Bullet holes and marks are seen on the windows of the Cafe Bonne Biere restaurant on Nov. 14, 2015 in Paris, France. At least 120 people have been killed and over 200 injured following a series of terrorist attacks in the French capital.David Ramos/Getty Images
Financial markets tend to shrug off terror attacks, but this time it may be different, and that would be a good thing. We need to think again about how we do business and who we choose as our business partners. We need to do this because, fundamentally, commerce is not about money. It is about culture, and our culture is under attack.
Predictably, stock markets in Europe bounced back quickly after the Paris atrocities. Even after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, when there was talk of the end of Wall Street, the Dow Jones index fully recovered within a month. At a superficial level, that is reassuring; there is a gutsiness about traders, a bravado that says "don't let the bastards get us down."
Even as we applaud those who get on with their jobs, we are missing something if we think that financial markets are impervious to political and cultural change. We need to think about what makes markets – it is not the fibre optics and microprocessors or even the trillions of dollars of liquidity chasing round the world. What underpins the tremendous expansion in world trade that has enriched billions in so many ways is the triumph of European culture. It is about centuries of political and social discourse, the crafting of complex legal systems based on ideas about fair dealing and level playing fields. It is about the free movement of goods and, more importantly, the free movement of people and of ideas. In Europe, the Schengen agreement, which guarantees free movement across internal European Union borders, is now under threat as a direct result of the collapse of civilization in the Levant. If huge political effort is not made to reform and secure Europe's borders, a vital pillar of Europe's freedoms could be lost. Europe will begin to fragment once again along its national borders.
We take our freedoms for granted, as did the young, itinerant, multinational and multi-ethnic children of globalization who attended the Bataclan night club in Paris on Friday. We like to think that a free-wheeling, libidinous world of casual experimentation in sensation and ideas is one that would be welcomed by all, until we meet its antithesis, one personified by a gun-toting, misogynistic religious bigot.
We are now at risk, not from defeat by gangsters in Iraq and Syria, but from the spread of the noxious culture in which the jihadis thrive. There are powerful, established interest groups – governments, wealthy families and institutions all over the Middle East and East Asia – who detest and despise Western values, sometimes openly. Even as they condemn intellectual liberalism, they use the financial markets in London, New York, Paris and Frankfurt to sell the commodities that keep their fragile societies afloat; meanwhile, some of that money finances the lethal weapons that killed the young concert-goers in Paris.
We need to acknowledge that which should be obvious: not all cultures are of equal value. We need to stop worrying about whether our discourse is safe or might cause offence. Instead, we must defend more loudly the open society that guarantees our right to a free conversation. Likewise, we must think carefully about our business culture, about its lack of discrimination. If we are to defend properly the intellectual enlightenment that built the markets of the civilized world, we must be prepared to pay the price in terms of losing uncivilized business.
Thankfully, there are signs that this debate has begun. Last month, Britain scrapped a £5.9-million ($12-million) contract to provide training for prison wardens in Saudi Arabia after a furious cabinet debate about the ethics of doing such business with a country that flogs minor offenders and executes dissenters. In the context of the U.K.'s vast business relationship with the desert Kingdom, it was trivial, but it rang alarm bells in Riyadh.
We should keep ringing them, loudly. If we believe in the values that European civilization exported around the world, we need to defend them, not just when they are attacked with weapons but when they are corrupted and traduced. In a heated exchange in the British House of Commons about British military intervention in Syria, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn needled the Prime Minister about whether he would impose sanctions on banks and countries that funnelled money to ISISs. David Cameron dismissed the question, suggesting that the Labour leader was dodging the issue of military action.
Both men are missing the point, because they are failing to acknowledge that the jihadis are a symptom of a massive political and cultural failure in the Islamic world and the post-Soviet world. If we want to carry on living in a world of free movement, free commerce and free exchange, we need to defend it, and the cost to us will be significant.