CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

I was depressed but not much moved when the Financial Times (among others) reported that Bush is unpopular around the world:

In 30 nations, many staunch allies of the US, the public favoured Mr Kerry over President George W. Bush by a two-to-one margin, according to the poll conducted by GlobeScan, a public opinion group, and the University of Maryland. Only Poland, Nigeria and the Philippines backed Mr Bush, while India and Thailand were a statistical tie.

Should we be listening to them? James Glassman at Tech Central is unfazed by the poll, asking

How many French voters would be swayed by American attitudes toward Jacques Chirac? Do Germans really care what people in Iowa think of Gerhard Schroeder?

Not quite convincing. French and Germans both know more about and are more affected by American elections than vice versa. Indeed, since the US president is the leader of the free world, it almost seems that the rest of the world should have a say in who is elected.

However, there is one good reason not to count at naught Americans' own opinions about it: Americans are more educated than foreigners. In three senses. First, Americans tend to have more years of education than foreigners, certainly if those foreigners are from Africa or South Asia or the Middle East, but even, I suspect, if those foreigners are from France and Germany. We also host the world's top universities. Second, Americans are much more educated about our own affairs than foreigners are about our affairs, be they French and Germans, Pakistanis or Indonesians or Russians, etc., even if they know more about our affairs than we know about theirs. This argument applies to the domestic side, but not so much to foreign affairs, where foreigners tend to know a lot more than we do about local facts. Yet even there, it matters that Americans are more educated about what freedom and democratic capitalism are, about why they work, and about the nature of our own national and popular commitment to them-- all of which are mysterious to and little understood by foreigners. We know about tolerance, about how deliberative democracy secures internal peace, about how a recognition of individual rights make both freedom and capitalist prosperity possible. We know these things because we live them. And this self-knowledge gives us insights into the occupation of Iraq, its nature, purposes and character, that the rest of the world lacks. (Heartland Americans know perfectly well that our boys are not imperialist-colonialist-oil-thieving-occupiers, for example.)

I knew Bush was unpopular; what surprised me was that some countries do prefer Bush to Kerry! Given the prevailing slant against Bush and the knee-jerk negative reaction to the word "war" with which Bush is associated, why is that? Why do so many people in Poland, Nigeria, India, the Philippines and Thailand like Bush?

To me, the clash-of-civilizations story seems to explain it. India is threatened by militant Islam. Bush is perceived as the Enemy #1 of militant Islam. A lot of Indians like having the superpower on their side. Likewise in the Philippines, where civil peace is threatened by Muslim rebels in the South. Thailand, too, has a problem with restive Muslims. I wonder if public opinion in Russia will tip towards Bush as it plunges into its own war on terror. Putin sees the US reaction as a model for the Russian response to horrors in Beslan. The places in the world where Bush is most popular are probably southern Sudan and the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where Bush has wielded American power to dispel the threat of genocide.

Nigeria also has a problem with Muslim-Christian communal violence, and no doubt their favoring Bush owes something to anti-Muslim feeling among the Christian community. The Bush administration has shown positive interest in Africa, boosting money to fight AIDS, for example. More fundamentally, west Africa is a place where an excruciating power vacuum is destroying lives and leaving the country with a hopeless future. What stands out in the Iraq situation from a west African perspective is not that heavily armed soldiers roam the streets. They're used to that. What stands out is that those soldiers are Americans, that they're civilized, that they are giving rather than taking, building rather than ransacking, that they can be trusted not to rob or rape or kill indiscriminately. To put it colorfully, to be occupied by American troops would be a "beautiful dream" for west Africa (to use an Iraqi's description of the fall of Saddam.) I suspect that any intelligent west African knows that.

What about Poland? No obvious Islamic militant threat there. Two reasons, I think. 1) Bush is picking up the Catholic vote. Poles know he stands against gay marriage and abortion, and that he is a believer. 2) Poland was a close ally in Iraq, and enjoyed playing a big role and eclipsing France and Germany. Maybe 3) they're offended that Kerry called the coalition "fraudulent." And 4) they know the political capital they built up during the Iraq war will be wasted if Kerry wins and starts kissing up to France and Germany.

The clash-of-civilizations story explains a lot of the opposition to Bush too. The Chinese, for example, see the US as a rival or even an enemy, and certainly the principle obstacle to their recovering Taiwan. They perceive Bush as a strong leader, Kerry as a weak leader, and they want America to be weak. (Not that I'm anti-Chinese. I greatly enjoyed my travels in China; respect its civilization; anticipate that China will succeed as world-hegemon within my lifetime; and rightly so, since we are guilty of creating a global caste system through our immigration restrictions and have thus, as a Chinese dynastic historian would put it, "forfeited the mandate of heaven." I hope, though that the remnants of totalitarianism melt away before that happens, and in the meantime, I think America has a lot of good things left it can do, at least if Bush is president.)

But the strongest opposition to President Bush is in Europe. Europe has become a strange civilization. Untethered from the realism of Judeo-Christian ethics, unwilling or unable to confront the darkness in its own history, retreating instead into an escapist post-historical worldview and a dream of perpetual peace, caged within its own prodigious Eurocentrism, socialist, pacifist and (mostly) atheist, stultified by political correctness, European political thought has been hijacked and smothered by the vast quasi-utopian project of the European Union. They see the rest of the world through this peculiar lens, and want the world to treat borders as sacred, delegate sovereignty to transnational agencies, and abjure violence in favor of endless negotiation. Europeans are true believers, devotees of international law, a substitute for the religion they have lost. They are the only ones. When non-EU countries appeal to international law, they do so because they assume they are too weak to change or overturn it, or because (as for China with respect to Taiwan) it is a useful cloak for the national interest. Meanwhile, myriads of separatists, oppressed ethnic minorities, and victims of tyranny find themselves at the losing end of international law. They fight. It is among these minorities that Bush finds his global constituency.

Israel is one country that cannot possibly believe in the dream of international law. Peace-loving appeasers paved the way for millions of Jews to die in the 1930s; and if they heeded UN resolutions, their state would long since have been annihilated once again. If they had been surveyed, I suspect it woudl be another point for Bush.

And one more: what would the Iranians' preference be in a Kerry-Bush contest, if it were possible to conduct a legitimate, free survey there? Bush, all the way.