One straight, one reversed, two stories: democracy and the fight against terror

Exactly 40 years have passed since 1979, when Jean-François Lyotard pointed out that the world we live in had entered a new turning point and bore distinguishing features that deserved to be called a "postmodern world." It would of course begin with realizing that we had emerged from an old world in which we thought we were living, into the new world we were entering.

According to Lyotard, one of the most distinctive features of that world was that it was sustained by grand narratives (meta-narratives). The grand narratives were the great ideologies such as progress, enlightenment, universality, freedom, equality, justice and humanism. People paid very heavy prices in pursuit of these grand narratives, but what they obtained in the name of these narratives was a great nothing. Neither the ideal of freedom that liberalism tried to convince people of was reached, nor the equality that socialism promised, nor justice. The place to which the enlightenment, progress and universality claims of modernism have brought the world is plain to see.

Humanity experienced tragically how the political movements that set out to rule people by putting forward these grand narratives ended up condemning them to a world that was the exact opposite of those ideals. In the new era there would no longer be room for such ideals, nor any need for them. There was now a postmodern condition, and people would try to find ways of being happy with smaller things. People would be fed up with grand narratives. No one would any longer be able to set such grand ideals before people and drive them forward.

Yet although 40 years have passed since the postmodern condition that Lyotard dwelt on, the situation in which humanity completely bids farewell to such grand narratives, a kind of "end of ideology," has amounted to nothing more than yet another story.

Perhaps the "end of grand narratives" that Lyotard recorded in fact corresponded to only one of the periodic moments of collapse of such narratives. He tried to write an "end of history" on that basis. Thus his own story came close to being substituted for all the grand stories.

In these 40 years the cold war, based on the conflict between socialism and capitalism, came to an end, but before that the idea that the countries thought to be socialist were engaged in a war against capitalism had already collapsed. The expectation that socialism could truly bring humanity a labor-based, egalitarian and peaceful life ended.

The collapse of socialism of course came about not merely by its being falsified at the level of ideas or its arguments being refuted, but through the failures, with tragic consequences, in realizing its ideals in practice, and the disappointments they caused. Otherwise, what is easier than putting forward arguments and defending them with the strongest and most attractive rhetoric? Doesn't the fact that a socialist discourse that keeps its tail up in theory and in rhetoric and art, even though all expectations of people have ended, goes on as if nothing had happened, sufficiently show that belief in narratives does not easily end?

In fact, people soon did not refrain from producing new grand ideologies again and from bidding farewell to those grand ideologies again. Perhaps not equality, but "Democracy," and, as a negative story, "terror," were presented to people as a new grand narrative, as a story.

Democracy was such a sacred, such a necessary thing that people had to be saved from the Saddams, the Gaddafis, the Castros, and defense against the plague of "terror that threatens our democracy" was sacred enough. The first strange equation was drawn between Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and the absence of democracy in Iraq. "Bringing democracy to the Middle East" was a camouflaged expression for a holy war, and it sounded convincing enough to the American and British peoples, and perhaps to many European peoples.

This was now the grand story: to let all humanity benefit from the blessing of democracy that belongs to the West. The prices that the countries to which democracy was exported had to pay in this cause were prices that the pagan-infidel Easterners historically deserved. The lives that were lost had no value. Human rights were not for them anyway. They were not even human beings in the first place. They were a herd of heedless ones, wrathfully doomed by the Kingdom of God, of which the enlightened West on the threshold of the new millennium was the executor.

We can say that, despite that great finding of Lyotard, for the last 30 years the world has been run by these two grand narratives, one inverted, one straight. Intellectuals are in fact aware that these are stories. Those who have been hurt in all the operations undertaken in the name of these stories are also more than aware. But a story is never something that everyone has to believe anyway. A story is the story of the rulers and is merely a tool to legitimize their way of running the world. If you swallow it.

The Arab peoples, who believed that democracy was very precious for Westerners, expected to find Western countries at their side when they set out at the end of 2010 to realize it. At first, supportive, even congratulatory messages came from both Europe and America. Yet when coups were mounted against the Arab revolutions, each of which was a true democracy story, that same Western world first stayed silent, did not even call the coups coups, and afterwards began to do business with all the coup-makers.

The image that all the European leaders gave together with the worst, the most bloodstained of the coup-makers in Sharm el-Sheikh revealed in all its nakedness what kind of story democracy is for Europeans in the Islamic world.

What shall we say now? Shall we say it is the end of one more grand story, like Lyotard, or shall we say we never believed in this story of the hypocritical colonialist Westerners anyway?

This is a question too: what about the AB's and ABD's initial stance and messages supporting the Arab Spring?

In fact, I had begun my article in order to answer this question, on the occasion of a conference that the leader of Tunisia's Ennahda movement, Rached Ghannouchi, gave at SETA the other day. We have come to the end of our space. So, we will continue...