excerpts from the book
The Clash of Civilizations
and the Remaking of World Order
by Samuel P. Huntington
Touchstone Books, 1996, paper
p51
Geoffrey Parker
"[I]n large measure, the rise of the West' depended upon
the exercise of force, upon the fact that the military balance
between the Europeans and their adversaries overseas was steadily
tilting in favour of the former; . . . the key to the Westerners'
success in creating the first truly global empires between 1500
and 1750 depended upon precisely those improvements in the ability
to wage war which have been termed 'the military revolution.'
The expansion of the West was also facilitated by the superiority
in organization, discipline, and training of its troops and subsequently
by the superior weapons, transport, logistics, and medical services
resulting from its leadership in the Industrial Revolution. The
West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values
or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were
converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized
violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never
do.
p51
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or
values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations
were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized
violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never
do.
p81
The Fading of the West: Power, Culture, and Indigenization
WESTERN POWER: DOMINANCE AND DECLINE
Two pictures exist of the power of the West in relation to
other civilizations. The first is of overwhelming, triumphant,
almost total Western dominance. The disintegration of the Soviet
Union removed the only serious challenger to the West and as a
result the world is and will be shaped by the goals, priorities,
and interests of the principal Western nations, with perhaps an
occasional assist from Japan. As the one remaining superpower,
the United States together with Britain and France make the crucial
decisions on political and security issues; the United States
together with Germany and Japan make the crucial decisions on
economic issues. The West is the only civilization which has substantial
interests in every other civilization or region and has the ability
to affect the politics, economics, and security of every other
civilization or region. Societies from other civilizations usually
need Western help to achieve their goals and protect their interests.
Western nations, as one author summarized it:
* Own and operate the international banking system
* Control all hard currencies
* Are the world's principal customer
* Provide the majority of the world's finished goods
* Dominate international capital markets
* Exert considerable moral leadership within many societies
* Are capable of massive military intervention
* Control the sea lanes
* Conduct most advanced technical research and development
* Control leading edge technical education
* Dominate access to space
* Dominate the aerospace industry
* Dominate international communications
* Dominate the high-tech weapons industry'
The second picture of the West is very different. It is of
a civilization in decline, its share of world political, economic,
and military power going down relative to that of other civilizations.
The West's victory in the Cold War has produced not triumph but
exhaustion. The West is increasingly concerned with its internal
problems and needs, as it confronts slow economic growth, stagnating
populations, unemployment, huge government deficits, a declining
work ethic, low savings rates, and in many countries including
the United States social disintegration, drugs, and crime. Economic
power is rapidly shifting to East Asia, and military power and
political influence are starting to follow. India is on the verge
of economic takeoff and the Islamic world is increasingly hostile
toward the West. The willingness of other societies to accept
the West's dictates or abide its sermons is rapidly evaporating,
and so are the West's self-confidence and will to dominate. The
late 1980s witnessed much debate about the declinist thesis concerning
the United States. In the mid-1990s, a balanced analysis came
to a somewhat similar conclusion:
[I]n many important respects, its [the United States'] relative
power will decline at an accelerating pace. In terms of its raw
economic capabilities, the position of the United States in relation
to Japan and eventually China is likely to erode still further.
In the military realm, the balance of effective capabilities between
the United States and a number of growing regional powers (including,
perhaps, Iran, India, and China) will shift from the center toward
the periphery. Some of America's structural power will flow to
other nations; some (and some of its soft power as well) will
find its way into the hands of non-state actors like multinational
corporations.:
Which of these two contrasting pictures of the place of the
West in the world describes reality? The answer, of course, is:
they both do. The West is overwhelmingly dominant now and will
remain number one in terms of power and influence well into the
twenty-first century. Gradual, inexorable, and fundamental changes,
however, are also occurring in the balances of power among civilizations,
and the power of the West relative to that of other civilizations
will continue to decline. As the West's primacy erodes, much of
its power will simply evaporate and the rest will be diffused
on a regional basis among the several major civilizations and
their core states. The most significant increases m power are
accruing and will accrue to Asian civilizations, with China gradually
emerging as the society most likely to challenge the West for
global influence. These shifts in power among civilizations are
leading and will lead to the revival and increased cultural assertiveness
of non-Western societies and to their increasing rejection of
Western culture.
The decline of the West has three major characteristics.
First, it is a slow process. The rise of Western power took
four hundred years. Its recession could take as long. In the 1980s
the distinguished British scholar Hedley Bull argued that "European
or Western dominance of the universal international society may
be said to have reached its apogee about the year 1900."
Spengler's first volume appeared in 1918 and the "decline
of the West" has been a central theme in twentieth-century
history. The process itself has stretched out through most of
the century. Conceivably, however, it could accelerate. Economic
growth and other increases in a country's capabilities often proceed
along an S curve: a slow start then rapid acceleration followed
by reduced rates of expansion and leveling off. The decline of
countries may also occur along a reverse S curve, as it did with
the Soviet Union: moderate at first then rapidly accelerating
before bottoming out. The decline of the West is still in the
slow first phase, but at some point it might speed up dramatically.
Second, decline does not proceed in a straight line. It is
highly irregular with pauses, reversals, and reassertions of Western
power following manifestations of Western weakness. The open democratic
societies of the West have great capacities for renewal. In addition,
unlike many civilizations, the West has had two major centers
of power. The decline which Bull saw starting about 1900 was essentially
the decline of the European component of Western civilization.
From 1910 to 1945 Europe was divided against itself and preoccupied
with its internal economic, social, and political problems. In
the 1940s, however, the American phase of Western domination began,
and in 1945 the United States briefly dominated the world to an
extent almost comparable to the combined Allied Powers in 1918.
Postwar decolonization further reduced European influence but
not that of the United States, which substituted a new transnational
imperialism for the traditional territorial empire. During the
Cold War, however, American military power was matched by that
of the Soviets and American economic power declined relative to
that of Japan. Yet periodic efforts at military and economic renewal
did occur. In 1991, indeed, another distinguished British scholar,
Barry Buzan, argued that "The deeper reality is that the
centre is now more dominant, and the periphery more subordinate,
than at any time since decolonization began." The accuracy
of that perception, however, fades as the military victory that
gave rise to it also fades into history.
Third, power is the ability of one person or group to change
the behavior of another person or group. Behavior may be changed
through inducement, coercion, or exhortation, which require the
power-wielder to have economic, military, institutional, demographic,
political, technological, social, or other resources. The power
of a state or group is hence normally estimated by measuring the
resources it has at its disposal against those of the other states
or groups ~t is trying to influence. The West's share of most,
but not all, of the important power resources peaked early in
the twentieth century and then began to decline relative to those
of other civilizations.
Territory and Population. In 1490 Western societies controlled
most of the European peninsula outside the Balkans or perhaps
1.5 million square miles out of a global land area (apart from
Antarctica) of 52.5 million square miles At the peak of its territorial
expansion in 1920, the West directly ruled about 25.5 million
square miles or close to half the earth's earth. By 1993 this
territorial control had been cut in half to about 12.7 million
square miles. The West was back to its original European core
plus its spacious settler-populated lands in North America, Australia,
and New Zealand. The territory of independent Islamic societies,
in contrast, rose from 1.8 million square miles in 1920 to over
11 million square miles in 1993. Similar changes occurred in the
control of population. In 1900 Westerners composed roughly 30
percent of the world's population and Western governments ruled
almost 45 percent of that population then and 48 percent in 1920.
In 1993, except for a few small imperial remnants like Hong Kong,
Western governments ruled no one but Westerners. Westerners amounted
to slightly over 13 percent of humanity and are due to drop to
about 11 percent early in the next century and to 10 percent by
2025 s In terms of total population, in 1993 the West ranked fourth
behind Sinic Islamic, and Hindu civilizations.
Quantitatively Westerners thus constitute a steadily decreasing
minority of the world's population. Qualitatively the balance
between the West and other populations is also changing. Non-Western
peoples are becoming healthier, more urban, more literate, better
educated. By the early 1990s infant mortality rates in Latin America,
Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast
Asia were one-third to one-half what they had been thirty years
earlier. Life expectancy in these regions had increased significantly,
with gains varying from eleven years in Africa to twenty-three
years in East Asia. In the early 1960s in most of the Third World
less than one-third of the adult population was literate. In the
early 1990s, in very few countries apart from Africa was less
than one-half the population literate. About fifty percent of
Indians and 75 percent of Chinese could read and write. Literacy
rates in developing countries in 1970 averaged 41 percent of those
in developed countries; in 1992 they averaged 71 percent. By the
early 1990s in every region except Africa virtually the entire
age group was enrolled in primary education. Most significantly,
in the early 1960s in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and
Africa less than one-third of the appropriate age group was enrolled
in secondary education, by the early 1990s one-half of the age
group was enrolled except in Africa. In 1960 urban residents made
up less than one-quarter of the population of the less developed
world. Between 1960 and 1992, however, the urban percentage of
the population rose from 49 percent to 73 percent in Latin America,
34 percent to 55 percent in Arab countries, 14 percent to 29 percent
in Africa, 18 percent to 27 percent in China, and 19 percent to
26 percent in India.
These shifts in literacy, education, and urbanization created
socially mobilized populations with enhanced capabilities and
higher expectations who could be activated for political purposes
in ways in which illiterate peasants could not. Socially mobilized
societies are more powerful societies. In 1953 when less than
15 percent of Iranians were literate and less than 17 percent
urban, Kermit Roosevelt and a few CIA operatives rather easily
suppressed an insurgency and restored the Shah to his throne.
In 1979, when 50 percent of Iranians were literate and 47 percent
lived in cities, no amount of U.S. military power could have kept
the Shah on his throne. A significant gap still separates Chinese,
Indians, Arabs, and Africans from Westerners, Japanese, and Russians.
Yet the gap is narrowing rapidly. At the same time, a different
gap is opening
he average ages of Westerners, Japanese, and Russians are
increasingly steadily, and the larger proportion of the population
that no longer works imposes a mounting burden on those still
productively employed. Other civilizations are burdened by large
numbers of children, but children are future workers and soldiers.
Economic Product. The Western share of the global economic
product also may have peaked in the 1920s and has clearly been
declining since World War II. In 1750 China accounted for almost
one-third, India for almost one-quarter and the West for less
than a fifth of the world's manufacturing output. By 1830 the
West had pulled slightly ahead of China. In the following decades,
as Paul Bairoch points out, the industrialization of the West
led to the deindustrialization of the rest of the world. In 1913
the manufacturing output of non-Western countries was roughly
two-thirds what it had been in 1800. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth
century the Western share rose dramatically, peaking in 1928 at
84.2 percent of world manufacturing output. Thereafter the West's
share declined as its rate of growth remained modest and as less
industrialized countries expanded their output rapidly after World
War II. By 1980 the West accounted for 57.8 percent of global
manufacturing output, roughly the share it had 120 years earlier
in the 1860s.
Reliable data on gross economic product are not available
for the pre-World War II period. In 1950, however, the West accounted
for roughly 64 percent of the gross world product; by the 1980s
this proportion had dropped to 49 percent. (See Table 4.5.) By
2013, according to one estimate, the West will account for only
30% of the world product. In 1991, according to another estimate,
four of the world's seven largest economies belonged to non-Western
nations: Japan (in second place), China (third), Russia (sixth),
and India (seventh). In 1992 the United States had the largest
economy in the world, and the top ten economies included those
of five Western countries plus the leading states of five other
civilizations: China, Japan, India, Russia, and Brazil. In 2020
plausible projections indicate that the top five economies will
be in five different civilizations, and the top ten economies
will include only three Western countries. This relative decline
of the West is, of course, in large part a function of the rapid
rise of East Asia.
Gross figures on economic output partially obscure the West's
qualitative advantage. The West and Japan almost totally dominate
advanced technology industries. Technologies are being disseminated,
however, and if the West wishes to maintain its superiority it
will do what it can to minimize that dissemination. Thanks to
the interconnected world which the West has created, however,
slowing the diffusion of technology to other civilizations is
increasingly difficult. It is made all the more so in the absence
of a single, overpowering, agreed-upon threat such as existed
during the Cold War and gave measures of technology control some
modest effectiveness.
It appears probable that for most of history China had the
world's largest economy. The diffusion of technology and the economic
development of non-Western societies in the second half of the
twentieth century are now producing a return to the historical
pattern. This will be a slow process, but by the middle of the
twenty-first century, if not before, the distribution of economic
product and manufacturing output among the leading civilizations
is likely to resemble that of 1800. The two-hundred-year Western
"blip" on the world economy will be over.
Military Capability. Military power has four dimensions: quantitative-the
numbers of men, weapons, equipment, and resources; technological-the
effectiveness and sophistication of weapons and equipment; organizational-the
coherence, discipline, training, and morale of the troops and
the effectiveness of command and control relationships; and societal-the
ability and willingness of the society to apply military force
effectively. In the 1920s the West was far ahead of everyone else
in all these dimensions. In the years since, the military power
of the West has declined relative to that of other civilizations,
a decline reflected m the shifting balance in military personnel,
one measure although clearly not the most important one, of military
capability. Modernization and economic development generate the
resources and desire for states to develop their military capabilities,
and few states fail to do so. In the 1930s Japan and the Soviet
Union created very powerful military forces, as they demonstrated
in World War II. During the Cold War the Soviet Union had one
of the world's two most powerful military forces. Currently the
West monopolizes the ability to deploy substantial conventional
military forces anywhere in the world. Whether it will continue
to maintain that capability is uncertain. It seems reasonably
certain, however, that no non-Western state or group of states
will create a comparable capability during the coming decades.
Overall, the years after the Cold War have been dominated
by five major trends in the evolution of global military capabilities.
First, the armed forces of the Soviet Union ceased to exist
shortly after the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Apart from Russia,
only Ukraine inherited significant military capabilities. Russian
forces were greatly reduced in size and were withdrawn from Central
Europe and the Baltic states. The Warsaw Pact ended. The goal
of challenging the U.S. Navy was abandoned. Military equipment
was either disposed of or allowed to deteriorate and become non-operational.
Budget allocations for defense were drastically reduced. Demoralization
pervaded the ranks of both officers and men. At the same time
the Russian military were redefining their missions and doctrine
and restructuring themselves for their new roles in protecting
Russians and dealing with regional conflicts in the near abroad.
Second, the precipitous reduction in Russian military capabilities
stimulated a slower but significant decline in Western military
spending, forces, and capabilities. Under the plans of the Bush
and Clinton administrations, U.S. military spending was due to
drop by 35 percent from $342.3 billion (1994 dollars) in 1990
to $222.3 in 1998. The force structure that year would be half
to two-thirds what it was at the end of the Cold War. Total military
personnel would go down from 2.1 million to 1.4 million. Many
major weapons programs have been and are being canceled. Between
1985 and 1995 annual purchases of major weapons went down from
29 to 6 ships, 943 to 127 aircraft, 720 to 0 tanks, and 48 to
18 strategic missiles. Beginning in the late 1980s, Britain, Germany,
and, to a lesser degree, France went through similar reductions
in defense spending and military capabilities. In the mid-1990s,
the German armed forces were scheduled to decline from 370,000
to 340,000 and probably to 320,000; the French army was to drop
from its strength of 290,000 in 1990 to 225,000 in 1997. British
military personnel went down from 377,100 in 1985 to 274,800 in
1993. Continental members of NATO also shortened terms of conscripted
service and debated the possible abandonment of conscription.
Third, the trends in East Asia differed significantly from
those in Russia and the West. Increased military spending and
force improvements were the order of the day; China was the pacesetter.
Stimulated by both their increasing economic wealth and the Chinese
buildup, other East Asian nations are modernizing and expanding
their military forces. Japan has continued to improve its highly
sophisticated military capability. Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand,
Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia all are spending more on their
military and purchasing planes, tanks, and ships from Russia,
the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and other countries.
While NATO defense expenditures declined by roughly 10 percent
between 1985 and 1993 (from $539.6 billion to $485.0 billion)
(constant 1993 dollars), expenditures in East Asia rose by 50
percent from $89.8 billion to $134.8 billion during the same period.
Fourth, military capabilities including weapons of mass destruction
are diffusing broadly across the world. As countries develop economically,
they generate the capacity to produce weapons. Between the 1960s
and 1980s, for instance, the number of Third World countries producing
fighter aircraft increased from one to eight, tanks from one to
six, helicopters from one to six and tactical missiles from none
to seven. The 1990s have seen a major trend toward the globalization
of the defense industry, which is likely further to erode Western
military advantages. Many non-Western societies either have nuclear
weapons (Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and possibly
North Korea) or have been making strenuous efforts to acquire
them (Iran, Iraq, Libya, and possibly Algeria) or are placing
themselves in a position quickly to acquire them if they see the
need to do so (Japan).
Finally, all those developments make regionalization the central
trend in military strategy and power in the post-Cold War world.
Regionalization provides the rationale for the reductions in Russian
and Western military forces and for increases in the military
forces of other states. Russia no longer has a global military
capability but is focusing its strategy and forces on the near
abroad. China has reoriented its strategy and forces to emphasize
local power projection and the defense of Chinese interests in
East Asia. European countries are similarly redirecting their
forces, through both NATO and the Western European Union, to deal
with instability on the periphery of Western Europe. The United
States has explicitly shifted its military planning from deterring
and fighting the Soviet Union on a global basis to preparing to
deal simultaneously with regional contingencies in the Persian
Gulf and Northeast Asia. The United States, however, is not likely
to have the military capability to meet these goals. To defeat
Iraq, the United States deployed in the Persian Gulf 75 percent
of its active tactical aircraft, 42 percent of its modern battle
tanks, 46 percent of its aircraft carriers, 37 percent of its
army personnel, and 46 percent of its marine personnel. With significantly
reduced forces in the future, the United States will be hard put
to carry out one intervention, much less two against substantial
regional powers outside the Western Hemisphere. Military security
throughout the world increasingly depends not on the global distribution
of power and the actions of superpowers but on the distribution
of power within each region of the world and the actions of the
core states of civilizations.
In sum, overall the West will remain the most powerful civilization
well into the early decades of the twenty-first century. Beyond
then it will probably continue to have a substantial lead in scientific
talent, research and development capabilities, and civilian and
military technological innovation. Control over the other power
resources, however, is becoming increasingly dispersed among the
core states and leading countries of non-Western civilizations.
The West's control of these resources peaked in the 1920s and
has since been declining irregularly but significantly. In the
2020s, a hundred years after that peak, the West will probably
control about 24 percent of the world's territory (down from a
peak of 49 percent), 10 percent of the total world population
(down from 48 percent) and perhaps 15-20 percent of the socially
mobilized population, about 30 percent of the world's economic
product (down from a peak of probably 70 percent), perhaps 25
percent of manufacturing output (down from a peak of 84 percent),
and less than 10 percent of global military manpower (down from
45 percent).
In 1919 Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau
together virtually controlled the world. Sitting in Paris, they
determined what countries would exist and which would not, what
new countries would be created, what their boundaries would be
and who would rule them, and how the Middle East and other parts
of the world would be divided up among the victorious powers.
They also decided on military intervention in Russia and economic
concessions to be extracted from China. A hundred years later,
no small group of statesmen will be able to exercise comparable
power; to the extent that any group does it will not consist of
three Westerners but leaders of the core states of the world's
seven or eight major civilizations. The successors to Reagan,
Thatcher, Mitterrand, and Kohl will be rivaled by those of Deng
Xiaoping, Nakasone, Indira Gandhi, Yeltsin, Khomeini, and Suharto.
The age of Western dominance will be over. In the meantime the
fading of the West and the rise of other power centers is promoting
the global processes of indigenization and the resurgence of non-Western
cultures.
p97
People do not live by reason alone. They cannot calculate and
act rationally in pursuit of their self-interest until they define
their self. Interest politics presupposes identity. In times of
rapid social change established identities dissolve, the self
must be redefined, and new identities created. For people facing
the need to determine Who am I? Where do I belong? religion provides
compelling answers, and religious groups provide small social
communities to replace those lost through urbanization. All religions,
as Hassan al-Turabi said, furnish "people with a sense of
identity and a direction in life."
p98
Fundamentalist movements, in particular, are "a way of coping
with the experience of chaos, the loss of identity, meaning and
secure social structures created by the rapid introduction of
modern social and political patterns, secularism, scientific culture
and economic development."
p98
More broadly, the religious resurgence throughout the world is
a reaction against secularism, moral relativism, and self-indulgence,
and a reafffirmation of the values of order, discipline, work,
mutual help, and human solidarity. Religious groups meet social
needs left untended by state bureaucracies.
p99
Unlike the Catholic Church, one Brazilian priest observed, the
Protestant churches meet "the basic needs of the person-human
warmth, healing, a deep spiritual experience." The spread
of Protestantism among the poor in Latin America is not primarily
the replacement of one religion by another but rather a major
net increase in religious commitment and participation as nominal
and passive Catholics become active and devout Evangelicals.
p100
In the nineteenth century non-Western elites imbibed Western liberal
values, and their first expressions of opposition to the West
took the form of liberal nationalism. In the twentieth century
Russian, Asian, Arab, African, and Latin American elites imported
socialist and Marxist ideologies and combined them with nationalism
in opposition to Western capitalism and Western imperialism. The
collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, its severe modification
in China, and the failure of socialist economies to achieve sustained
development have now created an ideological vacuum. Western governments,
groups, and international institutions, such as the IMF and World
Bank, have attempted to fill this vacuum with the doctrines of
neo-orthodox economics and democratic politics. The extent to
which these doctrines will have a lasting impact in non-Western
cultures is uncertain. Meanwhile, however, people see communism
as only the latest secular god to have failed, and in the absence
of compelling new secular deities they turn with relief and passion
to the real thing. Religion takes over from ideology, and religious
nationalism replaces secular nationalism.
p101
"More than anything else," William McNeill observes,
"reaffirmation of Islam, whatever its specific sectarian
form, means the repudiation of European and American Influence
upon local society, politics, and morals." In this sense,
the revival of non-Western religions is the most powerful manifestation
of anti-Westernism in non-Western societies. That revival is not
a rejection of modernity; it is a rejection of the West and of
secular, relativistic, degenerate culture associated with the
West. It is a rejection of what has been termed the "Westoxification"
of non-Western societies. It is a declaration of cultural independence
from the West, a proud statement that: "We will be modern
but we won't be you."
p112
Like fundamentalists in other religions, Islamists are overwhelmingly
participants in and products of the processes of modernization
They are mobile and modern-oriented younger people ...
As with most revolutionary movements, the core element has
consisted of students and intellectuals.
p117
Young people are the protagonists of protest, instability, reform,
and revolution.
p121
Muslim population growth will be a destabilizing force for both
Muslim societies and their neighbors. The large numbers of young
people with secondary educations will continue to power the Islamic
Resurgence and promote Muslim militancy, militarism, and migration.
As a result, the early years of the twenty-first century are likely
to see an ongoing resurgence of non-Western power and culture
and the clash of the peoples of non-Western civilizations with
the West and with each other.
p125
Peoples and countries with similar cultures are coming together.
Peoples and countries with different cultures are coming apart.
Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations are giving
way to alignments defined by culture and civilization. Political
boundaries increasingly are redrawn to coincide with cultural
ones: ethnic, religious, and civilizational. Cultural communities
are replacing Cold War blocs and the fault lines between civilizations
are becoming the central lines of conflict in global politics.
During the Cold War a country could be nonaligned, as many
were, or it could, as some did, change its alignment from one
side to another. The leaders of a country could make these choices
in terms of their perceptions of their security interests, their
calculations of the balance of power, and their ideological preferences.
In the new world, however, cultural identity is the central factor
shaping a country's associations and antagonisms. While a country
could avoid Cold War alignment. it cannot lack an identity. The
question, "Which side are you on?" has been replaced
by the much more fundamental one, "Who are you?" Every
state has to have an answer. That answer, its cultural identity,
defines the state's place in world politics, its friends, and
its enemies.
p126
In coping with identity crisis, what counts for people are blood
and belief, faith and family. People rally to those with similar
ancestry. religion, language, values, and institutions and distance
themselves from those with different ones. In Europe, Austria,
Finland, and Sweden, culturally part of the West, had to be divorced
from the West and neutral during the Cold War; they are now able
to join their cultural kin in the European Union. The Catholic
and Protestant countries in the former Warsaw Pact, Poland, Hungary,
the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, are moving toward membership
in the Union and in NATO, and the Baltic states are in line behind
them. The European powers make it clear that they do not want
a Muslim state, Turkey, in the European Union and are not happy
about having a second Muslim state, Bosnia, on the European continent.
p130
For self-definition and motivation people need enemies: competitors
in business, rivals in achievement, opponents in politics. They
naturally distrust and see as threats those who are different
and have the capability to harm them. The resolution of one conflict
and the disappearance of one enemy generate personal, social,
and political forces that give rise to new ones. "The 'us'
versus 'them' tendency is," as Ali Mazrui said, "in
the political arena, almost universal."
p158
Europe ends where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy
begin.
p169
In the early 1990s, Chinese made up 1 percent of the population
of the Philippines but were responsible for 35 percent of the
sales of domestically owned firms. In Indonesia in the mid 1980s,
Chinese were 2-3 percent of the population, but owned roughly
70 percent of the private domestic capital. Seventeen of the twenty-five
largest businesses were Chinese-controlled, and one Chinese conglomerate
reportedly accounted for 5 percent of Indonesia's GNP. In the
early 1990s Chinese were 10 percent of the population of Thailand
but owned nine of the ten largest business groups and were responsible
for 50 percent of its GNP. Chinese are about one-third of the
population of Malaysia but almost totally dominate the economy.
Outside Japan and Korea the East Asian economy is basically a
Chinese economy.
p184
The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from
the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and
Sinic assertiveness.
Alone among civilizations the West has had a major and at
times devastating impact on every other civilization. The relation
between the power and culture of the West and the power and cultures
of other civilizations is, as a result, the most pervasive characteristic
of the world of civilizations. As the relative power of other
civilizations increases, the appeal of Western culture fades and
non-Western peoples have increasing confidence in and commitment
to their indigenous cultures. The central problem in the relations
between the West and the rest is, consequently, the discordance
between the West's-particularly America's-efforts to promote a
universal Western culture and its declining ability to do so.
The collapse of communism exacerbated this discordance by
reinforcing in the West the view that its ideology of democratic
liberalism had triumphed globally and hence was universally valid.
The West, and especially the United States, which has always been
a missionary nation, believe that the non-Western peoples should
commit themselves to the Western values of democracy, free markets,
limited government, human rights, individualism, the rule of law,
and should embody these values in their institutions. Minorities
in other civilizations embrace and promote these values, but the
dominant attitudes toward them in non-Western cultures range from
widespread skepticism to intense opposition. What is universals
to the West is imperialism to the rest.
The West is attempting and will continue to attempt to sustain
its preeminent position and defend its interests by defining those
interests as the interests of the "world community."
That phrase has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing
"the Free World") to give global legitimacy to actions
reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western
powers. The West is, for instance, attempting to integrate the
economies of non-Western societies into a global economic system
which it dominates. Through the IMF and other international economic
institutions, the West promotes its economic interests and imposes
on other nations the economic policies it thinks appropriate.
In any poll of non-Western peoples, however, the IMF undoubtedly
would win the support of finance ministers and a few others but
get an overwhelmingly unfavorable rating from almost everyone
else, who would agree with Georgi Arbatov's description of IMF
officials as "neo-Bolsheviks who love expropriating other
people's money, imposing undemocratic and alien rules of economic
and political conduct and stifling economic freedom."
Non-Westerners also do not hesitate to point to the gap between
Western principle and Western action. Hypocrisy, double standards,
and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions.
Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists
to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not
for Israel, free trade is the elixir of economic growth but not
for agriculture; human rights are an issue with China but not
with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively
repulsed but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards
in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of
principle.
p185
Will the global institutions, the distribution of power, and the
politics and economies of nations in the twenty-first century
primarily reflect Western values and interests or will they be
shaped primarily by those of Islam and China?
p185
The issues that divide the West and these other societies are
increasingly important on the international agenda. Three such
issues involve the efforts of the West: 1) to maintain its military
superiority through policies of nonproliferation and counter-proliferation
with respect to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and
the means to deliver them; (2) to promote Western political values
and institutions by pressing other societies to respect human
rights as conceived in the West and to adopt democracy on Western
lines; and (3) to protect the cultural, social, and ethnic integrity
of Western societies by restricting the number of non-Westerners
admitted as immigrants or refugees. In all three areas the West
has had and is likely to continue to have difficulties defending
its interests against those of non-Western societies.
p192
HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEMOCRACY
During the 1970s and 1980s over thirty countries shifted from
authoritarian to democratic political systems. Several causes
were responsible for this wave of transitions. Economic development
was undoubtedly the major underlying factor generating these political
changes. In addition, however, the policies and action of the
United States, the major Western European powers, and international
institutions helped to bring democracy to Spain and Portugal,
many Latin American countries, the Philippines, South Korea, and
Eastern Europe. Democratization was most successful in countries
where Christian and Western influences were strong. New democratic
regimes appeared most likely to stabilize in the Southern and
Central European countries that were predominantly Catholic or
Protestant and, less certainly, in Latin American countries. In
East Asia, the Catholic and heavily American influenced Philippines
returned to democracy in the 1980s, while Christian leaders promoted
movement toward democracy in South Korea and Taiwan. As has been
pointed out previously, in the former Soviet Union, the Baltic
republics appear to be successfully stabilizing democracy; the
degree and stability of democracy in the Orthodox republics vary
considerably and are uncertain; democratic prospects in the Muslim
republics are bleak. By the 1990s, except for Cuba, democratic
transitions had occurred in most of the countries, outside Africa,
whose peoples espoused Western Christianity or where major Christian
influences existed.
These transitions and the collapse of the Soviet Union generated
in the West, particularly in the United States, the belief that
a global democratic revolution was underway and that in short
order Western concepts of human rights and Western forms of political
democracy would prevail throughout the world. Promoting this spread
of democracy hence became a high priority goal for Westerners.
It was endorsed by the Bush administration with Secretary of State
James Baker declaring in April 1990 that "Beyond containment
lies democracy" and that for the post-Cold War world "President
Bush has defined our new mission to be the promotion and consolidation
of democracy." In his 1992 campaign Bill Clinton repeatedly
said that the promotion of democracy would be a top priority of
a Clinton administration, and democratization was the only foreign
policy topic to which he devoted an entire major campaign speech.
Once in office he recommended a two-thirds increase in funding
for the National Endowment for Democracy; his assistant for national
security defined the central theme of Clinton foreign policy as
the "enlargement of democracy"; and his secretary of
defense identified the promotion of democracy as one of four major
goals and attempted to create a senior position in his department
to promote that goal. To a lesser degree and in less obvious ways,
the promotion of human rights and democracy also assumed a prominent
role in the foreign policies of European states and in the criteria
used by the Western-controlled international economic institutions
for loans and grants to developing countries.
As of 1995 European and American efforts to achieve these
goals had met with limited success. Almost all non-Western civilizations
were resistant to this pressure from the West. These included
Hindu, Orthodox, African, and in some measure even Latin American
countries. The greatest resistance to Western democratization
efforts, however, came from Islam and Asia. This resistance was
rooted in the broader movements of cultural assertiveness embodied
in the Islamic Resurgence and the Asian affirmation.
The failures of the United States with respect to Asia stemmed
primarily from the increasing economic wealth and self-confidence
of Asian governments. Asian publicists repeatedly reminded the
West that the old age of dependence and subordination was past
and that the West which produced half the world's economic product
in the 1940s, dominated the United Nations, and wrote the Universal
Declaration on Human Rights had disappeared into history. "[E]fforts
to promote human rights in Asia," argued one Singaporean
official, "must also reckon with the altered distribution
of power in the post-Cold War world.... Western leverage over
East and Southeast Asia has been greatly reduced."
He is right. While the agreement on nuclear matters between
the United States and North Korea might appropriately be termed
a "negotiated surrender," the capitulation of the United
States on human rights issues with China and other Asian powers
was unconditional surrender. After threatening China with the
denial of most favored nation treatment if it was not more forthcoming
on human rights, the Clinton Administration first saw its secretary
of state humiliated in Beijing, denied even a face-saving gesture,
and then responded to this behavior by renouncing its previous
policy and separating MFN status from human rights concerns. China,
in turn, reacted to this show of weakness by continuing and intensifying
the behavior to which the Clinton administration objected. The
administration beat similar retreats in its dealings with Singapore
over the caning of an American citizen and with Indonesia over
its repressive violence in East Timor.
The ability of Asian regimes to resist Western human rights
pressures was reinforced by several factors. American and European
businesses were desperately anxious to expand their trade with
and their investment in these rapidly growing countries and subjected
their governments to intense pressure not to disrupt economic
relations with them. In addition, Asian countries saw such pressure
as an infringement on their sovereignty and rallied to each other's
support when these issues arose. Taiwanese, Japanese, and Hong
Kong businessmen who invested in China had a major interest in
China's retaining its MFN privileges with the United States. The
Japanese government generally distanced itself from American human
rights policies: We will not let "abstract notions of human
rights" affect our relations with China, Prime Minister Kiichi
Miyazawa said not long after Tiananmen Square. The countries of
ASEAN were unwilling to apply pressure to Myanmar and, indeed,
in 1994 welcomed the military junta to their meeting while the
European Union, as its spokesman said, had to recognize that its
policy "had not been very successful" and that it would
have to go along with the ASEAN approach to Myanmar. In addition,
their growing economic power allowed states such as Malaysia and
Indonesia to apply "reverse conditionalities" to countries
and firms which criticize them or engage in other behavior they
find objectionable.
Overall the growing economic strength of the Asian countries
renders them increasingly immune to Western pressure concerning
human rights and democracy. "Today China's economic power,"
Richard Nixon observed in 1994, "makes U.S. Iectures about
human rights imprudent. Within a decade it will make them irrelevant.
Within two decades it will make them laughable." By that
time, however, Chinese economic development could make Western
lectures unnecessary. Economic growth is strengthening Asian governments
in relation to Western governments. In the longer run it will
also strengthen Asian societies in relation to Asian governments.
If democracy comes to additional Asian countries it will come
because the increasingly strong Asian bourgeoisies and middle
classes want it to come.
In contrast to agreement on the indefinite expansion of the
nonproliferation treaty, Western efforts to promote human rights
and democracy in U.N. agencies generally came to naught. With
a few exceptions, such as those condemning Iraq, human rights
resolutions were almost always defeated in U.N. votes. Apart from
some Latin American countries, other governments were reluctant
to enlist in efforts to promote what many saw as "human rights
imperialism." In 1990, for instance, Sweden submitted on
behalf of twenty Western nations a resolution condemning the military
regime in Myanmar, but opposition from Asian and other countries
killed it. Resolutions condemning Iran for human rights abuses
were also voted down, and for five straight years in the 1990s
China was able to mobilize Asian support to defeat Western-sponsored
resolutions expressing concern over its human rights violations.
In 1994 Pakistan tabled a resolution in the U.N. Commission on
Human Rights condemning India's rights violations in Kashmir.
Countries friendly to India rallied against it, but so also did
two of Pakistan's closest friends, China and Iran, who had been
the targets of similar measures, and who persuaded Pakistan to
withdraw the proposal. In failing to condemn Indian brutality
in Kashmir, The Economist observed, the U.N. Human Rights Commission
"by default, sanctioned it. Other countries, too, are getting
away with murder: Turkey, Indonesia, Colombia, and Algeria have
all escaped criticism. The commission is thus giving succor to
governments that practice butchery and torture, which is exactly
the opposite of what its creators intended." ]6
The differences over human rights between the West and other
civilizations and the limited ability of the West to achieve its
goals were clearly revealed in the U.N. World Conference on Human
Rights in Vienna in June 1993. On one side were the European and
North American countries; on the other side was a bloc of about
fifty non-Western states, the fifteen most active members of which
included the governments of one Latin American country (Cuba),
one Buddhist country (Myanmar), four Confucian countries with
widely varying political ideologies, economic systems, and levels
of development (Singapore, Vietnam, North Korea, and China), and
nine Muslim countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq,
Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya). The leadership of this Asian-lslamic
grouping came from China, Syria, and Iran. In between these two
groupings were the Latin American countries, apart from Cuba,
which often supported the West, and African and Orthodox countries
which sometimes supported but more often opposed Western positions.
The issues on which countries divided along civilizational
lines included: universality vs. cultural relativism with respect
to human rights; the relative priority of economic and social
rights including the right to development versus political and
civil rights; political conditionality with respect to economic
assistance; the creation of a U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights;
the extent to which the nongovernmental human rights organizations
simultaneously meeting in Vienna should be allowed to participate
in the governmental conference; the particular rights which should
be endorsed by the conference; and more specific issues such as
whether the Dalai Lama should be allowed to address the conference
and whether human rights abuses in Bosnia should be explicitly
condemned.
Major differences existed between the Western countries and
the Asian-lslamic bloc on these issues. Two months before the
Vienna conference the Asian countries met in Bangkok and endorsed
a declaration which emphasized that human rights must be considered
"in the context. . . of national and regional particularities
and various historical religious and cultural backgrounds,"
that human rights monitoring violated state sovereignty, and that
conditioning economic assistance on human rights performance was
contrary to the right to development. The differences over these
and other issues were so great that almost the entire document
produced by the final pre-Vienna conference preparatory meeting
in Geneva in early May was in brackets, indicating dissents by
one or more countries.
The Western nations were ill prepared for Vienna, were outnumbered
at the conference, and during its proceedings made more concessions
than their opponents. As a result, apart from a strong endorsement
of women's rights, the declaration approved by the conference
was a minimal one. It was, one human rights supporter observed,
"a flawed and contradictory" document, and represented
a victory for the Asian-lslamic coalition and a defeat for the
West. The Vienna declaration contained no explicit endorsement
of the rights to freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and religion,
and was thus in many respects weaker than the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights the U.N. had adopted in 1948. This shift reflected
the decline in the power of the West. "The international
human rights regime of 1945," an American human rights supporter
remarked, "is no more. American hegemony has eroded. Europe,
even with the events of 1992, is little more than a peninsula.
The world is now as Arab, Asian, and African, as it is Western.
Today the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International
Covenants are less relevant to much of the planet than during
the immediate post-World War II era." An Asian critic of
the West had similar views: "For the first time since the
Universal Declaration was adopted in 1948, countries not thoroughly
steeped in the Judeo-Christian and natural law traditions are
in the first rank. That unprecedented situation will define the
new international politics of human rights. It will also multiply
the occasions for conflict."
"The big winner" at Vienna, another observer commented,
"clearly, was China, at least if success is measured by telling
other people to get out of the way. Beijing kept winning throughout
the meeting simply by tossing its weight around." t9 Outvoted
and outmaneuvered at Vienna, the West was nonetheless able a few
months later to score a not-insignificant victory against China.
Securing the 2000 summer Olympics for Beijing was a major goal
of the Chinese government, which invested tremendous resources
in trying to achieve it. In China there was immense publicity
about the Olympic bid and public expectations were high; the government
lobbied other governments to pressure their Olympic associations;
Taiwan and Hong Kong joined in the campaign. On the other side,
the United States Congress, the European Parliament, and human
rights organizations all vigorously opposed selecting Beijing.
Although voting in the International Olympic Committee is by secret
ballot, it clearly was along civilizational lines. On the first
ballot, Beijing, with reportedly widespread African support, was
in first place with Sydney in second. On subsequent ballots, when
Istanbul was eliminated, the Confucian-lslamic connection brought
its votes overwhelmingly to Beijing; when Berlin and Manchester
were eliminated, their votes went overwhelmingly to Sydney, giving
it victory on the fourth ballot and imposing a humiliating defeat
on China, which it blamed squarely on the United States. "America
and Britain," Lee Kuan Yew commented, "succeeded in
cutting China down to size.... The apparent reason was 'human
rights.' The real reason was political, to show Western political
clout." Undoubtedly many more people in the world are concerned
with sports than with human rights, but given the defeats on human
rights the West suffered at Vienna and elsewhere, this isolated
demonstration of Western "clout" was also a reminder
of Western weakness.
Not only is Western clout diminished, but the paradox of democracy
also weakens Western will to promote democracy in the post-Cold
War world. During the Cold War the West and the United States
in particular confronted the "friendly tyrant" problem:
the dilemmas of cooperating with military juntas and dictators
who were anti-communist and hence useful partners in the Cold
War. Such cooperation produced uneasiness and at times embarrassment
when these regimes engaged in outrageous violations of human rights.
Cooperation could, however, be justified as the lesser evil: these
governments were usually less thoroughly repressive than communist
regimes and could be expected to be less durable as well as more
susceptible to American and other outside influences. Why not
work with a less brutal friendly tyrant if the alternative was
a more brutal unfriendly one? In the post-Cold War world the choice
can be the more difficult one between a friendly tyrant and an
unfriendly democracy. The West's easy assumption that democratically
elected governments will be cooperative and pro-Western need not
hold true in non-Western societies where electoral competition
can bring anti-Western nationalists and fundamentalists to power.
The West was relieved when the Algerian military intervened in
1992 and canceled the election which the fundamentalist FIS clearly
was going to win. Western governments also were reassured when
the fundamentalist Welfare Party in Turkey and the nationalist
BJP in India were excluded from power after scoring electoral
victories in 1995 and 1996. On the other hand, within the context
of its revolution Iran in some respects has one of the more democratic
regimes in the Islamic world, and competitive elections in many
Arab countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt would almost surely
produce governments far less sympathetic to Western interests
than their undemocratic predecessors. A popularly elected government
in China could well be a highly nationalistic one. As Western
leaders realize that democratic processes in non-Western societies
often produce governments unfriendly to the West, they both attempt
to influence those elections and also lose their enthusiasm for
promoting democracy in those societies.
p212
The effective end of Western territorial imperialism and the absence
so far of renewed Muslim territorial expansion have produced a
geographical segregation so that only in a few places in the Balkans
do Western and Muslim communities directly border on each other.
Conflicts between the West and Islam thus focus less on territory
than on broader intercivilizational issues such as weapons proliferation,
human rights and democracy, control of oil, migration, Islamist
terrorism, and Western intervention.
In the wake of the Cold War, the increasing intensity of this
historical antagonism has been widely recognized by members of
both communities. In 1991, for instance, Barry Buzan saw many
reasons why a societal cold war was emerging "between the
West and Islam, in which Europe would be on the front line.
This development is partly to do with secular versus religious
values, partly to do with the historical rivalry between Christendom
and Islam, partly to do I with jealousy of Western power, partly
to do with resentments over Western | domination of the postcolonial
political structuring of the Middle East, and partly to do with
the bitterness and humiliation of the invidious comparison between
the accomplishments of Islamic and Western civilizations in the
last two centuries.
In addition, he noted a "societal Cold War with Islam
would serve to strengthen the European identity all round at a
crucial time for the process of European union." Hence, there
may well be a substantial community in the West prepared not only
to support a societal Cold War with Islam, but to adopt policies
that encourage it." In 1990 Bernard Lewis, a leading Western
scholar of Islam, analyzed "The Roots of Muslim Rage,"
and concluded:
It should now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement
far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments
that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations-that
perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient
rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present,
and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important
that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic
but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.
Similar observations came from the Islamic community. "There
are unmistakable signs," argued a leading Egyptian journalist,
Mohammed Sid-Ahmed, in 1994, "of a growing clash between
the Judeo-Christian Western ethic and the Islamic revival movement,
which is now stretching from the Atlantic in the west to China
in the east." A prominent Indian Muslim predicted in 1992
that the West's "next confrontation is definitely going to
come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic
nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new
world order will begin." For a leading Tunisian lawyer, the
struggle was already underway: "Colonialism tried to deform
all the cultural traditions of Islam. I am not an Islamist. I
don't think there is a conflict between religions. There is a
conflict between civilizations."
In the 1980s and 1990s the overall trend in Islam has been
in an anti-Western direction. In part, this is the natural consequence
of the Islamic Resurgence and the reaction against the perceived
"gharbzadegi" or Westoxication of Muslim societies.
The "reaffirmation of Islam, whatever its specific sectarian
form, means the repudiation of European and American influence
upon local society, politics, and morals." On occasion in
the past, Muslim leaders did tell their people: "We must
Westernize." If any Muslim leader has said that in the last
quarter of the twentieth century, however, he is a lonely figure.
Indeed, it is hard to find statements by any Muslims, whether
politicians, officials, academics, businesspersons, or journalists,
praising Western values and institutions. They instead stress
the differences between their civilization and Western civilization,
the superiority of their culture, and the need to maintain the
integrity of that culture against Western onslaught. Muslims fear
and resent Western power and the threat which this poses to their
society and beliefs. They see Western culture as materialistic,
corrupt, decadent, and immoral. They also see it as seductive,
and hence stress all the more the need to resist its impact on
their way of life. Increasingly, Muslims attack the West not for
adhering to an imperfect, erroneous religion, which is nonetheless
a "religion of the book," but for not adhering to any
religion at all. In Muslim eyes Western secularism, irreligiosity,
and hence immorality are worse evils than the Western Christianity
that produced them. In the Cold War the West labeled its opponent
"godless communism"; in the post-Cold War conflict of
civilizations Muslims see their opponent as "the godless
West."
These images of the West as arrogant, materialistic, repressive,
brutal, and decadent are held not only by fundamentalist imams
but also by those whom many in the West would consider their natural
allies and supporters. Few books by Muslim authors published in
the 1990s in the West received the praise given to Fatima Mernissi's
Islam and Democracy, generally hailed by Westerners as the courageous
statement of a modern, liberal, female Muslim. The portrayal of
the West in that volume, however, could hardly be less flattering.
The West is "militaristic" and "imperialistic"
and has "traumatized" other nations through "colonial
terror" (pp. 3, 9). Individualism, the hallmark of Western
culture, is "the source of all trouble" (p. 8). Western
power is fearful. The West "alone decides if satellites will
be used to educate Arabs or to drop bombs on them. . . . It crushes
our potentialities and invades our lives with its imported products
and televised movies that swamp the airwaves.... [It] is a power
that crushes us, besieges our markets, and controls our merest
resources, initiatives, and potentialities. That was how we perceived
our situation, and the Gulf War turned our perception into certitude"
(pp. 146-47). The West "creates its power through military
research" and then sells the products of that research to
underdeveloped countries who are its "passive consumers."
To liberate themselves from this subservience, Islam must develop
its own engineers and scientists, build its own weapons (whether
nuclear or conventional, she does not specify), and "free
itself from military dependence on the West" (pp. 43-44).
These, to repeat, are not the views of a bearded, hooded ayatollah.
p217
During the fifteen years between 1980 and 1995, according to the
U.S. Defense Department, the United States engaged in seventeen
military operations in the Middle East, all of them directed against
Muslims.
p238
China's Confucian heritage, with its emphasis on authority, order,
hierarchy, and the supremacy of the collectivity over the individual,
creates obstacles to democratization.
p238
CIVILIZATIONS AND CORE STATES: EMERGING ALIGNMENTS
The post-Cold War, multipolar, multicivilizational world lacks
an overwhelmingly dominant cleavage such as existed in the Cold
War. So long as the Muslim demographic and Asian economic surges
continue, however, the conflicts between the West and the challenger
civilizations will be more central to global politics than other
lines of cleavage. The governments of Muslim countries are likely
to continue to become less friendly to the West, and intermittent
low-intensity and at times perhaps high-intensity violence will
occur between Islamic groups and Western societies. Relations
between the United States, on the one hand, and China, Japan,
and other Asian countries will be highly conflictual, and a major
war could occur if the United States challenges China's rise as
the hegemonic power in Asia.
Under these conditions, the Confucian-lslamic connection will
continue and perhaps broaden and deepen. Central to this connection
has been the cooperation of Muslim and Sinic societies opposing
the West on weapons proliferation, human rights, and other issues.
At its core have been the close relations among Pakistan, Iran,
and China, which crystallized in the 1990s with the visits of
President Yang Shangkun to Iran and Pakistan and of President
Rafsanjani to Pakistan and China. These "pointed to the emergence
of an embryonic alliance between Pakistan, Iran, and China."
On his way to China, Rafsanjani declared in lslamabad that "a
strategic alliance" existed between Iran and Pakistan and
that an attack on Pakistan would be considered an attack on Iran.
Reinforcing this pattern, Benazir Bhutto visited Iran and China
immediately after becoming prime minister in October 1993. The
cooperation among the three countries has included regular exchanges
among political, military, and bureaucratic officials and joint
efforts in a variety of civil and military areas including defense
production, in addition to the weapons transfers from China to
the other states. The development of this relationship has been
strongly supported by those in Pakistan belonging to the "independence"
and "Muslim" schools of thought on foreign policy who
looked forward to a "Tehran-lslamabad-Beijing axis,"
while in Tehran it was argued that the "distinctive nature
of the contemporary world" required "close and consistent
cooperation" among Iran, China, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan.
By the mid-1990s something like a de facto alliance had come into
existence among the three countries rooted in opposition to the
West, security concerns over India, and the desire to counter
Turkish and Russian influence in Central Asia.
Are these three states likely to become the core of a broader
grouping involving other Muslim and Asian countries? An informal
"Confucian-lslamist alliance," Graham Fuller argues,
"could materialize, not because Muhammad and Confucius are
anti-West but because these cultures offer a vehicle for the expression
of grievances for which the West is partly blamed-a West whose
political, military, economic and cultural dominance increasingly
rankles in a world where states feel 'they don't have to take
it anymore.' '; The most passionate call for such cooperation
came from Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi, who in March 1994 declared:
The new world order means that Jews and Christians control
Muslims and if they can, they will after that dominate Confucianism
and other religions in India, China, and Japan....
What the Christians and Jews are now saying: We were determined
to crush Communism and the West must now crush Islam and Confucianism.
Now we hope to see a confrontation between China that heads
the Confucianist camp and America that heads the Christian crusader
camp. We have no justifications but to be biased against the crusaders.
We are standing with Confucianism, and by allying ourselves with
it and fighting alongside it in one international front, we will
eliminate our mutual opponent.
So, we as Muslims, will support China in its struggle against
our mutual enemy....
We wish China victory....
p303
Civilizations grow, [Carroll] Quigley argued in 1961, because
they have an "instrument of expansion," that is, a military,
religious, political, or economic organization that accumulates
surplus and invests it in productive innovations. Civilizations
decline when they stop the "application of surplus to new
ways of doing things. In modern terms we say that the rate of
investment decreases. This happens because the social groups controlling
the surplus have a vested interest in using it for "nonproductive
but ego-satisfying purposes. . . which distribute the surpluses
to consumption but do not provide more effective methods of production."
People live off their capital and the civilization moves from
the stage of the universal state to the stage of decay. This is
a period of
acute economic depression, declining standards of living,
civil wars between the various vested interests, and growing illiteracy.
The society grows weaker and weaker. Vain efforts are made to
stop the wastage by legislation. But the decline continues. The
religious, intellectual, social, and political levels of the society
began to lose the allegiance of the masses of the people on a
large scale. New religious movements begin to sweep over the society.
There is a growing reluctance to fight for the society or even
to support it by paying taxes.
p305
A more immediate and dangerous challenge exists in the United
States. Historically American national identity has been defined
culturally by the heritage of Western civilization and politically
by the principles of the American Creed on which Americans overwhelmingly
agree: liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the
law, constitutionalism, private property. In the twentieth century
both components of American identity have come under concentrated
and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of
intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism
they have attacked the identification of the United States with
Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American
culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural
identities and groupings. They have denounced, in the words of
one of their reports, the "systematic bias toward European
culture and its derivatives" in education and "the dominance
of the European-American monocultural perspective." The multiculturalists
are, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., said, "very often ethnocentric
separatists who see little in the Western heritage other than
Western crimes." Their "mood is one of divesting Americans
of the sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions
from non-Western cultures."
The multicultural trend was also manifested in a variety of
legislation that followed the civil rights acts of the 1960s,
and in the 1990s the Clinton administration made the encouragement
of diversity one of its major goals. The contrast with the past
is striking. The Founding Fathers saw diversity as a reality and
as a problem: hence the national motto, e pluribus unum, chosen
by a committee of the Continental Congress consisting of Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Later political leaders
who also were fearful of the dangers of racial, sectional, ethnic,
economic, and cultural diversity (which, indeed, produced the
largest war of the century between 1815 and 1914), responded to
the call of "bring us together," and made the promotion
of national unity their central responsibility. "The one
absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing
all possibility of its continuing as a nation at all," warned
Theodore Roosevelt, "would be to permit it to become a tangle
of squabbling nationalities." In the 1990s, however, the
leaders of the United States have not only permitted that but
assiduously promoted the diversity rather than the unity of the
people they govern.
... The multiculturalists also challenged a central element
of the American Creed, by substituting for the rights of individuals
the rights of groups, defined largely in terms of race, ethnicity,
sex, and sexual preference. The Creed, Gunnar Myrdal said in the
1940s, reinforcing the comments of foreign observers dating from
Hector St. John de Crevecocur and Alexis de Tocqueville, has been
"the cement in the structure of this great and disparate
nation." "It has been our fate as a nation," Richard
Hofstader agreed, "not to have ideologies but to be one."
What happens then to the United States if that ideology is disavowed
by a significant portion of its citizens? The fate of the Soviet
Union, the other major country whose unity, even more than that
of the United States, was defined in ideological terms is a sobering
example for Americans. "[T]he total failure of Marxism .
. . and the dramatic breakup of the Soviet Union," the Japanese
philosopher Takeshi Umehara has suggested, "are only the
precursors to the collapse of Western liberalism, the main current
of modernity. Far from being the alternative to Marxism and the
reigning ideology at the end of history, liberalism will be the
next domino to fall." In an era in which peoples everywhere
define themselves in cultural terms what place is there for a
society without a cultural core and defined only by a political
creed? Political principles are a fickle base on which to build
a lasting community. In a multicivilizational world where culture
counts, the United States could be simply the last anomalous holdover
from a fading Western world where ideology counted.
Rejection of the Creed and of Western civilization means the
end of the United States of America as we have known it. It also
means effectively the end of Western civilization. If the United
States is de-Westernized, the West is reduced to Europe and a
few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. Without
the United States the West becomes a minuscule and declining part
of the world's population on a small and inconsequential peninsula
at the extremity of the Eurasian land mass.
The clash between the multiculturalists and the defenders
of Western civilization and the American Creed is, in James Kurth's
phrase, "the real clash" within the American segment
of Western civilization. Americans cannot avoid the issue: Are
we a Western people or are we something else? The futures of the
United States and of the West depend upon Americans reaffirming
their commitment to Western civilization. Domestically this means
rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism. Internationally
it means rejecting the elusive and illusory calI to identify the
United States with Asia. Whatever economic connections may exist
between them, the fundamental cultural gap between Asian and American
societies precludes their joining together in a common home. Americans
are culturally part of the Western family, multiculturalists may
damage and even destroy that relationship but they cannot replace
it. When Americans look for their cultural roots, they find them
in Europe.
p310
Culture, as we have argued, follows power. If non-Western societies
are once again to be shaped by Western culture, it will happen
only as a result of the expansion, deployment, and impact of Western
power. Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universals.
In addition, as a maturing civilization, the West no longer has
the economic or demographic dynamism required to impose its will
on other societies and any effort to do so is also contrary to
the Western values of self-determination and democracy. As Asian
and Muslim civilizations begin more and more to assert the universal
relevance of their cultures, Westerners will come to appreciate
more and more the connection between universals and imperialism.
Western universals is dangerous to the world because it could
lead to a major intercivilizational war between core states and
it is dangerous to the West because it could lead to defeat of
the West. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Westerners see
their civilization in a position of unparalleled dominance, while
at the same time weaker Asian, Muslim, and other societies are
beginning to gain strength.
... All civilizations go though similar processes of emergence,
rise, and decline. The West differs from other civilizations not
in the way it has developed but in the distinctive character of
its values and institutions. These include most notably its Christianity,
pluralism, individualism, and rule of law, which made it possible
for the West to invent modernity, expand throughout the world,
and become the envy of other societies. In their ensemble these
characteristics are peculiar to the West. Europe, as Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr., has said, is "the source-the unique source
of the "ideas of individual liberty, political democracy,
the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom.... These
are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern
ideas, except by adoption." They make Western civilization
unique, and Western civilization is valuable not because it is
universal but because it is unique. The principal responsibility
of Western leaders, consequently, is not to attempt to reshape
other civilizations m the image of the West, which is beyond their
declining power, but to preserve, protect, and renew the unique
qualities of Western civilization. Because it is the most powerful
Western country, that responsibility falls overwhelmingly on the
United States of America.
To preserve Western civilization in the face of declining
Western power, it is in the interest of the United States and
European countries:
* to achieve greater political, economic, and military integration
and to coordinate their policies so as to preclude states from
other civilizations exploiting differences among them;
* to incorporate into the European Union and NATO the Western
states of Central Europe that is, the Visegrad countries, the
Baltic republics, Slovenia, and Croatia;
* to encourage the "Westernization" of Latin America
and, as far as possible, the close alignment of Latin American
countries with the West;
* to restrain the development of the conventional and unconventional
military power of Islamic and Sinic countries;
* to slow the drift of Japan away from the West and toward
accommodation with China;
* to accept Russia as the core state of Orthodoxy and a major
regional power with legitimate interests in the security of its
southern borders;
* to maintain Western technological and military superiority
over other civilizations;
* and, most important, to recognize that Western intervention
in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most
dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict
in a multicivilizational world.
In the aftermath of the Cold War the United States became
consumed with massive debates over the proper course of American
foreign policy. In this era, however, the United States can neither
dominate nor escape the world. Neither internationalism nor isolationism,
neither multilateralism nor unilateralism, will best serve its
interests. Those will best be advanced by eschewing these opposing
extremes and instead adopting an Atlanticist policy of close cooperation
with its European partners to protect and advance the interests
and values of the unique civilization they share.
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