On November 4, 2008, like millions of people the world over, I watched the victory celebration for the election of President Barack Obama in Chicago’s Grant Park. It was a night of many images laden with emotion. For me, the most powerful symbol of that remarkable night was the tears of joy streaming down the face of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Those tears reminded me of other images from almost twenty years before—images like that of the great Russian composer Mstislav Rostropovitch, exiled from his homeland, now playing his cello before celebrating crowds in front of the crumbling Berlin Wall. They were tears of triumph and reconciliation, tears of harmony with the world, tears whose joyous message was that men and women can change history for the best when moved by emotions—the right emotions.
Less than a month later, in Mumbai—the city that is a symbol of hope of India—the “wrong emotions” were at work, as humiliation turned into terrorist violence. “Why are you doing this to us?” a man who had been taken hostage and was about to be executed called out to the gunmen. “We haven’t done anything to you.”
“Remember Babri Masjid?” one of the gunmen shouted in reply. He was referring to a sixteenth-century mosque built by India’s first Mughal Muslim emperor and destroyed by Hindu radicals in 1962. “Remember Godhra?” a second attacker asked. He was referring to the town in the Indian state of Gujarat, where religious rioting that evolved into an anti-Muslim pogrom began in 2002. The incident is further testimony, if any is needed, to the enduring power of symbols—in this case, symbols of humiliation—to evoke emotions and thereby control human behavior, even after a lapse of centuries.
The very title of this book, The Geopolitics of Emotion, will strike many critics as a sheer provocation, if not an oxymoron. After all, isn’t geopolitics about rationality, about objective data such as frontiers, economic resources, military might, and the cold political calculus of interest? By contrast, emotions are essentially subjective, if not purely irrational. To mix emotions and geopolitics can only be a futile, perhaps dangerous exercise, leading ultimately to the abyss of unreason epitomized by the pagan masses at Nuremburg during Germany’s descent into barbarity under Hitler.
Perhaps so. And yet this book is based on a dual conviction. First: One cannot fully understand the world in which we live without trying to integrate and understand its emotions. And second, emotions are like cholesterol, both good and bad. The problem is to find the right balance between them.
In November 2008, at least for a time, hope prevailed over fear. The wall of racial prejudice fell as surely as the wall of oppression had fallen in Berlin twenty years earlier. Obviously there were objective, rational reasons for Obama’s victory. In normal political terms, it was a rejection of the policies of the previous administration during a time of prolonged warfare and deep economic crisis. Yet the emotional dimension of this election and the sense of pride it created in many Americans must not be underestimated.
In the same vein, it is impossible to understand the Russian military adventures in the Caucasus in the summer of 2008 without considering their emotional meaning. The message being sent by the Moscow regime of Putin and Medvedev, not only to the Georgians but to the people of the world, was quite clear: “Imperial Russia is back! After 1989, you dared to condescend to us. Those days are over. We are ready to transcend our post-Soviet humiliation, erecting our new hope on the foundation of your fear.”
During that same summer of 2008, another regime sought to transcend past humiliation on the global stage, not through military adventurism but through international sport. By hosting the Olympic Games, China symbolically—and emotionally— reclaimed its historic centrality and its international legitimacy. Through the majesty of the opening ceremony, the architectural beauty of the stadium, and the many medals won by its athletes, China passed the test of entrance into modernity, attaining a new pinnacle of hope fueled by soaring economic growth.
Yet even as China grasps for hope, the Arab world remains mired in tragedy and the negative emotion of humiliation. Not all Arabs—not even a majority—subscribe to the irrational and hateful doctrines of violent jihad against the West. But even many Arab moderates reject notions of peaceful change and active citizenship, assuming that all political leaders are dishonest and corrupt. The attitude may be understandable, but it reflects and reinforces the feeling of despair that limits progress throughout the Arab world.
Fear against hope, hope against humiliation, humiliation leading to sheer irrationality and even, sometimes, to violence— one cannot comprehend the world in which we live without examining the emotions that help to shape it.
As I write these lines in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s election, the financial and economic crisis is deepening and widening throughout the world, affecting even Asia, the continent that until recently had been the primary driver of global economic growth. Which will prevail on the planetary stage—the spirit of hope carried by Obama’s victory, or the spirit of fear driven by economic collapse? It is, of course, impossible to predict. Much will depend upon the ability of the new American president to transform words into deeds, and to restore and rehabilitate politics in the eyes of his nation’s citizens. But much also depends on the quality of Chinese leadership, which is now faced with its greatest challenge in decades. For the first time in recent memory, the future of the planet will no longer be determined only by decisions taken by the democratic West. We may soon discover whether centralized, nondemocratic regimes such as China’s may actually be better equipped to respond to economic crises than democratic countries such as the United States.
This book has its own history, a bit reminiscent of a set of traditional Russian nesting dolls. It began with my Project Syndicate column of March 2006, titled “The Emotional Clash of Civilizations.” My former professor and now colleague at Harvard University, Stanley Hoffmann, encouraged me to develop it into a short essay, which was then published in the American journal Foreign Affairs in January 2007. This article, titled “The Clash of Emotions,” initiated a lively debate, and I was invited to present and defend my thesis widely in the American media, including an appearance on the popular National Public Radio program To the Point. One of my listeners, Charlie Conrad, a top executive at Random House, asked me to transform my Foreign Affairs essay into a book. This is how The Geopolitics of Emotion came to life.
Of course, by contrast to the essay on which it was based, the book is far more fully developed and therefore more nuanced in its presentation. Furthermore, the world has been radically transformed in the last two years. If there is as much humiliation as before, hope and fear both seem to have grown exponentially and in a very parallel manner. Yet the central thesis of the book has not changed. After all, emotions remain crucial to understanding the nature and evolution of the world, and it seems likely that this will be the case as long as the human species survives.
Dominique Moisi
Paris
November 24, 2008