Rival Brothers: A Mimetic View of East West Relations

  Chapter 1 - Facing each other fears

  If we put Europe and the Middle East in a broader geo-economic and cultural perspective stretching the last 60 years from the end of Word War II, we find an amazing level of structural similarities: Sharing the same economic history and perspectives Both Europe and the Middle East had a post World War II economic boom that brought an historically unmatched development in the region, and this despite (or maybe also thanks to) 40 years of Cold War in Europe and all the conflicts that plagued the Middle East from the 1948 first Arab-Israel war to the last Iraqi war. For example, the story of the Bin Laden family, while horribly tainted by the deeds of Osama, is first and foremost the account of an extraordinary entrepreneurial saga from the founder Mohamed to the current leader Bakr. It has nothing to envy and indeed a lot in common when it comes to their relationship with political power with similar European industrial dynasties like the Agnelli in Italy or the Porsche in Germany. Both regions see a natural path ahead as financial and manufacturing stalwarts (Europe) or trade and natural resource hubs (Middle East), yet both have to manage radical changes (with their associated threats and opportunities) in their reference markets brought forward by rising powers like China, Russia and Brazil. Sharing the same geopolitical risks In addition to that, both Europe and the Middle East face similar amounts of geopolitical uncertainty: each one of them is witnessing the seemingly unstoppable growth of Asian giant nations (i.e. China and India) next to the superpowers of yesterday, Russia and US, displacing the known and relatively comfortable and predictable system of alliances of Cold War times. Europe and Middle East are dealing with old and new rivalries that prevent the states of these regions to reach an adequate scale to effectively assert their interest and compete in the global arena of the 21st century, assuming there is one such thing as a “common European” or “common Middle Eastern” interest, which is still to be proven on a number of key items. As a result, both see their future development prospects or simply their existence as independent entities as not granted at all or at least uncertain. Sharing the same cultural quakes Beside the economical and geopolitical similarities, Western and Eastern Mediterranean societies in the post-World War II era have undergone massive amounts of cultural change, both characterized by a general trend to challenge if not outright do away with the established traditions and social hierarchies. We can just recall here the Marxist and Socialist wave that peaked in the 1968 protests in Europe, mirrored by the Arab socialism ways of Nasser in Egypt and his fellow regimes in Syria and the Levant. Questioning of social structure and economic development led inevitably to an ever growing role and progressive emancipation for women that is still in full swing, albeit with very different speeds across different countries. Too much “left swing” also led to conservative reactions in both societies, reactions that had nonetheless to take the new into account: so while the West saw the Roman Catholic Church re-discuss its approach to many themes and rely on a number of loosely organized “ecclesial movements” to re-assert its views within a secular society, in a rather similar way a number of Muslim movements are trying to re-adapt themselves and Middle Eastern societies to the changed circumstances. Just as example, pressure from the modern banking system led to Islamic Finance and you can hardly find a single booklet of Islamic proselytism that does not try to find also some “scientific” background to confirm the correctness of Islam. Finally, from a political point of view, Turkey makes for an excellent example: after a sweeping secular revolution that transformed the remnants of the Ottoman Empire into modern Turkey with changes so substantial that not even the French Revolution dared to attempt it is now openly giving more public space to religious beliefs and habits (Ataturk in the 1920s changed at once calendar, law, system of government, official administrative language and alphabet while French revolutionaries failed to replace Latin alphabet with something else). But make no mistake, despite the sinister crypto-fundamentalist image that some media like to depict the Turkish AKP party it actually looks much more like the Muslim equivalent of Christian Democrat parties and indeed reports of how AKP members and sympathizers like to behave recall almost perfectly the descriptions of the “Democrazia Cristiana” politicians made immortal by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia in his short novel “Todo Modo”. Sharing the same wave of immigration Publicly available data on the World Bank web site, show the percentage of immigration in some of the richest and influential EU and Mideast countries as of 2005. It is apparent that the relative percentage of migrants to the total population are far higher in Middle East (ranging from more than 25% in Saudi Arabia to over 80% in Qatar) than in the rest of Europe, that barely goes beyond 10% in the biggest countries to reach 22% only in Switzerland. The rates in Western Europe are now substantially aligned to those of the US, while in many Middle Eastern countries the rates are way higher of those of countries like Australia that are still pursuing a “growth by immigration” policy. While we read every day in European papers about the danger (or opportunity, depending if you read far right or far left publications) that immigration might one day change European culture for good, we almost never read at least in widespread media channels that Mid Eastern countries face the same tidal wave of immigration from places as culturally disparate as the Philippines or China, not to mention the consistent amount of Western expatriates that make up the ranks of middle and senior management of many firms. In the streets of Riyadh it is not uncommon to notice advertisements written in Sanskrit by mobile phone companies targeting the large Indian community. The only papers I recall on Mid Eastern immigration in Western papers protested against the strict immigration rules being enforced in the Gulf countries (like e.g. mandatory HIV tests) but one has to wonder what measures EU states would undertake under the pressure of public opinion if ever faced with immigration rates of more than 50%. US citizens in the aftermath of 9/11 attacks accepted restrictions to civil liberties for the sake of national security, and the latest debate ongoing around body scans at airports shows the trend is still very much in place. And it is maybe not at all a coincidence that one of the most discussed restrictions in terms of immigration religious freedom, the so called “Minaret Ban” in Switzerland, popped up in the European country with the highest immigration rate. If you then go to small talk conversation in front of a beer in Western Europe or a shisha house in the Middle East, almost invariably you will land on the argument of the “evil sheikhs belonging to Al-Qaeda” organizing immigrant trade to destroy Europe identity or, in perfect mirroring, the “evil Jewish lobby” trying to do the same to the Arab and Muslim world.

  Sharing the same envy Mimetic theory has taught us a lot about the central role of envy in Western culture and literature, and one has just to look at Rene Girard works for a detailed analysis. Western societies are to some extent huge machines where people are pushed to crave other people possessions and conversely show off whatever they can to have others crave for one’s own possessions. This role of envy is indeed very well known in the East, with the difference that most of moral prescriptions, accepted behaviors and even the laws are indeed targeted at preventing envy from happening rather than at enticing it like in the West. While this might seem a capital difference, it is actually the flip side of the mimetic crisis. The West is in full ritual mode to reproduce the mimetic crisis, the East puts the focus on the prohibition side trying to prevent a new crisis from happening. To explain the concept, I will refer to Saudi Arabia which has one of the most conservative societies of Middle East and to Rajaa Al-Sanea’s book “Girls of Riyadh” which describes the lives of four upper class Saudi girls in the years between high school and graduation. The girls go through all the romance and enchantments of love and passion, and as it always happens not every story turns out well: one of the girls gets to a happy marriage, another to a sad divorce, another one again gets disappointed in love and seeks some form of fulfillment in work. As the book is filled with the description of Saudi society habits, it has been hailed in the Wes
t as yet another proof of how Saudi society mistreats and oppresses women, and I am afraid it has been banned in Saudi Arabia for the very same reasons. After all, Saudi society is going through a development and learning curve that for example would require France to go from Charlemagne to Charles de Gaulle in just four generations. However, if you take out the rituals of Saudi society, the stories could very well belong to four girls located in Paris or London that grow up, get a good education at university, get to know boys of their age and then life develops itself for the better or the worse. Reading the book carefully and complementing it with some real life experience of Saudi society lets a deeper truth emerge, that is women having to wear “abayas” are actually a consequence of a much broader attempt to block any possible source of malicious glances that might trigger others’ envy. Family relationships, space allocation in public places like restaurants and shopping malls, the rhythm of social life is indeed paced on the need to prevent intrusions from the outside that might create insane desires, a chatter of gossip too much and eventually break the so much difficult to find and therefore precious harmony within the family or between the families. Only trusted individuals can be progressively and cautiously be introduced though the various circles that defend the family privacy.

  Yet the pressure to stand out among the others finds eventually some outlets that are deemed socially acceptable like fancy cars or privileged mobile numbers or, as I learned, having your name carved on a knife hang in public at a top class restaurant. As mimetic theory tells, when it comes to imitating desires and creating envy, the object does not ultimately matter much so if you hide women desire will stick eventually to something else. Sharing the same political (r-)evolution dynamics If we look back at the past few months in North Africa, it is impossible not to draw a direct comparison between the hugely popular and relatively peaceful uprisings of Egypt and Tunisia that led to the toppling of long-standing and seemingly very entrenched regimes and their counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of 1980s and most recently in Ukraine in 2004 (another revolution that was followed by a similar uprising in Lebanon). Comparisons range from the surprise and speed of the uprising, the weak response of the ruling governments and the contagion effect that led to the victory of the revolt. Sure, there is also plenty of differences in the context, ways and outcomes that the political changes in Tunisia and Egypt will lead with respect to the Central European precedents and this paper does not even dare start a sketch of analysis. Yet one cannot remark the stunning resemblance between the Central European and North African non-violent revolutions. Even where things are going in the wrong direction like in Libya, one cannot avoid recalling the violent meltdown of Yugoslavia, where a general but not compact hostility against the regime mixed with conflicting external interests and a fragmented ethnic and religious societal texture led to a bloody stalemate. Finally, we cannot but recall that also in violence and warfare the two sides of the Mediterranean have been engaged in mutual imitation: terrorism in its modern form was actually invented in the early 1800s by Spaniards that were waging their irregular war (“guerilla”) on French and Turkish troops to which Napoleon had outsourced the control of Spain as the bulk of the French Armee’ was busy in Central Europe. When Carl Schmitt first described the new concept of asymmetric war in its “Theory of Partisan” work with its implications, he could not yet fathom that the very same dynamics would be at work in Iraq 200 years later than Napoleon and with Turkish troops replaced by an array of private security contractors that would nonetheless lead to the same escalation of limitless violence and brutality. So here is the reality we have to face: due to the uncontrollable forces of history, on both sides of the Mediterranean, our societies and we have been more and more exposed to a giant scale mimetic crisis, with growing amounts of disillusion, resentment and fear. What’s worse, the economic and political environment is far more uncertain and unstable to make sure these tensions and stress are kept under control. As we know from mimetic theory, society and individuals under mimetic stress tend to find a solution by looking for scapegoats. No wonder that immigrants and the “other side” in general come in as handy first candidates, with Muslim in the West and Christians in the East being increasingly subject to subtle discriminations or in the most apparent cases outright prosecution, restriction of civil rights and terror attacks. But we know that this is no solution, because it hides the basic reality that violence is from within us. So before moving on to discuss how to try to defuse it, let’s look back first and see that indeed, some of the most enlightened men on both sides already had found what we are now trying to re-assert.