Gaza the Graveyard of the Liberal World Order
Transcript of a talk I recently gave to forum of Muslim students
I gave a talk recently to an inspirational group of young university students on the Liberal World Order. We spent hours discussing the topic after my presentation. Here is my transcript.
Gaza has been described as a graveyard of children. But it also represents a graveyard of the liberal world order. The very values that undergird this so-called rules-based system have been revealed for what they really are — a set of norms created to preserve the interests of the West. Their unrepentant support for the worst crimes of Israel, the brutality of indiscriminate bombings, the targeting of civilian infrastructure, the carpet bombings of entire neighbourhoods, and the use of the most wicked weaponry – without even the slightest murmur from Western capitals have consolidated a new consciousness. Violence has never been absent under the auspices of this order. Instead, the system was created to safeguard these perpetrators from prosecution. Like the rotten empires of old, as their failures domestically and internationally mount, so too does the duplicity with which they act. This is not an abdication of liberalism; this is, in fact, consistent with the very programme this ideology has to offer. This is a coming of age for many, including much of what is called the ‘Global South’ and, of course, you and I, the Muslim ummah.
Many still believe that the liberal world order is a fair one. Yet the slaughter that is Gaza has revealed its ugly underbelly. From the very first day of Israel’s aerial bombardment, leaders in the West have given it tacit cover for its crimes. The Biden Administration immediately dispatched its top diplomat, Anthony Blinken, to Israel and the region, as well as two strike aircraft carriers.
Both actions, combined, served to send a strong signal to the region to assuage any regional actor from intervening. President Joe Biden followed to give his unrestrained support to Netanyahu. Even when there were questions about international law, as the Israeli war machine swung into action, Whitehouse spokespersons made it clear there were no red lines. The same was reflected here in the UK; both Conservative and Labour leaders were falling over themselves to support Israel. Keir Starmer, a die-in-the-wool liberal, a man of integrity, we are often told, a human rights lawyer – made it clear that cutting off food, electricity, water, and fuel was a price worth paying for Israel to exact its revenge. To this day, the Labour leader refuses to call what has happened anything close to a genocide despite over 30,000 deaths, most of whom are children. Children sleeping in their beds, disturbed by a US or UK-made bomb – designed to kill all those that stood in the way of an enlightened West, unmoved by their final cries.
So, what’s going on here? Why have liberals and the liberal world order failed to address the most consequential blood-letting in years? How can it be that despite all that we have been told of a rules-based system, such atrocities could go on for over four months, yet there is nothing but silence and inaction, punctuated by the occasional speech by Biden, urging that civilians are safeguarded. Yet life continues. Or, in the case of Gaza, life is disregarded. There was more anger in Western capitals over the death of Alexi Navalny, the Russian dissident detained by the Putin government and cast into Siberia, where he was left to rot away. One man whom the freedom-loving West adored became the subject of anger and condemnation for days. Yet the deaths of 30,000 remain merely a subscript in press conferences. White House spokespersons insist, to this day, that the Israeli army does not deliberately target civilians, despite what we see with our own eyes on social media and the few TV channels that still tell the truth. All along, the US vetoed at the United Nations every attempt to censure Israel or call for a ceasefire. To paraphrase Stalin, the death of one man is a tragedy; the death of tens of thousands is a statistic. Why? It was the wrong kind of man that died. Let me explain.
To understand the true nature of the liberal world order, one must go back to World War II's aftermath. The Western alliance, buoyed by their victory over Nazism, were soon drawn into a conflict with a nuclear-armed, communist foe. If the Soviet Union represented a particular kind of economic eco-system and authoritarian government, the United States and its Western European allies would compete with it in the realm of ideas. Soon, the liberal world order became a rallying call for Western, that is, European and American, democratic nations. Where the Soviets and their satellites were described correctly as repressive societies. The West marketed its ideology as an antidote to suppression. As Ronald Reagan would later opine, the free world was confronting an ‘evil empire’. Many beleaguered people in Poland, Hungary, South Korea and South Africa – were convinced of the efficacy of this order. Unaware of its true motives and uninformed about its true nature and motivations, the liberal world order they clamoured for was meant to be one where they would be treated as equals in a community of states.
The world as we know it did not come about by chance, nor is the current world order a result of a natural evolutionary ascension of the human species. Rather, what has become known as the liberal world order emerged due to the United States’ entry into global politics, casting aside its self-imposed isolation and, in the process, organising the world in its image. This order, created in the wake of the Second World War, did not merely consolidate the position of America as a superpower but also set in motion the most ambitious project of hegemony the world has ever seen, surpassing the breadth of the Romans and outperforming the economic prowess of British Empire. In many ways, it was the inheritor of the latter project in its ideational spirit. The United States in 1945 saw itself as a unique power, untethered by imperial ambitions and narrow national interests. It was an ideological power, augmented by wholesome idealism, at least this is how it convinced itself of the righteousness of its mission. If the world was to save itself from the twin scourge of another European war and an authoritarian communist superstate, then it had to rally behind the only virtuous democracy left in global affairs. And so, the die was cast, and within time, this liberal leviathan, as John Ikenberry calls it, became a global hegemon with a global reach. Yet, at the height of its power, this order began to fray and ultimately wither. Until today, many of the world’s convulsions are directly attributable to this slow demise.
The decline of American power is not just a decline of economic or military dominance. It is the retreat of the very ideas that undergird the republic and its imprint upon the world. This is because America is not a normal power; it rather established itself after 1945 as a force built upon a set of ideals, ready to make the world safe for these standards. This missionary zeal had been woven into the very American fabric of this nascent country in the 18th Century. America was the “city on the hill”, ready to showcase to the world a government and a country that eschewed the politics of old monarchies and warring European dynasties. The crafting of the American constitution was an extraordinary feat of imagination, guided by the very theories that emerged in Europe but were thought to be too esoteric for the rough and tumble of practical government and society. This liberal polity, with its separation of powers, federalism, restraints on the executive and a powerful judiciary, together with commitments to secularism and religious freedom, was eventually embraced by the old world. This idea took root in America because of the writings of thinkers like Tom Paine, who took much of his radicalism from the early liberals like John Locke. Liberalism would underpin this new government, and notwithstanding the many contradictions that persisted in American life, such as its ugly racism and slavery, this state would shine as an example for others to emulate.
In the heady days after the end of the Cold War, the world had surrendered itself to American unipolarity and its ideological character. It became known as the liberal moment. The fifty-year conflict had relegated America’s order to its Western sphere, yet large parts of the world were closed off to free trade and democracy. This world order, as Henry Kissinger argues, was now to become truly universal. America would now recast the world so it would become safe for democracy, as Ikenberry surmised. If the United States resiled back to the continent after it carried the burdens of the Cold War, it was argued that this would be a mistake. The United States had become what Ikenberry described as a liberal leviathan. The biblical monster, a leviathan, was the Hobbesian conception of an overarching force needed to restrain man's worst appetites. Early liberals, like John Locke, feared such unbridled power. What Stephen Pinker would later describe as the "better angels" of our nature largely moved our internal impulses to goodness. But this new chimaera was a recognition among liberal universalists that the world without a policeman would turn into a world of disarray. A US-led coalition against Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait served to underscore what President HW Bush termed a new world order – where America would serve to keep the worst appetites of states in abeyance.
And this promise of a Kantian paradise seemed perfectly reasonable. It was the little-known political philosopher Francis Fukuyama who captured the zeitgeist in 1989, as the old soviet order was crumbling with the fall of the Berlin wall – that symbolised the division in Europe. He said in his now seminal work, The End of History,
Fukuyama not only captured the moment but also gave ideological heft to the new world that was about to be created. A world where wars would be a detail of history, where competition that led to conflict would be a thing of the past? Why? Because the German liberal philosopher Emmanuel Kant set out his vision for perpetual peace. Democracies and free trading countries would be less likely to fight one another. If the world embraced capitalism and democracy, this would mean the end of war as we knew it. It was a heady time. The rather patehtic Thomas Friedman of the New York Times also coined the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention. ‘No two countries that had McDonald’s restaurants would go to war’, he wrote. It sounds crazy today, but at the time, liberals were cashing in. Because this was the liberal moment. Globalisation captured the spread of capitalism and free trade. In the 1990’s, we were all intoxicated by this promise. Of richness and equality. To the degree that countries like Ukraine willingly gave up their old Soviet nuclear arsenal in exchange for a slice of this capitalist nirvana.
The European Union became the crowning achievement of this liberal project. It represented the pooling of sovereignty. It was Margaret Thatcher, paradoxically the Brexiteers poster girl, who championed the EU single market. A massive free trading economic union with free movement and the free flow of goods and services. Liberal thinkers like Joseph Nye called it the success of liberalism because it meant the erosion of European nationalism and the formation of a community-based political system. But behind the facade of equality lay a horrible secret. European companies, the recipients of large agricultural subsidies, dumped cheap goods into Africa, swamping local suppliers and eventually making these countries totally dependent on European products, such as German powder milk or Danish cheese. Today, It is cheaper to buy an imported powder milk packet from Germany in Cameroon than to go to the local farmer a few yards away. European companies like Glencore ravage Africa for cheap raw materials, using all forms of accounting devices to pay little for their extraction. Yet the liberal West turns a blind eye to such rabid exploitation. In Zambia, for example, the company’s copper mines pollute local waterways and pay little in taxes. The government remains powerless because the good people of the IMF, who had loaned previous corrupt Zambian governments millions in emergency aid, coerce the country to accept free trade; otherwise, it will be rendered powerless, excommunicated from the asymmetric global trading system designed to punish those that in sufficiently accepted their inferior status. Punishing Glencore, despite how they act, would be unacceptable. Like the people of Gaza, the liberal world order is seen by many to be exploitative, dehumanising and unequal.
As Samuel Huntington said, The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
The post-Cold War era may have hailed, on paper, at least, a period of cosmopolitanism and free trade, but it also gave space to a more muscular assertion of international liberalism, what became known as liberal interventionism. When President Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, declared, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation,” she echoed the same hubris woven into the liberal fabric. The resulting wars in Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011) were all fought to free beleaguered people from tyranny, only to devour the Muslim world into a fire pit of sectarianism and terror. The language of human rights and exporting democracy were the new instruments of this liberal crusade. When it went wrong, it was because the natives were not ready to run their own affairs and embrace liberal democracy. Niall Ferguson opines in his book Colossus that if only America had the stomach to stay the course like all empires, possibly fifty to a hundred years, then it could turn around a country like Iraq. This would allow the spread of “American values to Iraq’s mostly undemocratic neighbors.”
But few would have imagined that this world would unravel at such great speed. Certainly, the wars fought after 9/11 served to undermine American power and, with it, the righteousness of its ideas. The horrific recourse to torture, extra-judicial killings, and a willful abandonment of international law, together with the recognition of the limits of American military power, served to underscore the belief that the United States was out of control. There was a hint of distaste in the words of Hubert Vedrine, the French foreign minister, when he described America as a ‘hyperpower’ in 1999. He was drawing attention to an urgent need to counterbalance American unilateralism. The war in Kosovo in the same year, ostensibly fought to help a Muslim minority from the rabid appetites of Serbian nationalism, signalled unease in Moscow and Beijing. The new Prime Minister of Russia, Vladamir Putin, who accurately saw the bombing of Belgrade as an attempt to capitalise on Russian weakness and erode its strategic advantage in its traditional backyard, vowed to reset independent Russian power after a decade of humiliation. Humiliation was also on the mind of the Chinese. When the United States ‘accidentally’ bombed its embassy in Belgrade in 1999, killing its diplomats, Beijing saw it as an attempt to signal Washington’s strength. The Chinese, remembering its century of humiliation at the hands of Western colonialism, set out to construct its path to meet the United States from a position of strength.
Perhaps the global financial crisis in 2008 solidified the vacuousness of this order in the minds of its detractors. Financial capitalism had brought down the global economy and, in the process, the sacred cows that undergirded free-market liberalism. The global contagion that followed undermined the real trading economy for years and almost bankrupted the exemplary liberal project, the European Union and its Eurozone. Governments responded by racking up even more national debt as they looked to stabilise banks that were ‘too big to fail’. This debt would be paid by punitive austerity measures that hit the worst off in society. Real wages contracted and remained stagnant a decade and a half later. Across the West, it fell on the ordinary worker as Wall Street gamblers were bailed out. The Obama administration failed to hold a single bank executive to account, promoting many of the architects of the crisis to his cabinet and the Federal Reserve. The “Untouchables”, as they became known, returned to business as usual with few regulatory constraints on their behaviour. This is because the US government is a Wall Street enterprise. The money men bankroll the greatest democracy the world has ever seen. The crime scene was disinfected, and the offenders could walk free. The Chinese, who were called upon to help stabilise the global economy, did not lose any time to criticise this house of cards. America could not be trusted to lead the world economy, and China wanted to take a more active role in calling the shots. Yet the Americans were unwilling to share power, blocking modest reforms to increase Chinese voting rights in the International Monetary Fund – unable to accept the meteoric rise of this emerging peer competitor.
China’s rise as an economic and military power has caused consternation in Washington. It is beyond this piece to describe the multifaceted competition that is underway, intensifying daily. The struggle now directs the attention of American foreign policy; it was a factor behind President Obama’s reluctance to directly enter the Syrian conflict, opting instead to use proxies and militias to keep the war in abeyance. President Trump ratcheted up tensions with China through a well-orchestrated trade war, hoping to arrest Chinese economic growth and remind the Chinese that they were dependent on its lucrative export market. He also sought to negotiate with the Taliban, a humiliating exercise that could only have been accomplished by a President who had little self-respect. But he echoed the sentiments of great swathes of Americans, tired of forever wars and American adventurism. The subtext, however, remained China. America had taken its eye off of the greatest adversary it has ever faced, positively enabling its rise by giving it access to global markets and institutions. What has become known as the great gamble, guiding China’s peaceful rise, today looks like a masterclass in naivety. Francis Fukuyama's promise of the inevitable dominance of free-market liberal democracies the world over today lay in tatters.
And then we come to the Arab Spring, for many the moment where the old Cold War logic of propping up Middle Eastern dictators would become an untenable policy for Washington. Yet, as the revolutions gave way to chaos and instability – America reverted to type and turned a blind eye to the new strongmen that quickly filled the vacuum with US coalescence. Egypt had delivered an undesirable government, upsetting US policymakers, worried now about the true sentiments of the ‘Arab street’. Democracy was delivering bad results. The state of the Middle East and the greater Muslim world stands today as a metaphor for American hubris. Yet the very discontents that began the revolutions remain. For now, there is a begrudging acceptance, even in the Biden administration, that it is no longer worth the attention that dictators are better than people who want nothing but liberation from their stranglehold.
So why is the liberal world order so hypocritical? It’s because liberalism is. For all the talk of equality and rights, liberalism suffers from what Bikhu Parekh calls a deep narcissism; If you do not conform to the dominant consensus, you do not deserve equal recognition. This consensus is both intellectual and cultural. Those who refuse to embrace the values of liberal universalism and who do not represent the cultural attitudes of the dominant group have all too often been marginalised by liberal idealists and pushed to the fringes of societies. Both theory and practice, as well as an informed reading of history, attest to the chauvinism that has all too often been associated with liberal ideology.
Liberal toleration developed in the throes of European religious conflict in the seventeenth century. John Locke initially sought to devise a philosophy to remove conflict from the society that came from competing versions of the ‘good life’. To do so, what was needed was a neutral state that would act as a mediator, rise above the fray and not take sides. The state could not intervene in the personal realm or, indeed, the public realm unless real harm resulted from an activity. Both Locke and Mill and others built the contours of a society that would preserve and widen a free and liberal polity. In this political environment, all people would flourish.
In theory, this all sounds agreeable, and it is this version of liberal philosophy to which many would like to return. This is an ahistorical reading of an idea. Strikingly illustrated by John Gray in his book Two Faces of Liberalism, liberalism has always been torn between two contradictory ideals: one where it acts as a benign mediator and another where it advances a project of universalism. All too often, it is the proselytising mission of liberalism that has dominated the liberal state.
This crusading spirit of liberalism is unsurprising. The ideology was closely associated with a Darwinian belief that Europeans and their culture had a duty to civilize and tame the savagery of other world civilisations. This is why the “white man’s burden” was embraced by liberals at home like William Gladstone and later David Lloyd George, and why John Winthrop’s ‘city on the hill’ stood tall as an example for supposedly lesser cultures to imitate. Besides, liberalism, from its very first days, was less a neutral arbiter and more a neo-religious executioner. It demanded something in return for its toleration. Even when you were ready to give everything up to be embraced by the polity, your colour, cultural mores, and creeds meant that acceptance was always contingent on your gratefulness and recognition of your inferiority and status.
It is the cultural supremacism that undergirds liberalism that allowed John Locke, the father of liberalism, when penning his piece ‘On Toleration’ to see little contradiction with owning stocks in the Royal African Company, which ran the African slave trade for England. Nor did he feel discomfort with authoring The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which states, “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves …”. Equality and rights were reserved for the deserving. This is also why Thomas Jefferson, in 1776, when scribing the American Declaration of Independence, found little misgivings in enslaving over six hundred people over the course of his life. Although paying lip service to their emancipation, he argued that blacks were racially inferior and “as incapable as children” and that any future emancipation could only happen with a plan of repatriating slaves to Africa, for cultural dilution would be untenable. “A white woman”, he wrote in 1778 when updating the statutes of Virginia, “having a child by a Negro would be required to leave the state within a year”, or she would be “out of the protection of the laws.” In other words, the law could no longer protect her from the mob. In today’s language, we would call this ‘white supremacy’.
These were not just a few rotten apples or a result of attitudes of the age. Rather, this racial and cultural superiority undergirded early liberalism. Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, and Jean Jacques Rousseau all suffered from the hubristic ailments of liberal superiority. Kant, responsible for developing the early notions of democratic peace, suggested in his writings on the Destiny of Races that “The race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself.” And that “The race of Negroes … can be educated, but only to the education of servants.” And that Native Americans “are uneducable… care for nothing and are lazy.” Voltaire of the “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” fame was also a deep hater of Islam. He wrote a play deliberately aimed to denigrate Islam’s Prophet at a time when liberalism was pitted against the Ottoman faith to incite European jingoism. Voltaire described the play as “written in opposition to the founder of a false and barbarous sect.”
This hatred for the other mirrored a deeper chauvinism that cannot be detached from the liberal mindset. The ‘noble savage’ trope is commonly associated with Rousseau and was used to justify European mastery over native Americans and imperialism. In modern times, the hegemonic order theory often used in international relations to describe America’s role in the world after 1945 is deeply imbued in this Eurocentric chauvinism.
Liberalism cannot be reformed. Its narcissism has to be challenged.
For all these reasons, the liberal world order is not a fit order to recognise the world. As Muslims, we have to think beyond this order, and it's young people like you who should consider forging a confident ummatic alternative. In the Q&A, I invite a discussion about this.
This cannot be more true, or come at a better time. It is indeed the unraveling and decline of the established order that is on its way out, while a new order takes shape.
As a follower of The Thinking Muslim podcast, I have a suggestion for an episode if I may:
Ever since the war on Gaza, I've been thinking how this moment will be one historians turn back to to explain future events, as as you've rightly described, it is showing many of the limitations of the current world we live in.
A few I suspect would be the emergence of more regional security alliances, a new arms race, the erosion of global institutions that were supposed to regulate ideals like freedom, liberty, equality, justice globally and others, multipolar political scenes as you mentioned, and more. Not to mention what's happening currently in the tech space with AI (and its political and military implications).
It would be amazing if there was an episode of the podcast that could cover what experts believe the war in Gaza will bring about in terms of changes to the global stage, and what we as muslims should prepare ourselves for.
Big fan of the podcast and of the work you and your team have been producing, jazakum Allah khayran.
Amazingly thorough and detailed article. Absolutley agree that the foundation of liberalism is the superiority of Americans and West Europeans over others. It was so blatant early on but are now enforcing a type economic colonialism to maintain their power and status as clearly mentioned.
Ive founf this mentality of superiority not only exists at the top government level but is also found at the functional levels, in both the public and private companies. Unfortunelaty, I've heard of examples of promotions based on "looking the part" over experience and qualification, which I'm we all have. This may have worked for first generation migrants but is a recipe for disaster as migrant generations are born and raised in the West.
If only Muslims within Western countries could unite and rely on each other instead of the liberal world order... Insha'Allah we become the people worthy of such unity and strength.
Please keep up the articles and the podcasts!