The Human Community

By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times
May 11, 2007

The conventional view of Tony Blair is that he was a talented New Labor leader whose career was sadly overshadowed by Iraq. But this is absurd. It’s like saying that an elephant is a talented animal whose virtues are sadly overshadowed by the fact that it’s big and has a trunk.

Blair’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq grew out of the essence of who he is. Over the past decade, he has emerged as the world’s leading anti-Huntingtonian. He has become one pole in a big debate. On one side are those, represented by Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who believe humanity is riven by deep cultural divides and we should be careful about interfering in one another’s business. On the other are those like Blair, who believe the process of globalization compels us to be interdependent, and that the world will flourish only if the international community enforces shared, universal values.

Blair’s worldview began to take shape when he was 11 and his father suffered a debilitating stroke. That sent him off on an intellectual journey that led him to the theologian John Macmurray. “If you really want to understand what I’m all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray,” Blair once said. “It’s all there.”

Blair absorbed from Macmurray a strong communitarian faith. As prime minister, he tried to remove the class and political barriers that divide the British people. Abroad, his core idea was also communitarian: “Globalization begets interdependence, and interdependence begets the necessity of a common value system to make it work.”

In April 1999, Blair delivered a speech in Chicago in which he ran down all the features of the globalized world that cross borders and unite humanity: trade, communications, disease, financial markets, human rights and immigration. “Today the impulse towards interdependence is immeasurably greater,” he argued. “We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community.”

This meant moving away from the Westphalian system, in which the world and its problems were divided into nation-states. “The rule book of international politics has been torn up,” he argued in a speech last year. What’s needed instead are multilateral institutions that act “in pursuit of global values: liberty, democracy, tolerance, justice.” The economics of globalization are mature, he concluded, but the politics are not.

In his 1999 speech, Blair maintained that the world sometimes has a duty to intervene in nations where global values are under threat. He argued forcefully for putting ground troops in Kosovo and highlighted the menace posed by Saddam Hussein.

He saw the terrorists of Sept. 11 as extremists who sought to divide humanity between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-harb — the House of Islam and the House of War. “This is not a clash between civilizations,” he said last year in the greatest speech of his premiership. “It is a clash about civilization. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence.” He concluded that Britain had to combat those who would divide the human community, even without the support of the multilateral institutions that he cherished.

The crucial issue now is: Is this human community real? Is Iraq merely an intervention that was botched? Or are interventions inherently doomed because people in other cultures don’t want what we want, and will never see the world as we do?

Over the past three years, people on the left and right have moved away from Blair and toward Huntington. There has been a sharp rise in the number of people who think it’s insane to try to export our values into alien cultures. Instead of emphasizing our common community, people are more likely to emphasize the distances and conflicts between cultures. Whether the subject is immigration, trade or foreign affairs, there is a greater desire to build separation fences because differences in values seem deeply rooted and impossible to erase.

If Huntington turns out to be right, then Blair will be seen as one of the most naïve communitarians of all time. But I wouldn’t count him out just yet. It could be that over the long term, and despite the disaster in Iraq that he co-authored, his vision of a human community will be vindicated. Or it could be that Blair’s vision of that community was right — except in the Middle East, the region where he most aggressively sought to apply it.

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