Who is Tony Blair’s ‘Barbarian’?

In his speech on 16 July 2005 Tony Blair proclaimed in response to the terror attacks in London that the fight against terror is not a clash of civilizations because all ‘civilized’ people ‘Muslim or other’ reject terrorism. In his move away from a ‘clash of civilizations’ towards a clash between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbaric’, he has effected a change in the meaning of the word ‘civilized’. Civilization, like other words, has a history, the most recent chapter of which began with its reinvigoration during the Enlightenment. This history began in the Classical period and is derived from the Latin civitas describing people of the cities and distinguishing them from those people living in the rural areas (rus), and the barbarians beyond the borders of the empire (tribus).

During the Enlightenment the use of the word shifted away from a distinction between city and rural dwellers. It became synonymous with a particular understanding of ‘culture’. The cultured of society were the ‘refined’, those who attended the opera, the ballet, who had reading rooms in their houses and who ate cucumber sandwiches to the quiet sounds of Mozart. ‘Civilized’ came to describe the consumption patterns of these ‘cultured’ elites, and marked a distinction between them and the ‘coarse’ uncultured masses that laboured to keep ladies and gentlemen in their finery. The uncivilized thus became the poor and the colonial other for whom a special category was reserved – the ‘barbarian’.

As thinking around the idea of culture entered more fully into modernity with the establishment of academic disciplines aimed at its study, so its meaning changed. No longer restricted to the refinements associated with upper class existence, the term came to describe the sum of all things acquired by people as members of society. All people suddenly had culture, and all things were cultural, the beer hall as much as the ballet. Consequently, culture’s sister concept, civilization, which had so depended upon that earlier understanding of culture was also forced to change. It became a term to describe a certain level of attainment in a society, and became more than ever a marker and servant of distinction between the colonial powers and the subject colonies.

The ‘barbarian’ became distinguishable by lack: a lack of monumental architecture, a lack of writing, a lack of techno economic specialization. (These accusations could of course not be aimed at the Arab world, which had all of these markers of civilization long before the Europeans).

This brings us to the alleged clash of civilizations, one Muslim, one European. In this conception there is a struggle between two civilizations for the ascendancy of their mutually exclusive value systems, consumption patterns and vision of how the world ought to be. Blair’s rejection of this as an explanation for the recent terror attacks in London is good for the simple reason that it moves away from homogenizing all Muslims as fundamentalist or extremist, and undermines the association of Islam with terrorism. But what else does it do?

For one thing, it makes a kind of return to the Enlightenment understanding of the term. The ‘civilized’ are those that share common values and ways of doing things with the dominant global elite. Accompanying this is the necessary (because the term always needs an other) reintroduction of the ‘barbarian’. But the ‘barbarian’ is no longer the pre-industrial non-Christian colonial other, it is the terrorist. Much of the imagery surrounding this new breed of ‘barbarian’ is, however, continuous with its ancestor. It is evil, and a threat, but significantly, its evil stems from the threat it poses, not to the lives of the ‘civilized’, but to the ‘civilized’ life – to the patterns of consumption governed by the ‘values’ that give shape to the dominant and legitimate global order.

Civitas has come, through Blair’s words, to describe those within the walls, not of cities, but of the citadel of this global order, of the liberal democratic subjects of the neo-liberal capitalist global village. The ‘barbarians’ are those left on the other side of trade barriers and excluded from the circuits of international dialogue by the system of nation states and the increasing penetration into that system by both the powerful within it and the interests and agents of multi-national capital.

Did I say left on the outside? Let me rephrase – produced on the outside, this is more accurate. The current order was produced historically. Those included in and excluded from the sharing of its dividends was and is a crucial part of the production of those dividends which are, broadly, global political and economic power. To say the ‘barbarians’ were left out would presuppose that they are not, and never have been, a part of the system and its production.

For most of the twentieth century after the Second World War, the Cold War was the forum in which two major military and ideological centers struggled to secure these dividends and determine their distribution. This struggle found violent expression across the globe as the burgeoning US and Soviet empires tried to secure as much of the rapidly collapsing system of colonial rule as possible. Africa, South America and Asia lit up under the financial and military backing of the two super powers. So too did Afghanistan.

Just as with the first wave of colonialism, attempts by the superpowers to grab countries were met with resistance from local populations and both the US and the USSR became adept at marshalling local resistance against the expansionist attempts of the other. The US involvement in Afghanistan is, viewed in this light, central to understanding the history and origin of the new breed of ‘barbarian’ ushered onto the global stage by Tony Blair.

In order to oppose the Russian expansion into Afghanistan, the CIA seized upon, sharpened and raised to their own ends a particular understanding of the term Jihad. By converting Madressas into training grounds for Mujahadin to oppose the Russian forces; by training, arming and funding them; and by providing them with a leadership in the form of Usama Bin Laden, the US was able to run a successful opposition to the Russians and the evil empire of communism in a way similar to their opposition of communism in Angola.

Blair’s ‘barbarians’ were thus produced, given shape, direction and means in order to play a part in the triumph of capitalism over communism. They were the heroes of a war that helped to put in place and perpetuate the very neo-liberal economic, and liberal democratic political barriers on the wrong side of which they find themselves today.

Capitalism triumphed, and the monster that the CIA created in order to realize that victory ceased to be useful. However, it did not cease to be. Excluded from the international fora, a militant body trained armed and encouraged to fight for an Islamic state now find themselves the new enemy of their old allies in the ongoing battle over the distribution of global political and economic power.

A vision of the world (at least of the Middle East) sponsored by the US in their attempt to press their own cause against that of the soviet Union is now a ‘barbaric’ and ‘evil’ ideology. In the same way that the Soviet Union threatened to undermine the system of relationships upon which the patterns of consumption associated with ‘civilized’ life in the Western world rests, so too do the Mujahadin, now reinvented as Al Qaeda. The ‘barbarian’ cannot thus be thought of as just different from us mysteriously holding different values. The real question then, given that the ‘barbarian’ is in this case a very real product of the struggle to achieve the ‘civilised’ life, is whether or not ‘barbarism’ should be understood as the rejection of the ‘civilized’ life, or as that which is rejected by the ‘civilized’ world in order to propagate the globally unequal relations that ‘civilized’ life requires.

I personally favour the second option and as such am sure that terrorism, however horrifying will be with us until such time as the premises of ‘civilization’ are seriously questioned by those who most reap its rewards. The ‘barbarian’ is the shadow of global consumer lifestyles, but we can’t simply treat the problem as an undesirable side effect, as a kind of cancer that can be cut out. It is the price of ‘civilization’ and perhaps this is a product that is thus no longer worth buying.

By Andre Goodrich,