The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (32 page)

Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia have all explicitly defined themselves as Muslim countries and have actively attempted to exercise influence in and provide leadership to the
ummah.
In so doing, they have competed with each other in sponsoring organizations, funding Islamic groups, providing support to the fighters in Afghanistan, and wooing the Muslim peoples of Central Asia. Iran has the size, central location, population, historical traditions, oil resources, and middle level of economic development which would qualify it to be an Islamic core state. Ninety percent of Muslims, however, are Sunni and Iran is Shi’ite; Persian is a distant second to Arabic as the language of Islam; and the relations between Persians and Arabs have historically been antagonistic.

Pakistan has size, population, and military prowess, and its leaders have fairly consistently tried to claim a role as the promoter of cooperation among Islamic states and the speaker for Islam to the rest of the world. Pakistan is, however, relatively poor and suffers serious internal ethnic and regional divisions, a record of political instability, and a fixation on the problem of its security vis-à-vis India, which accounts in large part for its interest in developing close relations with other Islamic countries, as well as non-Muslim powers like China and the United States.

Saudi Arabia was the original home of Islam; Islam’s holiest shrines are there; its language is Islam’s language; it has the world’s largest oil reserves and the resulting financial influence; and its government has shaped Saudi society along strictly Islamic lines. During the 1970s and 1980s Saudi Arabia was the single most influential force in Islam. It spent billions of dollars supporting Muslim causes throughout the world, from mosques and textbooks to political parties, Islamist organizations, and terrorist movements, and was relatively indiscriminate in doing so. On the other hand, its relatively small population and geographical vulnerability make it dependent on the West for its security.

Finally, Turkey has the history, population, middle level of economic development, national coherence, and military tradition and competence to be the core state of Islam. In explicitly defining Turkey as a secular society, however, Ataturk prevented the Turkish republic from succeeding the Ottoman empire in that role. Turkey could not even become a charter member of the OIC because of the commitment to secularism in its constitution. So long as Turkey continues to define itself as a secular state, leadership of Islam is denied it.

What, however, if Turkey redefined itself? At some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West. Fundamentalism has been on the rise in Turkey; under Özal Turkey made extensive efforts to identify itself with the Arab world; it has capitalized on ethnic and linguistic ties to play a modest role in Central Asia; it has provided
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encouragement and support to the Bosnian Muslims. Among Muslim countries Turkey is unique in having extensive historical connections with Muslims in the Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Conceivably, Turkey, in effect, could “do a South Africa”: abandoning secularism as alien to its being as South Africa abandoned apartheid and thereby changing itself from a pariah state in its civilization to the leading state of that civilization. Having experienced the good and the bad of the West in Christianity and apartheid, South Africa is peculiarly qualified to lead Africa. Having experienced the bad and the good of the West in secularism and democracy, Turkey may be equally qualified to lead Islam. But to do so it would have to reject Ataturk’s legacy more thoroughly than Russia has rejected Lenin’s. It would also take a leader of Ataturk’s caliber and one who combined religious and political legitimacy to remake Turkey from a torn country into a core state.

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I
n the emerging world, the relations between states and groups from different civilizations will not be close and will often be antagonistic. Yet some intercivilization relations are more conflict-prone than others. At the micro level, the most violent fault lines are between Islam and its Orthodox, Hindu, African, and Western Christian neighbors. At the macro level, the dominant division is between “the West and the rest,” with the most intense conflicts occurring between Muslim and Asian societies on the one hand, and the West on the other. The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness.

Alone among civilizations the West has had a major and at times devastating impact on every other civilization. The relation between the power and culture of the West and the power and cultures of other civilizations is, as a result, the most pervasive characteristic of the world of civilizations. As the relative power of other civilizations increases, the appeal of Western culture fades and non-Western peoples have increasing confidence in and commitment to their indigenous cultures. The central problem in the relations between the West and the rest is, consequently, the discordance between the West’s—particularly America’s—efforts to promote a universal Western culture and its declining ability to do so.

The collapse of communism exacerbated this discordance by reinforcing in the West the view that its ideology of democratic liberalism had triumphed globally and hence was universally valid. The West, and especially the United
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States, which has always been a missionary nation, believe that the non-Western peoples should commit themselves to the Western values of democracy, free markets, limited government, human rights, individualism, the rule of law, and should embody these values in their institutions. Minorities in other civilizations embrace and promote these values, but the dominant attitudes toward them in non-Western cultures range from widespread skepticism to intense opposition. What is universalism to the West is imperialism to the rest.

The West is attempting and will continue to attempt to sustain its preeminent position and defend its interests by defining those interests as the interests of the “world community.” That phrase has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing “the Free World”) to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western powers. The West is, for instance, attempting to integrate the economies of non-Western societies into a global economic system which it dominates. Through the IMF and other international economic institutions, the West promotes its economic interests and imposes on other nations the economic policies it thinks appropriate. In any poll of non-Western peoples, however, the IMF undoubtedly would win the support of finance ministers and a few others but get an overwhelmingly unfavorable rating from almost everyone else, who would agree with Georgi Arbatov’s description of IMF officials as “neo-Bolsheviks who love expropriating other people’s money, imposing undemocratic and alien rules of economic and political conduct and stifling economic freedom.”
[1]

Non-Westerners also do not hesitate to point to the gaps between Western principle and Western action. Hypocrisy, double standards, and “but nots” are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue with China but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.

Having achieved political independence, non-Western societies wish to free themselves from Western economic, military, and cultural domination. East Asian societies are well on their way to equalling the West economically. Asian and Islamic countries are looking for shortcuts to balance the West militarily. The universal aspirations of Western civilization, the declining relative power of the West, and the increasing cultural assertiveness of other civilizations ensure generally difficult relations between the West and the rest. The nature of those relations and the extent to which they are antagonistic, however, vary considerably and fall into three categories. With the challenger civilizations, Islam and China, the West is likely to have consistently strained and often highly antagonistic relations. Its relations with Latin America and Africa, weaker civilizations which have in some measure been dependent on the West,
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will involve much lower levels of conflict, particularly with Latin America. The relations of Russia, Japan, and India to the West are likely to fall between those of the other two groups, involving elements of cooperation and conflict, as these three core states at times line up with the challenger civilizations and at times side with the West. They are the “swing” civilizations between the West, on the one hand, and Islamic and Sinic civilizations, on the other.

Islam and China embody great cultural traditions very different from and in their eyes infinitely superior to that of the West. The power and assertiveness of both in relation to the West are increasing, and the conflicts between their values and interests and those of the West are multiplying and becoming more intense. Because Islam lacks a core state, its relations with the West vary greatly from country to country. Since the 1970s, however, a fairly consistent anti-Western trend has existed, marked by the rise of fundamentalism, shifts in power within Muslim countries from more pro-Western to more anti-Western governments, the emergence of a quasi war between some Islamic groups and the West, and the weakening of the Cold War security ties that existed between some Muslim states and the United States. Underlying the differences on specific issues is the fundamental question of the role these civilizations will play relative to the West in shaping the future of the world. Will the global institutions, the distribution of power, and the politics and economies of nations in the twenty-first century primarily reflect Western values and interests or will they be shaped primarily by those of Islam and China?

The realist theory of international relations predicts that the core states of non-Western civilizations should coalesce together to balance the dominant power of the West. In some areas this has happened. A general anti-Western coalition, however, seems unlikely in the immediate future. Islamic and Sinic civilizations differ fundamentally in terms of religion, culture, social structure, traditions, politics, and basic assumptions at the root of their way of life. Inherently each probably has less in common with the other than it has in common with Western civilization. Yet in politics a common enemy creates a common interest. Islamic and Sinic societies which see the West as their antagonist thus have reason to cooperate with each other against the West, even as the Allies and Stalin did against Hitler. This cooperation occurs on a variety of issues, including human rights, economics, and most notably the efforts by societies in both civilizations to develop their military capabilities, particularly weapons of mass destruction and the missiles for delivering them, so as to counter the conventional military superiority of the West. By the early 1990s a “Confucian-Islamic connection” was in place between China and North Korea, on the one hand, and in varying degrees Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Algeria, on the other, to confront the West on these issues.

The issues that divide the West and these other societies are increasingly important on the international agenda. Three such issues involve the efforts of the West: (1) to maintain its military superiority through policies of nonprolifer
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ation and counterproliferation with respect to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and the means to deliver them; (2) to promote Western political values and institutions by pressing other societies to respect human rights as conceived in the West and to adopt democracy on Western lines; and (3) to protect the cultural, social, and ethnic integrity of Western societies by restricting the number of non-Westerners admitted as immigrants or refugees. In all three areas the West has had and is likely to continue to have difficulties defending its interests against those of non-Western societies.

The diffusion of military capabilities is the consequence of global economic and social development. As they become richer economically, Japan, China, other Asian countries will become more powerful militarily, as Islamic societies eventually will also. So will Russia if it is successful in reforming its economy. The last decades of the twentieth century have seen many non-Western nations acquire sophisticated weapons through arms transfers from Western societies, Russia, Israel, and China, and also create indigenous arms production facilities for highly sophisticated weapons. These processes will continue and probably accelerate during the early years of the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, well into that century, the West, meaning primarily the United States with some supplements from Britain and France, will alone be able to intervene militarily in almost any part of the world. And only the United States will have the air power capable of bombing virtually any place in the world. These are the central elements of the military position of the United States as a global power and of the West as the dominant civilization in the world. For the immediate future the balance of conventional military power between the West and the rest will overwhelmingly favor the West.

The time, effort, and expense required to develop a first-class conventional military capability provide tremendous incentives for non-Western states to pursue other ways of countering Western conventional military power. The perceived shortcut is the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. The core states of civilizations and countries which are or aspire to be regionally dominant powers have special incentives to acquire these weapons. Such weapons, first, enable those states to establish their dominance over other states in their civilization and region, and, second, provide them with the means to deter intervention in their civilization and region by the United States or other external powers. If Saddam Hussein had delayed his invasion of Kuwait for two or three years until Iraq had nuclear weapons, he very likely would be in possession of Kuwait and quite possibly the Saudi oil fields also. Non-Western states draw the obvious lessons from the Gulf War. For the North Korean military these were: “Don’t let the Americans build up their forces; don’t let them put in air power; don’t let them take the initiative;
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don’t let them fight a war with low U.S. casualties.” For a top Indian military official the lesson was even more explicit: “Don’t fight the United States unless you have nuclear weapons.”
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That lesson has been taken to heart by political leaders and military chiefs throughout the non-Western world, as has a plausible corollary: “If you have nuclear weapons, the United States won’t fight you.”