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Stephen Holmes is the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. He has previously served as director of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe at the University of Chicago and has authored numerous works on topics such as liberalism, political theory and the war on terror.

Professor Holmes sat down with the Research Desk at The Gazelle and shared his views on the shifting patterns of liberalism today. He spoke about some of the paramount developments in international politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, from Eastern Europe's transition to democracy to the rise of Daesh, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

In the ‘80s, I was writing a book comparing the French and U.S. American constitution-writing processes that took place in the late 1780s. This was a comparative project — not on constitutions, but on constitution making.

In 1989, as you remember, the communist system collapsed, and all of a sudden, there were a bunch of countries writing constitutions. I started traveling with my friend Jon Elster, an immensely talented political theorist and philosopher of social science, and interviewing people who were writing constitutions. We traveled everywhere in Eastern Europe, talked to people and developed this project into a University of Chicago Law School center of which I became the director: the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism. I ran a magazine for 12 years called theEast European Constitutional Review. We had reports about what was going on in every country as the post-communist transition process evolved. It was very interesting.

In the mid-’90s, I took a leave from the University of Chicago’s Law School and Department of Political Science and went to work for George Soros in Budapest. I ran an office on legal reform after communism, and we worked throughout Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union, and the Balkans, which was in the middle of a savage war at that time. It was an edgy and difficult time. The job was also very practical, and I like to call it the epistemology of bruises: You can’t learn what you can’t do until you try — particularly when you’re trying to work on policy issues in a complicated environment. When you go to a country, you actually have to go from A to B. There are things you learn about the landscape that you don’t learn if you’re just a passive observer. First of all, you learn who your real allies and enemies are. You’re negotiating a murky and sometimes hostile environment, not just listening to words... words are cheap. To go from A to B, you have to have a good grasp of the available resources and the thorny obstacles. It was incredibly informative and interesting, just from the point of view of social science: understanding what was happening, trying to do things like build a law school curriculum or helping people who have great needs.

One thing I noticed right off is that locally people had a very different view of foreign philanthropic aid than those who delivered it. When you go in to help, it’s very likely that you’re being engaged in a battle that you don’t understand, working on the side of a party whose motive you don’t know, against enemies whose existence you don’t even have a clue about. It’s really amazing how much you learn. One of my favorite examples: I went to Bucharest to talk to the Minister of Justice because he had asked my office to put together a dossier of model laws by which a Romanian who was arrested in Bulgaria could serve his sentence in Romania, and vice versa. There are many similar laws, so I had my staff assemble and arrange the material and I went to Bucharest and sat with him for a couple hours, explaining the details. At the end of our meeting, I said, “Minister, tell me, was this helpful?” And he said, “Well, do you want me to tell you the truth?” And I said, “Yeah, tell me the truth.” And he said, “It wasn’t at all helpful. However, in the next meeting, I’m going to tell them that you came here and gave me advice to do such-and-such, something we’d never talked about, and I’m going to use your prestige, outwardly, to get what I want in the next meeting, the one that really matters.”

This was very informative about the way things worked on the ground. Such manipulation of clueless donors by recipients with hidden agendas has significant consequences not only on philanthropy but also, interestingly, on foreign direct investment. FDI can have very strange consequences, because if you go in as a foreign direct investor, in countries you don’t understand, it’s very likely that you’ll be tricked. In fact, the dishonest hustler is usually disproportionately rewarded by the gullible foreign direct investor. So FDI often has the perverse consequence of weakening the honest people and strengthening the dishonest ones in every society to which such investments flow.

Here’s another example of my unsentimental education. I was working in Russia in the ‘90s, and I noticed that laws were being written by Harvard professors. I thought, “This is amazing; there’s no special-interest legislation.” Normally, when laws are being made, lobbyists swarm the lawmakers, deploying carrots and sticks to frame laws that will serve the interests of particular industries, even at the price of damaging the common interest. I was taken aback by the thought that in Russia, they were just making neutral laws. Special interests seemed to play no role in the legislative process. But it turned out that my first impression was illusory. Basically, no one cared what was written in the statutes, because everyone was buying judges, policemen and customs officers. They were buying at the level of implementation and, to some extent, interpretation. This made me understand that, paradoxically and contrary to what we ordinarily think, special-interest legislation is a legal advance, because it only occurs when strong social forces feel that it’s worthwhile to influence the law. If well-organized social forces take the trouble to rewrite the laws to reflect their special interests, they will be invested in the reliable application and enforcement of these laws. This, in turn, will serve the reliability interest shared widely throughout society, even though such laws will benefit the special interests more than the common interest. In early ‘90s Russia, no social force thought it worthwhile to frame the enforced special-interest legislation. This allowed me to come up with another definition for the rule of law: you only have the rule of law when the mafia needs lawyers. And Russia’s 1990s gangster class didn’t need lawyers at all.

Anyway, my interest in Eastern Europe came out of an interest in constitutionalism and watching these countries try to write constitutions, which means try to reorganize their political institutions to avoid tyranny, corruption, paralysis and uninformed decision making. People were saying that they were going to have things like a free market or a constitutional court or a parliament. I felt like a poor man’s Darwin, trying to understand how a species comes into being. Watching attempts to create liberal democracy from scratch was like tearing the skin off my own society and asking, How did we get where we are? An election is not really enough. And what this made me understand is that 1989, rather than being the end of history, as Frank Fukuyama said, or the triumph of liberal democratic models, was actually the beginning of the age of imitation. The age of imitation is where the rest of the world is expected to imitate the West. During the Cold War, the world was confronted with two equally imitable models of development. When one proved disappointing or repugnant, it was always possible to imagine that the other promised a better way. After 1989, the U.S. and Western Europe gained a monopoly on hope. There was now only one model to be imitated by all striving people. This is what makes the post-1989 age of imitation potentially so unstable. For one thing, U.S. American and Western European-style liberal democracy is a tiny spot in human history. It has complex preconditions. Knocking down a dictatorship may eliminate an obstacle, but it does not create the preconditions for liberal democracy to develop. As a result, the first big problem of the age of imitation is that it sets up most countries in the world for failure. And, after a while, people naturally start resenting being treated as bad imitations: why should you treat me as a second-rate Xerox copy of you? Plus, the imitator admires, honors and respects the imitated. But the imitated doesn’t respect the imitator. Indeed, he doesn’t find anything in the imitated worth paying attention to. So the imperative to imitate the one and only model of development worth imitating is bound to create a world of discontent. It breeds resistance, anger, and resentment. It creates ISIS, Putin and so forth.

At the beginning, in the immediate wake of 1989, the peoples of Eastern Europe tried to imitate Western models with the aim of reforming their systems and actually creating working liberal democratic systems. Accession to the European Union helped some Central European countries to go pretty far along this path. But even in Poland and Hungary, as we now see, imitation fatigue was bound to set in. Or rather, resentment at being treated as poor copies of the West was bound to explode. Because the collapse of communism barred the way of choosing a communist model to imitate, disgust and disillusion with being considered botched imitations of the West has naturally led to a rejection of imitation as such and a retreat into anti-civic sectarianism and ethnic nationalism. We see this in the political successes of Jarosław, Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán.

The parallel with ISIS is striking. Their operatives are saying, Oh, you want us to imitate you. Well, I’m going to start putting orange jumpsuits on people like you did in Guantanamo and burn them to death. Putin’s message is similar: You want me to imitate you? Okay, what you did to Kosovo, I’m going to do to Crimea. What we’re seeing, then, is a very aggressive and intentionally provocative form of mirror imaging. It should cure us of the illusion that the age of imitation is going to be an age without conflict.

Well, I really went off on a tangent there. Anyway, these are some of the interesting things that I learned from this period in the ‘90s, working in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and watching this kind of global attempt to mimic or replicate Western forms in countries that were very different.

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The two cases of democracy-promotion through military occupation were very different and indeed incommensurable. The idea that there was some kind of parallel between post-1945 Germany and post-2003 Iraq was perhaps the United States’ biggest illusion. We all read about the civilian reconstruction teams flying to Baghdad reading books about the role of the U.S. in post-war Germany. But there was absolutely no parallel. Germany had been destroyed in two world wars. Iraq had suffered a six-week military campaign. The German story was very particular; it was a very different setting. They had a history of liberal democracy, a history of constitutionalism and we knew a lot more about Germany. We went into Germany, and we had entire libraries describing the social fabric of small German towns because we had so many Germans in the United States. What happened in Iraq was a lightning military campaign. We knew nothing about Iraq. It was a denied area; we had no embassy. We went in blind — we, meaning the United States and, well, a small cohort of British soldiers. When monolingual U.S. Americans, ignorant of Iraqi Arabic, announced in 2003 that “the only language Iraqis understand is force,” the cruel irony was lost on no one. You realize that what they’re saying is, The only way we can speak to them — because we don’t know anything about their language, their culture, or anything else about them — is through force.

Certainly, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a disaster of world-shattering proportions. The terrible consequences are still unfolding; their full extent will not be known for decades. It was such a traumatic victory to destroy Iraq, to create an Arab Shiite power in the Middle East and double Iran’s influence in the region, to spread panic among Sunni governments in the Gulf — all of this has led directly to the destruction of Syria, which, in turn, has triggered the refugee crisis and is leading directly to the collapse of European institutions.

The truly extraordinary thing today, from the point of view of a U.S. American of my generation, is that U.S. President Obama has such little interest in the destruction of Europe. I can understand that he would imply that Syria, say, is not a core U.S. interest — it’s kind of cold-hearted, but still, it makes some sense. But for a president of the United States to say that the collapse of Europe — which is what we’re facing here — is of no strategic importance to the United States seems to be really wild, and it’s a product of this particular president and his particular way of seeing the world. I don’t know if the United States’ back-turning on Europe will endure or be reversed when a new president comes into office next year.

Not just Obama, but the entire political class has given up on democracy promotion. That — democracy promotion — just didn’t work anywhere, and we also don’t know how to do it. Why is the United States destroying governments but not creating them, people ask. This isn’t only because we’re not interested in it, but also because we don’t know how to create a government, and we certainly don’t know how to create a government with elections. How do you create a government in Kabul that actually represents the very complicated, dispersed rural society? We don’t know how to do that. We don’t do it, because we don’t know how. That should be said.

In his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, Obama said that we have to make a distinction between the core and peripheral interests of the United States. One thing he feels very hesitant about, certainly, is getting involved in overthrowing Bashar al Assad. I was shocked, actually, because I thought that when he said, “Assad must go,” he was thinking that the United States must get rid of him. But actually, the more you learn about what’s happening within the administration and at the State Department, you learn that they never wanted Assad to go. Never. It was never their policy for Assad to go. The policy was to not let ISIS take over Damascus. So basically, all they wanted was to change Assad’s calculations so that he would be ready to negotiate, and then, as the radicals moved in and ISIS developed, they wanted to change his calculations so that he would willingly negotiate with the moderate rebels, and then Assad and the rebels both, together, would swivel to fighting ISIS. This makes sense for Assad because he needs a Sunni force in order to govern any territory he recovered from ISIS. So the United States’ administration never considered using force to oust Assad from power. It was only interested in moderating Assad and convincing him first to negotiate with the non-Salafi opposition and then, with luck, to cooperate with the non-Salafi opposition to fight ISIS and oust it from the eastern half of Syria.

On the United States’ red line: Obama was in a press conference, and when someone asked him about it, he said, Oh, if he [Assad] is moving around some weapons, there should be a red line. Everyone thought, Obama, you can’t talk like that. It wasn’t really something he was serious about. In fact, in the interview, he says something like, I don’t understand why people say that if you want to disapprove of something, you have to be able solve the problem yourself. Over and over again, he says, We do not have the capacity to create order in the Middle East, and in fact, it’s not of that much importance to us. That is the key. Obama is tired of the US failing again and again in the Middle East. We will have better luck, he believes, if we pivot to Asia.

He is skeptical that the Saudis deserve to be called allies of the U.S. He thinks Pakistan is probably an enemy. The hidden story here may be Israel, even though he’s making all the gestures saying, Yes, we’re committed to Israel forever. In the U.S. military — and he [Obama] listens to those guys — the position is that protecting Israel is no longer in the strategic interest of the United States. We have, actually, no strategic interest in the Middle East once U.S. oil seems to ready to come online. This is why Obama basically wants to disengage with the region.  According to him, it’s absorbing way too much of our attention: we’re not successful at solving these problems, we don’t know how to do it, so let’s focus on countries where young people are actually building things, like Asia. So his whole pivot to Asia is, Look at these societies. These societies are not ones in which people are killing each other for some crazy, medieval ideologies.

The article in the Atlantic, which has created buzz worldwide, is an amazing testimony to Obama’s iron self-confidence that he’s done the right thing, even though we have 500,000 people dead in Syria. We have six and a half million refugees, and we are facing an imminent crack-up of Europe. Obama is the least Atlanticist president we’ve had since World War II. Maybe since Teddy Roosevelt. I don’t know where you’d go back to find someone like him. He’s not interested in Europe and he doesn’t think the Atlantic alliance is a source of order in the world. That’s the key. In my opinion, his non-Atlanticism is more decisive than his desire not to invade another Arab country, for which I can think he has the U.S. American people behind him — they don’t want to do that — and Congress, by the way. Because when Obama said, Okay red line, I’ll bomb Assad, his first gesture was, Let’s have a vote in Congress, and Congress said, No way, we’re not going to vote for that. So even though it seemed very amateurish of him, because he threatened bombing and he got the French to rev up their airplanes, he got the Saudis ready too. Everyone was ready, and then he just said, I’m being trapped, I’m being pressured, and then he changed his mind. And today, he’s incredibly proud that he wasn’t trapped by the claim in Washington, D.C. that, if he failed to bomb, he would lose his credibility.  He said: To avoid doing the wrong thing, I will gladly lose my — overrated — credibility.

By the way, there’s another important aspect of this, which makes Obama right. If you destroy Assad’s command and control, those chemical weapons would have sluiced out into the international clandestine arms market. So the real reason not to bomb Assad is that if you smashed his government, what would have happened is what happened in Libya, because in Libya, all those arms depots, full of hundreds of shoulder-held ground-to-air missiles were lost and are now for sale all over the world. We don’t know where they are, and that’s the spookiest part of the Libya operation. And I think Obama realized this. Just imagine if Saddam Hussain had nuclear weapons and we had destroyed his command and control in 2003. That’s when terrorists would have been able to get a hold of a nuclear weapon. Not from Hussain. Hussain wasn’t going to give a nuclear weapon to a terrorist. That would have been insane. But if you destroy the regime and the military control system . . . Obama doesn’t mention that in the article, I think, but behind the story there, this was a rational decision, even though the way he did it at the last minute shows how amateurish he can be. He’s sometimes disappointingly amateurish. He’d never had an executive office before. He’d never had a national office. He was a young man who was completely unprepared to be president. Smart. Very intelligent. But you can see what happened to him when he went to Washington, D.C., completely underestimating the obstructions of the Republicans, because he hadn’t been there. He didn’t know, and he thought he was so charming that he could win them over — as you probably noticed, he didn’t.

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I think it's really interesting. We need to distinguish between various phases of global anti-Western, anti-American terrorism. The first phase was local, aimed against the Arab dictators, like the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. In the next phase, Sayyid Qutb’s followers, such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, developed what they called a far-enemy strategy, aimed at the Western backers of local autocratic regimes, especially in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. This second group specialized in hit-and-run — or hit-and-die — attacks, the most spectacular of which were the Sept. 11 attacks in New York. They lived under the radar, operated in the mist, hid in the Hindu Kush mountains. They avoided retaliatory attacks by staying dispersed, and in hiding. They sent micro-armies, traveling undercover, to attack soft targets around the world, including the West. The Iraq war was to some extent a result of al-Qaeda’s style of terrorism. The U.S. had to hit back at someone but was unable to find those who had committed the attack, so the decision was made to attack a country that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks, to show that the U.S. wasn’t going to sit by passively and let itself be attacked. It sounds stupid, but that was the level of reasoning in the Bush administration at the time. They were thinking, What can we do which will really show how powerful we are? Apparently, they ran out of targets in Afghanistan, so they invaded Iraq.

But back to ISIS. At first glance, the Islamic State seems very different than al-Qaeda.  It controls territory and has thus forfeited the no-return-address advantage that made al-Qaeda a difficult target for retaliatory attack. After attacking Paris, its headquarters were attacked in turn.  Not only that, ISIS recruits are encouraged to bring their wives and children, to raise their families. Their pseudo-state provides rudimentary social services. There’s even such a thing as an ISIS passport, even though you can’t go anywhere with it and the ISIS leadership doesn’t recognize any other country, so it’s a kind of funny mimicry. But why has this new post-al-Qaeda form of radical Salafi violence emerged?  The reason for the development of this very unusual form of an extreme Salafi Islamic militant terrorist organization, in my opinion, is the coincidence of a power vacuum created in the Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria due to the discriminatory, violent, anti-Sunni policy and because the civil war in Syria created a space where no one has a big interest in attacking them. The Turks and the Saudis are supporting them, more or less. The Iranians fight ISIS but also, as Olivier Roy has written, benefit from the existence of a group that divides the Sunni world. Assad obviously likes the idea that the world is faced with a crude choice: either Assad or ISIS. The Kurds are confined, but only to a standstill. No one has an incentive to go in. They’ve never faced an army. If they had to face an army, they would lose, immediately, but they’ve never had to, so it’s unusual. But now, after Paris, after the Russian plane went down in Sinai, they’re being bombed very hard. What’s the consequence of this? The more pressure you put on them, the more they’re going to become like al-Qaeda. They’re going to start conducting terrorist attacks in Europe. So I think al-Qaeda’s model — from which they deviated because they had a space which they could call a Caliphate — was created by a temporary political coincidence in an area that became an ungoverned space. They lucked into an ungoverned space. As they are increasingly squeezed, they will revert to the de-territorialized al-Qaeda norm of hit-and-run or suicide attacks especially in Europe, or at least that is what I would expect. Because they have had the chance to recruit and train so many holders of Western passports, moreover, they will be al-Qaeda on steroids — that is, much more lethal and harder to contain.

In the meantime, how do we help eastern Syria and western Iraq make the transition to the non-fanatical governance of Sunnis by Sunnis? This is the big problem for everybody today.  Everyone is saying that ISIS has to be destroyed. But if you destroy it, you’re going to give birth to what can be termed as the son of ISIS, unless you’re able to govern the place — realistically, by locals and not through Iranian proxies. Iranian proxies cannot govern these Sunni areas in the Syria-Iraqi border zones. But how we are going to accomplish that, I don’t know.

Anyway, to repeat, ISIS is a temporary and deviant form of Salafi terrorism. It deviates from al-Qaeda, strikingly, but probably only for this interim period. And it’s been incredibly successful. Consider the media campaigns that are drawing people there.  And here’s another extremely important factor which differentiates al-Qaeda in Afghanistan from al-Nusra and ISIS in Syria. You can reach Raqqa by car from Europe. You couldn’t drive by car to Afghanistan, so all second-generation Muslim kids who were alienated from their parents and want to show that they’re adventurous and that they’re pious or whatever else they’re trying to show, they can go. And then Turkey lets them through. So it is very important. The proximity makes it a very different phenomenon. One of the things that gets it so much attention — more than the groups in Afghanistan — is that a lot of Western kids who grew up in Europe are joining ISIS, and it freaks people out.

First the Turks were weaponizing European kids who were flooding into Syria in order to fight Assad, with whom Erdoğan has a beef, and now they’re weaponizing refugees going in the other direction in order to extract billions from Brussels. And I think there’s also a little bit of schadenfreude at work. They seem to be saying, Oh, you don’t want Turks coming to Europe, so how do you like these refugees?

I think it’s an amazing story. I read about Turkey — I’m not in any way an expert — but I would say, on the one hand, Erdoğan seems to be a representative figure, another example of a general trend to reject the liberal democratic model that we thought — in the ‘90s — was conquering the world. You see something similar in Putin and Xi Jinping in China. They are all autocratic tough guys. Maybe Trump will be next on our list. You’ve got to have a strong guy. We want someone who is strong. This popular demand is disturbing, but hard to deny.

If we focus for a moment on the European Union’s policy toward Turkey, we will discover something quite extraordinary. The original idea behind European Union’s expansion was that Europe would be safer if the countries on its borders were open societies. Today, Brussels is assuming the opposite, namely that Europe will be safer if the countries on its borders are closed, fenced-in, authoritarian regimes designed to keep the refugees out. This is actually a huge crisis that’s been brewing for decades, of course, and the liberals put it this way: It’s a crisis of liberalism, because liberalism is possible only under two conditions. One, that every state in Africa becomes a real state of which it’s worthwhile to be a member, and two, all Africans come to Europe. Now, neither of those things is going to happen. What is going to happen is that refugees — they could be from Africa or Afghanistan — are going to be treated like second-class citizens in Europe. I live in Italy half of the year, and Albanians and others are not treated like citizens. Maybe in 50 years they will be, but right now, the idea of equal citizenship in Europe has been destroyed. And that’s the death of liberalism, because liberalism is based on the idea of equal citizenship. Right-wing parties are so successful lately because they speak to people. They speak to truth, without liberal hypocrisy about human rights. Liberals are saying that we’re all equal, but it’s just not true. The world doesn’t work like that. The capacity of right-wing parties to poach left-wing voters from socialist and social democratic parties is a sign that liberal ideals do not match lived realities.

Let’s take the great liberal idea of toleration toward those who are different. I saw this in Spain when I lived there several years ago. Toleration had become the ideology of businessmen who wanted to hire cheap labor and middle class women who wanted to hire servants. Well, if you’re a poor person, you live in a neighborhood with a lot of immigrants. Sometimes they’re rough. And the rich people wearing ties and nice dresses live in villas behind high walls — they don’t have to live with immigrants. When toleration becomes the ideology of the rich, I would argue, liberalism is destroyed. At the very least, it’s a problem. The immigrants are not going away. Another way to put the problem is this: how do you reconcile democracy with demography?  Demography is very powerful, and it’s not going to change. Obama’s genius, his greatness, was his ability to reconcile democracy and demography. His basic idea was, I’m going to show everyone that America can still be America even if it is a mixed-race nation. That’s why the Republicans hate him so passionately. He is taking away their impossible fantasy of making America white again. They feel like white lumps of sugar being dissolved in a black cup of coffee. And they blame Obama for their lunatic identity crisis. They hate Obama because he’s telling them they have to live in a mixed-race nation. Of course, he’s right, at the end of the day. Since we’re already living in a mixed-race nation, to deny it is just a recipe for violence. And you have Trump. Those of you who have seen these scuffles, they’re racial. It’s clearly racial. That’s what he’s playing with. It’s incredibly crazy, but it’s deeply rooted in the U.S. American story.

So what can we do to reconcile democracy and demography? I see the compatibility of community and diversity here, at NYUAD, just as I see it back home in New York. But there’s no European politician who has a clue how to go about it. Merkel can invite the immigrants into Germany. But integrating them is a different story. She is getting battered for her splendid open-door policy, but she doesn’t really have a plan for what to do next. She just says, Well, it’s human; we have to be humanitarian and help them, and we need workers, and so on. But actually, it’s a problem, and the right-wing parties are going to play shrewdly and successfully on the identity panic that mass immigration is bound to trigger in times of economic contraction. Remember, immigration works pretty well in a time of economic expansion. But European economies are troubled, so you’re having massive refugee flows at an inauspicious time, which produces . . . I don’t say fascism, but some kind of populist, hard, discriminatory chauvinism. These immigrants are going to feel unwelcome. Those who don’t get jobs will start feeling resentful. We can expect a lot of social tension.

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I don’t believe that. German culture is a very good example. In 1945, some people said that Germany could never become a liberal democracy. But German culture endured many different political systems. It was German culture under Bismarck, under a liberal democracy, under Nazism and under another liberal democracy.

So cultures are plastic. In the middle of the 20th century you could hear, Oh, Asians can never be capitalist, because of Confucianism, or something. That was a theory or, Look at Asian culture, it doesn’t adapt itself, there’s no individualism. But it turns out that the greatest capitalists in the world are in Asia. Cultures are malleable, and they evolve. Of course, fundamentalists like to attribute rigid and homogeneous malice to their enemy. Sayyid Qutb did not have an eye for diversity inside the West, just as Donald Trump sees no diversity inside Islam.  But this is absurd. The West was Hitler as well as Churchill. The West is not one thing. That’s ridiculous. It’s the same for Islam. It has all kinds of different strands; under what conditions it becomes what, we don’t know. I think that kind of determinism is just based on historical ignorance, because cultures aren’t that way.

Now, of course, cultural entrepreneurs can use cultures to try to make people say, You’re only being loyal to your culture if you kill the people who are different from you; and it seems to work, particularly with some young people. But these are such vast generalizations. Right now, I would say that extremist militancy among Muslims has more to do with resentment against U.S. American domination rather than with the cultural traditions of Islam. Inequality around the world is gross, which has a tendency to generate violence under certain conditions. You should remember that bin Laden justified violence against the United States not by mentioning that U.S. Americans are outside the true faith, but by saying that U.S. American violence against Muslims and non-Muslims — he mentioned Hiroshima — had to be repaid. The justification for Sept. 11 attacks wasn’t religious. Similarly, there is nothing religious about Iranian fury at the United States for overthrowing their elected government in 1953. We find a lot of the same hostility toward the U.S. in non-Islamic South America that we find in the Islamic world. You have a lot of the same resentments, the same irritations.

I don’t mean to be dismissive. Cultural differences can be seen as baffling and disturbing. People feel alienated by different dietary codes; for example, I was in Torino last year, and I met a guy from Sicily who said, “You know, 40 years ago, when I came to work up here, the restaurants said, ‘No dogs or Southerners allowed in the restaurants.’ And when the Moroccans came up here, I was very sympathetic with them. Also, my mother wore a scarf, and down in Sicily, men and women don’t go to public places together, and it’s like the Mediterranean world. It was completely normal to me. I was fine, and I thought these Moroccans were good. I welcomed them, and then they said, ‘No pork in the school.’ And I said, ‘Okay, we won’t have pork in the school, because we don’t really need that.’ Then they said, ‘No beef in the school, or something else.’” Then he got mad and said, “‘Come on. We’re welcoming you here. Don’t tell us everything we have to do.”

So I think there’s this place where politicians can play on what feels like something aggressive: You have to adapt to us. You have to do everything the way we want. And that’s potent. Do you see what happened when Hassan Rouhani went to Rome? Renzi covered all the naked ancient statues with boxes? These are ancient sculptures which have nothing to do with sex. They’re about bodily strength and have nothing to do with pornography.

I think it’s the Italians’ conception of what the Iranians wanted. But I think in this area there’s a potential political danger that hypersensitivity to unfamiliar social codes can be used by political entrepreneurs and politicians to ill effect.

But I want to come back to the topic of disillusionment with democracy today. In Europe, you can vote for one party instead of the other, but you always get one and the same policy. That’s true, because the policy is decided by Brussels, not by the national government you elect — and this is destroying the formula of democratic legitimacy. Whatever you do when you vote, you don't get what you want. This creates a lot of cynicism among voters. And if voters can’t vote their interests, they will start voting their emotions. This is how we got Donald Trump.

There’s a lot of emotional voting going on today, in the United States, for sure, and in Europe too. What do Trump voters think is going to happen if they elect their hero? Are we really going to send all the immigrants back? Are we going to forcibly deport 13 million immigrants from United States and back to countries such as Mexico? In order to bus them back to Mexico, we would have to hire illegal immigrants to drive the buses. I mean, we wouldn’t do such a thing. It’s impossible. No one thinks we could do it. So it’s an emotional kind of reaction. It’s very impractical and produces a very dark and potentially violent kind of politics — and when I say violent, I mean violent. Many Trump supporters are well-armed. So are many inhabitants of big city ghettos.

Who knows what’s going to come out of it? I do think that it feels like the new globalization: Trump in America, spewing anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and then these analogous right-wing parties [in Europe]. We’re increasingly living in besieged camps. We are drifting toward a world where blast-resistant walls and barbed-wire fences are more and more important. Start building walls, stop tearing down barriers — that’s Trump’s language. But he is not hallucinating, Israel has already built a wall, and I don’t think the Palestinians paid for it. We are entering into a new age of barricades and fortifications. Building walls has becomes an essential way of protecting yourself against danger, against the unwanted and the unknown. The dream of an open society is now officially defunct.

The best metaphor for capturing the essence of today’s world is a banquet in a fortress — and we have one right here at NYUAD. It’s a return to the Middle Ages in a way. Behind the walls, all sorts of artistic, scientific, entrepreneurial and scholarly inventiveness can be incubated and brought to fruition. But keeping such delicate projects afoot requires the protection of walls. Civilization won’t survive if the wolves roving around the fortress manage to breach the ramparts and attack the defenseless civilians inside.

So yes, I know what you are thinking: Game of Thrones. That’s very much the zeitgeist. There’s the wall. Outside, those guys with glassy, glowing eyes? They are the immigrants. So we have to protect ourselves behind the walls.

This is a very dangerous and even self-defeating approach, of course. Once you start building walls, for instance, you stop understanding the people on the other side. You actually become more afraid of them, irrationally afraid of them. You don’t know how to deal with them. You can’t help them become less dangerous to you. To the extent that this is happening, we’re lapsing back from open-eyed adventurousness into closed-off neo-parochialism. The slogan of 1989 was that we’re having an open society, an open demography and an open economy. Well, you can’t have a closed demography and an open economy, so if you’re going to close the demography, you’re going to close the economies too.

We’re seeing this in Europe — the borders are going up again. We’re definitely slamming the door on the open society. It is a revolt against globalization, and to the extent that this beautiful NYUAD campus is a representative of globalization, including replication of a Western institution in a place where it didn’t exist before — growing nice green grass in the desert, so to speak — it’s a typical product of the age of imitation. It’s important to keep this in mind because so much of the trouble in the world today stems from nativist resentment at the age of imitation. NYUAD is an expression of the idea that Western-style institutions, based not only on toleration for difference but on a welcoming openness toward diversity, can flourish anywhere and everywhere. But today’s world is feeling increasingly dangerous. Openness feels more and more like vulnerability and exposure. In order to keep precious things alive, we need to have concrete barriers and barbed wire and guards with guns and surround ourselves with barricades.

The initial impulse behind NYUAD, the basic idea of John Sexton and his team, was that U.S. Americans have to share the world with Muslims. We have one planet only, and we have to share it. That was the idea, and it was a correct one. On the other hand, we have to confront the paradox that our open society can flourish today, in many parts of the world, only behind insuperable barricades. Isn’t this the paradox of NYUAD?

So that’s another question. Well, I absolutely agree. Institutions have to be imported, not exported. That’s what has happened here. NYUAD is not a colonial project as were the American University in Beirut and the American University in Cairo. Those universities were exports, not imports. They were established by missionaries aiming to teach people to become like U.S. Americans. NYUAD was different. We were brought here by the local rulers for local reasons. But still, I think you’re absolutely right to suggest that the mission of building a U.S. American-style university in the UAE does create a relation between the imitators and the imitated that can potentially breed resentment if it’s not handled with care.

Similarly, the mission to defend human rights around the world can also breed resentment. Like it or not, it implies Western superiority. We say, You must have human rights like us. If you go to the United States and go to our prison system, you can say, Yeah, sure, human rights! What hypocrisy. This was the lesson from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. U.S. Americans talk about human rights, but still practice their violation.

Now for me, the extraordinary thing about NYUAD, what I love about it, is the way the students have created a vast, complex intelligence network among themselves. There’s as much knowledge about the world in our student body as there is at the CIA headquarters. For me, that’s the true mission of the place: not introducing young men and women from around the world to the latest academic fashions in the United States, but cultivating and taking advantage of the incredible range of experiences represented in our student body. It is such a wonderful exception to the rampant parochialism that is currently dominant in U.S. universities and around the world. Of course, what makes teaching here so interesting is the location, at the center of the Sunni-Shiite conflict, which will burn down the world in the next 30 years. And then there are concerns about oil politics and migrant labor. These are huge topics. There’s no university in the world better situated for studying any of these vital themes.

I stick with the idea that NYUAD is a project conceived in the age of globalization but come to realization in a world where banquets have to be held inside fortresses. It’s a paradox, but it also makes the place as intriguing as it is.

I always go back to Sam Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, Frank Fukuyama’s The End of History and Ken Jowitt’s The New World Disorder. Those are classics. But I urge everyone to read the recent Atlantic Monthly article on Obama’s foreign policy. That will tell you a lot about current U.S. American parochialism and the U.S turn-away from Europe as well as the Middle East.