America stood out as as an object for admiration, envy, and blame. This created a kind of cultural asymmetry. To us, Afghanistan seemed very far away. To members of al Quaeda, America seemed very close. In a sense, they were more globalized than we were.
— The 9/11 Commission Report, p.340
This is the most striking moment in the volume, if for no other reason than how the document otherwise keeps to a self-imposed facticity and diligently does not speculate on psychological conditions; if it wishes us to know, say, of the love between Ziad Jarrah and Aysel Senguen, it mentions only the extarodinarily-timed dates of known visits and phone calls. The passage above leaps from the sea of data, reflecting, as a leaping fish reflects light for just a moment, the possibility that world social relations might have had an impact on decisions made. And one doesn't regret the brevity, or the generality. In their own way, these four sentences, limited as they are by the conditions in which they themselves appear, are insightful. Possibly even "true."
And yet to think this is to realize that the converse is true as well. If the new new world is always bringing the faraway near, not just its images but its powers, this is not to say that "globalism" is necessarily the constant, disturbing experience of such proximity. Globalism, or global power, might equally be described as the power not to be confronted by such things. The seeming distance of Afghanistan in 2001, described above, is exactly the measure of how globalized we are — of a Western citizen's naturalized ability to move from city to city, strength to strength, Hilton to Sofitel lobby, without having to think much about it.
In this regard, the concept of "globalism" is perfectly dialectical, not just one asymmetry but an opposed series of them, pooling into a concept that keeps changing its shape, revealing different contours. "Globalism," that is to say, or "dialectics" or "history," these things are no more or less abstract than are the events tracked by the Commision's report, in so far as each is the stuff of the others.
Posted by jane at August 10, 2005 09:26 AM | TrackBack