The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (23 page)

While ASEAN moved slowly, the yen bloc remained a dream, Japan wavered, and the EAEC did not get off the ground, economic interaction in East Asia nonetheless increased dramatically. This expansion was rooted in the cultural ties among East Asian Chinese communities. These ties gave rise to “continuing informal integration” of a Chinese-based international economy, comparable in many respects to the Hanseatic League, and “perhaps leading to a de facto Chinese common market”
[9]
(see pp.
168
-
74
). In East Asia, as elsewhere, cultural commonality has been the prerequisite to meaningful economic integration.

The end of the Cold War stimulated efforts to create new and to revive old regional economic organizations. The success of these efforts has depended overwhelmingly on the cultural homogeneity of the states involved. Shimon Peres’ 1994 plan for a Middle East common market is likely to remain a “desert mirage” for some while to come: “The Arab world,” one Arab official commented, “is not in need of an institution or a development bank in which Israel participates.”
[10]
The Association of Caribbean States, created in 1994 to link CARICOM to Haiti and the Spanish-speaking countries of the region, shows little signs of overcoming the linguistic and cultural differences of its diverse membership and the insularity of the former British colonies and their overwhelming orientation toward the United States.
[11]
Efforts involving more culturally homogeneous organizations, on the other hand, were making progress. Although divided along subcivilizational lines, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey in 1985 revived the moribund Regional Cooperation for Development which they had established in 1977, renaming it the Economic Cooperation Organi
_p. 134
zation. Agreements were subsequently reached on tariff reductions and a variety of other measures, and in 1992 ECO membership was expanded to include Afghanistan and the six Muslim former Soviet republics. Meanwhile, the five Central Asian former Soviet republics in 1991 agreed in principle to create a common market, and in 1994 the two largest states, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan signed an agreement to allow the “free circulation of goods, services and capital” and to coordinate their fiscal, monetary, and tariff policies. In 1991 Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay joined together in Mercosur with the goal of leapfrogging the normal stages of economic integration, and by 1995 a partial customs union was in place. In 1990 the previously stagnant Central American Common Market established a free trade area, and in 1994 the formerly equally passive Andean Group created a custom union. In 1992 the Visegrad countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) agreed to establish a Central European Free Trade Area and in 1994 speeded up the timetable for its realization.
[12]

Trade expansion follows economic integration, and during the 1980s and early 1990s intraregional trade became increasingly more important relative to interregional trade. Trade within the European Community constituted 50.6 percent of the community’s total trade in 1980 and grew to 58.9 percent by 1989. Similar shifts toward regional trade occurred in North America and East Asia. In Latin America, the creation of Mercosur and the revival of the Andean Pact stimulated an upsurge in intra-Latin American trade in the early 1990s, with trade between Brazil and Argentina tripling and Colombia-Venezuela trade quadrupling between 1990 and 1993. In 1994 Brazil replaced the United States as Argentina’s principal trading partner. The creation of NAFTA was similarly accompanied by a significant increase in Mexican-U.S. trade. Trade within East Asia also expanded more rapidly than extraregional trade, but its expansion was hampered by Japan’s tendency to keep its markets closed. Trade among the countries of the Chinese cultural zone (ASEAN, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and China), on the other hand, increased from less than 20 percent of their total in 1970 to almost 30 percent of their total in 1992, while Japan’s share of their trade declined from 23 percent to 13 percent. In 1992 Chinese zone exports to other zone countries exceeded both their exports to the United States and their combined exports to Japan and the European Community.
[13]

As a society and civilization unique to itself, Japan faces difficulties developing its economic ties with East Asia and dealing with its economic differences with the United States and Europe. However strong the trade and investment links Japan may forge with other East Asian countries, its cultural differences from those countries, and particularly from their largely Chinese economic elites, preclude it from creating a Japanese-led regional economic grouping comparable to NAFTA or the European Union. At the same time, its cultural differences with the West exacerbate misunderstanding and antagonism in its
_p. 135
economic relations with the United States and Europe. If, as seems to be the case, economic integration depends on cultural commonality, Japan as a culturally lone country could have an economically lonely future.

In the past the patterns of trade among nations have followed and paralleled the patterns of alliance among nations.
[14]
In the emerging world, patterns of trade will be decisively influenced by the patterns of culture. Businessmen make deals with people they can understand and trust; states surrender sovereignty to international associations composed of like-minded states they understand and trust. The roots of economic cooperation are in cultural commonality.

In the Cold War, countries related to the two superpowers as allies, satellites, clients, neutrals, and nonaligned. In the post-Cold War world, countries relate to civilizations as
member states
,
core states
,
lone countries
,
cleft countries
, and
torn countries
. Like tribes and nations, civilizations have political structures. A
member state
is a country fully identified culturally with one civilization, as Egypt is with Arab-Islamic civilization and Italy is with European-Western civilization. A civilization may also include people who share in and identify with its culture, but who live in states dominated by members of another civilization. Civilizations usually have one or more places viewed by their members as the principal source or sources of the civilization’s culture. These sources are often located within the
core state
or states of the civilization, that is, its most powerful and culturally central state or states.

The number and role of core states vary from civilization to civilization and may change over time. Japanese civilization is virtually identical with the single Japanese core state. Sinic, Orthodox, and Hindu civilizations each have one overwhelmingly dominant core state, other member states, and people affiliated with their civilization in states dominated by people of a different civilization (overseas Chinese, “near abroad” Russians, Sri Lankan Tamils). Historically the West has usually had several core states; it has now two cores, the United States and a Franco-German core in Europe, with Britain an additional center of power adrift between them. Islam, Latin America, and Africa lack core states. This is in part due to the imperialism of the Western powers, which divided among themselves Africa, the Middle East, and in earlier centuries and less decisively, Latin America.

The absence of an Islamic core state poses major problems for both Muslim and non-Muslim societies, which are discussed in
chapter 7
. With respect to Latin America, conceivably Spain could have become the core state of a Spanish-speaking or even Iberian civilization but its leaders consciously chose to become a member state in European civilization, while at the same time maintaining cultural links with its former colonies. Size, resources, population,
_p. 136
military and economic capacity, qualify Brazil to be the leader of Latin America, and conceivably it could become that. Brazil, however, is to Latin America what Iran is to Islam. Otherwise well-qualified to be a core state, subcivilizational differences (religious with Iran, linguistic with Brazil) make it difficult for it to assume that role. Latin America thus has several states, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina, which cooperate in and compete for leadership. The Latin American situation is also complicated by the fact that Mexico has attempted to redefine itself from a Latin American to a North American identity and Chile and other states may follow. In the end, Latin American civilization could merge into and become one subvariant of a three-pronged Western civilization.

The ability of any potential core state to provide leadership to sub-Saharan Africa is limited by its division into French-speaking and English-speaking countries. For a while Côte d’Ivoire was the core state of French-speaking Africa. In considerable measure, however, the core state of French Africa has been France, which after independence maintained intimate economic, military, and political connections with its former colonies. The two African countries that are most qualified to become core states are both English-speaking. Size, resources, and location make Nigeria a potential core state, but its intercivilizational disunity, massive corruption, political instability, repressive government, and economic problems have severely limited its ability to perform this role, although it has done so on occasion. South Africa’s peaceful and negotiated transition from apartheid, its industrial strength, its higher level of economic development compared to other African countries, its military capability, its natural resources, and its sophisticated black and white political leadership all mark South Africa as clearly the leader of southern Africa, probably the leader of English Africa, and possibly the leader of all sub-Saharan Africa.

A
lone country
lacks cultural commonality with other societies. Ethiopia, for example, is culturally isolated by its predominant language, Amharic, written in the Ethiopic script; its predominant religion, Coptic Orthodoxy; its imperial history; and its religious differentiation from the largely Muslim surrounding peoples. While Haiti’s elite has traditionally relished its cultural ties to France, Haiti’s Creole language, Voodoo religion, revolutionary slave origins, and brutal history combine to make it a lone country. “Every nation is unique,” Sidney Mintz observed, but “Haiti is in a class by itself.” As a result, during the Haitian crisis of 1994, Latin American countries did not view Haiti as a Latin American problem and were unwilling to accept Haitian refugees although they took in Cuban ones. “[I]n Latin America,” as Panama’s president-elect put it, “Haiti is not recognized as a Latin American country. Haitians speak a different language. They have different ethnic roots, a different culture. They are very different altogether.” Haiti is equally separate from the English-speaking black countries of the Caribbean. Haitians, one commentator observed, are “just as
_p. 137
strange to someone from Grenada or Jamaica as they would be to someone from Iowa or Montana.” Haiti, “the neighbor nobody wants,” is truly a kinless country.
[15]

The most important lone country is Japan. No other country shares its distinct culture, and Japanese migrants are either not numerically significant in other countries or have assimilated to the cultures of those countries (e.g., Japanese-Americans). Japan’s loneliness is further enhanced by the fact that its culture is highly particularistic and does not involve a potentially universal religion (Christianity, Islam) or ideology (liberalism, communism) that could be exported to other societies and thus establish a cultural connection with people in those societies.

Almost all countries are heterogeneous in that they include two or more ethnic, racial, and religious groups. Many countries are divided in that the differences and conflicts among these groups play an important role in the politics of the country. The depth of this division usually varies over time. Deep divisions within a country can lead to massive violence or threaten the country’s existence. This latter threat and movements for autonomy or separation are most likely to arise when cultural differences coincide with differences in geographic location. If culture and geography do not coincide, they may be made to coincide through either genocide or forced migration.

Countries with distinct cultural groupings belonging to the same civilization may become deeply divided with separation either occurring (Czechoslovakia) or becoming a possibility (Canada). Deep divisions are, however, much more likely to emerge within a
cleft country
where large groups belong to different civilizations. Such divisions and the tensions that go with them often develop when a majority group belonging to one civilization attempts to define the state as its political instrument and to make its language, religion, and symbols those of the state, as Hindus, Sinhalese, and Muslims have attempted to do in India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia.

Cleft countries that territorially bestride the fault lines between civilizations face particular problems maintaining their unity. In Sudan, civil war has gone on for decades between the Muslim north and the largely Christian south. The same civilizational division has bedeviled Nigerian politics for a similar length of time and stimulated one major war of secession plus coups, rioting, and other violence. In Tanzania, the Christian animist mainland and Arab Muslim Zanzibar have drifted apart and in many respects become two separate countries, with Zanzibar in 1992 secretly joining the Organization of the Islamic Conference and then being induced by Tanzania to withdraw from it the following year.
[16]
The same Christian-Muslim division has generated tensions and conflicts in Kenya. On the horn of Africa, largely Christian Ethiopia and overwhelmingly Muslim Eritrea separated from each other in 1993. Ethiopia was left, however, with a substantial Muslim minority among its Oromo people. Other countries divided by civilizational fault lines include: India (Muslims
_p. 138
and Hindus), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists and Tamil Hindus), Malaysia and Singapore (Chinese and Malay Muslims), China (Han Chinese, Tibetan Buddhists, Turkic Muslims), Philippines (Christians and Muslims), and Indonesia (Muslims and Timorese Christians).