Distinguished Guest Lectures

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Europe, America and the Middle East

Michel Rocard

Mr President of the University of Alexandria ,
Mr Director-General of the Alexandria Library,
Ministers, Ambassadors, Ladies and Gentlemen

It is a great honour for me to be invited to talk here in this prestigious place, and, to tell you the truth, I am not entirely sure that I should have accepted to talk on this subject, which Dr Serageldin suggested to me. It is true that one of my books is entitled Parlez Vrai , or Tell the Truth , but my long political experience has warned me that you can only do that if you are very, very silent. For a foreigner, external to the region, talking about the Middle East and then mixing its problems with material on Euro-American relations in the present context is naturally an almost impossible challenge.

Furthermore, as Dr Serageldin has just reminded you, in order to lecture on a subject of this sort in a place such as this and before such an audience I would have needed to have worked two or three hours a day for a good month in order to prepare a careful, historical accurate speech in which every date, every quotation and every fact would have been absolutely correct. However, instead of that I have had to read and campaign for six weeks, during which time I was driven roughly 10,000 miles , held 60 meetings and thought of many things except the Middle East and Euro–American relations. Election campaigns have the virtue of taking you back to purely local roots, as you know. So, I am a little nervous, and some of my historical data will be a little doubtful concerning dates, and I am not sure I have been able to put all my thoughts in finished form.
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However that may be, the Middle East is a region of misery and of great unhappiness, though it is also beautiful in ways that few other regions are. It is also the birthplace of the three great Religions of the Book, and we are all concerned by what happens here. The fact that it seems to be impossible for this region to escape from endless cycles of violence also needs to be analyzed. I did not think it necessary for me to discuss issues of current politics in front of you, particularly as you already know everything about these, as I certainly do not, and therefore I thought it preferable to try to think long-term and to think sociologically and theoretically about some of the region's problems.

Regarding the origins of the problem of violence in the contemporary Middle East , we must remember the responsibility of the colonial period. The colonizers in this region, especially the British -- though they were not alone as we French also have our share in the miseries that have befallen the human race as a result of colonization -- drew up the frontiers of new countries, sometimes without regard for ethnic, linguistic and religious links or the constraints of geography. New borders creating new countries were drawn up in order to find a place for trusted royal families or princes. You in this region have paid a price for this policy, since neither Iraq nor Jordan , for example, have long histories making for stability.

Then there are other problems, one of which is called oil. Some people consider oil to be a blessing, but more and more people are coming round to the view that the discovery of oil in a country is more like a curse. Oil, in fact, in the Middle East is rather like dynamite, though in saying so I am walking on mines, as you know. Nevertheless, it can be said that possessing a lot of oil is an evil, and this is not only true for a country like Venezuela . Top of Page

A further problem, and probably one of the most serious, stems not only from the fact but also from the way in which the British managed the issue of a Jewish national homeland. As I am not an intense believer in God and have been educated in the protestant faith, which means that I belong to the 1% of the French population that is protestant and have a future, frankly, in a museum ; however I did receive from my religious education a great respect for any faith, for any recognition of transcendence, even if sometimes religions can lead believers into violent conduct, though I do not believe that this is a general attitude.

My thinking here is that there should be rules for worshipping God, but at the same time religions should teach their believers to live with others, and this is key. That being said, the fact that the Jewish community has lived under Christian authority for two millennia has produced historical horrors, far more than the cohabitation between Jews and Arabs, for example. This is a fact, though it is probably no longer true because of the results of the history of this relationship. One event that struck me was a telephone call, made at the end of 1945 or at the beginning of 1946, between Nahum Goldman, President of the World Jewish Congress, and David Ben-Gurion, Head of the Labour Party of Israel and future Israeli head of state. Goldman asked Ben-Gurion to try to win time by not making an early declaration of the State of Israel. Negotiations with the Arabs have not finished, Goldman said. They are still possible, and war can be avoided.

However, Ben-Gurion answered that delay was absolutely impossible. There was a mechanism and dynamism at work, he said, and we have to exploit the decision of the United Nations, which is not completely final and could be revised in a way not to our advantage, by confirming it immediately. Goldman replied that as a result there would be half a century of conflict and violence in the region. Top of Page

Such a statement will resonate in all our minds, but it is also clear that for many of those who lived in Palestine at the time and before there was not, or was only rarely, a hostile relationship with the Arab population. You all remember that when the Balfour Declaration was announced it did not provoke a general or unanimous upsurge of violence. However, I will not make any further comment on this, since we are not here for a history lesson. Rather, I will only say that the fact that the British engineered this Declaration, and then more or less changed their minds, has produced an exasperation and mistrust in the region that is one of the objective elements making up present problems. I will try not to sit in judgment, as I am not here to give marks for good conduct either to the British, the Arabs or the Jews, and naturally I am not here to give marks to the French either.

Such are the ingredients that begin the story. Then comes the Second World War and many further developments. Among these, first, there was the refusal among some Arab circles to support the British, some feeling sympathy for the Axis powers and Hitler, the surprising thing being here that these Arab circles were very few and were practically without influence. The Arab world massively, and in spite of what it had lived through, recognized where the cause of freedom lay, and therefore did not support the Nazi cause.

A second result of the War was that British influence diminished and Britain largely disappeared from the Middle East . The third element, not exactly a consequence but like one, was the agreement signed between President Roosevelt and King Abdel-Aziz Ibn Saoud in 1945 on a military vessel in the Red Sea. I told you earlier that I did not have time to check all the dates, but this event occurred when Roosevelt was coming back from Yalta , and he signed an extraordinary document, which is still, I was going to say embarrassing but I am not sure it is embarrassing for the American government. The agreement says that the US will provide Saudi Arabia with unconditional and permanent military protection in exchange for the unlimited guarantee of cheap oil. The agreement produced fantastic growth in the wealth of the kingdom, with an enormous amount of dollars coming from the United States to pay for petrol. These payments enriched the Wahabi Kingdom in all its aspects, including culture, and they reinforced the Wahabi faith.
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My general and unconditional respect for all forms of religion does not prevent me from saying that some religions are more developed than others, and I believe that Wahabi beliefs are not the most flexible and are not the most easily compatible with the values now available to the world as a whole, but first created in the West, namely freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of opinion, free elections and free government, and democracy and representative government.

To close these remarks on origins, two more remarks should be made on developments that have affected the contemporary Middle East . The first of these is Israel's feeling of being under threat, and this can be understood since quite objectively it is not unreasonable for Israel to feel threatened when it is a state of four million Jews surrounded by 100 million Arabs. However, this is not the issue. The issue is that Israel answers the perceived threat by using force in ways that are not always compatible with international law in terms of the conventions governing the treatment of the wounded and prisoners, etc. In terms of its respect for such agreements, Israel appears to be an exception for the international community, and it is forgiven war crimes and attitudes that would not be forgiven any other country.

Since we are talking about the early 1950s I will take another example from the same time, that of what happened to Dr Musaddiq when he wanted to use oil as a national resource for the growth of the national economy in a great Muslim country, not an Arab country but still a Muslim one, and was imprisoned or killed for it, I do not remember which. Anyway, Musaddiq disappeared in a coup d'état largely brought about by western forces, including the CIA, as you know. This event too contributed to the formation of a certain climate in the region. Top of Page

Now let us come to the more recent period and to the make up of the conflict. First of all, we should try to analyze what the influence of Wahabi money has been and what has increased thanks to this influence. It can probably be said – this will not hurt since I have been the host of the King of Saudi Arabia at least twice and France maintains good relations with the country – that the political establishment of the Kingdom has not used the fantastic amounts of money made available to it from oil to support political, social or regional forces in ways compatible with building improved relations with the West, which means developing forms of democracy. One could probably even draw the opposite conclusion, which is that Wahabi religious authorities have used this money to reinforce the hostility to values coming from western countries.

I will keep my second observation short in order to emphasize the third. I think we can not but accept another lesson of history, which is that no country can survive if it does not adapt to change. The end of the 20 th century and the beginning of the 21 st are periods of accelerating and fascinatingly rapid technological change. No country can resist this change without adapting its structures of power and the relationship between the government and the governed. I would not say that this process of adaptation has to take place as quickly as technological change does, but it does mean that the process of adaptation has to take this change into account.
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However, in order to do this countries usually need to have -- and I do not say this in order to offend -- control over their internal affairs and the hope of not having to spend too much on external affairs. But in fact in the Middle East, thanks to the events I have just quoted, and for this country, Egypt, in particular, or for another one not so far away, Turkey, and naturally also for Iraq (the Iranian case is a bit different, but I think what I have to say is also true for Iran), the pressure of geopolitics, the pressure of the threats of violence and the militarization of the whole surrounding region have not allowed enough breathing space to think internal reforms through thoroughly in peace and serenity. This is precisely one of the difficulties that Turkey is now experiencing, and your splendid, beautiful and historical country has probably suffered in having too many external problems to deal with and therefore not enough energy left, not enough rest time left, to deal with internal affairs.

Furthermore, the more events advance the more missed occasions there have been for making peace between Israel and its neighbours. It can also probably be said that after every missed occasion the situation is humanly, but also militarily, more difficult to resolve than it was before. I think the missed occasion of Oslo confirms this, and Egypt, which was the first country to create a partial but significant peace agreement with Israel, has not been able, not more than Israel anyway, to profit from the circumstances created by this peace agreement to enlarge peace in the region.

The usual way of thinking would be to use this opportunity to discuss the actions and decisions taken by both governments, or by all governments in the region, including the Palestinian leadership and Palestinian Authority. However, I will not undertake a discussion of this sort, since, first of all, all of you have been doing that all your lives and who in this region of so many threats does not undertake discussions of this sort? Most likely you know the issues much better than I do, and I would not therefore give you any interesting information. What I can do, on the other hand, is try to answer the question of whether the Arab world is living under some sort of “curse” responsible for present conditions. Is it true, for instance, as some western historians say, that Islam is an area where industry did not take off? Such attitudes have begun to change, and they have taken a long time to do so, but we also need to ask what the democracies have produced? It is difficult to answer this in the Japanese case, but I think it is a question that accords well with what I am going to say, and therefore in what follows I will speak about North America and Western Europe . Top of Page

Here, the priority was to build democracy and a peaceful life together starting from a religious inheritance, one that refuses violence and produced the conventions on the laws of war, and so on. In addition, religion was supplemented by the belief that in order to build secular societies, and we have in French a word for that that unhappily cannot be translated into English or German and hardly even into Italian, so you will have to do without it, and I will use instead simply the word “secular”. Secularism consists of the fact that the people, not God, are sovereign. The second element of secularism is that any way of worshipping God is acceptable and tolerated, and what is not acceptable is that violence should rule, which is probably a common feature of most religions. A third element is the concept of equality between men in general and especially between men and women, which is also partly Christian in origin, I think, the New Testament being progressive in this regard, though as you know women cannot be priests. The inequality between men and women is a subject of discussion in the Catholic Church, but in my view the situation of women has to be understood in a secular manner.

This commitment to secularism has been possible because religion has developed, though the problem for me is going to be to speak clearly about this. I am a Protestant, and in my country the Catholic Church centuries ago invented the Inquisition, which was something like the most fundamentalist form of Wahabism. Therefore, while we now benefit from a different period of history and from a better climate, no one has any lessons of morality to give anyone else, and I do not aim to do so. Nevertheless, one can try to translate the lessons of history for others, though not those of morality, and it is for this reason that the world has an obligation to think about the contrasting case of Islam. Historians have now pushed human history back some six thousand years, 5,800 of which were characterized by conditions where every person's and every family's work was sufficient only to bring in enough food, clothes, transportation and heating for immediate needs. We only escaped from this long period of historical poverty, or lack of luxury, at the end of the 18 th and beginning of the 19 th century thanks to the development of capitalism and of free enterprise. This was a development of genius, but how did it come about?Top of Page

Historians are more in agreement about this now, and lately an American historian has written an extraordinary book, which probably you know Dr Serageldin, which says that the capacity for growth comes when people feel free enough not to follow the official order of how the economy should be organized, such as was laid down by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, in other words the order of the good economy, la bonne economie , which then consisted of a rigid framework of rules and orders. In brief, growth comes when a population feels free enough to invent for itself and to escape from state orders, and this is a marvellous story demonstrated nearly everywhere. To put this another way, our economic growth is also a product of secularism, and it has been possible because most of our religious establishments have had to develop under pressure of this sort. This is probably the role that the Reformation played in Christianity, and in Christianity the reformers have frequently won, which has been less frequently the case in the Islamic world.

Is religion itself a cause of this failure of reform? I am not sure, but before returning to the question of the development and flexibility of religion I would like to refer to the thesis of a French demographer and sociologist, Emmanuel Todd, who has written a strange, sometimes excitable and unrealistic, but nevertheless extraordinary analysis and theory of development. Why are certain countries rich and others poor? Why do certain countries live under dictatorships, while others do not? Todd looked at the data and came to the conclusion that when a country reaches a situation where 85-90 % of its population is literate then things change, non-violently if those in power accept change, violently if they do not, as was the case for many modern states, and, of course, was the case during the French Revolution. Todd's second conclusion was that economic development was a result of literacy and began half a century after this level of literacy had been reached. Todd then asked why this was the case and went on to argue that it was related to the average age at which women got married. Top of Page

In southern Scandinavia in the mists of the Middle Ages tradition dictated that women marry at around 22-24 years old and not before then. In the rest of Europe , the marriage age was a bit less, but not by much. In Arab countries, on the other hand, women got married at 14-15 years of age, with the result that there was a great difference in the amount of time devoted to reading, in women's ability to develop themselves and in their ability to pass on to their children the benefit of the knowledge that they themselves had gained. I think this finding is extraordinarily striking, and if you read Todd's book La Troisième Planète you will be struck by the statistical correlations brought to bear in arguing this case.

This is not a religious factor, since neither the Bible nor the Talmud nor the Qur'an speak about it. Therefore, when our various religions have promoted certain forms of social behaviour such as that concerning marriage it has not always been by referring to the revelation contained in the sacred books. This calls for reflection, since certain forms of social behaviour have been shown to be not easily compatible with development. Furthermore, another Mediterranean form of behaviour has militated against the Mediterranean zone when compared to Northern Europe , namely endogamy, because marriage within the extended family does not incorporate different sensibilities, cultures, or sufficient diversity. It does not aim at the discovery of variety, and it does not bring as many opportunities to invent, to create, and to do things differently. Maybe I am surprising you by speaking in this way, but I am simply expressing my conviction that affairs of this sort are at the heart of the problems that beset the Mediterranean area and therefore that beset the Middle East . Top of Page

However, let us return to religious problems, and to the question of why attempts at bringing about the sociological development of religious practices succeeded in Western Europe . Many of these attempts were brought about through military means: think of Isabelle d'Aragon and Isabelle de Castille, of the Catholic King of Spain , or even of Louis XIV. However, this kind of development has not been possible in Islamic countries, due to historical bad luck, and this is probably the key to the present situation. I should also like to observe that the religions that have developed the quickest are those that were linked with power, such as the Catholic Church, obviously, but also the Protestant churches in Scandinavia , Britain and the US . Those religions, such as Judaism, Orthodox Christianity, and, in many countries, Islam, that had to protect their beliefs against the powers that be and had no responsibility towards them could only do so by remaining absolutely inflexible in their dogmas. This happened with the Jewish rabbinate as much as with the religious figures of Muslim countries.

My conviction, and now I am coming to my conclusions as to what is happening in this region, is that peace is out of the hands of politicians. I have had to recall this long history in order to arrive at this terrible conclusion. No politician can, and I can pretend to have some experience in the job, take important decisions without consensus, and the creators of consensus are the people, whatever their organizational form, and the people also create those symbols thought worthy of respect. As long as different religions preach incompatible symbols it will not be easy to arrive at a political consensus allowing all the communities concerned to pay the symbolic price of peace. Top of Page

Now, how does this relate to the present situation and to the different attitudes of the United States and of Europe ? The long humiliation of Muslim countries has led some in this region to despise Western civilization, believing it to be atheistic, materialistic, and devoted to money and not deserving of respect in the way it deals with sex and violence. I can understand that these elements of the Western model are not worthy of general respect. However, at the end of this long history we also come to the attacks of 11 September 2001 and to Al-Qaeda. Since those events, our American friends have decided that they are at war against terrorism, and they have decided to use force in this war with few preliminaries. I would even go so far as to say that they have abandoned any reflection on how a population that has fallen victim to a dictator – I am thinking of the Iraqi population -- can allow itself to be saved from that dictator by others without the objectives of that salvation being clearly defined. This question cries out for sociological reflection, and it is not a matter of being left or right in politics, or of having different religious convictions. On the contrary, the academic discipline that could have helped us to understand more fully is sociology, but my feeling is that sociology has disappeared from American universities, or at least from the minds of those American decision-makers who have responsibility for Iraq and the Middle East . Under these conditions the strategic choice of using violence to produce democracy, supposedly with the agreement of the most advanced and most developed elements of the Muslim intellectual community, was considered rational, but it was, I think, a false choice.

What we Europeans would like is to hear your contributions, particularly with regard to such American methodological errors. However, these errors come from a lack of sociological reflection before they come from being left wing or right wing in politics or from general criticism of the religion of a foreign region. Top of Page

Let us now come to Europe itself, a discussion of which is what you expected from me. You all know that perceptions of events in this region are more finely calibrated in Europe, and probably all the leaders of our public opinion have used the lessons of history and of sociology to take another view. However, two elements should be taken into account when examining European attitudes. The first is that since its foundation in 1959 the European Economic Community was forbidden from developing a common foreign policy. In the initial treaty, the Treaty of Rome negotiated in 1957-58, foreign policy was not mentioned. The need for a European economic force to develop some consequences of power in the international arena and in the fields of defence and security appears only with the Treaty of Maastricht, but all our governments have agreed that any decisions taken in this field should be taken unanimously.

Furthermore, the Iraq War, an event that our friends in the Middle East must keep in mind in order to judge what is currently happening, led to an important split among Europeans. Why? Because Europe deals with the economy, productivity, competitiveness, employment and salaries, and that is all. These are important areas, but they do not belong to the symbols for which one might take the risk of going to war or of being killed. Freedom, faith, motherland and language all remain national issues, which means that Europe provokes indifference on the part of national populations. At the last elections for the European Parliament, for example, which took place last Sunday, there were unprecedented abstention rates and public indifference. Of course, we are proud to share our belief in representative democracy and the respect for human rights, and so on, though these things are not enough to mobilize people. You who live in a violent region will be able to understand that for those who have long lived in a quiet area of the world there is nothing more important than security. Top of Page

We have built a great economic power in Europe , but we have not touched upon security issues, since here we do not share common values. Throughout the whole Cold War period there was a feeling of mistrust, Britain , for example, thinking that its security would not come from the “evil” European Continent. For Britain , the Continent is a constant threat; you can expect only bad things from the Continent. British policy for centuries has been to divide the Continent and to support one part of it at the expense of another and to alter the European balance of power in order to continue with the same policy. Why not? These are clearly the lessons of history.

France , on the other hand, has an extraordinarily arrogant military tradition and also a rather arrogant technological tradition. We have a powerful state, and France has built the myth of its independence on its capacity to develop nuclear weapons and not to depend on anyone else to build them on its behalf. This means that France has the strange distinction of being probably the only country in the world where the feeling of security is not primary and where security is not linked with decisive alliances. The non-nuclear countries of continental Europe naturally considered that their security depended on the US during the Cold War, and France did not devote enough efforts to convincing them of the importance of uncertainties in the Soviet command and of France having nuclear weapons. We did not even care to express these ideas to those who were not capable of defending themselves. This history is just to remind you that in terms of world security the European Union contains a history of mistrust on security matters.
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We now have 10 new members of the EU, eight of which have lived under Communism. These countries are able to breath once again, now that they have systems of representative democracy. They want to respect human rights much more than during the previous half century and to do so as we do in the rest of Europe . However, you will not be able to explain to a Slovak, a Czech or a Pole that it was Europe that freed them from Communism. They know that it was the United States . Furthermore, the Continent is not completely stable. What is the future of Russia ? Will the international community, including the United States but first we in Europe, be able to welcome a new Russian democracy, and thereby diminish Russia 's propensity to arm itself and to engage in nationalistic behaviour? No one knows. What is happening in China , which has one billion three hundred million inhabitants who in 30 years will be as rich as we are? China has been growing at more than 10% per year for 15 years. The World Bank is trying to promote high interest rates to finance public development in China , which is good for peace.

Under these conditions those countries of Eastern Europe that have been threatened every time the world was going through periods of radical change consider that nothing should diminish their solidarity with the US in strategic terms. And we westerners should have understood that, including President Chirac, who said unpleasant things of these countries because he did not understand their need for security.

So, my friends, I come to the conclusion that for more than half of Europe the countries that have joined have done so in order to make the continent into a kind of greater Switzerland . They ask us, “why do you French go around playing at being peacemakers in the world when this is something for the Americans? Let the Americans do it. We pay less than 2% of our gross national product for defence. Your policy will oblige us to double our defence efforts.” This is the attitude of the Dutch, the Italians and the Swedes, and it is compatible with American mistakes in world leadership. While we can vote on resolutions asking the US to behave differently in the Middle East we cannot do much more than that. Top of Page

I am now approaching the end of my analysis. The new members of Europe have been free and democratic for only a short time, and this is such a new condition for them that they have to get used to it, to absorb a culture of re-discovered peace and to live in serenity and quiet and attain a secure and true analysis of world equilibrium. My own feeling, which is that of German diplomacy and mostly of French diplomacy, as well as of Belgian diplomacy, which as you have seen has shown great courage, of Luxembourgeois diplomacy and of the new Spanish diplomacy, is that the half of the American people that is now in power has reached an impasse in terms of intellectual attitudes and in terms of relations with the rest of the world and that this could cause huge damage. However, this is only half of the US , and we are working with the other half in the expectation that it will win at the next elections. Yet, even supposing that Mr Kerry is elected next November he will not be able to withdraw from Iraq , whatever the consensus is, and we all have to deal with that. So it will be a long time before we are able to rediscover the conditions for good, negotiated regulation of the world by democratic countries whose wishes run in parallel.

I do not think that the European Union, having digested post-communism, will be able to escape the duty of radical change in its trade and cooperation policy with Africa, since Africa is slowly starving and moving beyond our reach. Europe can not avoid the need to bring greater pressure to bear for peace between Israel and Palestine either, or avoid the need to bring pressure to bear for the establishment of a commonly acceptable government in Iraq . However, we do not have the military power to do these things. Europe 's influence today is in the form of soft power, the Americans alone having hard power. Yet, my final piece of advice, my friends, is: do not despise soft power. My historical culture and political experience tell me that while hard power can help to bring about quick transitions in different periods it is never conclusive. The real development of the planet comes about through promoting understanding through the use of soft power. Top of Page

It is for this reason that Europe , despite its lack of power to help you, is nevertheless much nearer to you and to your beliefs and hopes and to the need you have for domestic development. This is why I touched upon some difficult subjects before coming to this conclusion. It is the wish and conclusion I leave you with because we need to improve the quality of our relations, which are peaceful. That is why, too, I have been glad to touch upon these difficult and important subjects before such a wonderful audience.

Thank you.

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