Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

particularly attractive to women because, it is argued, it is less tolerant of
male domestic violence and drunkenness than traditional Catholicism; it is
also the case that as Catholic Christianity has become more left-wing in
these societies, so the political right has looked to the evangelicals. The
point is that the international and the domestic interact and cannot readily
be separated. The same is even more obviously true of the rise of radical
Islam. The importance of Saudi money in financing Islamic education
based on their particular, rather austere version of Islam is clear, and radical
groups such as Al Qaeda clearly operate as international non-governmental
institutions – albeit of a particular, postmodern kind, as networks without a
formal, hierarchical, command structure – but the impact of these interna-
tional movements is also dependent on local conditions. The attractions of
radical Islam in Britain and France owe a great deal to the sense of alien-
ation felt by Muslim youth in those countries – what Al Qaeda and other,
less radical, international groups provide is a way for these young people to
make sense of their situation superior to that provided by the dominant
society or by older Muslim networks. Similarly the attraction of radical
Islam in countries such as Indonesia lies in its apparently offering an
alternative to the corruption of local elites. There is always a dialectic
between the international and the domestic at work in these situations.
In short, Fukuyama may be right to think that there is no systematic alter-
native to liberal democracy on the horizon – and none of the movements
mentioned above offer the kind of globally relevant systematic conception
of society characteristic of communist ideology – but the number of non-
systematic, local and particularist alternatives is very striking, and cannot
be explained away in terms of the short-run impact of the end of commu-
nism. There does genuinely seem to be a new kind of politics emerging, with
considerable implications for international relations.