The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (27 page)

Third and most important, the elites of Asian countries have been even less receptive to Australia’s advances than European elites have been to Turkey’s. They have made it clear that if Australia wants to be part of Asia it must become truly Asian, which they think unlikely if not impossible. “The success of Australia’s integration with Asia,” one Indonesian official said, “depends on one thing—how far Asian states welcome the Australian intention. Australia’s acceptance in Asia depends on how well the government and people of Australia understand Asian culture and society.” Asians see a gap between Australia’s Asian rhetoric and its perversely Western reality. The Thais, according to one Australian diplomat, treat Australia’s insistence it is Asian with “bemused tolerance.”
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“[C]ulturally Australia is still European,” Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia declared in October 1994, “. . . we think it’s European,” and hence Australia should not be a member of the East Asian Economic Caucus. We Asians “are less prone to making outright criticism of other countries or passing judgment on them. But Australia, being European culturally, feels that it has a right to tell others what to do, what not to do, what is right, what is wrong. And then, of course, it is not compatible with the group. That is my reason [for opposing their membership in EAEC]. It is not the color of the skin, but the culture.”
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Asians, in short, are determined to exclude Australia from their club for the same reason that Europeans do Turkey: they are different from us. Prime Minister Keating liked to say that he was going to change Australia from “the odd man out to the odd man in” in Asia. That, however is an oxymoron: odd men don’t get in.

As Mahathir stated, culture and values are the basic obstacle to Australia’s joining Asia. Clashes regularly occur over the Australians’ commitment to
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democracy, human rights, a free press, and its protests over the violations of those rights by the governments of virtually all its neighbors. “The real problem for Australia in the region,” a senior Australian diplomat noted, “is not our flag, but the root social values. I suspect you won’t find any Australians who are willing to surrender any of those values to be accepted in the region.”
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Differences in character, style, and behavior are also pronounced. As Mahathir suggested, Asians generally pursue their goals with others in ways which are subtle, indirect, modulated, devious, nonjudgmental, nonmoralistic, and non-confrontational. Australians, in contrast, are the most direct, blunt, outspoken, some would say insensitive, people in the English-speaking world. This clash of cultures was most dramatically evident in Paul Keating’s own dealings with Asians. Keating embodied Australian national characteristics to an extreme. He has been described as “a pile driver of a politician” with a style that is “inherently provocative and pugnacious,” and he did not hesitate to denounce his political opponents as “scumbags,” “perfumed gigolos,” and “brain-damaged looney crims.”
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While arguing that Australia must be Asian, Keating regularly irritated, shocked, and antagonized Asian leaders by his brutal frankness. The gap between cultures was so large that it blinded the proponent of cultural convergence to the extent his own behavior repelled those whom he claimed as cultural brethren.

The Keating-Evans choice could be viewed as the shortsighted result of overweighting economic factors and ignoring rather than renewing the country’s culture, and as a tactical political ploy to distract attention from Australia’s economic problems. Alternatively, it could be seen as a farsighted initiative designed to join Australia to and identify Australia with the rising centers of economic, political, and eventually military power in East Asia. In this respect, Australia could be the first of possibly many Western countries to attempt to defect from the West and bandwagon with rising non-Western civilizations. At the beginning of the twenty-second century, historians might look back on the Keating-Evans choice as a major marker in the decline of the West. If that choice is pursued, however, it will not eliminate Australia’s Western heritage, and “the lucky country” will be a permanently torn country, both the “branch office of empire,” which Paul Keating decried, and the “new white trash of Asia,” which Lee Kuan Yew contemptuously termed it.
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This was not and is not an unavoidable fate for Australia. Accepting their desire to break with Britain, instead of defining Australia as an Asian power, Australia’s leaders could define it as a Pacific country, as, indeed, Keating’s predecessor as prime minister, Robert Hawke, attempted to do. If Australia wishes to make itself a republic separated from the British crown, it could align itself with the first country in the world to do that, a country which like Australia is of British origin, is an immigrant country, is of continental size, speaks English, has been an ally in three wars, and has an overwhelmingly European, if also like Australia increasingly Asian, population. Culturally, the
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values of the July 4th 1776 Declaration of Independence accord far more with Australian values than do those of any Asian country. Economically, instead of attempting to batter its way into a group of societies from which it is culturally alien and who for that reason reject it, Australia’s leaders could propose expanding NAFTA into a North American-South Pacific (NASP) arrangement including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Such a grouping would reconcile culture and economics and provide a solid and enduring identity for Australia that will not come from futile efforts to make Australia Asian.

While Australia’s leaders embarked on a quest for Asia, those of other torn countries—Turkey, Mexico, Russia—attempted to incorporate the West into their societies and to incorporate their societies into the West. Their experience strongly demonstrates, however, the strength, resilience, and viscosity of indigenous cultures and their ability to renew themselves and to resist, contain, and adapt Western imports. While the rejectionist response to the West is impossible, the Kemalist response has been unsuccessful. If non-Western societies are to modernize, they must do it their own way not the Western way and, emulating Japan, build upon and employ their own traditions, institutions, and values.

Political leaders imbued with the hubris to think that they can fundamentally reshape the culture of their societies are destined to fail. While they can introduce elements of Western culture, they are unable permanently to suppress or to eliminate the core elements of their indigenous culture. Conversely, the Western virus, once it is lodged in another society, is difficult to expunge. The virus persists but is not fatal; the patient survives but is never whole. Political leaders can make history but they cannot escape history. They produce torn countries; they do not create Western societies. They infect their country with a cultural schizophrenia which becomes its continuing and defining characteristic.

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I
n the emerging global politics, the core states of the major civilizations are supplanting the two Cold War superpowers as the principal poles of attraction and repulsion for other countries. These changes are most clearly visible with respect to Western, Orthodox, and Sinic civilizations. In these cases civilizational groupings are emerging involving core states, member states, culturally similar minority populations in adjoining states, and, more controversially, peoples of other cultures in neighboring states. States in these civilizational blocs often tend to be distributed in concentric circles around the core state or states, reflecting their degree of identification with and integration into that bloc. Lacking a recognized core state, Islam is intensifying its common consciousness but so far has developed only a rudimentary common political structure.

Countries tend to bandwagon with countries of similar culture and to balance against countries with which they lack cultural commonality. This is particularly true with respect to the core states. Their power attracts those who are culturally similar and repels those who are culturally different. For security reasons core states may attempt to incorporate or to dominate some peoples of other civilizations, who, in turn, attempt to resist or to escape such control (China vs. Tibetans and Uighurs; Russia vs. Tatars, Chechens, Central Asian Muslims). Historical relationships and balance of power considerations also lead some countries to resist the influence of their core state. Both Georgia and Russia are Orthodox countries, but the Georgians historically have resisted Russian domination and close association with Russia. Vietnam and China are
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both Confucian countries, yet a comparable pattern of historical enmity has existed between them. Over time, however, cultural commonality and development of a broader and stronger civilizational consciousness could bring these countries together, as Western European countries have come together.

During the Cold War, what order there was was the product of superpower dominance of their two blocs and superpower influence in the Third World. In the emerging world, global power is obsolete, global community a distant dream. No country, including the United States, has significant global security interests. The components of order in today’s more complex and heterogeneous world are found within and between civilizations. The world will be ordered on the basis of civilizations or not at all. In this world the core states of civilizations are sources of order within civilizations and, through negotiations with other core states, between civilizations.

A world in which core states play a leading or dominating role is a spheres-of-influence world. But it is also a world in which the exercise of influence by the core state is tempered and moderated by the common culture it shares with member states of its civilization. Cultural commonality legitimates the leadership and order-imposing role of the core state for both member states and for the external powers and institutions. It is thus futile to do as U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali did in 1994 and promulgate a rule of “sphere of influence keeping” that no more than one-third of the U.N. peacekeeping force should be provided by the dominant regional power. Such a requirement defies the geopolitical reality that in any given region where there is a dominant state peace can be achieved and maintained only through the leadership of that state. The United Nations is no alternative to regional power, and regional power becomes responsible and legitimate when exercised by core states in relation to other members of their civilization.

A core state can perform its ordering function because member states perceive it as cultural kin. A civilization is an extended family and, like older members of a family, core states provide their relatives with both support and discipline. In the absence of that kinship, the ability of a more powerful state to resolve conflicts in and impose order on its region is limited. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and even Sri Lanka will not accept India as the order provider in South Asia and no other East Asian state will accept Japan in that role in East Asia.

When civilizations lack core states the problems of creating order within civilizations or negotiating order between civilizations become more difficult. The absence of an Islamic core state which could legitimately and authoritatively relate to the Bosnians, as Russia did to the Serbs and Germany to the Croats, impelled the United States to attempt that role. Its ineffectiveness in doing so derived from the lack of American strategic interest in where state boundaries were drawn in the former Yugoslavia, the absence of any cultural connection between the United States and Bosnia, and European opposition
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to the creation of a Muslim state in Europe. The absence of core states in both Africa and the Arab world has greatly complicated efforts to resolve the ongoing civil war in Sudan. Where core states exist, on the other hand, they are the central elements of the new international order based on civilizations.

During the Cold War the United States was at the center of a large, diverse, multicivilizational grouping of countries who shared the goal of preventing further expansion by the Soviet Union. This grouping, variously known as the “Free World,” the “West,” or the “Allies,” included many but not all Western societies, Turkey, Greece, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Israel, and, more loosely, other countries such as Taiwan, Thailand, and Pakistan. It was opposed by a grouping of countries only slightly less heterogeneous, which included all the Orthodox countries except Greece, several countries that were historically Western, Vietnam, Cuba, to a lesser degree India, and at times one or more African countries. With the end of the Cold War these multicivilizational, cross-cultural groupings fragmented. The dissolution of the Soviet system, particularly the Warsaw Pact, was dramatic. More slowly but similarly the multicivilizational “Free World” of the Cold War is being reconfigured into a new grouping more or less coextensive with Western civilization. A bounding process is underway involving the definition of the membership of Western international organizations.

The core states of the European Union, France and Germany, are circled first by an inner grouping of Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg, all of which have agreed to eliminate all barriers to the transit of goods and persons; then other member countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Britain, Ireland, and Greece; states which became members in 1995 (Austria, Finland, Sweden); and those countries which as of that date were associate members (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania). Reflecting this reality, in the fall of 1994 both the governing party in Germany and top French officials advanced proposals for a differentiated Union. The German plan proposed that the “hard core” consist of the original members minus Italy and that “Germany and France form the core of the hard core.” The hard core countries would rapidly attempt to establish a monetary union and to integrate their foreign and defense policies. Almost simultaneously French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur suggested a three-tier Union with the five pro-integrationist states forming the core, the other current member states forming a second circle, and the new states on the way to becoming members constituting an outer circle. Subsequently French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé elaborated this concept proposing “an outer circle of ‘partner’ states, including Eastern and Central Europe; a middle circle of member states that would be required to accept common disciplines in certain fields (single
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market, customs union, etc.); and several inner circles of ‘reinforced solidarities’ incorporating those willing and able to move faster than others in such areas as defense, monetary integration, foreign policy and so on.”
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Other political leaders proposed other types of arrangements, all of which, however, involved an inner grouping of more closely associated states and then outer groupings of states less fully integrated with the core state until the line is reached separating members from nonmembers.