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The Battle for Civilization Is Happening in Paris
In one tumultuous month, the city represented both the worst and the best of the international system.
By MICHAEL HIRSH
Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.
On a recent trip to Paris just before that city's most tumultuous month in years—one that began with terrorist slaughter and ended with Saturday's historic 195-nation climate accord—I noticed that the hottest item being hawked on the streets was the "selfie stick." Parisian street vendors carry bronze replicas of the Eiffel Tower and other baubles in their bags, but what they hold up in their hands for tourists to buy are those silly extenders for cellphones, the better to get a wide-angle selfie. No surprise, really. Where else but Paris, that place of "brilliant pleasures," in Thomas Jefferson's words, would a goggle-eyed selfie-seeker be so eager to record his backdrop? To visit Paris is to visit what is arguably the world's most beloved showcase of Western culture and art.
Two very different groups of visitors came to Paris in the past month: the first, terrorists bent on disrupting Western civilization there; the second, world leaders bent on saving that civilization—and the planet itself. Both groups succeeded in their aims, to differing degrees. The terrorists who killed 130 people on Nov. 13 did a fair job of terrorizing everybody, and pushing politicians near and far into measures that, if overdone or made permanent, could compromise the basic values of our now-globalized democratic culture. French President François Hollande's sweeping anti-terrorism measures, which allow him to detain anyone he wants (at least under house arrest) pre-emptively and without judicial approval, are only inches away from martial law—the threat of civilizational breakdown, in other words.
The question is whether the political leaders who signed what is being called "L'accord de Paris" were more effective in their efforts to preserve this civilization than the terrorists were in theirs to destroy it. Granted, the climate pact has plenty of holes—the biggest of which is that it is fairly nonbinding—but it still represents the strongest global consensus in two decades on climate change, bringing in nearly every nation on earth and amounting to, as President Barack Obama said, "the best chance we've had to save the one planet we've got."
Like those tourists with the selfie sticks, we should step back for a moment and take a wider-angle look at the contest we saw in microcosm over the past month in Paris—the one between the international community (civilization, if you will) we inhabit and the enemies who are trying to upend it. Paris represented both the worst and the best of the international system—in that order—between the vulnerabilities exposed by the shootings and the (relative) unity demonstrated by the climate deal.
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It seems, frankly, a pretty unequal contest. Like Paris itself, the international community is bound to survive handily against the incursions of ISIS and its minions. Islamist radicals, after all, are only the latest incarnation of holdouts to this Westernized global system, and like their predecessors they'll probably end up on the ash heap of history someday. In an important 2004 book, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, Ian Buruma and Avishal Margalit observed that the Islamists are just another in a long line of insurgent groups that have sought to organize against Westernization: Both German fascism and Japanese imperial militarism initially saw themselves as resistance movements to the perceived corrupting tendencies of the West. Both movements, of course, failed spectacularly—and both nations ended up becoming stalwart members of the international system. Radical Islamism, contrary to the kinds of things Marco Rubio has been saying, is not a rival "civilization." It is a vicious insurgency against our own.
And yet we all seem pretty confused still about what it is we're defending. One of the biggest problems of understanding the stakes in this contest is that the international community represented by L'accord de Paris seems such a gauzy thing. What is it really? Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once called it "illusory." Donald Trump seems to think it's about keeping the Muslims out. Rubio thinks it's about a "clash of civilizations."
Over the years, I've gone back and forth in my own mind about how real a thing the international community is. Clearly in recent years there's been reason to doubt it. And yet it also seems incontrovertible that there are lot more "good guys" who are organized out there than there are "bad guys," and the good guys—all the civilized nations, in other words—benefit from a "natural bonding agent" in the common fight against terrorism, in the words of Yale scholar Charles Hill. Across the global economy there is a deep and growing nexus of governments and peoples that share common interests and values, even if one of them is greed. There are working institutions like the U.N. Security Council that often speak for and legitimize these shared interests by approving steps like the sanctions against Iran and then the nuclear deal, or by bringing a besieged Ukraine into the Security Council (a recent vote that China joined, upsetting Moscow).
It has proved an enduring system, outlasting the 40-year Cold War and predictions that the "West" would come apart afterward. No country, not even would-be rogues like Iran and (possibly) Russia, has found a way around the iron law of this global order: In order to be influential or powerful, a nation must be prosperous; in order to be prosperous, its economy must be part of the international system; and in order to take part effectively in the international system, even countries with dramatically different political and social systems, like the U.S. and China, must join it and observe its norms and institutions.
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