European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 9

European Policy Analysis

survival as a minority group and even
some Christians in Syria do so too. The
Christians in Lebanon are also divided
in groups cooperating with Iran or with
the West. Western countries sometimes
chose the wrong partners among Islamic
groups: the Muslim Brothers were not
accepted, but Wahhabism, one of the most
dogmatic groups, was tolerated to keep
up cooperation with the Saudi dynasty.
Power in the Near East is not understood
in terms of the “legal state” of the West as
a possibility of mediating among groups,
but rather as an instrument of preserving
power. In this respect, secular despots,
such as Saddam Hussein or Assad, are
similar to radical Islamists. Both versions
created migrations in large numbers.

The IS in the West is frequently
understood as a traditional religious group.
This perception overlooks the fact that IS
agents, in spite of their fundamentalism,
are good capitalists with their oil business
and with many stolen works of art which
they sell. They are quite modernized
in their way of organizing military and
bureaucratic power in their conquered
territories which reach from the suburbs
of Aleppo close to Bagdad. Modernism is,
however, despised when it argues against
“Sharia.” In the universities under the
domination of the IS, whole faculties in
the fields of law, political science, and the
arts have been closed down.

Although Western politicians
recognized with secret pleasure that the
Soviet Union had failed to regulate politics
in Afghanistan—with many more soldiers
than the United States ever mobilized
in that area—they dared to intervene.
Even Germany—so prudent in the Iraq
War—followed this operation with little
knowledge of the heterogeneous society
which it wanted to influence. Recently, the

Western countries had to renounce the
complete withdrawal from Afghanistan
when they recognized that the central
government in Kabul was no longer in
control of many marginal areas of the
country—a poor picture of the support
for democracy. Western propaganda
for democracy and market society was
meaningless in countries with archaic
tribal and clan structures. The West
had little understanding of historical
continuities in political ideologies, even in
East European countries. The West needed
Russia for its struggle against radical
Islamists which violated Russian interests
in the North Caucasian and Central Asian
areas. Although Putin was open to close
contacts to Western democracies until
2004, the United States and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
extended their influence to the Russian
borders. This was at least against certain
cautious Western declarations in the
negotiations with Gorbachev on the
reunification of Germany (von Beyme
2016, 116f).

3. Immigration Policies

T

he collapse of the former dualistic
world system in 1990 put an end
to the old clarity of ideological
borders and created multi-polarity alien to
American perceptions that were based on
the American feeling of having survived
as the only world power. The Indian
writer Pankaj Mishra (2012) and other
essayists developed—in combination of
Asian religious ideas and Western anticapitalistic Leftist concepts—the hope that
the Western way of life, with emphasis on
capitalism and nation-building, is doomed
to failure in the future, and, especially,

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