TOWARDS WORLD PEACE: HEALING THE TRAUMA OF WESTERN IMPERIALISM
When Americans examine the obstacles to world peace, they do not often include the past in their inquiry. They may focus on competition for power and resources or quests for freedom and justice, security and safety as the sources of the various clashes that plague the world, but they are less likely to probe their historical roots. They are even less likely to recognize the large role that past trauma plays in igniting and sustaining the conflicts of the present. When Americans do acknowledge such trauma, they may single out the effects of the Holocaust on the importance that Israelis give to security. Some may even point to the lasting effects of historical trauma on African Americans today. But very few Americans pay attention to the effects of Western imperialism on intractable conflicts between the West and China and the Islamic world today, Japan in the past, and potentially India in the future.
Obstacles to Intercivilizational Dialogue
The need for intercivilizational cooperation has never been greater due to ecological breakdown and the threat of nuclear war. Yet, civilizations are moving further apart as nationalism and authoritarian forms of populism, emphasizing separation, gain greater allegiance. Exclusive identities are strongly emphasized as the narrative of progress with Western civilization as its vanguard is challenged by those who chafe at their continuing subordination. In a time of mental decolonization, the common Western assumption that there is only one path to and through modernity and that modernization equals westernization has been strongly challenged.
Historical understanding is vital for understanding the roots of the identity conflicts that threaten world peace and divide humanity into opposing camps. In particular, the aftermath of Western imperialism has left its imprint on intercivilizational relations, as Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Islamic civilizations have made determined efforts to escape Western domination. Some of the most dangerous fault lines in our time have been at the interface of these civilizations and the West. I call these four civilizations “Eastern” in this context because this is how the West has labeled these civilizational “others.” What they actually share, though, more than culture or geographical location, is the modern experience of subjugation and humiliation by the West; in other words, trauma.
The responses of pre-World War II Japan, Mao’s China, radical Islam, and Hindu nationalism to Western imperialism have been similar: rampant anti-Western sentiment, strident cultural self-assertion, and a decisive rejection of cultural blending and mixing. But Japan moved on after its decisive defeat in World War II, accepting the American imperial system while mounting an economic challenge to the West and emphasizing cultural uniqueness. China shifted from an all-out attack on capitalism in Mao’s time to an accommodation with US hegemony during the reform era. However, Deng Xiaoping’s strategy of building strength while keeping a low profile has given way to Xi Jinping’s aspiration to set up China’s own empire in Asia and beyond and to drive the US out of East Asia.
The four civilizations are also attempting to overcome fractured histories and to heal traumas induced by their forced entry into a Western-dominated world. A necessary condition for world peace is reckoning with the imperial and post-imperial past. The challenge for Western people is to become familiar with this history and its outsized role in identity formation. The gap between a Western view that sees only one evolutionary path, with its own civilization as the vanguard, and an Eastern view that emphasizes plural modernities must be bridged. An important step is acknowledging that the victims of Western imperial power tend to define themselves in opposition to the West, taking great pride in their own cultural heritages.
A Civilizational Approach
A civilization is both older and larger than either an empire or nation-state, although it may include them. It is a social order that brings people together to promote social stability and prevent the use of violence. The civilizing process is often based on networks, carried out through kinship and neighborhood ties, and teaches people self-control. The rules of civility are found in the society’s code of acceptable conduct.
Civilizations have grown and developed as they interact with each other. They are part of world history; for example, ideas and technologies, once invented or discovered, became the common property of all in Afro-Eurasia, contributing to overall prosperity and creative development, material and cultural enrichment. An advantage of a civilizational approach in today’s world is that it directs our attention away from the nation-state, which is often identified with political and economic systems. Instead, we are directed toward culture, our values and ideals. When a way of life and worldview loses its ability to meet the challenges of the time, it is the poets and artists who are most sensitive to such decline; they are also the first to provide new visions.
A focus on civilizations also allows for a historical perspective because we view the present as the outcome of transformations of the past. However, those who invoke the moral and spiritual authority that a civilization provides often assert an imagined continuity between past and present in order to promote ethnic nationalism. Civilizations have experienced breaks and ruptures: from the inside in the form of revolutions or civil wars and from the outside through invasions or defeats in war.
The four civilizations’ encounter with the Western colossus forced them to make accommodations with Western modernity, leading them to create new versions based on the integration of their own traditions with the modern institutions and worldviews that had been mostly developed in the West. Today, pressures to assimilate to the modern world order under US hegemony continue to stimulate resistance to its impositions and challenges to its governing assumptions and institutions.
Relations between Russia and the West are a glaring exception to my generalization about conflict between West and East. But Russia’s relationship with the West is better treated separately, since Russia has been both inside and outside the West. When Japan defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05, it was taken by non-Western people all over the world as a breakthrough: a major power in the seemingly invincible West had met its match.
Japan’s Fast Track to Modernization
The initial phase of civilizational response is one in which the overwhelming power of the West largely stemming from its scientific and technological prowess strikes fear and awe into largely premodern peoples. But in the Japanese case, the period of imitating the West called “civilization and enlightenment” that began in the late 1860s only lasted about 20 years before giving way to efforts to reclaim the traditional heritage. And by the early 1930s, Japanese elites sensed that they could challenge Western domination of Asia. By then the weaknesses of Western civilization had become evident: capitalism in disarray, liberal democracy in retreat, and an optimistic faith in progress assailed by doubts.
Nonetheless, Japan’s imitation of Western imperialism and its attempt to set up its own empire in East Asia ended in disaster. Its leaders and people underestimated America’s strength, believing that the Japanese spirit would make up for any shortcomings in the areas of economic and military power. The devastation and suffering of war taught the lesson that becoming a world power required being inconspicuous and biding one’s time, while appearing to follow the West’s lead. Head-on ideological challenges to the West like the prewar quest to “overcome modernity” and achieve a pan-Asian union had to be avoided and Western materialism was better embraced than attacked. Japan also cooperated with the American government in containing Asian communism, gaining economic benefits at the cost of political subordination.
Prewar ultranationalism was transmuted into economic and cultural nationalism. By the mid-1980s, it was abundantly clear that Japanese capitalism was not a carbon copy of the US laissez-faire version. The Japanese government was coordinating economic policy and relationships were often just as important as the bottom line. The US accused Japan of unfair trade and forced it to revalue its currency, reduce the volume of exports, and build manufacturing facilities in the US. This phase ended when the Japanese economy tanked at the end of the 1980s, effectively ending the Japanese threat to American economic dominance.
China’s Rupture with Tradition
In contrast to Japan, China only began to undergo radical change as it was being carved up by the Western powers and Japan in the early 20th century. The inability of the government to unify the country and drive out the foreign powers led to a rejection of tradition which was blamed for China’s pathetic condition. Young people looked to the Western left for both diagnosis and solutions. When Mao Zedong unified China in 1949, the dependency relationship with the West finally ended and an alternative Chinese modernity began to clearly emerge, based on a Chinese version of Marxism.
China followed in Japan’s footsteps once the reform movement gathered momentum in the late 1970s. It adopted the capitalist path and took advantage of the American desire to keep the Soviet Union at bay. The Chinese government’s strategy was to keep a low profile, take an unassertive foreign policy, and follow the US lead on international matters. American businessmen were attracted by China’s cheap labor and production capacities that allowed them to hollow out their own manufacturing industries. This strategy worked well enough until it became obvious that China would challenge American economic and military dominance in the long run.
At about the same time (2012), Xi Jinping became the supreme leader and adopted a more assertive stance toward the West and toward East Asia. Growing nationalism plus a desire for China to assume its accustomed place at the center of East Asia were motivating factors. Like Japan in the 1930s, China would like to drive the West out of East Asia and establish its own sphere of influence. And like prewar Japan, it may be underestimating the ability of the US to contain it. Hostility between the US and China is rapidly increasing with the increasing possibility of war over Taiwan. The big difference between prewar Japan and China today is that China has the capacity to equal or exceed the US in economic and military power, although it is hard to predict whether this potential will ever be realized.
India’s Emergence from a Long Dark Colonial Winter
In India, the British empire took control at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and did not relinquish it until India’s independence in 1947. India was coerced to participate in the global economy. Although in 1600 it was the world’s leading manufacturer and had a 22.5% share of world GDP, after about two centuries of rule first by the British East India Company and then the British government, India’s share fell to about 2%. For consolation, some educated Indians exalted their spiritual heritage, conceding Western superiority in the material domain. The feeling among many Indians was that life in Europe was more civilized and preferable to what India could offer. It was only in the late 20th century that Hindu nationalism in tandem with rapid economic development began to reverse this widespread attitude.
Toward the end of the 19th century, Swami Vivekananda undertook a mission to broaden and deepen Western people’s view of spirituality, sharing his love of all religions, not just the yogic path. The need to revive Indians’ spiritual fiber in the face of British devaluation of their religion and culture led to the modernization of Hinduism, lessening the grip of many disabling superstitions and unjust practices. The intellectual elite often viewed religion in its universal dimension. For example, Mohandas Gandhi spiritualized politics through his philosophy of nonviolence, derived from the Hindu and Jain traditions. As the leader of the independence movement, Gandhi was honored worldwide for bringing morality back into politics.
Since the 1990s, politicized Hinduism has gained much popular support, defining what it means to be Indian in an exclusive and discriminatory manner while rejecting longstanding Indian aspirations to tolerance of the diverse religious groups, linguistic communities, and ethnicities. The democratic institutions and the freedoms that India had adopted from British political thought have been under siege; what’s more, women are expected to defer to masculine leadership once again. Hindu nationalists glorify the martial spirit, asceticism, selflessness, and communalism in addition to economic development, downgrading the qualities identified with India’s elites and the West. Unsurprisingly, the Hindu lower classes and the entrepreneurs have been strong supporters of this movement that resembles rightwing populist nationalism elsewhere.
Islam’s Struggles to Regain Its Equilibrium
The Islamic world was thoroughly colonized by the West, causing severe trauma. Having been Europe’s “other” for close to 1000 years, it was subject to a highly virulent form of racial prejudice coupled with contempt for its religion and culture. Forced to become dependent on the West, Muslim societies were unable to regain their equilibrium and until the 1970s there was a strong tendency to adopt Western ways while downgrading the Islamic heritage. The most extreme examples were Turkey starting with Ataturk’s rule in 1923 and Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty from 1925 until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Despite a willingness to follow the Western path to modernization, the lack of success compared to Japan and China is striking, since much of the Islamic world still lacks the power to escape Western economic and political domination.
As in India, the Islamic world has an elite that is often western in outlook, in contrast to the vast majority of the population that upholds older Muslim notions of piety and ethical action. Similar to China, there is a strong desire to regain Islam civilization’s central place in the world which has led to much soul searching about the causes of its decline. And the great divergence between Islam’s past eminence and its present weakness and lack of creativity reminds us of early 20th century China when it lay prostrate after being dismembered by the triumphant West.
Religious revival has been the central vehicle for achieving Muslim dreams from the 1970s until the present. But the politics of the Islamic revival have ranged from liberal to authoritarian. There is general agreement that Western secularism, the banishing of moral considerations from political economy, unrestrained consumerism, and addiction to social media and entertainment are not the answer. But there is less agreement over whether Western ideals of democracy, intellectual and religious freedom, and human rights have universal validity, particularly in light of Western people’s reluctance to follow their own precepts. The resistance of politicized Islam to Western influence is greatest in the areas of women’s rights and family matters.
Encounters with Imperialism
Western people can help narrow the divides that make world peace such a distant dream by learning about what the Western intrusion was like from the writings of each civilization’s most sensitive observers. This would be an excellent way to nurture empathy and compassion.
The great early 20th century novelist Natsume Soseki deeply experienced the psychological and emotional trauma caused by Japan’s sudden and forced entry into the modern world. He observed that the speed with which Japan was changing produced a condition approaching a nervous breakdown. Japanese attempts to become a wealthy and powerful nation so that it could defend itself were resulting in a mechanical imitation of the West, while cutting off cultural roots. Frantic adoption of a foreign civilization brought great uncertainty and anxiety, self-division and loss of integrity.
In his own life, Soseki’s feelings about General Maresuke Nogi’s suicide on the day of the Emperor Meiji’s funeral in 1912 reflected his identity confusion. General Nogi, beloved hero of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05, in an act of loyalty to the emperor, his lord, followed what he believed to be the way of the samurai by committing ritual suicide together with his wife. This act profoundly moved Soseki, showing he was still attached to feudal values, even though he had adopted his own version of modern individualism as a philosophy of life.
The stories and essays of Lu Xun, China’s greatest modern writer, show that it was like for a highly critical, realistic, and perceptive intellectual to experience the era of foreign domination and Chinese weakness. Lu Xun was the conscience of the May Fourth movement of 1919 who often despaired that Chinese people could awaken and develop their wills, while lamenting the terrible poverty, starvation, and the selling of children that prevailed. He wrote, “Our vaunted Chinese civilization is only a feast of human flesh prepared for the rich and mighty. And China is only the kitchen where these feasts are prepared.”
Lu Xun also observed in 1923: “Unless a great whip lashes her on the back, China will never be willing to move forward of her own accord.” The whip was foreign imperialism which caused such pain that industrial workers, the commercial class, students, and intellectuals were stirred to take political action. Both the Chinese Nationalist and Communist parties gained large followings as they drew the connections between foreign domination and China’s terrible economic situation. Lu was appalled that so much innocent blood was shed by not only the British and French imperialists but also by Chinese warlords stooping to the most despicable barbarism as they massacred unarmed demonstrators.
Modern Indians, according to Ashis Nandy, a political psychologist and highly influential public figure, have deeply imbibed a Western view of their place in world history as well as 19th-century ideas of the nation-state. In The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983), he points out that notions of nationalism, progress, rationality, secularism, and even of a desirable society have taken on a Western aura as modern Indians have lost their cultural memories, becoming strangers to vital aspects of their own past. Sunk in a colonial mentality, the Indian psyche is a house divided against itself.
Nandy points out that India was once more receptive to plural realities. Although modernity has brought Indians greater individual freedom, it has also increased their need for stability, cultural continuity, and psychological security. Hindu nationalist demagogues meet this need through ethnic chauvinist, nationalist, and populist appeals that offer a sense of community based on Hindu cultural identity. Nandy is critical of modernists who believe that Western liberal philosophy is a great advance over what has prevailed in other parts of the world. He scorns the idea that liberalism fully supersedes traditional outlooks. On the other hand, he urges that traditional approaches to society and politics not be given a free pass just because they are “authentic.”
Muhammad Iqbal is Islam’s greatest modern poet and thinker, and his interrogation of Western political thought suggests Gandhi, his contemporary. The difference between European and Indian conditions led Iqbal to assert that the Western version of liberal democracy was unsuitable for India. The type of liberal democracy that Indian nationalists advocated favored the educated, urban classes embedded in the commercial economy. The peasants, making up the majority population, were not receptive to liberal notions such as interests, representation, and contract.
The West was spreading liberal ideals which Iqbal, like Gandhi, saw as undermining religion in India. Liberalism divided life into public and private arenas, consigning religion and whatever else did not relate to material things and property to the private realm. As a result, religion no longer affects social and political life and does not restrain the baser human tendencies. Religious faith is not easily represented in terms of interest and contract because it is nurtured by dialogue and conversation, and it is through conversation that ethics is given life. For Iqbal, liberal politics only regulates the clash of economic interests while driving out important human and ethical concerns.
Trauma and Intercivilizational Relations
Is it valid to describe the encounter with Western imperialism as traumatic? And, if so, how does this understanding contribute to more just and harmonious intercivilizational relations? First, we have to define trauma. According to Gabor Mate, trauma is a raw wound or scar, and our response to trauma shapes our behavior and social habits and how we think about the world. Tragically, blind reactions to trauma prevent us from thinking rationally about the most important things in our lives.
Does this definition of trauma apply to the experiences of large groups of people as well as individuals? Thomas Hubl tells us that collective traumas are the cause of most conflicts, although they are usually not recognized as such. Here, he is referring to ethical transgressions brought about by war and other types of oppression. In my view, the traumas that stem from the colonial encounter have been severe, yet often ignored. For this reason, healing and peace-building are difficult to achieve.
Hubl calls the process of becoming aware of histories of trauma and gaining insight into them “Global Social Witnessing,” describing it as “the ability to feel and relate to the cultural process.” Such inner awareness enables people to map social relations and see the connection between their own experience and that of their society. It is only through such awareness that we can end the vicious circle of reactivity.
The fractured histories of those peoples who encountered Western imperialism must be retrieved in order to complete the cycle of trauma and recovery. Eastern peoples have not yet freed themselves from the post-imperial condition. They no longer remember the original events and the fragments of memory have become unconscious, triggered whenever events in the present remind them of the original experience. The necessary healing has not taken place. When the victims of oppression are able to reflect and self-critically examine their motives and actions, they can make conscious choices and change habitual patterns of behavior. For instance, they can offer forgiveness rather than seek vengeance. Creative responses to histories of oppression are a necessary condition for civilizational renewal.
For the Western side, one major challenge has been that of how to deal with terrorism. The most common response has been to seek vengeance, which leads to fresh traumas. But reflective and aware people can respond from a different level than the perpetrators. They can consciously decide not to seek retribution, thereby breaking the relational pattern that feeds the conflict. By engaging in social witnessing rather than reacting to provocation, it is possible to act sensitively and with compassion, setting a new relational dynamic in motion.
Western people have been perpetrators of trauma but also are affected by trauma. There is a profound denial of the imperialist past among many North Americans and Europeans today and an inability to acknowledge their race- and class-based privilege. The pattern of denial, repression, and dissociation that can be observed at the collective level discloses the familiar symptoms of trauma. Since the trauma was not suffered at the hands of non-Western people for the most part, it is the product of their own societies. As Gabor Mate notes: “Amid spectacular economic, technological, and medical resources, our current culture induces countless humans to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation.”
It is imperative that both sides no longer interpret history in ways that lead to a perception of themselves as good and highly competent citizens who always act in ways that are beyond reproach. Instead, Western people need to apologize for the damage they inflicted on weaker peoples, and through appropriate action demonstrate the sincerity of their efforts to achieve reconciliation. Adopting a victim mentality prevents recognition of one’s own shortcomings and forecloses the possibility of taking responsibility for one’s own historical fate.
By addressing trauma, it is possible to start bringing about the ideological and institutional changes that can take us beyond the nation-state system. It would then no longer be necessary to gain maximum wealth and power in order to keep competing nations at bay in a zero-sum international order where the strong devour the weak. The conditions that produce collective traumas would begin to disappear.
Different Standpoints of Clashing Civilizations
A central point I am making is that governments and peoples within both Western and Eastern civilizations take refuge in nationalism due to their inability to heal their collective traumas. The chart below shows some of the ways that West and East define themselves in opposition to each other, which gives energy to the civilizational conflict. It is important, though, to make clear which people in Western and Eastern civilizations are providing such negative energy.
In the West, we are talking about the triumphal believers in liberalism and the Enlightenment, since it is no accident that the time when these modern values were celebrated the most was also the era of imperialism. When Eastern civilizations have had their greatest support for anti-Western values, it has been those who felt most humiliated and marginalized in the forefront of movements to gain revenge, taking fascist and communist forms. Fortunately, there are also people within and outside the main institutions in both West and East that understand how this game works. Instead of identifying with either side, their efforts are devoted to creating a new game while recognizing that the victims of imperialism have a lot more to heal than the perpetrators.
Culture
West: ornamental, commodified
East: unchanging essence
Identity
West: civil religion of liberalism
East: ethnicity
Time Orientation
West: future
East: past/future orientation
Politics
West: liberal/conservative
East: fascist/communist
History
West: modernization as westernization
East: multiple modernities
Cultural Adaptation
West: assimilate the late developers
East: separation from the West
Towards World Peace
The peoples of the four Eastern civilizations are aware that their national purpose can no longer be to catch up with the West economically and militarily. The rise of Japan and now China, in particular, shows that we are entering a new world of plural civilizations. Continuing pressure to assimilate to the world order under US hegemony produces resistance to its values and institutions. Alternative modernities are being created; the concept of “multiple modernities” now seems far more persuasive than modernization theory which assumed there was basically one path that all civilizations follow.
Under Chinese leadership, the BRICS nations are demanding a new world order that satisfies their needs and gives them a significant voice in determining the institutions and rules for a globalizing world. And this group is now in the process of greatly expanding its membership among the nations of the global South. A worldwide divergence between the West and the rest is emerging. This split is most apparent in the area of geopolitics, somewhat visible in the economic arena, and starting to have a cultural impact as well. However, there is an exception to this trend: Japan, although it encountered Western imperialism, is now in the Western camp militarily and politically, the result of geopolitical considerations and China’s inept diplomacy.
The likelihood of a nuclear war is greatest between China and the US as each side is currently involved in lining up allies. Taiwan’s status is the most likely flash point. China is motivated by a desire to avenge the “century of humiliation” by reuniting the country, eliminating cultural and political diversity, and keeping out Western influence. China’s ruling group believes that national unity provides the social solidarity and strength that will usher in the Chinese century. In addition, Chinese pride is satisfied as the country is restored to its alleged boundaries before the coming of the imperialists. By dredging up past grievances through the education system and the media, virulent nationalism is stimulated. Rather than facing the traumatic past, Chinese leaders use it as a way to increase their popularity, offering people the dream of taking the place of the US as the world’s hegemonic power.
In contrast, the US and other Western nations want China to be more like them, since they see Western values, liberal democracy, and capitalism as enlightened and progressive. Failing to recognize that resistance to the American-led world order originates in a long history of trauma, Western people, and especially Americans, blame such resistance on backward and regressive ways of thinking that must give way to the outlook of the Enlightenment. In other words, Western people are the teachers and the rest must play the part of students.
This scenario was played out with Japan in the early postwar era and China during the reform era. Once Japan and China became strong enough, they asserted themselves culturally and took pride in their identity, no longer pretending to be good students. But their own efforts to free themselves from the past were unsuccessful. Since they did not acknowledge and work through the traumatic experiences of imperial times, they were still trapped in the logic of power.
Western societies are the source of traumas that their own people have been unable to acknowledge and deal with, so their citizens are vulnerable to political figures who direct their attention to “others” as the source of their problems. The policies they support perpetrate further trauma on perceived enemies as the cycle continues.
Western nationalists who want to bring back the glory days of alleged greatness are locked in a hostile embrace with aggrieved Eastern nationalists. Post-traumatic learning enables all of us to avoid the tragic fate where the wounds of the past, not integrated, continue to live in us today, driving us to engage in endless wars. Such learning requires taking history into account, in particular, the history of Western imperialism and its aftermath. It also involves compassionate inquiry into our traumas.
