The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (24 page)

The divisive effect of civilizational fault lines has been most notable in those cleft countries held together during the Cold War by authoritarian communist regimes legitimated by Marxist-Leninist ideology. With the collapse of communism, culture replaced ideology as the magnet of attraction and repulsion, and Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union came apart and divided into new entities grouped along civilizational lines: Baltic (Protestant and Catholic), Orthodox, and Muslim republics in the former Soviet Union; Catholic Slovenia and Croatia; partially Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina; and Orthodox Serbia-Montenegro and Macedonia in the former Yugoslavia. Where these successor entities still encompassed multicivilizational groups, second-stage divisions manifested themselves. Bosnia-Herzegovina was divided by war into Serbian, Muslim, and Croatian sections, and Serbs and Croats fought each other in Croatia. The sustained peaceful position of Albanian Muslim Kosovo within Slavic Orthodox Serbia is highly uncertain, and tensions rose between the Albanian Muslim minority and the Slavic Orthodox majority in Macedonia. Many former Soviet republics also bestride civilizational fault lines, in part because the Soviet government shaped boundaries so as to create divided republics, Russian Crimea going to Ukraine, Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan. Russia has several, relatively small, Muslim minorities, most notably in the North Caucasus and the Volga region. Estonia, Latvia, and Kazakhstan have substantial Russian minorities, also produced in considerable measure by Soviet policy. Ukraine is divided between the Uniate nationalist Ukrainian-speaking west and the Orthodox Russian-speaking east.

In a cleft country major groups from two or more civilizations say, in effect, “We are different peoples and belong in different places.” The forces of repulsion drive them apart and they gravitate toward civilizational magnets in other societies. A
torn country
,
in contrast, has a single predominant culture which places it in one civilization but its leaders want to shift it to another civilization. They say, in effect, “We are one people and belong together in one place but we want to change that place.” Unlike the people of cleft countries, the people of torn countries agree on who they are but disagree on which civilization is properly their civilization. Typically, a significant portion of the leaders embrace a Kemalist strategy and decide their society should reject its non-Western culture and institutions, should join the West, and should both modernize and Westernize. Russia has been a torn country since Peter the Great, divided over the issue of whether it is part of Western civilization or is the core of a distinct Eurasian Orthodox civilization. Mustafa Kemal’s country is, of course, the classic torn country which since the 1920s has been trying to modernize, to Westernize, and to become part of the West. After almost two centuries of
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Mexico defining itself as a Latin American country in opposition to the United States, its leaders in the 1980s made their country a torn country by attempting to redefine it as a North American society. Australia’s leaders in the 1990s, in contrast, are trying to delink their country from the West and make it a part of Asia, thereby creating a torn-country-in-reverse. Torn countries are identifiable by two phenomena. Their leaders refer to them as a “bridge” between two cultures, and observers describe them as Janus-faced. “Russia looks West—and East”; “Turkey: East, West, which is best?”; “Australian nationalism: Divided loyalties”; are typical headlines highlighting torn country identity problems.
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For a torn country successfully to redefine its civilizational identity, at least three requirements must be met. First, the political and economic elite of the country has to be generally supportive of and enthusiastic about this move. Second, the public has to be at least willing to acquiesce in the redefinition of identity. Third, the dominant elements in the host civilization, in most cases the West, have to be willing to embrace the convert. The process of identity redefinition will be prolonged, interrupted, and painful, politically, socially, institutionally, and culturally. It also to date has failed.

In the 1990s Mexico had been a torn country for several years and Turkey for several decades. Russia, in contrast, has been a torn country for several centuries, and unlike Mexico or republican Turkey, it is also the core state of a major civilization. If Turkey or Mexico successfully redefined themselves as members of Western civilization, the effect on Islamic or Latin American civilization would be minor or moderate. If Russia became Western, Orthodox civilization ceases to exist. The collapse of the Soviet Union rekindled among Russians debate on the central issue of Russia and the West.

Russia’s relations with Western civilization have evolved through four phases. In the first phase, which lasted down to the reign of Peter the Great (1689-1725), Kievan Rus and Muscovy existed separately from the West and had little contact with Western European societies. Russian civilization developed as an offspring of Byzantine civilization and then for two hundred years, from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries, Russia was under Mongol suzerainty. Russia had no or little exposure to the defining historical phenomena of Western civilization: Roman Catholicism, feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, overseas expansion and colonization, the Enlightenment, and the emergence of the nation state. Seven of the eight previously identified distinctive features of Western civilization—religion, languages, separation of church and state, rule of law, social pluralism, representative bodies, individualism—were almost totally absent from the Russian experience. The only possible exception is the Classical legacy, which, however, came to Russia via Byzan
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tium and hence was quite different from that which came to the West directly from Rome. Russian civilization was a product of its indigenous roots in Kievan Rus and Moscovy, substantial Byzantine impact, and prolonged Mongol rule. These influences shaped a society and a culture which had little resemblance to those developed in Western Europe under the influence of very different forces.

At the end of the seventeenth century Russia was not only different from Europe, it was also backward compared to Europe, as Peter the Great learned during his European tour in 1697-1698. He became determined both to modernize and to Westernize his country. To make his people look European, the first thing Peter did on returning to Moscow was to shave the beards of his nobles and ban their long gowns and conical hats. Although Peter did not abolish the Cyrillic alphabet he did reform and simplify it and introduce Western words and phrases. He gave top priority, however, to the development and modernization of Russia’s military forces: creating a navy, introducing conscription, building defense industries, establishing technical schools, sending people to the West to study, and importing from the West the latest knowledge concerning weapons, ships and shipbuilding, navigation, bureaucratic administration, and other subjects essential to military effectiveness. To provide for these innovations, he drastically reformed and expanded the tax system and also, toward the end of his reign, reorganized the structure of government. Determined to make Russia not only a European power but also a power in Europe, he abandoned Moscow, created a new capital at St. Petersburg, and launched the Great Northern War against Sweden in order to establish Russia as the predominant force in the Baltic and to create a presence in Europe.

In attempting to make his country modern and Western, however, Peter also reinforced Russia’s Asiatic characteristics by perfecting despotism and eliminating any potential source of social or political pluralism. Russian nobility had never been powerful. Peter reduced them still further, expanding the service nobility, and establishing a Table of Ranks based on merit, not birth or social position. Noblemen like peasants were conscripted into the service of the state, forming the “cringing aristocracy” that later infuriated Custine.
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The autonomy of the serfs was further restricted as they were bound more firmly to both their land and their master. The Orthodox Church, which had always been under broad state control, was reorganized and placed under a synod directly appointed by the tsar. The tsar was also given power to appoint his successor without reference to the prevailing practices of inheritance. With these changes, Peter initiated and exemplified the close connection in Russia between modernization and Westernization, on the one hand, and despotism, on the other. Following this Petrine model, Lenin, Stalin, and to a lesser degree Catherine II and Alexander II, also tried in varying ways to modernize and Westernize Russia and strengthen autocratic power. At least until the 1980s, the democratizers in Russia were usually Westernizers, but the Westernizers
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were not democratizes. The lesson of Russian history is that the centralization of power is the prerequisite to social and economic reform. In the late 1980s associates of Gorbachev lamented their failure to appreciate this fact in decrying the obstacles which
glasnost
had created for economic liberalization.

Peter was more successful making Russia part of Europe than making Europe part of Russia. In contrast to the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire came to be accepted as a major and legitimate participant in the European international system. At home Peter’s reforms brought some changes but his society remained hybrid: apart from a small elite, Asiatic and Byzantine ways, institutions, and beliefs predominated in Russian society and were perceived to do so by both Europeans and Russians. “Scratch a Russian,” de Maistre observed, “and you wound a Tatar.” Peter created a torn country, and during the nineteenth century Slavophiles and Westernizers jointly lamented this unhappy state and vigorously disagreed on whether to end it by becoming thoroughly Europeanized or by eliminating European influences and returning to the true soul of Russia. A Westernizer like Chaadayev argued that the “sun is the sun of the West” and Russia must use this light to illuminate and to change its inherited institutions. A Slavophile like Danilevskiy, in words that were also heard in the 1990s, denounced Europeanizing efforts as “distorting the people’s life and replacing its forms with alien, foreign forms,” “borrowing foreign institutions and transplanting them to Russian soil,” and “regarding both domestic and foreign relations and questions of Russian life from a foreign, European viewpoint, viewing them, as it were, through a glass fashioned to a European angle of refraction.”
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In subsequent Russian history Peter became the hero of Westernizers and the satan of their opponents, represented at the extreme by the Eurasians of the 1920s who denounced him as a traitor and hailed the Bolsheviks for rejecting Westernization, challenging Europe, and moving the capital back to Moscow.

The Bolshevik Revolution initiated a third phase in the relationship between Russia and the West very different from the ambivalent one that had existed for two centuries. It created a political-economic system which could not exist in the West in the name of an ideology which was created in the West. The Slavophiles and Westernizers had debated whether Russia could be different from the West without being backward compared to the West. Communism brilliantly resolved this issue: Russia was different from and fundamentally opposed to the West because it was more advanced than the West. It was taking the lead in the proletarian revolution which would eventually sweep across the world. Russia embodied not a backward Asiatic past but a progressive Soviet future. In effect, the Revolution enabled Russia to leapfrog the West, differentiating itself not because “you are different and we won’t become like you,” as the Slavophiles had argued, but because “we are different and eventually you will become like us,” as was the message of the Communist International.

Yet at the same time that communism enabled Soviet leaders to distinguish
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themselves from the West, it also created powerful ties to the West. Marx and Engels were German; most of the principal exponents of their views in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were Western European; by 1910 many labor unions and social democratic and labor parties in Western societies were committed to their ideology and were becoming increasingly influential in European politics. After the Bolshevik Revolution, left-wing parties split into communist and socialist parties, and both were often powerful forces in European countries. Throughout much of the West, the Marxist perspective prevailed: communism and socialism were seen as the wave of the future and were widely embraced in one way or another by political and intellectual elites. The debate in Russia between Slavophiles and Westernizers over the future of Russia was thus replaced by a debate in Europe between left and right over the future of the West and whether or not the Soviet Union epitomized that future. After World War II the power of the Soviet Union reinforced the appeal of communism both in the West and, more significantly, in those non-Western civilizations which were now reacting against the West. Elites in Western-dominated non-Western societies who wished to seduce the West talked in terms of self-determination and democracy; those who wished to confront the West invoked revolution and national liberation.

By adopting Western ideology and using it to challenge the West, Russians in a sense became closer to and more intimately involved with the West than at any previous time in their history. Although the ideologies of liberal democracy and communism differed greatly, both parties were, in a sense, speaking the same language. The collapse of communism and of the Soviet Union ended this political-ideological interaction between the West and Russia. The West hoped and believed the result would be the triumph of liberal democracy throughout the former Soviet empire. That, however, was not foreordained. As of 1995 the future of liberal democracy in Russia and the other Orthodox republics was uncertain. In addition, as the Russians stopped behaving like Marxists and began behaving like Russians, the gap between Russia and the West broadened. The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism was between ideologies which, despite their major differences, were both modern and secular and ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality, and material well-being. A Western democrat could carry on an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be impossible for him to do that with a Russian Orthodox nationalist.