The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (56 page)

Far more significant than economics and demography are problems of moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunity in the West. Oft-pointed-to manifestations of moral decline include:

 1.  increases in antisocial behavior, such as crime, drug use, and violence generally;

 2.  family decay, including increased rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teen-age pregnancy, and single-parent families;

 3.  at least in the United States, a decline in “social capital,” that is, membership in voluntary associations and the interpersonal trust associated with such membership;

 4.  general weakening of the “work ethic” and rise of a cult of personal indulgence;

 5.  decreasing commitment to learning and intellectual activity, manifested in the United States in lower levels of scholastic achievement.

The future health of the West and its influence on other societies depends in considerable measure on its success in coping with those trends, which, of course, give rise to the assertions of moral superiority by Muslims and Asians.

Western culture is challenged by groups within Western societies. One such challenge comes from immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and to propagate the values, customs, and
_p. 305
cultures of their home societies. This phenomenon is most notable among Muslims in Europe, who are, however, a small minority. It is also manifest, in lesser degree, among Hispanics in the United States, who are a large minority. If assimilation fails in this case, the United States will become a cleft country, with all the potentials for internal strife and disunion that entails. In Europe, Western civilization could also be undermined by the weakening of its central component, Christianity. Declining proportions of Europeans profess religious beliefs, observe religous practices, and participate in religous activities.
[5]
This trend reflects not so much hostility to religion as indifference to it. Christian concepts, values, and practices nonetheless pervade European civilization. “Swedes are probably the most unreligious people in Europe,” one of them commented, “but you cannot understand this country at all unless you realize that our institutions, social practices, families, politics, and way of life are fundamentally shaped by our Lutheran heritage.” Americans, in contrast to Europeans, overwhelmingly believe in God, think themselves to be religious people, and attend church in large numbers. While evidence of a resurgence of religion in America was lacking as of the mid-1980s the following decade seemed to witness intensified religious activity.
[6]
The erosion of Christianity among Westerners is likely to be at worst only a very long term threat to the health of Western civilization.

A more immediate and dangerous challenge exists in the United States. Historically American national identity has been defined culturally by the heritage of Western civilization and politically by the principles of the American Creed on which Americans overwhelmingly agree: liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property. In the late twentieth century both components of American identity have come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism they have attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings. They have denounced, in the words of one of their reports, the “systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives” in education and “the dominance of the European-American monocultural perspective.” The multiculturalists are, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., said, “very often ethnocentric separatists who see little in the Western heritage other than Western crimes.” Their “mood is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures.”
[7]

The multicultural trend was also manifested in a variety of legislation that followed the civil rights acts of the 1960s, and in the 1990s the Clinton administration made the encouragement of diversity one of its major goals. The contrast with the past is striking. The Founding Fathers saw diversity as a reality and as a problem: hence the national motto,
e pluribus unum,
chosen by a
_p. 306
committee of the Continental Congress consisting of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Later political leaders who also were fearful of the dangers of racial, sectional, ethnic, economic, and cultural diversity (which, indeed, produced the largest war of the century between 1815 and 1914), responded to the call of “bring us together,” and made the promotion of national unity their central responsibility. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing as a nation at all,” warned Theodore Roosevelt, “would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”
[8]
In the 1990s, however, the leaders of the United States have not only permitted that but assiduously promoted the diversity rather than the unity of the people they govern.

The leaders of other countries have, as we have seen, at times attempted to disavow their cultural heritage and shift the identity of their country from one civilization to another. In no case to date have they succeeded and they have instead created schizophrenic torn countries. The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country’s cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the United States with another civilization, however, they wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United States will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.

The multiculturalists also challenged a central element of the American Creed, by substituting for the rights of individuals the rights of groups, defined largely in terms of race, ethnicity, sex, and sexual preference. The Creed, Gunnar Myrdal said in the 1940s, reinforcing the comments of foreign observers dating from Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Alexis de Tocqueville, has been “the cement in the structure of this great and disparate nation.” “It has been our fate as a nation,” Richard Hofstader agreed, “not to have ideologies but to be one.”
[9]
What happens then to the United States if that ideology is disavowed by a significant portion of its citizens? The fate of the Soviet Union, the other major country whose unity, even more than that of the United States, was defined in ideological terms is a sobering example for Americans. “[T]he total failure of Marxism . . . and the dramatic breakup of the Soviet Union,” the Japanese philosopher Takeshi Umehara has suggested, “are only the precursors to the collapse of Western liberalism, the main current of modernity. Far from being the alternative to Marxism and the reigning ideology at the end of history, liberalism will be the next domino to fall.”
[10]
In an era in which peoples everywhere define themselves in cultural terms what place is there for a society without a cultural core and defined only by a political creed? Political principles are a fickle base on which to build a lasting community. In a multicivilizational world where culture counts, the United States could be simply the last anomalous holdover from a fading Western world where ideology counted.

Rejection of the Creed and of Western civilization means the end of the
_p. 307
United States of America as we have known it. It also means effectively the end of Western civilization. If the United States is de-Westernized, the West is reduced to Europe and a few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. Without the United States the West becomes a minuscule and declining part of the world’s population on a small and inconsequential peninsula at the extremity of the Eurasian land mass.

The clash between the multiculturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American Creed is, in James Kurth’s phrase, “the
real
clash” within the American segment of Western civilization.
[11]
Americans cannot avoid the issue: Are we a Western people or are we something else? The futures of the United States and of the West depend upon Americans reaffirming their commitment to Western civilization. Domestically this means rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism. Internationally it means rejecting the elusive and illusory calls to identify the United States with Asia. Whatever economic connections may exist between them, the fundamental cultural gap between Asian and American societies precludes their joining together in a common home. Americans are culturally part of the Western family; multiculturalists may damage and even destroy that relationship but they cannot replace it. When Americans look for their cultural roots, they find them in Europe.

In the mid-1990s new discussion occurred of the nature and future of the West, a renewed recognition arose that such a reality had existed, and heightened concern about what would insure its continued existence. This in part germinated from the perceived need to expand the premier Western institution, NATO, to include the Western countries to the east and from the serious divisions that arose within the West over how to respond to the breakup of Yugoslavia. It also more broadly reflected anxiety about the future unity of the West in the absence of a Soviet threat and particularly what this meant for the United States commitment to Europe. As Western countries increasingly interact with increasingly powerful non-Western societies they become more and more aware of their common Western cultural core that binds them together. Leaders from both sides of the Atlantic have emphasized the need to rejuvenate the Atlantic community. In late 1994 and in 1995 the German and British defense ministers, the French and American foreign ministers, Henry Kissinger, and various other leading figures all espoused this cause. Their case was summed up by British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind, who, in November 1994, argued the need for “an Atlantic Community,” resting on four pillars: defense and security embodied in NATO; “shared belief in the rule of law and parliamentary democracy”; “liberal capitalism and free trade”; and “the shared European cultural heritage emanating from Greece and Rome through the Renaissance to the shared values, beliefs and civilization of our own century.”
[12]
In 1995 the European Commission launched a project to “renew” the transatlantic relationship, which led to the signature of an extensive pact between the Union and the United States. Simultaneously many European political and
_p. 308
business leaders endorsed the creation of a transatlantic free trade area. Although the AFL-CIO opposed NAFTA and other trade liberalization measures, its head warmly backed such a transatlantic free trade agreement which would not threaten American jobs with competition from low-wage countries. It was also supported by conservatives both European (Margaret Thatcher) and American (Newt Gingrich), as well as by Canadian and other British leaders.

The West, as was argued in
chapter 2
, went through a first European phase of development and expansion that lasted several centuries and then a second American phase in the twentieth century. If North America and Europe renew their moral life, build on their cultural commonality, and develop close forms of economic and political integration to supplement their security collaboration in NATO, they could generate a third Euroamerican phase of Western economic affluence and political influence. Meaningful political integration would in some measure counter the relative decline in the West’s share of the world’s people, economic product, and military capabilities and revive the power of the West in the eyes of the leaders of other civilizations. “With their trading clout,” Prime Minister Mahathir warned Asians, “the EU-NAFTA confederation could dictate terms to the rest of the world.”
[13]
Whether the West comes together politically and economically, however, depends overwhelmingly on whether the United States reaffirms its identity as a Western nation and defines its global role as the leader of Western civilization.

A world in which cultural identities—ethnic, national, religious, civilizational—are central, and cultural affinities and differences shape the alliances, antagonisms, and policies of states has three broad implications for the West generally and for the United States in particular.

First, statesmen can constructively alter reality only if they recognize and understand it. The emerging politics of culture, the rising power of non-Western civilizations, and the increasing cultural assertiveness of these societies have been widely recognized in the non-Western world. European leaders have pointed to the cultural forces drawing people together and driving them apart. American elites, in contrast, have been slow to accept and to come to grips with these emerging realities. The Bush and Clinton administrations supported the unity of the multicivilizational Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Russia, in vain efforts to halt the powerful ethnic and cultural forces pushing for disunion. They promoted multicivilizational economic integration plans which are either meaningless, as with APEC, or involve major unanticipated economic and political costs, as with NAFTA and Mexico. They attempted to develop close relationships with the core states of other civilizations in the form of a “global partnership” with Russia or “constructive engagement” with China, in the face of the natural conflicts of interest between the United States and
_p. 309
those countries. At the same time, the Clinton administration failed to involve Russia wholeheartedly in the search for peace in Bosnia, despite Russia’s major interest in that war as Orthodoxy’s core state. Pursuing the chimera of a multi-civilizational country, the Clinton administration denied self-determination to the Serbian and Croatian minorities and helped to bring into being a Balkan one-party Islamist partner of Iran. In similar fashion the U.S. government also supported the subjection of Muslims to Orthodox rule, maintaining that “Without question Chechnya is part of the Russian Federation.”
[14]