From: Kharin (kharin@kharin.com)
Date: Wed Sep 24 2003 - 15:04:05 MDT
" To understand why these agreements are being undermined, I recommend "The West and the Rest" by Roger Scruton."
Hmmm.
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/commentary/story/0,4386,210796,00.html
A right to represent the world
By DEEP K. DATTA-RAY
THE United Nations is on trial for its life. And not only because it was ignored over the Iraq war.
Though US Secretary of State Colin Powell has promised to restore some of its lost authority after the trauma of war, that has not silenced shrill voices - not only of the American neo-conservatives - calling for an end to the world body.
Eminent British philosopher Roger Scruton argues the UN has no right to represent the planet since it is a European product - steeped, he says, in Western values which are alien to what he calls, using an outdated colonial-era term, 'East of Suez'.
The phrase itself is Orientalist in Edward Said's pejorative sense for it reduces the Technicolor hues of non-European life to a monochrome.
Similarly, Scruton's European values are Occidentalist for they deny Westerners their individuality and the complexities of History.
Both terms have a long history. Karl Marx spoke of the 'Asiatic mode of production' as being inferior to some standard European system.
Such monotone arguments form the basis of Scruton's case. He shackles Europeans with the same handcuffs that Orientals found so repressive. Chafing at generalisations, Westerners might welcome the end of the myth of 'Occidentalism'.
Scruton's argument that the UN stems from a wave of innovative thinking known today as the European Enlightenment reeks of occidentalism. A leading light of the Enlightenment, Hugo Grotius, dwelt in the 18th century on the concepts that are enshrined at the UN's heart.
Grotius was certainly enlightened, but that did not mean that contemporary Europe was. He was not typical, he did not even represent the majority. His incarceration by the Calvinist orthodoxy that held sway in his native United Provinces - today's Holland - testifies to the fact that other Europeans disapproved of and shunned his ideas.
Grotius' contemporaries knew that they were few and scattered throughout an often hostile continent. That is why they spoke not of The Enlightenment - thick with modern biases - but of The Republic of Letters, which signified a territory and ideology, but lacked concrete shape or form.
The Republic was only as tangible as Letters. To say otherwise is to deny the brilliant flare of Grotius' intellect which allowed him to think what most did not and the courage to speak what others dared not.
The ideas that led to Grotius' imprisonment are now accepted in parts of Europe.
How has this come about? Voltaire's allegorical answer is that ideas travel, take seed, and blossom - just like coconuts from India might in Rome - if the environment is congenial.
Grotius' ideas have taken root throughout the world, the germination has borne precious fruit - the UN, which cannot be effective unless the environment is amenable.
Scruton also tried to expose the 'fiction' of treating non-Western states at par with European countries.
'African states are by no stretch of the imagination nation-states on the European model,' he says, citing Nigeria because it is composed of three disparate peoples.
But, what then of Belgium with 10 million people and five parliaments? There is one each for the entire country, for Brussels, for the tiny German-speaking community, for Wallonia and for French speakers.
Scruton's rejection of the differences within Europe denies Europeans their individual identity.
It is not just Africa that falls short of Scruton's idea of Europe. He dismisses the Middle East as just a 'more complex' Africa, while Iraq, over which the UN haemorrhaged, is only a 'legal entity created by two adventurous diplomats - Sykes and Picot', the British and French statesman who partitioned the defeated Ottoman empire after World War I.
Being typical of non-Europeans, Iraqis, he says, have no conception of allegiance to a single nation-state.
So should UN members not have debated Iraq? They certainly should have. The Suez Canal does not neatly divide humanity into two groups.
Yugoslavia's disintegration proved Europe, too, had its share of artificial states. Russia's Chechen and Spain's Basque separatists underline the same point.
Even the United Kingdom threatens to come apart at the ethnic seams. There are now three parliaments with Scotland and Wales jostling for more power, while England wants to know why Scots and Welsh MPs should sit in Westminster.
That European nations are also uniting as the European Union while some European countries are fragmenting is indicative of mankind's need to stand together.
The UN is the only organisation that makes this possible on a global scale. To destroy it because ahistorical theorists believe it is an irrelevant Western construct panders to the prejudice of occidentalism.
Europe is not united, just as the Orient is not. But every additional day that the UN survives is testimony to the courage and determination of individuals across time and space in their aim to unite the world.
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