At the root of what is now happening in Catalonia there are various diagnostic errors. Those who wish to manage the issue as that of legality and public order are radically mistaken in their failure to see in it an eminently political problem, requiring all the imaginative force of political reason. The mere guardians of legality are unaware either of such creativity or of the diplomatic acumen called for in especially complex conflicts. Technocratic management is impotent there, where what is at stake is identity itself with its acute affective dimension, the emotion saturating one’s belonging or non-belonging to a group. Therefore, the source of the current crisis surpasses its historical and geographical context and goes to the conflation of the political and the nonpolitical, which may be unnoticed in periods of “normalcy,” though not in exceptional, dangerous and decisive situations.
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In the wake of the Brexit vote and the 2016 American presidential election, the idea began to circulate that we were witnessing a trans-Atlantic, populist “revolt against the elites,” which had spontaneously arisen from populations whose concerns had, for too long, gone unheard by those in power. Longstanding economic problems regarding income disparity and wealth—left unaddressed by both sides of the political spectrum—are indeed among the most pressing issues that we currently face. But as has been observed, the first half-year of the new U.S. presidential administration, with one of the wealthiest cabinets in American history, calls into question the validity of the “populist” interpretation in the U.S. context. The failure of this theory has in turn exposed a gap in our ability to conceptualize what actually happened during the U.S. election, what is unfolding before us, and how we got here. This article develops new empirical perspectives on the growing gender policy and gender role clash of civilizations now looming ahead in Western countries. The very same European governments that welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants from countries with what the Muslim feminist Ziba Mir-Hosseini called “compulsory dress codes, gender segregation, and the revival of cruel punishments and outdated patriarchal and tribal models of social relations,” are untiringly promoting gender mainstreaming, which is now a top priority for European Union policymakers. Western feminism is at a turning point. Will it share with large sections of the green and left political currents in the West the cowardly silence about the threat of Islamist totalitarianism and terrorism, or will it develop solidarity with Muslim feminism? |
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