How from the multiculturalism of the 90s that focused on human rights, on respect for the values of each culture and the optimism that in the post-Cold War world we will live a new peaceful period for humanity through the establishment of the globalized free economy, we came to live three decades or so after the whirlwind of two wars?
How is it that in the age of unrestrained activism of social movements in favor of multiculturalism, of tolerance to diversity of all kinds, we have reached the rise of fundamentalism?
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Let's attempt a political, geopolitical and cultural timeline of the last 33 years that oscillate between the end of one century and the beginning of the next with the Christmas breakup of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991 as ground zero.
Just one year later, the American, of Japanese origin, political scientist, political economist and scholar of international relations, Francis Fukuyama writes the book The end of history and the last man which monopolizes interest in the field of international relations after the end of the cold war. Fukuyama is quick to speak of the victory of democracy, of the global establishment of a liberal economy, of the era of a new world peace.
All this thanks to the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which coincided with the end of the first Gulf War, the military coalition of 39 countries, led by the United States, in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that ended a little earlier with the victory of the Western allies. In the year that Fukuyama wrote his book, the West was horrified by the genocide of the Serbs against the Bosnian Muslims in the context of the Yugoslav civil war.
The decade of the 90s in its first steps, with China entering the geopolitical map as the new superpower in place of the Soviet Empire and the beginning of the influx of Muslims in the Western metropolises, discovers the idea of multiculturalism and the majority of the Western intelligentsia speaks almost exclusively – since the major issue of capital and ideologies that monopolized the interest of the 20ου century fades along with its expiration – for human rights and respect for the values of every culture.
The answer will come almost immediately. In 1993, the American political scientist Samuel Huntington in article of at Foreign Affairs with Title The Clash of Civilizations? will cause a political earthquake in Western intellectual circles, not only contradicting Fukuyama's wishful thinking about the end of conflicts and the rise of democracy around the world, but at the same time warning the West that the era of fierce battle between civilizations is beginning, explaining that future wars would not be between countries, but between cultures and that Islamic civilization would become the greatest threat to Western dominance in the world.
In 1996, he will expand his views in the book he will publish The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. For Huntington, post-Cold War conflicts would be more frequent and more violent because of cultural rather than ideological differences; Western states would, he argued, lose sovereignty if they failed to recognize the irreconcilable nature of cultural tensions and required the West to abandon its imposition of ideal of democratic universalism and its incessant military interventionism. Islamic culture, he was saying, is the most dangerous. The peoples in the Arab world do not share the positions of the Western world. Their primary loyalty is to their religion, not their country/state. Their culture is inhospitable to some liberal ideals, such as pluralism, individualism, and democracy. In short, Haddington argued that Arab regimes would not be westernized, explaining that the spread of the market economy did not entail the spread of the democratic ideal. He dispelled the illusions of the West by writing that McDonald's hamburgers cannot replace human rights.
A similar opinion was expressed in 1999 by the American journalist and author, Thomas Friedman, in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree characteristically saying that "Two countries that have McDonald's stores on their soil, will never engage in war with each other." The same he wrote and Cornelios Kastoriadis two years earlier in Free press: “The destruction of traditional cultures without any alternative favors the return of religious and ethnic fanaticism with the known horrible results. In any case, the facts show that Madonna cannot be a "reliable" alternative to the Koran...".
It is 1997, the same year that Umberto Eco will refer to fundamentalism through another angle by commenting on his book Five Moral Pieces that "Political correctness tends to evolve into a new form of fundamentalism"; we have now reached the era of political correctness which, since the early 1990s, has been defined as the avoidance of expressions and actions that exclude, marginalize, insult socially disadvantaged groups of people or experience discrimination against them. The seed of the beginning of the western activist movements that will culminate in the 21stThe century has already entered. The interesting fact is that the term first appeared in the Marxist-Leninist vocabulary after the Russian Revolution of 1917; it prevailed over Stalinism to describe the strict adherence to the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union… to arrive in the 90s to be used by Dinesh D'Souza, the right-wing political thinker, to criticize the left's efforts to promote multiculturalism.
And while the above debates about international relations, about West and East and about multiculturalism have been moving in a theoretical framework for about a decade, they acquired a new, real reality in 2001 with the strike of 11her September in the Twin Towers, where Islamism seems to be uniting terrorists from different countries and cultures for the first time.
World history has once again turned a page.
The following decade saw a steady strengthening of various social movements as an evolution of the political correctness movement that focus on the tolerance of diversity of any kind - race, gender, color -, on the inclusion and protection of human rights that through globalization, the digital revolution – internet, social media – create levers in West and East that set the stage for the Arab Spring, as the mass wave of protests and armed uprisings that erupted in December 2010 and spread across much of the Arab world, the Middle East and North Africa. The initial wave of revolutions and protests, which made heavy use of social networks, began to die down in mid-2012 after a violent response from the authorities. Despite many large-scale conflicts, the Arab Spring failed to lead the Arab states to a Western-style democracy. On the contrary, with the military interventions in Bahrain and Yemen and the devastating civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Libya, the power of religious elites has been consolidated and hopes for increased political participation, for economic and social equality have been dashed.
While the Arab world is experiencing the disappointment of the outcome of the Arab Spring, America is confronted with its movement Black Lives Matters which erupts in 2013 after the outcome of the trial for the death of the African-American Trayon Martin, which (movement) reaches 2020 with the murder of George Floyd at levels of shock in American society. An estimated 15 to 26 million people participated in the Black Lives Matter protests in the US.
The 2010s in the western world see a surge of activism, running from the grassroots of the political correctness movement, to #metoo which has emerged since 2006 and in 2017 is cemented by activist Alicia Milano's tweet to the movement Black Lives Matters creates Black Twitter which in turn sparks that of the woke, which goes from vigilance to racial prejudice and discrimination to run through various leftist and progressive movements and ideologies.
At the same time, after the upheavals of the Arab Spring that continue to preoccupy the Arab world - Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Libya - throughout the decade, the influx of Muslim immigrants has also increased in the West. The Islamic State appears to no longer have national boundaries. Deadly attacks in the name of Islam are on the rise in Europe and America, at the same time as the Western world's perplexity to interpret, accept and deal with the rise of fundamentalism and the possible failure of multiculturalism, social movements and the tolerant attitude of the sensitive Western Left towards the Islamic fanatics. Now, political correctness is blamed by its opponents for a failed model of multiculturalism, the influx of immigrants and the threat of terrorist acts.
The recent devastating attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7 with Israel's violent counter-attacks against the Palestinian people have left the Western world even more embarrassed, speechless and shocked.
Was Haddington right after all?
*Cover photo: Hatem Kotb- Egypt