The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (5 page)

 
•
  the failure of the West to provide meaningful support to the Bosnian Muslims or to denounce Croat atrocities in the same way Serb atrocities were denounced;

 
•
  the unwillingness of Russia to join other U.N. Security Council members in getting the Serbs in Croatia to make peace with the Croatian government, and the offer of Iran and other Muslim nations to provide 18,000 troops to protect Bosnian Muslims;

 
•
  the intensification of the war between Armenians and Azeris, Turkish and Iranian demands that the Armenians surrender their conquests, the deployment of Turkish troops to and Iranian troops across the Azerbaijan border, and Russia’s warning that the Iranian action contributes to “escalation of the conflict” and “pushes it to dangerous limits of internationalization”;

 
•
  the continued fighting in central Asia between Russian troops and
mujahedeen
guerrillas;

 
•
  the confrontation at the Vienna Human Rights Conference between the West, led by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, denouncing “cultural relativism,” and a coalition of Islamic and Confucian states rejecting “Western universalism”;

 
•
  the refocusing in parallel fashion of Russian and NATO military planners on “the threat from the South”;

 
•
  the voting, apparently almost entirely along civilizational lines, that gave the 2000 Olympics to Sydney rather than Beijing;

 
•
  the sale of missile components from China to Pakistan, the resulting imposition of U.S. sanctions against China, and the confrontation between China and the United States over the alleged shipment of nuclear technology to Iran;

 
•
  the breaking of the moratorium and the testing of a nuclear weapon by China, despite vigorous U.S. protests, and North Korea’s refusal to participate further in talks on its own nuclear weapons program;

 
•
  the revelation that the U.S. State Department was following a “dual containment” policy directed at both Iran and Iraq;

 
•
  
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the announcement by the U.S. Defense Department of a new strategy of preparing for two “major regional conflicts,” one against North Korea, the other against Iran or Iraq;

 
•
  the call by Iran’s president for alliances with China and India so that “we can have the last word on international events”;

 
•
  the new German legislation drastically curtailing the admission of refugees;

 
•
  the agreement between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk on the disposition of the Black Sea fleet and other issues;

 
•
  the bombing of Baghdad by the United States, its virtually unanimous support by Western governments, and its condemnation by almost all Muslim governments as another example of the West’s “double standard”;

 
•
  the United States’ listing Sudan as a terrorist state and indicting Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and his followers for conspiring “to levy a war of urban terrorism against the United States”;

 
•
  the improved prospects for the eventual admission of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia into NATO;

 
•
  the 1993 Russian parliamentary election which demonstrated that Russia was indeed a “torn” country with its population and elites uncertain whether they should join or challenge the West.

A comparable list of events demonstrating the relevance of the civilization paradigm could be compiled for almost any other six-month period in the early 1990s.

In the early years of the Cold War, the Canadian statesman Lester Pearson presciently pointed to the resurgence and vitality of non-Western societies. “It would be absurd,” he warned, “to imagine that these new political societies coming to birth in the East will be replicas of those with which we in the West are familiar. The revival of these ancient civilizations will take new forms.” Pointing out that international relations “for several centuries” had been the relations among the states of Europe, he argued that “the most far-reaching problems arise no longer between nations within a single civilization but between civilizations themselves.”
[17]
The prolonged bipolarity of the Cold War delayed the developments which Pearson saw coming. The end of the Cold War released the cultural and civilizational forces which he identified in the 1950s, and a wide range of scholars and observers have recognized and highlighted the new role of these factors in global politics.
[18]
“[A]s far as anyone interested in the contemporary world is concerned,” Fernand Braudel has sagely warned, “and even more so with regard to anyone wishing to act within it, it ‘pays’ to know how to make out, on a map of the world, which civilizations exist today, to be able to define their borders, their centers and peripheries, their provinces and the air one breathes there, the general and particular ‘forms’ existing and associating within them. Otherwise, what catastrophic blunders of perspective could ensue!”
[19]

_p. 40
H
uman history is the history of civilizations. It is impossible to think of the development of humanity in any other terms. The story stretches through generations of civilizations from ancient Sumerian and Egyptian to Classical and Mesoamerican to Christian and Islamic civilizations and through successive manifestations of Sinic and Hindu civilizations. Throughout history civilizations have provided the broadest identifications for people. As a result, the causes, emergence, rise, interactions, achievements, decline, and fall of civilizations have been explored at length by distinguished historians, sociologists, and anthropologists including, among others, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Oswald Spengler, Pitirim Sorokin, Arnold Toynbee, Alfred Weber, A. L. Kroeber, Philip Bagby, Carroll Quigley, Rushton Coulborn, Christopher Dawson, S. N. Eisenstadt, Fernand Braudel, William H. McNeill, Adda Bozeman, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
[1]
These and other writers have produced a voluminous, learned, and sophisticated literature devoted to the comparative analysis of civilizations. Differences in perspective, methodology, focus, and concepts pervade this literature. Yet broad agreement also exists on central propositions concerning the nature, identity, and dynamics of civilizations.

First, a distinction exists between civilization in the singular and civilizations in the plural. The idea of civilization was developed by eighteenth-century French thinkers as the opposite of the concept of “barbarism.” Civilized society differed from primitive society because it was settled, urban, and literate. To be civilized was good, to be uncivilized was bad. The concept of civilization
_p. 41
provided a standard by which to judge societies, and during the nineteenth century, Europeans devoted much intellectual, diplomatic, and political energy to elaborating the criteria by which non-European societies might be judged sufficiently “civilized” to be accepted as members of the European-dominated international system. At the same time, however, people increasingly spoke of civilizations in the plural. This meant “renunciation of a civilization defined as an ideal, or rather as the ideal” and a shift away from the assumption there was a single standard for what was civilized, “confined,” in Braudel’s phrase, “to a few privileged peoples or groups, humanity’s ‘elite.’ ” Instead there were many civilizations, each of which was civilized in its own way. Civilization in the singular, in short, “lost some of its cachet,” and a civilization in the plural sense could in fact be quite uncivilized in the singular sense.
[2]

Civilizations in the plural are the concern of this book. Yet the distinction between singular and plural retains relevance, and the idea of civilization in the singular has reappeared in the argument that there is a universal world civilization. This argument cannot be sustained, but it is useful to explore, as will be done in the final chapter of this book, whether or not civilizations are becoming more civilized.

Second, a civilization is a cultural entity, outside Germany. Nineteenth-century German thinkers drew a sharp distinction between civilization, which involved mechanics, technology, and material factors, and culture, which involved values, ideals, and the higher intellectual artistic, moral qualities of a society. This distinction has persisted in German thought but has not been accepted elsewhere. Some anthropologists have even reversed the relation and conceived of cultures as characteristic of primitive, unchanging, nonurban societies, while more complex, developed, urban, and dynamic societies are civilizations. These efforts to distinguish culture and civilization, however, have not caught on, and, outside Germany, there is overwhelming agreement with Braudel that it is “delusory to wish in the German way to separate
culture
from its foundation
civilization
.”
[3]

Civilization and culture both refer to the overall way of life of a people, and a civilization is a culture writ large. They both involve the “values, norms, institutions, and modes of thinking to which successive generations in a given society have attached primary importance.”
[4]
A civilization is, for Braudel, “a space, a ‘cultural area,’ ” “a collection of cultural characteristics and phenomena.” Wallerstein defines it as “a particular concatenation of worldview, customs, structures, and culture (both material culture and high culture) which forms some kind of historical whole and which coexists (if not always simultaneously) with other varieties of this phenomenon.” A civilization is, according to Dawson, the product of “a particular original process of cultural creativity which is the work of a particular people,” while for Durkheim and Mauss, it is “a kind of moral milieu encompassing a certain number of nations, each national culture being only a particular form of the whole.” To Spengler a
_p. 42
civilization is “the inevitable
destiny
of the Culture . . . the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable . . . a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming.” Culture is the common theme in virtually every definition of civilization.
[5]

The key cultural elements which define a civilization were set forth in classic form by the Athenians when they reassured the Spartans that they would not betray them to the Persians:

For there are many and powerful considerations that forbid us to do so, even if we were inclined. First and chief, the images and dwellings of the gods, burnt and laid ruins: this we must needs avenge to the utmost of our power, rather than make terms with the man who has perpetrated such deeds. Secondly, the Grecian race being of the same blood and the same language, and the temples of the gods and sacrifices in common; and our similar customs; for the Athenians to become betrayers of these would not be well.

Blood, language, religion, way of life, were what the Greeks had in common and what distinguished them from the Persians and other non-Greeks.
[6]
Of all the objective elements which define civilizations, however, the most important usually is religion, as the Athenians emphasized. To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions; and people who share ethnicity and language but differ in religion may slaughter each other, as happened in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and the Subcontinent.
[7]

A significant correspondence exists between the division of people by cultural characteristics into civilizations and their division by physical characteristics into races. Yet civilization and race are not identical. People of the same race can be deeply divided by civilization; people of different races may be united by civilization. In particular, the great missionary religions, Christianity and Islam, encompass societies from a variety of races. The crucial distinctions among human groups concern their values, beliefs, institutions, and social structures, not their physical size, head shapes, and skin colors.

Third, civilizations are comprehensive, that is, none of their constituent units can be fully understood without reference to the encompassing civilization. Civilizations, Toynbee argued, “comprehend without being comprehended by others.” A civilization is a “totality.” Civilizations, Melko goes on to say,

have a certain degree of integration. Their parts are defined by their relationship to each other and to the whole. If the civilization is composed of states, these states will have more relation to one another than they do to states outside the civilization. They might fight more, and engage more frequently in diplomatic relations. They will be more interdependent economically. There will be pervading aesthetic and philosophical currents.
[8]

_p. 43
A civilization is the broadest cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Chinese or Hindu communities. Chinese, Hindus, and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilizations. A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he strongly identifies. Civilizations are the biggest “we” within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other “thems” out there. Civilizations may involve a large number of people, such as Chinese civilization, or a very small number of people, such as the Anglophone Caribbean. Throughout history, many small groups of people have existed possessing a distinct culture and lacking any broader cultural identification. Distinctions have been made in terms of size and importance between major and peripheral civilizations (Bagby) or major and arrested or abortive civilizations (Toynbee). This book is concerned with what are generally considered the major civilizations in human history.