Defending the West - "The West and The Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat" - Book Review

National Review, Dec 23, 2002 by John Fonte

The West and The Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, by Roger Scruton (ISI, 200 pp., $19.95)

Will the nation-state, one of the premier achievements of modern Western civilization, survive? This is the question Roger Scruton poses in his penetrating, stimulating, sometimes misguided, but always insightful new book. Scruton, one of Britain's most thought-provoking Tory intellectuals, presents a Burkean conservative analysis of the problems of the clash of civilizations, Islamic terror, and the ill health of the Western nation-state.

Scruton begins by describing the deep and enduring cultural differences between Western and Islamic civilizations. First and foremost, the tension that has always existed in the West between religious and secular authority has no parallel in Islam. Thus the Christian Biblical admonition, "Render . . . unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's" contrasts "radically," says Scruton, with the Koranic vision, in which "nothing is owed to Caesar." The Greek city-state, Roman law, Augustine's concept of the duty of civil obedience for the clergy, and the medieval distinction between the regnum (kingship) and the sacerdotium (priesthood) -- the "uneasy coexistence of Emperor and Pope on the 'universal' thrones of medieval Europe" -- are all cited by Scruton as examples of secular-religious divisions that existed in the West long before the Reformation and the Enlightenment, but have been absent in the Moslem world.

Scruton draws a major distinction between religious and political forms of social order. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, political authority has been central to Western civilization. For Scruton, the "political" means human decision-making, secular law, participation in a political process, citizenship, and ultimately loyalty to one's territorial regime. By contrast, the "religious" means unquestioning obedience to God's law, in which one acts as a subject instead of a citizen. Scruton explains, however, that he does not mean to say that prayers should be excluded from American public schools, if the nation's citizens favor their inclusion; nor does he mean that America is not a religious nation, or that "religion has no part to play in establishing the legitimacy of American institutions." He means, instead, that "all the many religions of America are bound to acknowledge the authority of territorial law" -- in other words, to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.

Scruton argues that it is the political process (participation, law- making, discussion) that makes it possible to separate society from the state. Thus, in totalitarian regimes -- where there is no political process -- everything is of interest to the state. For Scruton, these totalitarian dictatorships are not "political," but anti-political. In this sense, the French revolutionary regime was not "political" either: Scruton insists that the French Revolution, with its "fanaticism and exterminatory zeal," should be understood as "primarily a religious phenomenon." Likewise, Marxism and feminism may claim to be political movements, but they are, in fact, movements "against politics" because they have the "ambitions of a monotheistic faith," providing answers to all great moral and social questions.

The greatest example of the "political" is the Western nation-state, which emerged in the modern era and established secular authority over a particular territory. Scruton explains that some form of "membership" is necessary to any community or society. Before the nation-state, membership (and thus loyalty) was often creedal (based on religion) or tribal (based on tribe, kinship, etc.), but in the early modern West it became territorial and national. Prior to the formation of a territory- based regime, the people living together in a particular area began to develop -- through long social interaction, language, and custom -- what he calls a "pre-political" or "pre-contractual" (meaning pre- social-contract) loyalty. They began to think of themselves as "we," as "members" of a "people," in visceral terms. Thus, the "nation" precedes the "state" in the formation of the nation-state. Scruton cites the American example, in which the words "We the People" (the nation) signify a "pre-contractual" (i.e., pre-constitutional) "we" who created the republic.

Crucial to the nation-state is the concept of the citizen, who is loyal to the territorially defined political community. Ultimately, the idea of citizenship "depends on the nation defined as a self-renewing organism clothed in the mantle of a law-governed state." Scruton, following Burke, tells us that the nation consists of more than the sum of its living citizens. It is a "partnership" that includes present citizens, past generations (the ancestral "we"), and those yet to be born. One's nation-state should not be viewed as a "temporary arrangement" (pace Strobe Talbott), but as a permanent entity. Otherwise patriotic sacrifice makes little sense.