War on Terrorism: Which West?

(To Giampiero Venturi)
09/12/15

The most frequent issues in which debates on international terrorism stagnate are the role and responsibilities of the West. Once the analysis of the scenario is over, we usually move on to the cause and the inevitable conspiracy theory. A bomb, an attack, a request for armed intervention and the refrain starts again.

Let us say that guilt syndrome is almost always a symptom of civilization. The more advanced a society is, the more it has an aptitude to look inward. It is self-evident that primordial societies generally do not have great capacity for self-criticism and appear more solid. No coincidence that the conspiracy often ends up trespassing in conspiracy and the facts (attacks or acts of real war) overlap deductions, thoughts and theories from the living room that are of little use.

However, this is not the place to reflect on legitimacy, nor on the merits of the debates. Our starting point is another.

Instead of asking whether it is necessary, useful or simply fair to intervene with weapons against an alleged terrorism, it would be interesting to ask ourselves which system we feel or do not feel a part of.

It is opportune to reflect on the fact that when the echo of the attacks weakens, the volume of anti-Western skepticism increases to the point of shaping a symmetrical society: on the one hand, those who believe in terrorism and feel themselves the object of an external threat, and on the other, those who think that The West is the cause of all evils, therefore also of its own.

The dichotomy becomes ideological and shifts attention to the personalities and preferences of each of us. Thus we lose sight of a focal point: even before feeling western or anti-Western it would be appropriate to ask ourselves which West we are referring to.

The question is not secondary because one can be strongly critical of choices and directions of industrialized countries, without however losing the sense of identity and the values ​​that it contains.

It is not so important to establish whether the West is wrong, but assuming that it has made mistakes, perhaps it is more useful to understand what the guidelines and principles it has looked at in recent decades have been. In other words: is there only one possible West?

It is universally recognized that after the Bretton Woods agreements in the '44, the command room of the world that counts has moved from Europe to America. The election of the dollar as the reference currency was not only a physical, but also a symbolic one, closely linked to the political events that would have marked the planet up to the present day: the Franco-British colonial-led world abdicated in favor on the other side of the Atlantic, decisive for establishing the results of the Second World War (Bretton Woods happened one month after the Landing in Normandy). The birth of NATO only 4 years later it would have been the confirmation on the military level.

Without entering into the historical debate, the objective of our analysis is to ask ourselves if after 25 years after the end of the Cold War, the rudder that marked the course of Europe (the cradle of Western thought), must still be the same.

Our reflection seems sensible if we consider that in European countries we have become so used to being a derivative thought that no longer holds direct interests, that we become slaves of guilt and self-harm.

Let's take an example with regard to geopolitics: let's talk about ISIS and destabilization in the Middle East. If we consider the tragic consequences of the 2003 war in Iraq we are usually used to interpreting the facts only in two keys: those who believe that the war was just by marrying the political choices of the Bush administration; those who believe that the West has made a mistake in war, as always. The idea that the war was wrong mainly because it is contrary to a Western interest, usually goes unnoticed or in the background.

In summary, if the West coincides with the United States and the set of values ​​they represent, whatever the orientation taken (pro or anti-Western), we Europeans always end up choosing according to the interests of someone else. This dualism will be even more evident if the Republican administration returns to the 2016 presidential elections, no longer obliged to hide American geopolitical interests behind veils of a pacifist demagogy. The choice would then be even more polarized: USA or Third Worldism, tertium non datur.

More than 70 years have passed since Bretton Woods and Yalta and many things have changed. Perhaps the world should review its balance and come back to ask questions. Europe in particular should ask itself if it still exists.

(photo: US DoD)