20.09.2006
Benedict XVI and the struggle for Europe
There is more to the pope's Regensburg speech than a crude attack on islam. Jack Conrad investigates
A year after the election of Joseph Ratzinger to succeed John Paul II, he is steering the catholic church into new waters. Benedict XVI's Regensburg speech on September 12 marks a reassertion of a specifically catholic outlook, agenda and claims to universality.
John Paul II's pontificate can be neatly divided into two, interlinked but distinct, phases. The first was characterised by the catholic church's close cooperation with the US - not least in snuffing out liberation theology in Latin America and helping to ensure an orderly collapse of bureaucratic socialism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. John Paul II is said to have acted as a conduit for CIA funds sent to Solidarnosà§.
The second phase was crocodile tears. The consequences of capitalist restoration and triumphant US superimperialism were immediate, destructive and horrible and brought about massive protests and even wider unrest. John Paul II issued pious statements condemning neoliberalism, the Iraq war and the murderous explosion in African poverty that came in the wake of IMF structural adjustment programmes. The catholic church has a billion-strong flock that has to be kept within the fold. To one degree or another its leaders must therefore reflect, show concern for and on occasion even run with the anger of the masses.
Not that John Paul II embraced the forces of secularism, social progress and working class socialism. He criticised the effects of unbridled capitalist exploitation. Simultaneously, however, he strove to cement a united front of religious reactionaries. A holy alliance. His solutions lay in a return to a largely mythical past. The hand of friendship was held out not only to the orthodox and protestant traditions within christianity, but to conservative Jews and muslims. John Paul II kissed the Koran and, visiting Israel, begged forgiveness for the catholic church's long and grisly record of anti-semitism.
History
Though Benedict XVI pleads that he is "deeply sorry" for giving offence to hypersensitive muslim feelings, there can be no doubt whatsoever that his original words were chosen with consummate care. He is a church intellectual. He was addressing the academic hierarchy. The Regensburg speech would have been months in the making, involving consultation with close colleagues, drafting and countless redraftings.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new and you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Not the words of Benedict XVI himself. As we all know now, they come from the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologos. Purportedly, there had been a "dialogue" between the "erudite" emperor and an "educated Persian" held at the Byzantine army's winter barracks near Ankara perhaps in the year 1391.
But the pope did not take hold of this jaundiced, and quite frankly thoroughly ignorant, statement, in order to set the record straight. The Byzantine empire was in terminal decline and desperately clung to a religious pacifism which promised salvation from the westward-expanding Ottoman Turks. When Manuel II committed his "dialogue" to paper, Constantinople was subject to what was to be an eight-year, if somewhat lacklustre, siege (1394-1402). Of course, the Ottomans were not religious fanatics. Adding to their power, exploitable assets and gaining a strategic gateway to Europe is what primarily motivated sultan Bayezit. Not that he was above using religion or forcible conversion. Eg, the Ottoman's elite military corps, the Janissaries, came from abducted christian children. They were subsequently trained to be highly disciplined, tough and ruthless shock troops.
Interestingly, temporary salvation for Byzantium came not from the christian west. Economically what remained of the Roman empire had effectively been reduced to a Venetian dependency. Strange though it may seem, it was the Mongol leader, Tamerlaine, who came to the rescue. He demanded that the Ottoman sultan raise the siege and restore Manuel's lands to him. Tamerlaine had his eye on the decrepit Byzantine empire for himself.
In July 1402 the armies of Tamerlaine and Bayezit fought a huge battle at Angora. The Ottomans were routed. Bayezit was captured. Tamerlaine took a cruel delight in keeping him caged like a wild animal and using him as a footstool. Bayezit's Serbian wife, Despina, was humiliatingly forced to serve at Tamerlaine's table stark naked. After eight months of such treatment, Bayezit had a stroke and died a few days later in March 1403.
Manuel II gleefully tore up the surrender agreement he had been preparing. However, within 50 years, the Ottomans had recovered their power in Anatolia and resumed the siege Bayezit had begun in 1394. Mehmet II (1451-81) finally breached the walls of Constantinople and seized the city in 1453.1
Converts
It is certainly true that under Mohammed the muslim community fought a string of minor battles, actually little more than skirmishes, which eventually culminated in the capture of Mecca in 630. While that military-political-religious campaign saw the genocidal massacre of one or two awkward Jewish tribes, there was at the time no forcible conversion (at least of peoples of the book).
During the first four caliphates, to be a muslim was to be privileged. It was to be a conqueror. It was to share in fabulous booty. It was to participate in a generous social security system. Converts saw the light not because of a sword held at their throats: rather for the rewards islam offered. The Koran says: "No compulsion is there in religion".2 A statement Benedict XVI contemptuously dismisses as coming from "the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat".3
True, with the Abbasid revolution in 750 things radically altered. Nevertheless, from muslim Spain to muslim Egypt, and from muslim Turkey to muslim India, there coexisted large religious minorities: christian, Jewish and hindu.
No such toleration can be boasted about by medieval christendom. Leave aside the butchery perpetrated by the crusades - Jews were periodically expelled from christian realms or put to the inquisition's flames unless they converted. So were muslims and minority christian sects. Over the course of its foul, dark and bestial history the catholic church has initiated or justified internal killings on a scale which rivals Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. So much for violence being against the nature of god.
Protests
Benedict XVI is more than aware of all this. Ditto the likelihood of what his uncritical Manuel II Paleologos quotations would unleash. Passages mocking Mohammed were bound to trigger angry protests. If Salman Rushdie's Satanic verses and 12 very mixed Danish cartoons were the cause of muslim outrage, what would a barbed speech by the vicar of Rome do? Clearly he is a hypocrite. His apologies are unconvincing. He is no fool, though. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Benedict XVI was out to denigrate islam. Not simply on the basis of forcible conversion and spreading Mohammed's faith by violence. The main thrust of the pope's argument is that christianity unites faith and reason (logos). By contrast islam supposedly holds that god is transcendent and therefore beyond reason. He cites Ibn Hazm (994-1064) - a fundamentalist muslim theologian and recluse - to the effect that Allah "is not bound even by his own word", and that nothing would "oblige him to reveal the truth to us". That, if it was his will, "we would even have to practise idolatry".
Smugly, Benedict XVI claims that catholicism marries the best of Greek philosophy with the divine truths revealed in both testaments of the Bible. As proof he laughably cites the dreams of the apostle Paul. In the New testament this pro-Roman founder of christianity is called upon to travel to Macedonia. A vision is interpreted by Benedict XVI as prefiguring "the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between biblical faith and Greek inquiry".4
Benedict XVI's seminal intellectual heroes are Augustine (354-430) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). Augustine held to a fideist doctrine. He insisted upon the superiority of faith over science. Scientific knowledge provides only facts about a phenomenon; faith explains fundamental causes. Aquinas, however, was an objective idealist. By adapting the writings of Aristotle - truncating and downplaying his materialism - he could maintain that christian faith was in harmony with reason. God can be logically proven.
US decline
However, Benedict XVI is out to do more than establish the superiority of godly catholicism over ungodly islam. He sees Europe as playing a special role in the world both in the past and in the future. "Christianity," he says, "despite its origins and some significant developments in the east," finally took on its "decisive character" in Europe. The fusion of biblical faith, Greek reason and the heritage of the Roman empire "created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe".5
So let us examine his speech through the prism of history and socio-economic trends. Benedict XVI is trying to navigate through a world where the decline of US power is the most visible determinate. The signs and portents appear daily in news bulletins: mass layoffs by Fords, New Orleans and hurricane Katrina, a two million prison population, the record number of billionaires, 37 million officially living below the poverty line.
In 1950 the US accounted for some 50% of the world's GNP, it is 21% at present. Sixty percent of the world's manufacturing production in 1950 came from the US; only 20% today. The phenomenon of relative US decline is, of course, exacerbated by the general decline of capital as a system. The law of value is shot through with bureaucratic organisation. A negative anticipation of socialism and the law of planning.
Meanwhile, George Bush can order the destruction of any small or medium power he cares to name. The 'war on terror' provides a much needed enemy within and without and excuses successive arms spending hikes. Nevertheless, the US is incapable of exporting itself in the manner displayed in the 1940s and 50s. Eg, the reconstruction of western Europe and Japan. The Iraq quagmire shows the shrinking parameters of US capabilities. While the US remains the sole superpower, that status increasingly relies on military, not economic, muscle. As the US declines economically, it artificially maintains itself by the turn to finance capital and parasitically sucking in wealth from the rest of the world. The US runs on a black hole of debt. At present $8.2 trillion. This produces chronic instability in the capitalist system as a whole and is quite obviously unsustainable. Sooner of later the crunch will come.
US decline is inevitably accompanied by a tentative repositioning by other countries and all manner of speculations about possible replacements. Transparently, Benedict XVI has a catholic Europe in mind as the alternative world hegemon. Eamonn McCann could not be more wrong when he argues, with a one-track mind, that the "most striking thing" about Benedict XVI's "remarks" in Regensburg "was the way they harmonised with George Bush and Tony Blair's propaganda line on the Middle East" 6
The Regensburg speech contains a frontal assault on protestant doctrines that place faith over reason. In other words the religion that motivates and guides George Bush. For example, Benedict XVI lambastes the "dehellenisation" of christianity that first emerged in connection with the "fundamental postulates of the reformation in the 16th century".7
Kevin Philips - once a member of the Nixon administration - convincingly shows how the Grand Old Party is dominated by an elite who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, creationism and the idea that we are living through the last of times. Disturbingly, many Republicans genuinely believe that Noah's Ark and the parting of the Red Sea happened just as the good book describes. Philips cites polls indicating that 70% of evangelicals think the world will end in Armageddon in a battle between christ and the antichrist.8 Such madness affects those below just as much as those above. Another clear sign of decline.
Europe
Benedict XVI is haunted by Europe's groundbreaking secular and revolutionary heritage. 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1968 are the other Europe. The Europe of democracy, anti-clericalism and Marxism. He is equally haunted by the mass influx of muslims and the prospect that Turkey may one day be allowed to join the European Union. Rightwing ideologues have tried to frighten public opinion with daft predictions of an islamic Europe by the end of the 21st century. Exactly with this 'danger' in mind, Benedict XVI calls upon Europe to recover its christian roots "if it truly wants to survive".9
The pope has criticised the EU's reluctance to acknowledge these roots because of an unwillingness to offend islam - a presence in Europe which conspiracy theorists claim has been actively connived at by European leaders, conservative and social democratic alike, over the last four decades. What really offends islam, according to Benedict XVI, is "the lack of reference to god, the arrogance of reason, which provokes fundamentalism". In that spirit he castigates multiculturalism, "which is so constantly and passionately encouraged and supported", because it "sometimes amounts to an abandonment and disavowal of what is our own".10
He contrasts the modern-day resurgence of islam with the post-1945 Europe. Old Europe, he says, is "moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognise anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires." Islam, on the other hand, eschews relativism: "The rebirth of islam is due in part to the new material richness acquired by muslim countries, but mainly to the knowledge that it is able to offer a valid spiritual foundation for the life of its people".11
To be great again, Benedict XVI says, Europe must return to the one true church of god. He therefore stridently opposes Turkey's proposed membership: "Turkey," he declares, "has always represented a different continent, always in contrast with Europe." Of course, Istanbul, Turkey's biggest city, lies in Europe and at its height the Ottoman empire incorporated the whole of south-eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Serbia, Albania, etc). Nevertheless, Benedict XVI says he rejects geographical oversimplifications that supposedly underlie Turkey's EU bid: "Europe," he claims, "was founded not on a geography, but on a common faith".12
In fact, the concept of Europe postdates christendom and has always been "tidal". The main gravitational factor being Russian state power.13 Geographically an extension of the great Eurasian land mass, Europe has constantly shifted its boundaries according to political, economic, cultural and military circumstances and calculations. Sometimes Europe has stopped short at Berlin. At other times it has extended eastwards to the Urals and southwards to the Caucuses. Religion has never been central. Europe is not an equivalent for christendom.
After all, the christianised Roman empire contained not only western and southern Europe. It incorporated the north African Mediterranean coastal rim and much of the Middle East. With Constantine the capital was shifted to Constantinople (Istanbul) in what is now Turkey. Europe is in origin a Greek word. Reinvented in modern times, it served as a replacement for christendom.14
Red Europe
Like Benedict XVI communists place a special emphasis on Europe. Needless to say, not a christian Europe nor an anti-muslim Europe. But a European Union under the rule of the working class.
In my view it is highly improbable that another imperialist power or some 'third world' combination will actually replace the US as the world hegemon. The decline of capitalism will surely be dominated by the decline of the US - just as the decline of slavery was dominated by the decline of the Roman empire. Hence what historical circumstances cry out for is not the replacement of the bellicose US by some other, supposedly more benign, capitalist superpower. A reactionary illusion.
It is socialism and the communist mode of production which stares in on us from every window. The world revolution is, however, unlikely to be a simultaneous event. A handful of countries, perhaps even one, will take the lead. But no socialist revolution can survive in isolation for long. A year or two, perhaps a decade, surely no more. Sooner or later counterrevolution will burst in on it from without, or well up from within. So, to the highest degree manageable, our revolution must be coordinated internationally.
The tempo of class struggle and therefore class-consciousness is, and for some considerable time to come will be, markedly uneven from country to country. Some move like the hare; others more like the tortoise. That said, there are broadly common tempos and similar levels of consciousness brought about by all manner of historically determined cultural and political factors, including agreements by capitalist governments to partially pool what they loftily call their sovereignties in an attempt to enhance global standing, impact and power to rob and exploit others.
With that in mind, as well as arguing for the closest regional unity of working class organisations objective circumstances permit across the world - eg, the Indian subcontinent, Latin America, the Arab-speaking countries - we have stressed Europe. Given its economic weight, relative prosperity, size of population and long history of class struggles and substantive gains made by those below, an EU ruled by the working class has the potential to roll back a declining US superimperialism, not least by lending unstinting moral and practical aid to the spreading flame of self-liberation - first Asia, South America, Africa and finally North America itself.
As things stand today, and for the foreseeable future, no single country, or even some other realistically envisageable regional grouping, could remotely hope to do that. While America will in all probability carry the everlasting honour of completing the world revolution, surely only Europe can decisively begin it.