Tea at Trianon: The Last Gasps of Globalization

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

The Last Gasps of Globalization

From The American Conservative:

For years following the end of the Cold War and the rise of Silicon Valley, Tom Friedman of “countries with McDonald’s don’t go to war against each other” fame, the prophet of globalization, was fantasizing about peace in the Promised Land. He argued that, in the struggle between the “olive tree” (Friedman’s metaphor for outdated nationalism, ethnicity, and religion) and the Lexus (which stands for democracy, open markets, the free flow of information, people, and money), the Lexus would win.

The collapse of the 1993 Oslo Accords between the Jewish State and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), then the failure of President Bill Clinton to make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians at the 2000 Camp David Summit, followed by the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, seemed to have challenged the notion that a conflict rooted in history, nationalism, and religion was coming to a happy end, and that soon young and hip Israelis and Palestinians would be surfing the Internet, watching MTV, and making money in a new high‐tech start‐ups in the “New Middle East” (a term coined by the former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres).

I recalled that, not long ago, neoconservatives predicted that this is what trendy Arabs and Kurds would be doing in the new Iraq in 2010 where the “anachronistic identities” of ethnicity and religion were supposed to have disappeared.

“In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communications have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism,” concluded the leftist historian Tony Judt in a article in the New York Review of Books, all but dismissing the idea of an Israeli‐Jewish state and by extension its mirror‐image, a Palestinian‐Arab one, and joining the chorus of those advocating a bi‐national state.

As he saw it, the world was characterized by a “clash of cultures” between “open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant faith‐driven ethno‐states.” Israel, he warned, risked falling into the “wrong camp.” Again, if one assumes that an independent Arab Palestinian state would probably share the kind of radical Arab nationalism and militant Islam that pervades to one degree or another all the states in the Middle East, Palestine, like Israel, is also bound to become a dysfunctional anachronism. “So it’s good‐bye anachronistic nation‐state and hello borderless world, that is, less border between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza,” as I summarized Judt’s argument. (Read more.)