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Benoist: From the Right to the Left
| Article
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12922 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1987 |
3,030 Words |
| Author
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David Gress
David Gress is professor of classics at Aarhus University,
Denmark, and fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute
in Philadelphia. He is the author of works on European history
and contemporary international relations, among them A History
of West Germany 1945-1991 (with Dennis Bark, 1993) and From
Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (1998).
His most recent book is The Flickering Lamp: History,
Education, and American Culture in the New Century. |
Marx once said that political events occur twice, once as history and a second time as farce. Europe and the Third World is a good illustration of this saying. Benoist's understanding of imperialism and of the relations between America, Europe, and the Third World are warmed-over repetitions of claims and arguments first made in the early 1960s that even then were wrong. In the meantime, evidence has continued to accumulate, so that even many of those who put forth the original arguments have abandoned them. Instead, former self-styled Rightists like Benoist pick them up, apparently unaware that they are no longer original, or even correct, and present them with great fanfare as new discoveries.
Benoist's thesis, such as it is, has two parts. First, he denounces the United States as a threat to the cultures and civilizations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Second, he argues that Europe, too, is threatened by American capitalism and American culture, and that European peoples therefore share an interest with the Third World in maintaining a pluralistic world independent of American power. Both parts of the thesis are illogical and absurd, and demonstrate a highly patronizing attitude toward Third World interests and concerns.
The idea that capitalist, democratic America threatens to overwhelm presumably more elevated and dignified cultures elsewhere in the world was first developed by the European Right in the late nineteenth century. In Germany, many leading intellectuals saw World War I as a fight between German "culture" and Franco-British "civilization." "Culture," in this vocabulary, was an organic growth rooted in national character, whereas "civilization" was a set of superficial, cosmopolitan attitudes which were indistinguishable from country to country. These attitudes were a threat to "culture" because they tended to suffocate any and all national differences in the name of liberty, equality, and the free market. The similarity of this idea to Benoist's notion that democratic capitalism threatens other cultures with uniformity is striking.
In the late 1920s, after Germany's defeat in the war, some conservatives moved from the idea of a grand struggle between national "culture" and cosmopolitan, egalitarian "civilization" to the idea of a "third way" between Western capitalism and socialism. In Germany, the idea of a "third way" fed into Nazism, which may be why Benoist does not make much of this element of his intellectual ancestry. Similar ideas were to be found on the French Right as well, and in France, after World War II, the idea of a "third way" found great resonance on both the antidemocratic and
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