Book Review by Dan Flynn of
The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat
by Roger Scruton
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2002, 187 pp., $19.95

Roger Scruton's The West and the Rest might have been more accurately titled, "Islam versus the West," or perhaps "The West versus Itself." In The West and the Rest, the "rest" aren't so much Africans, Asians, Arabs, and other non-Westerners, but the followers of Islam-particularly Islamic radicals. The 35,000 or so words that follow the somewhat misleading title are well worth reading.

While there have been a spate of post-September 11 books examining the West, Islam, or both, Scruton's book differs from the rest. Like Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About America or Oriana Fallaci's The Rage and the Pride, The West and the Rest excoriates radical Islam and embraces Western Civilization. Its real target, however, is the West. Specifically, it ponders the prospects of survival for a civilization ashamed of its roots, traditions, and history. Without any binding principles, why would anyone fight to preserve it?

Following 9/11, President Bush surmised that the terrorists hate us because they hate freedom. While critics harped on Bush's simplistic appraisal of the terrorists' motives, they ignored the other implication of Bush's statement: that just as freedom unifies our enemies to hate us, it is also what unites Westerners in a common community. Yet, as Scruton writes, "If all that Western civilization offers is freedom, then it is a civilization bent on its own destruction." Freedom, implying the freedom to do good as well as bad, is not enough. Something more is needed.

"To lay down your life for a friend is hard," Scruton writes. "To do so for a stranger harder still. Yet without the disposition to renounce life for the common good, a society of strangers cannot survive. It is in reflecting on this matter that we see the need to ally the idea of citizenship with a territorial loyalty." Westerners need to feel as though they are a part of a community, the author argues. Today, many Western states are "a society of strangers."

For Scruton, it is our inclusive political process-rather than race, religion, or language-that now defines nationhood in the West. In the West, every citizen has a stake in his country. "Western civilization depends on an idea of citizenship that is not global at all, but rooted in territorial jurisdiction and national loyalty," The West and the Rest alleges. "By contrast, Islam, which has been until recently remote from the Western world and without the ability to project its message, is founded on an ideal of godliness which is entirely global in its significance, and which regards territorial jurisdiction and national loyalty as compromises with no intrinsic legitimacy of their own."

Western nations, which fall under Scruton's category of "the personal state," implicate citizens in the policies of the nation. "The personal state is answerable to its citizens, and its decisions can be imputed to them not least because they, as citizens, participate in the political process," Scruton asserts. In a perverse sense, the terrorists who attack civilian targets in America and Israel understand Scruton's supposition.

Because democracies eventually reflect the will of the people, many Western pundits apply the lessons of their own lands to dissimilar nations, overestimating the will of the masses in determining the policies of non-democratic states. The will of the people in Iran, for instance, may be for modernization, increased secularism, and Westernization. Yet, since Iran is a totalitarian state and not a free republic, the will of the Iranian people is almost irrelevant to the future prospects of the nation. "The fact remains," Scruton writes, "that there is no defined role for opposition in those states, no way in which the opposing party can peacefully compete for power with the one that currently possesses it, and therefore no way in which opposition can be used to create a government based on dialogue." This, obviously, is a key difference between the West and the rest. It is also among the reasons that terrorism and other forms of political violence proliferate outside of the West.

Similarly, globalization has wrought a kind of gullibility amongst Western elites, who ascribe the descriptive term "democratic" to any organization representing a multitude of nations. Scruton writes: "those who turn up to UN meetings literally have no business being there. They are not the representatives of the people from whose territory they come, and if they speak for anyone, it is for the party, faction, or tyrant who sent them." In other words, a majority of people living outside the West reside in gangster regimes, thus, organizations like the World Trade Organization and the United Nations that include these regimes in the decision-making process cannot be considered in any way democratic.

Both Western elites and the rank-and-file followers of Islam suffer from the same problem: they both despise Western civilization. In the West, one sees cultural embarrassment among educators, entertainers, journalists, and other opinion-molders. This alienation from Western civilization is perhaps best exemplified in the lack of assimilation amongst immigrants to Europe and North America. "All criticism of minority cultures is censored out of public debate," The West and the Rest declares, "and newcomers quickly conclude that it is possible to reside in a European state as an antagonist and still enjoy the rights and privileges that are the reward of citizenship. This is the principal reason why efforts in Britain to recruit immigrant minorities to the police and armed forces-in other words, to the professions that symbolize our territorial jurisdiction and its claims on us-have met with such scant success." This is why, for instance, sympathy for anti-American terrorism was high in many communities of Islamic immigrants in the U.S.

Scruton points out that 70% of the world's immigrants are fleeing the Islamic world, while there is virtually no discernable exodus from the West. Europe and North America are such a desirable destination for outsiders because they offer freedom, particularly with regard to money. With freedom comes responsibility, namely an obligation to the new society. This is absent amongst some communities of immigrants, particularly Muslims. Scruton reminds us: "The plot to attack America was not hatched in any Muslim country, but on the continent where the West began." But why should the immigrant pledge allegiance to his new society when many a native does not? Scruton opines: "rights must be paid for by duties, and the call to duty is effective only in the context of a common loyalty. When loyalty erodes, the sense of duty erodes along with it. At the same time the erosion of duty is accompanied by no diminution in the call for rights.... My right is your duty."

The West and the Rest is correct in arguing that Western civilization, as it is now constituted, is something that few would die for. Rather than an historical curiosity, this hesitancy to lay down one's life for the greater good has always been the case. The millions that have died in past conflicts rarely went to combat willingly, but knowing that if they failed to fight they would be killed or imprisoned by their own societies. Few wars, it should be added, are fought to defend one's tribe, nation, or civilization-which also lends itself to the widespread reluctance of individuals to personally participate in non-defensive wars. Will an adoption of Scruton's organizing principle-linking citizenship to national loyalty-ensure that ours will be a civilization with an overflow of defenders? Perhaps not, but it will certainly be an improvement on the dissolution of the nation-state that has led to a civilization forced to harbor enemies within.

So what is wrong with Western civilization that needs to be fixed? Scruton answers by pointing to the evaporation of national boundaries without a corresponding absorption of the newcomer, a blind veneration of foreign cultures coupled with a denigration of our own culture, bureaucratic-made law, the inability of the state to govern multinational corporations, a materialistic devotion to money and not country, and intrusive "free trade" entities that invalidate local law. These are among the challenges to what Scruton points to as the unifying characteristic of the West: the participatory nation-state. It should be remembered that these threats to the present-day West do not just emanate from the Islamic world, but from inside the West itself.