Beyond the Global Culture War by Webb Adam Kempton

Author:Webb, Adam Kempton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-135-44259-0
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Chapter 8

Fortresses Become Prisons

So far we have scen how the major clusters of antiliberal resistance fit into the global culture war: their support bases, strategies, and goals. Their built-in problems with agency have also become clear. My main purpose has been to show why these movements have proved unable to mount a successful challenge. To the shortcomings already covered, I should now add their insularity. If global atomism is ever to face a challenge on its own scale, resistance must coalesce around a set of principles that can resonale worldwide. Why have these movements failed to fight on that level?

As a starting point, it bears noting that they are not wholly provincial. They have often forged wide-ranging alliances within their own communities of reference, even it those communities are spread over many countries. Amerindian movements, for example, have turned weakness into strength by linking up across Latin America's borders, appealing beyond their own governments to an international audience of human rights watchdogs, development foundations, and academics. Religious conservatives in the United States have been known to work together across Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish sectarian lines, on specific policy issues. Even more dramatically, Islamism also cuts across borders. Writings and taped sermons flow back and forth, militants train together, and leaders know one another. At the fringes of Islamism, al-Qā'idah has operatives everywhere from Argentina to Germany to Indonesia, and plots to blow up its enemies wherever they prove vulnerable.1 None of thcsc movements are provincial in a strict sense of the word.

Rather, the problem is that they do not collaborate on a truly global scale. Whenever these reactions do look outward, either at universal atomism or at one another, they tend to stay on the defensive. Part of this is understandable. Atomists have what amounts to a monopoly on global debate. They staff almost all transnational institutions and information networks, whether human-rights foundations or professional associations or policymaking bodies. If regional antiliberals take their efforts farther afield, beyond their own countries or ethnic or religious bases, they find that these settings recolor their message.

Amerindian activists have suffered most from this pattern. One scholar has described them as “self-consciously phualistic,” willing to draw on international language about human rights, identity, and the “global village.”.2 This Amerindian obeisance to global liberalism has several causes. First, the movements in question have chosen to appeal beyond their governments to certain kinds of transnational activist networks, which happen to have universal atomists staffing them. Second, Spanish-speaking countries are accessible to liberals and postmodernists from Europe and North America, in ways that, say, the Arab Middle East is not. The outlook of such activists and academics has shaped the language Amerindian activists use. They are pressed to be quaint, apologetic, and postmodern, as the price of visibility. Indeed, movements of this flavor—diluted, hybridized, and liberally networked—are for Northern onlookers by far the most palatable sort of “resistance.” Resistance currents elsewhere face the same pressures but to a lesser degree. Chinese nationalists find the global dominance of English-speaking academia stacked against them.

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