The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (18 page)

By the late 1970s the failure of communism to produce economic development and the success of capitalism in Japan and increasingly in other Asian societies led new Chinese leadership to move away from the Soviet model. The collapse of the Soviet Union a decade later further underlined the failures of this import. The Chinese thus faced the issue of whether to turn Westward or to turn inward. Many intellectuals and some others advocated wholesale Westernization, a trend that reached its cultural and popular culminations in the television series
River Elegy
and the Goddess of Democracy erected in Tiananmen Square. This Western orientation, however, commanded the support of neither the few hundred people who counted in Beijing nor the 800 million peasants who lived in the countryside. Total Westernization was no more practical at the end of the twentieth century than it had been at the end of the nineteenth century. The leadership instead chose a new version of
Ti-Yong:
capitalism and involvement in the world economy, on the one hand, combined with political authoritarianism and recommitment to traditional Chinese culture, on the other. In place of the revolutionary legitimacy of
_p. 106
Marxist-Leninism, the regime substituted performance legitimacy provided by surging economic development and nationalist legitimacy provided by invocation of the distinctive characteristics of Chinese culture. “The post-Tiananmen regime,” one commentator observed, “has eagerly embraced Chinese nationalism as a new fount of legitimacy” and has consciously aroused anti-Americanism to justify its power and its behavior.
[4]
A Chinese cultural nationalism is thus emerging, epitomized in the words of one Hong Kong leader in 1994: “We Chinese feel nationalist which we never felt before. We are Chinese and feel proud in that.” In China itself in the early 1990s there developed a “popular desire to return to what is authentically Chinese, which often is patriarchal, nativistic, and authoritarian. Democracy, in this historical reemergence, is discredited, as is Leninism, as just another foreign imposition.”
[5]

In the early twentieth century Chinese intellectuals, independently paralleling Weber, identified Confucianism as the source of Chinese backwardness. In the late twentieth century, Chinese political leaders, paralleling Western social scientists, celebrate Confucianism as the source of Chinese progress. In the 1980s the Chinese government began to promote interest in Confucianism, with party leaders declaring it “the mainstream” of Chinese culture.
[6]
Confucianism also, of course, become an enthusiasm of Lee Kuan Yew, who saw it as a source of Singapore’s success and became a missionary of Confucian values to the rest of the world. In the 1990s the Taiwanese government declared itself to be “the inheritor of Confucian thought” and President Lee Teng-hui identified of roots of Taiwan’s democratization in its Chinese “cultural heritage” stretching back to Kao Yao (twenty-first century
B.C.
), Confucius (fifth century
B.C.
), and Mencius (third century
B.C.
).
[7]
Whether they wish to justify authoritarianism or democracy, Chinese leaders look for legitimation in their common Chinese culture not in imported Western concepts.

The nationalism promoted by the regime is Han nationalism, which helps to suppress the linguistic, regional, and economic differences among 90 percent of the Chinese population. At the same time, it also underlines the differences with the non-Chinese ethnic minorities that constitute less than 10 percent of China’s population but occupy 60 percent of its territory. It also provides a basis for the regime’s opposition to Christianity, Christian organizations, and Christian proselytizing, which offer an alternative Western faith to fill the void left by the collapse of Maoist-Leninism.

Meanwhile in Japan in the 1980s successful economic development contrasted with the perceived failures and “decline” of the American economy and social system led Japanese to become increasingly disenchanted with Western models and increasingly convinced that the sources of their success must lie within their own culture. The Japanese culture which produced military disaster in 1945 and hence had to be rejected had produced economic triumph by 1985 and hence could be embraced. The increased familiarity of Japanese with Western society led them to “realize that being Western is not magically wonderful in and of itself. They get that out of their system.” While the Japanese
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of the Meiji Restoration adopted a policy of “disengaging from Asia and joining Europe,” the Japanese of the late twentieth century cultural revival endorsed a policy of “distancing from America and engaging Asia.”
[8]
This trend involved, first, a reidentification with Japanese cultural traditions and renewed assertion of the values of those traditions, and second and more problematical, an effort to “Asianize” Japan and identify Japan, despite its distinctive civilization, with a general Asian culture. Given the extent to which after World War II Japan in contrast to China identified itself with the West and given the extent to which the West, whatever its failings, did not collapse totally as the Soviet Union did, the incentives for Japan to reject the West totally have been nowhere near as great as those for China to distance itself from both the Soviet and Western models. On the other hand, the uniqueness of Japanese civilization, the memories in other countries of Japanese imperialism, and the economic centrality of Chinese in most other Asian countries also mean that it will be easier for Japan to distance itself from the West than it will be for it to blend itself with Asia.
[9]
By reasserting its own cultural identity, Japan emphasizes its uniqueness and its differences from both Western and other Asian cultures.

While Chinese and Japanese found new value in their own cultures, they also shared in a broader reassertion of the value of Asian culture generally compared to that of the West. Industrialization and the growth that accompanied it produced in the 1980s and 1990s articulation by East Asians of what may be appropriately termed the Asian affirmation. This complex of attitudes has four major components.

First, Asians believe that East Asia will sustain its rapid economic development, will soon surpass the West in economic product, and hence will be increasingly powerful in world affairs compared to the West. Economic growth stimulates among Asian societies a sense of power and an affirmation of their ability to stand up to the West. “The days when the United States sneezed and Asia caught cold are over,” declared a leading Japanese journalist in 1993, and a Malaysian official added to the medical metaphor that “even a high fever in America will not make Asia cough.” Asians, another Asian leader said, are “at the end of the era of awe and the beginning of the era of talking back” in their relations with the United States. “Asia’s increasing prosperity,” Malaysia’s deputy prime minister asserted, “means that it is now in a position to offer serious alternatives to the dominant global political, social and economic arrangements.”
[10]
It also means, East Asians argue, that the West is rapidly losing its ability to make Asian societies conform to Western standards concerning human rights and other values.

Second, Asians believe this economic success is largely a product of Asian culture, which is superior to that of the West, which is culturally and socially decadent. During the heady days of the 1980s when the Japanese economy, exports, trade balance, and foreign exchange reserves were booming, the Japanese, like the Saudis before them, boasted of their new economic power, spoke contemptuously of the decline of the West, and attributed their success and
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Western failings to the superiority of their culture and the decadence of Western culture. In the early 1990s Asian triumphalism was articulated anew in what can only be described as the “Singaporean cultural offensive.” From Lee Kuan Yew on down, Singaporean leaders trumpeted the rise of Asia in relation to the West and contrasted the virtues of Asian, basically Confucian, culture responsible for this success—order, discipline, family responsibility, hard work, collectivism, abstemiousness—to the self-indulgence, sloth, individualism, crime, inferior education, disrespect for authority, and “mental ossification” responsible for the decline of the West. To compete with the East, it was argued, the United states “needs to question its fundamental assumptions about its social and political arrangements and, in the process, learn a thing or two from East Asian societies.”
[11]

For East Asians, East Asian success is particularly the result of the East Asian cultural stress on the collectivity rather than the individual. “[T]he more communitarian values and practices of the East Asians—the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, and the Singaporeans—have proved to be clear assets in the catching up process,” argued Lee Kuan Yew. “The values that East Asian culture upholds, such as the primacy of group interests over individual interests, support the total group effort necessary to develop rapidly.” “The work ethic of the Japanese and Koreans, consisting of discipline, loyalty, and diligence,” Malaysia’s prime minister agreed, “has served as the motive force for their respective countries’ economic and social development. This work ethic is born out of the philosophy that the group and the country are more important than the individual.”
[12]

Third, while recognizing the differences among Asian societies and civilizations, East Asians argue that there are also significant commonalities. Central among these, one Chinese dissident observed, is “the value system of Confucianism—honored by history and shared by most of the countries in the region,” particularly its emphasis on thrift, family, work, and discipline. Equally important is the shared rejection of individualism and the prevalence of “soft” authoritarianism or very limited forms of democracy. Asian societies have common interests vis-à-vis the West in defending these distinctive values and promoting their own economic interests. Asians argue that this requires the development of new forms of intra-Asian cooperation such as the expansion of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the creation of the East Asian Economic Caucus. While the immediate economic interest of East Asian societies is to maintain access to Western markets, in the longer term economic regionalism is likely to prevail and hence East Asia must increasingly promote intra-Asian trade and investment.
[13]
In particular, it is necessary for Japan, as the leader in Asian development, to move away from its historic “policy of de-Asianization and pro-Westernization” and to pursue “a path of re-Asianization” or, more broadly, to promote “the Asianization of Asia,” a path endorsed by Singaporean officials.
[14]

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Fourth, East Asians argue that Asian development and Asian values are models which other non-Western societies should emulate in their efforts to catch up with the West and which the West should adopt in order to renew itself. The “Anglo-Saxon developmental model, so revered over the past four decades as the best means of modernizing the economies of developing nations and of building a viable political system, isn’t working,” East Asians allege. The East Asian model is taking its place, as countries from Mexico and Chile to Iran and Turkey and the former Soviet republics now attempt to learn from its success, even as previous generations attempted to learn from Western success. Asia must “transmit to the rest of the world those Asian values that are of universal worth. . . . the transmission of this ideal means the export of the social system of Asia, East Asia in particular.” It is necessary for Japan and other Asian countries to promote “Pacific globalism,” to “globalize Asia,” and hence to “decisively shape the character of the new world order.”
[15]

Powerful societies are universalistic; weak societies are particularistic. The mounting self-confidence of East Asia has given rise to an emerging Asian universalism comparable to that which has been characteristic of the West. “Asian values are universal values. European values are European values,” declaimed Prime Minister Mahathir to the heads of European governments in 1996.
[16]
Along with this also comes an Asian “Occidentalism” portraying the West in much the same uniform and negative way which Western Orientalism allegedly once portrayed the East. To the East Asians economic prosperity is proof of moral superiority. If at some point India supplants East Asia as the world’s economically most rapidly developing area, the world should be prepared for extended disquisitions on the superiority of Hindu culture, the contributions of the caste system to economic development, and how by returning to its roots and overcoming the deadening Western legacy left by British imperialism, India finally achieved its proper place in the top rank of civilizations. Cultural assertion follows material success; hard power generates soft power.

While Asians became increasingly assertive as a result of economic development, Muslims in massive numbers were simultaneously turning toward Islam as a source of identity, meaning, stability, legitimacy, development, power, and hope, hope epitomized in the slogan “Islam is the solution.” This Islamic Resurgence
[F06]
in its extent and profundity is the latest phase in the adjustment
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of Islamic civilization to the West, an effort to find the “solution” not in Western ideologies but in Islam. It embodies acceptance of modernity, rejection of Western culture, and recommitment to Islam as the guide to life in the modern world. As a top Saudi official explained in 1994, “ ‘Foreign imports’ are nice as shiny or high-tech ‘things.’ But intangible social and political institutions imported from elsewhere can be deadly—ask the Shah of Iran. . . . Islam for us is not just a religion but a way of life. We Saudis want to modernize, but not necessarily Westernize.”
[17]

The Islamic Resurgence is the effort by Muslims to achieve this goal. It is a broad intellectual, cultural, social, and political movement prevalent throughout the Islamic world. Islamic “fundamentalism,” commonly conceived as political Islam, is only one component in the much more extensive revival of Islamic ideas, practices, and rhetoric and the rededication to Islam by Muslim populations. The Resurgence is mainstream not extremist, pervasive not isolated.