The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (39 page)

To date, each side has, apart from the Gulf War, kept the intensity of the violence at reasonably low levels and refrained from labeling violent acts as acts of war requiring an all-out response. “If Libya ordered one of its submarines to sink an American liner,”
The Economist
observed, “the United States would treat it as an act of war by a government, not seek the extradition of the submarine commander. In principle, the bombing of an airliner by Libya’s secret service is no different.”
[16]
Yet the participants in this war employ much more violent tactics against each other than the United States and Soviet Union directly employed against each other in the Cold War. With rare exceptions neither superpower purposefully killed civilians or even military belonging to the other. This, however, repeatedly happens in the quasi war.

American leaders allege that the Muslims involved in the quasi war are a small minority whose use of violence is rejected by the great majority of moderate Muslims. This may be true, but evidence to support it is lacking. Protests against anti-Western violence have been totally absent in Muslim countries. Muslim governments, even the bunker governments friendly to and dependent on the West, have been strikingly reticent when it comes to condemning terrorist acts against the West. On the other side, European governments and publics have largely supported and rarely criticized actions the United States has taken against its Muslim opponents, in striking contrast to the strenuous opposition they often expressed to American actions against the Soviet Union and communism during the Cold War. In civilizational conflicts, unlike ideological ones, kin stand by their kin.

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a
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different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West.

The economic changes in Asia, particularly East Asia, are one of the most significant developments in the world in the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1990s this economic development had generated economic euphoria among many observers who saw East Asia and the entire Pacific Rim linked together in ever-expanding commercial networks that would insure peace and harmony among nations. This optimism was based on the highly dubious assumption that commercial interchange is invariably a force for peace. Such, however, is not the case. Economic growth creates political instability within countries and between countries, altering the balance of power among countries and regions. Economic exchange brings people into contact; it does not bring them into agreement. Historically it has often produced a deeper awareness of the differences between peoples and stimulated mutual fears. Trade between countries produces conflict as well as profit. If past experience holds, the Asia of economic sunshine will generate an Asia of political shadows, an Asia of instability and conflict.

The economic development of Asia and the growing self-confidence of Asian societies are disrupting international politics in at least three ways. First, economic development enables Asian states to expand their military capabilities, promotes uncertainty as to the future relationships among these countries, and brings to the fore issues and rivalries that had been suppressed during the Cold War, thus enhancing the probability of conflict and instability in the region. Second, economic development increases the intensity of conflicts between Asian societies and the West, primarily the United States, and strengthens the ability of Asian societies to prevail in those struggles. Third, the economic growth of Asia’s largest power increases Chinese influence in the region and the likelihood of China reasserting its traditional hegemony in East Asia, thereby compelling other nations either to “bandwagon” and to accommodate themselves to this development or to “balance” and to attempt to contain Chinese influence.

During the several centuries of Western ascendancy the international relations that counted were a Western game played out among the major Western powers, supplemented in some degree first by Russia in the eighteenth century and then by Japan in the twentieth century. Europe was the principal arena of great power conflict and cooperation, and even during the Cold War the principal line of superpower confrontation was in the heart of Europe. Insofar
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as the international relations that count in the post-Cold War world have a primary turf, that turf is Asia and particularly East Asia. Asia is the cauldron of civilizations. East Asia alone contains societies-belonging to six civilizations—Japanese, Sinic, Orthodox, Buddhist, Muslim, and Western—and South Asia adds Hinduism. The core states of four civilizations, Japan, China, Russia, and the United States, are major actors in East Asia; South Asia adds India; and Indonesia is a rising Muslim power. In addition, East Asia contains several middle-level powers with increasing economic clout, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia, plus a potentially strong Vietnam. The result is a highly complex pattern of international relationships, comparable in many ways to those which existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, and fraught with all the fluidity and uncertainty that characterize multipolar situations.

The multipower, multicivilizational nature of East Asia distinguishes it from Western Europe, and economic and political differences reinforce this contrast. All the countries of Western Europe are stable democracies, have market economies, and are at high levels of economic development. In the mid-1990s East Asia includes one stable democracy, several new and unstable democracies, four of the five communist dictatorships remaining in the world, plus military governments, personal dictatorships, and one-party-dominant authoritarian systems. Levels of economic development varied from those of Japan and Singapore to those of Vietnam and North Korea. A general trend exists toward marketization and economic opening, but economic systems still run the gamut from the command economy of North Korea through various mixes of state control and private enterprise to the laissez-faire economy of Hong Kong.

Apart from the extent to which Chinese hegemony at times brought occasional order to the region, an international society (in the British sense of the term) has not existed in East Asia as it has in Western Europe.
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In the late twentieth century Europe has been bound together by an extraordinarily dense complex of international institutions: the European Union, NATO, Western European Union, Council of Europe, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and others. East Asia has had nothing comparable except ASEAN, which does not include any major powers, has generally eschewed security matters, and is only beginning to move toward the most primitive forms of economic integration. In the 1990s the much broader organization, APEC, incorporating most of the Pacific Rim countries came into existence but it was an even weaker talking shop than ASEAN. No other major multilateral institutions bring together the principal Asian powers.

Again in contrast to Western Europe, the seeds for conflict among states are plentiful in East Asia. Two widely identified danger spots have involved the two Koreas and the two Chinas. These are, however, leftovers from the Cold War. Ideological differences are of declining significance and by 1995 relations had expanded significantly between the two Chinas and had begun to develop
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between the two Koreas. The probability of Koreans fighting Koreans exists but is low; the prospects of Chinese fighting Chinese are higher, but still limited, unless the Taiwanese should renounce their Chinese identity and formally constitute an independent Republic of Taiwan. As a Chinese military document approvingly quoted one general saying, “there should be limits to fights among family members.”
[18]
While violence between the two Koreas or the two Chinas remains possible, cultural commonalities are likely to erode that possibility over time.

In East Asia conflicts inherited from the Cold War are being supplemented and supplanted by other possible conflicts reflecting old rivalries and new economic relationships. Analyses of East Asian security in the early 1990s regularly referred to East Asia as “a dangerous neighborhood,” as “ripe for rivalry,” as a region of “several cold wars,” as “heading back to the future” in which war and instability would prevail.
[19]
In contrast to Western Europe, East Asia in the 1990s has unresolved territorial disputes, the most important of which include those between Russia and Japan over the northern islands and between China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and potentially other Southeast Asian states over the South China Sea. The differences over boundaries between China, on the one hand, and Russia and India, on the other, were reduced in the mid-1990s but could resurface, as could Chinese claims to Mongolia. Insurgencies or secessionist movements, in most cases supported from abroad, exist in Mindanao, East Timor, Tibet, southern Thailand, and eastern Myanmar. In addition, while interstate peace exists in East Asia in the mid-1990s, during the previous fifty years major wars have occurred in Korea and Vietnam, and the central power in Asia, China, has fought Americans plus almost all its neighbors including Koreans, Vietnamese, Nationalist Chinese, Indians, Tibetans, and Russians. In 1993 an analysis by the Chinese military identified eight regional hot spots that threatened China’s military security, and the Chinese Central Military Commission concluded that generally the East Asian security outlook was “very grim.” After centuries of strife, Western Europe is peaceful and war is unthinkable. In East Asia it is not, and, as Aaron Friedberg has suggested, Europe’s past could be Asia’s future.
[20]

Economic dynamism, territorial disputes, resurrected rivalries, and political uncertainties fueled significant increases in East Asian military budgets and military capabilities in the 1980s and 1990s. Exploiting their new wealth and, in many cases, well-educated populations, East Asian governments have moved to replace large, poorly equipped, “peasant” armies with smaller, more professional, technologically sophisticated military forces. With doubt increasing concerning the extent of American commitment in East Asia, countries aim to become militarily self-reliant. While East Asian states continued to import substantial amounts of weapons from Europe, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, they gave preference to the import of technology which would enable them to produce at home sophisticated aircraft, missiles, and
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electronics equipment. Japan and the Sinic states—China, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea—have increasingly sophisticated arms industries. Given the littoral geography of East Asia, their emphasis has been on force projection and air and naval capabilities. As a result, nations that previously were not militarily capable of fighting each other are increasingly able to do so. These military buildups have involved little transparency and hence have fostered more suspicion and uncertainty.
[21]
In a situation of changing power relationships, every government necessarily and legitimately wonders: “Ten years from now who will be my enemy and who, if anyone, will be my friend?”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s relationships between the United States and Asian countries, apart from Vietnam, increasingly became antagonistic, and the ability of the United States to prevail in these controversies declined. These tendencies were particularly marked with respect to the major powers in East Asia, and American relations with China and Japan evolved along parallel paths. Americans, on the one hand, and Chinese and Japanese on the other, spoke of cold wars developing between their countries.
[22]
These simultaneous trends began in the Bush administration and accelerated in the Clinton administration. By the mid-1990s American relations with the two major Asian powers could at best be described as “strained” and there seemed to be little prospect for them to become less so.
[F09]

In the early 1990s Japanese-American relations became increasingly heated with controversies over a wide range of issues, including Japan’s role in the Gulf War, the American military presence in Japan, Japanese attitudes toward American human rights policies with respect to China and other countries, Japanese participation in peacekeeping missions, and, most important, economic relations, especially trade. References to trade wars became commonplace.
[23]
American officials, particularly in the Clinton administration, demanded more and more concessions from Japan; Japanese officials resisted these demands more and more forcefully. Each Japanese-American trade con
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troversy was more acrimonious and more difficult to resolve than the previous one. In March 1994, for instance, President Clinton signed an order giving him authority to apply stricter trade sanctions on Japan, which brought protests not only from the Japanese but also from the head of GATT, the principal world trading organization. A short while later Japan responded with a “blistering attack” on U.S. policies, and shortly after that the United States “formally accused Japan” of discriminating against U.S. companies in awarding government contracts. In the spring of 1995 the Clinton administration threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on Japanesse luxury cars, with an agreement averting this being reached just before the sanctions would have gone into effect. Something closely resembling a trade war was clearly underway between the two countries. By the mid-1990s the acrimony had reached the point where leading Japanese political figures began to question the U.S. military presence in Japan.