The role of culture is often slighted. It makes us uncomfortable. It suggests racism and bigotry and cuts against the admirable liberal notion that we are all the same and can, with enough money, do better. So the zeitgeist around the Arab Spring is of great hope: Now that the nasties are gone, the Libyans and the Egyptians and, soon, the Syrians can be like us. Great importance is attached to cellphones and Twitter and other social media, and great attention is paid to the non-representative leader who is fluent in Googlespeak — as if putting an iPhone to the ear reverses polarity so that east becomes west. To utter the cautionary word “culture” is to utter an obscenity.
But the Egyptian revolution is turning out to be a counterrevolution instead — another military regime not all that different than the one that in 1952 sent King Farouk into a challenging exile of gastronomic and sexual excess. Democracy seems more and more unlikely. Something similar is probably in store for Libya, which, like Egypt, has never been a democracy and exhibited its handicrafts by apparently murdering a POW named Moammar Gaddafi. Should Bashar al-Assad depart either his nation or this life, Syria, too, is unlikely to be anything other than a military dictatorship. As for Iraq, the minute the last U.S. soldier is gone, scores will be settled.
The unwillingness to take culture into account explains why Iraq and Afghanistan have become such quagmires. The late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan, used to repeat the word “corruption” in the manner of Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz saying, “The horror! The horror!” To root out that sort of corruption would take nothing less than a change of culture. It can be done, but over many years and not certainly by bullets alone.
Cultures change. But glacially. It is no accident that the south of Europe — Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal — is extending a tin cup to the north. It is no accident that Arab countries are mucking up democracy, and it is no accident that Japan and Germany have the No. 1 and No. 2 carmakers. The FT was right to play that story on Page One. But it wasn’t about cars. It was about culture — the most important story of our times.
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The Washington Post