the clash of civilizations as a self-fulﬁlling prophecy · social scientists have long since...

Rethinking Political MythThe Clash of Civilizations as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Chiara Bottici and Benoît ChallandUNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE AND EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE, FLORENCE,

ITALY

AbstractThis article argues for the need to recover the concept of political myth inorder to understand the crucial phenomena of our epoch. By drawing onBlumenberg’s philosophical reflections on myth, it proposes to understandpolitical myth as the continual process of work on a common narrative bywhich the members of a social group can provide significance to theirpolitical conditions and experience. In order to show how this understand-ing of political myth can throw light on important aspects of contemporarypolitics, the article analyses the work on one of the most conspicuouspolitical myths of our time: the clash of civilizations. By reconstructing themechanisms through which this myth works, the article shows how aparadigm that has been strongly criticized as too simplistic and scientificallyinadequate could have turned into a successful political myth, i.e. into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Key words■ culturalism ■ medias ■ Orientalism ■ political myth ■ theories of myth

Social scientists have long since recognized the role that political myths play inboth traditional and modern societies. Historians, sociologists and anthropolo-gists, each in their own way, have devoted an important part of their work to theanalysis of these phenomena. While up to a point these studies have mainlyfocused on ancient societies, in which the influence of myth could still beattributed to the fusion of politics and religion,1 more recently a new series ofstudies focusing on modern societies has been initiated. The long series of studieson nationalism, together with a renewed interest in the symbolic dimensions ofpolitics,2 have demonstrated that, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz, myths have notgone out of modern politics, however much of the banal may have entered it(1983: 143).

European Journal of Social Theory 9(3): 315–336

Copyright © 2006 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

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The ever-growing literature on this topic might suggest the existence of aconsolidated theoretical framework for the concept of political myth. However,this seems not to be the case. Much of the political science literature on politi-cal myth is still trapped in an ‘enlightened’ approach to myth which looks at itfrom the standpoint of the logos. For instance, Flood (1996) and Lincoln (1989)define political myth in terms of its claim to truth and fail thus to understandthat political myths cannot be falsified because they are not scientific hypothe-sis, but rather the expression of a determination to act.3 Their approach, on theother hand, reflects a very limited view of what meaning and language are about.Indeed, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, human beings are ceremonious animals thatperform with their language innumerable actions that do not advance any scien-tific hypothesis as to the constitution of the world (Wittgenstein, 1979).

Furthermore, while most of the literature specifically dealing with politicalmyth is confined to the analysis of single case studies, the theoretical literatureusually deals with political myth under other headings, such as ‘political symbol-ism’ (Geertz, 1983) or, recently, ‘veil politics’ (Wingo, 2003). The problem,however, with these approaches is that they tend to assimilate political mythswith other kinds of political symbols. For instance, by vindicating the import-ance of elements such as flags, national heroes, political myths and rituals alltogether under the heading of ‘veil politics’, the risk is not only of conflating verydifferent phenomena, but also of ending up in a generalized defence of all sortof veils. For instance, it is debatable whether the massive recourse to the cult ofnational heroes and political rituals is compatible with the principle of individ-ual autonomy, as Wingo (2003), through his holistic treatment of all veils, seemsto suggest.

On the other hand, Wingo’s Veil Politics is perhaps the only recent work inpolitical philosophy devoted to political myth. The reluctance of political phil-osophy to specifically focus on political myth is even more striking in the lightof the richness of the philosophical studies on myth. Notwithstanding thisrichness, both enlightened thinkers who argue for the dismissal of myth and theromantics who advocate for its renovation have rarely dealt with the specific rolethat myth plays in politics.

The aim of this article is to argue for the need for a philosophical reflectionon political myth and the way in which it does so is partly philosophical andpartly sociological. In the first section, we show that the philosophical debate onmyth can provide very crucial insights as to the nature of political myth. Bydrawing on Hans Blumenberg’s work, we argue that a political myth is bestunderstood as a continual process of work on a common narrative by which themembers of a social group can provide significance to their political conditionsand experience. In the second section, we try to show how this understandingof political myth can throw light on crucial phenomena of contemporary politics.In particular, we argue that it can help explain the mechanisms through whichthe narrative of the clash of civilizations, which has been strongly criticized astoo simplistic and scientifically inadequate, could have turned into a successfulpolitical myth, i.e. into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Philosophical Reflection on Political Myth

One of the reasons why there is no vast tradition of philosophies of political mythis probably due to the fact that it is only in modern societies that the specificallypolitical role played by myth has been recognized. In ancient societies, politicalmyths and religious myths coincide most of the time in both their contents andtheir functions. Indeed, the appearance of purely political myths is a typicallymodern phenomenon – a consequence of both the modern separation of politicsfrom its religious anchorage and of its democratization. To put it in Sorel’s words(1990: Introduction), it is when it comes to explaining typically modernphenomena, such as large social movements, that the role played by narrativesappealing to people’s imagination becomes evident.

On the other hand, though, there seems to be something intrinsic to politi-cal myth that renders it recalcitrant vis-à-vis philosophical treatment. Indeed, ifone looks for a philosophical theory of political myth, one would find that theclassical theories are the product of reflections on specific examples. For instance,both Cassirer’s The Myth of the State (1973) and Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence(1990) are devoted to very specific examples, with the result that the generaltheories that can be derived from both of them remain too linked to their modelsand do not really allow for generalization. For example, are political myths ameans of oppression, as one can conclude from Cassirer’s (1973) analysis of themyth of the Aryan race, or should we rather think of them as possible means ofthe liberation of a social class, as Sorel (1990) argues with regards to the generalstrike?

Probably, both are correct in that political myths can be a means for both,depending on their nature and on the circumstances in which they operate.Indeed, political myths have an intrinsic particularistic nature, which links themto the particular circumstances in which they operate. For instance, what is apolitical myth in certain circumstances and for a certain group of people maynot be so for another social group or even for the same social group in othercircumstances, even if its content remains the same. Take, as an example, themyth of the millennium: there is nothing in the idea that the world is about toend which tells us why this image can work as a political myth. Notwithstand-ing this, as has been persuasively shown, this narrative has worked at times andin given contexts as a political myth (Tudor, 1972).

This also suggests that what renders a myth specifically political is not itscontent – since, for instance, there is nothing intrinsically political per se in theidea that the world is about to end. It is rather something in the relationshipbetween a given narrative and the way in which it can come to address the politi-cal conditions of a given group. This fact can also partly explain the difficultiesin putting forward a general theory of political myth.

On the other hand, there is nothing that a priori prevents a philosophicaltreatment of political myth. In particular, the debate on myth that took place inGermany in the 1970s can provide very useful insights. Indeed, if political phil-osophy is reluctant to take political myth as a specific object of inquiry, the

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tradition of philosophical studies on myth without further qualifications isextremely rich. In particular, of those who have focused on the particularisticnature of myth, Blumenberg (1985) is perhaps the philosopher who bestcaptured it with his theory of myth as a continual Arbeit am Mythos, or ‘work onmyth’. A myth, Blumenberg argued, is a not a single narrative that is given onceand for all, but is a process, a process of continual work on a basic narrativepattern that changes according to the circumstances. The work on myth, accord-ing to Blumenberg, stems from a human need for Bedeutsamkeit (significance)that continually changes over time: and it is for this reason that, in each context,the same narrative pattern is re-appropriated by different needs and exigencies(Blumenberg, 1985). This is what Blumenberg tries to convey with his conceptof Umbesetzung, or re-appropriation (Blumenberg, 1971; Leghissa, 2002).

Following Blumenberg’s insights, one can therefore argue that this particular-istic nature of myth is the consequence of the fact that a myth must providesignificance to a given group within a world that continually changes and musttherefore change with it. Thus, either a narrative can respond to this need forsignificance (Bedeutsamkeit) for a given group, and accommodate the newcircumstances by allowing variants to its narrative core, or it simply ceases towork as a myth. But what is ‘significance’ (Bedeutsamkeit)?

Blumenberg (1985: I, 3) understood Bedeutsamkeit as a defence against theindifference of the world. The need for Bedeutsamkeit is therefore the need tolive in a world that is not indifferent to us. In this sense, it is not simply the needto live in a world which has a meaning, because something can have a meaningand remain nevertheless indifferent to us. On the other hand, the need forBedeutsamkeit, as defined here, is not the need for ultimate meanings either, inthe sense that something that is significant to a given group is not necessarilywhat answers their ultimate questions on the meaning of life. To sum up, theconcept of significance helps point out that between a simple meaning, such asthat which can be provided by a scientific theory, and the question of the ultimatemeaning of life and death, which is answered by religion,4 there is a space – it isin this space that the work on myth operates.

The idea of human need for significance goes back to Gehlen’s characteriza-tion of human beings as the ‘always not yet determined animals’ (Gehlen, 1988).As Gehlen argued, using a famous Nietzschean expression, human beings, incontrast to other animals are not adapted to a specific environment and are there-fore always ‘noch nicht festgestellt’. Whereas other animals have a determinedrelationship with their environment in the sense that they are adapted to it,human beings change the environment in which they live and this puts them ina very peculiar relationship with their living conditions. As they are not assignedto a specific environment, human beings are exposed to a much higher numberof stimulations from the outside world, from which they must seek relief, orEntlastung (Gehlen, 1988). Culture and language are the means through whichsuch relief can be found.

To quote Blumenberg, when the pre-human creature was induced to availitself of a bipedal posture and to leave the protection of a hidden way of life in



the rainforest for the savannah, it exposed itself for the first time to the risks ofa widened horizon of perception. This, in the first place, meant that the humancreature faced the power of the unknown, or ‘the absolutism of reality’ (Blumen-berg, 1985: I, 1), and the means through which it did so were the developmentof a capacity for foresight, for the anticipation of what has not yet taken place,and preparation for what is absent.

Thus, human beings need culture (understood as a ‘web of meaning’) becausethey need relief (Entlastung) from the excess of stimulations to which they aresubjected as a consequence of their lack of adaptation to a specific environment.The fact that human beings, in contrast to other animals, change their environ-ments also means that they entertain a problematic relationship with theirconditions of existence. Therefore, as Blumenberg argues, not only do humanbeings need meanings in order to master the unknown, but also they need signifi-cance (Bedeutsamkeit) in order to fight the indifference of the world. The way inwhich myth does this is by inserting the world in a narrative of events. As Kerényialso has pointed out, the function of myth is not simply to provide a name forthings, but, more specifically, to ‘ground’ them. In his view, the German languageprovided the word that best captures this function: begründen (1963: 6). Theroot of the word begründen, which can only be translated with ‘to ground’ or ‘tosubstantiate’, is the term ‘Grund ’. Grund means both the English abstract noun‘reason’ and the concrete noun ‘ground’. Myths tell stories, they state the originsof things, and, thus, at the same time, where they are going. In this way, theyprovide a ‘ground’ and they do so by answering the question ‘whence?’ ratherthan ‘why?’.

The term Bedeusamkeit, which Blumenberg derives from Dilthey, points tothe fact that in the historical world of culture things can also have values differ-ent from those they have in the objective world that is studied by the exactsciences (Blumenberg, 1985: 67). Put otherwise, the world depicted by the lattercan still be a world completely indifferent to us. Hence the need for Bedeuts-amkeit to which myth responds. As Blumenberg persuasively concludes:

No one will want to maintain that myth has better arguments than science; no onewill want to maintain that myth has martyrs, as dogma and ideology do, or that it hasthe intensity of experience of which mysticism speaks. Nevertheless it has somethingto offer that – even with reduced claims to reliability, certainty, faith, realism, andintersubjectivity – still constitutes satisfaction of intelligent expectations. (1985: 67)

Political Myths

Blumenberg developed his theory through the analysis of literary myths. Politicsremains at best in the background of his theory.5 All the same, as we have seen,his idea of myth as a process, i.e. as a continual work on a basic narrative corecan help one grasp important features of political myths – in the first place, theirparticularistic nature. If a narrative that works as a political myth in a certaincontext and to a given group ceases to do so, this is because it can no longer



provide significance for the actions and experiences of that group. Indeed, eithera narrative can be re-appropriated in the new contexts or it ceases to be a politi-cal myth.

But what specifically renders a myth political? A political myth can be definedas the work on a common narrative, which provides significance to the politicalconditions and experiences of a social group. Therefore, what makes a politicalmyth out of a simple narrative is not its content or its claim to truth,6 but (1)the fact that it coagulates and reproduces significance; (2) that it is shared by agiven group; and (3) that it can address the specifically political conditions inwhich a given group lives.

The first corollary of this definition is that – to use a Gramscian expression –political myths are not a ‘piece of paper’ (Gramsci, 1996: II, 10, 41). The workof a political myth cannot be perceived by simply reading the stories that aredeposited in our books. In order to establish whether a narrative is a politicalmyth or not, it is not only at its production that we must look, but rather, andforemost, at its reception. It is the way in which a narrative is received that makesa political myth out of it. The whole system of production–reception–reproduc-tion is what constitutes the ‘work on myth’.

The work on myth is a process that can take place in very different settings:speeches, art (both visual and other types), rituals and social practices. It is almostimpossible to enumerate all the possible sites for the work on a political myth.We can only point to its pervasiveness, i.e. to the fact that all social activities andpractices can become the vehicle for this work as long as they can host the workon a narrative that responds to a need for significance.

As a consequence, political myths are not usually learned once and for all, butrather apprehended through a more or less conscious cumulative exposure to thework on them. This also explains the condensational power of political myth,i.e. their capacity to condense into a few images or ‘icons’ (Flood, 1996). Bymeans of a synecdoche, any object or gesture – a painting, an image, a song, afilm, and advertisement – can recall the whole work on myth that lies behind it.And this also explains the difficulties in analysing them: not only is the work onmyth usually intermingled with other kinds of discourses (from historiographyto ballets and advertising), but also takes place through icons that allusively referto the given narrative, rather than explicitly conveying it.

Roland Barthes (1972) referred to this in his Mythologies.7As he observed, thecondensational capacity of political myth, i.e. their capacity to be conveyedthrough all sorts of fragmentary references, images, keywords, icons, is exponen-tially increased in contemporary society. As a consequence of the mediatizationof politics, of the increased role of the media in our everyday life, as well as ofour continued exposure to the advertising industry, the work on political mythhas been given unprecedented opportunities to be pervasive. Thanks to thepotential continual exposure to images and icons conveying political myths, thelatter can benefit from what has been called the ‘primacy effect’ (Flood, 1996):by slipping into our unconsciousness, political myths can come to deeply influ-ence our basic and most fundamental perceptions of the world and thus escape



the possibility of critical scrutiny. Political myths are not only what we perceiveabout the world of politics, but also the lenses through which we perceive it(Bennett, 1980).

To sum up, political myths are mapping devices through which we look at theworld, feel about it and therefore also act within it as a social group. As Sorel(1990) pointed out, political myths cannot be falsified because they are not scien-tific hypotheses as to the constitution of the world or astrological almanacs thatforetell its future: they are determinations to act that can always reinforce them-selves. This practical dimension of a political myth cannot, however, be separatedfrom what we can call its cognitive and its aesthetic dimension. Political mythsprovide fundamental cognitive schemata for the mapping of the social world: byreducing the complexity of experience, they enable us to come to terms with themultifaceted character of the world we live in. On the basis of these mappingdevices, people also feel about the world and act within it. This, in turn, pointsto the aesthetic dimension of myth, or, as Tudor (1972) has put it, to the factthat political myths are narratives of events cast in a dramatic form. It is from thearticulation of such a drama that the pathos of a political myth stems.

The Clash of Civilizations

When analysing the technique of modern political myths, Cassirer (1973: 288f.)observed that modern politicians fulfil the functions that, in traditional societies,were performed by the homo magus and the homo divinans. In his view, prophecyhas become one of the most important modern techniques of power. Our poli-ticians, he continued, not only promise to cure all social evils, but also continu-ally foretell the future. Certainly the new techniques of divination have changedso much, to the point where they have lost any magical aspect, but divinationitself has by no means vanished. As an example of the new techniques of divina-tion, Cassirer looked at the role of scholarly literature, and in particular at theprophecy of the ‘decline of the West’ on which the Nazi regime largely drew:

Curiously enough, this new technique of divination first made its appearance not inGerman politics, but in German philosophy. In 1918 there appeared OswaldSpengler’s Decline of the West. Perhaps never before had a philosophical book had sucha sensational success. It was translated into almost every language and read by all sortor readers – philosophers and scientists, historians and politicians, students andscholars, tradesman and man in the street. What was the reason for this unprecedentedsuccess, what was the magic spell that this book exerted over its readers? It seems tobe a paradox; but to my mind the cause of Spengler’s success is to be sought rather inthe title of his book than in its content. The title Der Untergang des Abendlandes (TheDecline of the West) was an electric spark that set the imagination of Spengler’s readersaflame. (Cassirer, 1973: 289)

The passage draws our attention to one of the sensational successes of our time.In particular, Spengler’s prophecy cannot but recall Huntington’s The Clash ofCivilizations (1996), which also seems to owe its success to its title much more



than to its content. Huntington’s book not only witnessed an incredible successand was translated into many languages, but also the idea that a clash of civiliza-tions is happening seems to have become a very powerful lens through which thecontemporary world is experienced. According to a widespread belief, Islam, asthe neighbouring civilization, is indeed bringing about a ‘clash of civilizations’between Muslims and the West (Bremner, 2004).

The aim of this section of the article is to show that the idea of a clash ofcivilizations has worked to a great extent as a political myth, one of the mostpowerful of our epoch. In order to show this, we will not focus on the produc-tion of such a myth as much as on its reception and re-elaboration within verydifferent discourses and social practices. It is precisely through this work on myththat the idea of a clash between civilizations has come to work as a powerfulimage, on the basis of which people not only think about the world, but also actwithin it. In this sense, the clash of civilizations works as a self-fulfilling prophecy.Indeed, as we have seen, a political myth is not only the result of an existingidentity, but is the means of creating an identity yet to come, and therefore alwaystends to turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In what follows we will analyse the work on myth from a threefold perspec-tive: (1) cognitive (myth as a lens through which we perceive the world); (2) prac-tical (myth as an image, on the basis of which we act in the world); and (3)aesthetic-emotional (myth as a dramatic representation, on the basis of which wefeel about the world). This does not mean that they are three separate dimen-sions of the work on myth. As we have seen, the work on myth always operatesin between them, and, if it is useful to distinguish between them at the theoreti-cal level, they can hardly be separated in practice. And here, as we will see, liesone of reasons for the strength of the work on myth.

Surprisingly, the idea of a clash of civilizations, when it first appeared, wasstrongly criticized, not to say simply dismissed by most of the scholarly litera-ture. For instance, Huntington’s understanding of civilizations has been criticizedbecause it surreptitiously assumes that internal variety can be classified under theone heading of ‘civilization’ (Arnason, 2001). In reply to his theory, otherscholars stated that it was a clash of interests and not of cultures that had shapedcontemporary politics (Gerges, 1999). Finally, others pointed out that he leavespolitics out of the picture for a mistaken over-emphasis on cultural factors andthat, for instance, the ongoing struggle between the United States and Islamicradicals is not the result of a clash between civilizations but rather of the behav-iour of extremist groups preying upon discontent within Muslim majority states(Kupchan, 2002: 70).

Notwithstanding those criticisms, people increasingly came to believe that aclash between civilizations was taking place. Two independent surveys of the USmedia reaction to the 9/11 attacks showed that the totality of these events wasframed within the paradigm of the clash of civilizations (Abrahamian, 2003;Seib, 2004). As a consequence, Huntington’s book became a bestseller to the pointthat by 2002 Netscape was offering Internet surfers free copies (Abrahamian,2003: 529).



For example, immediately after the attacks, the New York Times launched anew section entitled ‘A Nation Challenged’ which appeared every day for thenext four months. The titles of the articles appearing in this section mostlyreferred to a clash between Islam and the West: ‘Yes, this is about Islam’, ‘Jihad101’, ‘Barbarians at the gates’, ‘The force of Islam’, ‘The core of Muslim rage’,‘Dreams of Holy War’, ‘The deep intellectual roots of Islamic rage’, ‘The age ofMuslim wars’, ‘This is a religious war’ (Abrahamian, 2003). This latter articlewas illustrated with pictures of atrocities from medieval Europe, including Goya’sSpanish Inquisition (Sullivan, 2001). Similarly, an article in the Washington Postwritten by an expert on religion, warned that the government should take careto respect Islam because its ‘awakening’ had pitted a huge section of the worldagainst the West. The article was entitled ‘A Fervor America Should Easily Recog-nise’ and was accompanied by a photo of hooded men carrying the Koran anda hatchet (Morgan, 2001).

All these titles referred to cultural and religious factors, leaving political expla-nations completely aside. In contrast to their European counterparts, whoinvoked the US and European policies in the Middle East as a major source ofexplanations for the attacks (see e.g. Halliday, 2001; Fisk, 2001), the US mediaplayed down all attempts to bring politics back to the forefront. According toThomas Friedman (2002), the ‘highjackers left no demands because they hadnone at all’. In his view, these terrorists had no political demands because theirreal driving force was Muslim rage against Western civilization. All the evidencepointing to the political dimensions of the attacks was ignored if not activelydeleted from the leading headlines. For instance, at the beginning of Bin Laden’sfirst tape relayed by al-Jazeerah, he explicitly stated that the highjackers’ motiva-tion was precisely ‘the 80 years of wars’ waged in the Middle East, but the WhiteHouse advised the media not to broadcast such ‘inflammatory propaganda’ andthe media agreed to edit future tapes too (Carter, 2001). Another tape releasedby Bin Laden, in which he explicitly affirmed that the aim of the attacks was,among others, ‘to avenge our people killed in Palestine’ was not even aired in theUSA. It came to be known only through its publication in Europe and Blair’smentioning it in a press conference in the States (Abrahamian, 2003: 536).8

But how can it be that a theory that has been so strongly criticized as toosimplistic has become such a successful narrative through which so many peopleread the contemporary world? This was the result of a work on the narrative ofthe clash between civilizations that started long before September 11 and thattook place, as we will see, in the media as well as in intellectual discourses andother kind of social practices. The result of this work, which has actually inten-sified after 9/11, is that this narrative has become one of the most powerfulimages through which people both in Western and non-Western societiesperceive the world and act within it. For instance, if by September 2001, as wehave seen, European newspapers were reluctant to adopt this scheme, byDecember 2004 an article appearing in The Times openly stated that ‘Islamicfundamentalism is causing a clash of civilizations between liberal democraciesand Muslims’ (Bremner, 2004). Even more striking, an Ipsos poll quoted in the



same article revealed that 48% of Italians believed that a ‘clash of civilizations’was under way and that ‘Islam is a religion more fanatical than any other’(Bremner, 2004).

In order to show the mechanisms through which this change has happened,one must not only look at what is explicitly said about the clash of civilizationsand the threat of Islam. The work on myth takes place on a much more subtlelevel, placed between what is consciously learned and what is unconsciouslyapprehended by exposure to it.

According to Seib (2004: 72), the original appeal of Huntington’s line wasthat it provided some parts of answers to the post-Cold War era when uncer-tainty reigned about the new world order to come. In his view, the collapse ofcommunism left a vacuum and both politics and the news media needed a newenemy to fill this vacuum (Seib, 2004: 76). In his analysis of the news industry,he shows how the narrative of the clash between civilizations has provided ameans to choose what to say and how to say it. Paradoxically, he observes,precisely at the moment when Americans are fed with the images of a clashbetween Islam and the West, they are left with very little information about the‘opposing’ civilization in question. The huge drop in international news (and notjust on the Middle East) that followed the end of the Cold War9 has known onlya partial and abrupt inversion as a consequence of the US attacks on Afghanistanand the invasion of Iraq. But beyond Iraq, the networks’ international reportingwas negligible.

In place of this lack of information, people are left with a myriad of iconssubtly alluding to the threat of Islam. As Geisser observed in his analysis of theemergence of a new Islamophobia in France, the sources of the mediatic Islam-ophobia are not so much explicit statements about the evils of Islam. At least inFrance, it is rather the case that journalists are very cautious in their statementsand even explicitly deny the paradigm of the clash. The sources of what he callsthe ‘media Islamophobia’ are the continual insistence on the ‘security ideology’(‘idéologie sécuritaire’), i.e. the continual assertion of the need for more security,and the parallel – only at times related to the former – ‘media demonization ofMuslims’ (Geisser, 2003: 25). As he observes, ‘the media portrayal of Muslim-ness is mostly constrained by the prism of a radical and conflictual Otherness; itlargely plays on the repertoire of threat, when not straightforwardly that of a cata-strophe’ (2003: 24).10 In this sense, images such as the ‘Marianne voilée’, i.e. thefemale symbol of the French Republic wearing the Muslim veil, are much morepowerful conveyers of the work on myth than any explicit statement about thethreat of Islam.11 Through an unconscious association, images such as the veiledMarianne and the hooded Muslim with the Koran and the hatchet in his hand(Morgan, 2001) can come to coagulate and crystallize the fears and anguish thatare typical of the epoch of uncertainties (Bauman, 1999).

Sometimes the association of Islam and a threat can be more explicit. Forinstance, the BBC drama series Spooks depicted a mosque in Birmingham as thehome of a terrorist cell, recruiting children to commit terrorist attacks in Britishschools and playgrounds. Being conveyed by a drama series (i.e. in a programme



open to all sorts of spectators, one that does not, by its very nature, call for criticaldiscussion), messages such as these can come to enjoy what we have called aprimacy effect. By slipping into our unconsciousness they can come to deeplyinfluence our more basic perceptions of the world that will be thereafter hard todismantle.

This illustrates an important point: the work on myth operates with icons,that is fragmentary and allusive references or subtle associations of images whichare apprehended through more or less conscious exposure to them. Beingexposed to such icons, they tend to slip into our unconsciousness and to thusavoid the possibility of a critical discourse. In this inexplicit way, for instance,medias can operate what Geisser has called the ‘mise en ordre médiatique du senscommun’, that is, the media systematization of a general discourse about Islamwhich depicts it as an immutable and conflictual bloc. According to his analysisof the French medias, this reductionist logic has brought about an ideal-type: the‘media Muslim’ (Homo islamicus mediaticus) who is always represented in thesame postures – believers praying seen from the back, crying and threateningcompact groups, veiled women, a fanatical bearded man with an open mouthand eyes wide open (Geisser, 2003: 24).12

All these icons are much more effective precisely because they recall by synec-doche the whole discourse about the threat of Islam. On the other hand, anotherimportant part of this discourse stems from ideas circulating in the scholarlyliterature. As Tudor observed (1972), myth and theory are not incompatible.Rather, they reciprocally sustain each other: myth provides theory with a practi-cal impact, whereas theory, in its turn, gives to myth an air of timeless signifi-cance. In this whole, made of theory and myth, this latter is given the chance towork at the same time as a cognitive schema, which maps the world, as a prac-tical image, which orients us within it, and as an image on the basis of which wefeel about the world.

The role of intellectual discourse in creating a narrative of the clash betweencivilizations can hardly be overestimated. Indeed, explanations of the 9/11events, which attribute the attacks to the essentially aggressive nature of Islam,insert themselves in a long tradition of studies and representations of Islam. Forinstance, Foreign Affairs, which in the past had hosted a long series of criticalresponses to Huntington’s initial article on the clash, launched a new special issueentitled ‘Long war in the making’, and its leading article argued that the realroots of the attacks on the Twin Towers lay in seventh-century Arabia, in themedieval Crusades, in the Mongol invasion and the demise of the Caliphate(Doran, 2002). The arguments put forward by this article, and the medievalminiature representing the Prophet Mohammed aggressively leading a militaryexpedition, were simply fragments of a whole work on the myth of the threat ofIslam whose origins go far back in the past.

Creating blocs with opposing values, schematized violence and an aestheticaltranslation of these themes into icons are all key elements of what have beencalled ‘Orientalist’ discourses (Said, 1978). Orientalism can be understood as amechanism at work in the social sciences, literature, music and the visual arts



whereby the Orient becomes the mirror of what the Occident is not. Therefore,the end result is a negatively biased representation of the Other. Through such anessentialization, Islam is portrayed as a fixed blueprint that accounts for the entiresocio-political and economic way of life of hundreds of millions of Muslims allover the world. Examples of Orientalist literature abound. Among the mostsignificant are the discourses about the ‘Arab mind’, which depict it as violent,backward and resistant to civil order (Patai, 1973). Other examples include theidea that Islam is and has always been an intrinsically violent religion (Crone,1980; Pipes, 1983) and/or that it promotes political submission so that pluralismand modern freedom can never succeed in Muslim13 societies (Gellner, 1994).

Scholarly literature thus provided a repertoire of topoi that are directly recalledby the icons of the work on myth, such as the image of the fanatical beardedman with an open mouth and eyes wide open or of the hooded men with theKoran and hatchet in their hands. In some cases, the media titles that we haveseen above came directly from pieces of academic writing, journal articles orbooks: ‘The Muslims Are Coming! The Muslims Are Coming!’ (Pipes, 1990),‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’ (Lewis, 1990), ‘Terror, Islam, and Democracy’(Boroumand and Boroumand, 2002), The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and UnholyTerror (Lewis, 2003), or Onwards Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still ThreatensAmerica and the West (Spencer, 2002). Other titles are not directly related toviolence, but still suggest an essentially negative and threatening view of Islam:The Malady of Islam (Meddeb, 2003), What Went Wrong? Western Impact andMiddle Eastern Response (Lewis, 2002).14

Culturalist arguments of this sort are not new since they have been widespreadat least since the golden age of colonialism. A revival of these arguments wasthereafter linked to the emergence of the modernization theories from the 1960sonwards. The ‘Oriental societies’ were represented as simply the negative coun-terpart of the ‘Western’ ones: discourses about their backwardness were the mereresult of the application of a paradigm of modernization constructed on the basisof the European experience. These discourses followed the same mechanism atwork in the colonialist literature, which was first labelled as ‘Orientalism’ byEdward Said. Through such a mechanism, the variety of a multifaceted experi-ence is reduced to a fixed and immutable bloc, the ‘Orient’, which, as its verygeographical definition shows, can only exist as a negative reflex of an ‘Occident’taken as the starting point of observation (Said, 1978).

Despite Said’s (and others’) criticism, Orientalism still prevails in most of therecent literature on the Middle East, for instance, with a renewed variety ofculturalist simplifications. Criticism of these new essentializations is usuallyreferred to as ‘neo-Orientalism’. One key example of the transformation of theorientalist into a neo-Orientalist theme concerns the issues of power andviolence. If, according to classical Orientalism, ‘oriental despotism’ generatedquiescent and weak civil societies because the ‘strength’ of Islam prevented therise of individualism, the neo-Orientalist explanations (that had to adapt, amongothers, to the victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran, and to the widespreadpopular unrest in many Muslim majority countries) saw in Islam the origin of



excessively strong civil societies wanting to take power and impose an ‘Islamicorder’ (Sadowski, 1993). Thus, when Western studies present civil society as thecure for all political evils, Islam is seen as the source of a violent and hence uncivilsociety, whereas when the emphasis was rather on the importance of strong statestructures, Islam was seen as the source of quiescent civil societies and very weakstates.

As these remarks highlight, the process of construction of an Islamic bloc wasthe simple counterpart of the construction of a ‘civilization at home’. In orderto have a conflict, one needs two parties. Indeed, Orientalist discourses reinforcethe idea and the feeling of an equally homogeneous ‘Western civilization’.Contemporary neo-Orientalist discourses can in this sense be read as simply there-actualized swing of modernization theories: those who do not follow theWestern model are simply traditional or backwards.15 But one should also high-light the fact that Islamist militants striving for power (be they Middle Eastern-or ‘Western’-based) also create simplified blocs by portraying the ‘West’ and‘modernity’ as a threat to Islam and to their worldviews.16 The power to mobilizesuch over-simplified images of the Others rests in their ability to meet a naturalhuman need: the need for significance. In this way, people who do not have anyaccess to formal political power can rely on the symbolic power of specific narra-tives to address their contemporary political conditions.17

However, in order to reconstruct the work on myth, one should not only lookat more or less explicit claims and theories about the threat of/to Islam. As wehave seen, the power of myth is much stronger when it can be conveyed by iconsthat only subtly recall the whole work on myth and that can thus slip into ourmental consciousness as part of the lens through which we look at the world.Thus, even in a context where Orientalism is apparently rejected, there can be aspace for the work on myth. For instance, it can be argued that even John Rawls’sattempt to propose a normatively desirable and practically viable set of laws ofpeoples can be the site for the work on myth. One of the most original aspectsof his theory is precisely his attempt to include in the society of peoples evenpeoples who cannot be labelled as ‘just’ according to his theory. To this aim, heproposes an imaginary example of a non-liberal people, which he calls‘Kazanistan’ (Rawls, 1999: 5, 75–8). This mental experiment, which is appar-ently neutral as such, and is even aimed at admitting this hypothetical non-liberalpeople into the society of peoples, is a potential site for the work of the myth ofthe clash between civilizations. How can it be so? In the first place, its name‘Kazanistan’ is not so innocent, because it cannot but recall in the readers’ mindcountries with similar names – the name being apparently a cross between‘Afghanistan’ and ‘Kazakhstan’, two Muslim majority countries. What can thesenames evoke for the American reader of the end of the millennium? On the otherhand, the fact that the ‘imagined’ Kazanistan is a Muslim country is not left tothe imagination of the readers, given that Rawls says so explicitly in the Intro-duction of his book (Rawls, 1999: 5). Why, however, should it be assumed thata non-liberal people has to be Muslim? Even if the general argument of the bookis that a clash between the imagined Muslim country and the ‘liberal democratic



peoples’ is not unavoidable, still the very construction of such a mental experi-ment recalls some of the topoi of the (neo-)Orientalist literature about Muslimcountries – first, the idea that a Muslim country cannot be ‘liberal’ in Rawls’ssense, that it cannot be democratic but allows, in the best case scenario, a consul-tation hierarchy (Rawls, 1999: 77), that it will not separate the state from thechurch and can at best enable the toleration of religious minorities, and that, likemost Muslim rulers, rulers of Kazanistan are likely to have sought to build anempire (1999: 76). To sum up using Rawls’s own terms, a Muslim country canat best be ‘decent’ (1999: 76).

As Talal Asad also observed (2003), the construction of an Islamic threat, whichbegan long before 9/11 and even Huntington’s book, is precisely the result of theapplication of modern Western categories and as such it becomes impossible todisentangle the two processes. For instance, Asad emphasizes that the zealotry socharacteristic of many Islamic political movements in recent times as well as theirideal of an Islamic state, in which no distinction operates between state andreligion, is not a product of the mainstream historical tradition of Islam. Rather,in his view, it is the product of the totalizing ambitions typical of modern politicsand of the modernizing state. As he shows in his work, in the Islamic history, ‘therewas no such thing as a state in the modern sense’. This is not to say that the factthat many contemporary Islamist movements have endorsed the idea is irrelevant– which is obviously not the case. It simply means that the fact that many Islamicmilitants have accepted this perspective as their own, striving for the establishmentof an Islamic state, does not make it essential to Islam (Asad, 2003: 352).18

On the other hand, this essentialization of Islam favoured and most of thetime went hand in hand with an over-emphasis on its intrinsic violence. Thisimage of an essentially violent Islam is, in Asad’s view, the reflex of a perceivedthreat to Western values.19 The violence of Islamist radical movements is takenas a symbol of the violence of Islam itself, whereas

no liberal in the west would suggest that the Gush Emunim [‘Block of the Faithful’, aJewish pro-settler group in Israel] represent the essence of Judaism, or that theassassination of abortion doctors in the U.S. by pro-Life activists represents the essenceof Christianity. (Asad, 2003: 350)

The fact that many Islamic militants have reinterpreted the idea of an Islamicstate as part of their Islamic tradition points to the parallel process of construc-tion of an Islamic civilization on the part of the Muslims. ‘Orientalism’, whichwas born in the West, has also been re-appropriated by non-Western individuals,scholars or not. For instance, in 1992, the Saudi King Fahd declared that ‘theprevailing democratic system in the world is not suitable for us in this region,for our peoples’ composition and traits are different from the traits of that world’(quoted in Sadowski, 1993: 14).20 Other neighbouring countries nowadays usethis type of argument, according to which Arab citizens are convinced on a dailybasis that democracy is not possible in their country. Similar arguments arefrequently found in the literature produced by ‘oriental orientalists’ or ‘western-ized orientalists’, to use the expression coined by Sadiki (2004): Ajami (2002)



has become a mouthpiece for Arab support of the US wars in Afghanistan andIraq, predicting that US soldiers would be greeted with flowers in Iraq, andZakaria (1997) wrote abundantly about illiberal democracies in the region.

The clash of civilizations is not just a Western political myth that has beenexported and imposed on the non-Western world. The work on this myth is awork that has taken place in different contexts, each time assuming differentconnotations and providing significance to very different political conditions:from Al-Qa’eda terrorists incited by their leaders to violent acts against the‘impure West’ to the re-elaboration of the post-9/11 shock all around the world.

The consequences of the work of this myth in Arab countries are well illumi-nated by Telhami (2004). In his view, there has always been a variety of politicalpossibilities for self-identification in the Arab worlds – at least, just to mentionsome of the most important, pan-Arabism, Islam and nationalism as embeddedin single individual states. However, a survey he conducted in June 2004 in sixArab countries revealed that more and more Arabs identify themselves as Muslimsfirst. Telhami observed that this trend is pretty clear, even though it is not uniform,given that in Egypt and Lebanon, in contrast to Saudi Arabia and Morocco, peopleidentify themselves as Egyptians and Lebanese more than Arabs and Muslims.

A parallel increase in the role of religion can be witnessed in Westerncountries.21 Some, for instance, have noticed the increasing role of religious argu-ments in public and political debates. Well-known examples are the recurrenceof debates on religious symbols such as the crucifix or veils in European schools,the role of religious lobbies in US politics, or recently, the debate that took placein Europe about the inclusion or not of reference to the Christian roots in thedrafting of the European Constitution. However, what is more interesting for usis the increased symbolic presence of religious icons of the clash between civiliza-tions. For instance, the revival of the interest in the epoch of the Crusades, asproved by the increasing number of exhibitions and films devoted to this theme,has made of them and of figures such as Richard the Lion-Heart conspicuoussymbols that capture and reproduce significance for a ‘West’ in search of the rootsof its ‘civilization’ (Seib, 2004: 76). Similarly, new illustrated copies of the Bibleand the Koran are being offered by even the most secular newspapers in Italy (seeLa Repubblica and La Nazione), whereas the figure of Christ has returned to thescene of Hollywood with a new blockbuster film (see e.g. The Passion of the Christby Mel Gibson).

A political myth is not just a scientific hypothesis as to the constitution of theworld or a contemplative image about it. A political myth, as Sorel pointed out,is a determination to act. The work on myth that we have described above hasclearly had its practical counterpart: a political myth is not simply a prophecy,but it tends rather to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the case of the clashbetween civilizations, this is evident not just in the tapes released by Bin Laden,but also in US President George W. Bush’s description of the ‘war on terrorism’as a ‘crusade’ and the Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s statement on 26September 2001 that ‘we should be conscious of the superiority of our civiliz-ation’ (Guardian Unlimited, 27 September 2001).



Going back to Cassirer’s analysis of the role of prophecy in modern politics,it should be pointed out that the prophets of the clash did not operate in a socialvacuum. For instance, the person who explicitly launched the prophecy of theclash had been a member of the National Security Council and an importantfigure in the circles of US foreign policy since the Vietnam War. Curiously, oneof the arguments on the basis of which Huntington made his predictions aboutthe threat of Islamic civilization was the observation that five of the countries thatthe US had classified as ‘terrorist states’ were Muslim and that during the 15 yearsbetween 1980 and 1995 the US had engaged in 17 military operations in theMiddle East, all of them directed against Muslims (Huntington, 1996: 216–17).In this sense, it can be argued that the prophecy of a clash between civilizations,when launched by Huntington, was, to a certain extent, already self-fulfilled.

Conclusion

Finally, if power is the ability to influence another person and make him or herdo, or not do, what he or she otherwise would not, or would, have done, thenit is clear that the most effective power is the power that can be felt without beingseen. In this sense, symbolic power, defined as the power to construct a success-ful version of reality, permeates all the dimensions of power – political, ideologi-cal and economic, without it being possible to treat them without taking thissymbolic dimension into consideration. In particular, today more than ever itseems that control over the means for physical coercion goes hand in hand with(and is quite often even overcome by) the greater role played by the control ofthe means of interpretation. In other words, politics seems to be increasinglyabout a struggle for people’s imagination rather than a struggle for the legitimateuse of physical coercion.

An important part of this struggle is played through the work on myth.However, as Spinoza pointed out a long time ago (1951), if all societies have anunavoidable imaginative dimension, what they differ in is the degree to whichpolitical imagination is subjected to open critical discussion.22 This does not meanthat myth and reason are mutually exclusive and incompatible, as an ‘enlightened’approach assumes. It simply means that there are conditions that can help orprevent the development of a critique.23 What are the conditions that in thepresent situation can favour or prevent such a discussion? We do not havethe space to discuss them here at length, but we will, however, point to some ofthe possible difficulties. In the first place, there is the fact that, particularly insocieties which claim to be completely de-mythologized, political myths are mostof the time intertwined with other kinds of discourses and tend thus to get lostbehind them. One only has to think of the often porous contours betweenmythical and historical narratives (Stråth, 2000) or of the possible interplaybetween myth and scientific theory, as shown by the (neo-) Orientalist literature.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, is the fact that power tends to beconcealed for the very reason that we have highlighted above, namely that the



more a power can be felt without being seen, the stronger it is. This, indeed, hasbeen the ambition of power in all times and in all places, but it is precisely inour epoch that this ambition has been given an unprecedented chance. First, inthe global village, it is the entire world that can become the potential site for thework on a political myth, leaving thus potentially no blind spots. The role thatthe media play as the site for the work on the myth of the clash of civilizationsis a powerful illustration of this potentiality. Second, the very mediatic configu-ration of such a village enables political myth to reach levels of pervasiveness towhich it could never have aspired in the past. Indeed, our life takes place injungles of potential icons of a political myth. Going to the supermarket, surfingthe Web, watching a film or a cartoon, or even simply walking in the streets –all of them can be acts that expose us to the work on a political myth. On theother hand, the more difficulties that arise for critical discussion, the more, it canbe argued, we have need of it.

Acknowledgements

This article is the result of joint research. However, Chiara Bottici is responsible for thefirst two sections, while Benoît Challand is responsible for the section on the clash ofcivilizations. Finally, we wish to thank Danilo Zolo and Federico Squarcini for theirhelpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1 See, for instance, Malinowski (1992), Bloch (1924) and Kantorowicz (1957).2 On the role of national myths, see, for instance, Hobsbawn and Ranger (1983), Smith

(1999) and Stråth (2000). Other examples of the renewed emphasis on the symbolicdimension of power are Cohen (1989), Geertz (1983), or Edelmann (1988).

3 For a wider discussion of this point as well as of the existing literature on politicalmyth, see Bottici (2006: Introduction).

4 As Cassirer discussing Malinowski argues, religion, notwithstanding its variety ofmanifestations, is in first place ‘a question of life and death’ (Cassirer, 1973: 4).

5 For instance, expressions such as ‘the absolutism of reality’ seem to point to a possiblepolitical reading of his theory. It can here be observed that Gehlen’s view of a humanbeing as a deficient being (Mangelwesen), on which Blumenberg draws, has beencriticized for its connivance with Nazism. In Gehlen’s view, the fact that humanbeings are ‘not yet determined’ is interpreted as a lack (Mangel ) which immediatelycalls for discipline (Gehlen, 1988). However, one can interpret the same fact as asign of richness rather than a deficiency.

6 Tudor (1972: 17), for instance, maintains that what renders a myth specificallypolitical is precisely its subject matter. This definition, however, contrasts with theexample of the myth of the millennium that he himself analyses at length, whosecontent is not political per se. Against those who define a political myth in terms ofits claim to truth (Flood, 1996), it can be observed that a myth is not a hypothesisas to the constitution of the world, but rather a determination to act within it, which



cannot therefore be falsified. As we will see, the aspiration of a political myth is tobecome a self-fulfilling prophecy.

7 In Barthes’ view (1972), however, ‘this process is exactly that of bourgeois ideology.If our society is objectively the privileged field of mythical significations, it is becauseformally myth is the most appropriate instrument for the ideological inversion thatdefines this society’. In this way, he reduced the work on myth to a phenomenonlimited to bourgeois society and argued in fact that proletarians have no myths,whereas in our view myth stems from a universal need for significance. The fact thatcapitalism gave to the work on myth new technical possibilities does not mean thatit is rooted in it. For a critique of Barthes’ view of myth, see Bottici (2006: x, xii,Chapters 10, 11).

8 This omission is what Paul Richards (1996) called the ‘new barbarism’ thesis in orderto criticize such ‘presentations of political violence that omit political and economicinterests and contexts when describing that violence’. In analysing the ways in whichthe new barbarism thesis is produced, Tuastad (2003), following Zygmunt Bauman,observes that in modern societies racist imaginaries need professional organizations,leaderships and experts. In the case of the clash between civilizations, one of theseexperts was Robert Kaplan, a consultant with the US Army, who argued in his veryinfluential The Coming of Anarchy that the new danger was represented by the poorpeople who could not attain the economic and cultural condition that alone canallow them to overcome mankind’s natural proclivity to conflict (Kaplan, 2000: 45).

9 For example, ABC, CBS and NBC (three large US TV stations) dedicated 4,032minutes of coverage to non-US countries in 1989, but that figure had dropped to1,382 by 2000. More precisely on parts of the ‘Islamic civilization’, Afghanistanreceived 206 minutes of coverage in November 2001, 106 minutes in February2002, and only one minute in March 2003. For the whole of 2003, the Palestinianquestion received a total of 284 minutes (Seib, 2004: 76–83). In other words, thisimpoverishment of the coverage can only lead to the fact that ‘most Americans areclueless when it comes to the politics and ideology in the Muslim world’ (Seib, 2004:79). To this scarce and selective media focus one could add the fact that there existsliterally no media coverage on the 200 million-strong Muslim population living inIndia, by far the largest resident Muslim population living in any single country.

10 ‘Les représentations médiatiques du fait musulman restent dominées par la mise enscène d’une altérité radicale et conflictuelle, jouant très largement sur les registresalarmistes, voire catastrophistes’.

11 The image first appeared in the Figaro Magazine, 26 October 1985. For an analysisof similar images, see Geisser (2003: 23).

12 Even the famous French journalist Cavada fell into this trap when his team, for anedition of La Marche du Siècle (on France 3, a public TV station) on Islamism inFrance, drew beards on three French Muslims living in a banlieue on the pictures hescreened (mid-1990). There was no reason to do so but to make them more ‘Muslim’or ‘Arab’. Cavada had to apologize after the scandal this created.

13 Note the gradual shift over time from an identity marker based on language (‘Arab’)in the 1970s, to a religious marker (‘Muslim’) in the 1980s. Nowadays (and evenmore so after 9/11), the preferred marker used by authors wanting to reinforce the‘otherness’ is increasingly one based on politico-religious motives, namely ‘Islamist’,or ‘Islamicist’.

14 Among the academic figures who have become very influential in the media after9/11, Daniel Pipes and Bernard Lewis are perhaps the most striking examples of how



the borders between academic production and media are porous. Both also have hadan increasingly direct influence as consultants for the US Administration. On thelatter’s attempts to directly control the intellectual discourses through laws (and inparticular Middle Eastern studies), see Brown (2005).

15 Fukuyama’s End of History (1992) epitomizes the self-celebration of Western civiliz-ation, with its argument that this latter, thanks to the successes of Western liberal-ism, has no longer any rivals.

16 Halliday (2003) deals at length on this aspect in his chapter on ‘Islam and the West:“Threat of Islam” or “Threat to Islam”?’

17 See Levine and Salvatore (2005) on how an exclusively religious public sphere canserve to contest hegemonies.

18 On this point, see Tripp (1996) and Arjomand (2004).19 For a historical perspective on this phenomenon, see Rodinson (1989).20 King Fahd was here evidently using this Orientalist argument about the ontological

difference to hide the much deeper reasons for leaving Saudi Arabia free fromexternal pressure to democratize. Democratizing would mean opening Pandora’s boxof representation by enfranchising the Shi’a minority and giving official status to thevery large foreign workers community living in the Saudi Monarchy.

21 Recent literature on the sociology of religion has questioned the secularist thesisaccording to which religion in advanced capitalist countries has been reduced to aprivate phenomenon (Casanova, 1994).

22 On this interpretation of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, see Hippler (2000)and Bottici (2006: Chapter 8).

23 On the relationship between myth and critique, see Bottici (2006: Chapters 7 and 12).

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■ Chiara Bottici is a researcher in political philosophy in the Department ofPhilosophy of the University of Florence. Her recent publications include: Uominie Stati: Percorsi di un’analogia (Pisa: ETS, 2004) and A Philosophy of Political Myth(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Address: Dipartimento diFilosofia, via Bolognese, 52, I-50133 Florence. [email: [email protected]] ■

■ Benoît Challand holds a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the EuropeanUniversity Institute in Florence. His recent publications include La Ligue MarxisteRévolutionaire en Suisse Romande (1969–1980) (Fribourg: Presses de l’Universitéde Fribourg, 2000) and the forthcoming monograph, The Power to Promote andto Exclude: External Support for Palestinian Civil Society. Address: Department of Social and Political Sciences, European University Institute, Via dei Roccetini, 9,I-50016 Florence. [email: [email protected]] ■



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