Clash Of Civilizations

Lito M. Lorenzana
03/20/2019
Manila Times

The 8 civilizations

Part 1

THIS year marks the 30th year after the Berlin Wall came down.
This was the beginning of the dying throes of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR). In two years, in the autumn of 1991,
President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, passing on power to Boris
Yeltsin of Russia. The Soviet Union was dissolved, the Cold War
ended, and the West won. Liberal democracy and capitalism
trumped communism. The former was meant to sweep across the
world in a new order, with the Western powers led by the United
States presiding over a new era of harmony. This did not happen.
The euphoria of victory was short-lived.

By the end of WW2, with the ascendancy of America as the lone

self-appointed global police, an Iron Curtain descended upon the
USSR ,dividing Europe into East and West blocs. The Cold War
broke out, delineating the world further into political spheres of
influence: the US-led Western liberal capitalist alliance; the Soviet
Union-led communist bloc and the non-aligned countries which
were the ideological moving targets of the power dynamics
between the first two and where conflicts took place. The nuclear
arsenal on opposing sides guaranteed total world destruction if
ever the Cold War turned into a shooting conflict. Strangely, this
paradigm brought about a modicum of stability of “non-war and
non-peace” under the threat of mutually assured destruction
(MAD). After 1991, this pattern of history, uneasy at best,
disappeared.

In 1996, Samuel Huntington, an erudite Harvard professor

published his book The Clash of Civilizations and The Remaking of
World Order. His hypothesis is that in the post-Cold War world,
future wars would be fought not between ideologies but between
cultures. And the primary source of discord will be the people’s
cultural and religious identities.
Accordingly, encounters fall along the faultlines of the world’s
biggest cultural entities or civilizations. There is no universal
civilization. Instead there are these seven or eight, each within its
own set of values: a) Western North America and Western Europe
with the US, Germany and France as the core states; b) Orthodox,
with Russia as the core state; c) Confucian or Sinic with China as
core state; d) Islamic but with no core states because of its
heterogeneity; e) Latin American also with no core state; f) Hindu,
India as core; and g) Japanese, Japan as core; and sub-Saharan
Africa with no core state.

Two decades after Huntington’s book, empirical data suggests

many nations did indeed align along cultural lines. Countries with
similar cultures come together; those historically with different
cultures broke up. Yugoslavia split up along cultural lines;
Serbia/Bulgaria/Greece formed an Orthodox entente; Catholic
parts of Yugoslavia/Slovenia/ Croatia came knocking on NATO’s
door; Turkey resumed its role as protector of Muslims in the
Balkans, Bosnia and Albania. Greece and Turkey are members of
NATO, but with the post-Cold War ideological threat gone, Greece
and Turkey are teetering on the edge of violence against each
other. Sometimes civilizations go through boundaries of states.
The eastern and western parts of Ukraine belong to different
civilizations.

Two corollary issues are bones of contention. Western civilizations’

unique values; separation of Church and state; rule of law and
rights of individuals; pluralistic nature of Western societies; which
has evolved and existed for a thousand years have been imposed
on other civilizations even older than itself. Confucian, Japanese
and Hindi civilizations have their own unique ethos contradictory
to the Western concepts. These attempts, backed up by might
and the Cross, did not bode well for these already complex
relationships.

Which brings us to the second issue — that of equating

westernization with modernization. Under the guise of the
globalization mantra as the vehicle for liberal democracy and
capitalism, greater interaction with other civilizations was the
intent of the Western world, primarily to create and expand world
markets. But global capitalism has over-emphasized its impact on
the world. In Islam, Chinese and other Eastern cultures, there is
resistance to Western values of human rights and democracy.

All societies strive for wealth, welcoming the influx of new

technology, availing of the benefits of modern science; adopting
some elements of free-markets. But they don’t necessarily want
to embody Western values nor take on their religions.
Predominantly Shinto and Buddhist Japan is the template which
could work. It is thoroughly modern, has significantly adopted
elements of Western culture in its drive for economic growth, but
it is not Western in character. Japanese don’t think of themselves
as Western. They recognize certain fundamental differences in
their culture, society and in their way of life which are anathema
to other cultures, especially the US and Western Europe.

What is disturbing by far is the emergence of Islam challenging

American hegemony framed by the knee-jerk response after the
Sept. 11, 2001 Twin Towers attack. America had to re-evaluate its
policy on foreign intervention after the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq. The lessons of these debacles resonated on the current
Trump administration’s fixation on domestic immigration and the
outright use of the label radical Islamic terrorism, which Bush and
Obama refused to do, emphasizing that America was at war with
violent extremists, not Islam itself.

The predicate of Trump’s racist position on immigration may have

been that of Huntington’s proposition that the US needs to
partner with its European allies to limit immigration to the US and
put a cap from an annual 800K after 1965 to 500K, a needed
pause to better concentrate on assimilating the millions who are
already in place. President Trump rescinded this recommendation
and reconfigured the issue into a massive racist rejection of the
inflow of Muslims from the Middle East and countries from which
“Islamic terrorists” are sourced.

It is believed, however, that a clash with Islam will not lead to a

major war. As a civilization, Islam has no single dominant core
Islamic state; but it is so fragmented and occupied primarily with
fighting each other.

Islam has sub-civilizations within — Arabic, Malay, Turkic, and

they compete for Islamic leadership, posing a destabilizing force
in their region and culture. Iran vs Saudi for a time were arming
Bosnian Muslims, for example, supporting different Islamic groups
fighting non-Islamic ones. Islam used to have the dominant
Ottoman Empire which disappeared. The rise of IS is a parody of
the Islamic caliphate.

The “clash of civilizations” also presaged the singular rise of the

Middle Kingdom. After Deng Xiaoping unleashed its economic
dragons, China has become increasingly assertive and if it grows
economically at the same rate as in the past decades, it will
establish its hegemony over Asia and reclaim its sphere of
influence which historically endured hundreds of years until the
mid-19th century. Its nine-dash line and expansion in the South
China Sea (West Philippine Sea) does not augur well for the
countries on its periphery. China has already declared it is their
right. But how will Japan and, more importantly, America react to
this? And how will this affect the Philippines?