The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (7 page)

The relations among civilizations have evolved through two phases and are now in a third. For more than three thousand years after civilizations first emerged, the contacts among them were, with some exceptions, either nonexistent or limited or intermittent and intense. The nature of these contacts is well expressed in the word historians use to describe them: “encounters.”
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Civilizations were separated by time and space. Only a small number existed at any one time, and a significant difference exists, as Benjamin Schwartz and Shmuel Eisenstadt argued, between Axial Age and pre-Axial Age civilizations in terms of whether or not they recognized a distinction between the “transcendental and mundane orders.” The Axial Age civilizations, unlike their predecessors, had transcendental myths propagated by a distinct intellectual class: “the Jewish prophets and priests, the Greek philosophers and sophists, the Chinese Literati, the Hindu Brahmins, the Buddhist Sangha and the Islamic Ulema.”
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Some regions witnessed two or three generations of affiliated civilizations, with the demise of one civilization and interregnum followed by the rise of another successor generation.
Figure 2.1
is a simplified chart (reproduced from Carroll Quigley) of the relations among major Eurasian civilizations through time.

Civilizations were also separated geographically. Until 1500 the Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations had no contact with other civilizations or with each
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other. The early civilizations in the valleys of the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow rivers also did not interact. Eventually, contacts between civilizations did multiply in the eastern Mediterranean, southwestern Asia, and northern India. Communications and commercial relations were restricted, however, by the distances separating civilizations and the limited means of transport available to overcome distance. While there was some commerce by sea in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, “Steppe-traversing horses, not ocean-traversing sailing ships, were the sovereign means of locomotion by which the separate civilizations of the world as it was before
A.D.
1500 were linked together—to the slight extent to which they did maintain contact with each other.”
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Ideas and technology moved from civilization to civilization, but it often took centuries. Perhaps the most important cultural diffusion not the result of conquest was the spread of Buddhism to China, which occurred about six hundred years after its origin in northern India. Printing was invented in China in the eighth century
A.D.
and movable type in the eleventh century, but this technology only reached Europe in the fifteenth century. Paper was introduced into China in the second century
A.D.
, came to Japan in the seventh century, and was diffused westward to Central Asia in the eighth century, North Africa in the tenth, Spain in the twelfth, and northern Europe in the thirteenth. Another Chinese invention, gunpowder, made in the ninth century, disseminated to the Arabs a few hundred years later, and reached Europe in the fourteenth century.
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Figure 2.1 – Eastern Hemisphere Civilizations

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The most dramatic and significant contacts between civilizations were when people from one civilization conquered and eliminated or subjugated the people of another. These contacts normally were not only violent but brief, and they occurred only intermittently. Beginning in the seventh century
A.D.,
relatively sustained and at times intense intercivilizational contacts did develop between Islam and the West and Islam and India. Most commercial, cultural, and military interactions, however, were within civilizations. While India and China, for instance, were on occasion invaded and subjected by other peoples (Moguls, Mongols), both civilizations also had extensive times of “warring states” within their own civilization. Similarly, the Greeks fought each other and traded with each other far more often than they did with Persians or other non-Greeks.

European Christendom began to emerge as a distinct civilization in the eighth and ninth centuries. For several hundred years, however, it lagged behind many other civilizations in its level of civilization. China under the Tang, Sung, and Ming dynasties, the Islamic world from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, and Byzantium from the eighth to the eleventh centuries far surpassed Europe in wealth, territory, military power, and artistic, literary, and scientific achievement.
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Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, European culture began to develop, facilitated by the “eager and systematic appropriation of suitable elements from the higher civilizations of Islam and Byzantium, together with adaptation of this inheritance to the special conditions and interests of the West.” During the same period, Hungary, Poland, Scandinavia, and the Baltic coast were converted to Western Christianity, with Roman law and other aspects of Western civilization following, and the eastern boundary of Western civilization was stabilized where it would remain thereafter without significant change. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Westerners struggled to expand their control in Spain and did establish effective dominance of the Mediterranean. Subsequently, however, the rise of Turkish power brought about the collapse of “Western Europe’s first overseas empire.”
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Yet by 1500, the renaissance of European culture was well under way and social pluralism, expanding commerce, and technological achievements provided the basis for a new era in global politics.

Intermittent or limited multidirectional encounters among civilizations gave way to the sustained, overpowering, unidirectional impact of the West on all other civilizations. The end of the fifteenth century witnessed the final re-conquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Moors and the beginnings of Portuguese penetration of Asia and Spanish penetration of the Americas. During the subsequent two hundred fifty years all of the Western Hemisphere and significant portions of Asia were brought under European rule or domination. The end of the eighteenth century saw a retraction of direct European control as first the United States, then Haiti, and then most of Latin America revolted
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against European rule and achieved independence. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, renewed Western imperialism extended Western rule over almost all of Africa, consolidated Western control in the Subcontinent and elsewhere in Asia, and by the early twentieth century subjected virtually the entire Middle East except for Turkey to direct or indirect Western control. Europeans or former European colonies (in the Americas) controlled 35 percent of the earth’s land surface in 1800, 67 percent in 1878, and 84 percent in 1914. By 1920 the percentage was still higher as the Ottoman Empire was divided up among Britain, France, and Italy. In 1800 the British Empire consisted of 1.5 million square miles and 20 million people. By 1900 the Victorian empire upon which the sun never set included 11 million square miles and 390 million people.
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In the course of European expansion, the Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations were effectively eliminated, Indian and Islamic civilizations along with Africa were subjugated, and China was penetrated and subordinated to Western influence. Only Russian, Japanese, and Ethiopian civilizations, all three governed by highly centralized imperial authorities, were able to resist the onslaught of the West and maintain meaningful independent existence. For four hundred years intercivilizational relations consisted of the subordination of other societies to Western civilization.

The causes of this unique and dramatic development included the social structure and class relations of the West, the rise of cities and commerce, the relative dispersion of power in Western societies between estates and monarchs and secular and religious authorities, the emerging sense of national consciousness among Western peoples, and the development of state bureaucracies. The immediate source of Western expansion, however, was technological: the invention of the means of ocean navigation for reaching distant peoples and the development of the military capabilities for conquering those peoples. “[I]n large measure,” as Geoffrey Parker has observed, “ ‘the rise of the West’ depended upon the exercise of force, upon the fact that the military balance between the Europeans and their adversaries overseas was steadily tilting in favour of the former; . . . the key to the Westerners’ success in creating the first truly global empires between 1500 and 1750 depended upon precisely those improvements in the ability to wage war which have been termed ‘the military revolution.’ ” The expansion of the West was also facilitated by the superiority in organization, discipline, and training of its troops and subsequently by the superior weapons, transport, logistics, and medical services resulting from its leadership in the Industrial Revolution.
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The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
[missingperiod]

By 1910 the world was more one politically and economically than at any other time in human history. International trade as a proportion of the gross world product was higher than it had ever been before and would not again
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approximate until the 1970s and 1980s. International investment as a percentage of total investment was higher then than at any other time.
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Civilization meant Western civilization. International law was Western international law coming out of the tradition of Grotius. The international system was the Western Westphalian system of sovereign but “civilized” nation states and the colonial territories they controlled.

The emergence of this Western-defined international system was the second major development in global politics in the centuries after 1500. In addition to interacting in a domination-subordination mode with non-Western societies, Western societies also interacted on a more equal basis with each other. These interactions among political entities within a single civilization closely resembled those that had occurred within Chinese, Indian, and Greek civilizations. They were based on a cultural homogeneity which involved “language, law, religion, administrative practice, agriculture, landholding, and perhaps kinship as well.” European peoples “shared a common culture and maintained extensive contacts via an active network of trade, a constant movement of persons, and a tremendous interlocking of ruling families.” They also fought each other virtually without end; among European states peace was the exception not the rule.
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Although for much of this period the Ottoman empire controlled up to one-fourth of what was often thought of as Europe, the empire was not considered a member of the European international system.

For 150 years the intracivilizational politics of the West was dominated by the great religious schism and by religious and dynastic wars. For another century and a half following the Treaty of Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were largely among princes—emperors, absolute monarchs, and constitutional monarchs attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mercantilist economic strength, and, most important, the territory they ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution the principal lines of conflict were between nations rather than princes. In 1793 as R. R. Palmer put it, “The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun.”
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This nineteenth-century pattern lasted until World War I.

In 1917, as a result of the Russian Revolution, the conflict of nation states was supplemented by the conflict of ideologies, first among fascism, communism, and liberal democracy and then between the latter two. In the Cold War these ideologies were embodied in the two superpowers, each of which defined its identity by its ideology and neither of which was a nation state in the traditional European sense. The coming to power of Marxism first in Russia and then in China and Vietnam represented a transition phase from the European international system to a post-European multicivilizational system. Marxism was a product of European civilization, but it neither took root nor succeeded there. Instead modernizing and revolutionary elites imported it into non-Western societies; Lenin, Mao, and Ho adapted it to their purposes and
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used it to challenge Western power, to mobilize their people, and to assert the national identity and autonomy of their countries against the West. The collapse of this ideology in the Soviet Union and its substantial adaptation in China and Vietnam does not, however, necessarily mean that these societies will import the other Western ideology of liberal democracy. Westerners who assume that it does are likely to be surprised by the creativity, resilience, and individuality of non-Western cultures.