The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (43 page)

The core of any meaningful effort to balance and contain China would have to be the American-Japanese military alliance. Conceivably Japan might slowly acquiesce in redirecting the alliance to this purpose. Its doing so would depend upon Japan’s having confidence in: (1) the overall American ability to sustain itself as the world’s only superpower and to maintain its active leadership in world affairs; (2) the American commitment to maintain its presence in Asia and actively to combat China’s efforts to expand its influence; and (3) the ability of the United States and Japan to contain China without high costs in terms of resources or high risks in terms of war.

In the absence of a major and improbable show of resolution by and commitment from the United States, Japan is likely to accommodate China. Except for the 1930s and 1940s when it pursued a unilateral policy of conquest in East Asia with disastrous consequences, Japan has historically sought security by allying itself with what it perceives to be the relevant dominant power. Even in the 1930s in joining the Axis, it was aligning itself with what appeared to be then the most dynamic military-ideological force in global politics. Earlier in the century it had quite consciously entered into the Anglo-Japanese alliance because Great Britain was the leading power in world affairs. In the 1950s
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Japan similarly associated itself with the United States as the most powerful country in the world and the one that could insure Japan’s security. Like the Chinese, the Japanese see international politics as hierarchical because their domestic politics are. As one leading Japanese scholar has observed:

When the Japanese think of their nation in international society, Japanese domestic models often offer analogies. The Japanese tend to see an international order as giving expression externally to cultural patterns that are manifested internally within Japanese society, which is characterized by the relevance of vertically organized structures. Such an image of international order has been influenced by Japan’s long experience with pre-modern Sino-Japanese relations (a tribute system).

Hence, Japanese alliance behavior has been “basically bandwagoning, not balancing” and “alignment with the dominant power.”
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The Japanese, one longtime Western resident there agreed, “are quicker than most to bow to
force majeure
and cooperate with perceived moral superiors. . . . and quickest to resent abuse from a morally flabby, retreating hegemon.” As the U.S. role in Asia subsides and China’s becomes paramount, Japanese policy will adapt accordingly. Indeed, it has begun to do so. The key question in Sino-Japanese relations, Kishore Mahbubani has observed, is “who is number one?” And the answer is becoming clear. “There will be no explicit statements or understandings, but it was significant that the Japanese Emperor chose to visit China in 1992 at a time when Beijing was still relatively isolated internationally.”
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Ideally, Japanese leaders and people would undoubtedly prefer the pattern of the past several decades and to remain under the sheltering arm of a predominant United States. As U.S. involvement in Asia declines, however, the forces in Japan urging that Japan “re-Asianize” will gain in strength and the Japanese will come to accept as inevitable the renewed dominance of China on the East Asia scene. When asked in 1994, for instance, which nation would have the greatest influence in Asia in the twenty-first century, 44 percent of the Japanese public said China, 30 percent said the United States, and only 16 percent said Japan.
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Japan, as one high Japanese official predicted in 1995, will have the “discipline” to adapt to the rise of China. He then asked whether the United States would. His initial proposition is plausible; the answer to his subsequent question is uncertain.

Chinese hegemony will reduce instability and conflict in East Asia. It also will reduce American and Western influence there and compel the United States to accept what it has historically attempted to prevent: domination of a key region of the world by another power. The extent who which this hegemony threatens the interests of other Asian countries or the United States, however, depends in part on what happens in China. Economic growth generates military power and political influence, but it can also stimulate political
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development and movement toward a more open, pluralistic, and possibly democratic form of politics. Arguably it already has had that effect on South Korea and Taiwan. In both countries, however, the political leaders most active in pushing for democracy were Christians.

China’s Confucian heritage, with its emphasis on authority, order, hierarchy, and the supremacy of the collectivity over the individual, creates obstacles to democratization. Yet economic growth is creating in south China increasingly high levels of wealth, a dynamic bourgeoisie, accumulations of economic power outside governmental control, and a rapidly expanding middle class. In addition, Chinese people are deeply involved in the outside world in terms of trade, investment, and education. All this creates a social basis for movement toward political pluralism.

The precondition for political opening usually is the coming to power of reform elements within the authoritarian system. Will this happen to China? Probably not in the first succession after Deng but possibly in the second. The new century could see the creation in south China of groups with political agendas, which in fact if not in name will be embryonic political parties, and which are likely to have close ties with and be supported by Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. If such movements emerge in south China and if a reform faction took power in Beijing, some form of a political transition could occur. Democratization could encourage politicians to make nationalist appeals and increase the possibility of war, although in the long run a stable pluralistic system in China is likely to ease its relations with other powers.

Perhaps, as Friedberg suggested, Europe’s past is Asia’s future. More probably, Asia’s past will be Asia’s future. The choice for Asia is between power balanced at the price of conflict or peace secured at the price of hegemony. Western societies might go for conflict and balance. History, culture, and the realities of power strongly suggest that Asia will opt for peace and hegemony. The era that began with the Western intrusions of the 1840s and 1850s is ending, China is resuming its place as regional hegemon, and the East is coming into its own.

The post-Cold War, multipolar, multicivilizational world lacks an overwhelmingly dominant cleavage such as existed in the Cold War. So long as the Muslim demographic and Asian economic surges continue, however, the conflicts between the West and the challenger civilizations will be more central to global politics than other lines of cleavage. The governments of Muslim countries are likely to continue to become less friendly to the West, and intermittent low-intensity and at times perhaps high-intensity violence will occur between Islamic groups and Western societies. Relations between the United States, on the one hand, and China, Japan, and other Asian countries will be highly
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conflictual, and a major war could occur if the United States challenges China’s rise as the hegemonic power in Asia.

Under these conditions, the Confucian-Islamic connection will continue and perhaps broaden and deepen. Central to this connection has been the cooperation of Muslim and Sinic societies opposing the West on weapons proliferation, human rights, and other issues. At its core have been the close relations among Pakistan, Iran, and China, which crystallized in the early 1990s with the visits of President Yang Shangkun to Iran and Pakistan and of President Rafsanjani to Pakistan and China. These “pointed to the emergence of an embryonic alliance between Pakistan, Iran, and China.” On his way to China, Rafsanjani declared in Islamabad that “a strategic alliance” existed between Iran and Pakistan and that an attack on Pakistan would be considered an attack on Iran. Reinforcing this pattern, Benazir Bhutto visited Iran and China immediately after becoming prime minister in October 1993. The cooperation among the three countries has included regular exchanges among political, military, and bureaucratic officials and joint efforts in a variety of civil and military areas including defense production, in addition to the weapons transfers from China to the other states. The development of this relationship has been strongly supported by those in Pakistan belonging to the “independence” and “Muslim” schools of thought on foreign policy who looked forward to a “Tehran-Islamabad-Beijing axis,” while in Tehran it was argued that the “distinctive nature of the contemporary world” required “close and consistent cooperation” among Iran, China, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan. By the mid-1990s something like a de facto alliance had come into existence among the three countries rooted in opposition to the West, security concerns over India, and the desire to counter Turkish and Russian influence in Central Asia.
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Are these three states likely to become the core of a broader grouping involving other Muslim and Asian countries? An informal “Confucian-Islamist alliance,” Graham Fuller argues, “could materialize, not because Muhammad and Confucius are anti-West but because these cultures offer a vehicle for the expression of grievances for which the West is partly blamed—a West whose political, military, economic and cultural dominance increasingly rankles in a world where states feel ‘they don’t have to take it anymore.’ ” The most passionate call for such cooperation came from Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi, who in March 1994 declared:

The new world order means that Jews and Christians control Muslims and if they can, they will after that dominate Confucianism and other religions in India, China, and Japan. . . .

What the Christians and Jews are now saying: We were determined to crush Communism and the West must now crush Islam and Confucianism.

Now we hope to see a confrontation between China that heads the Confucianist camp and America that heads the Christian crusader camp. We have
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no justifications but to be biased against the crusaders. We are standing with Confucianism, and by allying ourselves with it and fighting alongside it in one international front, we will eliminate our mutual opponent.

So, we as Muslims, will support China in its struggle against our mutual enemy. . . .

We wish China victory. . . .
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Enthusiasm for a close anti-Western alliance of Confucian and Islamic states, however, has been rather muted on the Chinese side, with President Jiang Zemin declaring in 1995 that China would not establish an alliance with any other country. This position presumably reflected the classical Chinese view that as the Middle Kingdom, the central power, China did not need formal allies, and other countries would find it in their interest to cooperate with China. China’s conflicts with the West, on the other hand, mean that it will value partnership with other anti-Western states, of which Islam furnishes the largest and most influential number. In addition, China’s increasing needs for oil are likely to impel it to expand its relations with Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia as well as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Such an arms-for-oil axis, one energy expert observed in 1994, “won’t have to take orders from London, Paris or Washington anymore.”
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The relations of other civilizations and their core states to the West and its challengers will vary widely. The Southern civilizations, Latin America and Africa, lack core states, have been dependent on the West, and are relatively weak militarily and economically (although
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that is changing rapidly for Latin America). In their relations with the West, they probably will move in opposite directions. Latin America is culturally close to the West. During the 1980s and 1990s its political and economic systems came more and more to resemble Western ones. The two Latin American states that once pursued nuclear weapons abandoned those attempts. With the lowest levels of overall military effort of any civilization, Latin Americans may resent the military dominance of the United States but show no intention of challenging it. The rapid rise of Protestantism in many Latin American societies is both making them more like the mixed Catholic-Protestant societies of the West and expanding Latin American-Western religious ties beyond those that go through Rome. Conversely, the influx into the United States of Mexicans, Central Americans, and Caribbeans and the resulting Hispanic impact on American society also promotes cultural convergence. The principal conflictual issues between Latin America and the West, which in practice means the United States, are immigration, drugs and drug-related terrorism, and economic integration (i.e., admission of Latin American states to NAFTA vs. expansion of Latin American groupings such as Mercosur and the Andean Pact). As the problems that developed with respect to Mexico joining NAFTA indicate, the marriage of Latin American and Western civilizations will not be easy, will
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probably take shape slowly through much of the twenty-first century, and may never be consummated. Yet the differences between the West and Latin America remain small compared to those between the West and other civilizations.

The West’s relations with Africa should involve only slightly higher levels of conflict primarily because Africa is so weak. Yet some significant issues exist. South Africa did not, like Brazil and Argentina, abandon a program to develop nuclear weapons; it destroyed nuclear weapons it had already built. These weapons were produced by a white government to deter foreign attacks on apartheid, and that government did not wish to bequeath them to a black government which might use them for other purposes. The ability to build nuclear weapons cannot be destroyed, however, and it is possible that a post-apartheid government could construct a new nuclear arsenal to insure its role as the core state of Africa and to deter the West from intervention in Africa. Human rights, immigration, economic issues, and terrorism are also on the agenda between Africa and the West. Despite France’s efforts to maintain close ties with its former colonies, a long-term process of de-Westernization appears to be underway in Africa, the interest and influence of Western powers receding, indigenous culture reasserting itself, and South Africa over time subordinating the Afrikaner-English elements in its culture to African ones. While Latin America is becoming more Western, Africa is becoming less so. Both, however, remain in different ways dependent on the West and unable, apart from U.N. votes, to affect decisively the balance between the West and its challengers.