Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS for short, are a threat to the settled order of the Middle East. A new empire is taking shape before our eyes, complete with the change of authority and frontiers that are the objectives of all empire-building. Abu Bakr and ISIS may look like another tribal horde riding over the horizon to take power. However they have the very different purpose of restoring the Caliphate with Abu Bakr as Caliph. Muslim fanaticism motivates them to civil war that is actually a war of conquest, complete with barbarities like the public crucifixion of anyone whose ideas are different. Abu Bakr and ISIS, it has to be said, have got this far only because his opponents have been so reckless and inept. Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, created conditions leading to civil war, and President Obama removed the American forces that alone could have kept the peace.
The real Caliphate was at best honorific, even fictional. The title of caliph had been vested in the Ottoman sultan from the Middle Ages on, and was abolished after the First World War without any fuss. The Khedive of Egypt was then a pretender who got nowhere with it. Restoration of this ghost is a fantasy, as unreal and irrational as the comintern or the Thousand Year Reich, with the same sort of emotional appeal to believers.
Another empire in the process of formation is the European Union. The EU is of course not to be compared to the Caliphate, though both share the essential feature that they operate without the consent of those they claim to represent. The process whereby someone called Jean-Claude Juncker has emerged as President of the European Commission is blindingly obscure. Virtually no Europeans have ever heard of this former prime minister of Luxemburg, just as virtually no Arab had ever heard of Abu Bakr. An unseen and mysterious horse-trading took place. Apparently he is a federalist, which in the context means moving towards a United State of Europe. This attempted revival of the Holy Roman Empire is a fantasy quite as irrational as Abu Bakr’s Caliphate. And there’s nothing to be done except to wait and see what price will be paid for these fantasies.