No End of (Mimetic) Crises? Reflections on Mimetic Escalation, Order, and the Nature of Peacemaking in the Shadow of Brexit

In his final original book, Battling to the End, Girard could hardly have been clearer: "Violence" he wrote, "can no longer be checked. From this point of view we can say that the apocalypse has begun."¹

Faced with the rise of global Islamist terror and the declaration of a "war against terror," Girard observed the collapse of politics as a mechanism to contain violence. History is not inevitably and dialectically converging on a rational Hegelian Aufhebung but has the pattern of a duel, as observed by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz after the defeat of the Prussian army by Napoleon's revolutionary French army at Jena. Far from converging on reconciliation, the logic of mimetic rivalry predicts escalation to the extremes. For Girard, the intellectual task was to follow von Clausewitz's insight to its logical conclusion (to "complete Clausewitz," as the French title of his book demands), a path from which even the Prussian theorist himself had shrunk: "In a more realistic manner than Hegel, Clausewitz showed the utter powerlessness of politics against the escalation to extremes. Ideological wars, monstrous justifications of violence, have led humanity to the stage beyond war where we are today."²

By focusing on the implications of globalization, Girard in one sense concurs with business writer and commentator Thomas Friedman, who pronounced in 2005 that "the world is flat."³ Five hundred years after Columbus, Friedman pointed out that political, historic, and geographical differences were less and less decisive in a unitary global economy where all competitors increasingly operated on the same rules. Furthermore, mimetic change is taking place in multiple locations: the end of the Cold War, the spread of digital technology, the breaking down of international barriers through the availability of information, the sharing of work across all physical boundaries through file sharing (uploading), the creation of global supply chains, and the ability to collaborate through constant communication. Accordingly, no "state" is now bigger than the market and all workers are increasingly direct competitors. The rise of social media and the Internet has only further turbocharged Friedman's drift. Things that once separated—including physical distance, time, size and scale, public and private—have progressively become blurred, if not indistinguishable.

Optimistically, Friedman asserted that the world was now held together by the rational self-interest of what he dubbed "the Dell theory of conflict resolution," in which no two countries that are part of a major global supply chain (like Dell) will ever fight a war against each other.⁴ In contrast, Girard emphasized escalating mimesis of desire as the defining characteristic of globalized human relations and identified instead the potential implications of the elimination of remaining cultural differences as humans living together in a world of unrestricted global mimetic rivalry. The phenomenon of global rivalry is also echoed by Pankaj Mishra, who has charted the mimetic unity of seemingly disparate phenomena spreading from Europe into the smallest corner of the global system.⁵ Political and social aspiration leading to frustration have turned politically toxic. Radical identities have emerged in postcolonial societies fundamentally shaped by their oppositional relationship to their opponent.

For Girard, violence in human affairs does not arise from essential difference but from escalating rivalry over the same objects, and from the consequent elimination of differences. Girard disputes Samuel Huntington's thesis that the underlying dynamic of global warfare is cultural difference leading to a "clash of civilizations."⁶ Instead, he roots the political crisis in the rapid erasure of many of the cultural separations and differences. In a world without boundaries, all distinction between inside and outside collapses. The process broadly described as "globalization" has now reached the point where no culture is closed, and therefore no person is outside the mimetic influences of the wider world. In the absence of restraining cultural limits, efforts to assert differences paradoxically both escalate and disappear in mimesis of desire for the same object and an escalating frenzy of reciprocity and, eventually, violence. The resulting "crisis of undifferentiation" renders all...