Flashback Tuesday

I've read about Owen Harries' 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs, "The Collapse of the West," for quite a while now, but I was never sufficiently motivated to sit and try to track it down. Thanks be to my university's electronic library, finding a transcript proved less work than the ten year delay warranted. Obviously, the essay is a little dated; nevertheless, some of the points it makes about the "fiction" of the West is very much in line with some of the same things I keep harping on about here. The gist of the article is pretty clear: without a clear, determinable enemy, i.e., the "East", the binary-opposite concept of the West not only becomes vapid, it (generally) becomes unworkable because of the obstinate hang-ups on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean regarding the intricacies of maintaining the image. (I'm sensing a trend in my posts of late.) Or, as Harries himself puts it:

In particular, such proposals for what amount to a new NATO are based on a most questionable premise: that "the West" continues to exist as a political and military entity. Over the last half century or so, most of us have come to think of "the West" as a given, a natural presence and one that is here to stay. It is a way of thinking that is not only wrong in itself, but is virtually certain to lead to mistaken policies. The sooner we discard it the better. The political "West" is not a natural construct but a highly artificial one. It took the presence of a life-threatening, overtly hostile "East" to bring it into existence and to maintain its unity. It is extremely doubtful whether it can now survive the disappearance of that enemy.

[. . .]

In the absence of an overriding threat that one is incapable of handling on one's own--and sometimes even in the presence of such a threat--the inclination on both sides of the Atlantic has been to emphasize not unity, but the difference and incompatibility of Europe and America. Thus, even before final victory was achieved in 1945, the prevailing model of the political world had become that of the "Big Three," with Franklin Roosevelt more suspicious of Britain and its empire than of the Soviet Union; and immediately after victory, Harry Truman ruthlessly and abruptly ended Lend-Lease aid to Europe without any obvious concern for the overall well-being of"the West." Even later in the 1940s, as the clouds of the Cold War were gathering rapidly, most Europeans who thought about such things -- George Orwell for one -- conceived the world in terms not of two groupings but of three, with Europe and the United States constituting not one but two of them. In an article written for Partisan Review in 1947, Orwell saw the two as divided not only as separate power blocs but ideologically as well. Europe stood for democratic socialism, the United States, for capitalism. He longed for a self-sufficient United States of Europe, able to hold out against both America and Russia -- that is, for Europe as the original "third world."

I'm not really sure that Harries is (er, make that, "was") arguing for the demise of, say, NATO, but his essay is certainly a prescient presentation of the background that colors the "Western" divide, or at least the strain, that we're seeing emerge now within NATO. For that alone it is quite interesting.

Note: When I originally posted this, about an hour ago, I included a link to Harries' essay. Upon reading the copyright information on the site, however, I saw that my library privileges could be threatened if that link were discovered. Even while I don't get that many hits, thus making it unlikely, the presence of Google is making me thinking twice anyway. If you're interested, though, I have a .pdf copy of the file, and will more than gladly email it to you.