THE MODERN DILEMMA
The intellectual history of relations between Asian and Islamic civilizations on the one hand and Western civilization on the other can help us understand some of the difficulties that intercivilizational dialogue faces today. An underlying problem going back to the late 19th century has been the tendency to treat civilizations as self-contained entities with a completely independent trajectory rather than as products of mutual influence. This tendency developed from the need to assert civilizational superiority at the expense of those defined as “other” in terms of geography, race, or religion and it has served to justify attempts to dominate, exploit, and control. The heightened Western imperialism of the late 19th century was closely followed by Japanese imperialism, and the resulting clash of imperialisms led to World War II in the Pacific.
During the postwar era, the United States has maintained its unofficial world empire that includes the strategically important region of East Asia. And China may now be embarking on its own imperial mission in East Asia, determined to drive out the US in order to form a sphere of influence, as it asserts itself in territorial disputes with its neighbors. But the US-China conflict is only the latest act in a long-lasting civilizational drama, which has had one major confrontation already, the Second World War. Therefore, it is valuable to examine this history of conflict from the less familiar Asian and Islamic side, as expressed in the writings of intellectuals, to gain insight into the current face-off in the Pacific.
From the Height of Western Imperialism to World War I
In the 1870s, non-Western intellectuals like Yukichi Fukuzawa in Japan and Namik Kemal in the Ottoman Empire countered the prevailing assumption that only Western people were capable of achieving the heights of civilization and progress. They proposed that the people of their own nations could also reach these universal goals. Differences of race, religion, or climate did not matter, and the door was open to all, offering prosperity and security to those that could follow the recipe that the West was the first to discover.
But dark clouds appeared as racist ideologies gained strength in Europe and the United States, Christianity was forcefully equated with civilization, and imperialism assumed its most aggressive form. The competition for colonies among the European powers intensified as Great Britain took over Egypt in 1882 and Africa was divided among the European powers in 1884 at the Congress of Berlin, with Britain and France taking the lion’s share. There was a glaring contradiction between the universal values of freedom and equality proclaimed by the West and the reality of a hierarchical world order under Western domination.
At this time, there wasworld wide discussion of the question of civilization. A discourse on civilization had been used by Western writers to justify the superiority of their own civilization. Islamic, Indian, and Chinese civilizations were judged inferior in comparison as sharp distinctions were drawn not only between civilizations, but between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and the white and the colored races. However, there were Western intellectuals who initiated self-critiques, and after the carnage of World War I a more pessimistic mood set in, reflected in the popularity of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
At that time, intellectuals in Asia and the Islamic world asserted the equality of civilizations, emphasizing the compatibility of their civilizations with the modern world. In Japan and the Ottoman Empire, leading thinkers recognized that a balance would have to be worked out between the areas of life where modern Western civilization would replace their own and those where local institutions and values could be retained. A distinction tended to be drawn between Western knowledge and Eastern spirit, but in practice it was difficult to limit Western influence to the realm of science and technology. In addition, the legitimacy of the Eurocentric world order was challenged by pan-Islamic and pan-Asian intellectuals who accused the imperialist West of violating its own standards of civilized behavior and of not putting into practice its own Enlightenment ideals.
In 1905, a huge challenge to assumptions of white supremacy came when Japan defeated Russia, the first time that a major Western power had lost a war to a country outside the West in several centuries. This victory demonstrated to nationalists and people of color all over the world that a new day was coming when those who suffered at the hands of the imperialists would rise and proudly assert their dignity. Gandhi, Tagore, Nehru, Sun Yat-sen, Ataturk, and Du Bois, among others, were impressed and took note. The racial hierarchies of the West and its civilizing mission had been exposed as hollow. Then, after World War I, notions of Western decline gained ground among Western intellectuals, too, and assertions of the value of non-Western civilizations by people of the stature of Gandhi and Tagore made the idea of East-West synthesis credible.
One of the most famous proponents of East-West synthesis and pan-Asianism was the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who made trips to China and Japan in the 1920s to implore people not to recklessly discard their traditional heritage. Distinguishing between the materialistic West and the spiritual East, Tagore advocated the preservation of local cultures in harmony with nature and the valuing of aesthetic and spiritual matters, not just national power. But he was shaken by the fierce criticism he encountered as many Japanese and Chinese intellectuals viewed him as the representative of a weak, colonized nation, asking them to renounce modern Western influences, including nationalism, that brought them strength and pride. In particular, Mao Zedong disdained Tagore’s romantic outlook which he thought would inhibit the revolutionary ardor of Chinese young people.
Public sentiment in the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century had been turning against the government’s progressive policies and its pro-Western stance. Notions of an ongoing clash between Christians and Muslims and the encirclement of Muslims by the Christian world made pan-Islamism seem credible as a way for the Ottoman state and an independent Islamic world to survive. Appeals to international law seemed ineffective and the Western powers continued to pursue imperialist policies. This change in the climate of opinion pushed the Ottoman Empire toward casting its lot with Germany in the First World War. This alliance plus a pan-Islamic foreign policy would counterbalance the British, French, and Russian empires that each had large Muslim populations.
Major Challenges to Western Dominance
Japan was on the winning side in World War I, but Japanese intellectuals with a pan-Asian vision claimed Japan would never be treated as an equal by its white allies on account of racial difference. Therefore, it would be better to end cooperation with them and cast one’s lot with Asia, a position which gained considerable sympathy in the 1930s. The coming of the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarian movements in Europe indicated that Western capitalism might be faltering and the time was ripe for disengagement with the international order. Japan’s decision to leave the League of Nations in 1933 symbolized this determination.
During World War II, Japan was able to gather considerable support from Asian peoples for its slogan “Asia for Asians,” driving Western imperialism out of several Asian countries while revealing Western weaknesses. Links were established with nationalist leaders in Burma, Malaysia, and Indonesia as well as with Subash Chandra Bose in India. But imitating Western imperialism by subjugating China through force and coercion did not help its cause, while the arrogance and prejudice of Japanese military governments during the war created bitterness and resentment in Southeast Asia.
In the 1970s, Japan built up a sphere of economic influence in Southeast Asia, leading to street protests against Japanese economic domination in Indonesia and Thailand. Japanese scholars in the 1960s came up with the flying geese paradigm to explain Japan’s technological leadership in Asia. Their claim was that Japan as the lead goose would assist the less-developed Asian nations in catching up with the West, implying a regional hierarchy with Japan at the top.
A Chinese version of Asia for Asians was expressed by Xi Jinping in 2014 when he proclaimed that Asians should provide their own security. “In the final analysis, it is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia. The people of Asia have the capability and wisdom to achieve peace and stability in the region through enhanced cooperation.” This statement echoed Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, since Xi was implying that the US had no right to be the hegemonic power in East Asia. Asians were no longer subordinate to the US economically, so they were ready to assume their rightful place in world affairs after a long period of humiliation at Western hands. And China would be in the forefront of this effort.
Long before Xi, Mao Zedong chartered China’s own independent path, reflecting a fierce desire for self-determination, regardless of actual economic and military power. China saw itself as the leader of the Third World, its credibility enhanced through successful diplomacy on the part of Zhou Enlai at the Bandung Conference, the forerunner of the non-aligned movement, in 1955. China’s revolution and its distancing itself from the West gave it prestige, while Mao’s winning over the peasants by dealing with land issues showed his willingness to go beyond the orthodoxies of Western Marxism.
Two Pan-Asian People’s Conferences were held in Nagasaki in 1926 and Shanghai in 1927 and an Asian Relations Conference in Delhi in 1947. They can be viewed as preludes to the Bandung Conference which was the coming together of African as well as Asian nations seeking modernization and equality in an unjust international order created by the Western imperialist nations. Their common aspiration was to find a third way between capitalism and communism; the “Third World” demanded decolonization and true sovereignty, while asserting that another world is possible. The symbolic meaning of the Conference, which continues to resonate, was a rupture with the acquiescence and low-profile posture of the early postwar era. The Third World nations gathered to roundly criticize Western hegemony as well as the failure of the Western powers to consult the “developing” world.
Since the time of the Bandung Conference, the non-aligned group of nations and the Third World have come and gone, but the conditions which spawned this response against the international order remain: lack of autonomy, gross inequality of wealth and power, and an international agenda set by more powerful others. The main change that has taken place since then is the shift in economic and military power toward China and India and away from the West. India is now a more important player on the world stage than Great Britain, its former colonial master, while China has mounted a serious challenge to US hegemony in East Asia.
Both Indian and Islamic civilizations have seen the rise of politicized religion. After independence, India was culturally oriented toward the West, although a leader of the non-aligned movement. The Islamic world, too, during the postwar period, was dominated by Western cultural and political influences. But Islamic societies in the 1970s and India in the 1990s began looking more favorably on exclusive forms of religion in order to increase social solidarity and assist political mobilization. The external enemy for uniting Islamic societies has been the West, whereas in India, it has been Pakistan as well as Muslims treated as non-Indian, despite their identification with the land and culture of India.
The strength of religious belief in these two civilizations showed that secularization along European lines would not accompany modernization. Liberal and progressive Hindus and Muslims have advocated the kind of secularization where religion plays an important role in public life but there are safeguards to prevent any one religion from becoming the state religion and to protect religious freedom. However, over the past few decades in India, there has been a reaction against the values of tolerance, freedom of expression, and diversity promoted by Nehru and Gandhi. In the Islamic world, religion was proclaimed to be the answer to modern ills, but it has been sometimes interpreted in puritanical terms and yoked to authoritarian rule carried out by zealots. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan serve as prime examples of this trend.
An Interpretation of Civilizational Conflicts
My interpretation of the conflicts that have arisen over the past century and a half between Western civilization and the four prominent Eastern civilizations is that they are the product of both identity issues and the competition for wealth and power among nation states. All civilizations in imitation of the West have accepted the primacy of the nation state as the way to be “modern.” Their goal has been uniformity within the nation to maximize power, using that power to either defend themselves against predators or to prey on others. In a world without a higher ethical framework beyond national self-interest, instrumental considerations prevail, even though foreign policy decisions are often justified in moral terms.
In the late 19th century when Western imperialism threatened the autonomy and cultural integrity of all other regions, there was little choice but to adopt the Western model of the nation state based on exclusive sovereignty over a particular area as specified by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Its acceptance was also a necessary credential for integration in the world system. On the surface, the system was regulated by international law upholding the sovereign rights of each nation; in reality, weaker members were subject either to direct colonial takeover or else forced to join a powerful Western alliance for their own protection. Non-Western civilizations, caught in this predicament, searched for ways to evade the harsh consequences.
There were many Ottoman intellectuals who supported pan-Islamism in the early 20th century and many Japanese intellectuals took a pan-Asianist stance in the 1930s. In China during the same period, intellectuals often looked to socialism and communism, although liberalism also had allure. In India, Tagore, Aurobindo, and Gandhi put forward a modernized Hinduism as a source of light for a world that had lost its soul. They were all looking for alternatives to Western modernity, with leftwing Chinese at the modernist end of the spectrum, upholding science, rationality, and instrumental thinking.
The critiques of Western modernity by Gandhi, Muslim intellectuals, German writers, the Kyoto philosophers, and Russian Slavophiles have affinities with the outlook of romanticism. The imperatives of Western modernity to achieve wealth and power collided with the desires of some members of late developers to preserve community, the sacredness of nature, an enchanted world, local diversity, and life at human scale. The nation state aims for uniformity; the village community for harmony among all living beings. Of course, many of the values associated with village life had long been on the defensive outside the West, but the alienating effects of Western modernity enhanced their attractiveness.
At various times, Eastern civilizations have enlisted these qualities to construct their own unique identity, distinguishing themselves from the West: Japan in the prewar era, Islamism today, India in the early 20th century. And when their wealth and power increase, they proclaim their unequaled ability to integrate tradition and modernity, the values of the spirit and technological prowess. High-growth Japan, China, and India have contrasted their superior form of modernity with a modern West in decline, unable to fire the energy and enthusiasm of its people.
In the interplay between culture and political economy that makes up the civilizing process, the ideals that provide unique identity have been enrolled in the quest for power and dominance in modern times. Western values of liberty and equality have been disfigured by modern imperialism, yet they have also served as a rallying cry for its victims. And when the West appears to be losing its hegemonic position, Eastern civilizations step forward to promote their own forms of imperial dominance: first Japan and now China in East Asia, India in Kashmir, and Iran and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East.
We need to recognize that civilizational interchange is pervasive. It is also a two-way street, with each civilization having greater influence in its areas of current excellence. European thought, Japanese architecture, Chinese social harmony, and Indian spirituality are examples. No civilization has a monopoly on the capacity to illuminate and to inspire and all civilizations rise and fall over time; claims to exceptionalism and uniqueness are empty.
As long as the higher cultural ideals continue to give way to the requirements of power, there will be, at best, a cold peace. The present conflict between China and the US is just one more round of the struggle for primacy in a world of predatory nation states. This is the modern dilemma.
