Abstract
Recognizing and finding the barbarian living inside us is a dangerous and challenging endeavour. Yet, Todorov embarks on this journey with firmness and conviction: each one of us can turn into a barbarian if we deny the humanity of others. This statement is functional, in the author’s analysis, to the sketching of a world of international politics in which civilizations (or cultures, as he sometimes defines them) do not clash, as Samuel Huntington had maintained in 1996 in his famous and controversial book (The Clash of Civilizations). For Tororov, civilization can rather be described as having fertile encounters with each other, which reconfigure and displace allegiances to the state and to communities. The author departs from a thorough analysis of the use of words such as ‘barbarian’ and ‘civilization’ in ancient Greek and Roman history and literature. His purpose is to demonstrate that the concept of ‘barbarity’ descends from the incapability or refusal to have empathic feelings for the other who does not speak our language or does not have the same customs.
This exegesis introduces the reader to the question of what constitutes the core of any collective identity and whether identities may function as a tool to deny to others their humanity and, hence, become barbarian. Such an issue is surely contentious and Todorov uses eloquent language to illustrate how identities are always the product of multiple influences and ‘cross-fertilization’. This disquisition on the terms by which collective identities, and more precisely national identities, come to be defined in opposition to one another, allows Todorov to propose a way to defuse the bomb of the contemporary dichotomic distinction between ‘the West’ and ‘Islam.’ In his intentions, in fact, it is necessary to refuse the reduction of Islam under the rubric of ‘Islamism’ as a political movement. The author’s argument, however, seems to suffer from a fundamental naïveté, namely, the hope that current western politics could turn its back on the logic of the ‘War on Terror’ waged against the threat of international terrorism, in order to embrace a politics based on tolerance and recognition of difference grounded in the most genuine traditions of the Enlightenment. This proposition, addressed to a Europe having difficulties in managing multiplicity on its soil, does not take into account how the concept of ‘tolerance’ can be a slippery one and may be based on an implicit presumption of moral superiority. In particular, when Todorov affirms that the best way to promote moral values is not by the means of war but by reinstating and repeating such values, there is an insufficient recognition of the way globalization works, in subtle ways, to benefit the ‘exportation of democracy’, not in military, but in ideological and pacific ways. The resentment/fear dichotomy, on which Todorov seems to rely to justify patterns of aggression and defence from presumably opposed entities (‘Islam’ and ‘the West’), does not tell the reader much about the economic and financial patterns of the exploitation of resources and the political intention to maintain a ‘status of fear’ or discontent in order to maximize profits and heighten social inequalities, even within the European continent.
Such an incomplete analysis can also be seen in relation to the discussion of the peculiarities of European identity and its desirable evolution in the future. Todorov is right on the importance of solidarity among European Union (EU) member states if they are to achieve success and prosperity. But he does not delve more deeply into the intricate web of selfishness and narrow national interests that currently informs the functioning of the EU itself, in which some countries display a higher moral and material status than others, and in which solidarity proves to be more rhetorical than tangible.
Todorov’s book is imbued with a genuine attachment to the values of humanism. It is a humanism, however, that has often proved to be insufficient for the protection of the rights of individuals in the 20th and 21st centuries. He attempts to find a third way between Rousseau’s and Hobbes’s views of human nature (if such a ‘nature’ can be detected in the first place), but ends up suffering from that same oversimplification of categories that he wants to refuse. His appealing description of the ways in which identities are the product of hybrid processes and are multiple and ever-changing is surely one of the most interesting aspects of his work, but it may not be sufficient to engender feelings of sympathy and empathy between actors who live in a world in which social and political justice are often unattained. The fear of barbarians, in fact, may not only be engendered by a genuine ignorance of the humanity of the other, or a stubborn refusal to recognize it. It is also motivated by a politics of the divide et impera that scatters the dispossessed and the marginalized across the world and cross-culturally in order to instil in them a fear of a radical otherness that does not actually exist. The Fear of Barbarians is a thought-provoking book that sets an ambitious goal. Although the author does not always delivers what he promises in terms of answers to the questions he proposes, the book engenders a profound curiosity in the reader who is led to start thinking about the dormant ‘barbarian’ living inside him or her.