It has been argued in Chapter One that socio-political order in such deeply divided societies as Lebanon or, even, Switzerland cannot be fully understood through the prism of predetermined and rigid, yet controversial and ambivalent conceptualisations of modernity. The problematic arises from the ambivalence associated with the definition of the so-called ‘modernity project’. The Eurocentricity of the study of modernity leaves social scientists with the inescapable urge to compare modern societies with little regard to differences in their political, economic, social and intellectual histories.
Theoretical and conceptual debates on ‘modernity’, it must be noted, have oscillated between zealous modernists and postmodernists. Essentially, modernists can be seen as defenders of the Enlightenment project and, thus, continue to view modernity and the Eurocentric values upon which it is founded as a project for all of humanity. According to this view, ‘modernity’ aims to achieve an ahistorical homoginisation of the world by expanding and diffusing the values and socio-cultural project of the Enlightenment to the resilient and late-modernising societies of the non-Western world (Fukuyama, 1992; Huntington, 1996; Duara, 2002). In responding to this, postmodernists on the other hand believe that the modern project has reached its apex and is, thus, substituted with the notion of ‘cultural resistance’ to global standardisation as the ‘modernity project’ is no longer capable of explaining the social reality in different parts of the world as well as from within ‘the West’ itself (Anderson, 1998).
Notwithstanding this difference, modernists and postmodernists alike conceptualise modernity as a coherent whole, an all-encompassing, all-pervasive hisotircal project representing a single, uniform and consistent world. This perceived coherence of modernity as a specific way of life conceived during the Enlightenment render it a rigid and unilinear project; a set of absolute truths; and a standardisation of rational, secular knowledge – things even modern man himself is incapable of changing (Kaya, 2004). This is evidenced in the works of Michel Foucault who, through Kant, traces ‘the ontology of the present’ to the exemplary event of the 1789 French Revolution (Foucault, 2002). In doing so, modernisation theory confers a sense of spatiality and temporality upon ‘the modernity project’ as evidenced by the Hegelian-Marxist expressive totality (Bhabha, 1994: 31-32; 91; 243).
Modernisation theory, therefore, pays little attention to the context within which transitions to modernity occur; the agents carrying forth the socio-cultural project of modernity; and the role of ‘culture’ and ‘acculturation’ on the processes of modernisation. More importantly, classical modernisation theory presupposes the development of similar – if not identical – institutional designs and socio-political constellations of modernity. On the political level, for instance, it is
assumed that the pedagogical function of modernity is ‘the will to be a nation’ as Renan (in Bhabha, 1994:160) argues. These nations are governed by a unitary centre represented by the monolithic Hegelian state which is charged with the function of articulating ‘national culture’ and the shared behavioural and attitudinal value system. National society, on the other hand, is reorganised into a relatively homogenous, a deeply penetrated, malleable and conformist periphery. For modernists, this prototypical structure, the nation-state, is an inescapable and inevitable tenet of modern society. This prototypical order is upheld by modernisation theorists despite the fact that different societies may have undergone historical transformations in which sub/transnational identities were not replaced by the nation; or modern Hegelian states did not develop a monopoly over the monolithic task of producing social change.
It is the intention of this chapter, thereofore, to address modernity as a state or a condition separable from the philosophical and institutional constellations produced by a particular historical experience. In other words, this chapter aims to liberate the concept of modernity from the historical and cultural baggage attributed to it by Eurocentric political theorists. Such a position, indeed, runs contrary to the universalist and unilinear claims of modernisation theorists who perceive modernity as an all-encompassing civilisational transition – an assertion which categorically denies that the historical and cultural specificities of the instigators of the transition to modernity are of any relevance to the epistemological and ontological content of the modernity project itself. Instead, modernity is perceived as the inevitable, objective process of ‘thinking the unthought’; liberating man’s ‘cognito’ and, thus, ‘knowledge’ from the realm of transcendentalism through rational empiricism; and, as a result, ‘ending man’s alienation’ by ‘reconciling him with his own essense’ (Foucault, 2002:351). This, of course, is seen as an exemplary, revolutionary achievement which would, inevitably, transform human civilisation in its entirety – through ‘acculturation’, cultural dissemination or the ‘mission civilisatrice’ of the colonial modern (Tibi, 1988:12-18). As such, what critics of modernisation theory view as a self-imposing Eurocentrism project, modernists perceive an absolute and objective truth – a self-professed universality which leaves ‘modern man’ no choice but to ‘modernise’ or perish:
As a modern man in this modern world, one better welcome and celebrate [modernity] joyously [...] otherwise he is bound to be crushed, destroyed and annihilated. [...] This is the message of modernity as a universal project, the project that begad in the period of the Enlightenment (Kassim, 2005:19).
Despite its self-professed universality, however, modernity can be defined as a relatively long historical phase which involved a socio-intellectual shift in the fields of scientific research, knowledge and technology. Politically, it involved the restructuring of state-society relations, the birth of the nation-state and the expansion of its authorities to encompass the political,
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civil, legal, economic and cultural spheres (Turkmani, 2004). In fact, political theorists often use the term modern, as a state of being, in reference to the structural changes which link a modern state with industrialisation, democratisation and nationalism suggesting that the state
of modernity cannot exist unless a society undergoes these transformations (Riggs, 1998).
What concerns us here, however, is the fact that the ‘modernity project’ occurred against the backdrop of a unique form of cultural and civilisational contact and a corresponding cultural framework which exhibits a completely new quality. In other words, ‘modernity’ as articulated in Europe took place in a world society unknown and unimagined in classical history: the Industrial Revolution, as Bassam Tibi (1988:13) noted, “thrusted Europe into a heady position of dominance from which it could conquer and mold the entire world in its own image”.
This uniqueness of this ‘modern’ form of civilisational contact, Tibi (1988) explains, rests on the concept of ‘acculturation’: a concept which expresses the penetration of the entire world by a single culture. ‘Modernity’, thus, is a relationship between the global ‘centre’ and the global ‘periphery’. This relationship between ‘top-dogs’ and ‘underdogs’ – to use Tibi’s expression – is premised on the unequal distribution of opportunities rooted in the structure of world economy, the industrialism-capitalism nexus and the colonial encounter.
In light of this unique modality of civilisation and cultural contact – acculturation, the mere historical precedence of ‘modernity’, industrialism and capitalism in Europe allows European modernity to position itself at the ‘centre’ of World Society and ‘mold the world in its own image’. In other words, the presupposition that ‘Modernity’ is singular and capitalised – as is envisaged by modernisation theorists – underpins the ‘impregnation’ of the ‘underdogs’ with novel ontologies, epistemologies, aesthetic norms and institutional designs – either through ‘voluntary acculturation’ or through the colonial ‘mission civilatrice’ (Al-Azmeh, 1996:80). The shortcomings of modernisation theory, hence, this chapter proposes, are, in fact, twofold. Firstly, modernisation theory fails to acknowledge that the socio-cultural project and the institutional designs of ‘modernity’ are, in fact, the product of a historical context: they are the outcome of particular social, cultural and intellectual dynamics of a relatively long historical phase and are carried forward by social actors/movements who are embedded within this context and, thus, act as the bearers of the antinomies of ‘modernity’. Secondly, social theory is so embedded in the study of Enlightenment that it fails to capture the underdogs’ transition to modernity – that is to say, the dynamics of intellectual and socio-political modernism in non-Western societies.
In light of this critique of modernisation theory, this chapter will engage with the concept of ‘hybrid modernities’ and ‘late modernities’ in an attempt to establish a conceptual framework within which institutional and ontological ‘deviations’ from the nation-state model and the socio-cultural presuppositions of the metatheories of modernism and postmodernism may be understood. It must be noted, however, that this chapter conceptualises modernity as a dynamic process which is neither monocivilisational nor unidirectional – as opposed to the authentic conceptualisations of modernity. The discussion presented in this study, however, interrogates ethnocentric forms of cultural modernity and contemporarises the notion of culture. In other words, inspired by Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994), the arguments presented here oppose ‘cultural pluralism’ as well as ‘cultural relativism’ much as they question the Eurocentricity and ‘universalism’ of the logics of binary oppositions inherent in classical modernisation theory.
This chapter is divided into four sections. In the first section, some of the fundamental presuppositions of classical modernisation theory are discussed. The second section examines variations in the transition to modernity with a particular focus on the Arabo-Islamic world in an attempt to explain how pre-modern order may have had an influence on the social actors and the historical transition to modernity. In the third section, the concepts of ‘late’, ‘hybrid’ and ‘incomplete’ modernities are introduced exploring the nature and dynamics of transitions to modernity in societies where modernism and capitalism were triggered by direct or indirect; violent or peaceful encounter with ‘the modern other’ in light of the concept of acculturation. The final section examines the Nahda shedding light on the political-economy and sociology aspects of the Arab transition to modernity. The chapter comes to an end with some concluding remarks on the epistemology and ontology of modernity in the contemporary Middle East and the political superstructures which characterise the modern state in the Arab world today.