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This is the second of a series in which I will, however cursorily, consider the challenges – especially to the Western world – of life in the coming century.
As I concluded in the first instalment, in 2020 we finally find ourselves on the threshold of the 21st century. The mobile phone is its paradigmatic technology – and globalism is shaping as its paradigmatic ideological battleground.
The 19th century was dominated by European colonialism, which was in fact the first great surge of globalisation, unsurpassed until the end of the 20th century. In fact, much of the 20th century was a retreat from globalisation. The 20th century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarianism: first, of Nazism and fascism, later communism. With the fall of communism (at least in Europe) at the end of the 20th century, pundits and policy-makers were left scratching their heads: what now? What rough beast was slouching its way to the 21st century to be born?
Some optimistically preached that “War is Over”. This view found its intellectual justification in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that, with communism dealt with, liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had prevailed, and would continue to prevail, for ever and ever, amen. Fukuyama’s thesis enjoyed wide popular appeal at a time when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union fell without a shot. In the words of Jesus Jones’ hit song, Right Here, Right Now, we were “watching the world wake up from history”.
Samuel Huntington countered Fukuyama’s sunny assessment with his own thesis of a Clash of Civilizations. With the overarching ideology of communism no longer smothering half the globe, Huntington argued, the world would fracture along civilisational fault lines. Pointing to the fracturing of the post-Soviet world, whether in the -stans of Central Asia or in the Balkans, vast groups of humanity were rediscovering (or free, again, to re-express) their relative cultural affinities – and enmities.
Huntington identified around half-a-dozen dominant civilisations: from Western and Orthodox, to Islamic, Sinic and Japanese. Some of these might find more-or-less affinity with others (Western and Latin American, for instance), while others were bitterly antagonistic (Western and Islamic, to pick an obvious pair).
So, who was right? Well, both and neither.
Of the two, Huntington certainly appears to have been the more correct. Looking at Europe, particularly France, it seems hard to deny that a civilisational clash is playing out between its Western indigenes and Islamic immigrants. The clash also appears to be irresolvable: the two civilisational worldviews are just too mutually incompatible to coexist, no matter how many optimistic bumper stickers are printed.
A theory is also only as good as its predictions – and some of Huntington’s predictions have borne out remarkably well. Aside from the civilisational fault-lines fracturing into open warfare, as they did in the Balkans in the 1990s and are now threatening to in the South China Sea, Huntington argued that the collapse of communist/capitalist rivalry meant that there would be a struggle by some powers to assert themselves as civilisational centres. China clearly sees itself as the centre of a Sinic civilisation in East Asia, while Russia is striving to reassert itself as the centre of an Orthodox civilisation in place of much of the old Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Iran and Turkey are competing to establish themselves as the centres of a new Islamic empire.
Where, on the other hand, is the centre of a Latin American civilisation? Or African?
If anything, sub-Saharan African nations are slowly groping towards the kind of collective identity which has so far reached its strongest expression in the EU. Certainly, transnationalist efforts in Africa, riven by old tribal hatreds and inter-group antagonisms, face a much greater battle than in Europe. On the other hand, Europe fought two of the bloodiest wars in human history before (mostly) agreeing to try and co-operate. But, above older rivalries, there are two broadly competing visions of African transnationalism: the African Union and the Organisation of African Unity.
The major difference between the two is that the AU calls for the political union of African states while the OAU is much more cautious, advocating a trial of economic union before proceeding to any kind of political union (similar to the Common Market preceding the EU proper). So far, African states seem reluctant to cede any of their national sovereignty.
Which raises the question of sovereignty and the nation-state in the 21st century.
Fukuyama argued that the nation-state would remain the peak organising principle of international relations in the 21st century. They would just all become alike: liberal democracies. The evidence so far is firmly against that view.
Huntington countered that the nation-state will remain important, but that civilisations will become umbrella-ideas under which nation-states coalesce. Civilisations, in Huntington’s view, do not so much supersede nation-states as supervene on them. States of a civilisational feather will flock together.
But is that true? India, Japan, and Australia are states belonging to completely different Huntingtonian civilisations – yet, all three, along with the US, are rapidly banding together in order to contain the expansion of another state which is also a civilisational centre: China. So, it would seem that the realities of nation-state relations can easily override civilizational differences.
The states of the “Quad” are finding common ground, not in civilisations, but in a much bigger ideological struggle. That struggle is one that has in fact been fought over in various guises since at least the early 20th century. Indeed, some argue that it is a struggle that dates at least to Classical Greece. Its 20th century manifestations were the great struggles against fascism, Nazism and communism. Contrary to either Fukuyama or Huntington, that struggle is far from over.
The struggle I speak of is the struggle between the open and the closed society.
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