The Geopolitics of Emotion

by Moisi, Dominique

• ISBN13: 9780307387370
• ISBN10: 0307387372
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2010-06-01
• Publisher: Anchor

Summary

The first book to expose and investigate the far-reaching emotional impact of globalization. In his celebrated 1993 bookThe Clash of Civilizations,political scientist Samuel Huntington argued that the fundamental source of conflict in the postCold War world would not be primarily ideological or economic, but cultural. InThe Geopolitics of EmotionDominique Moisi, a leading authority on international affairs, demonstrates that our post-9/11 world has become divided by more than cultural fault lines between nations and civilizations. Moisi brilliantly chronicles how the geopolitics of today is characterized by a "clash of emotions," and how cultures of fear, humiliation, and hope are reshaping the world. Moisi contends that both the United States and Europe have been dominated by fears of the "other" and of their loss of a national identity and purpose. Instead of being united by their fears, the twin pillars of the West are more often divided by themor, rather, by bitter debates over how best to confront or transcend them. For Muslims and Arabs, the combination of historical grievances, exclusion from the economic boon of globalization, and civil and religious conflicts extending from their homelands to the Muslim diaspora have created a culture of humiliation that is quickly devolving into a culture of hatred. Meanwhile, Asia has been ableto concentrate on building a better future and seizing the economic initiative from the American-dominated West and so creating a new culture of hope. Do these emotions represent underlying cultural tendencies characteristic of particular regions and populations today? How will these varying emotions influence the political, social, and cultural conflicts that roil our world? How can the West transcend its fear and avoid sliding into protectionism or militarism? What can the Muslim world do to overcome is legacy of humiliation? Will China and India manage to maintain their status as the cultures of hope? And what will the effect of the world economic crisis be? By delineating the necessity of confronting emotions to understand our changing world and deciphering the driving emotions behind our cultural differences,The Geopolitics of Emotionpresents a provocative new perspective on globalization.

Author Biography

DOMINIQUE MOÏSI is a founder and now a senior adviser to the French Institute of International Affairs, (IFRI) in Paris. He writes a column for the Financial Times and contributes to Foreign Affairs. In the spring of 2009 Moïsi will be a visiting professor at the Department of Government, and Pierre Keller Visiting Professor at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, at Harvard University.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

Preface to the American Edition	p. ix
Introduction: The Clash of Emotions	p. 1
Globalization, Identity, and Emotions	p. 9
The Culture of Hope	p. 30
The Culture of Humiliation	p. 56
The Culture of Fear	p. 90
Hard Cases	p. 123
The World in 2025	p. 137
Acknowledgments	p. 161
Notes	p. 163
Selected Bibliography	p. 169
Index	p. 173
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One
Globalization, Identity, and Emotions


In an age of globalization, emotions have become indispensable to grasp the complexity of the world we live in. Magnified by media, they both reflect and react to globalization and in turn influence geopolitics. Globalization may have made the world "flat," to cite journalist Thomas Friedman's famous metaphor, but it has also made the world more passionate than ever.
In a moment, we shall examine the reasons that this is true. But first we need to clarify the nature of globalization itself, since many people misunderstand it. In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman defines globalization as the international system that replaced that of the Cold War. Unlike the Cold War system, globalization is not static but a dynamic ongoing process, involving the inexorable integration of markets, nation--states, and technologies to a degree never before witnessed, in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations, and countries to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before. This same process is also producing a powerful backlash from those brutalized or left behind by the new system.
For many people, especially critics, globalization is identical with Americanization. The spread of American influence--political, economic, and cultural--dates back at least to the Second World War, but it gained new strength after the end of the Soviet empire in 1991, which left the United States as the world's only superpower. Thus the growing unification of the world's economies and cultures means in effect a unification on American terms. As a result, today's antiglobalization protests, which are now mounting with the deepening of the current financial and economic crisis, combine anti--American sentiments with anticapitalist critiques in their struggle for equality, fair trade, and sustainable development.
But when we look closer, we see that the equation of globalization with Americanization is too simplistic. The reality is that while the cultural influence of the United States throughout the world is all--pervasive and unprecedented, economically the West is being overtaken by Asia. The current phase of globalization reflects the coming-of-age of the Asian continent, resulting in the relay of economic power from an American--dominated West to China and India.
Globalization can thus be seen as the combination of two disparate phenomena, which may be seen as either contradictory or complementary. On the one hand, we witness the impact of the cultural Americanization of the world. The French economist Daniel Cohen believes that the gradual reduction of birthrates in the Southern Hemisphere is the direct result of the popularity of American television series, families with two children having become a universal ideal. On the other hand, the economic rise of Asia is bringing about the end of the monopoly of the Western model. Western predominance in the world, which began with the establishment of the Raj in India in the mid--eighteenth century and the decline of China in the early nineteenth and culminated in the early part of the twentieth century, seems to be coming to an end. This comes as no surprise to historians of empire, who have long known that the rise and fall of empires follow a cyclical pattern.
This leads to a situation of asymmetric multipolarity: The key actors on the world stage not only are unequal in terms of power and influence but also differ dramatically in their views of the world. While America and Europe still approach world affairs in a normative manner on the basis of a belief in universal values, China and India and now also post--Communist Russia appear far less interested in what the world should become than in their own positions of power within it. (Thus, for example, Russia's oil and gas wealth is not supposed to contribute to the improvement of life on the planet but to restore the strengt

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Excerpted from The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World by Dominique Moisi
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