Twenty years ago the towers of the World Trade Center were shot down by two planes. The worst attack in history would have led the United States and its allies to launch into a world war against terrorism and the “axis of evil”. For the American neocons, the attack was a proof of the theses proposed by the political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1996: the “clash of civilizations” was the new prism for reading the world. Unfortunately today we know that Washington’s desire for revenge and the brutalization of entire regions that followed have only exacerbated identity conflicts. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, involving lies about weapons of mass destruction, undermined the credibility of Western democracies. Thanks to the images of US soldiers holding Abu Ghraib prison inmates on a leash, there was no need for agents to recruit jihadists. The arrogance of the US military and the enormous civilian losses within the Iraqi population (at least one hundred thousand confirmed deaths) did the rest, contributing to the fragmentation of the Syrian and Iraqi territory and the rise of the Islamic State group. The failure in Afghanistan, with the return to power of the Taliban after twenty years of Western occupation, symbolically concluded this sad sequence.
To truly emerge from 9/11, a new reading of the world is needed: it is time to abandon the concept of “clash of civilizations” and replace it with those of common development and global justice. This requires shared prosperity goals and the definition of a new, sustainable and equitable economic model. We all agree by now: the military occupation of a country strengthens the most radical and reactionary segments of society and does nothing good. The risk is that the military and authoritarian vision will be replaced by an isolationist closure and the illusion that the free circulation of goods and capital is enough to spread wealth. It would mean forgetting the hierarchical character of the world economic system and the fact that not all countries fight on equal terms.
From this point of view, a first opportunity was missed in 2021: discussions on how to reform the taxation of multinationals have essentially boiled down to a sharing of tax revenues among rich countries. Instead, it is urgent that everyone, from the north to the south of the world, receive a share of the income from the rich of the planet (multinationals and billionaires) in proportion to their population. First of all because every human being should have the right to development, health and education, and secondly because the prosperity of rich countries would not exist without poor ones. The growth of the West yesterday or that of China today has always been based on the international division of labor and the exploitation of the world‘s human and natural resources. When refugees appear from the other side of the planet, Westerners say it is up to neighboring countries to take care of them. Conversely, when there is uranium or copper to exploit, they are the first to come forward, whatever the distance.
If we accept the principle of the division of tax revenues among all countries, we need to talk about the rules to be respected. It would be an opportunity to dictate precise conditions on human rights, in particular for women and minorities, to be applied to the Taliban as well as to countries that want to benefit from this revenue. To prevent money from being misused, we should also involve everyone in the hunt for opaque riches and clarify the excessive accumulation of money, whether in the public or private sectors. The fundamental point is that the criteria must be defined in a neutral way and applied everywhere in the same way, in Afghanistan as in Saudi Arabia, in Paris as in London. Western countries must stop using the argument of corruption to deny the global South any right to develop, while at the same time coming to terms with oligarchs and despots who serve their interests. The era of unlimited free trade is over: trade must depend on social and environmental indicators.
It is understandable that US President Joe Biden wants to overcome the clash of civilizations. For the United States, the threat is no longer Islamist: it is Chinese and above all internal, due to social and racial divides. But the fact is that the Chinese challenge, like the internal social challenge, will find a solution only with the transformation of the economic model. If nothing to that effect is proposed, then poor countries and peripheral regions of the United States will increasingly turn to Beijing and Moscow to finance their development and maintain order. The exit from 9/11 must not end with a new isolationism, but with a new wind of internationalism and universalism.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
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