Make Civilizations Clash Again
The West demanded free speech. Now it demands free love.
In a “Politics in the Twentieth Century” class, Robert Manne asked which of us was Team Huntington and which were Team Fukuyama. I was the only Team Fukuyama and to my surprise, I made my case well. American liberalism is never popular in university, especially in the W. era, but we didn’t have walls of civilizations erected in the 21st century. Chinese and Arab investors came to Europe just as Australian and American athletes, entrepreneurs, and engineers worked in Shanghai and Dubai. Every nation had to pretend that they were democratic and held fair elections. As much as Western students complained about the hypocrisy and failure of liberal democracy, they couldn’t say any nation where socialism worked well. Not even Cuba or Venezuela. They also couldn’t argue for a better civilization than the Western.
Two decades later Western civilization has evolved into something very unexpected. Its main creed is no longer free speech, but free love. In the 1990s, you’d criticize Qatar for being an undemocratic and dishonest place. In 2022, Qatar is bad because it’s homophobic and misogynistic. And because it has little regard for human life, especially the lives of poorer foreigners.
Russia faced the same accusations when hosting the 2018 World Cup, but not on a daily level. Some Westerners who say that they are too scared to go to Qatar admitted that they went to Russia in 2018 because Russia was once a gay-friendly place in the 1990s.
About five years ago I thought that criticisms of Qatar (very expected) would be counterbalanced by some hesitation. Here’s the first World Cup in an Arab nation, and the first World Cup in a Muslim nation. Here’s a chance for Middle Eastern and African nations to shine. But no such consideration mattered when the event began. BBC could even ignore Morgan Freeman, the disabled Qatari YouTuber Ghanim Al Muftah, and all the Arabic dances to focus on Qatar’s sins.
Qatar had prepared for this more than 15 years ago. Al Jazeera English had become a distinguished news source for Western liberals in the 2000s and even seemed more trustworthy than corporate CNN or pro-Labour BBC. Western conservatives had no problem subscribing to beIN Sports in the 2010s, which had outbid Fox Sports and ESPN in broadcasting European football leagues – and even women’s football and rugby championships. Qatar Airways, like Emirates, had replaced European airlines as the luxury airlines of the 21st century. Even until last year AJ+ still competed with NowThis News in providing progressive video clips for American students.
For all the questions “How could Qatar host the World Cup?” made in 2022, the decision made sense back in 2011. Look at the competitors. United States, Japan, and South Korea had hosted recent tournaments. Australia will never beat Qatar in the money game, and its time zone is never acceptable to the rest of the world. Plus, in 2011 we had accepted that the Asian Century, if not the end of the West, had arrived.
Everyone knew that Qatar, like other Arab monarchies, will not change. They see humanity in a hierarchy, they have conservative (“medieval” is the liberals’ favorite adjective) views on women and sexuality, and they put premium prices on bacon and beer, the staples of sports. Western values, however, have changed rapidly. The West has always been anti-racist, egalitarian, feminist, and liberal over the last 50 years, but it has demanded much more over the last 10 years.
Came November 2022, northern European federations focused on LGBT rights. While northern European societies also discuss women’s rights and dead Asian laborers in Qatar, the emphasis is on Qatar’s homophobia. OneLove, starting as an initiative from the Royal Dutch Football Association, is supposed to “show solidarity against all forms of discrimination and supporting inclusion in football”. The OneLove colors represent antiracism and LGBT rights, but Qatar isn’t the only nation that believes that both are First World problems.
Who Is My Neighbor?
The West and the Rest are surprised by each other’s attitude toward OneLove. The West, so used to its cosmopolitan Twitter and liberal institutions, is astonished to find a world that doesn’t say yes to kindness. “This isn’t about culture, but about human rights” is the standard concluding statement. The Rest isn’t necessarily defending Qatar but is irritated at an assertive West that performs unprecedented piety in a foreign land, despite all their talks of decolonization and decentering Whiteness. The Rest is simply astonished that UEFA teams are willing to die on the hill of gay rights.
Germany closed their mouths, Denmark talked about leaving FIFA, and the French minister of sport criticized Les Blues who are not activist enough. Pardon us who draw a link between the UEFA seven and Protestantism – only Belgium is historically Catholic among them. European Protestantism might have evolved into OneLove, including in the church itself.
The road from humanism in 1992 to OneLove in 2022 is logical. Both are Euro-American, post-Christian values embraced by the urban upper middle class. Since the 1990s, the rest of the world has accepted and adopted liberal values such as women’s rights, children’s rights, the free market, and multiculturalism.
Gay rights itself has undergone vast changes over the last 30 years. From the mentions of “gay” in pop culture in the 1990s, to openly gay celebrities (globally) and politicians (West only) in the 2000s, to same-sex marriage in the West in the 2010s, to the current trans activism and the gender identity war. You can see here that the Rest takes gay rights as a slippery slope that the West itself cannot recover from. Not when lesbians are at war with trans.
The West knows that the evolution of gay rights in the Rest is too slow and is very impatient about it. News agencies shame Japan for being the only G7 member that doesn’t allow same-sex marriage. Singapore, which is about to decriminalize gay sex, is asked to do more. All the tuts-tuts about Qatar. Africa is a trickier case, so Senegal’s Idrissa Gueye got away easier for refusing the rainbow jersey. Non-European Western athletes also get away with homophobia easier if they are Muslims instead of Christians.
Perhaps it gets to do with who you see as your campus neighbors, even in your adult life. Muslim Africans and Arabs are neighbors, but royalist Muslims and East Asians are not. Even Pacific Islanders lose their neighbor status once their Christianity clash with LGBT identities.
The common criticism against Fukuyama and his liberalism is that liberal democracy isn’t necessarily universal. The same critics now insist that OneLove is universal. They know it’s not working, and that’s the point. Keep snarky, keep angry, and keep the moral high ground in a world where the West is no longer special.