Second Lecture delivered at “Islam and the West,” Lifelong Learning Seminar, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan

 

Muhammad founded a monarchic regime and an imperial state upon a prophetic religious doctrine. Authority remained personal, as in all of the ‘ancient’ and ‘medieval’ regimes, with the subject’s allegiance owed first to God, then to the Prophet/Monarch. Had the ‘modern’ or scientific-administrative state existed in the seventh century, Muhammad would have condemned it as a sort of idol. Although a person, Allah differs from the God of the Bible in that he is first and foremost not a spirit but a will. This inclines Islam away from viewing reason as authoritative, as in the Christian emphasis on God as Logos or Word.

With time and schisms, traditional Muslims often contented themselves with less-than-strict caliphs who ruled over societies in which clerics had influence but did not necessarily exercise direct political rule. For the men scholars now call Islamists, political activity to enforce the Sha’ria comes back to the center, as it had been under Muhammad himself. But Islamists face a problem Muhammad never saw: rather than the tribes of ancient Arabia, or the surrounding loosely-confederated empires, Islamists operate in societies in which centralized rule intrudes more into everyday activities than it ever did in ancient and medieval empires. To push against such rule in the hands of infidels and heretics, Islamist engage civil-social organizing, electoral politics, and/or guerilla warfare and terrorism. This is why scholars often call Islamism “political Islam,” even if Islamists themselves, thinking of their enterprise as a return to Muhammad’s practice, regard such a phrase as redundant. Given the Islamic emphasis on God as a supreme Will rather than as a supreme Word, or a reasoning God with whom one may speak, and even argue (as the prophets of Israel did), political Islam tends not to be really political in Aristotle’s strict sense. For it, rule doesn’t involve give-and-take or consent but is more a matter of command and obedience.

The more radical Islamists, the ones who use war as a means of gaining power, are not simply throwbacks to Muhammad, no matter what they may claim. In the modern world, terror or fear was designed first as an instrument of modern state building, as seen most clearly in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who invokes the terrors of civil war to justify the counter-terror exercised over factions by the modern state, the “mighty Leviathan.” Marxism-Leninism (which, as we’ve seen, influenced some of the Islamists) deployed statist terror as an instrument of remaking human nature. (The so-to-speak classical argument for this may be found in Leon Trotsky’s book, Marxism and Revolution, but Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were the most notable practitioners of it among Marxists, and Lenin and Stalin were imitated by the tyrants of the right, particularly Hitler).

Terrorism developed as a revolutionary tactic under conditions of modern statism, as a way of fighting the fear-inspiring mighty Leviathan. This is the most dramatic of the distinctively modern dimensions of Islamism. You will not find homicide-suicides in the Koran, although you will find militants and martyrs. Islamism thus entwines Islamic ideas with modern ones, Muhammad with Machiavelli. In the case of homicide-suicide terrorism, the synthesis has produced an action that neither of its forebears commended.

In the first lecture I mentioned that Islamism also reflects the egalitarianism of modernity. The social equality that Tocqueville describes yields republican regimes or despotic ones. Under Islam, with its less-than-firm commitment to reason, despotism has been the more frequent outcome. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the elimination of the caliphate by the statist-nationalist modernizer, Mustafa Kemal. That same breakup also saw the advance of modern, statist empires—Britain, France—in the Middle East. Both indigenous and foreign rulers in the Middle East thus deliberately depoliticized their societies—again, in Aristotle’s sense of ‘the political’; this left such civil-social organizing as was permitted to the Islamists, who have had the Koran-inspired courage to organize themselves against tyrannical rule and to deliver the social services the corrupt and incompetent statists have failed to provide. That is, the secular nationalists who wrested rule from Western imperialists after World War II squandered the political capital they had built up in that struggle by their very despotism and also by copying the Soviet model of economic development, a model that failed to compete effectively in the world market anywhere it was tried.

The decline of local aristocracies in the face of the onslaught of modern statism brought a vast democratization of Islam. This is a circumstance likely to produce ‘self-made’ religions or variations of religions, designed to appeal to popular passions. Under the Islamic regime-ethos, voluntary martyrdom results in no pain at death and promises great rewards in Paradise. Further, because one’s birth, life, and death are all predetermined by Allah, civilians (including children) killed in terrorist attacks were destined to die, anyway, so there is no moral harm in doing God’s will. So, for example, in one jihadist publication, women are instructed to understand that “The blood of our husbands and the body parts of our children are our sacrificial offering.” When the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the use of children as human mine-sweepers during the war with Iraq, he described this as a “divine blessing” to them. It is easy to see how such an approach might destabilize modern states that are new, despotic, corrupt, and incompetent. And so it has. Given the fact that Islam is a form of universalism or inter-nationalism, a democratized and hyper-fanatical form of Islam will appeal to many—especially many young men—who resent their local nation-state and thirst for glory.

Another feature of modernity is the valorization of commerce and industry as indispensable elements of the human conquest of nature. As modern commerce and industry developed, the use of oil to fuel large and powerful machines was discovered, famously empowering those peoples on lands with oil reserves underneath them. We recall the sharp increase in oil prices resulting from the embargo imposed by the Arab oil cartel in the mid-1970s. Revenues often went to support Muslim clerics, who were regarded by the monarchies as social counterweights to the communists—who, during the Cold War, enjoyed more formidable international support than local clerics could expect. Further, urbanization brought peasants into the cities, where they kept their allegiance to the clerics but also came physically closer to the centers of state authority. The same held true for the influx of students into the universities; even then-fashionable Marxism could not appeal to students recently removed from the countryside to the degree that radical Islamism could do, especially since Islamism incorporated Marxist motifs into a larger theological framework familiar to the students. Re-Islamization of Middle Eastern societies proceeded ‘from below,’ forming strong networks of persons in but not of the modern state.

To put it in ‘regime’ terms, then, Islamists amount to a new would-be ruling body or set of rulers on the geopolitical scene, one that represents its members as being of the ‘old regime’ of Muhammad. For the past few decades, the most notorious Islamist radical group has been al-Qaeda, founded by Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden’s story is now familiar. Born in 1957, he was a member of the generation of Arabs who would question nationalist secularism. His Wahhabist upbringing would have led him to question it, anyway. But he would eventually diagnose and reject the Saudi version of Wahhabism on ‘Qutbian’ grounds. As a member of a prominent, but not royal, Saudi family, he was near enough to see, but distant enough to reject, royal family decadence.

He formulated a regime-centered policy to combat that decadence. As early as 1996 he called upon his fellow Saudis to “change the regime” of Saudi Arabia, which he regarded as a mere agent of the United States. The Saudi regime has “imposed on the people a life that does not appeal to the free believer”—a life insufficiently Islamic. Indeed, after World War I, the Saudis had allied themselves with the British in bringing down the last caliphate, the Ottoman Empire. The United States replaced Great Britain as the Saudi regime’s principal Western ally after the Second World War, and Bin Laden characterized America as “unjust, criminal, and tyrannical” on four grounds: it “stole our oil”; it “executed” 600,000 Iraqi children with its embargo following the first Gulf War; it supports Israel; it subordinates itself to Jews, the arch-tyrants of the modern world. Jews, and therefore the Americans they control, are servants of Satan. Americans did not cause the Soviet Union to fall; God did, and to claim otherwise is blasphemy. Bin Laden denied that the United States assisted the mujahedin in Afghanistan. In addition to being evil, the United States is contemptible; it is “weaker than the picture it wants to draw in people’s minds.” Not only the American government but the American people themselves are contemptible, “a lowly people ho do not understand the meaning of principles,” a “debauched” people—”the cowards of this age.” Economic relations might be permissible with such a rabble, insofar as those relations serve Islam. But in occupying the Arabian peninsula Americans have declared war “against God, his prophet, and the Muslims.” The only valid Islamic answer is jihad. “May God show them his wrath and give them what they deserve.”

Despite its many vices and weaknesses, America remains the most powerful country of the age. How to fight it? For this, bin Laden had no state of his own, and even if he had, what state could stand against the United States? he needed an organization that could torment the godless superpower without presenting a target America could destroy. In his war on Israel, Palestinian leader Yasr Arafat had developed the policy of intifada, a low-level form of combat employing guerilla fighting and terrorism, needing no established state organization. Arafat himself had seen the success of guerilla warfare against the United States in Vietnam. Bin Laden in effect decided to take an Islamified intifada worldwide, and aim it at America.

The first experiment was in Afganistan, against the Soviets, who were then the more immediate threat. “Al-Qaeda” means “The Base,” and Afghanistan proved such a necessary territorial launching pad for jihad. There, bin Laden developed an international cadre of jihadis, young men who had severed their social ties at home and replaced them with the strong bonds that form among warriors. After the war, the bin Laden segment of the mujahedin did two things. In Afghanistan, they allied with the Taliban, Islamists backed by Pakistan. The Pak prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, had allied herself with one of the Pakistani Islamist parties in the hope of splitting the movement and co-opting it; she sent aid to the Taliban, hoping to secure Pakistan’s western flank, and so to be able to concentrate her attentions on Pakistan’s perennially tense relations with India. With both Pakistani and Arab-Islamist backing, the Taliban founded the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 1996.

The Taliban solution to the problem of modern statism turned out to be very simple; they had no modern state at all, no impersonal, centralized bureaucracy. They simply enforced moral codes, collected tolls, and fought the remnants of their local enemies. They had no universalist ambitions. Meanwhile, bin Laden and his organization (along with several other jihadi groups) enjoyed a safe haven for their worldwide operations, aiming most immediately at the expulsion of the United States from Arabia, and at the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy, with the ultimate aim of effecting the triumph of Islam throughout the world—God willing.

The core of al-Qaeda was small, consisting of fewer than 200 operatives, tightly controlled by bin Laden. But its network was and remains vast; al-Qaeda-trained jihadis have fanned out into about 80 countries around the world in what capitalists might call a franchise operation. Among other things, this meant that even if bin Laden and his core group were destroyed, the franchise or cells would live on, having been trained to act independently to subvert their local regimes by terror. In other words, al-Qaeda operates in the opposite manner from the centralized, modern state.

The expulsion of Israeli troops from Lebanon by Hezbollah in the 1990s provided a small but important test case for this strategy. The leader of Islamic Jihad, an al-Qaeda affiliate, drew the lesson: “Our jihad has exposed the enemy’s weakness, confusion, and hysteria. It has become clear that the enemy can be defeated, for if a small faithful group was able to instill all this horror and panic in the enemy through confronting it in Palestine and southern Lebanon, what will happen when the nation confronts it with all its potential? Martyrdom actions will escalate in the face of all pressures [and is] a realistic option for confronting the unequal balance of power. If we are unable to effect a balance of power now, we can achieve a balance of horror.” Insofar as such “martyrdoms” destroy innocents, the Islamist strategy seems in-Islamic. However, the regime of democracy solves this problem for al-Qaeda partisans, at least in their war against the Western republics. If the people are sovereign, then no one is innocent.

In a limited way, bin Laden’s achievement was impressive, if vile. This is a brilliant and ruthless way to attempt to destroy modern statism, much more formidable than the tactics of the various ‘anti-globalization’ groups on the Left who have been reduced to breaking shop windows and chanting at G-8 summits before getting swept away with tear gas and propelled water. Radical Islamists have focused precisely on the institutional structure of the modern world. The modern state justifies its existence primarily by providing security and, in the commercial republics, an orderly framework for liberty. The Marxist project—overthrowing the ‘bourgeois state’ and replacing it with “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” leading to the elimination of all states worldwide and the advent of Communism—has failed, and he anarchist or radical libertarian projects obviously partake of utopianism as well A network of terrorists, however, effectively amounts to a non-governmental organization, an NGO, with guns, or an international drug cartel with ideas—indeed, with religious ideas and religious laws.

Such an organization can ‘network’ on the civil-social level, under the state’s law-enforcement radar screen. From there, it can do in a systematic way what anarchist bomb-throwers did, well, anarchically, and therefore impotently: delegitimize statism. Hence bin Laden’s appeal to American mothers in his 1997 CNN interview: “To the mothers of soldiers of American troops… I say if they are concerned for their sons, then let them object to the American government’s policy and to the American president.” To replace the modern state, bin Laden intended to found a stateless ummah under the regime of the prophet Muhammad, ruling through clerics who invoke the prophet’s name. It is as if the Christian ecclesia or assembly had moved to substitute canon law for civil law wherever Christianity went. To put it again in regime terms, a clerical aristocracy will arise out of modern social egalitarianism in order to rule the world, out of a worldwide network, already in place.

It is worth noting that the egalitarianism of the modern project—the systematic attack on aristocratic classes, very often at the service of statist centralization—is no more consistently maintained in radical Islamism than it was in fascism or communism. Fascism quite explicitly proposed a new aristocracy to replace the by-then-decadent ‘old regime’ aristocracies of Europe. For its part, Communism proposed a supposedly temporary neo-aristocracy that the Communists called the ‘revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat.’ Intellectually armed with Karl Marx’s self-described ‘scientific socialism,’ the revolutionary vanguard would lead the proletariat first to victory over the capitalist bourgeoisie, and then on to a classless and stateless society.

On this topic in Islamist thought, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Ayman al-Zawahiri proves particularly instructive. Zawahiri is a former surgeon in the Eghyptian army and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood since the age of fourteen; he took over the leadership of al-Qaeda after the death of bin Laden. His book is entitled Knights Under the Prophetic Banner, published in 2001. In Zawahiri’s model, radical Islamism replaces the racial/national warfare of fascism and the class war of Communism with religious warfare or jihad. Sounding very much like an Islamicized Marxist, Zawahiri calls for a reconstitution of the relations between the “elites” and the “masses.” The elites must lead the masses in jihad, in a “scientific, confrontational, rational” manner, as he puts it. Elites must take care first to mobilize broad support among the masses before undertaking violent jihad; otherwise, they will be overmatched by the states. “The jihadist movement must move toward the masses, defend their honor, prevent injustice, and guide them along the path leading to victory.” It is up to the elites to guide the masses, to set strategy for them. Perhaps even more than Lenin, Mao appears to have been a sort of model for Islamists—Mao, with his emphasis on guerilla warfare and his famous contention that America was nothing more than “a paper tiger.” This makes sense, inasmuch as Mao appealed much more to ‘Third World’ sensibilities than any Russian Marxist could do.

With this correct relationship between elites and masses, leaders and followers, solidly in place, jihad can proceed with a series of terrorist and guerilla operations, operations that can turn modernity against itself. Known in contemporary military circles a ‘asymmetrical warfare,’ terrorism and guerilla war apply violent force to the key, weak pressure points of the modern state. Thus disrupted, the state will collapse, despite its vast logistical superiority. As mentioned earlier, the result will be the rule of the ummah, the body of Islamic believers, the final worldwide politeuma or ruling body established by Allah. This body might be loosely organized under a worldwide empire or caliphate, but it would not be modern-statist. Thus will Islam accomplish, with the energy of religious fervor, what communists could only dream of, and failed to do. But, then, the historical progress toward communism was seen as a merely human process, whereas the worldwide jihad has Allah on its side. Jihad has the highest of moral and religious purposes, according to the late Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian-Arab theologian and founding member of al-Qaeda: Jihad “can purify souls and elevate them above reality.” Not that this will be easy. “Islamic society needs to be born, but birth takes place in pain and suffering.”

The American war in Iraq saw another instance of this strategy. In this case, the existing state having been removed not by jihadists but by the hated Americans, the jihadists have sought to prevent the founding of a new state, particularly a new state on socially democratic, commercial-republican regime lines. A democratic-republican state would be especially dangerous to their cause, inasmuch as such a regime might make Islamist vanguardism a matter of the ballot instead of the bullet and the bomb. Apart from the recent experience of Turkey, actual rule by Islamists has proven unpalatable wherever it has been tried; no less an authority than Zawahiri himself has decried the establishment of commercial republicanism in Iraq and vows to prevent it. In Zawahiri’s view, ‘democracy’ is a religion—an alternative, false religion in which human judgment and sovereignty and law override Allah’s judgment, sovereignty, and law. Democracy gives authority to “man’s desires, whatever they may be,” “replac[ing] God absolutely.” The worldwide struggle of Islam therefore must aim finally at Satan’s tool, the worldwide movement toward democracy. Which regime will prevail on the earth?

The strengths of the al-Qaeda strategy are noteworthy, but its limitations are considerable. In the days following the September 11 attack, I wondered aloud, “Where’s the follow-up?” Although this made some people around me a bit nervous, and I suppose I could have been more sensitive and considerate, it was clear then, and has become even clearer since then, that while a worldwide terrorist organization can disrupt its enemies, it cannot quickly seize and hold political power on a wide scale. It will remain a physical threat to states for a long time, but it is unlikely to destroy any but the weakest of them. Indeed, bin Laden tended to talk very much like a child of the television and Internet age, extolling the 9/11 attack for its symbolic meaning more than for any material effect it inflicted.

And then there was the problem of the counterattack. The U. S. war against the Taliban proved far more effective than bin Laden likely expected it to be. He probably thought of the United States as another Soviet Union, soon to be bogged down and cut to pieces by his mujahedin. The problem with that analysis—shared, you will recall, by the many exceedingly foolish commentators who popped up on television chat shows and op-ed pages—is very simple. Notwithstanding bin Laden’s silly lie about American victory in the Cold War, the mujahedin who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan could use supplies from America, principally Stinger missiles. Against the United States, however, the mujahedin had no reliable suppliers of first-rate weaponry. What is more, the United States of 2002 could not be compared to the Soviet Union of the 1980s—politically, militarily, or technologically. The Taliban and bin Laden had no idea what they were in for. As a result, both were driven back, and most of the key al-Qaeda senior and mid-level members were arrested or killed.

Second, the CIA Counterterrorism Center developed a plan called the Worldwide Attack Matrix. Using intelligence seized in the Afghan war, they tracked down the rosters of terrorist trainees, and tracked those trainees back to their host countries. Sharing intelligence with other states—few of which had any reason to want their own regimes destabilized by fanatics—the CIA helped to stop a planned series of attacks on U. S. military sites, businesses, and diplomatic offices in Singapore and elsewhere. All told, the modern state continues to deploy impressive resources of its own. Indeed, one of the main assets al-Qaeda continues to enjoy is willing or unwilling shelter lent to them by certain modern states themselves, where terrorists can be confident they will not be attacked, lest the host state’s sovereignty be violated. This fact has not gone unnoticed in Washington: hence the Bush Administration’s strategy of “regime change.” Although that strategy itself soon fell into disfavor, it intimidated a number of otherwise anti-American regimes into cooperation with the United States, long enough to tighten security in many countries around the world.

What, then, has the internationalist Islamist movement been thinking since the 2011 death of bin Laden and the degradation of the original core of al-Qaeda? Under the not-very-dynamic leadership of Zawahiri, al-Qaeda has often been reduced to urging its local franchises and even lone-wolf sympathizers to mount their own terrorist attacks. None of the franchises has been able to expand its power beyond their own regions, most of which are remote from world capitals. Low-intensity warfare, especially in Islamic countries, is about the most al-Qaeda can do. Meanwhile, within the jihadi movement itself, al-Qaeda has been challenged by a breakaway organization, the ‘Islamic State,’ which has proved more violent and radical in its methods than the parent organization itself. I shall save discussion of ISIS for the final lecture in this series, on Syria.

The main danger that jihadi organizations pose to the United States and the other commercial republics today continues to be their power to distract those regimes from much more powerful rivals, China and Russia. They, too, are prepared for a long conflict with the West, and they are much better equipped to wage it.

 

Primary source readings

Yonah Alexander and Michael S. Swetam: Usama bin Laden’s al-Qaida: Profile of a Terrorist Network. Ardsley: Transnational Publishers, 2001. Contains an appendix of documents by and about bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, eds.: Al Qaeda in Its Own Words. Pascale Ghazaleh translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Lecture delivered at Lifelong Learning Seminar, “Islam and the West,” Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.

 

This week I will give five talks on Islam and modern politics. Today, I’ll talk about the origins of the ideology called ‘Islamism’ or ‘political Islam.’ Tomorrow I will discuss radical Islamism (specifically the ideology of the al Qaeda organization) as understood by its founder, Osama bin Laden and its other principal spokesmen. Following that, I will lecture on the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria, respectively. Saudi Arabia and Iran are the two most insistently ‘Islamic’ of the well-established regimes ruled by Muslims, and Syria’s civil war illustrates the clash of several would-be regimes, each backed by foreign regimes—some Islamic, some not.

My co-speakers are giving you an idea of what Islam is, but if I am to speak on Islam and modern politics, I still owe you an account of what I mean by ‘politics’ and what I mean by ‘modern.’ By spending the first half of this first lecture on those themes I intend to make my subsequent thoughts on Islamic politics much clearer. An added benefit to this approach is that I will be presenting a way of thinking clearly, as a citizen, about politics generally. What I’ll be saying next will be useful when you think about Saudi Arabia and Iran, but also when you think about China, Russia, Brazil, and the United States of America. One of my colleagues earlier asked good question: How to learn about Islam? I want to begin with the question of how political scientists learn about anything. Optimistically, I assume that political scientists are educable.

In trying to understand human communities, political science resembles anthropology, economics, and sociology in one way: It starts with individuals and families, looking specifically at the types of ruling that goes on in them. Political science differs from anthropology, economics, and sociology in one principal respect: It looks to the regime as the key feature that defines our lives together.

It so happens that the term ‘regime’ has been much in the news for the last several decades. The Clinton and Bush administrations have pushed for in such countries regime change as Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. What, exactly, is a regime. Why should anyone want to change one. Thus the basic term of political science happens to have become central to the American political debate, a debate that we know, at least since the terrorist attacks by radical Islamists on 9/11/2001, to involve our very lives and our way of life.

In political science, a regime roughly parallels a species, or perhaps a genus, in biological science. It’s a term of classification or identification. As in biological species, we identify regimes by the behavior of the organism, the purposes it pursues, and its form or structure.

Regimes consist of two elements:

1. Rulers. How many people rule the community—one, a few, or many?—and what is their character. It makes a difference if only one person rules a community, or if only a few or many do; it also makes a difference if they are for the most part good or for the most part bad, whether (for example) the one who rules is Queen Anne of seventeenth-century England or Mao Zedong of twentieth-century China. This matters, not only because one set of rulers will act differently than another, but also because we tend to ‘look up’ to rulers, model our lives on them. A collection of Soviet-era educational materials had the piquant title, “I Want to Be Like Stalin.”

2. The Way of Life, the moral atmosphere of the society—its “habits of the mind and the heart,” as Tocqueville puts it—will foster the characteristic human type who lives in a given society. Business person or warrior, saint or sybarite, cowboy or computer geek? Or maybe all of those things, in which case you know you’re in America.

3. The purposes of a regime should be consistent with the rulers and the way of life. In America, the Declaration of Independence asserts that just governments aim at securing the unalienable, natural rights of the governed. In the Soviet Union, the purpose of the regime was to advance the ‘dialectic of history,’ first towards socialism and eventually towards worldwide communism. Neither the ancient Athenian democrats nor the contemporary Iranian mullahs would endorse the purposes of either of those regimes.

4. The form or structure of the regime refers to the authoritative structures by which the rulers rule. How are the most ambitious people in the society channeled into the positions of authority and prestige that they crave? And on what channels do those positions run? One might compare a regime’s form to an power grid, both directing and concentrating, but also limiting, the enunciation and enforcement of the ruler or rulers’ commands, including laws.

Obviously, these four elements of the regime—rulers, way of life, purposes, and institutions—are interrelated, mutually influential. If the rulers change, the way of life and institutions may change, in order to accommodate the intentions of the new rulers. For example, the election of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party in Germany in 1933 soon led to a new way of life for Germans, under a new set of ruling institutions, institutions that did not include a genuinely authoritative legislature, as the previous regime had done.

If the institutions change, the way of life and rulers will change. The way of life of Japan after the installation of General Douglas MacArthur’s constitution in the 1940s, and the kind of rulers Japan has had since that time, have both changed radically from what they were in the 1930s until August 1945.

If a community’s way of life changes, then rulers and institutions will change—usually somewhat gradually but no less profoundly. Consider the changes in the Roman Empire after Christianity pervaded its society ‘from below,’ so to speak. Finally, if the purposes of the regime change, this may well have profound consequences regarding the community’s rulers, way of life, and form. Many political communities have changed radically in these respects with the introduction of Islam, which sets down a far different set of purposes for human life than those pursued by, for example, Zoroastrianism.

All of these regime elements form an ethos or character specific to the regime. A person born to the same set of parents might be biologically identical if born in 1920s Hamburg on 1920s Pittsburgh, but his or her view of the world, life expectations would be very different; in important ways, the person himself would be entirely different.

A regime change is therefore nothing less than a revolution—whether violent, as in the United States and in France in the 1780s and 1790s, or peaceful, as Czechoslovakia in the 1980s and 1990s. The regime which prevails in our society effects all of our lives physically and morally, spelling ‘liberty or death,’ sometimes to millions.

Since Aristotle’s time, four massive facts have intervened to modify, if not to alter fundamentally, Aristotle’s system of political classification.

1. The first of these are religions that are both prophetic and international—specifically, Christianity and Islam. These are prophetic rather than civil religions in the sense that they require their adherents to ‘speak truth to power’ and not simply to reinforce existing regimes. They are international, indeed universal in that the God of the Bible and the God of the Koran rule over all human beings, not only particular communities or peoples. Notice that both of these religions have regimes: God is the King of kings; He is also the founding lawgiver, prescribing institutions and also requiring a particular way of life. This sets up a circumstance in which the City of God ‘cross-cuts’ the City of Man, sometimes commending a given regime and sometimes calling it to account or even undermining it. Prophetic and universal religions change both internal politics and international politics, permanently.
2. The modern state appeared, invented by the Florentine philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli and put into practice widely in Europe by the middle of the seventeenth century. Aristotle saw two basic kinds of political communities, in terms of size and centralization. The polis was small and centralized, tightly-knit, a place where even a regime of ‘the many’—either a mixed regime or a democracy—could assemble all of its rulers in one place for deliberation in common. In such highly centralized and highly ‘politicized’ communities, the regime mattered intensely to everyone because the rulers really could rule everyone, really ‘reach into’ the life of every family. The empire, in contrast to the polis, was big but decentralized, typically a loose confederation of political communities whose subordinate members paid tribute in money, honor, soldiers, and slaves to the central government—which might have any of the six regime types—but otherwise left most major ruling decisions to the local rulers. The modern state combines the centralized rule of the polis with a size closer to that of some of the ancient empires. Machiavelli and subsequent political philosophers and statesmen invented ways of making this possible, of making the central ruling authority capable of reaching down into the families, into what now would be called ‘civil society,’ in contrast to ‘the state.’ These included the technologies generated by modern science, animated by the ambition enunciated by Machiavelli’s philosophic disciple, Francis Bacon: “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.” Other modern political methods included an impersonal and professional bureaucracy—avowedly ‘scientific’ in its methods of rule—and modern, standardized military practices, seen most notably in a writer like Carl von Clausewitz.
3. A third feature of modern society, again urged by Machiavelli and his innumerable followers, consisted of an acquisitive, commercial/capitalist society—not mere trade routes or port cities, which had existed for centuries, but whole societies devoted to acquisition, with systems of finance to match. Such a political economy of acquisition could generate the vast revenues needed to support the modern bureaucratic and military apparatuses of the modern state. The modern political economy typically led to the ’embourgoisement’ of society, the rise of the middle classes and the partial displacement of the titled aristocracies.
4. Social embourgoisement, but also professionalization of military and civilian bureaucracies also enhance the democratization of society, societies in which, increasingly, who you were mattered less than what you were, and particularly what you could do to enhance the power of acquisition—politically, militarily, and economically.

These four massive facts, the last three at the service of the modern scientific project, have come together to form what we have come to call the distinctively modern life. That life raises the perennial question of regimes in the most serious ways. From the disposition of your soul for all eternity to the disposition of soul and body here and now, it matters more than ever who rules, by what institutions they rule, the way of life and the purposes rulers and ruling institutions enforce. Given the massive and transformative powers of modern states, as ruling entities and as frameworks for civil-social activities, regimes matter to us, to ordinary citizens or subjects, in some ways more than ever.

The history of the past two centuries accordingly has seen vast, sometimes worldwide struggles over exactly this regime question. The American regime of commercial republicanism is one answer to the question. But we’ve also seen the military republicanism of revolutionary France, the military tyranny of Napoleonic France, the constitutional monarchic imperialism of Metternich’s Austria, the military-capitalist monarchy of Wilhelmine Germany, the military and ideological tyrannies of Communist Russia and China, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Today, Islamism addresses this same question of who will rule us and how we shall be ruled in the modern world.

Consider these basic terms of political science with respect to Islam, and especially to contemporary Islamism. Muhammad was a political ruler and, more than that, a lawgiver and founder of a new regime. The regime he founded was a monarchy, and he began the conquest of territories that became a vast empire soon after his death. The empire he founded was an ‘ancient’ empire, not a modern state. Authority in that empire derived from persons—ultimately, from Allah—and not from impersonal functions in a centralized bureaucracy. For Islamists, too, politics is central. But unlike Muhammad they operate in societies where the modern state reaches down into the lives of every individual and family, societies in which centralized rule intrudes more into everyday activities than it ever did in the empires of antiquity or the middle ages. Pushing back against the modern state, and against the modern project generally, Islamists put politics in the foreground of their enterprise. This is why Islamism is often called “political Islam.”

Islamism also reflects the social-democratizing tendency of modernity. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the elimination of the caliphate by the statist-nationalist modernizer, Kemal Ataturk. That same breakup also saw the advance of modern, nation-state empires—Britain, France—in the Middle East. The elimination of the caliphate has brought a vast democratization to Islam. Under the caliphate, only a trained Islamic scholar could issue a fatwa; today, an adolescent can do so, and some have. Now, that’s democratization for you.

To put the matter in theoretical terms: modernity involves egalitarianism and the sharp break with tradition implied by the conquest of nature. Both egalitarianism and anti-traditionalism undermine the authority of the family, of fathers and mothers, of parental rule. To undermine the family is to generate individualism, the sense of ‘I’m on my own.’ But undermining the family in no way stops human beings from being human, that is, from being social and political animals who desire a sense of ‘belonging,’ of community; therefore, to undermine the family is only to initiate a quest for a substitute for the family. In modernity, we see several such substitutes. One is nationality; significantly, one’s country is called ‘the fatherland’ or ‘the motherland.’ Another was communism—the life of the communist cell, in which members experienced fraternity without parenthood. Yet another substitute for the family has been religious revival. This comes as a surprise to secularists, who had supposed, since the Enlightenment, that they alone would control the moral terrain of modernity. Socially, Islamism—for all its ‘traditional’ trappings and claims to orthodoxy—resembles the revivalisms or fundamentalisms that have characterized much of modern religious life. Islamists break with their families, adopting a self-made version of a particular religion in a new, ‘adopted’ family—experiencing, as they do, the intense emotions associated with family life. In the phrase of the French scholar Olivier Roy, Islamists are agitated by the “side effects of their own Westernization” or more precisely their own modernization. Politically—and here they differ from, for example, the fundamentalist revivalisms in Christianity—recent Islamists tapped into the political leftism of college and university campuses in the West, especially in Europe, which is where they experienced the emotional consequences of their removal from their real families, and where they began to think through their encounter with modernity.

An earlier generation of Islamists also tapped into fascism and communism after World War I. The elimination of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement by modern empires also meant a crisis for Arab and Iranian nationhood. In subsequent decades, Arab rulers allied themselves with Soviet Russia, and later with Nazi Germany, in their quest for national independence—a dangerous strategy from which they were saved by the commercial republics, which defeated those alternate empires. In the 1950s, Arabs won their independence not through Islam but through nationalism—Nasser in Egypt, the Ba’athists in Syria and Iraq. Even the Palestinian Arabs, living in and out of Israel, appropriated a nationalist identity and program, and will now tell you, in the fanciful way that nationalists tend to adopt, that they are the descendants of the ancient Philistines, and therefore predate the Jews in their residence on the land.

As long as the nationalists had credit among predominantly Muslim peoples, the thinkers now called Islamists remained on the fringes, their followers persecuted by nation-statist rulers. These men included Ruhollah Khomein in Iran, Sayyid Qutb in Egypt, and Mawlanda Mawdudi in Pakistan. In fact, Qutb was hanged by Nasser in 1966.

But Arab nationalism became discredited in the eyes of many within a single generation. The nationalists failed to conquer Israel, losing spectacularly in the Six-Day War of 1967 and falling short in 1973. Nationalist rulers also came down firmly on the despotic side of the social-democratization issue, blocking the next generation from political participation. The post-independence generation of Muslims thus never fully sympathized with nationalism; many listened to the transnational notions of Islamism, spread by modern technology to a worldwide audience. Islamism also benefited from the  religio-political policy of the nationalist despots, who co-opted many of the more traditionalist clergy, rather in the way the Soviets co-opted many Russian Orthodox clergy. Thus compromised, the traditionalist lost prestige in the eyes of the young, and their loss was Islamism’s gain. Urbanized and educated, Islamists exemplified Tocquevillian democratization, but did so without the middle-class background of the liberal democrats or commercial republicans of nineteenth-century Europe. Furthermore, in the last twenty-five years Islamists have notched some important successes: overthrowing the Shah of Iran, defending the new Iranian clerical regime against Iraq and Iraq’s Saudi backers in the 1980s; launching successful terrorist attacks against America and other targets around the world; and of course defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Who are these people” What is ‘Islamism’?

Khomeini, Qutb, and Mawdudi all rejected nationalism as a form of idolatry, a neo-paganism to be resisted as violently as Muhammad had resisted the paganism of his time. To Islamists, the sovereignty of anyone but God is idolatry; nation and state are idols. The core of modernity, ultimately the self-deification of man, is false and evil. I shall discuss Khomeini in my lecture on Iran; today, I’ll outline the ideas of Qutb, Mawdudi, and Qutb’s predecessor, Hassan al-Banna.

In Egypt, Qutb joined the existing radical group, the Muslim Brothers, which had been founded in the 1920s by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. Faced with the overwhelming power of the modern state, the Muslim Brothers sought to Islamify it, advocating what they called “Islamic modernity.” As the French scholar Gilles Kepel so pointedly notes, “The exact meaning of Islamic modernity has never really been settled.” Understandably so, inasmuch as it is fundamentally a contradiction. Islamic modernity, for the Brothers, involved a sort of totalitarianism—an amalgamation of society, state, culture, and religion, all under the guidance of Islam, and therefore of Islamists. The American founders had warned that any attempt to eliminate all factionalism, to constitute any thoroughgoing unity, would lead to tyranny. Peoples in the Middle East have seen this in those places—Khomeini’s Iran, the Taliban’s Afghanistan—where Islamism has established a regime, and in both of those places the people have been restive under the ‘totalizing’ yoke. Islamists have found that a shared religion does not constitute a sufficiently strong bond to hold a society together, and so have resorted to the frequent use of violence as a supplement.

Islamism agrees with Wahhabism (and indeed with Islam simply) on the need to Islamify all society, everywhere. It disagrees with Wahhabism on the issue of social equality. Islamism would end landed aristocracy. It is more urban and democratic—more modern—than Wahhabism. Wahhabism can tolerate the Saudi royal family, so long as they seem pious. Islamists do not tolerate them at all.

As the leader of the Muslim Brothers, Banna copied his organizational practices from the Nazis, who were active in Egypt, against the regnant British Empire, in the 1930s. He established a youth wing; he endorsed the Füherprinzip (the leadership principle); he had his people engage in paramilitary training, and cultivated a cult of the heroic death—all Hitlerian motifs. He was assassinated in 1949, but the Muslim Brothers persist to this day, briefly ruling Egypt a few years ago, and thus far winning and consolidating political power in Turkey.

Qutb joined the Brothers in the early 1950s, but favored a radicalism of the Left, not the now-defeated radicalism of the Right. The Islamist theorist he admired was Mawdudi of Pakistan, a contemporary of Banna who had advocated an Islamic state in all of India. Mawdudi wanted to take the modern state and use its apparatus to Islamify Indian society ‘from above,’ eradicating what he regarded as the local paganism, namely, Hinduism. Mawdudi founded his part, the Jamaat-e-Islami, on Lenin’s successful Bolshevik model. As you will recall, Lenin was a Marxist, believing that ‘History,’ understood as the course of human events, was proceeding dialectically, as Marxism and Engels had taught, toward its ‘end’ or culmination in a class-free, communalist worldwide society. That is, for Marxists ‘History’ proceeds by the conflict of socioeconomic classes. The urban working class, or proletariat, eventually triumph over the bourgeois class, seize and transform the bourgeois state, and use its power to eliminate all classes. Once classes are gone, the state will “wither away,” as it will no longer have any purpose. To hurry ‘History’ along towards this wondrous consummation, Lenin formed the Bolshevik Party as the working class’s vanguard party, the political party on the cutting edge of the historical dialectic, leading the working class to victory. The vanguard of the vanguard was, of course, Lenin himself, leader of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That regime would come to fulfill Tocqueville’s prediction of a Russian empire facing off against the great commercial republic of America.

To Mawdudi, Marxian dialectical struggle seemed very reminiscent of jihad. Under the Islamic rubric of jihad, whose “central theme” is “the propagation of the Faith through combat,” he would imitate Leninist political organization.

Mawdudi departed from Lenin in preferring a more strictly political course of action. His party engaged in parliamentary politics with a patience Lenin seldom exhibited. Here is where Qutb sided more with Lenin than with Mawdudi. Endorsing the ideas of the revolutionary vanguard and of the one-part state leading to a class-free society, Qutb preferred extra-parliamentary methods; indeed, in Nasser’s Egypt, such methods would have been irrelevant. The Muslim vanguard will work for the “abolition of man-made laws,” and their substitution with the perfect law, the Shar’ia, obedience to which he deemed true liberation. Thus, I what would eventually be seen as typical Islamist fashion, Qutb attempted to use modern political techniques as instruments of Islam.

As for the deeper substance of the modern project, Qutb authored a multi-volume critique of modernity. Modernity, he argued, had caused humanity to lose contact with its own nature. The original error went back much farther than modern philosophy, however. The original error went back to Judaism and Christianity.

Judaism had been God’s revelation. But Judaism fell prey to legalism because Jews had become slavish during their years of captivity in Egypt. Slavery had actually changed their nature, and so, when they received the laws of God from Moses, they inclined to worship the laws themselves instead of God. This led to the mission of Jesus of Nazareth, who rightly broke with Jewish legalism. However, the early Christians fell victim to harsh persecution, causing the Christian message to become garbled; this adulterated message went too far against legalism. Having abandoned the Jewish law entirely, Christians reached out not to Judaism but to paganism (specifically, Greek political philosophy) as the needed, worldly supplement to their faith. Thus Christianity left itself vulnerable, in Roman times, to what Qutb regarded as Constantine’s pseudo-conversion, which drove the genuine Christians into the monasteries, as ascetic ‘desert saints.’ Asceticism is only another form of Christian extremism, a rejection of the bodily which bifurcates what should be coordinated, namely, spirit and nature. This leads to the characteristic Christian dualisms—sacred versus secular, God versus Caesar—dual standards.

To remedy this “hideous schizophrenia,” the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century brought a new legal code. This new code reintegrates spirit with physical nature. The unified, genuinely monotheistic religion of Islam thus reestablishes both the original revelation to the Jews and the original message of Jesus. Almost as boldly, Qutb claims that the return of the proper human relation to physical nature opened Islamic minds to the experimental scientific method, which Muslim scientists discovered in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, the full use of this method for the benefit of all mankind was blocked by the Christian Crusaders and the Mongols, both of whom disrupted Islamic life shortly after the discovery was made. The scientific method was taken by Christians to Europe in the sixteenth century, and exploited by them. Under Christian auspices, this method was used to reinforce the sacred-secular bifurcation favored in that civilization. Conflict arose between religion and science, the one informed by faith, the other by atheism. Atheist modernity has triumphed over Christendom in this struggle, leading to the crisis of nihilism in the West.

Thus, in Qutb’s account, Jews, Christians, and Muslim infidels have caused the current plight of Arab Muslims. America, with its separation of church and state, embodies both the Christian and the modern legacy. America’s presence in the Middle East betokens a war against Islam. As a result of the advance of the modern project, the whole world has reverted to the condition of paganism seen by Muhammad. Qutb and his followers are the only true Muslims remaining. They must do what Muhammad did: reconquer the world for God.

It is worth noting, in passing, that Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb, became a university professor in Saudi Arabia. One of his students was a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden came to understand that he must undertake a struggle over regimes: Who will rule? How will they rule? What way of life will prevail? What purposes will the rulers, ruling institutions, and prevailing way of life serve?

 

Primary Source Readings in Translation

Roxann L. Euben and Mhammad Qasim Zaman, eds.: Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Hassan al-Banna: Five Tracts of Hassan al-Banna. Available on-line.

Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi: Islamic Civilization: Its Foundational Beliefs and Principles. Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 2013.

Sayyid Qutb: Milestones. Available on-line.

____. In the Shade of the Koran.

____. Social Justice in Islam.

 

Secondary Readings

Bostom, Andrew G.: The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2005.

Bonner, Michael: Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Olivier Roy: The Failure of Political Islam. Carol Volk translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Kepel, Gilles: The War for Muslim Minds. Pascale Ghazaleh translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Cook, David: Understanding Jihad. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Review of Denis MacShane: François Mitterrand: A Political Odyssey. New York: Universe Books, 1983.

Originally published in Chronicles of Culture, January 1984. Republished with permission.

 

Years before many Americans noticed him, France’s socialist president made a career while provoking contrary sentiments. He evidently prefers not to be understood. The conservative Reagan Administration must nonetheless decide what to think of a ruler who supports the United States and opposes the Soviets in Europe while opposing the United States and supporting Soviet allies in Latin America. This biography can contribute to that effort, albeit modestly.

Denis MacShane accurately describes his book as “accessible,” not “exhaustive or definitive.” It is also frequently polemical. “In most capitalist democracies,” he laments, “ideas of the Left are restricted either by not being published or by attaining only a limited distribution in book form.” A few pages later, he claims to have watched the 1981 French presidential election reports on a television “in a small apartment in a working class district of Paris.” As in most such writing, the allegedly matter-of-fact statement is absurd while the patently theatrical one is believable.

Mitterrand too can brush facts aside as he strains to realize the fictive. He came to politics after studying literature and music in ‘Thirties Paris. He still “disdains the technical detail of economics” (as MacShane puts it), telling the French, simply: “You are either for the exploiters or the exploited.” He sees capitalism as a vast appetite; he ignores its productivity. One might describe this as a literary point of view. Were MacShane and Mitterrand capable only of rhetorical posing this book could pass unremarked. But MacShane to some extent and Mitterrand to a further extent offer more than that.

After Hitler’s conquest of Paris, Mitterrand escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp; he worked for the collaborationist government at Vichy while aiding the Resistance. (He managed to earn decorations for both activities, thereby displaying a precocious aptitude for a certain sort of politicking). He entered parliamentary politics after the war, involving himself with a succession of small parties, really “political grouplets,” which satisfied “his taste for leadership and position.” He won his first election by campaigning against the Communist Party, nationalization, and bureaucracy. “Even with the most charitable interpretation,” MacShane intones, “it was a campaign of undiluted opportunism. But it worked….” In his first ministerial position, he won the respect of Maurice Thorez, the cynical boss of the French Communist Party, by breaking a strike. (Thorez elicits MacShane’s most bizarre description: “a close personal friend of Stalin.”)

Throughout the 1950s, Mitterrand remained a firm if reformist supporter of French colonialism. As the minister responsible for Overseas Territories, he wooed African nationalists away from the Communist Party, then advocated a similar policy toward Ho Chi Minh and even Mao—who were probably not so susceptible to Gallic pleasantries. About Algerian nationalists he said, “There can only be one form of negotiation: war.”

All of this politique, real and surreal, came from a man who insisted on his leftist credentials. It undercuts his claim that he opposed Charles de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 simply because too many of the General’s supporters “wanted vengeance on the poor,” for some unspecified reason. MacShane describes this dissent as “an act of political courage for a man who up to that moment had been considered to be most obsessed with his career.” He quickly and sensibly adds that “At the age of forty-one, perhaps Mitterrand thought that he could wait a few years until the sixty-eight-year-old de Gaulle vanished and the traditional political forces re-emerged.” Indeed, Mitterrand lost his seat in the National Assembly but soon reappeared, running as de Gaulle’s main opponent in the 1965 presidential election. A year later, Le Monde‘s editor wrote, “One does not believe in his sincerity so much as his agility.”

The same writer nonetheless added that “François Mitterrand, unlike most politicians, is worth more than he appears.” The actual Mitterrand excels the fictional one Mitterrand celebrates but prudently fails to embody. His dealings with Marxism and the Communist Party illustrate this. In a 1969 book, Mitterrand (in MacShane’s words) “openly embraced Marxist concepts, though he admitted that he had never made a detailed study of Marx.” That aversion of the eyes undoubtedly made the embracing less repugnant. He accepted Marx’s social/economic determinism but rejected ‘proletarian’ dictatorship. “We are here to conquer power, but only after we have won over the minds of our fellow citizens.” Marx and Lenin scorn such ‘bourgeois formalism,’ and neither address the unconvinced as “fellow citizens.” Marxism au Mitterrand retains a place for civility; he is a Social Democrat, not a Bolshevik.

His Marxism also cares for individuality. MacShane quotes his comment on the prison camp: “Being obliged to live with a mass of people one gets to know solitude.” Politically, this inclines him to liberty more than equality, “the great problem on the road to Socialism.” In a passage from his edited diary/notebook, The Wheat and the Chaff (New York: Seaver Books, 1982), Mitterrand insists that socialism must “prove… it has returned to the sources, its own sources, that it is the daughter of the revolutions where one swore ‘freedom or death’ and kept one’s word.” This sounds a good deal more like Victor Hugo than V. I. Lenin; a Marxist would complain that these were bourgeois revolutions. To his lasting credit and discredit, Mitterrand is not listening. Credit, because no Marxist could write that “the worst tyranny is that of the spirit,” which will “lie in wait for its prey until the end of time.” Discredit, because he prefers to ignore, or pretends to ignore that the Communists’ willingness to temporize aims at a dictatorship presented lyingly (‘dialectically’) as the agent of the ‘withering away’ of the State. Moreover, after deploring the solitude of mass-life and spiritual tyranny, he can stumble into this enumeration of the kinds of “dignity and responsibility” freedom should serve: “abolition of the death penalty; giving women control of their personal destiny, i.e., contraception and abortion; divorce by mutual consent; the right to vote at age 18, and so on.” ‘Bourgeois’ in the best sense, he is also ‘bourgeois’ in the worst sense.

‘Bourgeois’ socialism can more easily anger Marxists than it does conservatives. MacShane plausibly suggests that after Mitterrand took over direction of the Socialist Party in 1971 the ensuing alliance with George Marchais’s Communist Party was a marriage of convenience, understood as such by both partners. The dissolution of this “Union of the Left” came in September of 1977; Mitterrand has suggested that Marchais acted in response to the Soviet position taken that January condemning such alliances. The conservative argument that a Socialist government would be a Trojan horse lost some of its plausibility. This, along with President Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s blunders, France’s high unemployment, and Mitterrand’s appeal to the Gaullist tradition yielded a victory by three-and-one-half percentage points in the 1981 election.

MacShane surveys the first months of the Mitterrand presidency, citing a 27% increase in public spending, 39 banks nationalized (95% of French bank funds are now under state control, up from 70%), and an additional 14% of industry nationalized, totaling 32%. He wrote the book too early to mention the subsequent violent disorders in Paris as unemployment remained high and inflation got worse. MacShane loses the chance to predict trouble by misunderstanding a conversation Mitterrand had with U. S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger late in 1975. Kissinger, MacShane sputters, indulged in an “anti-Communist tirade” that was “circular” and “pointless.” As Mitterrand himself recounts it in The Wheat and the Chaff, what Kissinger had to say was quite pointed indeed. Why nationalize industry, he asked when nationalizing would only cause your head of state to be blamed for every economic problem? The socialist program would make the French less governable than ever.

Mitterrand replied that he sincerely wanted the state to wither away, not by dictatorship but by ever-increasing decentralization and autogestion—literally self-direction or self rule, both political and economic. He concludes his book by claiming that technology, far from requiring increased hierarchy, can constitute “the decisive instrument of liberation” if a genuinely socialist ethos guides it. “Data processing, biology, nuclear physics: The great fields of knowledge are open to conquistadors setting out in the name of democracy.” It makes one think that the “political odyssey” MacShane describes has been undertaken by a Ulysses who rides a horse named Rocinante.

Unlike MacShane, Mitterrand sees Kissinger’s point and wishes he had more time to consider it. He is a man with a taste for thinking but without the leisure for sustained thought. This injures him more than it would injure a conservative or moderate politician because, as a democratic socialist, he cannot refer to a well-established social and political tradition that has, so to speak, done a measure of thinking for him. (Democratic socialism has an established intellectual tradition, of course; it is recent but voluminously recorded. However, one needs time to read the many volumes.)  The French word moeurs means both morals and customs; Mitterrand’s socialism has moral sentiments but no customs to make them habitual. This yields precisely to what Kissinger foresaw: political overextension.

It also yields lifelong improvisation, and the mistakes that inevitably follow. Mitterrand first opposed the Gaullist constitution’s strong presidency, and now supports it; he opposed relinquishing any colonies, then bowed to their loss; he opposed French nuclear weapons before changing his mind after the Soviets overran Czechoslovakia; he opposed de Gaulle, then ran for office as the inheritor of Gaullism; he attacked Giscard for intervening militarily in Chad, then sent in troops himself. He eventually learns the right lessons, which is more than any ideologue can say. But he must learn the hard way. Now that he wields presidential power his countrymen share the hard knocks.

Americans will not suffer as much as the French. Mitterrand learned his basic lessons in foreign policy during the 1930s. “The righteous must be stronger than the strong if they want to be involved in world affairs,” he wrote in 1938, at the age of twenty-one, criticizing French and British weakness after Hitler’s annexation of Austria. Some forty years later he told Marchais, “I will not go down in history as the person responsible for leaving France unarmed in a world [that] is not.”  And to the Soviet ruler, Brezhnev, in 1975: “Why these troops and arms massed on the soil of Europe? And those rockets pointing toward our cities? Our specialists have never located so many nor such powerful ones. The state of NATO forces in that sector does not justify such excessive armaments.” MacShane, a much younger man who finds Soviet viciousness harder to believe, suggests that Mitterrand has another motive to avoid breaking with the United States: he fears Allende’s fate. A CIA plot against the life of a French president strikes me as unlikely. Serious fear of same by a French president strikes me as unlikely, too.

Mitterrand will remain anti-Soviet in Europe, anti-U.S. in Latin America. Because he counts for more in Europe than in Latin America he will help more than he hurts, at least in the short run. His party is another matter. It may drift toward neutralism after Mitterrand if Mitterrand does not educate its younger members as he educated himself. Idealist or opportunist, François Mitterrand will not betray the West. But to help save it he will have to become a statesman.