Cultural Encounter As 'Emergence': Rethinking Us-Arab Relations
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Institute of Advanced Insights Study CulturalCultural EncounterEncounter asas ‘Emergence’:‘Emergence’: RethinkingRethinking US-ArabUS-Arab RelationsRelations Nathan J. Citino Volume 8 2015 Number 4 ISSN 1756-2074 Institute of Advanced Study Insights About Insights Insights captures the ideas and work-in-progress of the Fellows of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. Up to twenty distinguished and ‘fast-track’ Fellows reside at the IAS in any academic year. They are world-class scholars who come to Durham to participate in a variety of events around a core inter-disciplinary theme, which changes from year to year. Each theme inspires a new series of Insights, and these are listed in the inside back cover of each issue. These short papers take the form of thought experiments, summaries of research findings, theoretical statements, original reviews, and occasionally more fully worked treatises. Every fellow who visits the IAS is asked to write for this series. 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While Lewis used ‘emergence’ to refer to a universal process of westernisation, this article associates the term with historical contingency and anti-determinism. It applies that understanding of emergence, first in a discussion of recent scholarship about colonial encounters in the Middle East and then in a description of the author’s own research on US foreign policy during the Cold War. The article concludes that emergence, in its anti-determinist sense, is a valuable concept for understanding cultural encounters. Historians’ contingent interpretation of past encounters challenges the notion that today’s conflicts are culturally predetermined. rom my colleagues among the 2014 Michaelmas term IAS fellows, I learned about the Fmany applications of ‘emergence’ as a concept for analysing complex change in which newly-observed phenomena exhibit different properties from their constituent parts. While this concept has proven useful in the natural sciences, its value to those of us who study modern history, and more specifically relations between the United States and the Arab world, is perhaps less clear. Yet during my time as an IAS fellow, I came to employ ‘emergence’ as an approach for re-conceptualising the US-Arab encounters addressed in my scholarly research and for situating that work within the history of Middle East studies. My fellowship coincided with the completion of a long-term book project about modernisation in US-Arab relations during the cold-war era. The context for this work has been dispiriting in the extreme, timed as it was with the disastrous consequences of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, the disappointments of the ‘Arab Spring’, the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State. Regional conflict is typically discussed in terms of monolithic cultural categories and attributed to the characteristics supposedly inherent to those groups. Such categories include Arabs and Israelis, and Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, but the ‘clash of civilisations’ between Islam and the West is assumed to be the most essential, irreducible conflict of all. As will be seen, emergence is most useful for the way it can be used to represent an emphasis on contingency in encounters between different cultures. Restoring contingency to accounts of past encounters calls into question the presumption that today’s conflicts are culturally predetermined. This article uses ‘emergence’ to situate my research on US-Arab relations within the Middle East studies literature and to explain its original contributions. These objectives can best be achieved by beginning with a classic book in the field of Middle Eastern history, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, first published in 1961 by Bernard Lewis. I begin with Lewis’s concept of emergence, and then consider the same concept in a very different sense. Emergence offers a way of exploring the alternative kinds of narratives that historians of the Middle East have recently developed to understand historical change. As I stressed to interdisciplinary audiences while at the IAS, the interpretive function of narrative is an essential part of the historian’s contribution 2 Institute of Advanced Study Insights to understanding. He or she does not merely recover facts. As the US historian Thomas Bender explains, the plot of a historical account ‘becomes itself an interpretation of society and the way it works’, by presenting an ‘image of society’ to the reader which it ‘crystallizes in narrative form’ (Bender, 1986, p. 122). In describing a cross-cultural encounter, the narrative must also demonstrate the reciprocal influence of each culture upon the other, while taking into account the disparities in power that characterised colonial or neo-colonial relationships. Lewis is well known as one of the leading British orientalists of the twentieth century. In the 1970s, he moved from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London to Princeton. He was Edward Said’s principal antagonist and debating opponent during the intellectual battles over Said’s work Orientalism during the 1980s. Later, Lewis advised Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon on Middle Eastern history in the run-up to the 2003 occupation of Iraq. For my purposes, Lewis is important for the way in which he understood emergence and used that concept to describe the process of modernisation in a non-Western Islamic society. His concept of emergence was quite different from, even diametrically opposed to, the definitions of emergence that I encountered in dialogues with other IAS fellows. For Lewis, the emergence of modern Turkey occurred as part of a linear, rational and largely predictable process over more than a century, by which the features of traditional Islamic society in the Ottoman Empire were transformed into those of a modern and westernised Turkish nation-state. This process was predictable because in the intellectual context of Lewis’s day, the evolution of traditional into modern societies was thought to be universal. The characteristics of modern society – secularism, nationalism, industrialisation, statehood – were the culmination of a process of westernisation that was occurring in many other parts of the world in the contexts of decolonisation and the Cold War. Modern Turkey would inevitably come to resemble societies that had previously experienced modernisation. And so it fell to Lewis to explain the emergence of those features in the history of attempts to reform the Ottoman Empire and its transformation into republican Turkey over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.