The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (55 page)

Unlike Russia and Germany, the United States lacked cultural commonality with its Bosnian client and hence was in a weak position to pressure the Muslims to compromise. In addition, apart from rhetoric, the United States only helped the Bosnians by turning a blind eye to the violations of the arms embargo by Iran and other Muslim states. The Bosnian Muslims, consequently, felt increasingly grateful to and increasingly identified with the broader Islamic community. Simultaneously they denounced the United States for pursuing a “double standard” and not repelling the aggression against them as it had against Kuwait. Their wrapping themselves in the victim guise made it still more difficult for the United States to pressure them to be accommodating. They thus were able to reject peace proposals, build up their military strength with help from their Muslim friends, and eventually take the initiative and regain a substantial amount of the territory they had lost.

Resistance to compromise is intense among the primary parties. In the Transcaucasus War, the ultranationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnak), which was very strong in the Armenian diaspora, dominated the Nagorno-Karabakh entity, rejected the Turkish-Russian-American peace proposal of May 1993 accepted by the Armenian and Azerbaijani governments, undertook military offensives that produced charges of ethnic cleansing, raised the prospects of a broader war, and aggravated its relations with the more moderate Armenian government. The success of the Nagorno-Karabakh offen
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sive caused problems for Armenia, which was anxious to improve its relations with Turkey and Iran so as to ease the food and energy shortages resulting from the war and the Turkish blockade. “[T]he better things are going in Karabakh, the more difficult it is for Yerevan,” commented one Western diplomat.
[63]
President Levon Ter-Petrossian of Armenia, like President Yeltsin, had to balance pressures from nationalists in his legislature against broader foreign policy interests in accommodating other states, and in late 1994 his government banned the Dashnak party from Armenia.

Like the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, the Bosnian Serbs and Croats adopted hard-line positions. As a result, as the Croatian and Serbian governments came under pressure to help in the peace process, problems developed in their relations with their Bosnian kin. With the Croats these were less serious, as the Bosnian Croats agreed in form if not in practice to join the federation with the Muslims. Spurred by personal antagonism, the conflict between President Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, in contrast, became intense and public. In August 1994 Karadzic rejected the peace plan that had been approved by Milosevic. The Serbian government, anxious to bring sanctions to an end, announced that it was cutting off all trade with the Bosnian Serbs except for food and medicine. In return, the U.N. eased its sanctions on Serbia. The following year Milosevic allowed the Croatian army to expel the Serbs from Krajina and Croatian and Muslim forces to drive them back in northwest Bosnia. He also agreed with Tudjman to permit the gradual return of Serb-occupied Eastern Slavonia to Croatian control. With the approval of the great powers, he then in effect “delivered” the Bosnian Serbs to the Dayton negotiations, incorporating them into his delegation.

Milosevic’s actions brought an end to the U.N. sanctions against Serbia. They also brought him cautious approbation from a somewhat surprised international community. The nationalist, aggressive, ethnic-cleansing, Greater Serbian warmonger of 1992 had become the peacemaker of 1995. For many Serbs, however, he had become a traitor. He was denounced in Belgrade by Serbian nationalists and the leaders of the Orthodox Church and he was bitterly accused of treason by the Krajina and Bosnian Serbs. In this, of course, they replicated the charges West Bank settlers levied at the Israeli government for its agreement with the P.L.O. Betrayal of kin is the price of peace in a fault line war.

Exhaustion with the war and the incentives and pressures of tertiary parties compel changes in the secondary and primary parties. Either moderates replace extremists in power or extremists, like Milosevic, find it in their interest to become moderate. They do so, however, at some risk. Those perceived as traitors arouse far more passionate hatred than enemies. Leaders of the Kashmiri Muslims, Chechens, and Sri Lankan Sinhalese suffered the fate of Sadat and Rabin for betraying the cause and attempting to work out compromise solutions with the archfoe. In 1914 a Serbian nationalist assassinated an Aus
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trian archduke. In the aftermath of Dayton his most likely target would be Slobodan Milosevic.

An agreement to halt a fault line war will be successful, even if only temporarily, to the extent that it reflects the local balance of power among the primary parties and the interests of the tertiary and secondary parties. The 51 percent– 49 percent division of Bosnia was not viable in 1994 when the Serbs controlled 70 percent of the country; it became viable when the Croatian and Muslim offensives reduced Serbian control to almost half. The peace process was also helped by the ethnic cleansing which occurred, with Serbs reduced to less than 3 percent of the population of Croatia and members of all three groups being separated violently or voluntarily in Bosnia. In addition, secondary and tertiary parties, the latter often the core states of civilizations, need to have real security or communal interests in a war to sponsor a viable solution. Alone, primary participants cannot halt fault line wars. Halting them and preventing their escalation into global wars depend primarily on the interests and actions of the core states of the world’s major civilizations. Fault line wars bubble up from below, fault line peaces trickle down from above.

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H
istory ends at least once and occasionally more often in the history of every civilization. As the civilization’s universal state emerges, its people become blinded by what Toynbee called “the mirage of immortality” and convinced that theirs is the final form of human society. So it was with the Roman Empire, the ’Abbasid Caliphate, the Mughal Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. The citizens of such universal states “in defiance of apparently plain facts . . . are prone to regard it, not as a night’s shelter in the wilderness, but as the Promised Land, the goal of human endeavors.” The same was true at the peak of the Pax Britannica. For the English middle class in 1897, “as they saw it, history for them, was over. . . . And they had every reason to congratulate themselves on the permanent state of felicity which this ending of history had conferred on them.”
[1]
Societies that assume that their history has ended, however, are usually societies whose history is about to decline.

Is the West an exception to this pattern? The two key questions were well formulated by Melko:

First, is Western civilization a new species, in a class by itself, incomparably different from all other civilizations that have ever existed?

Second, does its worldwide expansion threaten (or promise) to end the possibility of development of all other civilizations?
[2]

The inclination of most Westerners is, quite naturally, to answer both questions in the affirmative. And perhaps they are right. In the past, however, the peoples of other civilizations thought similarly and thought wrong.

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The West obviously differs from all other civilizations that have ever existed in that it has had an overwhelming impact on all other civilizations that have existed since 1500. It also inaugurated the processes of modernization and industrialization that have become worldwide, and as a result societies in all other civilizations have been attempting to catch up with the West in wealth and modernity. Do these characteristics of the West, however, mean that its evolution and dynamics as a civilization are fundamentally different from the patterns that have prevailed in all other civilizations? The evidence of history and the judgments of the scholars of the comparative history of civilizations suggest otherwise. The development of the West to date has not deviated significantly from the evolutionary patterns common to civilizations throughout history. The Islamic Resurgence and the economic dynamism of Asia demonstrate that other civilizations are alive and well and at least potentially threatening to the West. A major war involving the West and the core states of other civilizations is not inevitable, but it could happen. Alternatively the gradual and irregular decline of the West which started in the early twentieth century could continue for decades and perhaps centuries to come. Or the West could go through a period of revival, reverse its declining influence in world affairs, and reconfirm its position as the leader whom other civilizations follow and imitate.

In what is probably the most useful periodization of the evolution of historical civilizations, Carroll Quigley sees a common pattern of seven phases.
[3]
(See p.
44
.) In his argument, Western civilization gradually began to take shape between
A.D.
370 and 750 through the mixing of elements of Classical, Semitic, Saracen, and barbarian cultures. Its period of gestation lasting from the middle of the eighth century to the end of the tenth century was followed by movement, unusual among civilizations, back and forth between phases of expansion and phases of conflict. In his terms, as well as those of other civilization scholars, the West now appears to be moving out of its phase of conflict. Western civilization has become a security zone; intra-West wars, apart from an occasional Cold War, are virtually unthinkable. The West is developing, as was argued in
chapter 2
, its equivalent of a universal empire in the form of a complex system of confederations, federations, regimes, and other types of cooperative institutions that embody at the civihzational level its commitment to democratic and pluralistic politics. The West has, in short, become a mature society entering into what future generations, in the recurring pattern of civilizations, will look back to as a “golden age,” a period of peace resulting, in Quigley’s terms, from “the absence of any competing units within the area of the civilization itself, and from the remoteness or even absence of struggles with other societies outside.” It is also a period of prosperity which arises from “the ending of internal belligerent destruction, the reduction of internal trade barriers, the establishment of a common system of weights, measures, and coinage, and from the extensive system of government spending associated with the establishment of a universal empire.”

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In previous civilizations this phase of blissful golden age with its visions of immortality has ended either dramatically and quickly with the victory of an external society or slowly and equally painfully by internal disintegration. What happens within a civilization is as crucial to its ability to resist destruction from external sources as it is to holding off decay from within. Civilizations grow, Quigley argued in 1961, because they have an “instrument of expansion,” that is, a military, religious, political, or economic organization that accumulates surplus and invests it in productive innovations. Civilizations decline when they stop the “application of surplus to new ways of doing things. In modern terms we say that the rate of investment decreases.” This happens because the social groups controlling the surplus have a vested interest in using it for “nonproductive but ego-satisfying purposes . . . which distribute the surpluses to consumption but do not provide more effective methods of production.” People live off their capital and the civilization moves from the stage of the universal state to the stage of decay. This is a period of

acute economic depression, declining standards of living, civil wars between the various vested interests, and growing illiteracy. The society grows weaker and weaker. Vain efforts are made to stop the wastage by legislation. But the decline continues. The religious, intellectual, social, and political levels of the society began to lose the allegiance of the masses of the people on a large scale. New religious movements begin to sweep over the society. There is a growing reluctance to fight for the society or even to support it by paying taxes.

Decay then leads to the stage of invasion “when the civilization, no longer
able
to defend itself because it is no longer
willing
to defend itself, lies wide open to ‘barbarian invaders,’ ” who often come from “another, younger, more powerful civilization.”
[4]

The overriding lesson of the history of civilizations, however, is that many things are probable but nothing is inevitable. Civilizations can and have reformed and renewed themselves. The central issue for the West is whether, quite apart from any external challenges, it is capable of stopping and reversing the internal processes of decay. Can the West renew itself or will sustained internal rot simply accelerate its end and/or subordination to other economically and demographically more dynamic civilizations?
[F11]

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In the mid-1990s the West had many characteristics Quigley identified as those of a mature civilization on the brink of decay. Economically the West was far richer than any other civilization, but it also had low economic growth rates, saving rates, and investment rates, particularly as compared with the societies of East Asia. Individual and collective consumption had priority over the creation of the capabilities for future economic and military power. Natural population growth was low, particularly compared with that of Islamic countries. Neither of these problems, however, would inevitably have catastrophic consequences. Western economies were still growing; by and large Western peoples were becoming better off; and the West was still the leader in scientific research and technological innovation. Low birth rates were unlikely to be cured by governments (whose efforts to do so are generally even less successful than their efforts to reduce population growth). Immigration, however, was a potential source of new vigor and human capital provided two conditions were met: first, if priority were given to able, qualified, energetic people with the talents and expertise needed by the host country; second, if the new migrants and their children were assimilated into the cultures of the country and the West. The United States was likely to have problems meeting the first condition and European countries problems meeting the second. Yet setting policies governing the levels, sources, characteristics, and assimilation of immigrants is well within the experience and competence of Western governments.