East and West: Orientalism, war and the colonial present

Résumé 0

For at least two hundred years, Western countries have exercized a "benevolent" violence through colonization. Advocated in the name of the "civilizing mission" of the West and inspired by eschatology, this calling held the promise of redemption, both for the colonizer and for the colonized. The "war declared on terrorism" after the massacre of 9/11 in New York, with the subsequent military operations in Afghanistan and in Iraq, revives this tradition of ameliorative interventionism by carrying on the old orientalist-related topoi. Far from effacing the Great Divide between the West and the Rest, the wars of a putatively new type reinforce and polarize the division between "civilized" and "barbaric" in the era of "globalization". The unfolding ideology of the American, according to which there would no longer be "outside" or "inside", because no country would now be exempt from terrorism, obscures at little cost, but not ineffectually, the "colonial present". What now prevails is a sombre vision of globalization, that of a fight to the death between two worlds, extending over all continents, between the "Empire of the Good", incarnated by America, and the "Empire of Evil", incarnated by Islamic terrorism. But this novelty goes back to schemas that are as old as the United States itself, insofar as this self-proclaimed "exceptional", "unilateral" and "providential" "imperial republic" has an idealistic or utopian component qualified as "indispensable". Welcome the the "Wilsonism in boots"!