The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (37 page)

Intercivilizational conflict takes two forms. At the local or micro level,
fault
_p. 208
line conflicts
occur between neighboring states from different civilizations, between groups from different civilizations within a state, and between groups which, as in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, are attempting to create new states out of the wreckage of old. Fault line conflicts are particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims. The reasons for and the nature and dynamics of these conflicts are explored in chapters
10
and
11
. At the global or macro level,
core state conflicts
occur among the major states of different civilizations. The issues in these conflicts are the classic ones of international politics, including:

 1.  relative influence in shaping global developments and the actions of global international organizations such as the U.N., IMF, and World Bank;

 2.  relative military power, which manifests itself in controversies over non-proliferation and arms control and in arms races;

 3.  economic power and welfare, manifested in disputes over trade, investment, and other issues;

 4.  people, involving efforts by a state from one civilization to protect kinsmen in another civilization, to discriminate against people from another civilization, or to exclude from its territory people from another civilization;

 5.  values and culture, conflicts over which arise when a state attempts to promote or to impose its values on the people of another civilization;

 6.  occasionally, territory, in which core states become front line participants in fault line conflicts.

These issues are, of course, the sources of conflict between humans throughout history. When states from different civilizations are involved, however, cultural differences sharpen the conflict. In their competition with each other, core states attempt to rally their civilizational cohorts, to get support from states of third civilizations, to promote division within and defections from opposing civilizations, and to use the appropriate mix of diplomatic, political, economic, and covert actions and propaganda inducements and coercions to achieve their objectives. Core states are, however, unlikely to use military force directly against each other, except in situations such as have existed in the Middle East and the Subcontinent where they adjoin each other on a civilizational fault line. Core state wars are otherwise likely to arise under only two circumstances. First, they could develop from the escalation of fault line conflicts between local groups as kin groups, including core states, rally to the support of the local combatants. This possibility, however, creates a major incentive for the core states in the opposing civilizations to contain or to resolve the fault line conflict.

Second, core state war could result from changes in the global balance of
_p. 209
power among civilizations. Within Greek civilization, the increasing power of Athens, as Thucydides argued, led to the Peloponnesian War. Similarly the history of Western civilization is one of “hegemonic wars” between rising and falling powers. The extent to which similar factors encourage conflict between the rising and falling core states of different civilizations depends in part on whether balancing or bandwagoning is the preferred way in these civilizations for states to adjust to the rise of a new power. While bandwagoning may be more characteristic of Asian civilizations, the rise of Chinese power could generate balancing efforts from states in other civilizations, such as the United States, India, and Russia. The missing hegemonic war in Western history is that between Great Britain and the United States, and presumably the peaceful shift from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana was in large part due to the close cultural kinship of the two societies. The absence of such kinship in the shifting power balance between the West and China does not make armed conflict certain but does make it more probable. The dynamism of Islam is the ongoing source of many relatively small fault line wars; the rise of China is the potential source of a big intercivilizational war of core states.

Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise. The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity. At times, peaceful coexistence has prevailed; more often the relation has been one of intense rivalry and of varying degrees of hot war. Their “historical dynamics,” John Esposito comments, “. . . often found the two communities in competition, and locked at times in deadly combat, for power, land, and souls.”
[2]
Across the centuries the fortunes of the two religions have risen and fallen in a sequence of momentous surges, pauses, and countersurges.

The initial Arab-Islamic sweep outward from the early seventh to the mid-eighth century established Muslim rule in North Africa, Iberia, the Middle East, Persia, and northern India. For two centuries or so the lines of division between Islam and Christianity stabilized. Then in the late eleventh century, Christians reasserted control of the western Mediterranean, conquered Sicily, and captured Toledo. In 1095 Christendom launched the Crusades and for a century and a half Christian potentates attempted, with decreasing success, to establish Christian rule in the Holy Land and adjoining areas in the Near East, losing Acre, their last foothold there, in 1291. Meanwhile the Ottoman Turks
_p. 210
had appeared on the scene. They first weakened Byzantium and then conquered much of the Balkans as well as North Africa, captured Constantinople in 1453, and besieged Vienna in 1529. “For almost a thousand years,” Bernard Lewis observes, “from the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna, Europe was under constant threat from Islam.”
[3]
Islam is the only civilization which has put the survival of the West in doubt, and it has done that at least twice.

By the fifteenth century, however, the tide had begun to turn. The Christians gradually recovered Iberia, completing the task at Granada in 1492. Meanwhile European innovations in ocean navigation enabled the Portuguese and then others to circumvent the Muslim heartland and penetrate into the Indian Ocean and beyond. Simultaneously the Russians brought to an end two centuries of Tatar rule. The Ottomans subsequently made one last push forward, besieging Vienna again in 1683. Their failure there marked the beginning of a long retreat, involving the struggle of Orthodox peoples in the Balkans to free themselves from Ottoman rule, the expansion of the Hapsburg Empire, and the dramatic advance of the Russians to the Black Sea and the Caucasus. In the course of a century or so “the scourge of Christendom” was transformed into “the sick man of Europe.”
[4]
At the conclusion of World War I, Britain, France, and Italy administered the coup de grace and established their direct or indirect rule throughout the remaining Ottoman lands except for the territory of the Turkish Republic. By 1920 only four Muslim countries—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan—remained independent of some form of non-Muslim rule.

The retreat of Western colonialism, in turn, began slowly in the 1920s and 1930s and accelerated dramatically in the aftermath of World War II. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought independence to additional Muslim societies. According to one count, some ninety-two acquisitions of Muslim territory by non-Muslim governments occurred between 1757 and 1919. By 1995, sixty-nine of these territories were once again under Muslim rule, and about forty-five independent states had overwhelmingly Muslim populations. The violent nature of these shifting relationships is reflected in the fact that 50 percent of wars involving pairs of states of different religions between 1820 and 1929 were wars between Muslims and Christians.
[5]

The causes of this ongoing pattern of conflict lie not in transitory phenomena such as twelfth-century Christian passion or twentieth-century Muslim fundamentalism. They flow from the nature of the two religions and the civilizations based on them. Conflict was, on the one hand, a product of difference, particularly the Muslim concept of Islam as a way of life transcending and uniting religion and politics versus the Western Christian concept of the separate realms of God and Caesar. The conflict also stemmed, however, from their similarities. Both are monotheistic religions, which, unlike polytheistic ones, cannot easily assimilate additional deities, and which see the world in dualistic,
_p. 211
us-and-them terms. Both are universalistic, claiming to be the one true faith to which all humans can adhere. Both are missionary religions believing that their adherents have an obligation to convert nonbelievers to that one true faith. From its origins Islam expanded by conquest and when the opportunity existed Christianity did also. The parallel concepts of “jihad” and “crusade” not only resemble each other but distinguish these two faiths from other major world religions. Islam and Christianity, along with Judaism, also have teleological views of history in contrast to the cyclical or static views prevalent in other civilizations.

The level of violent conflict between Islam and Christianity over time has been influenced by demographic growth and decline, economic developments, technological change, and intensity of religious commitment. The spread of Islam in the seventh century was accompanied by massive migrations of Arab peoples, “the scale and speed” of which were unprecedented, into the lands of the Byzantine and Sassanian empires. A few centuries later, the Crusades were in large part a product of economic growth, population expansion, and the “Clunaic revival” in eleventh-century Europe, which made it possible to mobilize large numbers of knights and peasants for the march to the Holy Land. When the First Crusade reached Constantinople, one Byzantine observer wrote, it seemed like “the entire West, including all the tribes of the barbarians living beyond the Adriatic Sea to the Pillars of Hercules, had started a mass migration and was on the march, bursting forth into Asia in a solid mass, with all its belongings.”
[6]
In the nineteenth century spectacular population growth again produced a European eruption, generating the largest migration in history, which flowed into Muslim as well as other lands.

A comparable mix of factors has increased the conflict between Islam and the West in the late twentieth century. First, Muslim population growth has generated large numbers of unemployed and disaffected young people who become recruits to Islamist causes, exert pressure on neighboring societies, and migrate to the West. Second, the Islamic Resurgence has given Muslims renewed confidence in the distinctive character and worth of their civilization and values compared to those of the West. Third, the West’s simultaneous efforts to universalize its values and institutions, to maintain its military and economic superiority, and to intervene in conflicts in the Muslim world generate intense resentment among Muslims. Fourth, the collapse of communism removed a common enemy of the West and Islam and left each the perceived major threat to the other. Fifth, the increasing contact between and intermingling of Muslims and Westerners stimulate in each a new sense of their own identity and how it differs from that of the other. Interaction and intermingling also exacerbate differences over the rights of the members of one civilization in a country dominated by members of the other civilization. Within both Muslim and Christian societies, tolerance for the other declined sharply in the 1980s and 1990s.

_p. 212
The causes of the renewed conflict between Islam and the West thus lie in fundamental questions of power and culture.
Kto? Kovo?
Who is to rule? Who is to be ruled? The central issue of politics defined by Lenin is the root of the contest between Islam and the West. There is, however, the additional conflict, which Lenin would have considered meaningless, between two different versions of what is right and what is wrong and, as a consequence, who is right and who is wrong. So long as Islam remains Islam (which it will) and the West remains the West (which is more dubious), this fundamental conflict between two great civilizations and ways of life will continue to define their relations in the future even as it has defined them for the past fourteen centuries.

These relations are further roiled by a number of substantive issues on which their positions differ or conflict. Historically one major issue was the control of territory, but that is now relatively insignificant. Nineteen of twenty-eight fault line conflicts in the mid-1990s between Muslims and non-Muslims were between Muslims and Christians. Eleven were with Orthodox Christians and seven with adherents of Western Christianity in Africa and Southeast Asia. Only one of these violent or potentially violent conflicts, that between Croats and Bosnians, occurred directly along the fault line between the West and Islam. The effective end of Western territorial imperialism and the absence so far of renewed Muslim territorial expansion have produced a geographical segregation so that only in a few places in the Balkans do Western and Muslim communities directly border on each other. Conflicts between the West and Islam thus focus less on territory than on broader intercivilizational issues such as weapons proliferation, human rights and democracy, control of oil, migration, Islamist terrorism, and Western intervention.

In the wake of the Cold War, the increasing intensity of this historical antagonism has been widely recognized by members of both communities. In 1991, for instance, Barry Buzan saw many reasons why a societal cold war was emerging “between the West and Islam, in which Europe would be on the front line.”