint also has the concomitant worry that the violent counter to that Western Civilisation's current global hegemony is also in danger of being locked into the same logic of civilisational suicide.

After all, the "counter" politics by Third World governments, some sections of Third World elites, and mass social movements are all just that in this globalised Earth: a counter to the dominant phenomenon. In the sense of a globalised Earth, the dynamics between the forces of Western-led "globalisation" or imperial domination and the forces that oppose it are an internal dynamic within the global system.

Thus when the dominant powers and their Civilisation engages in violent confrontation in a manner that completely undermines the legitimacy of their hegemony, the responding violence and counter-politics face the ever-present danger of being dragged down into the abyss of Western Civilisation's downfall. The enthusiasm or the fanaticism of the counter-politics becomes the measure of a mutually deadly embrace of imperator and subject.

But my focus is on the on-going suicide of Western Civilisation. My argument is that it is not suicide bombers who are undermining civilisation but that a certain imperious civilisation is determined to get into the kamikaze act.

Inherent in the very concept of 'Western Civilisation' is the presumption of hegemony, universality and absolutism. After all 'Western' Civilisation, as we know it today, came into being entirely through the process of European colonialism, the subsequent global spread of capitalism and stamping of Euro-American geo-political supremacy by means of two 'world wars'. Prior to colonialism, there was European civilisation but no 'Western' civilisation.

The 'de-colonisation' process itself was, ultimately, a process of further colonisation: it put in place the post-colonial global system of 'nation-states' - that form of ethno-political community originating in Europe as a corollary to European-originated capitalism. All post-colonial societies, indeed all societies on Earth, must today fit into this global successor to the partially global ethos of European colonialism.

And at the apex of this global inter-state system is the United Nations on the one hand and a set of political-economic 'muli-lateral institutions' on the other, both of which are creations of the dominant Western powers, those successors to a receding European colonialism. The UN, the World Bank, and IMF, the World Trade Organisation, NATO and other similar bodies are a conglomerate of institutions that collectively manage the current world system; that is, they ensure the continued hegemony of Western Civilisation.

The unique achievement of Western Civilisation is this successful assumption of supremacy over entire humanity in terms of a formal domination in almost every sphere of human life and activity. As Baudrillard notes in his essay: "To understand the hatred the rest of the world feels towards the West, we must reverse our perspectives. This is not the hatred felt by people from whom we have taken everything and to whom we have given nothing back. Rather, it is the hatred felt by those to whom we have given everything and who can give nothing in return." Such is the totality of the domination.

I say 'formal domination' because at the informal and non-legitimate 'formal' level there is considerable autonomy of non-Western and non-modern life, resistance or insubordination. And I say 'almost every sphere' because these 'spheres' themselves are those defined by Western Civilisation and there are many other 'spheres' defined differently by other, currently subordinated civilisations, that are yet autonomous or only partially colonised.

At the ideological apex of Western Civilisation of course is 'Science'. The very term 'Science' implies Western science and in that implication lies the hegemonic. But even if Science yet remains supreme globally, even among many who otherwise oppose the West's domination, that other vital paradigm of Western Civilisation, 'Democracy' is not only failing, but is under threat from those who imposed it on the world as a whole and continue to claim its universal validity.

If the careless abuse of 'Science' for purposes of military supremacy, profitability and the frantic satisfaction of desires is beginning to undermine its omnipotence, the even more careless, capricious abuse of the norms of Democracy is more swiftly undermining the sway of the West's political hold over the Earth. The potency of this subversion is that it is not by some external 'enemy' but it is by those who are at the apex, at the very heart, of Western power.

Every step Washington takes toward the military intimidation of Iraq, or other states, is one more step that undercuts the legitimacy of its current standing as 'defender' of the Western idea of democracy and of Western Civilisation as a whole.

When the Western big media organs turned crudely nationalistic after the September 11 attacks, all those besotted with the 'objectivity' and pristine 'standards' of the Western mass media were rudely shaken. Local media trainers and 'ethics' formulators, who had for long depended on the Western 'model' now have to look for new 'models' or, more realistically, abandon the very conceptions of social communication that require such models.

More significantly though, when the US Government ignores United Nations procedures, when it loudly dictates to the Security Council and continues to ignore the voices in the UN General Assembly, the 'greatness' of American Democracy is subverted.

When 8,000 pages of the 12,000-page first report of UN Weapons Inspectors on Iraq were arbitrarily appropriated by the US delegation to the UN before anyone else in either the Security Council or the rest of the giant UN system could see the report, whatever claims that the current US Government has to a commitment to Democracy at a global level is severely undermined.

When senior officials in Washington continue to make the most warlike statements and continue to threaten to disregard the main world political forum that Washington help establish, these are yet further nails in the coffin of the hegemony of the Western idea of Democracy and of Western Civilisation.

It is a subversion that I celebrate not because I spurn 'democracy' or 'civilisation'. Rather, it is the necessary rejection of the link between hegemony and civilisation. What is urgently needed to save Democracy in America as well as Civilisation in the West as a whole, is to end the imperial rule of the Western Democracies and of Western Civilisation.

When I first visited the United States of America in 1988, I enjoyed the trip but underwent my first serious 'culture shock' in my discovery of the limits of my 'westernisation'. In my second visit to the US in 1991 and year-long sojourn I deeply appreciated the richness of American society and democracy. I did so primarily because I discovered the bulky underbelly of American dissidence, dissonance, intellectual ferment and sheer insubordination that parallels the super-structure of the military-industrial complex and imperial power. It is that rich complexity of American society and polity that has had such a profound personal impact and to which I owe much intellectually.

In that sense, even if imperial Washington's arrogant aggressiveness on the world stage today is swiftly undermining the hegemony of Western Civilisation, I need not fear the end of Democracy in America. Rather, the increasingly large rallies in that country for peace and against Washington's currently aggressive foreign policy are living proof of the vibrancy of that underbelly, and a sign of hope for the future of America.

Similarly, the solid popular opposition in the whole of Europe to crude imperialism in the form of military adventures against an emasculated, beleaguered Iraqi dictatorship is also a sign of hope for Civilisation in the West. That Civilisation can only survive with the death of its imperial alter ego that holds sway today.

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