The Spanish prime minister's proposal for an 'alliance of civilisations' to counter international terrorism is attractive, but raises some hard questions, writes Paddy Woodworth
It is all too easy, all too tempting, for most of us to forget, once the bodies from the last atrocity have been buried, that international terrorism continues to pose a terrifying threat to democratic societies. Last week's warning by UN secretary general Kofi Annan that a nuclear attack by terrorists does not belong to the realm of science fiction, but is a daily possibility, should jar us back to reality.
Mr Annan was speaking at a conference in Madrid to mark the first anniversary of the Islamist train bombings in the Spanish capital. Questions about democracy, terrorism and security were under discussion by leading world figures who, in the main, disagree strongly with the strategy of the "war on terror" of the Bush administration.
Mr Annan's stark reminder was timely and welcome in this context. Critics of Washington's policy too often seem to underplay the dangers presented by terrorism after 9/11, in favour of an abstract rhetoric of human rights.
Equally significant, however, was his formal espousal of the proposal by the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, for an "alliance of civilisations" as the best bulwark against terrorism.
Mr Zapatero is probably best known internationally as the man who withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq. He announced this immediately after his surprise election victory over the pro-Bush conservatives of the Partido Popular (PP), just after the bombings. He is keenly aware of the need to counter the outraged response of his critics, nationally and internationally, who have portrayed this move as the action of a quisling and a coward. He has presented a strong defence, arguing that terrorism is strengthened, not weakened, by a neo-conservative strategy which flouts international law and treats human rights as a dispensable luxury.
At the UN general assembly last September, he obliquely criticised the disastrous dirty war against the Basque terrorist group Eta, waged (ironically enough) by a previous PSOE administration in the 1980s. Spain's own experience shows, he said, that violating democratic principles plays straight into the hands of terrorist strategists.
He then referred to Spain's history as a country "created and enriched" by the fusion of Islamic and Christian cultures to introduce his Big Idea: "an alliance of civilisations between the western world and the Arab and Muslim world."
His proposal has since been accepted in principle by the Latin American countries, and by the Arab League, and Annan's espousal of it is significant.
However, one must wonder whether Zapatero and his advisers have fully thought through the implications of this proposal. Like motherhood and apple pie, it is, of course, a good thing that those of us who come from the western and Christian traditions should treat the Islamic religion with respect. We should, of course, recognise Arab culture as the product of a great civilisation which, as in the case of Moorish Spain, was at times well in advance of our own.
The problem with the idea of an "alliance of civilisations", though, is that it may respond rather too mechanically to the idea which presumably provoked it, and thus share some of that idea's underlying assumptions. Samuel P. Huntington's famous (or notorious) essay, The Clash of Civilisations (1993) argued that, with the end of the cold war: "The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics The next World War, if there is one, will be a war between civilisations."
The 9/11 attacks gave a crude version of this thesis wide currency, without taking on board the many qualifications entered by Huntington himself. However, Huntington's main argument has one great flaw. He assumes that "civilisations" impose overriding loyalties that bind their component peoples together in a zero-sum game against other "civilisations".
He thus tacitly accepts the view that values officially held by the UN to be universal, like democracy and human rights, are intrinsic only to "western civilisation", and cannot become a real force in, for example, Chinese or Arab civilisations.
If this were so, the world is in deep trouble, because there would be no principle which can unite citizens in Beijing and Boston, no common cause between the peoples of Cairo and Chicago.
This assumption, curiously enough, lays aside a basic tenet of the very "western" civilisation Huntington writes from and for: that democratic freedoms and human rights are, as the American founding fathers put it, "self-evident" and applicable to "all men".
The Bush administration's gung-ho "war on terror" has ridden roughshod over these principles.
But it is not the only impediment to Zapatero's alliance of civilisations, his "institutional dialogue with Islam and the Arab world". The other obstacle is the tyrannical nature of most Arab and Islamic states.
This makes them unlikely partners for the propagation of the culture of democracy, equality and human rights, which he rightly proposes as an antidote to terrorism.
A further and very tricky twist is the uncomfortable fact that democratic advances in the Islamic world often lead directly to the emergence of Islamist governments, which impose religious law on civil society. Their value systems are as hostile to democratic principles as were the Christian churches, prior to the Enlightenment and the great revolutions which separated church and state in Europe and America.
Zapatero's initiative is welcome, in that it both promotes democratic values and rejects a confrontational approach to Islamic civilisation. The hard question it raises, however, is whether these two worthy aims are compatible.