With respect to modernity and women's place in it, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris and Iris Marion Young are sharply at odds. Young sees a rending and tearing of the social fabric, and no determinate relationship between gender equality and modernity, while Inglehart and Norris think modernization and women's rights are seamlessly joined at the hip. We think that neither of these analytical stances will do. Our assessment extends from a concept of modernity that embraces a relational complex of features and tendencies—one that is analytical, not normative, and that must always be historically situated. Modernity is a vulnerable achievement rather than the secure culmination of automatic social processes. When called to its defense, we have argued, feminists and small-d democrats may sometimes have to endorse means and modes of coercion controlled by imperfectly democratic states.

Inglehart and Norris respond to our criticisms of modernization theory by insisting that their reconstructed version improves on the original unilinear story (nicely summarized in Treiman 1970). We agree. It nevertheless falls short in a couple of important ways. First, the theory fails to identify the internal unevenness of processes that get bundled together as modernization. Thus, Inglehart and Norris call fascism and communism “interludes” in modernization—where it is clear that they are something more disturbing than that. Second, the nation-states at the core of their analysis are not simply more or less advanced on the various roads to modernity. These states (or, in some cases, parts of states) exist in systematic relationships with one another. Historically, some states have been net resource extractors from others, forcible exporters of religious doctrines and other social forms, and engines of political and military domination. Some of these relationships were organized under long-term colonial and imperial relations. In today's world, these relationships tend to be temporary and unstable, less strictly state-based, and more multidirectional in flow, with former colonial territories likely to have cost far more in cash than they had ever brought in to metropolitan coffers (think of Britain's Northern Ireland, for example). These days, debate is rife about whether empire is on the march once again, albeit in new and unfamiliar forms. Even if not, the old imperial relationships have left practical traces and forged enduring symbolic templates through which many people interpret the world.

All this matters for Inglehart and Norris's argument about women's equality. It is not otherwise comprehensible why the “rising tide” (Inglehart and Norris 2003) of gender equality also provokes difficulties with women-as-a-category—including shame, rage, and disgust at women's uncovered bodies and public presence as the tokens of an excoriated modernity. With the Taliban, that reached the point of systematic mass confinement, institutionalized educational and medical neglect, and finally, retributive beatings, rapes, torture, and murder. The Taliban are an extreme case, but they define one pole of a recognizable continuum. Some regional national leaders—such as Saudi Arabia's—have not simply collaborated with but have actively encouraged the negative Islamist coding of women-as-women and the associated punitive sanctions against them. It is not clear whether Inglehart and Norris avoid these painful topics because they think such negative symbolic associations between gender and modernity are not there, or are but a temporary way station on the way to gender equality and full-fledged modernity. Their conclusions about gender equality and modernization rely on cohort differences, which purport to tell us about the effects of economic growth if those cohorts grew up in dramatically different economic circumstances. But in most Islamic countries, growth has not been impressive (in the few alternative cases, mineral wealth looms large, and elsewhere Inglehart plausibly argues that this does not deliver modernity), and even the youngest cohorts did not grow up in anything approaching an affluent society. In their own modernization-theoretic terms, then, it is too soon to tell whether the classic convergence argument holds, or whether there is cultural lag, or whether religion will trump economic development when it comes to gender relations. It is impossible to tell whether the rising tide will be checked or will reach full spate.

In Iris Young's version of world history (in some ways the obverse of Inglehart and Norris's), the tide of modernization is also rising, but that is deemed a problem. Young notes that she has never said she is “against” modernity—indeed, “modernity” is not thematized in her work; in her comment, she forwards a notion of the modern that reduces it to the present day—and therefore a “set of social facts that cannot be rejected.” Conceptually, this means that her discussions of democracy and security lack historical content and context.¹

Meanwhile, Young sweepingly aggregates many complicated processes—modernization, capitalism, industrialization, and globalization—along the way eroding virtually all contradictions within and among them. But these complexities cannot be so readily foreclosed and assumed to be one thing—and that largely negative. Nor is Young's romanticized image of the alternative gender relations of prestate subsistence societies a workable counterproposal. Our analysis is much closer to Inglehart and Norris's in this regard. For once states and systematic surplus extraction are in place, we take the development of democratic rights and institutions and the discursive and practical extension of rights to women to be absolutely necessary for women's full social personhood—and these achievements depend upon the resources, institutions, and practices of modernity.

Let us presume that some such version of modernity is in place—as it is in the contemporary United States. The question of how to deal with violent threats to its integrity is a difficult one for feminists, who do not, after all, control the means of coercion—or come near it, anywhere. This question is at the core of our disagreement with Iris Young. We are indeed familiar with Young's other works, in which she defends some version of an agonistic conception of politics internal to capitalist democracies, where contenders accept the fundamental democratic rules of the game (e.g., Young 2000). But we differ on the ways in which democrats and feminists should respond to the violent attacks perpetrated by those who do not share those operating assumptions, whether they be fascists or followers of Al Qaeda or other radical Islamist movements. In our view, national states—constrained and constituted by democratic processes—have an important role, a role that in the last instance embraces military force. Young claims in this issue of Politics & Gender that “Adams and Orloff dismiss the idea of a global rule of law as the mutterings of a spineless utopian who cannot face the reality of power. This seems to me to express disdain for the standard of a rule of law itself.” Perhaps there is a problem of cross-disciplinary communication, of normative versus diagnostic analysis? What we take to be an accurate description of empirical reality—that there is currently no functioning international rule of law—Young seems to read as “celebration of coercion” or “disdain for the rule of law” in general. Analytical description is not celebration.

Since what we wrote was so different from Young's summary of our views, perhaps we should clarify our argument about modernity, state coercion, and international threats. We certainly did not call for “modernization” of “traditional” societies by means of war (a hopeless prescription if ever there was one!). Our point was rather that feminists and democrats should be concerned with defending modern democratic societies, institutions, representations, and practices against movements that seek to eliminate them. In this particular case, the immediate impetus came from Al Qaeda's attacks on U.S. and other civilians, most spectacularly on September 11, 2001, but also in less dramatic episodes throughout the 1990s. Al Qaeda received crucial political and logistical support from the Taliban's state regime. A primary goal of the war in Afghanistan was to dislodge the Taliban from state power, and to remove the Taliban from state power required armed military action, not merely “global policing.” At the time, even George Bush, Tony Blair, and other allied leaders discussed Afghani democratization—not, by the way, “modernization”—as secondary to removing the Taliban and building a functioning state that would not sponsor terrorist groups.²

Elsewhere (Archibugi and Young 2002), Young admits that terrorist attacks are indeed problems of violence, although she prefers to understand them as “crimes” rather than “attacks,” for she does not want to invoke statist premises in her suggested response to them: “If the September 11 attacks are seen as crimes against humanity rather than against only the United States, an international tribunal instituted by the UN, based on the model of those for the ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda, with the processing judges coming from Western and Islamic countries, would be appropriate” (pp. 30–31). Her arguments on this point are contradictory. She has also written that “the United Nations needs its own military force under its own military command for peace enforcement” (2000, 273). At the same time, she complains that as currently constituted, the UN does not grant equal power to all states (ibid.). Does Young believe that if such a UN military force were organized—as a one-state-one-vote General Assembly alternative to, say, NATO—it would be an improvement? Sometimes the UN can be mobilized against fascism or terrorist violence, as in the case of Afghanistan, and sometimes not, as in the cases of Milosevic or (so far) Sudan. But there is an even thornier difficulty with relying on the UN as the final arbiter of the legitimacy of the use of force. Many powers on the Security Council, much less the General Assembly, are not in any sense motivated by democratic governance or equality; their opposition to action in response to violence comes in the interest of goals with which no feminist or democrat could possibly agree. Even imagining that there is an answer for all this, we note that the UN still depends on the armies of what we have called “imperfect democratic states.”

In her work on the “logic of masculine protection” (Young 2003), with which we were concerned in our initial Politics & Gender article, Young goes still further. There, she asserts that the threats posed by radical Islamism to the U.S. state and citizens are either illusory or worse (i.e., a U.S.-organized, patriarchal protection racket). This is dangerously misguided. The recent London and Bali bombings, the spectacular murder of Theo van Gogh, and the continued threats to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's life as well as democratic institutions and processes in the Netherlands—these are but three of the many illustrations that the United States is far from the only state confronting this problem. Those who adopt Young's stance must address both the character of the political and military threats that face not only American citizens but also the world's peoples, and the realistic means by which they might be surmounted. In doing so, they need not mortgage themselves to binarizing political logics. To consider Islamist terrorism a real problem does not mean taking the side of the Bush administration, just as opposing the war in Afghanistan does not make Iris Young a supporter of the Taliban.

The United States has had a long history of foreign policy engagements of a neoimperialist character. These include the so-called small wars (Max Boot 2003) that have been fought with more or less success since the early nineteenth century. Some—though not all—of these were justified with reference to various threats to national sovereignty that in retrospect turned out to be overblown. Quite a few feminists, and others on the Left, know this and are therefore almost instinctively prepared to reject any claim by a U.S. president that this country faces an international enemy, that some sort of military action is necessary, and that domestic security measures have to be beefed up as well. Such claims obviously merit the closest public scrutiny. But in our collective concern to unmask the strategies of America's powers-that-be with respect to such claims, we would be wise not to sacrifice our own analytical abilities. Too often, the U.S. Left, feminist and otherwise, has been unwilling to craft an independent analysis for fear that any shade of nuance will nourish domestic political forces hostile to progressive politics. Yet there is another parallel history that bears underlining: that of Americans left, right, and center underestimating or misunderstanding social phenomena—particularly the fascism of interwar Europe—that came to pose the gravest dangers.

Alongside its misadventures, the United States eventually contributed decisively to the defeat of fascism and to the unraveling of the Soviet empire. Small-d democrats faced a tough challenge in supporting the constructive efforts of American governments, while simultaneously criticizing the terrible excesses and outright mistakes—for example, internment of Japanese citizens, COINTELPRO, McCarthyism—committed by those same governments, particularly when they would often be accused of offering aid and comfort to the enemy. Obviously, not all rose to that challenge. Today, feminists (now more numerous than in the mid–twentieth century) and democrats face similar hurdles. We believe that unless radical Islamism is taken seriously as a threat not just to Americans but to the world's peoples, including Islamic publics (see, e.g., Moaddel 2005), feminists and democrats will not be in a position to put forward a credible alternative to policies that are noxious, ineffective, or both. We hope, at least, that we all can agree that we need our own autonomous analysis of how to respond to terrorist violence, and to gain clarity about the grounds on which different types of coercion are or are not warranted.

Autonomous analysis cannot magically deliver autonomous action, however. Contemporary feminism has uneven political strengths, with few representatives in government and none with their hands on any important buttons or triggers. Nowhere but in certain sci-fi novels do feminists control state power. Nevertheless, women's equality has become such a widely accepted goal that even the Bush administration finds that it must frame its projects at least partly in terms of women's rights. These tropes did matter, for example, when women's representation was considered in the makeup of Afghanistan's fledgling post-Taliban government and when concerns about women's rights were referenced during the drafting of the Afghan constitution. (For another argument that framing has mattered for women's issues in post-Taliban Afghanistan, see Ferguson 2005.) These are questions of political signification. They are also quintessentially political questions about struggles against patriarchal fundamentalisms abroad and at home, and in favor of democracy and women's emancipation everywhere. In such situations, there will always be issues of the relative strength of feminists' and democrats' own mobilization as activists and voters, and our collective understanding of what most matters in defending democracy or advancing gender equality.³

Inglehart and Norris do not face this problem as an analytic one. Perhaps that is because as partisans of a retooled modernization theory, they argue that many of the processes associated with modernization—the rise of cities; the transition from agrarian to industrial and postindustrial economies; the spread of literacy; the rise of science and the circumscription of religious political powers—put overwhelming pressure on societies to make reasonably full use of women's capacities. Inglehart and Norris argue that the opportunity costs of full-time housewifery (and how much more female seclusion!) become too great to sustain, so that social barriers to women's societal participation must come down, against more or less political resistance. This is a very interesting—and testable—hypothesis that we would like to see further explored. But at this point, as we have argued, the jury is still out on whether the aspects of modernity conducive to gender equality will eventually triumph worldwide. Contra Young, however, it is not the case that acknowledging empirical associations between, say, the generalization of a discourse of rights and women's equality smacks of “normative teleology”—whether that criticism is leveled against us or (in slightly different form) against Inglehart and Norris.⁴

The excellent historical work that gender scholars and others have carried out on the societies and systems that have risen and fallen since the origin of states and systematic surplus extraction persuades us that significant steps toward women's full personhood and equal status have come with modernity. This leads us—as feminists—to call for the defense of modern democratic societies, institutions, representations, and practices and, we think, helps to explain why some fundamentalist movements seek to eliminate them.

Yet some forms of modernity can and have gone terribly wrong (even in the extreme sense of being evolutionarily unreproducible dead ends). And both social scientists and historians have raised important critiques of the concept of modernity itself. Thus, in our original Politics & Gender article (Adams and Orloff 2005) and in our Introduction, with Elisabeth Clemens, to our edited collection (2005), we called for “remaking” modernity—and would not claim that this is a finished analytical project. Scholars are really just beginning to examine the historically differentiated strands of modernity and their systematic and variable relationships in distinctive social settings. We repeat our view that this broad collective project rests on understanding all features, components, and associations, the historically hideous as well as the gorgeously inspirational. Is it any surprise that we would also argue for a politics that takes both into account? We should defend modern democratic societies, institutions, practices—and states—against those who would seek to demolish them, while at the same time working to remake them in line with the normative goals of equality, participation, freedom.