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The tale of civilization at a crossroads is told in words and pictures.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s September 22 speech at the United Nations offered a rousing celebration of civilization. “Do we want to live, under this state of affairs, with a return to the law of the jungle?” he asked rhetorically. “Or do we want to live in a civilized international society?” Close readers of Macron’s translated words will note that this is a false choice. “International society” need not be at the core of civilization; indeed, in a world where bad actors seek to impose not the law of the jungle, but their own morality, their own theology, and their own way of life, civilization as we know it may be incompatible with internationalism.
Nevertheless, Macron rallied the internationalists gathered at Turtle Bay to “continue lending our support to the International Court of Justice and supporting the central role it plays” in upholding “international humanitarian law.” He did so because, “as we’ve often said, there cannot be peace without justice.” In his view, the world has come to tolerate not mere injustices but “a new era of barbaric acts…El-Fasher, Bukavu, Gaza.” Two of those metonymic places are unlikely to be familiar to anyone who does not follow world events in granular detail because they—sites of mass executions and other atrocities—have been dwarfed in the “civilized international” imagination by the third. Israel’s supposed barbarism responding to the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023, once again manages to upstage all else. Nor was Macron done castigating Israel with blithe comparisons to actual barbarism:
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Tal Fortgang is a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute.