Steve Smith makes several good points in his essay. Essentially he claims that academic researchers and writers are major contributors to the current situation, a world climate in which the events of 9/11 could and did happen. Smith contends that academics popularized the western view of international relations, including the mistaken notions gained from Weber’s now rather dated work and other distorted “outsider” views of the non-capitalist countries, which led to the oppositional stances of the major powers. Smith contends that academics represented their research as objective when objectivity in social science is nearly impossible. While I agree that his views have some validity, I would place less of the onus on academics and more on those who use them to support their agendas.
Islam has become the demonized face of Jihad in the west. It began in the 1960s with two major writers on the political science front: Bernard Lewis and Samual Huntington.
“It was Bernard Lewis who launched the hoax of the “Clash of Civilizations”—in a September 1990 Atlantic Monthly article on “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” which appeared three years before Brzezinski clone Samuel Huntington’s publication of his Foreign Affairs diatribe, “The Clash Of Civilizations.” Huntington’s article, and his subsequent book-length treatment of the same subject, were caricatures of Lewis’ more sophisticated British Orientalist historical fraud, which painted Islam as engaged in a 14-century-long war against Christianity. Huntington acknowledged that Lewis’ 1990 piece coined the term “Clash of Civilizations.” (Thompson and Steinberg 2001)
It began with Lewis’s 1967 book, The Assassins, and continued until Lewis had created an entirely fictional account of Islam and the planned destruction of the infidels. Lewis began with Weber’s work and exaggerated it beyond all belief. Lewis created a 14-page history that read like the Arabian Nights, claiming that Bin Laden was simply following the Koran and cleansing the earth of the infidels. From his insulated cover at Princeton University, since 1949, Lewis has been feeding the ambitions of presidents to “clear up” the middle eastern problem.
He has been the most influential expert on Islam and the middle east since then and has been the architect of such things as the madman Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Arc of Crisis” policy of fomenting the Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist insurrections all along the southern tier of the Soviet Union. The Iatollah Khomeni was overthrown with US assistance to root out the Jihadists.
Because of the political ambitions of western leaders, and the fear of the unknown “enemy” which already had a bloody history, westerners began to believe that all Muslims were warmongers intent on destroying all other religions. Of course, history is written by the winners, so the horrors of the Christian Crusades have been downplayed over time.
So Smith’s major point is valid, and we should seek to alleviate the problem in some way. I would suggest that we need more academic work from all the sectors our literature looks at from the outside. We need dialogue among scholars to create a new understanding. However, that is hardly possible while we are throwing bombs. Rather than expect researchers and academics to write objectively we need to set up an exchange of ideas. As Margaret Mead showed us, it is quite impossible to write about any society from the outside.
Smith’s points about centering research on the “state” and his major points of the fallacies of this method are, indeed, relevant, especially the idea that globalization will somehow homogenize world culture and governance. Democracy is neither the best form of government nor does it work with every group. It is best only for certain types of cultures and only within limited numbers. Mainland China has tried to establish a democratic rule of sorts, but its population is just too huge and undereducated for this to work, so they use an indirect tiered system which is rife with problems, but it works for them.
All in all, Smith is correct that academia certainly has contributed to the problems of international relationships through the somewhat short-sighted egocentric notion that they are impartial and objective. If there is anyone on earth who is impartial or objective I want him or her to take the Turing test, and if they pass, we can let them rule the world.
References
Smith, S. (2004)’Singing Our World into Existence: International Relations Theory and September 11′ International Studies Quarterly, 48: 499-515
Thompson, Scott and Steinberg, Jeffrey, 2001, PROFILE: BERNARD LEWIS: British Svengali Behind Clash Of Civilizations, Executive Intelligence Review.