The Clash of Civilizations
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.
US and Third World
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