[Discussion] Book Review: Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

[sule tarakcioglu]

By G. John Ikenberry
 From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. Ian Buruma and 
Avishai Margalit. New York: Penguin Press, 2004, 176 pp. $21.95

In this grandly illuminating study of two centuries of anti-Western 
ideas, Buruma and Margalit contend that the hostility of Islamic 
jihadists toward the United States is but the most recent manifestation 
of a long-running, worldwide reaction to the rise of Western modernity. 
They call the cluster of prejudices and unflattering images of the West 
conjured by its enemies "Occidentalism," a phenomenon that originated 
within the West itself in the late eighteenth century and only later 
spread to the Middle East, Asia, and beyond. German romantics, reacting 
to the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalism, expressed it in their 
rejection of a coldly rational Europe -- a "machine civilization," 
manifest in imperialism, urbanism, and cosmopolitanism. From there, 
similar themes appear in Occidentalism's other variants: the sinfulness 
and rootlessness of urban life; the corruption of the human spirit in a 
materialistic, market-driven society; the loss of organic community; the 
glory of heroic self-sacrifice in overcoming the timidity of bourgeois 
life. Western liberalism is a threat -- to religious fundamentalists, 
priest-kings, and radical collectivists alike -- because it deflates the 
pretensions of their own brand of heroic utopianism. Ultimately, the 
picture that emerges is not of a clash of civilizations but of deeply 
rooted tensions that ebb and flow within and across civilizations, 
religions, and cultures. What the West can do about Occidentalism, 
however, is less clear. The anti-Western impulses in nineteenth-century 
Europe and interwar Japan were only transitional, overwhelmed by the 
forces of socioeconomic advancement. Whether the Occidentalism of 
present-day Islamic radicals will also come to accommodate modernity is 
the great question of our time. Buruma and Margalit do not venture an 
answer, but their evocative study shows that, whatever happens in the 
end, it will play out as a long and violent historical drama.