We are all Americans now !
Yes, after the monstrous attacks on New York and Washington, we are all Americans on this side of the Atlantic as well. A spontaneous reaction to the unbearable images. Can we take this a step further, however, and draw some lasting lessons from this tragedy?
Because we are all Americans now, perhaps it is time, particularly for us French, to try to stop making our friends from over the Atlantic into scapegoats, fall guys and caricatures on whom our mistakes and frustrations can be blamed? Just like the old Marxists, weeping over the historical collapse of their successive ‘models’, like all those for whom anti-Americanism acts as a diplomatic compass, via the thousands of jean-clad Asterixes crowding into the latest remake of Planet of the Apes, a Coke in one hand and a bag of popcorn in the other, after applauding an attack on a McDonalds in the name of the ‘cultural exception’. How many of our journalists – and not always the worst – have successively described all the elected Presidents of the United States as gullible fools or cynical playboys? How many of our political leaders – including the most important – have portrayed the American system as a model of liberalism gone mad, indifferent to poverty, cruel to the weak, while making no effort at all to find out about the major work of the federal states or the results of the Clinton reforms, or the extraordinary commitment of charity organisations, or the melting pot which is starting to welcome as many immigrants as during the busiest years of the Ellis Island centre – when New York symbolised the dream of freedom of all the world’s outcasts. Today, again, unemployed Latinos, Indian engineers and the scientific elites of all the other continents are being irresistibly attracted by the American dream. We can rightly oppose an intrusive hegemony; as individuals, we are entitled not to go along with a model of society which differs in practice from our own; but let’s stop being unfair to an admirable people.
Especially as we have embarked upon the same century, face the same threats, the same hostility and the same hate. The attacks of 11 September are no ‘ordinary’ terrorism. Dozens of men preparing coldly and methodically, for months, to massacre the innocent and to lose their own lives is a new and disturbing development; especially as their senseless and shameful act is viewed sympathetically in various parts of the world; that is what should be of utmost concern to us. Lulled by the hum of diplomatic conferences and by our infinite capacity for moral complacency, we have failed to see the rising tide of resentment towards the West – including Europe, as we are all someone’s Americans. Half a century after decolonisation, it is easy for many of the ensuing non-democratic regimes to continue to make us scapegoats for their own corruption.
If the success of the Asian ‘tigers’ and the emerging countries of Latin America has weakened the notion of the economic Third World, there is still a political Third World to which equal rights are being refused in the new international order. This problem goes far beyond the powder keg of the Middle East alone. While we feel it is our duty to interfere in Africa, Iraq or Kosovo, we take no action against Russian power in Chechnya or against the Chinese authorities in Tibet. When setting up the International Criminal Court, the West ensured that its own military leaders would not be answerable to it. At the recent conference against racism in Durban, European unwillingness to comment on slavery eclipsed, as far as opinion was concerned, the useful final compromise. In Seattle and Genoa, people from affluent countries turned up to oppose, in the name of anti-globalisation, negotiations which gave the poor countries a first real chance to put forward their views. Like our calls for a universal ban on GM crops to preserve the purity of our fields, which take no account of their major advantages in the tropical countries.
Lastly and in particular: those of us with the words ‘justice’ and ‘control of globalisation’ on our lips, how can we continue to support an organisation whose sole criterion for participation in the management of the world, the circle of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, continues to be membership of the victors’ camp from … 1945? Thereby eliminating the whole of Africa, Latin America and South-East Asia? Five out of five of whose members are former enslaving and/or colonial powers, with no decolonised country; four of whose members are Christian countries, with no Muslim country. No place yet for the largest democracy in the world, India, and its ‘insignificant’ billion people, or Brazil, with three times as many people as France, or Pakistan with as many people as Russia, or Nigeria, which is twice the size of the United Kingdom. We should nevertheless be aware that equal dignity underpins the thirst for justice everywhere. We are supporting an unworthy international order.
Americans, Europeans, as well as Asians and Africans, we are all brothers in mankind. The 21st century world will never be completely free from fanatics – whether fanatics of God, the Devil, or possibly even worse, of Reason. We have the power to make them less dangerous. More so than the Americans, the Europeans have the historical merit of having invented a model of peace on their continent. It is now their duty to play their part in inventing a world model based on people’s equal dignity. It would be highly symbolic if this were to happen in New York, a few blocks away from the smoking ruins, on the banks of the East River: at the headquarters of a certain United Nations.
Alain Lamassoure, 16 September 2001