Culture in the Blender

The more I think and read about the cartoons, the more strongly I feel that there can be no case made for that the cartoons should not have been published. The same points are made over and over again in commentaries, and regardless of circumstances basic cornerstones of liberal democracy cannot be sacrificed by Denmark. It is regrettable that people got so upset, but no outsider has the right to tell Denmark to change its system of government, of which the cartoons are a small by-product. If it were acceptable for non-Danish muslims to require Danish press to conform to their ideas of right and wrong, we would have a world of chaos and oppression of all by all. What Denmark does is Denmark’s business – and if Danish muslims wish to change their country because of the cartoons, they can, because they are Danish. It it their country to change. However, I suspect that most do not, because by being Danish they most likely also prize liberal democracy just as much as danish atheists and christians.

Neither does Denmark as a whole, which isn’t even involved other than indirectly, speak for the entire West. No one has the capacity to speak for millions and millions of people of different cultures, different histories and different languages as a unified voice. As a Western TCK, I am actuely aware of this. There are huge cultural variations within the West, and a commitment to that pluralism is especially prevalent in the European Union, which could not exist without such pluralistic acceptance. Even within every western country, there are regional sociocultural differences of all kinds. A reality of globalization is, as Friedman puts it, that “No one is in charge.” Everyone reading this has probably noticed that America and Europe disagree on a lot of policy issues, as well as have different basic value systems in many ways. (Not to mention Americans eat more crap.) There is no monolithic West any more than there is a monolithic set of muslims. The political leaders of Western nation-states do not even really speak for their entire populations, let alone one person speaking for all of the diverse Western countries!

It pisses me right off when people see the West as the US, the UK, Germany, Australia and France – there are many other Western countries that are distinct from the bigger ones! My ancestors were not in any way, shape or form involved with colonialism other then as initial explorers who got pushed aside by the bigger countries. My ancestors did not have anything to do with slave trade, holding slaves, building empires, smallpox, or any of the other atrocities committed by Western nations. They haven’t got the bomb now either, they don’t fund secret prisons or give guns to rebels they support nor engineer elections abroad. They have no military bases anywhere outside their territories and few within them. I’m not saying they were so noble that they didn’t want to. They probably did. But their histories took other paths, because their countries were small and relatively powerless. Just as in the world wars. Finland fought a war of independence, because they did not have resources to do anything else. Sweden sold ore to the nazis because they knew they didn’t stand a chance in a fight. Estonia got taken by the Russians because they did not have enough resources to fight them off, and no one assisted them. Poland has been split and occupied many times by neighboring countries. The perspectives of small countries are NOT the same as those of big countries! So how can little Denmark, which few of the people who are pissed probably can find on a map, suddenly be a spokescountry for the West? Small European countries get ignored and confused with each other by non-Euros all the time. I have yet to meet a Chinese who knew off the bat where Finland is. Sweden and Switzerland get confused all the time in both the US and China. I bet you about 1% of both Americans and Chinese know Lichtenstein even exists. But we all have our own national histories, languages, and traditions, which we take great care to distinguish from our neighbors. Part of the reason non-Anglo European countries reacted so strongly to America’s stance on Iraq is exactly that – to make it known to both the Americans and everyone else that the US prez and the UK PM do not speak for Europe as a whole as well. We have our own voices, expressed in our own media, and we will use our plural voices to whatever end we think is right. If that doesn’t please the US or anyone else, then too bad. We have our own national heroes, our own popular culture, our own fashion and music… our media reflect our debates, in our languages, for the benefit of no one but ourseves and our own democratic process. Small Western countries are not some sort of tack-on onto the larger ones. We do not just follow, we create our own destinies and determine our own actions.

Any Huntington-style reading of what’s going on is supplying all kinds of assumptions that are not there. How can there be a fight between two entities that do not exist?