Moving Targets: An Interview with Cultural Theorist and Intellectual Historian Tzvetan Todorov

Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008)

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Moving Targets: An Interviewby Danny Postel

Tzvetan Todorov

Translated by Gila Walker

Danny Postel: Among the twentieth-century thinkers you most admireis Raymond Aron. One of Aron’s defining traits was his penchant forintellectual combat and political debate. One thinks, for example, of TheOpium of the Intellectuals, his frontal assault on the romance of theFrench intelligentsia with the Communist Party. But this is not at all yourstyle. Not only have you never written a book like The Opium of the In-tellectuals, you rarely even mention those of your contemporaries whosephilosophical or political views are at odds with your own. There is nodirect engagement with the likes of Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere, or Baud-rillard. I wonder why not. As a passionate advocate of liberal democracy,why have you not penned a critique, say, of antiliberalism in Frenchthought today? As a critical humanist, why have you not published anessay, say, on antihumanism in contemporary European theory? I’m notsuggesting that you should have done any of these things. I’m merelycurious, particularly given your affinity for someone like Aron, why youhaven’t taken up this sort of intellectual-political engagement. Is itpurelya matter of temperament, or is there a question of principle involved?

Tzvetan Todorov: The question you are raising about the absence of apolemical thrust to my intellectual work takes my mind in two differentdirections, which are not necessarily independent: I can ask myself aboutthe reasons I may give to justify this choice or about the causes that mayhave led me to it, sometimes without realizing it.

Insofar as the first aspect is concerned, I see my attitude to begin withas resulting from a choice of priorities and an economy of means. I op-pose adversaries in my books, but they are movements of ideas and typesof conduct rather than individuals. In The Conquest of America or in On

250 Tzvetan Todorov / Interview by Danny Postel

Human Diversity, I analyze and, at the same time, I fight against racism,ethnocentrism, xenophobia, nationalism, and a few other perversions inour relationships to “others.” In Facing the Extreme and in Hope andMemory, I do the same with regard to totalitarian ideology. In compar-ison with these fundamental debates, quarrels with my contemporariesseem somewhat trivial to me. I’m not trying to systematically ignoreopinions held by others, but I’d rather generalize them because I thinkthat other people may share them too. The important thing is to confrontthe argument, not the person. Encountering different interpretationshasoften been a source of stimulation in my work, but my feeling is thatpriority must be given in the final result to the whole rather than to par-ticular cases, which are unlimited by definition.

I also think that the most interesting work you can produce is workthat represents the greatest challenge to you. Ease of execution has alwaysseemed to me to be a sign of not getting to the bottom of things; con-versely, the confrontation with a new difficulty has a stimulating effecton me. This is how I explain to myself my own reluctance to concentrate

Tzvetan Todorov is Director of Research at the Centre National de laRecherche Scientifique in Paris. A native of Bulgaria living in France for over fourdecades, he is among the most influential literary and cultural theorists writingtoday. Among his many books available in English translation are The Fantastic:A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973), The Poetics of Prose (1977),Theories of the Symbol (1982), The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other(1984), Genres in Discourse (1990), On Human Diversity (1993), Facing theExtreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1996), A Passion for Democracy:Benjamin Constant (1999), The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria’s Jews Survivedthe Holocaust: A Collection of Texts with Commentary (2001), Frail Happiness: AnEssay on Rousseau (2001), Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (2002), andThe New World Disorder: Reflections of a European (2005). His most recent bookis Les Aventuriers de l’absolu (2006). Danny Postel is the author of Reading“Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism (2006). Amember of the editorial board of Common Review and the editorial advisoryboard of Logos, his work has appeared in Salmagundi, Daedalus, The Guardian,The Nation, Exquisite Corpse, and Philosophy and Social Criticism. GilaWalker is the translator of more than 100 works from French, including textsby Jacques Derrida, Francois Julien, and Yves Bonnefoy. She has just completedwork on Todorov’s Duties and Delights: The Life of a Go-Between and ShmuelTrigano’s The Democratic Ideal and the Shoah: The Unthought in PoliticalModernity. Walker divides her time between her homes in New York and in thesouthwest of France. Her email is [email protected]

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2008 251

for a long time on the same subject and my desire, after having workedin one area for a few years, to venture into a new related field. I sometimesfind it mind-boggling, in retrospect, to consider the variety of disciplinesthat I’ve tackled: poetics and rhetoric, semiotics and hermeneutics, thehistory of literature and painting, the history of ideas and doctrines,moral and political philosophy. . . . Positive construction, I think, ismuchmore difficult than criticism of an adversary. This is particularly true inwritten confrontations (even though this is the only form in which ar-gumentation can prevail over oratorical effects) when the object of yourcriticism is not there to contradict you and you can ridicule the personto your heart’s delight. Asserting your conception of the world withoutworrying too much about other people’s conceptions seems to me atonce more difficult and more interesting.

Added to this is my conviction that the most fruitful intellectual en-counters are not those in which you are in total disagreement with theother person. A dialogue, to pick up a hackneyed term, is situated some-where between war and perfect harmony; if different voices merge intoone or if they fight each other tooth and nail, their plurality brings noenrichment. I’ve learned the most from authors with whom I couldpeacefully travel a certain distance before they lead me off in an unknowndirection. When you’re three-quarters in agreement and a quarter in dis-agreement, the latter becomes the starting point of keener, more nuancedthinking. And when you have that many things in common, you haveno desire to engage in a head-on confrontation anymore.

One last consideration: I have gradually come to the conclusion thatit is harmful to separate human beings from their ideas. I don’t meanthis in the sense in which it was formerly understood in literary historywhen attempts were made to explain the work by the person; but it seemsto me that an author’s biography is as eloquent an expression of histhought as his works are. For this reason, when I’ve written about think-ers and authors, I’ve tried to leave room for both their personal lives andtheir ideas. I followed this approach as much in my book on BenjaminConstant (Benjamin Constant: A Passion for Democracy) as in my shorterportraits of Raymond Aron and Edward Said and more recently in myportrayals of Wilde, Rilke, and Tsvetaeva, characters in one of my latestbooks, Les Aventuriers de l’absolu. Now, if it is possible to oppose thetheses of an author in a polemical way, it makes no sense to do so whendealing with a life. How can you be “against” a life?

I might add that I myself aspire less today than in the past to producea text reducible to its theses; I try to enrich it with stories, other people’sor my own, and, as we know, stories give rise to interpretations, not ref-


utations. Books like A French Tragedy, The Fragility of Goodness, or myintellectual autobiography Devoirs et delices: Une Vie de passeur belongto a genre that has no polemical side to it; they cannot be reduced totheses subject to debate.

So you see I can find all sorts of arguments to justify my choice of notengaging in polemics with my contemporaries. But I’m not sure that theysuffice to explain an existential choice. It seems to me that decisions ofthis kind are caused by events that occur in the past, particularly in theformative years of childhood and adolescence. I can only feel my wayuncertainly in this direction; there isn’t much I can be sure of. Obviously,the twenty years from 1944 to 1963, when I was living under the BulgarianCommunist regime, are of major importance in my biography. Today Ibelieve, for instance, that my initial interest in questions of form andstructure in literature, which led me to translate the Russian formalistsinto French (in 1965) and then to write such books as The Fantastic orThe Poetics of Prose, was closely linked to the fact that debating ideas wasimpossible in a totalitarian country. Anyone who wanted to say some-thing about literature had a choice between serving the purposes of of-ficial propaganda and focusing on the formal aspects of the texts alone.

It is quite possible, although I cannot be sure, that my avoidance ofpolemics, my refusal to engage in direct confrontations, may also be re-lated to this totalitarian past. The regime taught us that whoever con-tested the official position risked losing their social status, their work,their right to live in a particular city or study in a particular university,and sometimes even their freedom if not their life. The consequences ofexpressing an antagonistic thought were so serious that the great ma-jority of people felt it was preferable not even to try. To put it morebluntly, we were systematically inculcated with the fear of saying whatwe thought, and this bred attitudes of adaptation, concession, and com-promise rather than a spirit of contestation and confrontation. Whoknows, maybe this is one of the sources of my lack of enthusiasm forengaging in the kind of verbal sparring matches at which many intellec-tuals, especially French intellectuals, are so adept.

These two ways of answering the same question are not mutually ex-clusive. Conscious opinions can have unconscious sources; this doesn’tmean they can be reduced to them.

Postel: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the November [2005] riotsin France. There has been such a range of explanations and interpreta-tions put forward—that the key factor is Islam, racism, class oppression,ethno-religious strife, a clash of civilizations, the return of the colonialrepressed, the manifestation of a global underclass culture . . . to name


a few. There is controversy over the statements of Alain Finkielkraut thatthe issue is one of republicanism and its discontents. What was your ownreaction to the riots? What is your sense of the phenomenon and its re-percussions?

Todorov: First I must say that I have no direct knowledge of the events.The acts of violence did not reach the city centers, and so they did notpenetrate into Paris, the center of an extensive region. The violence wasgeographically limited to housing projects in the banlieues. What I know,then, comes from television and newspapers. My opinions were shapedby contact with intermediaries, with journalists, social workers, localteachers, legal professionals, and the police. My firsthand knowledge isof the discourses on the violence in November, not of the violence itself.This is to set the boundaries of my comments.

From these discourses, I’d like to single out two extreme views, twomarginal interpretations, which are given all the more credence the far-ther we get from the actual scene of the violence. So what if they don’tcorrespond to observable facts? They meet the expectations of the peopleto whom they are addressed. One of these explanations, which I firstheard on a visit to New York’s Columbia University in December 2005,was that the violence was the legitimate revolt of a population oppressedand persecuted by a colonialist, racist state that is Islamophobic to boot.The other, which I read in the American press, regarded the events as anattack on France and its values, an antirepublican pogrom of sorts, to beseen in the context of terrorist Islam’s threat to the West. There are peoplewho subscribe to these explanations in France, too, mainly those whohave never had any contact with the banlieues in question. These twostandpoints imply opposing judgments, but they share the idea that weare dealing with a political conflict, the basis of which is ethnic and re-ligious. Personally, I’m afraid that both explanations tell us more aboutthe fantasies of their authors and about their conscious or unconsciousanxieties and hopes than about the reality of the facts.

But what exactly was this reality? Let us start with some essentiallyindisputable facts. In January 2006, the procureur general [the state pros-ecutor] of Paris announced that 63 percent of those arrested for acts ofviolence were minors, 87 percent had French nationality, 50 percent hadno previous arrest records, and 50 percent were not in the school system.As to their motivation, he declared that there was “no trace of identityclaims and no sign of political or religious instigation and appropria-tion.” Indeed, during the events, the only Islamic voices to be heard be-longed to religious figures imploring the youngsters to go home. EvenJean-Marie Le Pen, head of the far-right National Front, ever ready to


fuel cultural or racial conflict, was forced to admit to this; he declaredthat he was “in complete disagreement” with those who saw “religiousand ethnic” reasons for the violence, which he described as a “game thatwas not revolutionary at all.” It seems that the clash of civilizations onlytook place in the minds of those who believed in it in the first place.

How then can we describe what happened in France in November?And what can we learn from the events? First I think it’s important todistinguish between the immediate factors involved in the violence andthe indirect factors that have had an impact over the long term. Both arepresent, but they do not lead to the same consequences, nor do they callfor the same reactions.

The crisis was sparked by the death of two teenagers, electrocutedwhile running away from the police (whether or not the police were ac-tually chasing them is secondary from this standpoint). The interiorminister then proceeded to add fuel to the fire by announcing that hewas going to “clean up” the housing projects of this “lowlife.” The re-action of those who felt targeted by the minister’s comment was instan-taneous. In a show of force aimed at both the minister and the public atlarge, they clashed with the police for several weeks but without,however,exceeding certain boundaries, as in a game; no one died on either side(although one person was killed outside the clashes). The show of powerquickly turned into a contest of one-upmanship, the question being whocould start more fires, torch more cars, and defy the police better andlonger. This contest was both followed and fueled by TV (“140 carsburned here. Who can raise the stakes?”). One cannot help but be struckby the macho-confrontation side of these acts—groups of youngsterswere trying to gain recognition and respect from their peers by struttingtheir stuff (but then so was the minister). Significantly, girls did not takepart in the clashes. As for the boys, two-thirds of whom were betweentwelve and eighteen, they were performing a kind of rite of passage tomasculine adulthood.

The particular forms of violence displayed are also worthy of note. Atno point were political, ethnic, or religious demands expressed. Thegangs of youngsters did not come to Paris where the rich live, and theydidn’t attack city halls or other institutional buildings. They hardlystepped out of the housing projects where they live. Instead of takingtheir anger out on symbols of the French Republic, they did so on theirneighbors who resemble them in every respect but age and on structuresof social order that are there for their benefit. They burned cars on theirstreets and their parking lots, cars that belonged to their uncles or neigh-bors. They tried to destroy sports facilities and other meeting places in-


tended for their use. They set fire to day-care centers and schools wheretheir younger siblings went and to state employment services that weremeant to help them. All these acts have an evident self-destructive char-acter (even if their agents do not always realize it). When they burn busesthat connect (however poorly) their housing projects to the outsideworld, they and their families are the ones to suffer, not the people re-siding in the upscale districts.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen such self-destructive behavior, andwe know today the mechanisms at work in terms of the individual andthe group. Children who have been given a negative image of themselvesend up adopting this self-image and taking it a step further, in an “I’llshow them that I’m even meaner than they think” attitude. They feel thatthey owe nothing to a society that has rejected them and that they rejectin turn, and so they rejoice over its destruction. One hundred thirtyyears ago, Dostoyevsky had a few people in this situation say, “If I can’tsucceed, let the whole world perish!” These are nihilistic, not religious,words. The identity that the youngsters are asserting is not ethnic. Theirfocus is restricted to their district and the only value they are defendingis its control in face of the threat of police incursions. The only law thatprevails is the law of the strongest; the only goal that subsists is the im-mediate satisfaction of a few simple desires. This hatred of the outsideworld and its norms—the rules inherent in any organized social group—reflects a repressed self-hatred and a state of profound dejection.

I’d like to quote a few remarks by the great French novelist RomainGary about a similar outbreak of violence that took place some thirtyyears ago in 1975: “The adolescent feels insignificant in face of the over-whelming and all-powerful giantism of the surrounding foreign com-munity. He feels crushed and imprisoned by it. His self, which is at oncestricken with insignificance and continuously challenged in every re-spect, is transferred onto the group’s ‘self ’: the group becomes the in-dividual and seals its unity, its pact of union, by a criminal initiationfromwhich there is no turning back, and which is a manifestation of belong-ing.”

We can see from such behavior how important it is for children to bestructured at an early age if they are to lead fully human lives. Contraryto what has been all too thoughtlessly suggested by some theorists ofpostmodernity, nomadism, flexibility, and nonaffiliation are not neces-sarily good things. Families, communities of origin, and traditions canbe oppressive, but their total absence produces even more negative con-sequences. These youngsters have sorely missed out on the early child-hood integration necessary to the construction of their personality.


Many have grown up in families without fathers or with fathers who werehumiliated and depreciated. Because their mothers were either at workall day or suffering themselves from an absence of social integration, thechildren had no framework for internalizing the rules of communal life.From day one at school, they felt excluded; they had trouble with thelanguage and could not find the conditions they needed to work quietlyat home. Their families had immigrated to France, but they themselvesare one, two, or more generations away from the distant land of origin,and so they have no other identity to put in the place of the one they arehaving difficulty constructing in France. And, when they reach the ageto work, they can’t find anyone willing to hire them; they have no par-ticular skills, and their conduct is not considered trustworthy. With un-employment in the housing projects often hovering at around 50 percent,they end up turning to small-time drug dealing and petty crime to sur-vive.

The impact of the images that our society disseminates in profusionis not to be underestimated either. Children left alone from early infancyin front of the television—the babysitter of the poor—watch and absorbscenes of physical and sexual violence. The foreigners whom they imitateare not so much imams from Cairo as rappers from Los Angeles. Themodels that inspire them inhabit their TV sets, and they themselves haveabsorbed so many television images that they readily confuse fiction andreality. In many respects, these youngsters are acting like caricatures, butthey are caricatures of our own society. Everywhere there is advertisingconstantly inviting them to buy new things, and they don’t have themeans to do so. The wealth is there on display, but they live in low-income high-rises that are falling to pieces, in projects lacking in every-thing, stuck between highways and railways, without nice streets,without stores, without commodities. Might as well set fire to them. Ina comment about our “baiting” or “provoking” society Gary arguedthat,“constantly subject to advertising that calls on them to consume, theyare refused the means to do so. Whence the explosion.” (It is true thathe was referring at the time to the riots in the African-American innercity districts in the United States.)

Macho aggressiveness, self-destructive nihilism, and exasperation atbeing outcasts are immediate factors responsible for the recent outbreakof violence. But how can they be explained in turn? Here we have to stepback from the November 2005 events. To try to bring some elements ofan answer to this question, we could start from the following observa-tion: youngsters whose parents or grandparents migrated from Asia(China, Vietnam, or India) have managed their social integration in


France more successfully than those whose ancestors come from NorthAfrica or Black Africa. There may be several reasons for this. One is that,aside from the Indochinese peninsula, French colonial conquests weresituated in Africa. This experience, which lasted nearly a century, some-times more, has left wounds that are still unhealed. The formerly colo-nized first internalized an image of inferiority and then violently rejectedit; the former colonizers retained a sense of superiority and an attitudeof condescension and contempt toward the colonized. Whence the racistor hostile behavior on the part of government representatives (that ispolice officers) and private individuals (for example property owners orbusiness managers). Whence also the self-destructive or aggressive actson the part of the children or grandchildren of the formerly colonized.

Another characteristic of this population has to do with family struc-ture and the place of women in Moslem families. Contrary to popularbelief, there is no necessary relationship between Islam and the subor-dination of women. In a pioneering work on Mediterranean kinshipsystems, Le Harem et les cousins, anthropologist Germaine Tillion dem-onstrates that we are dealing with structures that predate Islam and ex-tend beyond its geographical reach since they are found in the paganworld of ancient Greece and the Christian culture of modern Sicily andCorsica. Nonetheless, the part of the immigrant population that prac-tices the Moslem religion has proven to be particularly vulnerable to theshock of the encounter with Western lifestyles. Women are exploited inall traditions, but Moslem women are often confined to their homes bytheir husbands. Young men who have ties with this tradition tend to di-vide women into two categories, the virgins and the whores, and to clingto their privilege as older brothers to keep an eye on their sisters. Thissituation generates new types of frustration.

There has been a disastrous junction between images of women fromtwo entirely different origins. Firstly, there is the image typical of youngmen in the ghettos of the banlieues where social relationships are oftenreduced to an escalation in shows of physical strength and violence. Thisimage is very much the same in socially underprivileged areas every-where, from Los Angeles to the greater Paris area, and has nothing to dowith a particular religion. It results from the lack of a norm to which allsubscribe: the law of force replaces the force of law. Secondly, there is theimage that comes from a Moslem tradition linked to the lifestyle of aformer rural society and now confronted with new living conditions asmuch in Europe as in Africa and Asia. It is this overdetermination—women as the “repos du guerrier” [“relaxation of the warrior”], on theone hand, and veiled, imprisoned women, on the other—that makes the


image particularly powerful. This is also what has compelled womenfrom this background to declare that they are “ni putes ni soumises”[“nei-ther whores nor submissive”], as formulated in the slogan of a movementvery active in the banlieues.

Since the roots of these difficulties run deep, remedies for them willnot be easy to find. Our world is no longer made up of self-containedhomogenous societies living apart from one another. Men and womenfrom a wide variety of traditions have been torn from their originalhomes and have settled in foreign, even hostile, environments where theyhave to live side by side and adapt to one another. Friction between themis inevitable. France is a country that is not accustomed to gradualchange; it alternates long conservative periods with radical upheavals.Yet we know in which direction we have to go to deal with these diffi-culties; everything must be done to re-create the social fabric and allowthe people living in this country to gain confidence and recognitionthrough peaceful activities. For this purpose, it is indispensable to speaktruthfully. This means not giving into fantasies but not shying away fromlooking the facts in the face. Politically correct discourse is responsiblefor a great deal of hypocrisy and ignorance. Having said this, one alsomust be careful not to attack the wrong target and mistake the awkwarddefense of outcasts and the poor for the enemy. On the pretext of avoid-ing the politically correct there is a danger of lapsing into the politicallyabject. And we have nothing to gain from this.

Postel: While Islam may not have been a factor in France’s Novemberriots,it most clearly is one in the global protests and outrage over the Danishcartoons. Again, as with the French unrest, we have seen quite a plethoraof perspectives and debate about these events. What is your own sense—firstly of the events themselves but also of the debate about them?

Todorov: This time we are indeed dealing with a conflict whose roots arecultural, one in which Islam plays an undeniable role. The cartoon affairraises a number of questions that need to be examined one by one. Myanswers are not intended to be exhaustive.

Let us start with a reminder of what actually happened. The Muham-mad cartoons were published at the end of September 2005 by a con-servative Danish daily with the stated intention of proving that there areno limits to freedom of the press in Denmark. We should also keep inmind something of the context: the Danish coalition governmentneededthe support in parliament of the populist Danish People’s Party (DF),whose program can be summed up more or less by its anti-immigrantstance, particularly toward immigrants from Moslem countries.Moslemcommunity leaders, who felt offended by the cartoons, collected 17,000


signatures and delivered the petition to the prime minister, to no effect.They then turned to the ambassadors of Moslem countries in Denmarkand asked them to speak to the prime minister on their behalf, but herefused to see them too, explaining that he could not interfere with thelaws protecting the freedom of the press in Denmark. Community lead-ers then turned to a slew of religious authorities in Moslem countrieswho organized or ignited violent demonstrations. During the demon-strations, flags as well as buildings belonging to several European coun-tries were set on fire and destroyed, and death threats were issued. Policecrackdowns resulted in turn in the death of several dozen protesters invarious countries in Asia and Africa.

The first observation I’d like to make about this unpredictable se-quence of events is that it shows the extent to which we are all living inthe same space—I’d be tempted to say, the same village—today. Whocould have imagined that something published in some obscure news-paper in Copenhagen could provoke a riot in Nigeria! The instantaneoustransmission of news, in particular of live TV images, which lends itselfto immediate perception, is radically changing our relationship to theworld and deeply impacting everyone’s behavior. Our acts have manymore consequences than we imagine, and it is high time we internalizedthis new state of affairs.

Let’s examine the affair from the Danish and more broadly the Eu-ropean side. The principle of freedom of expression, with the consequentlack of governmental control over what newspapers publish, is one ofthe pillars of liberal democracy. It is not, however, the only one. Indeed,freedom is always restricted by other equally fundamental principles.Forinstance, depending on the legislation in different countries, statingpub-licly that all Jews are bankers who grow fat on other people’s backs, thatall Arabs are thieves, or that all blacks are rapists may be against the lawjust as it may be forbidden to glorify terrorism, Nazism, or rape. In Feb-ruary 2006, the revisionist historian David Irving was sentenced in Aus-tria to three years in prison without parole for contesting the existenceof gas chambers in Auschwitz. And French bishops have just managedto get an advertisement deemed offensive to the feelings of Christiansbanned.

Such restrictions on freedom of speech are grounded, like all restric-tions on the freedom of the individual to do what he or she likes, in theneed to safeguard public welfare, and hence social stability, and toprotectthe dignity of other citizens—a requirement legitimated by the principleof equality. Between the right to act and the deed, there is a distance thatone should traverse only after taking into account the eventual conse-


quences of the act in a given context. When Europeans denounce theIranian president’s declaration that Iran has the right to develop nuclearplants, it is because they are looking beyond the “right” to do what onelikes or to do the same thing that others do to the effect on world peaceand are worried that the development of nuclear devices by Iran is par-ticularly dangerous in this regard. This is why, as some said on the oc-casion of the cartoons, one should not throw a lighted match whenthere’s a barrel of gunpowder nearby, even if there’s no law against it.

It seems to me that what the Danish newspaper did was either stupid(not realizing that running the cartoons in today’s context could haveharmful effects) or provocative (setting a trap for the Moslem commu-nity to prove its obscurantism and intolerance and thus reinforce itsexclusion from Danish society). As for the reaction of the Danish gov-ernment, it was basically tactless. Without resorting to legal measures(such as banning blasphemy as some Islamists were demanding), thegovernment could have put to use whatever political latitude it had at itsdisposal. Since a sizeable number of individuals said they felt offendedby the publication, the government should have met with them, shownthem due respect and concern, and explained to them what legal formtheir protest could take. A distinction should be drawn here between thedifferent reasons for protest: protesting against any representation of theProphet Muhammad is a purely theological (iconoclastic) demand thatthe European media cannot take into consideration; on the other hand,the representation of Mohammad with a bomb-shaped turban is not anoffense to theology but to Moslems themselves because the insinuationis that they are all terrorists. Such a reaction on the part of the govern-ment, without compromising on principles, would have calmed inter-community tensions in Denmark and saved a number of lives elsewhere.

This is by no means a matter of instituting censorship or renouncingfreedom of criticism but simply of realizing that our public acts takeplacenot in some abstract space but in a specific context that must be takeninto account. There’s a difference between criticizing a triumphant ide-ology and criticizing a marginalized, persecuted group: the one is an actof courage, the other an act of hatred. There’s a difference between mak-ing fun of oneself and making fun of others, and doing so in pictures orin writing. Moreover the latter two categories are too broad and need tobe subdivided in turn: newspaper headlines do not have the same statusas specialized publications, nor novels as political discourse, nor paint-ings as TV reports. The media today wield enormous power and, unlikeother forms of power, it does not originate with the will of the people.To gain legitimacy it must, as Montesquieu said, impose limits upon it-


self. Or, to put it in the terms of Max Weber, it is not enough to act inthe name of an ethics of conviction; it is an ethics of responsibility thatis needed, one that considers the probable consequences of acts.

So European societies have not come out of this affair with increasedstature, but the image that Moslem societies have given of themselves iseven more worrisome. Such worrying signs did not, of course, appearout of the blue with the cartoon affair; no other religion serves todayto justify terrorist attacks, murders, and persecutions. Demonstratorsagainst Denmark trampled on several distinctions that seem essential toEuropeans: between religious principles and civil laws, between the lawsof one country and those of another, between the will of the governmentand the will of individuals. The death threats voiced during the dem-onstrations in London, for example, came under the heading of a crime,and British authorities were right to take legal action against them. IfWestern societies needed a reminder that their values are not universallyadmired and that they have many enemies in the world, well, now they’vegot it.

The ease with which religious or political agitators were able to incitesuch enormous crowds to join them also reveals the degree of frustrationand the state of abandonment in which masses of people are living inthese countries. This dissatisfaction is due, to begin with, to appallingeconomic conditions, massive unemployment, and a lack of educationand of widespread transmission of knowledge. It is aggravated by a feel-ing of humiliation inflicted by the West, a feeling that becomes a powerfulmotive for violent acts. It is fueled by the Western occupation of Moslemcountries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, by the injustice inflicted onPalestine, and by the images of prison torture from Abu Ghraib andGuantanamo, among others. I’m not saying that all the ills of Moslemcountries are due to outside causes, that they are imported from theWest, or that these countries are merely victims of neocolonialism. I be-lieve, to the contrary, that they mainly have their own leaders to blamefor their underdevelopment. Nonetheless, the injustices of which West-ern countries can be accused have become emblematic in Moslem coun-tries and have made it possible to find an easy scapegoat, obscuring inthis way the other causes of distress.

This contrast between Moslem countries and liberal democracies hasled some people to conclude that the problem has been there from theoutset, that it comes from the Islamic religion itself and from Islam’sholybook, the Koran. I have a hard time accepting the essentializationofmorethan a billion people from all walks of life, all of whom are supposed tobehave in the same way. The immense majority of Moslems, like all other


populations, would like to live in peace; they are looking for personalhappiness, not jihad and the victory of one religion over another. Reli-gious determinism is never sufficient and the doctrines themselves au-thorize multiple interpretations. In my opinion, the source of currenttensions is more political than theological; it is situated more on earththan in heaven. This does not mean that a new war between religions,called civilizations for the occasion, is inconceivable. All it would take isa fanatic, influential minority since the masses—that is, you and I—willfollow passively.

What lessons can be drawn from the distressing Danish cartoonaffair?They are twofold, both on the outside and on the inside. Vis-a-vis theMoslem countries, European countries should avoid lapsing into an-gelism and pacifism; we have enemies who will not hesitate to use forceto make us renounce the values that we hold dear. To defend ourselves,we too must be ready to use force. At this point in time, when Iran seemson the verge of having nuclear weapons at its disposal, this affair is awarning that is not to be taken lightly. But we must simultaneously en-sure that our democratic principles do not look like a deceptive maskhiding selfish interests related to land or energy. We must immediatelyclose prisons where people are being tortured with impunity and evenlegally, and we must put an end to our military occupations as quicklyas possible. Setting an example of freedom and justice—which is nothappening right now—could well be more to our advantage thancurrentmilitary operations. If we do not do so (and it does not look like theAmerican government is heading in this direction), we will have signifi-cantly contributed to our own misfortunes.

The same twofold approach is to be applied at home. No compro-mising on principles: theology must not interfere with politics, the free-dom and plurality of the media must be safeguarded, and the right ofwomen to free choice and dignity must be defended. At the same time,we’ve got to avoid pitting communities against one another, stigmatizingthem unduly and preferring one to the others. Tolerance towards othersis all the easier to put into practice when it is underpinned by intransi-gence in the face of the intolerable.

Postel: Do you agree that the French no vote on the EU constitution, asseveral observers have claimed, is connected to the demonstrations/riotsthat convulsed France in the spring of 2006? What are your impressionsof and thoughts about these events? And what is your view of the Frenchvote on the EU constitution and of France’s relationship with the EU?

Todorov: In March and April 2006, the major cities in France went througha new period of agitation after that of November 2005, this time over a


government bill to introduce a new work contract. The Contrat PremiereEmbauche, or First Employment Contract, was intended to make it easierfor employers to lay off employees but promised to make hiring easier,too. After extensive demonstrations, the government withdrew the bill.What conclusions can someone like me draw from these events, keepingin mind that I’m not an economist and that I’m not looking for a jobanymore? I’m afraid that my thoughts on the subject will include no rev-elations.

From day to day, as events were unfolding, I found myself attentiveto some of the excessive aspects of the protests. The first reason for mylack of sympathy was strictly formal. I am attached to representative de-mocracy and I don’t like to see the government giving in to street pres-sure; it reminds me of the fascist demonstrations of strength in theinterwar period that eventually brought about the collapse ofdemocracy.A million protesters in the streets is obviously very impressive, but I ha-ven’t forgotten that there were many more people than that who votedthis parliament and this government into office along with their pro-gram. The rules of democratic life require that we accept election resultseven when we’re not happy about them. Representative democracytodayis subject to the ongoing pressure of what Jacques Julliard terms “per-manent democracy” in nonelectoral periods, such as opinion polls,which often have a strong impact on strictly political decisions.

My second reservation had to do with the turn that the debate took.France’s unemployment rate has been hovering around 10 percent formany years, up to 25 percent among the young, and even 50 percent inthe poorer areas. Unemployment is not merely an economic disaster; it’sa cancer that eats away at the social fabric. We must do everything wecan to fight it, so why not a new type of contract? I don’t know whetherit was an economically viable solution but I thought it was a bit excessiveto reject it on principle. It should have been a practical question, some-thing to be tried for a year, let’s say, kept if it helped and dropped if it diddamage. All of the different political parties want to lower unemploy-ment; the struggle against it should not be the object of partisan fighting.

Next, large numbers of students got involved in the protesting, butwhether or not it was a demonstration of their political maturity is an-other question. What I observed around me (I live near the Latin Quar-ter) was more the need to participate in a ritual that has come to beregarded as nearly mandatory by each new generation: meetings, sit-ins,student “strikes,” demonstrations, clashes with the police. I got the sensethat they were demonstrating how little they cared about their studiesmore than a real enthusiasm for a political struggle. Admittedly, entire


sections of the French university system are in a sorry state—unlike thehighly selective grandes ecoles—which doesn’t motivate students to pur-sue their studies.

I also felt that the students’ reaction revealed a fairly shallow under-standing of economic issues; to be sure, the teaching of economics inFrench schools is notoriously inadequate. Critics of the proposed mea-sures seemed to forget that a less-than-perfect contract is better than nocontract at all and that, before wealth can be redistributed, it must beproduced. This lack of realism has been manifest in other social conflictsas well, as if people did not understand that the increased life expectan-cies we’ve been experiencing for half a century necessitate a lengtheningof lifetime working hours, not a reduction thereof (with the thirty-five-hour work week or retirement at sixty).

Lastly, I couldn’t get rid of the impression that the people we werehearing in the course of this conflict were not those for whom the mea-sures were intended but rather other sectors of society that were not con-cerned by them. The First Employment Contract was meant to helpyoung people with no qualifications—the very youngsters who were in-volved in the November demonstrations. But most of the protesters inthe spring demonstrations were students, mainly from the middle class,and members of trade unions, entrenched almost exclusively in the pub-lic service sector where there is full job security. The youngsters from theimpoverished areas were not (from what we heard) systematicallyhostileto the government’s proposals.

But I cannot restrict my analysis solely to these reservations. Beyondthe motives actually voiced by the protesters, one could hear other,deeper reasons for concern. The questions raised were not merely eco-nomic. What triggered the initial protests was the prime minister’s de-cision to impose his reform without consulting either the unions orparliament. He acted like an enlightened despot from the eighteenthcen-tury, knowing, or thinking he knows, what’s best for his subjects andimposing it upon them without asking what they have to say. In so do-ing, he was apparently regarding (anticipated) economic effects as all-important and the social debate as meaningless. The intensity of thehostile reactions showed that he was mistaken—people behaved as if dig-nity mattered more than economic benefits. What politicians todayseemto forget all too often is that, however desirable material wealth may be,it is but a means to a more fulfilling, more worthy, more meaningful life.Pure economic criteria, as we all know today, do not suffice to assess thewell-being of a population and must be subordinated to social criteria.

Which brings me to the usual reactions in Europe against free-market


capitalism (often said to be running wild). For someone like me who haslived part of his life in Communist Bulgaria in a “planned” and not a“market” economy, the choice seems cut-and-dry: between penury andopulence, you don’t hesitate for long. But you cannot be satisfied withan observation such as this when you know that human well-being is nota matter of company growth rates and turnovers, nor does it derive au-tomatically from the latter. While maintaining the advantages of a com-petitive economy, political action must work to offset its harmful effectsby implementing social measures for the common good.

On what level must such policies be implemented to be efficient? Eu-ropean nations are not big enough for each to alter its own economicsituation. On the other hand, the size of the European Union, betweena small nation and the world, offers precisely the right context for suchaction. The problem is that the EU is not yet a sufficiently united entityto adopt common measures. In fact, as a unified entity it has even re-gressed since the negative vote on the constitution in France and in theNetherlands in 2005.

The no vote in France came from the conjunction of two extremes:the majority obtained by adding together the votes from the extremeRight and the extreme Left. There was something very odd, to say theleast, about seeing such unlikely bedfellows as a Trotskyist leader, a sec-retary of the Communist Party, the leader of the nationalist Right, andthe head of the extreme Right standing side by side—physically—intheircampaign for the no. Nationalist and xenophobic representatives of theRight will probably never change their minds, lest they lose the sole thrustof their political agenda. But the left of the mainstream Left is not au-tomatically anti-European. If it voted no, it was because the writers ofthe constitution wanted to include principles that already figured in pre-viously signed treaties, in particular regarding the free market economy.In this sense, there was a connection between the ‘no’ to the constitutionand the demonstrations in March and April 2006. All it would take toreverse this vote is to drop the articles in question, and this could be doneall the more easily as economic policies do not belong to the category offundamental rights; they are of a conjunctural nature and have no busi-ness figuring in the constitution.

France today gives me the impression, and I am not alone in this re-spect, of a country mired in stagnation, dominated by a conservativeoutlook and a political class that lacks daring and inventiveness. The Eu-ropean framework may just be the one that will provide it with a newlease on life.

Postel: Why is it advisable for a political Europe to exist?


Todorov: Because everybody stands to benefit from it. With its 450 millioncitizens, the European Union can implement an economic policy thatno single European nation would be able to conduct alone; it can dealwith energy resource problems that are common to all, adopt a commonstance toward immigration, and develop advanced research centers thatno isolated state could afford. European countries also need to unite inorder to resist common adversaries more efficiently. Until now, terroristshave been able to move from country to country with greater ease thanexamining judges. Environmental dangers cross borders with equalease—the cloud of radioactivity from Chernobyl was unwilling to stopat the Rhine, and the impact of global warming is as strong in Italy as inDenmark—and yet protection policies still remain in the hands of eachnation.

In a world that is so much more unified than ever before, Europe canplay a role that none of its individual member nations could hope tofulfill, defending its interests vis-a-vis other world powers and embody-ing a set of principles that can serve as a model for all. Because of thepainful experiences that have marked its history over the last few cen-turies (colonialism, totalitarianism, the world wars), Europeans aspiretoday to become a “quiet power,” willing to defend itself yet seeking tomake its presence felt in the rest of the world through its values, not itsarmies. The peoples of Europe are no longer dreaming of a radiant fu-ture, but they cannot confine themselves to dealing with routine affairs.To gather momentum again, they need a project, a “grand design,” suchas embodying and defending European values. Such momentum wasstopped in its tracks by the French and Dutch no vote to the Europeanconstitution.

If, as I am arguing, a stronger Europe is advisable, how can we get outof the current impasse? In theory, we have three options: we can dropthe constitutional treaty, propose another one, or adapt the existing textto make it acceptable to everyone. The first solution is unworkable, andit is not the Hampton Court Agenda (called l’Europe des projets inFrench), with its shift in focus away from a constitution toward a seriesof concrete projects, that will prove the contrary. It is unworkable forpsychological reasons (the loss of momentum takes us back in time, andthis tide needs to be reversed), but also for technical ones. The EU isparalyzed by the existing treaties, which are unsuitable for an enlargedunion of twenty-five member states. The draft treaty for the constitutiondealt with this problem in a number of clauses about qualified majorityvoting, enhanced cooperation, and greater stability for the presidency ofthe council. Drafting a new text is an equally impractical solution. Not


1. July 2007: the direction suggested here is more or less the one actually adopted by the lastEuropean summit in June 2007.

because the existing text is perfect (it isn’t), but because sixteen countrieshave already voted in favor of it, and nothing justifies asking them tostart all over again. What’s more, everyone knows that this text wasreached through compromise and that we are highly unlikely to see an-other one suddenly winning unanimous support. As it stands, it is animperfect but perfectible text that would allow us to take one step for-ward right away.

So there is only one solution left and that is to adapt the text. To doso requires starting from the principle that nothing should be submittedto a vote that was not already in the initial draft but also that he who cando more can do less. Otherwise put, the nine countries that did not ratifythe treaty should be given the possibility of adopting an abridgedversion,limited to parts I (the institutions), II (fundamental rights) and IV (gen-eral provisions), and excluding part III (policies and functioning) andthe annexes. This reduction, which would shorten the text from 183 to23 pages, is justified not only because French and Dutch reservationswere essentially motivated by the third part but also because the latterhas more to do with political choices that change with changing major-ities than with a legal framework that has to be stable over time. Thiscondensed text could be given a new name, such as the FundamentalTreaty, and every country that wants to continue to be part of the Eu-ropean Union would be required to adopt it. For this reason, andbecauseit is a decision that engages each country’s political future, it should bemade by those who are responsible for the country’s political destiny,namely, its parliament or its two chambers.

To implement this solution, all it would take is for the next EuropeanCouncil to adopt it and at the same time postpone the deadline for rat-ification to 1 November 2007, leaving the choice of the most opportunemoment for this vote to each government. Acting now, rather than atsome uncertain future date, would allow us to benefit from a favorablepro-European atmosphere in several countries. We should take advan-tage of the fact that such staunch pro-Europeanists as Jose Luis Rodrı-guez Zapatero in Spain, Angela Merkel in Germany, and Romano Prodiin Italy are now in power. Add France to these three countries, and youalready have more than half the population of Europe.1

It is interesting to note that some of these governments are center-Left, others center-Right, so clearly when it comes to building Europe,the dividing line is not so much between Left and Right as between pro-


European centrists and anti-European extremists (as was illustrated inFrance by the unlikely coalition of Left and Right extremists advocatingthe no).

Once this ratification has been obtained and European momentumrestored, the EU can get moving again by making use of the provisionsconcerning enhanced cooperation in particular. In a Europe withtwenty-five or twenty-seven member states, this is the only way to moveforward. The European Union will have, not a hard-core group of thesame countries, but a multi-purpose functioning (“L’Europe a geometrievariable”) according to the sectors in which enhanced cooperationseemsuseful. This is, incidentally, already the case: the Schengen zone includesfourteen countries, the Eurozone twelve, Eurocorps six countries di-rectly and five others indirectly—but they are never exactly the sameones. The same model could be applied to other agreements concerning,for example, social protection, legal cooperation, or fiscal coordination.

France has a particular interest in the development of a strongpoliticalEurope. The only chance it has of making its voice heard on the globalstage is through the European Union. France can be strong in Europe;Europe will be strong in the world. But for this purpose other Europeanswill have to see France working for the common good and not for itsown particular interests. France could evidence this stance by eloquentgestures, such as letting the European parliament move to Brussels in-stead of keeping it in Strasbourg, where it adds unnecessary expenses tothe EU budget without enhancing the grandeur of France. It could getthe EU more involved in the positions it defends as a permanent memberon the Security Council; it could commit to using the military means atits disposal to safeguard the integrity of European territory rather thanspeaking in this context of defending undefined “allied countries” (asJacques Chirac did in his speech on defense on 19 January 2006).

The reinforcement of a European identity is not, as some fear, det-rimental to national identities. Europe is not a nation and never will be.The two identities are not incompatible; after all, each and every one ofus already has several affiliations, whether we know it or not. Firstly, weall have a cultural identity, in the wide sense of the term, of which we arethe passive recipients in childhood. This includes our mother tongue,above all, and the worldview embedded in it, a religion (or its absence),memories of landscapes, culinary and physical habits, but also elementsof culture in the narrower sense, such as books, pictures, and melodies.Then we all have a national and civic identity, cemented by solidarityrather than shared feelings—this identity is founded on our economicand social interdependence, as expressed in the state budget and taxesand translated through our systems of retirement, health coverage, edu-


2. Perry Anderson, “Inside Man,” The Nation, www.thenation.com/doc/20060424/anderson

cation, and transport, among others. In addition, we all have an identitybased on our moral and political choices, since we subscribe to certainuniversal principles, including the democratic system, the rule of law,and human rights.

It is to this set of collective identities that the European identity isbeing added. It proceeds from the acknowledgement of the undeniableplurality of nations within a single entity: Europe. It consists in turninga lack of unity into a unity on a higher level, of converting difference intoan identity. We can accomplish this by an active commitment to coex-istence, comparison, and confrontation with those who do not alwaysthink and feel as we do; by practicing tolerance and not giving in to thetemptation to do good by force; by encouraging emulation and, at thesame time, a critical spirit; and by learning, as Kant said, “to think fromthe standpoint of everyone else.”

Postel: A central theme of your book Le Nouveau Desordre mondial is theEurope/U.S. split. A great deal has been made of this topic since the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Many observers regard it as a pivotal geopoliticaldevelopment. Some even bestow world-historic significance upon it.Perry Anderson, among others, has articulated a rather different view:

European hostility to the [Iraq] war is broad but not deep. The invasionwas widely opposed, but once consummated has not given rise to muchfurther protest. Demonstrations against the occupation have been fewand far between, in stark contrast with the global wave of protestsparked by the war in Vietnam. The British government that joined inthe American attack has not been punished at the polls. The Germangovernment that opposed the invasion was soon helping out behind thescenes, providing information on targets in Baghdad and assistancewith CIA renditions. The French government, taxed by Fukuyama withdouble-crossing the United States in the Security Council, in fact toldthe White House to go ahead without a new resolution, and has workedclosely with Washington to install suitable regimes in Haiti and Leba-non. All stand united on Iran. European hostility to the current presi-dency is more pique than conniption. What has grated is indifference todiplomatic niceties, and insufficient homage of acceptable vice to osten-sible virtue. Elites and masses alike are attached to the veils that havetraditionally draped compliance with American will and resent a gov-ernment that has discarded them. Grievances of this kind, a matter ofstyle rather than substance, will pass with a return to decorum. A Clin-ton restoration would no doubt see a swift and rapt reunion of the OldWorld with the New.2


3. Vinay Lal, “The Beginning of a History,” www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-fukuyama/beginning_3585.jsp

What do you make of this? How consequential, in your view, is the At-lantic divide (or, as Anderson would have it, lack thereof), in practical,geopolitical terms as well as in larger geohistorical ones? There is anotherquotation I would like to include along with the one from Anderson,from the Indian historian Vinay Lal:

From the point of view of those who come from the formerly coloni-sed states of the global south, there is absolutely nothing to choose be-tween the Europeans and the Americans.3

This in no way changes the essential thrust of my question. It simply fillsout the picture, adding a postcolonial element to the Marxist one foundin Anderson’s argument. This is something on which the Marxist andpostcolonial perspectives converge: the feeling that Europe and Americaare of a piece, that the talk of a Euro-American rift is misplaced, a dis-traction from the underlying harmony of the imperial-capitalist world-system. It is against this intellectual backdrop that my question is framed.

Todorov: Observe the Earth from Mars and I’m sure you won’t see anydifference between Americans and Europeans (or Asians and Africans,for that matter): they’re all earthlings! Apparently there are people inIndia who see the West (or should I say the “global north”?) as a mono-lithic block. I must say that I do not find such generalizations convincingor helpful. I think formerly colonized countries should be attentive todifferences; for example, old colonialist countries, such as Great Britainand France, suffer from a bad conscience that is missing in the UnitedStates, a former colony itself. Underlining these differences can be a con-venient way of ensuring the support of one against the other. I’m alsonot convinced that the ex-colonized (the “global south”) form a coherentblock. Is there really no difference between South Korea and Angola orbetween India and Kenya?

If we broaden the basis of comparison, the United States and the Eu-ropean Union clearly share many interests and values; there is no reasonto pass over them in silence. Besides, they are sometimes joined by others,such as Japan, the Latin American countries, or Russia. All states havean interest in preventing nonstate acts of terrorism. Nuclearproliferationis a real danger for humanity; the fewer the states that have the bomb,the better off we are. Peace and independence in Lebanon are unques-tionably preferable to civil war and occupation by a foreign army.

But similar reactions such as these and others cannot mask the exis-


tence of significant differences. To confine ourselves to questions of for-eign policy, all these states are out to defend their own interests (and notonly principles of justice and democratic values, as they sometimesclaim), but only the United States systematically adopts an imperial pol-icy. What I mean by this is that they declare that their interests are atstake all over the planet and consider it legitimate to employ force todefend them. The Europeans were clearly tempted by the same posturein the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they have abandonedit since (Great Britain’s unconditional support for the United States is asign of submission, not domination). The explanation for the Europeanstance is to be sought not so much in a greater attachment to virtue asin the active presence in Europe of the past and its aftereffects, and alsoin a concern for efficiency; the Europeans were convinced that the oc-cupation of Iraq would only intensify terrorism rather than diminish it(and they were right).

To be sure, the “Europe” label also masks divergences, firstly betweenthe people and their governments and then between the different gov-ernments. Whereas the vast majority of the people in Europe wereagainst the war, some of the governments—notably in Spain, Italy, GreatBritain, and Poland—supported the American intervention. In demo-cratic countries where government officials are periodically subject toelections, this rift is a source of danger, and we have seen that prowargovernments lost subsequent elections to those who had opposed thewar; this was the case in Italy and Spain. More recently in Great Britain,Tony Blair resigned under pressure from his own party; the main criti-cism against him was his blind allegiance to U.S. foreign policy. Poland’scase is somewhat different; loyalty to America is a means for the Polishto buy insurance against any eventual intrusive attempt on the part oftheir big Russian neighbor, for the memory of past incursions is stillpainfully alive. But the Polish people themselves were as hostile to thewar as the Italians and the Spanish. Maybe the reason why the Frenchdid not organize massive demonstrations against the war was that theyidentified with the position of their government and were dubious aboutthe effect of mass protests at the Bastille or the White House.

What Europeans reproach the Americans for, in this context, is thatthey seem to believe in brute military force as the only means of reachinga goal. Take terrorism, for example. Fighting against terrorism is a le-gitimate goal. I consider bombing al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan an actof legitimate defense for the United States. But the U.S. intervention inIraq under the pretext of fighting terrorism was outrageous, and I’m stillperplexed by the fact that the majority of the American people did not


realize it. Firstly, deliberate lying became a commonplace means of ac-tion like any other (as used to be the case in totalitarian states); and,secondly, the administration achieved the opposite of what it said it weregoing to. Post-9/11 American policies illustrate the danger of thinkingthat one’s position as a victim in the past (in this case, as the target ofterrorist attacks) gives one the right to disregard rules, norms, and prin-ciples of justice. Just as Auschwitz serves in Israel to justify actionsagainstits Arab neighbors, so 9/11 serves to dispense the U.S. government fromobserving international conventions and legitimates torture in the AbuGhraib prison and in Guantanamo. A reaction of this kind is dangerous;one mustn’t forget that humiliation can become the source of great vi-olence. This is true of people in big and small countries alike.

The Europeans are not expecting everybody to knuckle under; afterall they’ve been victims of terrorist attacks more often than the Ameri-cans, recently in Madrid and in London and before that in Paris and inBerlin. But they think that the bombing in Afghanistan ought to havebeen the exception, not the rule; rarely does a government officially pro-tect terrorists the way the Kabul government did. What is needed the restof the time is police work—infiltrating, phone tapping, tailing, andfreezing assets—and it would hardly be appropriate to call this war. Whatis needed more especially, aside from dealing with the symptom, is ad-dressing what legitimates it psychologically: the long-term occupationof Palestine and the more recent occupation of other Moslem countries,Iraq and Afghanistan.

Terrorism is to be taken seriously, and not only because the acts ofviolence are really dangerous in a world where technological progresshas made them easy. We have to worry as much if not more about thedangerous effects on our own thinking. We are beginning to conceive ofthe world exclusively in terms of good and bad, friends and enemies, andto see every Moslem as a threat. Dangers exist, but this does not justifyanything and everything. Let’s not act like the Fascists who, between thetwo world wars, gained power over people’s minds by waving the Bol-shevik threat, or like Senator McCarthy who did likewise in the fifties(even if Soviet spies were a reality). It is precisely because the risks arereal that we must show discernment and resist movements of sheerpanic.This is the duty of intellectuals and academics, in particular, whose pro-fession consists in trying to get as close to the exact truth as possible:shouting fire whenever someone lights a cigarette will not help put outactual fires.

The war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 illustrated again the dif-ference in approach between the Europeans (minus Great Britain) and


the United States. The latter gave unconditional support to the Israeliintervention, which was another attempt to resolve a political problemby brutal force, in this case by bombing. This intervention was not, aswe know, crowned with success. Israel has the right to demand that itsvillages not be attacked and its citizens not kidnapped. But aren’t thereother means of achieving this goal? Wouldn’t it be helpful, in particular,to put an end to the occupation of foreign territories, military interven-tions, and the imprisonment of enemies? The European Union, on theother hand, asked insistently for the bombings to cease. After the ar-mistice, it sent a peace force to the region. Its representatives seem tothink that a political conflict cannot be settled in a permanent way usingweapons alone.

Whether the Atlantic divide widens or narrows will depend as muchon American foreign policy in the future as on the construction of a morecoherent political Europe. The European Union needs to acquire mili-tary autonomy, and the United States must be willing to take into ac-count other nations’ interests. I would rather have a plural world than aunified one, and this is not just a matter of personal preference; this is,I believe, in the common interest. A power acquires genuine legitimacynot from its origin but from the way it is exercised, and this means settingitself limits.

[Paris–Chicago 2006–2007]

Documents

Moving Targets: An Interview with Cultural Theorist and Intellectual Historian Tzvetan Todorov