The cosy world of the British intelligentsia has been torn apart by a rather vicious little spat between two wings of the British soi-disant Left, although neither side would be recognisable as particularly left-wing to the horny-handed sons of toil who built the Labour Party from the ground up during the last century. In the blue corner, we have an odd alliance of natural conservatives and universalist liberals whose man of the moment is Martin 'string 'em up' Amis, son of the novelist Kingsley and a novelist of note in his own right (excuse the pun!). In the red corner, we have Terry Eagleton, last of the great Marxist dinosaurs who once roamed freely across the plains of Western intellectual life but who were largely extinguished by the Reaganomic meteorite. 

It is a debate about the role in politics of universal vaues. It is the culmination of a process by which the Enlightenment has been acquired for its own purposes by the 'bourgeois' Right in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet experiment. 

The undignified Amis-Eagleton squabble exemplifies a crisis in the West as its hegemony comes under question. What has emerged might best be described as a new fundamentalism to join those of the faith-based communities. It is aggressive, intolerant and 'full of itself', all signs of the discomfort of a culture of secular humanism that has lost its confidence and is as much under threat from global modernisation as its enemies in Tehran or Havana.

It is a debate that is not restricted to London. The neo-conservative impulse was famously an East Coast American alliance of former Trotskyists, frustrated enlightenment types (often Jewish and therefore understandably universalist in a world of nationalisms), right-wing libertarians and 'America first' ideologues. This wide circle could be squared by having America - the 'city on the hill', the New Jerusalem - as the type-nation for world government and global values. Similar figures emerged in Europe, often in aggressive reaction to the soulless domination of intellectual life by scholastic Marxism, but increasingly by an irritation with relativism and what it meant for the shattering of all that which makes an intellectual believe that he or she is somehow special. 

In France, Raymond Aron had challenged Sartre from the very beginning but the real change came when the next generation of intellectuals decided that there was no moral equivalence between America and the Soviet Union (the mainstay of European Leftism) and that liberal values were absolute - as absolute as any 'role of the Party' might have been to the other side. Bernard-Henri Levy is the most famous member of a new and conservative French intellectual culture whose apogee is the rule of its current President.

9/11 then came hurtling into Western intellectual life with all the force of a revelation. The emergence of Islam came as a challenge to Western ways of thinking.  Its odd alliance with left-populism against the American Imperium and the belief that the West (with Israel as its little colony in the desert of Arabia) was uniquely designed to bring universal values to liberate the masses of the world allowed these intellectuals to capture the high ground of intellectual life in much of Europe. They attracted intellectuals (especially Jewish, feminist and gay) who had hitherto claimed to be of the Left because of its liberatory aspects and created a new ideological paradigm centred on narratives of Islamo-Fascism, of pre-emptive and liberatory humanitarian intervention and of a united West, trumphant in its purity of purpose.  The late Oriana Fallaci and the Dutch radical liberals, as well as the new Right emerging in places like Switzerland, all have a visceral fear of Islam in common, an expression of anxiety that makes Melanie Phillips look like a model of easy-going tolerance.

The United Kingdom has not been immune to all this but the mess that is the Iraq War and the reality of largely decent relations with the Pakistani minority (to date) has limited the damage. It has left behind a small but vociferous group patronised by News International, the rest of the right-wing Press, some dissidents in the security services, a rump of neo-con radicals in the Tory Party (now led by a former Times Deputy Editor conveniently silenced by his Shadow Housing portfolio) and hardline Blairites. It gets coverage but not necessarily support. 

The high point (which was also its low point intellectually) was the Euston Manifesto which demanded radical universalist interventionism in world affairs just at that moment when the nation had agreed that the country had neither the will nor the resources to use taxpayers' money to feed the fantasies of a small and self-referential bunch of policy wonks. Brit intellectuals do not have a toy like the Pentagon to play with.

Since then, Liberal Fundamentalism has cohered as a faction. It has partially captured Private Eye under the direct or indirect influence of radical journalists such as Nick Cohen and Frances Wheen. It is fighting to retain control of editorial policy on the Observer. Yet it is weak. Its war is no longer to capture influence in Government but to undermine and destroy the moral credibility of its opponents on the Left. To these universalists, faced with a ragged, inconsistent and generally tactically incompetent enemy, scarcely recovered from the defeats inflicted by Thatcher and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the association of the Left with Islam is a contradiction in terms and a sign of decadence. Some of the same radical attitudes are now entering the Left by the 'rainbow' and the quasi-Marxist back door with recent gay and planned Labour Representation Committee demonstrations against King Abdullah's State Visit on October 30th and a growing Hard Left interpretation of regional policy that is getting dangerously close to that of James Woolsey and the US Democratic Right - some coincidence, surely?!  Really real liberals who are opposed to ersatz neocon 'real liberals' are now facing a war on two fronts.

George Galloway may be the main bete noire of these almost uncategorisable Leftists of the Right or Rightists of the Left (old terms no longer seem useful) but any intellectual on the Left who questions their strict vision of the priority of universal principles over contingent reality is, by definition, now a crypto-fascist or, the vilest of terms in this coterie, an anti-semite. Needless to say, because many of their opponents still cling to the tattered remnants of Marxism, much of the attack on the Old Left is like stealing candy from a baby. 

Does all this matter?  Up to a point, not at all - national culture will continue to be tolerant and the resources are simply not available for the sort of fun and games that these activists want. But at another level, we should be disturbed if we have any belief in the importance of realism in international affairs. 

These intellectuals are engaged in a process of radical simplification of complex issues and, in doing so, they raise ridiculous expectations within the political class, discourage detailed investigation into reality on the ground and indicate to potential allies and trading partners that the West is something to be worked around rather than engaged with. These intellectuals are not necessarily very bright outside their ability to handle words and are certainly not appropriately educated for public policy development in international relations. Their influence is likely to be malign on internal ethnic relations, in encouraging NGOs and other interest groups to get above their station and in causing 'incidents' with other countries that will lose us jobs (though never theirs) and real influence.

We have a useful marker document in the sixteen questions presented in the Sunday Times of October 21st whose answers were designed to define whether you are a 'phoney liberal' or not. Surely never in the field of popular journalism has an ideological quiz been so loaded. The Sunday Times (News International) is, like the intellectuals it promotes, illiberally liberal. The whole idea of a 'phoney liberal' is similar in concept to an extreme evangelical referring to a high church anglican as a 'phoney christian' - but look at the questions (see link above) and see what is really so phoney about a liberal who disagrees.

The correct answer to some of the questions - those of the 'eating people is wrong' type'- would be the same in Cuba and Iran as much as in France. Their inclusion is suggestive that any socialist or Islamist (or real liberal) can be identified with practices that would be regarded as savage and unacceptable in any decent society. We all agree in the West that calling for the death of apostates and cartoonists, forced marriages, honour killing and female genital mutilation are absolute wrongs in themselves - whether it is useful to say so from the West in particular situations overseas where like-minded indigenous reformers are trying to reform savage inherited practices through national development and education is a moot point. The abiding illusion of the intellectual is that saying something makes it so, a version of ancient magical principles that may suitable for personal and spiritual development but which are not the way to conduct international affairs. To say that such behaviour is not morally acceptable is not to draw necessary foreign policy conclusions or to believe that moralistic protests are the best means of stopping such practices. 

More to the point, many of these crimes against women arise from under-development and poverty and the failure (precisely because of the actions of liberals in the Cold War) to permit and encourage socialist and secularist alternative ways of promoting women's rights in the developing world. Compare the treatment of women by Baathist Syria and even Iraq with Islamism and you can see some confusion in the targeting of rogue states already. But also look at the reality of the region - Saudi, Lebanese and Moroccan middle class women are often more in control of their destinies than their Western sisters. The 'Muslim fundamentalist' could, if they so chose, create a similar set of questions to liberals surrounding the lack of action on organised prostitution rackets, the widespread commercial use of body imagery, the easy access to pornography, the very high prison population (certainly in the Anglo-Saxon world) and the lack of socially organised charitable giving.

The remaining questions in the article that allegedly define one's liberalism are all more sensibly anwered with an 'it depends' and it is this aspect of contingency that these intellectuals cannot come to terms with. All opinion is set against an absolute essentialist standard (for them, existence does not precede essence). In this, they are heirs of Plato and the last bastions of thought processes that no longer accord with reality, if they ever did. This Platonic essentialism places them alongside Communism and Fascism more easily than they can be placed in the same philosophical camp as Popper - and this anti-Popperian aspect of contemporary Liberal Fundamentalism helps to explain why conservative Republican realists and traditional Reagan supporters are almost as horrified by radical neo-conservative and radical liberal ideas and attitudes as are left-wing liberals.

The Liberal Fundamentalist shares with the religious fundamentalist the belief that there is something out there greater than raw existence - not all liberals or religious people draw the conclusion from their beliefs that the 'something greater' out there is so knowable that its devotees can safely impose its values on the rest of humanity. For the existentialist of course, the fundamentalists are all barking mad and all alliances are tactical, but the mass of the population are nicely pragmatic. A cosy, secular society with freedom to choose one of a thousand lifestyle eccentricities remains a reasonable defintion of the good life and one that the great Voltaire might have recognised if not necessarily agreed with.

So what sort of 'it depends' are we dealing with, beyond the usual 'on circumstances' that begs the original question. In the end, the 'it depends' comes down to particular histories in particular places, to efficacy (does willing in itself make things happen) and to definitions. Our essentialist universalists are a-historical, without allegiance to place or tradition, unconcerned with practicalities and are rank twisters of language - they are, in sum, rootless cosmopolitans (not in the old Soviet sense) with their heads in the clouds and with ideas whose net result may eventually be dead people, i.e. really existing and not theoretical corpses. They might not have the cold calculation of Herman Kahn or Robert McNamara in the glory days of winnable nuclear war but their fantasies may result in something that Dr. Strangelove merely dreamt about.

The challenges of homophobia, enforced dress codes, lack of democracy, freedom to blaspheme, restriction of access to non-believers and the full panoply of human rights are still issues in our own culture. Transgender people are often forced into prostitution to pay for something intrinsic to their being, workers are forced to wear branded uniforms, freedom to blaspheme can be interpreted as freedom to insult, one million people on the street could not change the direction of a Prime Minister seemingly more interested in the views of one man in Washington, people of faith are ghettoed into the BBC 'God slot' and the Government appears to connive in extraordinary rendition. I am not taking sides here - just suggesting that reality is much more complex than a simple struggle between good and evil and that my 'relativism' still means that Salman Rushdie may have had every right to write what he did but that he was an ill-mannered and tactless oaf in doing so.

It is very true that Muslim lands tend to be less free by a considerable degree than Western countries but the a-historicism of critics fails to take account of the differential economic development and the role of imperialism in retarding these countries' political development and removing or embarrassing indigenous liberals at every opportunity. The case of Mossadeq in Iran is the thin end of a very large wedge of malign interference. It is the experience of Mossadeq that provides Iranian Shi'a democracy with a core part of its origin myth. 

Liberals in the Muslim world are sociologically in the same position as communists in the Western World during the Soviet era. As the assumed 'enemy within' (yet a liberal or a communist can be a patriot as Tito and Dubcek showed), there is no reason why overseas regimes should not follow the lead of the 'Red Scare' mongers of 1918, the forgers of the Zinoviev Letter and the House Committee on Un-American Activities and label their dissidents as in the service of a foreign power - if only because the West is showing every effort to make every Saffron Monk, every Orange revolutionist and every Russian or Chinese dissident look as if they are taking orders from overseas. This is destructive and malign. It undermines, in practice, the free and fair indigenous development of national liberal democracy across the emerging world and hands it over to the Chinese model of state capitalism and guided democracy.

But the core of the questions in the Sunday Times article lies elsewhere. The reader has been led to associate some pretty vile behaviour with a general enemy and is then asked to compare his wonderful culture with the enemy's savage and benighted culture. Eleven of the sixteen questions have eschewed complexity, declined to ask deeper questions about our own culture and, in particular, have applied universals and absolutes to environments that are very different, with different histories and levels of economic development. The last five questions are key - do they adopt a stance which, for good or ill, would mobilise the resources of the West to engage in dialogue, provide capacity to reforming elites and redistribute power and wealth for the sake of peace? This is the real liberal agenda and the one, fortunately, that dominates thinking in the current British Government, in Europe and in the wiser elements of the State Department.  No, the 'real liberal' does not.

The five remaining questions pigeon-hole the reader as for or against US-Israeli foreign policy, Iran's assumed WMD programme, resistance in Iraq (assumed to be Al-Qaeda and only Al-Qaeda) and, above all, the rights of the feminist Muslim rebel and pin-up girl of neo-conservativism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (she gets two questions). The flaws in the assumptions behind the question are typical - that anti-semitism lurks behind criticism of Israel, that Iran is provenly intent on a bomb, that Al-Qaeda is the only force preventing settlement in Iraq and that our heroine has rights to the expenditure of taxpayers' money to protect her from her own statements. By the end of this, we know where we stand - the only true liberals, it would seem, are those whose liberalism is absolutist, who abandon historical judgement and (dare we say it) reality and who buy a package of measures in which criticism is as unwelcome as it was to the organisers of the Comintern.

Beware the claims of these people that they are of the Left. They are of the new Hard Right. They are radical individualists, anti-collectivists who have merely included women, homosexuals and artists in their coalition. They certainly have a right to their opinion but support them, if you must, with your eyes wide open. As for what the Left actually is - that is for another day ...

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