Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Barbarians and Civilization in International RelationsBy Mark B. SalterPluto PressCopyright © 2002 Mark B. SalterAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-7453-1902-5ContentsAcknowledgements, ix, 1. Introduction, 1, 2. Civilization and Barbarians, 8, 3. Empire of Barbarians, 28, 4. A Civilized/Barbaric Europe, 64, 5. New Barbarians, 91, 6. Decolonizing the Discipline: Forgetting the Imperial Past and the Imperial Present, 114, 7. New Barbarians, Old Barbarians: Post-Cold War IR Theory. 'Everything Old is New Again', 128, 8. Conclusion: The Return of Culture, Identity, Civilization and Barbarians to International Relations, 156, Epilogue: New Barbarians, New Civilizations and No New Clashes, 163, Notes, 168, Bibliography, 202, Index, 221, CHAPTER 1IntroductionOn the Corniche, along the Nile, just outside the Luxor temple, is a traffic sign that reads 'Obeying the traffic light is a sign of civilization'. After five years of noting each invocation of the discourse of 'civilization', the traffic sign – in English – seemed to illustrate the end of the road. This exhortation, directed at the English-speaking tourists rather than the Arabic-speaking inhabitants, seemed to signify exactly what was at stake in the 'clash of civilizations' debate in International Relations. What I found in Luxor was not only the assertion of an Islamic identity against the continual flow of Western influences or the rejection of globalization. Rather, at Luxor, I found refutation of the inevitable 'clash' of civilizations, cultures or Islam and the West.Luxor is a site that has gained prominence several times in its history. Luxor temple in particular is an excellent example of civilizational dialogue: it was started by Amenhotep III (1414 BC), added to by the Tutankhamun (1333–23 BC), defaced by the famous Ramses II (1290–24 BC), invaded by the Assyrians in the seventh century BC, and later by Alexander the Great (332–23 BC). Copts converted the inner sanctum into a church, defacing the hieroglyphics with Christian iconography in AD 200–300. After the Muslim invasion, a mosque was built into the structure of the pharaonic temple in the thirteenth century. And the temple is the source of the obelisk that now stands in the heart of Paris, the Place de la Concorde. More recently, in 1997, Luxor was the site of a terrorist attack against tourists at the temple of Queen Hatshepsut. Currently, one might point as signs of globalization to the obligatory McDonald's, innumerable cruise boats continuing the flow of tourists that began with the French invasion and Thomas Cook, or the multilingual shopkeepers hawking copies of the artifacts that grace the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum. What is notable in Luxor (and in Egypt generally) is their complex relationship to the West and to Islamic extremism.Let me start with the present. The terrorist attack, which killed 68 Western tourists and Egyptians, seemed to prove Samuel Huntington's construction of a violent Islamic revival. Because of popular and academic constructions of the Muslim as terrorist, supplemented by the image of the Palestinian Intifada, Western media interpreted this attack as a 'natural' or 'typical' manifestation of the 'fundamentalist' backlash against Western domination and/or globalization. Tourism, on which the local Luxor economy depends, dried up for nearly three years. Cut off from the global networks of capital and the consumerist culture that accompany it, Luxor was economically devastated.There were several attempts to disavow the attack. The Egyptian authorities tried to dispel the image of danger with a 'funeral ceremony' at the temple one week later, complete with Verdi's Tears of Anger and candles. The popular press blamed Islamist extremists for the attacks and the government for their failure to deal with the root causes of social alienation. As one commentator argued, 'The only way to describe t