THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
February 05, 2005, Saturday
Five share victory in Gib
By Malcolm Pein
FIVE players shared first at the Gibtelecom Masters organised by the
BCF at the Caleta Hotel in Gibraltar. Kiril Georgiev of Macedonia and
Lev Aronian of Armenia both won their last-round games to join the
leaders on 7.5/10. The trio on seven points at start of play —
Alexey Shirov, Emil Sutovsky and Zahar Efimenko — all drew.
Danny Gormally drew with a second Armenian international, Gabriel
Sargissian, and gained nearly 30 rating points while ending as the
best-placed British player on 6.5/10. Peter Wells, who defeated Jon
Speelman, and Colin McNab, who overcame Juan Bellon, also scored 6.5,
but their results do not compare with Gormally’s, who was inspired
and faced six of the world’s top-ranked players and lost only once.
There were 120 players in the competition.
Round 10 results: 2 Kotronias (6=) = — = Efimenko (7); 3 Georgiev
(6=) 1 — 0 Erenburg (6=); 4 Sargissian (6=) = — = Gormally (6=); 5
Rogers (6) 0 — 1 Aronian (6=); 6 Spraggett (6) = — = Dreev (6) ; 7
Areshchenko (6) 1 — 0 Sasikiran (6) ; 8 Nakamura (6) 1 — 0 N Pert
(6) ; 9 Wells (5=) 1 — 0 Speelman(6) ; 10 Lahno (5=) 0 — 1 Avrukh
(5=); 11 Tregubov (5=) = — = Radziewicz (5=); 12 Postny (5=) = —
Skripchenko (5=); 13 Hamdouchi (5=) = — = Tissir (5=); 14 Hebden
(5=) = — = Thorfinnsson (5=); 15 Rendle (5=) = — = Ward (5=); 16
Arakhamia (5=) = — = Al Sayed (5=); 17 Bellon (5) 0 — 1 McNab (5=).
SHIROV mates his opponent after opening lines with a pawn sacrifice;
see if you can spot the finish in the diagram below.
A.Shirov — K.Spraggett
Gibraltar Masters (9)
Sicilian Defence
1 e4c5 2Nf3e6
3 d4cxd4 4Nxd4a6
5 Bd3Nf6 60-0d6
7 c4Qc7 8Nc3Be7
9 b3b510Bb2b4
11 Nce2Nbd712Ng3Nc5
13 Bc2Bb714Qe10-0
15 Rd1Rfe816f4d5
17 cxd5exd518e5Nfe4
19 Ndf5Bf820Rc1Qd7
21 Qe3Rac822Rfd1Qe6
23 Nd4Qb624Nde2Qb5
25 f5Nd726Bd3Rxc1
27 Rxc1Qa528e6!fxe6
29 fxe6Rxe630Nf4Re8
31 Nxe4dxe432Bc4+Kh8
1-0
Spraggett
Shirov
Final position after 32…Kh8 and Black resigned: why? Answer on
Monday.
THE Bermuda International is a top-class event, with a double-round
all-play-all that includes six of the world’s top 100 players.
Scores after five rounds: 1-3 Vescovi (Brazil) 2645, Gelfand (Israel)
2696, Harikrishna (India) 2632 3/5; 4 Dominguez, (Cuba) 2661 2.5; 5
Volokitin (Ukraine) 2; 6 Macieja (Poland) 2618 1.5.

Financial Times (London, England)
February 5, 2005 Saturday
The last fling Beirut appears to have reclaimed its reputation as the
playground of the Arab world, but a glittering lifestyle belies a
darker reality:Lebanon is deeply in debt and caught up in a looming
confrontation between its neighbour and controller, Syria, and the
west
By DAVID GARDNER
It is midnight on Saturday in downtown Beirut and the Buddha Bar is
heaving. A cavernous copy of its Parisian namesake, with a 20ft- high
Buddha statue as its presiding spirit, the bar is just the latest
incarnation of the Lebanese craving for novelty and gift for fun.
The son of a Maronite Christian warlord assassinated, allegedly by
the Syrians, during the 1975-90 civil war, thrusts his way through
the throng to the bar with the help of a bodyguard out of central
casting: black T-shirt, tailored leather jacket, wrap-around shades
and designer stubble.
A vast Johnnie Walker whisky icon towers over the bar itself, causing
one regular patron to observe that, “almost everything that takes
place in this city happens under the eyes of Johnnie Walker”.
Beirut, it would appear, is back in business, restored to its pre-
war position as the playground of the Arab world.
The city’s downtown area, reduced to rubble by 16 years of inter-
communal warfare, has been rebuilt. Though a few shell-shattered
hulks, such as the old Holiday Inn, still scar the skyline, the core
of the city is now resplendent with restored or faux-Ottoman
buildings, gleaming sandstone, limestone and marble, recreated
churches and mosques, and streets of bars, cafes and restaurants, the
sweet smoke of hubble-bubble pipes wafting between them.
Blocks of Dollars 5m apartments stand back from a shoreline
re-sculpted by landfill to accommodate their owners’ yachts. The
hotels are still full at the end of a record year for tourism, with
tanned guests eagerly discussing the prospects for a good skiing
season in the nearby mountains that rise dramatically from the
Levantine littoral.
The wine-producers of the fertile valley that lies between Mount
Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon range that dips down to Syria – the
Bekaa hitherto best known for the quality of its hashish and as a
stronghold of the militant Shia Islamist movement Hizbollah – are
struggling to meet demand. In few cities of the world will you see so
many trophy cars, not just top-of-the range Mercedes, BMWs and
Porsches, but Lamborghinis, Maseratis and Ferraris, racing
homicidally on the cramped highways, as though their owners had hit
on a novel means to continue the civil war.
For the first time since before the war, Europeans can be seen in
numbers. The international music festivals at Baalbeck, Byblos and
Beiteddine, set in Roman, Greek and Lebanese Ottoman splendour, play
to full houses. For the Gulf Arabs who make up the bulk of Lebanon’s
visitors the city has other allures. One hotel, punctilious in its
service even by Lebanon’s exacting standards, allows a catalogue of
call-girls to circulate for its clients’ convenience. Even a senior
minister cannot resist remarking to a visitor that Beirut will always
have an edge on rival destinations in the region because of the famed
beauty of its women.
The Lebanese themselves party hard. At Crystal, another over-the- top
bar currently in vogue, conspicuously consuming socialites and scions
of the political elite vie with each other in nightly auctions of
Champagne costing thousands of dollars. At 1975, a bizarre addition
to Beiruti nightlife, a bar with sandbags, newly bullet-pocked walls
and waiters in designer fatigues offers the amnesiac Lebanese a
tasteless time-capsule of the year war broke out.
“It’s like Wall Street at its most excessive in the late 1980s and
90s, but here they do it harder,” says one keen observer of local
social mores. “But it’s the same crowd of people, definitely not more
than 50,000 or so, that keep all this spinning; it’s really just a
revolving door.”
Behind this splendid facade, however, a politically unreconstructed
Lebanon is lurching towards crisis, weighed down by huge debts and
trapped in a looming confrontation between western powers and Syria,
which has not just dominated but micro-managed the country’s affairs
since the war it helped bring to an end. Nor has Beirut anything like
recaptured its pre-war pre-eminence.
Before the fighting started in 1975, Beirut had been the region’s
unchallenged entrepot. Reaching back almost into pre-history, to the
Phoenicians and beyond, the coastal settlements of the Levant were an
entrepreneurial bridge between the civilisations emerging along the
Nile and between the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates. It has
been well said that the flag of modern Lebanon should contain a
dollar sign instead of a cedar tree, for it is by vocation a merchant
republic.
Before its descent into tribal war, its gifted bankers recycled
petrodollars seeking a remunerative home in the west and its canny
middlemen reeled in westerners seeking to sell anything from
technology to arms to the east. Beyond the cliches about the “lost
Paris of the Orient” or the “Switzerland of the Middle East”, it was
an authentic, east-west interface, facilitated by a mixed
Muslim-Christian culture, laid out in an intricate Byzantine mosaic
of its 18 different religious sects.
As well as being the financial and services hub of the region, it was
its media and publishing capital, as well as an education centre. It
was freewheeling, more or less democratic and thus a magnet for the
emigres and exiles spat out by the Arab autocracies surrounding it –
and for the Israeli state to its south that needed to monitor them.
These elements also combined to make it a den of regional intrigue,
listening post as well as playground for hundreds of international
journalists and spies – somewhere between Bogart’s Casablanca and
Batista’s Havana by way of Noriega’s Panama.
In a delightful memoir of the celebrated St George Hotel’s bar* –
“the centre of the centre of the Middle East” – the Palestinian
writer Said Aburish recaptures how notorious spies such as Kim Philby
and Archie and Kermit Roosevelt sat drinking cheek-by-jowl with
regional potentates, oilmen, arms-dealers and reporters (from one of
whom, New York Times correspondent Sam Pope Brewer, Philby stole his
wife Eleanor), while plots were hatched and coups planned. The Buddha
Bar, not to mention Crystal and 1975, has a long way to catch up.
Glittering though Beirut Redux now looks, it is in substance a shadow
of its former self. Then, the city and its preoccupations were
regional and international. Now, even though its people speak several
languages and are well-travelled, it is pretentious and provincial –
international mostly in the sense that it risks being the meat in the
sandwich between a seemingly unreformable Ba’athist regime in Syria
and a regionally aggressive US, which on this occasion is being egged
on by France, the main holdout against President George W. Bush’s war
of choice against Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist tyranny in Iraq.
The Lebanese emerged from the long years of bloodletting somewhat
surprised to find they still had a country. Despite the destruction
of cities and villages, the 145,000 dead and perhaps double that
number wounded, 17,400 “disappeared”, 3,614 car-bombs and the retreat
into homogeneous sectarian communities, there was a palpable will
among ordinary Lebanese of nearly all persuasions to try to find a
new way forward. Alas, they have yet to find it.
One of the reasons for that is Syria, and what one Lebanese political
leader characterises as its creeping Anschluss to absorb a country no
pan-Syrian or pan-Arab nationalist has ever really accepted as a
stand-alone entity. Another, equally important, reason is the craven
corruption of much of the Lebanese political class, who interlock as
clients with the Syrian nomenklatura in their shared pillage of what
should be a much more vibrant economy.
Lebanon is, indeed, a geopolitical oddity, something that has a lot
to do with its topography. In a region that abounds with religious
sects spawned by millennia of doctrinal controversy, Mount Lebanon
has for centuries offered a secure fastness for the most heterodox
among them. The Maronite Christians, aligned with the Catholic Church
and originally from Syria’s Orontes valley, fled to the mountains to
escape Byzantine (Christian) persecution – not, as their subsequent
myth-making had it, Muslim oppression. The Druze – whose precise
religious beliefs are known only to their elders and initiates but
who appear to derive from the heterodox Shi’ism associated with the
Fatimid Muslim dynasty a millennium ago – also found refuge in Mount
Lebanon. These were the original core communities of the Lebanon, to
be joined by Sunni and Shia Muslims in the coastal plains and the
valleys, as well as by Greek Christians, Orthodox and Catholic,
Armenians (Catholic and Orthodox), Chaldeans et al.
The Sunni prospered under the Ottomans who, nevertheless, ruled by
proxy through a mountain emirate of almost interchangeable Maronite
and Druze notables. The Shia, originally inhabitants of the mountain
as well as the valley, were gradually driven south.
The Maronites and the Druze, however, were structurally tribal and
highly fissiparous. The earliest known document referring to the
Maronites is a papal bull from 1216 absolving the losers in a civil
war provoked by the allegiance of part of the community to the
Franks, or Crusaders. The Druze were also known to hedge their bets.
In the mid-13th century, the Druze Buhturid dynasty had forces
fighting on both sides when the Mamluks drove the Mongols out of
Syria at the battle of Ayn Jalut near Lake Tiberias.**
The pivotal modern change came as a result of the Maronite-Druze
civil war of the mid-19th century. That sucked in European powers led
by the French who, in 1920, carved out “Greater Lebanon” from
post-Ottoman Syria. An ostensibly “Christian” triumph, this added to
Mount Lebanon territory and peoples who were not Christian. That, in
turn, necessitated the National Pact of 1943 to launch Lebanon’s
independence. This prescribed an inter-communal power structure
extrapolated from the last ever census taken in 1932, which gave a
proportional majority and political predominance to the Christians on
the arithmetically assisted assumption of a 6-5 population balance in
their favour.
It was a bluff, but a magnificent bluff, that enabled the Lebanese to
revel in their heterogeneity for three golden decades. What brought
it to an end is as much disputed as the fanciful history each sect
has manufactured to embellish its own antecedents. The seeds of
conflict – within as well as between each community – were visibly
there long before a shot was fired.
In the then-ruling Maronites’ view, the arrival of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation – ejected from Jordan after losing the
1970-71 Black September war against the late King Hussein – tipped
the delicate confessional balance unacceptably in favour of the
Muslims. The PLO did indeed behave with all the arrogance of a
state-within-the (extremely fragile)-state, and invited Israel’s
retribution by using south Lebanon as a base to confront its enemy.
But Muslims, and especially the Shia, had long been pressing for a
fairer share of power, and the PLO only joined the Muslim-Druze
alliance after Maronite militias had launched their attempt to
reaffirm Christian hegemony.
Syria entered the fray as a result, to prevent Christian defeat,
abort the emergence of a Palestinian stronghold on its border, and
reassert its pan-Arab (as well as pan-Syrian) credentials.
The conflict moved from the cities to the mountains, from the hotel
towers to the refugee camps. The lethal kaleidoscope of sectarian
alliances kept shifting and re-combining, amid fathomless sub-plots
of intra-sect vendettas – the Maronites were especially prone to
slaughtering each other. Saudis and Syrians, Iraqis and Libyans,
Iranians and Israelis used Beirut as the address to communicate with
each other by car-bomb and as the arena for proxy war, as western
powers including the US and France blundered in only to be
truck-bombed out. The idea of Lebanon went up in smoke. The long war
and Israel’s invasion in 1982 – when the then defence minister Ariel
Sharon almost destroyed West Beirut as he sought to crush the PLO –
shattered the country into cantonised fragments. When the shooting
eventually stopped, Syria was left holding most of the pieces.
The Lebanese republic was supposed to be relaunched by a new national
entente – the 1989 Taif Accord. This rearranged the confessional
balance to give Muslims and Christians parity in parliament, where a
Shia speaker presides, and to transfer executive power from a
presidency still held by the Maronites to a Sunni Muslim prime
minister. Most militias were disbanded and partly folded into a new
national army, while Syria was to redeploy its troops to its border
and eventually leave. In practice, Israel’s continuing occupation of
south Lebanon gave Syria an alibi to stay. Damascus licensed
Hizbollah, arguably the most effective guerrilla movement in the
world, as the spearhead of resistance to the Israelis. It then set
about recreating Lebanon in its own image, the better to loot it.
Far from withdrawing, Damascus reconsecrated the pre-war sectarian
system in a way designed to highlight its own role as indispensable
arbiter and bulwark against a relapse into conflict. It cultivated
political clients, including warlords and rival forces within each
community, using lucrative patronage and divide-and-rule tactics to
prevent the emergence of a cross-confessional national force. Samir
Franjieh, a left-of-centre opposition leader from a leading Maronite
clan, puts it this way: “The state should be based on all rights for
individuals and all guarantees for (the 18) communities. What we have
now is all rights vested in the communities but usurped by their
leaders.”
The arrival of Rafiq Hariri, a billionaire construction magnate who
has spread into banking and media, raised hopes that at last a
Lebanese champion would articulate a national project to revive the
country. Hariri, a Sunni who made his money in Saudi Arabia and
helped negotiate an end to the war, has been prime minister for 12 of
the past 14 years. He resigned in October after Syria forced him, his
cabinet and parliament to change the constitution so that the
ineffectual but pliant President Emile Lahoud could stay on another
three years.
But Hariri’s advent in 1992 raised great expectations. The currency
stabilised, Lebanon’s credit was restored, and the prime minister
mobilised his network of international contacts, not only in the Gulf
but among European leaders such as Jacques Chirac and Silvio
Berlusconi. During the war, “infrastructure” meant little more than
holding the high ground, a few power generators and each militia
having its own port. Now there was a plan to recreate central Beirut,
and Solidere, a company part-owned by Hariri, would do it. The core
idea was to make the city the region’s uncontested capital market.
But, while Hariri has rebuilt much of Lebanon, he has left it
politically unreconstructed. He and his friends complain that Syria
meddled from the first, leaving them little margin for manoeuvre. The
prime minister’s critics are harsher. Michel Moawad, son of Rene
Moawad, the president assassinated in a bombing widely attributed to
Syria as the war drew to an end in 1989, says: “The Syrians employ
Hariri as a marketing director. He’s good, but the problem is their
system is no longer marketable.”
The cost of reconstruction was huge, and has saddled Lebanon with a
debt of nearly Dollars 35bn, almost twice its gross domestic product.
The lifeblood of remittances repatriated by the Lebanese diaspora,
perhaps four times as numerous as the roughly 4m who live in the
country, has started to dry up. Current prosperity depends heavily on
Beirut as an alternative destination for Gulf Arabs seeking to avoid
visa problems in the west after 9/11.
With its banks, mostly smallish family affairs, growing fat and lazy
on government borrowing, Beirut is losing ground to rival financial
centres such as Dubai and Bahrain. Its stock market remains tiny,
dominated by the banks and Solidere. The regional media business is
also heading for Dubai and Qatar, and Lebanon could even start losing
its niche in areas such as education and health to these city states,
whose dynamism, ironically, is partly powered by an inflow of
Lebanese emigres. A lot of energy pulsing through Beirut, by
contrast, is the energy of dissipation. Lebanon’s descent into a
miasma of corruption and clientilism under Syrian tutelage, the
parcelling out of post-war institutions as booty for the warlords,
and the paralysis of government caused by the president, prime
minister and speaker vying together as though they were Roman
triumvirs, are all part of the reason.
“Twelve years after the start of reconstruction you come to the
realisation you’ve rebuilt some of the infrastructure – by no means
all and by no means in all regions – at a very high cost,” says
Nasser Saidi, a former economy minister. “Very little effort went
into the building of institutions or into learning the lessons of the
war and making people accountable for what they did. Maybe there were
too many people to punish, but that doesn’t mean you should reward
them by putting them in power. It’s obvious we could have built
something better without them. It’s not just the high debt and so on,
it’s that there’s no participation in political life.”
Each community, by contrast, has carved out a share of the state. The
Council of the South to develop southern Lebanon and the national
electricity company, for instance, are fiefs of Amal, the Shia
militia-turned-party led by Nabih Berri, Syrian ally and speaker of
parliament. The ministry of the displaced is the preserve of the
Druze, the main reconstruction council of the Sunnis. One party
levies surtaxes of up to Dollars 200 for each container coming
through the port of Beirut, a racket worth an estimated Dollars 350m
it shares with its patrons in Syria’s intelligence services and their
sorcerer’s apprentices in the Lebanese security services. Since
Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father Hafez al-Assad as Syria’s
president four years ago, those in charge in Damascus – including
Ghazi Kenaan, the military intelligence chief who ran Lebanon for 20
years – appear most interested in the economics of Lebanon.
“This is no more than a giant racket,” says one opposition leader.
“Under Hafez al-Assad Syria saw Lebanon as political patrimony to be
used in the larger Middle East game. But these people are no longer
even interested in the politics.”
There is a certain whiff of class animus in all this, of patrician
scorn towards new money grubbily acquired and contempt towards
ostentation because, although the civil war had no decisive outcome,
it certainly engendered social mobility.
“One reading of the war is that it was a social revolution,” says
Samir Franjieh. “It was not strictly speaking about poverty, but
about relative poverty and relative wealth – it was an attempt to
settle the question of rank and standing in society. The problem is
that these people know they lack legitimacy and the Syrians know that
and find it easy to play on their sense of insecurity.”
Such is their greed that Lebanon does worse than Syria in the
Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, where last
year it dropped 19 positions to rank 97th among 146 countries, tied
with Algeria, Nicaragua and Serbia. “There is no normal economic
relationship between Syria and Lebanon,” says Walid Jumblatt, the
hitherto Syrian-allied leader of the Druze and of the opposition.
“It’s their mafias and local clients overmilking our cow.” Jumblatt
was speaking at Mukhtara, his ancestral palace in the Chouf
mountains, transformed into an armed camp after the October car- bomb
attack on his close ally Marwan Hamade, another former economy
minister who pulled out of the government in protest at Syria’s
decision to extend President Lahoud’s mandate. Jumblatt’s father,
Kamal, leader of the Muslim-Left alliance in the war, was
assassinated in 1976 just as the Syrian army was beginning its push
into Lebanon. The son, by denouncing the Syria-Lebanon set-up as
police states run by clans and mafias, risks a similar fate.
Damascus accuses him and Hariri of inciting France to ally with the
US in pushing Resolution 1559 through the UN Security Council last
September. This calls on Syria to end its meddling in Lebanese
politics, withdraw its remaining troops, and for the disarmament of
remaining militias, meaning Hizbollah.
Jumblatt says: “I originally proposed they keep their troops here as
long as Israel occupied any of the country but that they stop
interfering in Lebanese affairs. But they just can’t do it. Now
they’re accusing me of colluding with Hariri to provoke the French
into 1559. According to them, Marwan Hamade actually wrote (the
resolution) in Sardinia (Hariri’s holiday retreat). I appear to be
Public Enemy Number One and we have gone backwards 28 years (to his
father’s murder). Now they’re like Bush – you’re either with us or
against us.”
Jumblatt and Hamade’s real crime, however, has been to foster
cross-communal unity. Three years ago the Druze leader received the
Maronite Patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, in a historic
reconciliation between the two communities that devolved into an
alliance between Jumblatt’s parliamentary bloc and the mainstream
Christian opposition. That was bad enough from the Syrians’ point of
view, but they got really spooked once Hamade became the link- man in
the emerging alliance between Hariri’s powerful Sunni bloc and the
opposition. As Nayla Moawad, widow of the president who died for
doing much the same thing, puts it: “The great taboo for the Syrians
is to have any bridge between the communities.”
Four different government and opposition sources, moreover, confirm
that the Syrian leadership reacted implacably to Lebanese hostility
to its enforced extension of President Lahoud’s mandate. It said it
would burn Beirut rather than leave it: “We destroyed the country
once and we can do it again – we will never allow ourselves to be
pushed out,” was the precise threat.
While Syria’s methods in Lebanon are crude, its diplomacy has been a
fiasco. In late 2002, after giving its assent to the first UN
Security Council Resolution 1441 on Saddam Hussein’s regime, Damascus
had the opportunity to build bridges to the Americans and reinforce
links with the Europeans, preparing what Beirut newspaper publisher
Jamil Mroue calls “a soft landing for its political system”. Instead,
it stands accused by Washington – rightly or wrongly – of allowing
Saddam loyalists to foment insurgency in Iraq from Syrian territory.
The neo-conservative cabals in Washington that helped crank up
support for the Iraq war are now baying for Bashar al-Assad’s blood.
“They can’t see the American train coming down the track; they think
it’s like in the desert, a mirage,” says one Beirut politician. “They
are walking down the same track as Saddam Hussein.”
But what ranks as an almost gratuitous act of political vandalism was
the way Syria burnt its bridges with France and Jacques Chirac. This
relationship, facilitated by Hariri, was Damascus’s only real window
on the world. Yet the Ba’athist leadership not only rebuffed
insistent French suggestions it withdraw from Lebanon, Assad simply
ignored letters from Chirac, including one lobbying for a Dollars
700m gas contract that instead went to a little known consortium with
ties to the nomenklatura. “This is the inebriation of corruption,”
says one person familiar with the details.
“They did nothing to prevent (Resolution) 1559,” says an indignant
former Syrian ally. “What the extremist Christians failed to do in
two decades, to internationalise the Lebanese situation, these people
managed to do in two days.” Trapped in its time warp, Syria has
floated the idea of reviving peace talks with Israel. This, after
all, had worked in the past. As long as it was negotiating with
Israel during the 1990s, no one but the Lebanese raised the question
of the Syrian occupation. Some keen observers of Syria now suspect
Damascus may withdraw its remaining roughly 14,000 troops – and then
foment unrest to demonstrate how indispensable Syria’s stabilising
presence was. Sheikh Naim Qassem, number two in the leadership of
Syria-aligned Hizbollah, alludes rhetorically to this scenario. “Are
they (the Americans) ready for the consequences of (a Syrian)
withdrawal? If they corner Syria, maybe it will make them a present
(by leaving Lebanon).” Brave words. But Syria has managed the
improbable diplomatic feat of pushing France and the US together.
That makes Syria more “doable” than Iran, much the greater
preoccupation in Washington but a much harder nut to crack.
Whatever happens, this looks like a turning point for a still
ambitious and hopeful Beirut and a fearful if reckless Damascus. As
Mroue puts it: “The situation is a bit like a huge boil: it’s ugly
and it’s livid but it’s only when it bursts that you’ll know whether
it’s benign or malignant. Either way, this is the end of an era.”
David Gardner is an FT leader writer.
* “The St George Hotel Bar: International Intrigue in Old Beirut” by
Said K. Aburish (Bloomsbury 1989);
** “A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered” by
Kamal Salibi (I.B. Tauris 1988).

Associated Press Worldstream
February 5, 2005 Saturday 12:14 PM Eastern Time
Gang shootout in Armenian capital kills one, wounds two
YEREVAN, Armenia
A gun fight broke out between criminal gangs in the Armenian capital,
killing one person and wounding two, Yerevan police said Saturday.
The shooting broke out on the outskirts of Yerevan Friday evening and
lasted for nearly 10 minutes, the Yerevan city police press service
said.
Three people were wounded in the fighting, and were rushed to a
nearby hospital in a private car. One of the wounded died en route to
the hospital; another remained in serious condition Saturday. Police
identified one of the wounded as an American citizen.
Police later seized an AK-74 assault rifle and gun cartridges from
the car.
It was unclear what sparked the fighting.
Organized crime is widespread in this former Soviet republic, and
gang-related killings are common.

Cyprus Press and Information Office, Occupied Northern Cyprus
Feb 5 2005
French Parliament Speaker reminded the Turks about the Turkish
occupation of Cyprus and the Armenian genocide
Ankara Anatolia news agency (03.02.05) reported from Ankara that the
Turkish Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc and the President of the
French National Assembly Jean Louis Debre held a joint news
conference on Thursday.
When asked, ”do you think that a negative result will emerge in the
referendum which will be held in France about Turkey’s EU membership
and how do you interpret such a result?” Arinc said: ”Turkey is not
after a privilege about EU membership. However, we oppose to any
discrimination to be made against Turkey. EU should apply the same
procedure it applied on other candidates.
”A referendum for Turkey will be held in the future, not today.
Throughout this period, I believe there will be positive developments
in Turkey and France. I think a positive result will emerge from the
referendum.”
Replying to the same question, Debre said: ”It is a tradition to
hold a referendum (in France) when a situation is in question
regarding borders and structure of the EU. When time has come, French
people will make its decision.”
Meanwhile, Arinc said that they have taken up Turkey-EU relations
during meetings between Turkish and French delegations. He noted:
”We informed the French delegation about the details of the reforms
Turkey implemented.”
On the other hand, Debre said: ”It is impossible to stay indifferent
to the request of a country with a population of 71 million habitants
to join the EU. We should listen to each other. Of course, some
questions emerge in the French public opinion. Because, we want to
build a Europe we have questions to ask. Is the Turkish society ready
to adopt the reforms which will change the structure of their
society? There are also other questions like Cyprus, human rights and
Armenian issue, to be solved.”
Regarding the Cyprus problem and Armenian issues, Debre said: ”We
have discussed these issues with Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. I told him that Cyprus and Armenian issues are considered as
problems in France. Everything works more comfortably as long as
people are in peace with their own histories.”

PanArmenian News
Feb 5 2005
NKR CITIZENS WILL HAVE RIGHT FOR DUAL CITIZENSHIP, NKR FM SAID
05.02.2005 15:30
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ In compliance with the bill on citizenship of the
Nagorno Karabakh Republic, its citizens will have a right for dual
citizenship, NKR Foreign Minister Arman Melikian stated today. In the
Minister’s words, the law will protect the rights of all citizens
irrespective of their background, racial or ethnic belonging. As
stated by A. Melikian, the NKR has to assume responsibility for the
fates of those Armenians, who were born, lived and were further
expelled from Azerbaijan. The bill provides for granting citizenship
to the mentioned group, which will allow full protection of their
rights, the Minister stated.

PanArmenian News
Feb 5 2005
TALKS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT KARABAKH PARTICIPATION, NKR FM SAID
05.02.2005 15:15
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The format of talks over the settlement of the
Nagorno Karabakh conflict is broken, NKR Foreign Minister Arman
Melikian stated at a press conference today. In his opinion, the
negotiation process is based on Azerbaijan’s attempts to accuse
Armenia in aggression. “We see the negotiations in the plane of talks
between Azerbaijan and Karabakh,” the Minister said. “The
Armenia-Azerbaijan format can hardly be called counter-productive,
however the talks are impossible without Karabakh’s participation,”
Arman Melikian stated. Besides, as noted by the Minister, “Nagorno
Karabakh has never participated in any talks over return of
territories or withdrawal of troops.”

PanArmenian News
Feb 5 2005
ONE KILLED, TWO WOUNDED IN SKIRMISH IN YEREVAN
05.02.2005 14:45
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Yesterday at about 8:30 p.m. two young people were
taken to Erebuni Medical Center due to a skirmish at the crossroad of
Artsakhi and Arin-Berd streets in Yerevan. As reported by the
Armenian Police Press Service, one of those wounded – Mher
Ter-Harutyunian (born in 1974) died in the hospital later. As
evidenced by witnesses, two groupings took part in the skirmish. It
should be noted that an AK-74 submachine gun was found in the BMW, in
which the men were taken to hospital. Shells of 7.62 mm and 5.45 mm
are discovered at the scene of the incident. An
operative-investigation group is formed. The investigation is lead by
Yerevan Office of Public Prosecutor.

Nawaat.org, Tunisia
Feb 5 2005
The Clash of civilizations.

By Samuel P. Huntington.
This article does not argue that civilization identities will replace
all other identities, that nation states will disappear, that each
civilization will become a single coherent political entity, that
groups within a civilization will not conflict with and even fight
each other.
THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT
World politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not
hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be–the end of
history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states,
and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of
tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches
aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed
a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the
coming years.
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this
new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.
The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of
conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most
powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of
global politics will occur between nations and groups of different
civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global
politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle
lines of the future.
Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the
evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half
after the emergence of the modern international system with the Peace
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.” This
nineteenth- century pattern lasted until the end of World War 1.
Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against
it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies,
first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then
between communism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this
latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two
superpowers, neither of which was a nation state in the classical
European sense and each of which defined its identity in terms of its
ideology.
These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were
primarily conflicts within Western civilization, “Western civil
wars,” as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold
War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the
seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the
Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and
its center- piece becomes the interaction between the West and
non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the
politics of civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western
civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of
Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of
history.
THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATIONS
During the cold war the world was divided into the First, Second and
Third Worlds. Those divisions are no longer relevant. It is far more
meaningful now to group countries not in terms of their political or
economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development
but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.
What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? A civilization is a
cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities,
religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of
cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy
may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both
will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from
German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural
features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities.
Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader
cultural entity. They constitute civilizations. A civilization is
thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level
of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes
humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective
elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions,
and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have
levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with
varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a
Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he
belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he
intensely identifies. People can and do redefine their identities
and, as a result, the composition and boundaries of civilizations
change.
Civilizations may involve a large number of people, as with China (“a
civilization pretending to be a state,” as Lucian Pye put it), or a
very small number of people, such as the Anglophone Caribbean. A
civilization may include several nation states, as is the case with
Western, Latin American and Arab civilizations, or only one, as is
the case with Japanese civilization. Civilizations obviously blend
and overlap, and may include subcivilizations. Western civilization
has two major variants, European and North American, and Islam has
its Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions. Civilizations are
nonetheless meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are
seldom sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and
fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows,
civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time.
Westerners tend to think of nation states as the principal actors in
global affairs. They have been that, however, for only a few
centuries. The broader reaches of human history have been the history
of civilizations. In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee identified 21
major civilizations; only six of them exist in the contemporary
world.
WHY CIVILIZATIONS WILL CLASH
Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future,
and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions
among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western,
Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American
and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of
the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these
civilizations from one another.
Why will this be the case?
First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are
basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history,
language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion. The
people of different civilizations have different views on the
relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the
citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as
well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and
responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy.
These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon
disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among
political ideologies and political regimes. Differences do not
necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily, mean
violence. Over the centuries, however, differences among
civilizations have generated the most prolonged and the most violent
conflicts.
Second, the world is becoming a smaller place. The interactions
between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these
increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness and
awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities
within civilizations. North African immigration to France generates
hostility among Frenchmen and at the same time increased receptivity
to immigration by “good” European Catholic Poles. Americans react far
more negatively to Japanese investment than to larger investments
from Canada and European countries. Similarly, as Donald Horowitz has
pointed out, “An Ibo may be … an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in
what was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he is simply an
Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an African.” The
interactions among peoples of different civilizations enhance the
civilization-consciousness of people that, in turn, invigorates
differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch back
deep into history.
Third, the processes of economic modernization and social change
throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local
identities. They also weaken the nation state as a source of
identity. In much of the world religion has moved in to fill this
gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled
“fundamentalist.” Such movements are found in Western Christianity,
Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as in Islam. In most
countries and most religions the people active in fundamentalist
movements are young, college-educated, middle- class technicians,
professionals and business persons. The “unsecularization of the
world,” George Weigel has remarked, “is one of the dominant social
facts of life in the late twentieth century.” The revival of
religion, “la revanche de Dieu,” as Gilles Kepel labeled it, provides
a basis for identity and commitment that transcends national
boundaries and unites civilizations.
Fourth, the growth of civilization-consciousness is enhanced by the
dual role of the West. On the one hand, the West is at a peak of
power. At the same time, however, and perhaps as a result, a return
to the roots phenomenon is occurring among non-Western civilizations.
Increasingly one hears references to trends toward a turning inward
and “Asianization” in Japan, the end of the Nehru legacy and the
“Hinduization” of India, the failure of Western ideas of socialism
and nationalism and hence “re-Islamization” of the Middle East, and
now a debate over Westernization versus Russianization in Boris
Yeltsin’s country. A West at the peak of its power confronts
non-Wests that increasingly have the desire, the will and the
resources to shape the world in non-Western ways.
In the past, the elites of non-Western societies were usually the
people who were most involved with the West, had been educated at
Oxford, the Sorbonne or Sandhurst, and had absorbed Western attitudes
and values. At the same time, the populace in non-Western countries
often remained deeply imbued with the indigenous culture. Now,
however, these relationships are being reversed. A de-Westernization
and indigenization of elites is occurring in many non-Western
countries at the same time that Western, usually American, cultures,
styles and habits become more popular among the mass of the people.
Fifth, cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and
hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and
economic ones. In the former Soviet Union, communists can become
democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians
cannot become Estonians and Azeris cannot become Armenians. In class
and ideological conflicts, the key question was “Which side are you
on?” and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In
conflicts between civilizations, the question is “What are you?” That
is a given that cannot be changed. And as we know, from Bosnia to the
Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can mean a
bullet in the head. Even more than ethnicity, religion discriminates
sharply and exclusively among people. A person can be half-French and
half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two countries. It is
more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim.
Finally, economic regionalism is increasing. The proportions of total
trade that were intraregional rose between 1980 and 1989 from 51
percent to 59 percent in Europe, 33 percent to 37 percent in East
Asia, and 32 percent to 36 percent in North America. The importance
of regional economic blocs is likely to continue to increase in the
future. On the one hand, successful economic regionalism will
reinforce civilization-consciousness. On the other hand, economic
regionalism may succeed only when it is rooted in a common
civilization. The European Community rests on the shared foundation
of European culture and Western Christianity. The success of the
North American Free Trade Area depends on the convergence now
underway of Mexican, Canadian and American cultures. Japan, in
contrast, faces difficulties in creating a comparable economic entity
in East Asia because Japan is a society and civilization unique to
itself. However strong the trade and investment links Japan may
develop with other East Asian countries, its cultural differences
with those countries inhibit and perhaps preclude its promoting
regional economic integration like that in Europe and North America.
Common culture, in contrast, is clearly facilitating the rapid
expansion of the economic relations between the People’s Republic of
China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the overseas Chinese
communities in other Asian countries. With the Cold War over,
cultural commonalities increasingly overcome ideological differences,
and mainland China and Taiwan move closer together. If cultural
commonality is a prerequisite for economic integration, the principal
East Asian economic bloc of the future is likely to be centered on
China. This bloc is, in fact, already coming into existence. As
Murray Weidenbaum has observed,
“Despite the current Japanese dominance of the region, the
Chinese-based economy of Asia is rapidly emerging as a new epicenter
for industry, commerce and finance. This strategic area contains
substantial amounts of technology and manufacturing capability
(Taiwan), outstanding entrepreneurial, marketing and services acumen
(Hong Kong), a fine communications network Singapore), a tremendous
pool of financial capital (all three), and very large endowments of
land, resources and labor (mainland China)…. From Guangzhou to
Singapore, from Kuala Lumpur to Manila, this influential
network–often based on extensions of the traditional clans–has been
described as the backbone of the East Asian economy.”(1)
Culture and religion also form the basis of the Economic Cooperation
Organization, which brings together ten non-Arab Muslim countries:
Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. One impetus to
the revival and expansion of this organization, founded originally in
the 1960 by Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, is the realization by the
leaders of several of these countries that they had no chance of
admission to the European Community. Similarly, Caricom, the Central
American Common Market and Mercosur rest on common cultural
foundations. Efforts to build a broader Caribbean-Central American
economic entity bridging the Anglo-Latin divide, however, have to
date failed.
As people define their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they
are likely to see an “us” versus “them” relation existing between
themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion. The end of
ideologically defined states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union permits traditional ethnic identities and animosities to come
to the fore. Differences in culture and religion create differences
over policy issues, ranging from human rights to immigration to trade
and commerce to the environment. Geographical propinquity gives rise
to conflicting territorial claims from Bosnia to Mindanao. Most
important, the efforts of the West to promote its values of democracy
and liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military
predominance and to advance its economic interests engender
countering responses from other civilizations. Decreasingly able to
mobilize support and form coalitions on the basis of ideology,
governments and groups will increasingly attempt to mobilize support
by appealing to common religion and civilization identity.
The clash of civilizations thus occurs at two levels. At the micro-
level, adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations
struggle, often violently, over the control of territory and each
other. At the macro-level, states from different civilizations
compete for relative military and economic power, struggle over the
control of international institutions and third parties, and
competitively promote their particular political and religious
values.
THE FAULT LINES BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS
The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political and
ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis
and bloodshed. The Cold War began when the Iron Curtain divided
Europe politically and ideologically. The Cold War ended with the end
of the Iron Curtain. As the ideological division of Europe has
disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between Western
Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam,
on the other, has reemerged. The most significant dividing line in
Europe, as William Wallace has suggested, may well be the eastern
boundary of Western Christianity in the year 1500. This line runs
along what are now the boundaries between Finland and Russia and
between the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through Belarus and
Ukraine separating the more Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox
eastern Ukraine, swings westward separating Transylvania from the
rest of Romania, and then goes through Yugoslavia almost exactly
along the line now separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of
Yugoslavia. In the Balkans this line, of course, coincides with the
historic boundary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The
peoples to the north and west of this line are Protestant or
Catholic; they shared the common experiences of European
history–feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the
Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution; they
are generally economically better off than the peoples to the east;
and they may now look forward to increasing involvement in a common
European economy and to the consolidation of democratic political
systems. The peoples to the east and south of this line are Orthodox
or Muslim; they historically belonged to the Ottoman or Tsarist
empires and were only lightly touched by the shaping events in the
rest of Europe; they are generally less advanced economically; they
seem much less likely to develop stable democratic political systems.
The Velvet Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of
ideology as the most significant dividing line in Europe. As the
events in Yugoslavia show, it is not only a line of difference; it is
also at times a line of bloody conflict.
Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic
civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. After the founding
of Islam, the Arab and Moorish surge west and north only ended at
Tours in 732. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the
Crusaders attempted with temporary success to bring Christianity and
Christian rule to the Holy Land. From the fourteenth to the
seventeenth century, the Ottoman Turks reversed the balance, extended
their sway over the Middle East and the Balkans, captured
Constantinople, and twice laid siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries as Ottoman power declined Britain, France,
and Italy established Western control over most of North Africa and
the Middle East.
After World War 11, the West, in turn, began to retreat; the colonial
empires disappeared; first Arab nationalism and then Islamic
fundamentalism manifested themselves; the West became heavily
dependent on the Persian Gulf countries for its energy; the oil-rich
Muslim countries became money-rich and, when they wished to,
weapons-rich. Several wars occurred between Arabs and Israel (created
by the West). France fought a bloody and ruthless war in Algeria for
most of the 1950; British and French forces invaded Egypt in 1956;
American forces went into Lebanon in 1958; subsequently American
forces returned to Lebanon, attacked Libya, and engaged in various
military encounters with Iran; Arab and Islamic terrorists, supported
by at least three Middle Eastern governments, employed the weapon of
the weak and bombed Western planes and installations and seized
Western hostages. This warfare between Arabs and the West culminated
in 1990, when the United States sent a massive army to the Persian
Gulf to defend some Arab countries against aggression by another. In
its aftermath NATO planning is increasingly directed to potential
threats and instability along its “southern tier.”
This centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is
unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent. The Gulf War left
some Arabs feeling proud that Saddam Hussein had attacked Israel and
stood up to the West. It also left many feeling humiliated and
resentful of the West’s military presence in the Persian Gulf, the
West’s overwhelming military dominance, and their apparent inability
to shape their own destiny. Many Arab countries, in addition to the
oil exporters, are reaching levels of economic and social development
where autocratic forms of government become inappropriate and efforts
to introduce democracy become stronger. Some openings in Arab
political systems have already occurred. The principal beneficiaries
of these openings have been Islamist movements. In the Arab world, in
short, Western democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces.
This may be a passing phenomenon, but it surely complicates relations
between Islamic countries and the West.
Those relations are also complicated by demography. The spectacular
population growth in Arab countries, particularly in North Africa,
has led to increased migration to Western Europe. The movement within
Western Europe toward minimizing internal boundaries has sharpened
political sensitivities with respect to this development. In Italy,
France and Germany, racism is increasingly open, and political
reactions and violence against Arab and Turkish migrants have become
more intense and more widespread since 1990.
On both sides the interaction between Islam and the West is seen as a
clash of civilizations. The West’s “next confrontation,” observes M.
J. Akbar, an Indian Muslim author, “is definitely going to come from
the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the
Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will
begin.” Bernard Lewis comes to a similar conclusion:
We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of
issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no
less than a clash of civilizations–the perhaps irrational but surely
historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian
heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of
both.(2)
Historically, the other great antagonistic interaction of Arab
Islamic civilization has been with the pagan, animist, and now
increasingly Christian black peoples to the south. In the past, this
antagonism was epitomized in the image of Arab slave dealers and
black slaves. It has been reflected in the on-going civil war in the
Sudan between Arabs and blacks, the fighting in Chad between
Libyan-supported insurgents and the government, the tensions between
Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the Horn of Africa, and the
political conflicts, recurring riots and communal violence between
Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. The modernization of Africa and
the spread of Christianity are likely to enhance the probability of
violence along this fault line. Symptomatic of the intensification of
this conflict was the Pope John Paul II’s speech in Khartoum in
February I993 attacking the actions of the Sudan’s Islamist
government against the Christian minority there.
On the northern border of Islam, conflict has increasingly erupted
between Orthodox and Muslim peoples, including the carnage of Bosnia
and Sarajevo, the simmering violence between Serb and Albanian, the
tenuous relations between Bulgarians and their Turkish minority, the
violence between Ossetians and Ingush, the unremitting slaughter of
each other by Armenians and Azeris, the tense relations between
Russians and Muslims in Central Asia, and the deployment of Russian
troops to protect Russian interests in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Religion reinforces the revital of ethnic identities and restimulates
Russian fears about the security of their southern borders. This
concern is well captured by Archie Roosevelt:
Much of Russian history concerns the struggle between the Slavs and
the Turkic peoples on their borders, which dates back to the
foundation of the Russian state more than a thousand years ago. In
the Slavs’ millennium-long confrontation with their eastern neighbors
lies the key to an understanding not only of Russian history, but
Russian character. To understand Russian realities today one has to
have a concept of the great Turkic ethnic group that has preoccupied
Russians through the centuries.(3)
The conflict of civilizations is deeply rooted elsewhere in Asia. The
historic clash between Muslim and Hindu in the subcontinent manifests
itself now not only in the rivalry between Pakistan and India but
also in intensifying religious strife within India between
increasingly militant Hindu groups and India’s substantial Muslim
minority. The destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in December 1992
brought to the fore the issue of whether India will remain a secular
democratic state or become a Hindu one. In East Asia, China has
outstanding territorial disputes with most of its neighbors. It has
pursued a ruthless policy toward the Buddhist people of Tibet, and it
is pursuing an increasingly ruthless policy toward its Turkic-Muslim
minority. With the Cold War over, the underlying differences between
China and the United States have reasserted themselves in areas such
as human rights, trade and weapons proliferation. These differences
are unlikely to moderate. A “new cold war,” Deng Xaioping reportedly
asserted in 1991, is under way between China and America.
The same phrase has been applied to the increasingly difficult
relations between Japan and the United States. Here cultural
difference exacerbates economic conflict. People on each side allege
racism on the other, but at least on the American side the
antipathies are not racial but cultural. The basic values, attitudes,
behavioral patterns of the two societies could hardly be more
different. The economic issues between the United States and Europe
are no less serious than those between the United States and Japan,
but they do not have the same political salience and emotional
intensity because the differences between American culture and
European culture are so much less than those between American
civilization and Japanese civilization.
The interactions between civilizations vary greatly in the extent to
which they are likely to be characterized by violence. Economic
competition clearly predominates between the American and European
subcivilizations of the West and between both of them and Japan. On
the Eurasian continent, however, the proliferation of ethnic
conflict, epitomized at the extreme in “ethnic cleansing,” has not
been totally random. It has been most frequent and most violent
between groups belonging to different civilizations. In Eurasia the
great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more
aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the
crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to
central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand,
and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India,
Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody
borders.
CIVILIZATION RALLYING: THE KIN-COUNTRY SYNDROME
Groups or states belonging to one civilization that become involved
in war with people from a different civilization naturally try to
rally support from other members of their own civilization. As the
post-Cold War world evolves, civilization commonality, what H. D. S.
Greenway has termed the “kin-country” syndrome, is replacing
political ideology and traditional balance of power considerations as
the principal basis for cooperation and coalitions. It can be seen
gradually emerging in the post-Cold War conflicts in the Persian
Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia. None of these was a full-scale war
between civilizations, but each involved some elements of
civilizational rallying, which seemed to become more important as the
conflict continued and which may provide a foretaste of the future.
First, in the Gulf War one Arab state invaded another and then fought
a coalition of Arab, Western and other states. While only a few
Muslim governments overtly supported Saddam Hussein, many Arab elites
privately cheered him on, and he was highly popular among large
sections of the Arab publics. Islamic fundamentalist movements
universally supported Iraq rather than the Western-backed governments
of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Forswearing Arab nationalism, Saddam
Hussein explicitly invoked an Islamic appeal. He and his supporters
attempted to define the war as a war between civilizations. “It is
not the world against Iraq,” as Safar Al-Hawali, dean of Islamic
Studies at the Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, put it in a widely
circulated tape. “It is the West against Islam.” Ignoring the rivalry
between Iran and Iraq, the chief Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, called for a holy war against the West: “The struggle
against American aggression, greed, plans and policies will be
counted as a jihad, and anybody who is killed on that path is a
martyr.” “This is a war,” King Hussein of Jordan argued, “against all
Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq alone.”
The rallying of substantial sections of Arab elites and publics
behind Saddam Hussein caused those Arab governments in the anti-Iraq
coalition to moderate their activities and temper their public
statements. Arab governments opposed or distanced themselves from
subsequent Western efforts to apply pressure on Iraq, including
enforcement of a no-fly zone in the summer of 1992 and the bombing of
Iraq in january I993. The Western- Soviet-Turkish-Arab anti-Iraq
coalition of 1990 had by 1993 become a coalition of almost only the
West and Kuwait against Iraq.
Muslims contrasted Western actions against Iraq with the West’s
failure to protect Bosnians against Serbs and to impose sanctions on
Israel for violating U.N. resolutions. The West, they alleged, was
using a double standard. A world of clashing civilizations, however,
is inevitably a world of double standards: people apply one standard
to their kin- countries and a different standard to others.
Second, the kin-country syndrome also appeared in conflicts in the
former Soviet Union. Armenian military successes in 1992 and I993
stimulated Turkey to become increasingly supportive of its religious,
ethnic and linguistic brethren in Azerbaijan. “We have a Turkish
nation feeling the same sentiments as the Azerbaijanis,” said one
Turkish official in 1992. “We are under pressure. Our newspapers are
full of the photos of atrocities and are asking us if we are still
serious about pursuing our neutral policy. Maybe we should show
Armenia that there’s a big Turkey in the region.” President Turgut
Ozal agreed, remarking that Turkey should at least “scare the
Armenians a little bit.” Turkey, Ozal threatened again in 1993, would
“show its fangs.” Turkish Air Force jets flew reconnaissance flights
along the Armenian border; Turkey suspended food shipments and air
flights to Armenia; and Turkey and Iran announced they would not
accept dismemberment of Azerbaijan. In the last years of its
existence, the Soviet government supported Azerbaijan because its
government was dominated by former communists. With the end of the
Soviet Union, however, political considerations gave way to religious
ones. Russian troops fought on the side of the Armenians, and
Azerbaijan accused the “Russian government of turning 180 degrees”
toward support for Christian Armenia.
Third, with respect to the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, Western
publics manifested sympathy and support for the Bosnian Muslims and
the horrors they suffered at the hands of the Serbs. Relatively
little concern was expressed, however, over Croatian attacks on
Muslims and participation in the dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In the early stages of the Yugoslav breakup, Germany, in an unusual
display of diplomatic initiative and muscle, induced the other II
members of the European Community to follow its lead in recognizing
Slovenia and Croatia. As a result of the pope’s determination to
provide strong backing to the two Catholic countries, the Vatican
extended recognition even before the Community did. The United States
followed the European lead. Thus the leading actors in Western
civilization rallied behind their coreligionists. Subsequently
Croatia was reported to be receiving substantial quantities of arms
from Central European and other Western countries. Boris Yeltsin’s
government, on the other hand, attempted to pursue a middle course
that would be sympathetic to the Orthodox Serbs but not alienate
Russia from the West. Russian conservative and nationalist groups,
however, including many legislators, attacked the government for not
being more forthcoming in its support for the Serbs. By early 1993
several hundred Russians apparently were serving with the Serbian
forces, and reports circulated of Russian arms being supplied to
Serbia.
Islamic governments and groups, on the other hand, castigated the
West for not coming to the defense of the Bosnians. Iranian leaders
urged Muslims from all countries to provide help to Bosnia; in
violation of the U.N. arms embargo, Iran supplied weapons and men for
the Bosnians; Iranian-supported Lebanese groups sent guerriuas to
train and organize the Bosnian forces. In I993 uP to 4,000 Muslims
from over two dozen Islamic countries were reported to be fighting in
Bosnia. The governments of Saudi Arabia and other countries felt
under increasing pressure from fundamentalist groups in their own
societies to provide more vigorous support for the Bosnians. By the
end of 1992, Saudi Arabia had reportedly supplied substantial funding
for weapons and supplies for the Bosnians, which significantly
increased their military capabilities vis-a-vis the Serbs.
In the 1930s the Spanish Civil War provoked intervention from
countries that politically were fascist, communist and democratic. In
the 1990s the Yugoslav conflict is provoking intervention from
countries that are Muslim, Orthodox and Western Christian. The
parallel has not gone unnoticed. “The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has
become the emotional equivalent of the fight against fascism in the
Spanish Civil War,” one Saudi editor observed. “Those who died there
are regarded as martyrs who tried to save their fellow Muslims.”
Conflicts and violence will also occur between states and groups
within the same civilization. Such conflicts, however, are likely to
be less intense and less likely to expand than conflicts between
civilizations. Common membership in a civilization reduces the
probability of violence in situations where it might otherwise occur.
In 1991 and 1992 many people were alarmed by the possibility of
violent conflict between Russia and Ukraine over territory,
particularly Crimea, the Black Sea fleet, nuclear weapons and
economic issues. If civilization is what counts, however, the
likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low.
They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close
relationships with each other for centuries. As of early 1993,
despite all the reasons for conflict, the leaders of the two
countries were effectively negotiating and defusing the issues
between the two countries. While there has been serious fighting
between Muslims and Christians elsewhere in the former Soviet Union
and much tension and some fighting between Western and Orthodox
Christians in the Baltic states, there has been virtually no violence
between Russians and Ukrainians.
Civilization rallying to date has been limited, but it has been
growing, and it clearly has the potential to spread much further. As
the conflicts in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia continued,
the positions of nations and the cleavages between them increasingly
were along civilizational lines. Populist politicians, religious
leaders and the media have found it a potent means of arousing mass
support and of pressuring hesitant governments. In the coming years,
the local conflicts most likely to escalate into major wars will be
those, as in Bosnia and the Caucasus, along the fault lines between
civilizations. The next world war, if there is one, will be a war
between civilizations.
THE WEST VERSUS THE REST
The west in now at an extraordinary peak of power in relation to
other civilizations. Its superpower opponent has disappeared from the
map. Military conflict among Western states is unthinkable, and
Western military power is unrivaled. Apart from Japan, the West faces
no economic challenge. It dominates international political and
security institutions and with Japan international economic
institutions. Global political and security issues are effectively
settled by a directorate of the United States, Britain and France,
world economic issues by a directorate of the United States, Germany
and Japan, all of which maintain extraordinarily close relations with
each other to the exclusion of lesser and largely non-Western
countries. Decisions made at the U.N. Security Council or in the
International Monetary Fund that reflect the interests of the West
are presented to the world as reflecting the desires of the world
community. The very phrase “the world community” has become the
euphemistic collective noun (replacing “the Free World”) to give
global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United
States and other Western powers.(4) Through the IMF and other
international economic institutions, the West promotes its economic
interests and imposes on other nations the economic policies it
thinks appropriate. In any poll of non-Western peoples, the IMF
undoubtedly would win the support of finance ministers and a few
others, but get an overwhelmingly unfavorable rating from just about
everyone else, who would agree with Georgy Arbatov’s characterization
of IMF officials as “neo-Bolsheviks who love expropriating other
people’s money, imposing undemocratic and alien rules of economic and
political conduct and stifling economic freedom.”
Western domination of the U.N. Security Council and its decisions,
tempered only by occasional abstention by China, produced U.N.
legitimation of the West’s use of force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait
and its elimination of Iraq’s sophisticated weapons and capacity to
produce such weapons. It also produced the quite unprecedented action
by the United States, Britain and France in getting the Security
Council to demand that Libya hand over the Pan Am 103 bombing
suspects and then to impose sanctions when Libya refused. After
defeating the largest Arab army, the West did not hesitate to throw
its weight around in the Arab world. The West in effect is using
international institutions, military power and economic resources to
run the world in ways that will maintain Western predominance,
protect Western interests and promote Western political and economic
values.
That at least is the way in which non-Westerners see the new world,
and there is a significant element of truth in their view.
Differences in power and struggles for military, economic and
institutional power are thus one source of conflict between the West
and other civilizations. Differences in culture, that is basic values
and beliefs, are a second source of conflict. V. S. Naipaul has
argued that Western civilization is the “universal civilization” that
“fits all men.” At a superficial level much of Western culture has
indeed permeated the rest of the world. At a more basic level,
however, Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent
in other civilizations. Western ideas of individualism, liberalism,
constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law,
democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often
have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu,
Buddhist or Orthodox cultures. Western efforts to propagate such
ideas produce instead a reaction against “human rights imperialism”
and a reaffirmation of indigenous values, as can be seen in the
support for religious fundamentalism by the younger generation in
non-Western cultures. The very notion that there could be a
“universal civilization” is a Western idea, directly at odds with the
particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what
distinguishes one people from another. Indeed, the author of a review
of 100 comparative studies of values in different societies concluded
that “the values that are most important in the West are least
important worldwide.”(5) In the political realm, of course, these
differences are most manifest in the efforts of the United States and
other Western powers to induce other peoples to adopt Western ideas
concerning democracy and human rights. Modern democratic government
originated in the West. When it has developed in non-Western
societies it has usually been the product of Western colonialism or
imposition.
The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be, in
Kishore Mahbubani’s phrase, the conflict between “the West and the
Rest” and the responses of non-Western civilizations to Western power
and values.(6) Those responses generally take one or a combination of
three forms. At one extreme, non-Western states can, like Burma and
North Korea, attempt to pursue a course of isolation, to insulate
their societies from penetration or “corruption” by the West, and, in
effect, to opt out of participation in the Western-dominated global
community. The costs of this course, however, are high, and few
states have pursued it exclusively. A second alternative, the
equivalent of “band- wagoning” in international relations theory, is
to attempt to join the West and accept its values and institutions.
The third alternative is to attempt to “balance” the West by
developing economic and military power and cooperating with other
non-Western societies against the West, while preserving indigenous
values and institutions; in short, to modernize but not to
Westernize.
THE TORN COUNTRIES
In the future, as people differentiate themselves by civilization,
countries with large numbers of peoples of different civilizations,
such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, are candidates for
dismemberment. Some other countries have a fair degree of cultural
homogeneity but are divided over whether their society belongs to one
civilization or another. These are torn countries. Their leaders
typically wish to pursue a bandwagoning strategy and to make their
countries members of the West, but the history, culture and
traditions of their countries are non-Western. The most obvious and
prototypical torn country is Turkey. The late twentieth-century
leaders of Turkey have followed in the Attaturk tradition and defined
Turkey as a modern, secular, Western nation state. They allied Turkey
with the West in NATO and in the Gulf War; they applied for
membership in the European Community. At the same time, however,
elements in Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and
have argued that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern Muslim society.
In addition, while the elite of Turkey has defined Turkey as a
Western society, the elite of the West refuses to accept Turkey as
such. Turkey will not become a member of the European Community, and
the real reason, as President Ozal said, “is that we are Muslim and
they are Christian and they don’t say that.” Having rejected Mecca,
and then being rejected by Brussels, where does Turkey look? Tashkent
may be the answer. The end of the Soviet Union gives Turkey the
opportunity to become the leader of a revived Turkic civilization
involving seven countries from the borders of Greece to those of
China. Encouraged by the West, Turkey is making strenuous efforts to
carve out this new identity for itself.
During the past decade Mexico has assumed a position somewhat similar
to that of Turkey. Just as Turkey abandoned its historic opposition
to Europe and attempted to join Europe, Mexico has stopped defining
itself by its opposition to the United States and is instead
attempting to imitate the United States and to join it in the North
American Free Trade Area. Mexican leaders are engaged in the great
task of redefining Mexican identity and have introduced fundamental
economic reforms that eventually will lead to fundamental political
change. In 1991 a top adviser to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari
described at length to me all the changes the Salinas government was
making. When he finished, I remarked: “That’s most impressive. It
seems to me that basically you want to change Mexico from a Latin
American country into a North American country.” He looked at me with
surprise and exclaimed: “Exactly! That’s precisely what we are trying
to do, but of course we could never say so publicly.” As his remark
indicates, in Mexico as in Turkey, significant elements in society
resist the redefinition of their country’s identity. In Turkey,
European-oriented leaders have to make gestures to Islam (Ozal’s
pilgrimage to Mecca); so also Mexico’s North American-oriented
leaders have to make gestures to those who hold Mexico to be a Latin
American country (Salinas’ Ibero-American Guadalajara summit).
Historically Turkey has been the most profoundly torn country. For
the United States, Mexico is the most immediate torn country.
Globally the most important torn country is Russia. The question of
whether Russia is part of the West or the leader of a distinct
Slavic-Orthodox civilization has been a recurring one in Russian
history. That issue was obscured by the communist victory in Russia,
which imported a Western ideology, adapted it to Russian conditions
and then challenged the West in the name of that ideology. The
dominance of communism shut off the historic debate over
Westernization versus Russification. With communism discredited
Russians once again face that question.
President Yeltsin is adopting Western principles and goals and
seeking to make Russia a “normal” country and a part of the West. Yet
both the Russian elite and the Russian public are divided on this
issue. Among the more moderate dissenters, Sergei Stankevich argues
that Russia should reject the “Atlanticist” course, which would lead
it “to become European, to become a part of the world economy in
rapid and organized fashion, to become the eighth member of the
Seven, and to put particular emphasis on Germany and the United
States as the two dominant members of the Atlantic alliance.” While
also rejecting an exclusively Eurasian policy, Stankevich nonetheless
argues that Russia should give priority to the protection of Russians
in other countries, emphasize its Turkic and Muslim connections, and
promote “an appreciable redistribution of our resources, our options,
our ties, and our interests in favor of Asia, of the eastern
direction.” People of this persuasion criticize Yeltsin for
subordinating Russia’s interests to those of the West, for reducing
Russian military strength, for failing to support traditional friends
such as Serbia, and for pushing economic and political reform in ways
injurious to the Russian people. Indicative of this trend is the new
popularity of the ideas of Petr Savitsky, who in the 1920s argued
that Russia was a unique Eurasian civilization.(7) More extreme
dissidents voice much more blatantly nationalist, anti-Western and
anti-Semitic views, and urge Russia to redevelop its military
strength and to establish closer ties with China and Muslim
countries. The people of Russia are as divided as the elite. An
opinion survey in European Russia in the spring of 1992 revealed that
40 percent of the public had positive attitudes toward the West and
36 percent had negative attitudes. As it has been for much of its
history, Russia in the early 1990s is truly a torn country.
To redefine its civilization identity, a torn country must meet three
requirements. First, its political and economic elite has to be
generally supportive of and enthusiastic about this move. Second, its
public has to be willing to acquiesce in the redefinition. Third, the
dominant groups in the recipient civilization have to be willing to
embrace the convert. All three requirements in large part exist with
respect to Mexico. The first two in large part exist with respect to
Turkey. It is not clear that any of them exist with respect to
Russia’s joining the West. The conflict between liberal democracy and
Marxism- Leninism was between ideologies which, despite their major
differences, ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality
and prosperity. A traditional, authoritarian, nationalist Russia
could have quite different goals. A Western democrat could carry on
an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be virtually
impossible for him to do that with a Russian traditionalist. If, as
the Russians stop behaving like Marxists, they reject liberal
democracy and begin behaving like Russians but not like Westerners,
the relations between Russia and the West could again become distant
and conflictual.(8)
THE CONFUCIAN-ISLAMIC CONNECTION
The obstacles to non-Western countries joining the West vary
considerably. They are least for Latin American and East European
countries. They are greater for the Orthodox countries of the former
Soviet Union. They are still greater for Muslim, Confucian, Hindu and
Buddhist societies. Japan has established a unique position for
itself as an associate member of the West: it is in the West in some
respects but clearly not of the West in important dimensions. Those
countries that for reason of culture and power do not wish to, or
cannot, join the West compete with the West by developing their own
economic, military and political power. They do this by promoting
their internal development and by cooperating with other non-Western
countries. The most prominent form of this cooperation is the
Confucian-Islamic connection that has emerged to challenge Western
interests, values and power.
Almost without exception, Western countries are reducing their
military power; under Yeltsin’s leadership so also is Russia. China,
North Korea and several Middle Eastern states, however, are
significantly expanding their military capabilities. They are doing
this by the import of arms from Western and non-Western sources and
by the development of indigenous arms industries. One result is the
emergence of what Charles Krauthammer has called “Weapon States,” and
the Weapon States are not Western states. Another result is the
redefinition of arms control, which is a Western concept and a
Western goal. During the Cold War the primary purpose of arms control
was to establish a stable military balance between the United States
and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. In the post-Cold
War world the primary objective of arms control is to prevent the
development by non-Western societies of military capabilities that
could threaten Western interests. The West attempts to do this
through international agreements, economic pressure and controls on
the transfer of arms and weapons technologies.
The conflict between the West and the Confucian-Islamic states
focuses largely, although not exclusively, on nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons, ballistic missiles and other sophisticated means
for delivering them, and the guidance, intelligence and other
electronic capabilities for achieving that goal. The West promotes
nonproliferation as a universal norm and nonproliferation treaties
and inspections as means of realizing that norm. It also threatens a
variety of sanctions against those who promote the spread of
sophisticated weapons and proposes some benefits for those who do
not. The attention of the West focuses, naturally, on nations that
are actually or potentially hostile to the West.
The non-Western nations, on the other hand, assert their right to
acquire and to deploy whatever weapons they think necessary for their
security. They also have absorbed, to the full, the truth of the
response of the Indian defense minister when asked what lesson he
learned from the Gulf War: “Don’t fight the United States unless you
have nuclear weapons.” Nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and missiles
are viewed, probably erroneously, as the potential equalizer of
superior Western conventional power. China, of course, already has
nuclear weapons; Pakistan and India have the capability to deploy
them. North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Algeria appear to be
attempting to acquire them. A top Iranian official has declared that
all Muslim states should acquire nuclear weapons, and in 1988 the
president of Iran reportedly issued a directive calling for
development of “offensive and defensive chemical, biological and
radiological weapons.”
Centrally important to the development of counter-West military
capabilities is the sustained expansion of China’s military power and
its means to create military power. Buoyed by spectacular economic
development, China is rapidly increasing its military spending and
vigorously moving forward with the modernization of its armed forces.
It is purchasing weapons from the former Soviet states; it is
developing long-range missiles; in 1992 it tested a one-megaton
nuclear device. It is developing power-projection capabilities,
acquiring aerial refueling technology, and trying to purchase an
aircraft carrier. Its military buildup and assertion of sovereignty
over the South China Sea are provoking a multilateral regional arms
race in East Asia. China is also a major exporter of arms and weapons
technology. It has exported materials to Libya and Iraq that could be
used to manufacture nuclear weapons and nerve gas. It has helped
Algeria build a reactor suitable for nuclear weapons research and
production. China has sold to Iran nuclear technology that American
officials believe could only be used to create weapons and apparently
has shipped components of 300-mile-range missiles to Pakistan. North
Korea has had a nuclear weapons program under way for some while and
has sold advanced missiles and missile technology to Syria and Iran.
The flow of weapons and weapons technology is generally from East
Asia to the Middle East. There is, however, some movement in the
reverse direction; China has received Stinger missiles from Pakistan.
A Confucian-Islamic military connection has thus come into being,
designed to promote acquisition by its members of the weapons and
weapons technologies needed to counter the military power of the
West. It may or may not last. At present, however, it is, as Dave
McCurdy has said, “a renegades’ mutual support pact, run by the
proliferators and their backers.” A new form of arms competition is
thus occurring between Islamic-Confucian states and the West. In an
old-fashioned arms race, each side developed its own arms to balance
or to achieve superiority against the other side. In this new form of
arms competition, one side is developing its arms and the other side
is attempting not to balance but to limit and prevent that arms
build-up while at the same time reducing its own military
capabilities.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE WEST
This article does not argue that civilization identities will replace
all other identities, that nation states will disappear, that each
civilization will become a single coherent political entity, that
groups within a civilization will not conflict with and even fight
each other. This paper does set forth the hypotheses that differences
between civilizations are real and important; civilization-
consciousness is increasing; conflict between civilizations will
supplant ideological and other forms of conflict as the dominant
global form of conflict; international relations, historically a game
played out within Western civilization, will increasingly be
de-Westernized and become a game in which non-Western civilizations
are actors and not simply objects; successful political, security and
economic international institutions are more likely to develop within
civilizations than across civilizations; conflicts between groups in
different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained and
more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization;
violent conflicts between groups in different civilizations are the
most likely and most dangerous source of escalation that could lead
to global wars; the paramount axis of world politics will be the
relations between “the West and the Rest”; the elites in some torn
non-Western countries will try to make their countries part of the
West, but in most cases face major obstacles to accomplishing this; a
central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between
the West and several Islamic- Confucian states.
This is not to advocate the desirability of conflicts between
civilizations. It is to set forth descriptive hypotheses as to what
the future may be like. If these are plausible hypotheses, however,
it is necessary to consider their implications for Western policy.
These implications should be divided between short-term advantage and
long- term accommodation. In the short term it is clearly in the
interest of the West to promote greater cooperation and unity within
its own civilization, particularly between its European and North
American components; to incorporate into the West societies in
Eastern Europe and Latin America whose cultures are close to those of
the West; to promote and maintain cooperative relations with Russia
and Japan; to prevent escalation of local inter-civilization
conflicts into major inter-civilization wars; to limit the expansion
of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to moderate
the reduction of Western military capabilities and maintain military
superiority in East and Southwest Asia; to exploit differences and
conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other
civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests; to
strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate
Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of
non-Western states in those institutions.
In the longer term other measures would be called for. Western
civilization is both Western and modern. Non-Western civilizations
have attempted to become modern without becoming Western. To date
only Japan has fully succeeded in this quest. Non-Western
civilizations will continue to attempt to acquire the wealth,
technology, skills, machines and weapons that are part of being
modern. They will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their
traditional culture and values. Their economic and military strength
relative to the West will increase. Hence the West will increasingly
have to accommodate these non-Western modern civilizations whose
power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests
differ significantly from those of the West. This will require the
West to maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect
its interests in relation to these civilizations. It will also,
however, require the West to develop a more profound understanding of
the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other
civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see
their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of
commonality between Western and other civilizations. For the relevant
future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world
of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to
coexist with the others.
Notes:
(1) Murray Weidenbaum, Greater China: The Next Economic Superpower?,
St. Louis: Washington University Center for the Study of American
Business, Contemporary Issues, Series 57, February 1993, pp. 2-3.
(2) Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic Monthly,
vol. 266, September 1990, p. 6o; Time, June 15, 1992, pp. 24-28.
(3) Archie Roosevelt, For Lust of Knowing, Boston: Little, Brown,
i988, PP 332-333.
(4) Almost invariably Western leaders claim they are acting on behalf
of “the world community.” One minor lapse occurred during the run-up
to the Gulf War. In an interview on “Good Morning America,” Dec. 21,
1990, British Prime Minister John Major referred to the actions “the
West” was taking against Saddam Hussein. He quickly corrected himself
and subsequently referred to “the world community.” He was, however,
right when he erred.
(5) Harry C. Triandis, The New York Times, Dec. 2S, 1990, p. 41, and
“Cross-Cultural Studies of Individualism and Collectivism,” Nebraska
Symposium on Motivation, vol. 37, 1989, pp. 41-133.
(6) Kishore Mahbubani, “The West and the Rest,” The National
Interest, Summer 1992, pp. 3-13.
(7) Sergei Stankevich, “Russia in Search of Itself,” The National
Interest, Summer 1992, pp. 47-51; Daniel Schneider, “A Russian
Movement Rejects Western Tilt,” Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 5,
1993, pp. 5-7.
(8) Owen Harries has pointed out that Australia is trying (unwisely
in his view) to become a torn country in reverse. Although it has
been a full member not only of the West but also of the ABCA military
and intelligence core of the West, its current leaders are in effect
proposing that it defect from the West, redefine itself as an Asian
country and cultivate dose ties with its neighbors. Australia’s
future, they argue, is with the dynamic economies of East Asia. But,
as I have suggested, close economic cooperation normally requires a
common cultural base. In addition, none of the three conditions
necessary for a torn country to join another civilization is likely
to exist in Australia’s case.
Samuel P. Huntington is the Eaton Professor of the Science of
Government and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic
Studies at Harvard University. This article is the product of the
Olin Institute’s project on “The Changing Security Environment and
American National Interests.”

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Flint Journal, MI
Feb 5 2005
Computers take students around world for history lessons
FLINT
THE FLINT JOURNAL FIRST EDITION
Several Flint Southwestern Academy students wrote essays as part of a
contest sponsored by the U.S. State Department during International
Education Week in November.
Cheryl Jamison, Tionna Lang, Katie McArthur, Shayla Thrash, and
Roneshia Williams, students in John Davidek’s world history class,
won awards for their essays on the topic, “Why I want to be
internationally educated.”
The students received award certificates signed by the U.S.
ambassador to Armenia and an educational CD for their computers,
Armenian postcards and a hand-crafted necklace with silk threads
wound around a walnut.
***

FLINT – Eva Hughes was talking via computer to a student in
Uzbekistan more than 6,000 miles away when her teacher, John Davidek,
urged her not to create an “international incident.”
Eva, 16, was on a Flint Southwestern Academy computer Friday morning
when she was asked a question by her counterpart in Uzbekistan: Did
she think God was involved in natural disasters such as the recent
tsunami in Southeast Asia.
“I myself am not that religious,” typed Eva, an 11th-grader and
member of the Model United Nations class at Central High School. “But
natural disasters do seem to be a Godly thing. God always has a job
in the Earth’s disasters.”
Davidek prodded her to change ‘job’ to ‘hand,’ and she did.Learning
how to communicate with students from around the world has been a
year-long project for students in Davidek’s world history class at
Southwestern.
His students also have regular Internet chats and joint projects with
peers in Armenia, a country near Russia, and are in the process of
getting linked to youth in Rwanda, an East African country, Davidek
said.
The hope is by linking students across the globe they can learn from
each other while studying history.
“The students learn people are all the same,” Davidek said. “Cultures
might vary. Ethnically they might vary, but people are the same. They
all yearn for the same things, especially young people.”
The effort is tied to Davidek’s selection last summer as one of 22
American educators to participate in an international teacher
exchange program called Project Harmony.
As part of the nonprofit program, Davidek spent several days in
Armenia and stayed with a teacher there. In a couple of months the
Armenian teacher will visit Davidek, his students and Flint.
The Flint Southwestern and Armenian students recently had a joint
assignment in which they reported on a historical figure and the
value the person represented. They also both have watched and studied
the Michael Moore movie “Farenheit 9/11.”
“One of the (Armenian) kids did a report on Franklin Roosevelt, and
that was interesting,” said Southwestern 11th-grader Alexandria
Umphrey, 16. “It was interesting to me that they thought he was
important even in Armenia.”
Davidek said there was a learning curve for his world history
students when trying to communicate with the foreign youth.
“There is some sensitivity,” he said. “When we first started doing
this I said use proper English, you can’t say, ‘What’s up’ and stuff
like that because they won’t understand.”
Students said it’s been fun to communicate and learn from youngsters
they would otherwise never meet.
“We learned that the kind of things they value are similar to what we
value,” said Tionna Lang, an 11th-grader.

Zaman, Turkey
Feb 5 2005
Debre Sweats at Turkish Parliament
By Anadolu Agency (aa), Cihan
The Speaker of the French Parliament Jean Louis-Debre has proposed
that an independent international institution conduct research into
allegations of the so-called Armenian genocide.
Still continuing his official Turkey visit, Debre voiced his proposal
at a meeting with Turkish Parliamentary European Union (EU)
Adjustment Committee Yasar Yakis and other commissioners.
Debre proposed research be undertaken into the so-called genocide
allegations by an independent international institution. Expressing
that a group of researchers from The United Nations (UN), the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and The Council of Europe along
with a Swiss group could conduct this independent research. Debre
noted that this may be the only way to reveal whether or not the
genocide allegations are true. Yakis, on the other hand, stressed
that any assessments based on the hypotheses that an Armenian
genocide did occur without any analysis on the validity of some
events that are described as “genocide” would be erroneous. Yakis
said that Turkey is not opposed to the historians’ research and
studies, it has opened the archives on this issue; however, it is the
Armenian side that has not open their archives.
A commissioner and a Republican People’s Party (CHP) member deputy
Onur Oymen also announced that a similar meeting regarding the issue
was previously held in Vienna; however, the Armenian historians did
not attend the second meeting even though Turkey had opened its
archives regarding the issue and presented all information, including
records and documents for examination. Oymen asked: “To which country
had this proposal of yours been made before?” and emphasized that
making political decisions over historical events paves the way for
erroneous outcomes. Debre in response to Oymen’s question of “Why did
you pass a law in your parliament without having research or studies
done on the issue of Armenian genocide?” with, “Let’s put this aside.
We have to forget the past. We want to assist you on your way to the
EU.”