Saving Western civilization. Again.
Admir Mulaosmanovic
Author is associate professor and expert in World and European Contemporary History. He is currently member at Department of Political Sciences and Public Administration of Balikesir University.
In one of TV appearances at the beginning of December 2023, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said, among other things, that the war against Hamas is being waged to save Western civilization, thus making an argument that we can hear more and more often as a justification for the atrocities committed in the last few decades in the name of western values. But in the public discourse, the narrative about saving this civilization lasts even longer than its doom is prophesied. From Spengler and his famous work The Decline of the West (first book published in 1918) to the student's Stanford chants of "Hey, hey, ho, ho, 'Western Civ' has got to go!" (1987) seventy years have passed while rescue, according to some opinions, began with St. Patrick’s mission in Ireland.
Leaving aside this debate, I assume that even superficial connoisseurs of relations in the Middle East, and especially between Palestinians and Jews, consider this position nebulous because there is no basis for such a claim. On the other hand, if this position, this apprehension, is seriously considered in order to try to penetrate the possible fears of both Israel and the collective West, it is possible to imagine several perspectives around which the entire Western exclusivist thought revolves.
I will refer very briefly to the two most significant perspectives that I believe play a key role in everything that happens in the Holy Land. The first refers to the constructed Judeo-Christian alliance, which views the existence of Israel through eschatological glasses, and the second, within which Israel represents a beacon of liberal order towards the Eastern Hemisphere. However profound the differences between these two approaches, one purely religious and the other essentially secularist, in the case of Israel they go hand in hand. This leads to the paradox that secular thought and states that are proud of their secular tradition and order zealously represent the interests of Israel's prophetic biblical foundation.
But Israel is not the only "defender" of Western civilization. When we bypass the big historical narratives and look back at the period after the fall of communism in Europe and the end of the Cold War, we get a rather condensed area where the "defenders" are located. The American administration under the leadership of both Bush (Senior and Junior), the EU integrational discourse, the hegemonic aspirations of the concept of human rights and values, popular culture etc., they all stand in defense of Western civilization.
In the Balkans, Great Serbian ideologues had a similar approach during the disappearance of Yugoslavia as a common state of the South Slavs, and especially during the aggressive campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the eighties of the 20th century, the Great Serbian intellectual elite seriously established the narrative of the Islamic threat, focusing on the Albanian and Bosniak factors in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although it was (even today, the situation is not much better) about peoples who were exposed to torture and neglect in the post-Ottoman period, this narrative found fertile ground in certain European circles.
The first reason for acceptance was the aforementioned grand narratives and the historical reminiscences that arose from them. The Balkans, as a "soft belly" within which great traditions merge, for Western Christianity for long period of time represented its front wall (antemurale christianitatis). While the Croats assumed the role of defenders against the Ottoman invaders, the Serbs tried to use this approach to the maximum for their expansionist policy in contemporaneity and even said that they had a mandate from Europe to stop the "Islamic threat". But as the distinguished journalist Gojko Berić rightly observed - If we accept that the Serbs have this mandate from Europe, the question arises why they carry it out in such a bloody manner.
Most of these fears, as another reason for acceptance, were built on the feeling of European demographic vulnerability and the potential malignant influence of migrants who came to the Old Continent mainly from Muslim areas - from Asia to Great Britain, from the Maghreb and the Sahel to France, and from Turkey to Germany. Unfortunately, these processes are not public interpreted as a consequence of colonialism (if we exclude Germany), which additionally speaks of the uncritical nature of European countries.
Western fears, therefore, are gathered around the problem of preserving one's identity, but also concerns about exporting one's own view to other parts of the world. When both aspects are taken into account, the West is actually concerned about the hegemonic position of the white man. Hence, everything that is not "white", in terms of race, ideology or culture, represents an otherness that needs to be cultivated or rejected. History has witnessed this countless times, and the examples of the Zionist and Great Serbian approach are more than clear indicators of supremacism.
In the end, the key question is how much such narratives influence the acceptance of crimes committed "in the name of protection of Western Civilization". Judging by the actions of the Western powers towards what is happening in Gaza, they are ready to accept the slaughter of the Palestinians as a necessity. All this time after October, 7th shows us that. But that means that saving that particular civilization, in this way and by those means, is a futile effort. The actions of the Zionist regime, that beacon of liberal order, made the existence of double standards evident, which in the era of global information further morally degraded Western civilization in the eyes of many peoples. How it will save itself then? The answer is only and exclusively with a critical look to its own relation toward otherness. Because, time of fairy tales are over.