Cause and effect.

What could have motivated the French and British governments to obtain a Security Council vote that allowed them to use air-power against Gaddafi’s armed forces? The humanitarian aspect was the strongest argument put forward, and there was the Kosovar precedent. But Kosovo was a breakaway region of Serbia with an ethnic identity. Whereas the division of Libya was never envisaged, though ethnicity and regional oppositions were preponderant in the conflict. The overthrow of a tyrant and regime change might have been justified morally, but both were strongly denied till the end, as they were not included in the Security Council resolution. Libyan oil and gas probably played a role, though the uncertain policies of future Libyan governments and the actual consensus on keeping production down and prices up should have argued against intervention, as an embargo would have sufficed. Attacking the Libyan army with an important deployment of air power gave Cameron and Sarkosy the political statures of Commanders in Chief. It was also the opportunity to show off the effectiveness of the Tornado, the Rafale and other high-tech killing machines, all of which are commercial disasters.

Now that Gaddafi is dead and the National Revolutionary Council has taken executive control of Libya, what is the balance of all these motives? Aircraft sales have not improved, and yesterday’s comrades in arms are at loggerheads over Europe. As intensive bombing, both aerial and terrestrial, have badly damaged Libyan infrastructures, Libya will not be influencing the oil and gas markets for a while. A new government is in place, but the divisions remain, between Tripoli and Benghazi, between Arabophones and Berberophones, between the coast and the vast interior. Can these different factions unite to form a nation, and why should they? Why should the arbitrary lines drawn on maps by European diplomats decide what nations are for all eternity? Why should colonial borders continue to divide up humanity as though there was no history, obliging existing cultures and languages to disappear or amalgamate inside imposed geographical limits? Whatever may be, the only uniting factor in Libya to-day is Sunni Islam, which is practiced by almost everyone. Given its borders, Libya’s existence as a nation has been enforced by the violence of an autocrat, but it might also be possible to reach a religious consensus. Libyans may follow the path taken by Tunisia and Egypt. If they do, their joint momentum will inevitably push East and West. So, whatever their intentions, Cameron and Sarkosy will have consolidated a movement that has the potential to spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The Moslem world is beginning to experiment alternatives to absolute monarchy and autocracy, just as the Christian world did four centuries ago. Then as now, this quest has a strong element of religious fundamentalism. Confronting absolutism needs strong convictions, and faith builds convictions more easily than reason, so that the fundamentalist element may be unavoidable. But European precedents (the Dutch and the English, recently the Poles) show that religious fervour is quickly secularised by the realities of government. However, the Arab Spring could be the premise of something much bigger, such as East and West coming together to produce something new. The decline of Western imperialism opens alternative paths, and syncretism is one of them.