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| Volume IX, December 2002, Number 4 |
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| EXCERPT: Imperial Headaches: Managing Unruly Regions in an Age of Globalization |
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| Michael C. Hudson |
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Dr. Hudson is a professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. The following text is a revision of papers presented to the conference on "International Terrorism, the United States and the Arab World," University of Exeter, July 14-15, 2002, and the International Conference on "Continuing the Dialogue Between Civilizations -- After September 11," University of Southern Denmark, Odense, August 30-September 1, 2002.
It has been four years since the
Iranian president, Mohammed
Khatami, proposed a "dialogue
between civilizations," but it seems much longer. Indeed, in the year since September 11, the global mood has darkened, and the decade of the 1990s now appears to have been the calm before the storm. As by far the most powerful actor in what President Bush the elder once described as a bright "new world order," the United States, having been brutally attacked in its very centers of power, is reacting with a mixture of fear, anger and hubris to a world suddenly dangerous, and to an ill-defined enemy capable of penetrating the strongest military power the world has ever known.
Ghastly though they were, the attacks of September 11, 2001, offered an opportunity for the United States to reach out to a sympathetic world in order to address in common the causes of transnational terrorism. A cooperative approach, informed by dialogue, might have been fashioned and institutionalized. Unfortunately, this opportunity was missed, and dialogue was substituted with monologue. An American administration, although divided within itself, appears to have lurched toward the radical right, driven by a self-righteous sense of victimhood, and prepared to employ its far-reaching military capabilities unilaterally to fight a war without borders against an enemy who is said to be almost everywhere (in 80 countries, according to the administration) and yet whose leadership remains elusive.
Until it was revived by neoconservative publicists, the term "empire" seemed quaint and anachronistic, redolent of ancient Rome and the now-defunct empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But today the notion of empire is debated in the journals and think-tanks of Washington and New York. But since September 11, the advocates of "soft power," as a means for the United States to exercise a kind of loose and benevolent authority in a globalized world, appear to have given way to hawkish ideologues who not only believe in the necessity of force -- unilateral if necessary -- but who also naively suppose that force alone will not only eradicate global terrorism but create stable liberal democracies and thriving market economies in unruly regions like the Middle East that appear to be the source of the "evil" that has so sorely afflicted us. |
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