Chapter II
CLASH OF CIVILIZATION OR CLASH OF INTERESTS?

Kirkpatrick also points out that "Huntington knows that the great question for non-Western societies is whether they can be modern without being Western. He believes Japan has succeeded. He is probably right that most societies will simultaneously seek the benefits of modernization and of traditional relations. To the extent that they and we are, successful in preserving our traditions while accepting the endless changes of modernization, our differences from one another will be preserved, and the need for not just a pluralistic society but a pluralistic world will grow ever more acute."

In order to illustrate the point further, it would be worth our while to glance at what Akio Kawato16, has to say on the issue of values: Perhaps the debate regarding value differences reflects the on-going redistribution of political and economic interests in the post-Cold War world, rather than the fact that values continue to differ. However, it would be an inverted argument to say that unless the cu rrent Western paradigm is used, economic expansion could not occur, and that people should therefore switch immediately to the Western model.

It is a matter of elementary truth that the opportunities that allowed Western Europe to become what it is today, especially through the proliferation of individualism, stem from the economic development that occurred beginning in the 16th Century. Even though the economic development of Western Europe since the 16th Century can be said to be largely self-made, it cannot be denied that the coincidental development of the gun and the sacrifices of the colonies played a large role. Furthermore, Western civilization has developed to its present heights while continuing a pattern of bloodshed through revolution and war.

Industrialized nations should realize how unwise their practice is of pushing developing countries into rapidly adopting new policies, how unwise it is to imply that to advance economically they must adopt modern values and new social systems b efore they embark on economic development. In Western Europe, it took more than 300 years between the dawn of economic expansion in the 17th Century to the granting of universal suffrage. In the United States, civil rights issues were the cause of much debate until very recently. A sudden change in values and social systems can increase tensions within a society.

Reverting to Huntington's clash of cultures, what Kishore Madhubani17 has to say is illuminating: "It is Ironic that the West should increasingly fear Islam when daily the Muslims are reminded of their weakness. "Islam has bloody borders," Huntington says. But in all conflicts between Muslims and pro-Western forces, the Muslims are losing and losing badly, whether they be Azeris, Palestinians, Iraqis, Iranians or Bosnian Muslims. With so much disunity, the Islamic world is not about to coalesce into a single force.

"The West protests the reversal democracy in Manmar, Peru or Nigeria, but not in Algeria. These double standards hurt. Bosnia has wreaked incalculable damage. The dramatic passivity of powerful European nations as genocide is committed on their doorsteps has torn away the thin veil of moral authority that the West had spun around itself as a legacy of its recent benign era. Few can believe that the West would have remained equally passive if Muslim artillery shell had been raining down on Christian populations in Sarajevo or Srebrenica. Arms sales to Saudi Arabia do not suggest a natural Christian-Islamic connection. Neither should Chinese arms sales to Iran. Both are opportunistic moves, based not on natural empathy or civilizational alliances.

"The failure to develop a viable strategy to deal with Islam or China reveals a fatal flaw in the West: an inability to come to terms with the shifts in relative weights of civilizations that Huntongton well documents. Two key sentences in Huntington's essay, when put side by side, illustrate the nature of the problem: first, "In the politics of civil izations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civilization no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonization but join the West as movers and shapers of history," and second "The West in effect is using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will maintain Western predominance, protect Western interests and promote Western political and economic values." This combination is a prescription for disaster.

"Simple arithmetic demonstrates Western folly: The West has 800 million people; the rest make up almost 4.7 billion. In the national arena, no Western society would accept a situation where 15 per cent of its population legislated for the remaining 85 percent. But this is what the West is trying to do globally," Madhubani concludes.

Huntington's image of other cultures is not new and he is resurrecting an old controversy. In his assessment of his thesis Albert Weeks18 explains: "Sa meul P. Huntington has resurrected an old controversy in the study of international affairs: the relationship between "microcosmic" and "macrocosmic" processes. Partisans of the former single out the nation state as the basic unit, or determining factor, in the yin and yang of world politics. The "macros," on the other hand, view world affairs on the lofty level of the civilizations to which nation states belong and by which their behavior is allegedly largely determined.

"His methodology is not new. In arguing the macro case in the 1940s, Arnold Toynbee distinguished what he called primary, secondary and tertiary civilizations by the time of their appearance in history, contending that their attributes continued to influence contemporary events. Quincy Wright, likewise applying a historical method, classified civilizations as "bellicose" (including Syrian, Japanese and Mexican), "moderate bellicose" (Germanic, Western, Russian, Scandinavian, etc.) and "most peaceful" (such as Irish, Indian and Chinese). Like Toynbeen and now Huntington, he attributed contemporary significance to these factors. Huntington's classification, while different in several respects from those of his illustrious predecessors, also identifies determinants on a grand scale by "civilizations."

"His endeavour, however, has its own fault lines. The lines are the borders encompassing each distinct nation state and mercilessly chopping the alleged civilizations into pieces. With the cultural and religious glue of these "civilizations" thin and cracked, with the nation states' political regime providing the principal bonds, crisscross fracturing and cancellation of Huntington's own macro-scale, somewhat anachronistic fault lines are inevitable. 

The world remains fractured along political and possibly geopolitical lines while cultural and historical determinants are a great deal less vital and virulent. As Albert Weeks19 astutely points out: Politics, regimes and ideologies are culturally, historically and "civilizationally" determined to an extent. But it is willful, day-to-day, crisis-to-crisis, war-to-war political decision-making by nation-state units that remains the single most identifiable determinant of events in the international arena. How else can we explain repeated nation-state "defection" from their collective "civilizations" As Huntington himself points out, in the Persian Gulf war "one Arab state invaded another and then fought a coalition of Arab, Western and other states."

One may agree with Akito that in key Western capitals there is a deep sense of unease about the future. The confidence that the West would remain a dominant force in the 21st century, as it has for the past four or five centuries, is giving way to a sense of foreboding that forces like the emergence of fundamentalist Islam, the rise of East Asia and the collapse of Russia and Eastern Europe could pose real threats to the West. A siege mentality is developing. Within these troubled walls, Samuel P. Huntington's essay "The Clash of Civilizations?" is bound to resonate.