The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (11 page)

The third and most general argument for the emergence of a universal civilization sees it as the result of the broad processes of modernization that have been going on since the eighteenth century. Modernization involves industrialization, urbanization, increasing levels of literacy, education, wealth, and social mobilization, and more complex and diversified occupational structures. It is a product of the tremendous expansion of scientific and engineering knowledge beginning in the eighteenth century that made it possible for humans to control and shape their environment in totally unprecedented ways. Modernization is a revolutionary process comparable only to the shift from primitive to civilized societies, that is, the emergence of civilization in the singular, which began in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, and the Indus about 5000
B.C.
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The attitudes, values, knowledge, and culture of people in a modern society differ greatly from those in a traditional society. As the first civilization to modernize, the West leads in the acquisition of the culture of modernity. As other societies acquire similar patterns of education, work, wealth, and class structure, the argument runs, this modern Western culture will become the universal culture of the world.

That significant differences exist between modern and traditional cultures is beyond dispute. It does not necessarily follow, however, that societies with modern cultures resemble each other more than do societies with traditional cultures. Obviously a world in which some societies are highly modern and others still traditional will be less homogeneous than a world in which all societies are at comparable high levels of modernity. But what about a world in which all societies were traditional? This world existed a few hundred years ago. Was it any less homogeneous than a future world of universal modernity is likely to be? Possibly not. “Ming China . . . was assuredly closer to the France of the Valois,” Braudel argues, “than the China of Mao Tse-tung is to the France of the Fifth Republic.”
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Yet modern societies could resemble each other more than do traditional societies for two reasons. First, the increased interaction among modern societies may not generate a common culture but it does facilitate the transfer of techniques, inventions, and practices from one society to another with a speed and to a degree that were impossible in the traditional world. Second, traditional society was based on agriculture; modern society is based on industry, which may evolve from handicrafts to classic heavy industry to knowledge-based industry. Patterns of agriculture and the social structure which goes with them are much more dependent on the natural environment than are patterns of industry. They vary with soil and climate and thus may give rise to different forms of land ownership, social structure, and government. Whatever the overall merits of Wittfogel’s hydraulic civilization thesis, agriculture dependent on the construction and operation of massive irrigation systems does foster the emergence of centralized and bureaucratic political authorities. It could hardly be otherwise. Rich soil and good climate are likely to encourage development of large-scale plantation agriculture and a consequent social structure involving a small class of wealthy landowners and a large class of peasants, slaves, or serfs who work the plantations. Conditions inhospitable to large-scale agriculture may encourage emergence of a society of independent farmers. In agricultural societies, in short, social structure is shaped by geography. Industry, in contrast, is much less dependent on the local natural environment. Differences in industrial organization are likely to derive from differences in culture and social structure rather than geography, and the former conceivably can converge while the latter cannot.

Modern societies thus have much in common. But do they necessarily merge into homogeneity? The argument that they do rests on the assumption that modern society must approximate a single type, the Western type, that modern civilization is Western civilization and that Western civilization is modern civilization. This, however, is a totally false identification. Western civilization emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries and developed its distinctive characteristics in the following centuries. It did not begin to modernize until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The West was the West long before it was modern. The central characteristics of the West, those which distinguish it from other civilizations, antedate the modernization of the West.

What were these distinguishing characteristics of Western society during the hundreds of years before it modernized? Various scholars have produced answers to this question which differ in some specifics but agree on the key institutions, practices, and beliefs that may legitimately be identified as the core of Western civilization. These include the following.
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As a third generation civilization, the West inherited much from previous civilizations, including most notably Classical civilization. The legacies of the West from Classical civilization are many, including Greek philosophy and rationalism, Roman law, Latin, and Christianity. Islamic and
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Orthodox civilizations also inherited from Classical civilization but nowhere near to the same degree the West did.

Western Christianity, first Catholicism and then Catholicism and Protestantism, is historically the single most important characteristic of Western civilization. During most of its first millennium, indeed, what is now known as Western civilization was called Western Christendom; there existed a well-developed sense of community among Western Christian peoples that they were distinct from Turks, Moors, Byzantines, and others; and it was for God as well as gold that Westerners went out to conquer the world in the sixteenth century. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation and the division of Western Christendom into a Protestant north and a Catholic south are also distinctive features of Western history, totally absent from Eastern Orthodoxy and largely removed from the Latin American experience.

Language is second only to religion as a factor distinguishing people of one culture from those of another. The West differs from most other civilizations in its multiplicity of languages. Japanese, Hindi, Mandarin, Russian, and even Arabic are recognized as the core languages of their civilizations. The West inherited Latin, but a variety of nations emerged and with them national languages grouped loosely into the broad categories of Romance and Germanic. By the sixteenth century these languages had generally assumed their contemporary form.

Throughout Western history first the Church and then many churches existed apart from the state. God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual authority and temporal authority, have been a prevailing dualism in Western culture. Only in Hindu civilization were religion and politics also so distinctly separated. In Islam, God is Caesar; in China and Japan, Caesar is God; in Orthodoxy, God is Caesar’s junior partner. The separation and recurring clashes between church and state that typify Western civilization have existed in no other civilization. This division of authority contributed immeasurably to the development of freedom in the West.

The concept of the centrality of law to civilized existence was inherited from the Romans. Medieval thinkers elaborated the idea of natural law according to which monarchs were supposed to exercise their power, and a common law tradition developed in England. During the phase of absolutism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the rule of law was observed more in the breach than in reality, but the idea persisted of the subordination of human power to some external restraint: “
Non sub homine sed sub Deo et lege
.” The tradition of the rule of law laid the basis for constitutionalism and the protection of human rights, including property rights, against the exercise of arbitrary power. In most other civilizations law was a much less important factor in shaping thought and behavior.

Historically Western society has been highly pluralistic. As Deutsch notes, what is distinctive about the West “is the rise and persistence of
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diverse autonomous groups not based on blood relationship or marriage.”
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Beginning in the sixth and seventh centuries, these groups initially included monasteries, monastic orders, and guilds, but then expanded to include in many areas of Europe a variety of other associations and societies.
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Associational pluralism was supplemented by class pluralism. Most Western European societies included a relatively strong and autonomous aristocracy, a substantial peasantry, and a small but significant class of merchants and traders. The strength of the feudal aristocracy was particularly significant in limiting the extent to which absolutism was able to take firm root in most European nations. This European pluralism contrasts sharply with the poverty of civil society, the weakness of the aristocracy, and the strength of the centralized bureaucratic empires which simultaneously existed in Russia, China, the Ottoman lands, and other non-Western societies.

Social pluralism early gave rise to estates, parliaments, and other institutions to represent the interests of the aristocracy, clergy, merchants, and other groups. These bodies provided forms of representation which in the course of modernization evolved into the institutions of modern democracy. In some instances these bodies were abolished or their powers were greatly limited during the period of absolutism. Even when that happened, however, they could, as in France, be resurrected to provide a vehicle for expanded political participation. No other contemporary civilization has a comparable heritage of representative bodies stretching back for a millennium. At the local level also, beginning about the ninth century, movements for self-government developed in the Italian cities and then spread northward “forcing bishops, local barons and other great nobles to share power with the burghers, and in the end often yield to them altogether.”
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Representation at the national level was thus supplemented by a measure of autonomy at the local level not duplicated in other regions of the world.

Many of the above features of Western civilization contributed to the emergence of a sense of individualism and a tradition of individual rights and liberties unique among civilized societies. Individualism developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and acceptance of the right of individual choice—what Deutsch terms “the Romeo and Juliet revolution”—prevailed in the West by the seventeenth century. Even claims for
equal
rights for all individuals—“the poorest he in England has a life to live as much as the richest he”—were articulated if not universally accepted. Individualism remains a distinguishing mark of the West among twentieth-century civilizations. In one analysis involving similar samples from fifty countries, the top twenty countries scoring highest on the individualism index included all the Western countries except Portugal plus Israel.
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The author of another cross-cultural survey of individualism and collectivism similarly highlighted the dominance of individualism in the West compared to the prevalence of collectivism elsewhere and concluded that “the values that are most important in the West are least
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important worldwide.” Again and again both Westerners and non-Westerners point to individualism as the central distinguishing mark of the West.
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The above list is not meant to be an exhaustive enumeration of the distinctive characteristics of Western civilization. Nor is it meant to imply that those characteristics were always and universally present in Western society. Obviously they were not: the many despots in Western history regularly ignored the rule of law and suspended representative bodies. Nor is it meant to suggest that none of these characteristics appeared in other civilizations. Obviously they do: the Koran and the
shari’a
constitute basic law for Islamic societies; Japan and India had class systems paralleling that of the West (and perhaps as a result are the only two major non-Western societies to sustain democratic governments for any length of time). Individually almost none of these factors was unique to the West. The combination of them was, however, and this is what gave the West its distinctive quality. These concepts, practices, and institutions simply have been more prevalent in the West than in other civilizations. They form at least part of the essential continuing core of Western civilization. They are what is Western but not modern about the West. They are also in large part the factors which enabled the West to take the lead in modernizing itself and the world.

The expansion of the West has promoted both the modernization and the Westernization of non-Western societies. The political and intellectual leaders of these societies have responded to the Western impact in one or more of three ways: rejecting both modernization and Westernization; embracing both; embracing the first and rejecting the second.
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Japan followed a substantially rejectionist course from its first contacts with the West in 1542 until the mid-nineteenth century. Only limited forms of modernization were permitted, such as the acquisition of firearms, and the import of Western culture, including most notably Christianity, was highly restricted. Westerners were totally expelled in the mid-seventeenth century. This rejectionist stance came to an end with the forcible opening of Japan by Commodore Perry in 1854 and the dramatic efforts to learn from the West following the Meiji Restoration in 1868. For several centuries China also attempted to bar any significant modernization or Westernization. Although Christian emissaries were allowed into China in 1601 they were then effectively excluded in 1722. Unlike Japan, China’s rejectionist policy was in large part rooted in the Chinese image of itself as the Middle Kingdom and the firm belief in the superiority of Chinese culture to those of all other peoples. Chinese isolation, like Japanese isolation, was brought to an end by Western arms, applied to China by the British in the Opium War of 1839-1842. As these cases suggest, during the nineteenth century Western power made it
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increasingly difficult and eventually impossible for non-Western societies to adhere to purely exclusionist strategies.