The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (34 page)

The efforts by the United States and other Western countries to prevent the
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proliferation of “equalizer” weapons of mass destruction have met with and are likely to continue to meet with limited success. A month after President Clinton said that North Korea could not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, U.S. intelligence agencies informed him that it probably had one or two.
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U.S. policy consequently shifted to offering the North Koreans carrots to induce them not to expand their nuclear arsenal. The United States was also unable to reverse or to stop nuclear weapons development by India and Pakistan and it has been unable to halt Iran’s nuclear progress.

At the April 1995 conference on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty the key issue was whether it should be renewed for an indefinite period or for twenty-five years. The United States led the effort for permanent extension. A wide range of other countries, however, objected to such an extension unless it was accompanied by much more drastic reduction in nuclear arms by the five recognized nuclear powers. In addition, Egypt opposed extension unless Israel signed the treaty and accepted safeguard inspections. In the end, the United States won an overwhelming consensus on indefinite extension through a highly successful strategy of arm twisting, bribes, and threats. Neither Egypt nor Mexico, for instance, both of whom had been against indefinite extension, could maintain its position in the face of their economic dependence on the United States. While the treaty was extended by consensus, the representatives of seven Muslim nations (Syria, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Malaysia) and one African nation (Nigeria) expressed dissenting views in the final debate.
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In 1993 the primary goals of the West, as defined in American policy, shifted from nonproliferation to counterproliferation. This change was a realistic recognition of the extent to which some nuclear proliferation could not be avoided. In due course, U.S. policy will shift from countering proliferation to accommodating proliferation and, if the government can escape from its Cold War mind-set, to how promoting proliferation can serve U.S. and Western interests. As of 1995, however, the United States and the West remained committed to a hold-down policy which, in the end, is bound to fail. The proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction is a central phenomenon of the slow but ineluctable diffusion of power in a multicivilizational world.

During the 1970s and 1980s over thirty countries shifted from authoritarian to democratic political systems. Several causes were responsible for this wave of transitions. Economic development was undoubtedly the major underlying factor generating these political changes. In addition, however, the policies and action of the United States, the major Western European powers, and international institutions helped to bring democracy to Spain and Portugal, many Latin American countries, the Philippines, South Korea, and Eastern
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Europe. Democratization was most successful in countries where Christian and Western influences were strong. New democratic regimes appeared most likely to stabilize in the Southern and Central European countries that were predominantly Catholic or Protestant and, less certainly, in Latin American countries. In East Asia, the Catholic and heavily American influenced Philippines returned to democracy in the 1980s, while Christian leaders promoted movement toward democracy in South Korea and Taiwan. As has been pointed out previously, in the former Soviet Union, the Baltic republics appear to be successfully stabilizing democracy; the degree and stability of democracy in the Orthodox republics vary considerably and are uncertain; democratic prospects in the Muslim republics are bleak. By the 1990s, except for Cuba, democratic transitions had occurred in most of the countries, outside Africa, whose peoples espoused Western Christianity or where major Christian influences existed.

These transitions and the collapse of the Soviet Union generated in the West, particularly in the United States, the belief that a global democratic revolution was underway and that in short order Western concepts of human rights and Western forms of political democracy would prevail throughout the world. Promoting this spread of democracy hence became a high priority goal for Westerners. It was endorsed by the Bush administration with Secretary of State James Baker declaring in April 1990 that “Beyond containment lies democracy” and that for the post-Cold War world “President Bush has defined our new mission to be the promotion and consolidation of democracy.” In his 1992 campaign Bill Clinton repeatedly said that the promotion of democracy would be a top priority of a Clinton administration, and democratization was the only foreign policy topic to which he devoted an entire major campaign speech. Once in office he recommended a two-thirds increase in funding for the National Endowment for Democracy; his assistant for national security defined the central theme of Clinton foreign policy as the “enlargement of democracy”; and his secretary of defense identified the promotion of democracy as one of four major goals and attempted to create a senior position in his department to promote that goal. To a lesser degree and in less obvious ways, the promotion of human rights and democracy also assumed a prominent role in the foreign policies of European states and in the criteria used by the Western-controlled international economic institutions for loans and grants to developing countries.

As of 1995 European and American efforts to achieve these goals had met with limited success. Almost all non-Western civilizations were resistant to this pressure from the West. These included Hindu, Orthodox, African, and in some measure even Latin American countries. The greatest resistance to Western democratization efforts, however, came from Islam and Asia. This resistance was rooted in the broader movements of cultural assertiveness embodied in the Islamic Resurgence and the Asian affirmation.

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The failures of the United States with respect to Asia stemmed primarily from the increasing economic wealth and self-confidence of Asian governments. Asian publicists repeatedly reminded the West that the old age of dependence and subordination was past and that the West which produced half the world’s economic product in the 1940s, dominated the United Nations, and wrote the Universal Declaration on Human Rights had disappeared into history. “[E]fforts to promote human rights in Asia,” argued one Singaporean official, “must also reckon with the altered distribution of power in the post-Cold War world. . . . Western leverage over East and Southeast Asia has been greatly reduced.”
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He is right. While the agreement on nuclear matters between the United States and North Korea might appropriately be termed a “negotiated surrender,” the capitulation of the United States on human rights issues with China and other Asian powers was unconditional surrender. After threatening China with the denial of most favored nation treatment if it was not more forthcoming on human rights, the Clinton Administration first saw its secretary of state humiliated in Beijing, denied even a face-saving gesture, and then responded to this behavior by renouncing its previous policy and separating MFN status from human rights concerns. China, in turn, reacted to this show of weakness by continuing and intensifying the behavior to which the Clinton administration objected. The administration beat similar retreats in its dealings with Singapore over the caning of an American citizen and with Indonesia over its repressive violence in East Timor.

The ability of Asian regimes to resist Western human rights pressures was reinforced by several factors. American and European businesses were desperately anxious to expand their trade with and their investment in these rapidly growing countries and subjected their governments to intense pressure not to disrupt economic relations with them. In addition, Asian countries saw such pressure as an infringement on their sovereignty and rallied to each other’s support when these issues arose. Taiwanese, Japanese, and Hong Kong businessmen who invested in China had a major interest in China’s retaining its MFN privileges with the United States. The Japanese government generally distanced itself from American human rights policies: We will not let “abstract notions of human rights” affect our relations with China, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa said not long after Tiananmen Square. The countries of ASEAN were unwilling to apply pressure to Myanmar and, indeed, in 1994 welcomed the military junta to their meeting while the European Union, as its spokesman said, had to recognize that its policy “had not been very successful” and that it would have to go along with the ASEAN approach to Myanmar. In addition, their growing economic power allowed states such as Malaysia and Indonesia to apply “reverse conditionalities” to countries and firms which criticize them or engage in other behavior they find objectionable.
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Overall the growing economic strength of the Asian countries renders them
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increasingly immune to Western pressure concerning human rights and democracy. “Today China’s economic power,” Richard Nixon observed in 1994, “makes U.S. lectures about human rights imprudent. Within a decade it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades it will make them laughable.”
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By that time, however, Chinese economic development could make Western lectures unnecessary. Economic growth is strengthening Asian governments in relation to Western governments. In the longer run it will also strengthen Asian societies in relation to Asian governments. If democracy comes to additional Asian countries it will come because the increasingly strong Asian bourgeoisies and middle classes want it to come.

In contrast to agreement on the indefinite expansion of the nonproliferation treaty, Western efforts to promote human rights and democracy in U.N. agencies generally came to naught. With a few exceptions, such as those condemning Iraq, human rights resolutions were almost always defeated in U.N. votes. Apart from some Latin American countries, other governments were reluctant to enlist in efforts to promote what many saw as “human rights imperialism.” In 1990, for instance, Sweden submitted on behalf of twenty Western nations a resolution condemning the military regime in Myanmar, but opposition from Asian and other countries killed it. Resolutions condemning Iran for human rights abuses were also voted down, and for five straight years in the 1990s China was able to mobilize Asian support to defeat Western-sponsored resolutions expressing concern over its human rights violations. In 1994 Pakistan tabled
[U.K.:proposesomething;U.S.:postpone]
a resolution in the U.N. Commission on Human Rights condemning India’s rights violations in Kashmir. Countries friendly to India rallied against it, but so also did two of Pakistan’s closest friends, China and Iran, who had been the targets of similar measures, and who persuaded Pakistan to withdraw the proposal. In failing to condemn Indian brutality in Kashmir,
The Economist
observed, the U.N. Human Rights Commission “by default, sanctioned it. Other countries, too, are getting away with murder: Turkey, Indonesia, Colombia, and Algeria have all escaped criticism. The commission is thus giving succor to governments that practice butchery and torture, which is exactly the opposite of what its creators intended.”
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The differences over human rights between the West and other civilizations and the limited ability of the West to achieve its goals were clearly revealed in the U.N. World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in June 1993. On one side were the European and North American countries; on the other side was a bloc of about fifty non-Western states, the fifteen most active members of which included the governments of one Latin American country (Cuba), one Buddhist country (Myanmar), four Confucian countries with widely varying political ideologies, economic systems, and levels of development (Singapore, Vietnam, North Korea, and China), and nine Muslim countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya). The leadership of this Asian-Islamic grouping came from China, Syria, and Iran. In
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between these two groupings were the Latin American countries, apart from Cuba, which often supported the West, and African and Orthodox countries which sometimes supported but more often opposed Western positions.

The issues on which countries divided along civilizational lines included: universality vs. cultural relativism with respect to human rights; the relative priority of economic and social rights including the right to development versus political and civil rights; political conditionality with respect to economic assistance; the creation of a U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights; the extent to which the nongovernmental human rights organizations simultaneously meeting in Vienna should be allowed to participate in the governmental conference; the particular rights which should be endorsed by the conference; and more specific issues such as whether the Dalai Lama should be allowed to address the conference and whether human rights abuses in Bosnia should be explicitly condemned.

Major differences existed between the Western countries and the Asian-Islamic bloc on these issues. Two months before the Vienna conference the Asian countries met in Bangkok and endorsed a declaration which emphasized that human rights must be considered “in the context . . . of national and regional particularities and various historical religious and cultural backgrounds,” that human rights monitoring violated state sovereignty, and that conditioning economic assistance on human rights performance was contrary to the right to development. The differences over these and other issues were so great that almost the entire document produced by the final pre-Vienna conference preparatory meeting in Geneva in early May was in brackets, indicating dissents by one or more countries.

The Western nations were ill prepared for Vienna, were outnumbered at the conference, and during its proceedings made more concessions than their opponents. As a result, apart from a strong endorsement of women’s rights, the declaration approved by the conference was a minimal one. It was, one human rights supporter observed, “a flawed and contradictory” document, and represented a victory for the Asian-Islamic coalition and a defeat for the West.
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The Vienna declaration contained no explicit endorsement of the rights to freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and religion, and was thus in many respects weaker than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the U.N. had adopted in 1948. This shift reflected the decline in the power of the West. “The international human rights regime of 1945,” an American human rights supporter remarked, “is no more. American hegemony has eroded. Europe, even with the events of 1992, is little more than a peninsula. The world is now as Arab, Asian, and African, as it is Western. Today the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants are less relevant to much of the planet than during the immediate post-World War II era.” An Asian critic of the West had similar views: “For the first time since the Universal Declaration was adopted in 1948, countries not thoroughly steeped in the Judeo-Christian and
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natural law traditions are in the first rank. That unprecedented situation will define the new international politics of human rights. It will also multiply the occasions for conflict.”
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