To the memory of my father, Jules Moïsi,
number 159721 in Auschwitz,
who survived extreme fear and humiliation to teach me hope
Samuel Huntington’s landmark book, The Clash of Civilizations, presented a vision of a world divided by cultural differences, national interests, and political ideologies. In The Geopolitics of Emotion, Dominique Moïsi brilliantly demonstrates that the world is nowadays more likely to be shaped by the ‘clash of emotions’.
Moïsi contends that both Europe and the United States are dominated by a fear of the ‘other’ and by the loss of their national identity and purpose. For Muslims and Arabs, the combination of historical grievances, exclusion from the economic boon of globalization, and civil and religious warfare has created a culture of humiliation that is quickly devolving into a culture of hatred.
And as the West and the Muslim world lock horns, Asia, able to concentrate on building a better future, has come to embody ‘the culture of hope’.
By making clear the driving emotions behind today’s headlines, Dominique Moisi offers a better understanding of the world we live in and perhaps a more constructive approach to the conflicts that plague us.
Dominique Moïsi is a founder of and now a senior adviser to the French Institute of International Affairs (IFRI) and a professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. He writes a column for the Financial Times and contributes to Foreign Affairs and the Guardian. He lives in Paris.
IN AN AGE of globalization, emotions have become indispensable to grasp the complexity of the world we live in. Magnified by media, they both reflect and react to globalization and in turn influence geopolitics. Globalization may have made the world “flat,” to cite journalist Thomas Friedman’s famous metaphor, but it has also made the world more passionate than ever.
In a moment, we shall examine the reasons why this is true. But first we need to clarify the nature of globalization itself, since many people misunderstand it. In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman defines globalization as the international system that replaced that of the Cold War. Unlike the Cold War system, globalization is not static but a dynamic ongoing process, involving the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies to a degree never before witnessed, in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations, and countries to reach around the world further, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before. This same process is also producing a powerful backlash from those brutalized or left behind by the new system.
For many people, especially its critics, globalization is identical to Americanization. The spread of American influence—political, economic, and cultural—dates back at least to the Second World War, but it gained new strength after the end of the Soviet empire in 1991, which left the United States as the world’s only superpower. Thus the growing unification of the world’s economies and cultures means in effect a unification on American terms. As a result, today’s antiglobalization protests, which are now mounting with the deepening of the current financial and economic crisis, combine anti-American sentiments with anti-capitalist critiques in their struggle for equality, fair trade, and sustainable development.
But when we look closer, we see that the equating of globalization with Americanization is too simplistic. The reality is that while the cultural influence of the United States throughout the world is all-pervasive and unprecedented, economically the West is being overtaken by Asia. The current phase of globalization reflects the coming of age of the Asian continent, resulting in the relay of economic power from an American-dominated West to China and India.
Globalization can thus be seen as the combination of two disparate phenomena, which may appear either contradictory or complementary. On the one hand, we witness the impact of the cultural Americanization of the world. The French economist Daniel Cohen believes that the gradual reduction of birth rates in the Southern Hemisphere is the direct result of the popularity of American television series, families with two children having become a universal ideal. On the other hand, the economic rise of Asia is bringing about the end of the monopoly of the Western model. Western predominance in the world, which began with the establishment of the Raj in India in the mid-eighteenth century and the decline of China in the early nineteenth and culminated in the early part of the twentieth century, seems to be coming to an end. This comes as no surprise to historians of empire, who have long known that the rise and fall of empires follow a cyclical pattern.
This leads to a situation of asymmetric multipolarity: the key actors on the world stage are not only unequal in terms of power and influence but also differ dramatically in their views of the world. While America and Europe still approach world affairs in a normative manner on the basis of a belief in universal values, China and India, and now also post-Communist Russia, appear far less interested in what the world should become than in their own positions of power within it. (Thus, for example, Russia’s oil and gas wealth is not supposed to contribute to the improvement of life on the planet but to restore the strength and legitimacy of Russia in the international system.)
Such a pragmatic approach is evident in China’s view of Singapore. That city-state, with its fusion of Confucian values and eighteenth-century-style enlightened despotism, has played a major role in the evolution of modern China. When, in February 1978, China’s new leader Deng Xiaoping stopped in Singapore on a diplomatic visit, he did not recognize the “mosquito dump” he remembered from the 1920s. Barely a decade after achieving its independence in 1965, Singapore was already a prosperous city, which had embraced capitalism under the firm but enlightened guidance of Lee Kuan Yew. Once liberated from a narrow socialist economic vision, Lee Kuan Yew argued to Deng Xiaoping, the Communist heirs of the mandarins of the Middle Empire should be able to do even better economically than the descendants of poor Chinese peasants from the south. And indeed this has been the broader vision that Deng and the rest of China’s leaders have followed.
For China, this pragmatic approach has paid off. The country’s remarkable economic progress has been achieved without democracy, even without the rule of law.
In the rest of the world, meanwhile, democracy has been dangerously devalued through the inflationary use of the word by the Bush administration in its attempt to justify the United States’ geopolitical ambitions. The contrast between the democratic ideal and the reality of democratic practices in too many Western and non-Western countries may explain in part the relay of power from America to Asia that I have described.
If democracies are losing faith in democratic models, and if autocratic regimes are supported in their anti-democratic practices by their combination of high economic growth and political stability, it is the Western world that suffers most from this evolution. Less than twenty years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West enjoyed a sense of supremacy because of its democratic values that more than compensated for the fact that countries like the newly united Germany were not doing well economically. But today the democratic essence of the West is no longer seen as compensating for its lack of economic performance. Maybe emotions have returned to the forefront of the international scene in part because the West can no longer rely on either its values or its fading economic supremacy and therefore reacts to global changes with a certain bitterness and a desire to protect its precious open world against hostile forces.
But the primary reason that today’s globalizing world is the ideal fertile ground for the blossoming or even the explosion of emotions is that globalization causes insecurity and raises the question of identity. In the Cold War period there was never any reason to ask, “Who are we?” The answer was plainly visible on every map that depicted the two adversarial systems dividing the globe between them. But in an ever-changing world without borders, the question is intensely relevant. Identity is strongly linked with confidence, and in turn confidence, or the lack thereof, is expressed in emotions—in particular, those of fear, hope, and humiliation.
Economically, globalization can be defined simply as the integration of economic activities across borders through markets. The driving forces of globalization, masterfully analyzed by Martin Wolf, are technological and policy changes that reduce the costs of transport and communications and encourage greater reliance on market forces. But this free flow of goods in economic terms also implies in political terms the free flow of emotions, including both positive emotions (ambition, curiosity, yearning for self-expression) and evil ones, including the angry passions that lead to hatred between nations, religions, and ethnic groups. Thus terrorism has become the threatening, tragic face of globalization.
I don’t mean to imply that contemporary terrorism is a direct result of globalization. Terrorists have always crossed borders in pursuit of their goals (notably in nineteenth-century Europe), and the terrorism of al Qaeda has its origins in the specific political situation of the Middle East, which predates and is quite distinct from globalization. But what is new is the impact of the communications and transportation revolutions on the strategy and tactics of the terrorists, with the media revolution (including the internet) providing new and powerful sounding boards for the terrorist message. New technologies have created a world where, to adapt the words of Churchill, “Never have so few been able to do so much harm to so many.”
In a world where the West no longer has a monopoly on the media, events and conflicts can be reported from a variety of angles. The invasion of Lebanon by Israel in the summer of 2006, for instance, appeared as two entirely different wars depending on whether one viewed the coverage on Al Jazeera or on CBS news. In today’s world, everyone has access not only to continuing information but also to unfolding emotions. Now that American television series reach all corners of the world and have nearly become universal frames of reference, the poor know how the rich live, and vice versa. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult for the rich to ignore the world’s poor, whose anger they witness on the evening news. Many poor people risk their lives by crossing seas and climbing barriers to enter the world of the rich; others who stay at home develop an abiding hatred for the affluent who deliberately ignore their fate.
After 9/11, the brother of one of the al Qaeda terrorists imprisoned by the American authorities before he could join the nineteen other conspirators, was interviewed on French television. He described his brother as a young man who “wanted to succeed at the top of Wall Street or destroy to ashes the world that would not make a place for him.” Such a statement would be impossible if Wall Street and the Islamic Middle East still occupied separate worlds, as they once did.
In a transparent world the poor are no longer ignorant of the world of the rich, and the rich have lost the privilege of denial. They may choose to ignore the tragedies of the developing world, but it is a choice they must make consciously and, increasingly, at their own peril. “Not to act is to act,” the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to say. Today not to intervene to alleviate the sufferings of the world is a form of intervention.
Thus globalization has created a process of universal bench-marking that makes the West more vulnerable. This is true even by comparison with the era of the Cold War, with its ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, a threat that was both less diffused and more visible and therefore, in retrospect, more emotionally manageable, even “reassuring.” When West and East confronted each other across a metaphorical wall (made real, of course, in Berlin), the enemy was singular, easy to identify, and capable of being analyzed, deterred, and negotiated with. Now all that has changed, and the enemy comes not only from another cultural and religious domain but seemingly from another era, one with premodern historical and political references.
The privatization of violence through terrorism; the fact that more conflicts are internal and not external (civil wars rather than international conflicts); the invisible nature of the terrorist threats; and the multiplication of nonpolitical threats such as global pandemics and climate change: all these factors have contributed to a sense of insecurity, vulnerability, and fear. Today in the West we live with an apprehension that can be formulated in one question: what kind of world will our children inherit? Will the combination of spectacular demographic trends—leading, according to projections, to a world of nine billion people by 2050—and worsening shortages of energy, water, and other commodities produce extreme planetary tensions and even wars of sheer survival?
If the twentieth century was both “the American century” and “the century of ideology,” I think there is strong evidence that the twenty-first century will be “the Asian century” and “the century of identity.” The parallel shifts from ideology to identity and from West to East mean that emotions have become more important than ever in the way we see the world.
In the ideological atmosphere of the twentieth century, the world was defined by conflicting political models: socialism, fascism, and capitalism. In today’s world, ideology has been replaced by the struggle for identity. In the age of globalization, when everything and everybody are connected, it is important to assert one’s individuality: “I am unique, I am different, and, if necessary, I am willing to fight until you recognize my existence.” A Slovak is not a Czech, and a citizen of Montenegro is not a Serb. In a world dominated by identity, we are defined less by our political beliefs and ideas than by the perception of our essence, by the confidence we gain from our achievements and the respect we receive from others or by the lack thereof.
In this perception of our essence, emotions come into play, linked to the way we look at others as much as to the way others look at us. Emotions are at the same time the image in the mirror and the eye of the person that beholds that image. Emotions are reciprocal, as powerfully illustrated, for instance, by the modern well-educated Muslim women who choose to wear the head scarf in the West, thereby eliciting a cascade of mirror emotions concerning their identity and motives. You fear someone, you are humiliated by someone, and even in the case of hope you are inspired by the success of someone else. Such intertwined, mutually dependent emotions are the key to understanding our identity-dominated world.
Fear, humiliation, and hope can thus can be seen as equally natural and vital ingredients in human beings as the three components of blood: red cells, white cells, and plasma. We all require these three elements in order to live a healthy life. But health depends on the right balance between them. To have too much or too little of any of these three components is dangerous for the balance of the body and for its long-term health. A balance of emotions is as vital to the “health of the world” as “balanced” blood to the health of individuals.
The two “passions” (emotions) that most concerned the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Spinoza were hope and fear, for both relate to uncertainty over what the future will bring. Yet both are necessary in life. An element of fear is necessary for survival, and hope ignites and fuels the motor of life. Even humiliation in very small doses can stimulate one to do better, especially if it comes from a friend who does better in sports or school or a friendly country that performs better in sports or business. But deliberate humiliation without hope is destructive, and too much fear, too much humiliation, and not enough hope constitute the most dangerous of all possible social combinations, the one that leads to the greatest instability and tension.
We all might agree that emotions play an important role in human behaviour. We might even agree that the emotional conflicts raised by identity issues in today’s globalizing world appear likely to have a significant impact on geopolitics. But what is the specific, concrete connection between emotions and geopolitical conflict? Is it possible to go beyond generalizations about emotions to see actual patterns of behaviour that help explain what is happening on the world stage?
I believe it is, and that the mapping of emotions is one way of recognizing these patterns. Such a mapping involves bringing together elements as diverse as surveys of public opinion (how people feel about themselves, their present, and their future), the statements of political leaders, and cultural productions such as films, plays, and books. Architecture is particularly significant, for it reflects the way a society decides to project itself in space at a given time. Through indicators like these, emotions, the most subjective of topics, can be approached and studied in an objective, if not in a “scientific,” way.
The mapping of resources or interests is of course much more familiar than the mapping of emotions. In fact at one time geopolitics, in the strictest sense of the term, was based on a belief in the absolute determinism of geography, the conviction that the behaviour of nations and empires was dictated by it. A maritime power like Great Britain would necessarily behave differently from a continental power like Russia. In the hands of certain influential geopolitical thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century this notion became oversimplified. In its worst manifestation, when its ideas influenced Hitler’s Lebensraum ideology, geopolitics even contributed to the destruction of Europe in the Second World War by encouraging statesmen to view control of territory as crucial enough to national destiny to justify launching a global war.
Today most students of history recognize that while geography does matter, it is not the single determining factor some once claimed. In sixteenth-century France the philosopher Jean Bodin developed a theory of climates that remains useful. Political regimes are still in part influenced by climatic and geographic considerations. The so-called Protestant ethic appears to exert a stronger influence in cold countries than in hot and humid climates, yet Singapore would appear to be a perfect counterexample, where humidity and an ethic of hard work are not incompatible. Like any other form of determinism, geographic determinism fails to reflect the complex realities of human behaviour.
Thus, if we are to apply the basic insight that geography influences behaviour to the world of emotions, we must avoid the oversimplification and rigid determinism that are the twin pitfalls of such an approach. But if we do not integrate emotions into our analysis of the world, we are in danger of ignoring a fundamental aspect of political life.
For instance, we cannot begin to comprehend the Israeli–Palestinian conflict without understanding its emotional dimension. This is of course a conflict about land, security, prosperity, and sovereignty, but it is also charged with emotions. A leading member of the Palestinian elite once memorably described to me how his people felt: “It is as if you were walking in the streets of the city where you were born and suddenly, above your head, a window opens and someone throws out of that window a human being that crushes you as he reaches the ground.” The unfortunate passerby is of course the Palestinian; the person responsible for the defenestration is the European; and his victim, who in turn becomes the oppressor of the Palestinian, is the Israeli Jew.
No doubt children of Holocaust survivors would find this interpretation of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict difficult to accept. But they have to take it into account if they are to understand the position, the motives, and the concerns of the adversary with whom they must deal.
How do you reconcile two peoples with diverse emotional landscapes, when the miracle of rebirth for one is the Naqbah, the catastrophe of defeat and oppression, for the other? While for the Israelis their state is the legitimate and necessary manifestation of nationhood, for the Arabs it is an anachronistic demonstration of Western imperialism.
I consider the Israel–Palestine conflict not only, so to speak, the matrix of international relations but the archetypal encounter between two of the primary emotions I describe in this book: humiliation and fear. A nation has been born out of an absolute and unique tragedy; a people has been crushed and oppressed by a victim rendered blind to the suffering of others by the immensity of his own wounds, physical and psychological. Nothing could be more emotionally charged than this tragic encounter taking place on an international stage still dominated by the guilt of a Western European world torn between memories of anti-Semitism and colonialism.
The Israeli– Palestinian conflict could well become the epitome of the relationship between the West and the Arab Islamic world as a whole if it is allowed to remain without a solution. If the West does not successfully exit from the vicious encounter between fear and humiliation—between itself and the Arab-Islamic fundamentalists—it may be condemned to inexorable decline and a relegation from the centre of history to its margins.
And where is hope? I met it in Asia. I came back from my various Asian trips, from Mumbai to Singapore in particular, convinced that the mood gap between Asia and the rest of the world is huge and growing. In the last World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2008, the contrast between the sense of doom and gloom of the Western representatives and the sense of lighthearted resiliency and confidence demonstrated by Asians was striking. (Of course the fact that the leading government of the West, that of the United States, is now financially dependent on vast sums borrowed from the East surely has something to do with the relative confidence of Asian economic leaders as compared with their Western counterparts.) Yesterday’s motto, “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold,” seemed to have been replaced in Davos by a new formula: “When America catches pneumonia, China and India merely sneeze.” And though the world financial crisis we are now experiencing will affect Asia too as it deepens, the ability of the Asians to rebound is probably greater, enhanced by the “hope surplus” their people enjoy.
Some observers have said that conflicts between nations today can be best explained not by emotions but rather by broader and deeper cultural patterns. This is the belief most notably articulated by Samuel Huntington in his famous 1993 essay in which he claimed that a clash of civilizations was about to dominate world politics, in which culture, alongside national interest and political ideology, was becoming a geopolitical fault line. He presented a cyclical vision of history, starting from religions and ending with civilizations, after having gone from the clash between states to oppositions between nations and from nations to ideologies.
I have always had serious reservations about Huntington’s theory. I think that in his search for a new enemy in order to focus the foreign policy of the United States after the demise of the Soviet empire, Huntington dangerously confused the notion of culture in general, including social and religious beliefs and behaviours, with that of political culture. Are not many in the Asian world also believers in the universal applicability of Western values and practices such as democracy? If so, what does this do to the idea that cultural fault lines are necessarily political and ideological fault lines as well?
There also seems to be no sign of an alliance between Asia and the Islamic world against the West, as Huntington predicted. On the contrary, in the international arena India and China behave more like satisfied status quo powers than irresponsible and dangerous revolutionaries. China and India largely accept the world as it is. The Chinese seem to feel comfortable with the international status quo as long as they can fully control and suppress any attempt to challenge their imperial power (as they seek to do in Tibet) and as long as they are convinced that the tide of world affairs is moving their way. The idea, widespread in the 1990s, that Europe’s past could be Asia’s future and that military competitions and insecurity have moved from Western Europe to East Asia has not been confirmed with the passage of time. What has moved from West to East is not war but, above all, economic growth.
In recent years, the truly revolutionary powers in the world have been the two former rivals of the Cold War: Putin and Medvedev’s Russia and George W. Bush’s America. And the revolutionary nature of these regimes has been driven not by any cultural factors but by emotional ones: Russia’s renewed sense of confidence and its recovery from the humiliation it felt in the wake of the Cold War, and America’s overconfidence in the universal appeal of the democratic ideal and the unique strength of its military power—an overconfidence that may in fact reflect a deep identity crisis. With the United States trying to change the existing status quo in the Middle East in the name of democracy, and with Russia threatening to change it in the Caucasus in an effort to restore its own imperial status, America and Russia have had more in common than either side would willingly admit.
By focusing on emotions, I am emphasizing a new reality that can be summarized in very simple terms: in the age of globalization the relationship with the Other has become more fundamental than ever.
In European history, in the eighteenth century and before, there were so few absolute Others that they were a source of curiosity, treated as conversation pieces or like exotic animals to be collected and exhibited. With the revolution in transport, absolute Others became much more numerous and were enrolled as an important element of our economic or military adventures. Colonial empires came to play a central part in European rivalries. We had taken great care to “civilize” the Others, and the time had come to use them directly for our own benefit. (Just consider the number of North African or black African graves on the battlefields of World War I in the eastern and northern parts of France.)
But while in the nineteenth and even the first half of the twentieth centuries, the Other was no longer a rare curiosity, it had not yet become the absolute Other, forcing us to question our own identities and to challenge our social and political models. At the time of the Cold War, the absolute Other for the Western world came from the Communist system; in intellectual and cultural terms it was the “other side of the West.” Today in our global age the absolute Other comes not only from another, non-Western culture but even, in a sense, from a different century, mixing a quasi-tribal mind set that seems reminiscent of our own Middle Ages with the technological instruments of the present. And the Other not only evokes our past of religious intolerance and warfare, but may also incarnate our future. Yesterday, for the West, non-Westerners could succeed only if they were following the Western model; they would fail if they stuck to their own traditions. Today, when we Westerners look eastward, we are all too uncomfortably aware that we may be glimpsing our own future, one that is beyond our control.
With the rise of Asia as a challenge and the emergence of fundamentalism as a threat, the West is today confronted with serious questions about its identity. In the age of globalization, relations with the Other have become so central that we are forced to redefine our own essence. Who are we? What makes us so special and different? This task proves to be far more difficult for someone from the West, who is used to interpreting the world in the categories of “us” and “them,” than it is for a Chinese or an Indian, who is used to living in parallel worlds, his own and one that is Western dominated.
Most of my Asian friends went through the best Western universities. They have an intimate knowledge of us and our culture. They know what makes us tick, so to speak. By contrast, the “Asian side” of their personality remains largely a mystery to me and my Western friends. In the West, experts on Asia remain too few and are too often limited to their field of expertise, be it art, history, or languages. One highly respected specialist on Japan at a major American university told me many years ago that the more she knew about Japanese culture, the less she “really” understood.
Thus the hybrid nature of Asian identity seems much more adaptive to a world in conflict, and therefore more beneficial, than the relative homogeneity we find in the Western world. Because we in the West still tend to see ourselves as central, we are more challenged and even destabilized in our core identity than Asians are. They manage to remain themselves while becoming us.
Another challenge to the notion that emotions can be a key to understanding global conflict might come from the belief that emotions are too inherently subjective, “soft” and indefinable to be truly meaningful. This is an attitude that connects powerfully with the present dominant scientific, positivist mood in academic circles, particularly in the realm of international relations.
I understand the thinking behind this attitude. The more complex the world becomes, the greater the temptation to analyze the international system through the distancing prism of a scientific or pseudoscientific approach. The refusal to be “policy oriented” can be understood from an ethical standpoint; you do not want to be “corrupted” by even remote contact with day-to-day realities, such as the current war in Iraq. But this approach runs the risk of losing any relevance to the real world. Quantitative analysis theories, so popular today in departments of international relations in many of the world’s most prestigious universities, may be reassuring in their abstraction, but does their refusal to touch the big questions make sense? (According to one simple metric, the answer is no. In many universities, students react to these abstractions with their feet and simply desert the courses.)
The fact is that subjective, “soft” realities are essential to understanding geopolitics at even the most rudimentary level.
Consider maps of physical geography. They have a reassuringly objective quality. Plains are green, mountains are brown, and oceans are blue. Of course nature sometimes changes more brutally than political realities. After a tsunami or an earthquake, the colour lines of a physical map can change dramatically, introducing more blue where there was green or brown. And the warming of the planet will most likely accelerate the rhythm of these natural changes. Greenland already has new islands that were until recently thought to be part of its mainland.
By contrast, political and economic maps aren’t objective portraits of natural realities but subjective constructions, very often even instruments in the hands of governments. Israel does not exist on most Arab maps. It has simply been erased, like pictures of opponents to the Soviet regime in reworked photographs at the time of Stalin. Judaea and Samaria stand for the West Bank in Israeli maps. Cyprus is shown split in two on Turkish maps, as one on Greek maps. The Gulf is Arabian for Saudi Arabia and Persian for Iran. It would be easy to multiply these examples.
Of course, data about demography, level of wealth, and energy resources can be treated in a more objective, even scientific way, but this isn’t always the case. Even figures can be distorted for political purposes, as with the demographic evolution of respective religious minorities in Lebanon, or in Bosnia during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, or simply hidden, like life expectancy data in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
The mapping of political regimes is even trickier. In ancien régime Europe, maps kept evolving as a function of wars and alliances that were successively formed and broken and empires that swelled and shrank. Nations were formed and dissolved—for example, Poland, a country that disappeared as an independent state for more than a century between 1795 and 1918 after three partitions among greedy neighbours.
At the time of the Cold War, maps had a reassuring simplicity. They barely changed from 1945 to 1989. Two blocs confronted each other, and the rest was the so-called nonaligned world. The Soviet bloc was classically shown in red; the Atlantic alliance, generally in blue.
Since the end of the Cold War, political maps have again become more liable to change. First, a multiplicity of states has emerged, especially in Europe and Central Asia, as a result of the disappearance of Yugoslavia, the end of the Soviet empire, and the peaceful reshaping of countries like Czechoslovakia and Germany.
Second, the criteria by which to determine alignments are even more uncertain. Where is Russia to be placed now that it is no longer the Soviet Union? In the European West, which probably makes cultural sense, or in the Asian East, which fits its political orientation, given its traditional flirtation with “Oriental despotism”? Should democracies be defined purely in terms of the character of the electoral process, with the danger of confusing “illiberal democracies,” such as Iran, with old, established democratic countries based on the rule of law? Should religiosity and faith instead be the criteria for classification, with China and Europe in the same secular category, and the United States, India, and the world of Islam forming a kind of spiritual and religious bloc? What is the value of a religious map when, in the continent of Europe, the practice of Christianity is in deep decline, to judge by the number of vocations for the priesthood and church attendance?
It’s clear, then, that even the “objective” factors beloved by those who claim a scientific, positivist approach to history are often more subjective than they appear.
Nonetheless, we must acknowledge that mapping emotions is far from easy. If even classical political maps are increasingly difficult to draw, the mapping of emotions can seem like a pure fantasy and perhaps a dangerous illusion, a superficial and potentially unstable venture based on subjectivity, simplification, and a Manichaean view of the world.
Even the idea of associating colours with emotions is problematic. What would the colours of emotions be? Colours vary with different cultures. Should humiliation be green because it is the colour of Islam and because of the common Western expression “green with envy”? Should fear be red and hope blue, or should it be the reverse? How would the American political vocabulary of “red” and “blue” states affect the equation? The colour of affliction is black in some countries, white in others.
It would take the genius of a great artist to capture the subtle variations and nuances of colours that characterize the world of emotions. And even a Turner or a Monet would find it impossible to achieve, especially in today’s complicated world.
Another reason for the difficulty of mapping emotions is the growing relativity of geography in our global age. For many, geography is no longer a given but a matter of choice. Consider the case of the United Arab Emirates. In geographical terms, they are clearly located in the Middle East. But in psychological, economic, and emotional terms, they are in Asia, having joined the culture of hope very consciously and very deliberately, helped in this process by their unique combination of huge energy resources and smallness in geographical and demographic terms. Their model is clearly and openly Singapore. Dubai is competing with Malaysia for the possession of the tallest tower buildings in the world. Their towers of optimism reaching to the sky are, and are meant to be, an open declaration of confidence in a region otherwise marked by diffidence and violence.
Of course the price of Dubai’s culture of hope for the happy few is the miserable living conditions of those who make that geographical and psychological shift possible. But are these mostly immigrant workers worse off than the millions of unemployed people elsewhere in the world? At least these migrant workers are able to feed their families left at home as long as Dubai’s prosperity continues. On the whole, the achievements of the emirates should be respected. They represent important testimonials to human willpower as well as evidence that Islam and modernity are compatible.
If the state of Israel, by a magical or divine process of levitation, could leave the Middle East, that would satisfy a majority of Israelis who are eager to join the Asian sphere of prosperity or perhaps return to Europe, the continent that was the seat of their tragic destiny but also, for centuries, the place of their largely successful integration. I still remember the Israeli professor whose family was of German descent who, as we walked in the streets of Berlin at the peak of the second intifada, took out her German passport and sadly, ironically declared, “This passport is my life insurance.” In fact the number of Israeli citizens who have left their country for the Federal Republic of Germany more than doubled to over four thousand in 2006. The number of Israelis residing abroad is becoming a worrying brain drain for the country.