The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (31 page)

This movement toward accommodation was abruptly suspended in 1995 as the Taiwanese government aggressively pushed for diplomatic recognition and admission to international organizations. President Lee Teng-hui made a “private” visit to the United States, and Taiwan held legislative elections in December 1995 followed by presidential elections in March 1996. In response, the Chinese government tested missiles in waters close to the major Taiwanese ports and engaged in military exercises near Taiwanese-controlled offshore islands. These developments raised two key issues. For the present, can Taiwan remain democratic without becoming formally independent? In the future could Taiwan be democratic without remaining actually independent?

In effect the relations of Taiwan to the mainland have gone through two phases and could enter a third. For decades the Nationalist government claimed to be the government of all of China; this claim obviously meant conflict with the government that was in fact the government of all of China except Taiwan. In the 1980s the Taiwanese government dropped this pretension and defined itself as the government of Taiwan, which provided the basis for accommodation with the mainland concept of “one country, two systems.” Various individuals and groups in Taiwan, however, increasingly emphasized Taiwan’s separate cultural identity, its relatively brief period under Chinese rule, and its local language incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers. In effect, they were attempting to define Taiwanese society as non-Chinese and hence legitimately independent of China. In addition, as the Taiwan government became more active internationally, it, too, seemed to be suggesting that it was a separate country not part of China. In short, the Taiwan government’s self-definition appeared to evolve from government of all of China, to government of part of China, toward government of none of China. The latter position, formalizing its de facto independence, would be totally unacceptable to the Beijing government, which repeatedly affirmed its willingness to use force to prevent it from materializing. Chinese government leaders also stated that following incorporation into the PRC of Hong Kong in 1997 and Macao in 1999, they will move to reassociate Taiwan with the mainland. How this occurs depends, presumably, on the degree to which support for formal independence grows in Taiwan, the resolution of the succession struggle in Beijing which
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encourages political and military leaders to be strongly nationalist, and the development of Chinese military capabilities that would make feasible a blockade or invasion of Taiwan. Early in the twenty-first century it seems likely that through coercion, accommodation, or most likely a mixture of both Taiwan will become more closely integrated with mainland China.

Until the late 1970s relations between staunchly anticommunist Singapore and the People’s Republic were frosty, and Lee Kuan Yew and other Singaporean leaders were contemptuous of Chinese backwardness. As Chinese economic development took off in the 1980s, however, Singapore began to reorient itself toward the mainland in classic bandwagoning fashion. By 1992 Singapore had invested $1.9 billion in China, and the following year plans were announced to build an industrial township, “Singapore II,” outside Shanghai, that would involve billions of dollars of investment. Lee became an enthusiastic booster of China’s economic prospects and an admirer of its power. “China,” he said in 1993, “is where the action is.”
[24]
Singaporean foreign investment which had been heavily concentrated in Malaysia and Indonesia shifted to China. Half of the overseas projects helped by the Singaporean government in 1993 were in China. On his first visit to Beijing in the 1970s, Lee Kuan Yew reportedly insisted on speaking to Chinese leaders in English rather than Mandarin. It is unlikely he did that two decades later.

The structure of political loyalty among Arabs and among Muslims generally has been the opposite of that in the modern West. For the latter the nation state has been the apex of political loyalty. Narrower loyalties are subordinate to it and are subsumed into loyalty to the nation state. Groups transcending nation states—linguistic or religious communities, or civilizations—have commanded less intense loyalty and commitment. Along a continuum of narrower to broader entities, Western loyalties thus tend to peak in the middle, the loyalty intensity curve forming in some measure an inverse
U
. In the Islamic world, the structure of loyalty has been almost exactly the reverse. Islam has had a hollow middle in its hierarchy of loyalties. The “two fundamental, original, and persisting structures,” as Ira Lapidus has observed, have been the family, the clan, and the tribe, on the one hand, and the “unities of culture, religion, and empire on an ever-larger scale,” on the other.
[25]
“Tribalism and Religion (Islam) played and still plays,” one Libyan scholar similarly observed, “a significant and determining role in the social, economic, cultural, and political developments of Arab Societies and Political Systems. Indeed, they are intertwined in such a way that they are considered the most important factors and variables which shape and determine Arab Political culture and [the] Arab Political Mind.” Tribes have been central to politics in Arab states, many of which, as Tahsin Bashir put it, are simply “tribes with flags.” The founder of
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Saudi Arabia succeeded in large part as a result of his skill in creating a tribal coalition through marriage and other means, and Saudi politics has continued to be a largely tribal politics pitting Sudairis against Shammars and other tribes. At least eighteen major tribes have played significant roles in Libyan development, and some five hundred tribes are said to live in the Sudan, the largest of which encompasses 12 percent of the country’s population.
[26]

In Central Asia historically, national identities did not exist. “The loyalty was to the tribe, clan, and extended family, not to the state.” At the other extreme, people did have “language, religion, culture, and life styles” in common, and “Islam was the strongest uniting force among people, more so than the emir’s power.” Some one hundred “mountainous” and seventy “plains” clans have existed among the Chechens and related North Caucasus peoples and controlled politics and the economy to such an extent that, in contrast to the Soviet planned economy, the Chechens were alleged to have a “clanned” economy.
[27]

Throughout Islam the small group and the great faith, the tribe and the
ummah,
have been the principal foci of loyalty and commitment, and the nation state has been less significant. In the Arab world, existing states have legitimacy problems because they are for the most part the arbitrary, if not capricious, products of European imperialism, and their boundaries often did not even coincide with those of ethnic groups such as Berbers and Kurds. These states divided the Arab nation, but a Pan-Arab state, on the other hand, has never materialized. In addition, the idea of sovereign nation states is incompatible with belief in the sovereignty of Allah and the primacy of the
ummah.
As a revolutionary movement, Islamist fundamentalism rejects the nation state in favor of the unity of Islam just as Marxism rejected it in favor of the unity of the international proletariat. The weakness of the nation state in Islam is also reflected in the fact that while numerous conflicts occurred between Muslim
groups
during the years after World War II, major wars between Muslim
states
were rare, the most significant ones involving Iraq invading its neighbors.

In the 1970s and 1980s the same factors which gave rise to the Islamic Resurgence within countries also strengthened identification with the
ummah
or Islamic civilization as a whole. As one scholar observed in the mid-1980s:

A profound concern with Muslim identity and unity has been further stimulated by decolonization, demographic growth, industrialization, urbanization, and a changing international economic order associated with, among other things, the oil wealth beneath Muslim lands. . . . Modern communications have strengthened and elaborated the ties among Muslim peoples. There has been a steep growth in the numbers who make the pilgrimage to Mecca, creating a more intense sense of common identity among Muslims from as far afield as China and Senegal, Yemen and Bangladesh. Growing numbers of students from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the southern Philippines, and Africa are studying in Middle Eastern universities, spreading ideas and establish
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ing personal contacts across national boundaries. There are regular and increasingly frequent conferences and consultations among Muslim intellectuals and
ulama
(religious scholars) held in such centers as Teheran, Mecca, and Kuala Lumpur. . . . Cassettes (sound, and now video) disseminate mosque sermons across international boundaries, so that influential preachers now reach audiences far beyond their local communities.
[28]

The sense of Muslim unity has also been reflected in and encouraged by the actions of states and international organizations. In 1969 the leaders of Saudi Arabia, working with those of Pakistan, Morocco, Iran, Tunisia, and Turkey, organized the first Islamic summit at Rabat. Out of this emerged the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which was formally established with a headquarters in Jiddah in 1972. Virtually all states with substantial Muslim populations now belong to the Conference, which is the only interstate organization of its kind. Christian, Orthodox, Buddhist, Hindu governments do not have interstate organizations with memberships based on religion; Muslim governments do. In addition, the governments of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and Libya have sponsored and supported nongovernmental organizations such as the World Muslim Congress (a Pakistani creation) and the Muslim World League (a Saudi creation), as well as “numerous, often very distant, regimes, parties, movements, and causes that are believed to share their ideological orientations” and which are “enriching the flow of information and resources among Muslims.”
[29]

Movement from Islamic consciousness to Islamic cohesion, however, involves two paradoxes. First, Islam is divided among competing power centers each attempting to capitalize on Muslim identification with the
ummah
in order to promote Islamic cohesion under its leadership. This competition goes on between the established regimes and their organizations, on the one hand, and Islamist regimes and their organizations, on the other. Saudi Arabia took the lead in creating the OIC in part to have a counter to the Arab League, which at the time was dominated by Nasser. In 1991, after the Gulf War, the Sudanese leader Hassan al-Turabi created the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference (PAIC) as a counter to the Saudi dominated OIC. PAIC’s third conference, in Khartoum in early 1995, was attended by several hundred delegates from Islamist organizations and movements in eighty countries.
[30]
In addition to these formal organizations, the Afghanistan war generated an extensive network of informal and underground groups of veterans who have shown up fighting for Muslim or Islamist causes in Algeria, Chechnya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bosnia, Palestine, the Philippines, and elsewhere. After the war their ranks were renewed with fighters trained at the University of Dawa and Jihad outside Peshawar and in camps sponsored by various factions and their foreign backers in Afghanistan. The common interests shared by radical regimes and movements have on occasion overcome more traditional antagonisms, and with
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Iranian support linkages were created between Sunni and Shi’ite fundamentalist groups. Close military cooperation exists between Sudan and Iran, the Iranian air force and navy used Sudanese facilities, and the two governments cooperated in supporting fundamentalist groups in Algeria and elsewhere. Hassan al-Turabi and Saddam Hussein allegedly developed close ties in 1994, and Iran and Iraq moved toward reconciliation.
[31]

Second, the concept of
ummah
presupposes the illegitimacy of the nation state and yet the
ummah
can be unified only through the actions of one or more strong core states which are currently lacking. The concept of Islam as a unified religious-political community has meant that cores states have usually materialized in the past only when religious and political leadership—the caliphate and the sultanate—have been combined in a single ruling institution. The rapid seventh-century Arab conquest of North Africa and the Middle East culminated in the Umayyad caliphate with its capital in Damascus. This was followed in the eighth century by the Baghdad-based, Persian-influenced, Abbasid caliphate, with secondary caliphates emerging in Cairo and Cordoba in the tenth century. Four hundred years later the Ottoman Turks swept across the Middle East, capturing Constantinople in 1453 and establishing a new caliphate in 1517. About the same time other Turkic peoples invaded India and founded the Mogul empire. The rise of the West undermined both the Ottoman and Mogul empires, and the end of the Ottoman empire left Islam without a core state. Its territories were, in considerable measure, divided among Western powers, which when they retreated left behind fragile states formed on a Western model alien to the traditions of Islam. Hence for most of the twentieth century no Muslim country has had both sufficient power and sufficient cultural and religious legitimacy to assume that role and be accepted as the leader of Islam by other Islamic states and non-Islamic countries.

The absence of an Islamic core state is a major contributor to the pervasive internal and external conflicts which characterize Islam. Consciousness without cohesion is a source of weakness to Islam and a source of threat to other civilizations. Is this condition likely to be sustained?

An Islamic core state has to possess the economic resources, military power, organizational competence, and Islamic identity and commitment to provide both political and religious leadership to the
ummah.
Six states are from time to time mentioned as possible leaders of Islam; at present, no one of them, however, has all the requisites to be an effective core state. Indonesia is the largest Muslim country and is growing rapidly economically.
[period]
It is, however, located on the periphery of Islam far removed from its Arab center; its Islam is of the relaxed, Southeast Asian variety; and its people and culture are a mixture of indigenous, Muslim, Hindu, Chinese, and Christian influences. Egypt is an Arab country, with a large population, a central, strategically important geographical location in the Middle East, and the leading institution of Islamic learning, Al-Azhar University. It is also, however, a poor country, economically
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dependent on the United States, Western-controlled international institutions, and oil-rich Arab states.