-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.centraleurope.com/ceo/special/zoranapr30.html Updated Fri., Apr. 30, 1999 at: Lon 12:12 p.m. Prague 1:12 p.m. N.Y. 7:12 a.m. Editors' Pick: Kosovo Crisis -- The latest updates on the crisis in Yugoslavia. The Clash of Civilizations And World Peace by Philip Cunningham Pax Americana is in deep trouble. Even if the war in Kosovo does not turn out to be America's "Suez" or "Dienbienphu", the ill-conceived intervention could very well be Nato's undoing. And even if Nato holds together on the battlefield and achieves some of its ever-shifting objectives, bombing the Belgrade government out of power, it will have left a dangerous legacy. Intervention in Kosovo has created dangerous rifts with Russia and China, dangerously altering the delicate global balance of power and posing all kinds of new problems down the road. If US-led Nato coalition is successful in "taking out" an unfriendly government, the world will become a more insecure place, polarized by a dangerous precedent: --it's okay to attack a sovereign state for alleged humanitarian reasons in defiance of international law and UN authority. If prolonged military intervention results in a stalemate that more or less restores the status quo ante after thousands of deaths, enduring refugee problems, a devastated infrastructure and economic calamity one can only wonder if the end result was worth the terrible price. Conversely, if the US-led mission to bomb Yugoslavia is immediately halted because of Russian pressure to go back to the table or domestic rifts within Nato nations, the tilting of the global power balance can be righted in time. Nothing will turn the clock back to the relative peace of the pre-March 24, 1999 world, but diplomacy and development aid can make up for some of the damage. An immediate and complete halt to the bombing is not an endorsement of a tyrant in Belgrade, nor does it condone atrocities. Indeed, bombing is both tyrannical and atrocious, so stopping it can only be an improvement. Setting a good example is one kind of influence. Boycotts are another. All sorts of non-violent solutions are possible, because the means we use are as important as ends we seek. It doesn't take much imagination to realize that there has to be a better way to stop people from hurting one another than to drop explosives from the sky. So far, Nato casualities are virtually nil, which provides a golden opportunity to cut all losses and pull out. Getting a little egg on the face is far better than getting dragged into the mud of a quagmire. More importantly, the terrifying, divisive and unacceptable losses of an open-ended war can be largely be avoided. If the do-gooders led by Clinton were less eager to cross boundaries and intervene militarily, there would be fewer if any casualties and only a fraction of the costs that are being run up with the astronomical military bill. Peace does not come for free, but war is the most costly of all. In the Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington describes a worldview that may ultimately prove prescient, a world in which good fences make good neighbors. His paradigm rests on the assumption that the world is irrevocably broken into major cultural zones that will never assimilate and homogenize into a single world culture. In such a world, war would be avoided not by a coercive global cop, but by a relative parity of power that would prevent disruptive projections of power across civilizational lines. In short, a truly multipolar system is more stable than a quasi-multipolar system which is a group of regional powers plus a single superpower. Despite the negative tone of the title, Huntington's provocative work offers the hope that clashes between nations can be avoided if each recognizes and accepts the ultimate differentness of others. In this sense, Pax Americana, with its universal aspirations, is a threat to systemic stability. Huntington orders the world into broad civilizational categories: Western, (US and Western Europe) Orthodox (Orthodox Christian countries), Islamic, Hispanic, Sinitic (China, Vietnam, Korea), Hindu, Japanese, etc. As a student in Huntington's seminar at Harvard University, I found myself constantly arguing with the good-humored professor about the rough edges of his bold theory. What constitutes a civilization? -Why isn't Southeast Asia a civilization? Why does Japan stand in a category of its own, yet multicultural America is thrown in with Europe under the rubric "Western," or how to determine where one civilization ends and another begins? But the power of his ideas were such that by the end of the seminar, most of us realized that we had bought his central thesis and were just sweating the details. The overall trends he describes are visible everywhere. In the absence of cold war ideology, people and nations are cloaking themselves in culture. That's the good news and the bad news. It takes a careful reading of his work to realize the bright side to all this; -- in a world without a universal culture or a single hegemon, the inability to project power and re-create the world in one's image creates is a humbling fact of life. Having the wisdom not to try to change that which one cannot change is a kind of liberation. You give up the idea of changing the world because it's beyond your power to do so. The real danger comes when one power is strong and cocky enough to think otherwise. In a multipolar world, each civilization is more or less equal but different. According to the categories outlined above, the US shares vital ties with Canada and Britain as co-members of the Western group, but it is almost inconceivable that America need to intervene in Yugoslavia, or Korea or Iraq; the three hot spots of the world today. The tragic unfolding of events in Kosovo offers examples of human folly that both reflect and repudiate controversial ideas put forward by Sam Huntington. Clash theory predicts that the fragmenting states of former Yugoslavia are at best tangential to the US sphere of interest and intervention could go awry because of the cultural gulf between Orthodox and Western worldviews. By the same token, Russia, with its deep cultural and religious ties to Yugoslavia, most especially the Serbs, has got to be a player. But this kind of Clash theorizing on the macro level misses the fatal beauty of Yugoslavia's social fabric; it's woven with the threads of at least three major civilizations and when you try to separate the threads, the society and country verges on collapse. Yugoslavia could be broadly described as a bastion of Orthodox culture, and its ties to Russia were strengthened by the shared culture of socialism, but nearly every part of Tito's once-unified domain contains West-leaning Croats and Islamic-leaning Albanians, not to mention Hungarians, Gypsies and other ethnic groups. By the same token, multicultural America may be too diverse to qualify as a purely Western civilization. Thus Huntington's theorizing goes flat in places where several major civilizations co-exist in close proximity. It works better where the cultural and national divides are distinct; --it's very much a world where good fences make good neighbors. Kosovo, like Bosnia, is a place where three civilizations collide; - -Western, Orthodox and Islamic. Like a fractal coastline, it seems no matter what size the unit, cultural diversity inevitable in former Yugoslavia. Not only did Yugoslavia as a whole contain three civilizations in microcosm, but so too does rump Yugoslavia and each of the newly independent states that ceded from Belgrade. And the beautiful and tragic truth is, many villages contain a parallel level of diversity, a font of both tolerant harmony and cross-civilizational strife. Huntington's misgivings about multiculturalism in America, most notably voiced as a fear of Spanish becoming a second language, struck me as uncharitable at first glance. Why shouldn't the US embrace the Hispanic civilization within its borders? Isn't America becoming more Asian? Well, maybe. But Huntington's monocultural argument is not without appeal if you are willing to look at culture as an transformative worldview instead as a passive hodge podge of whatever's around. Certainly in the case of Yugoslavia there is an argument to be made the forced monoculturalism under Tito was preferable to the imploding multiculturalism of strife-torn Bosnia and Kosovo. Thus the paradox of the Clash theory; Huntington's ideas support monoculturalism at home, but require multiculturalism abroad. Further support for the Clash theory of civilizational loyalties can be seen in how support for Serbia runs deep in "orthodox" countries such as Russia and Greece, whereas American popular interest in Kosovo is rather shallow. Even while decrying Serb ethnic cleansing, Western and Islamic critics of Serbia tar the entire Serb population with a single brushstroke as modern day Nazis. The Muslim affiliation of most Albanians in Kosovo has, as Clash theory predicts, elicited support from Turkey, Iran, Malaysia and other Islamic communities. But Islamic support has been muted because the Kosovars are being rescued by the arch nemesis of Islamic culture; the US and the West. Nato membership has been extended into the Orthodox realm of former Eastern Europe which raises a red flag according to Clash thinking. Not only does this alliance dangerously denude Russia of its natural buffer states and cultural kin, but it is crossing civilizational lines that will eventually lead to cultural clash. A further problem, already widely noted in the Russian and Chinese press, is the precedent of Nato ganging up to bomb and perhaps invade a sovereign nation. Though Huntington does not in any way advocate the dissolution of Nato, the foolishness of violently intervening in Kosovo, across civilizational lines and beyond the realm of vital interests, could end up leading to Nato's demise. While Huntington has spoken out openly in favor of Nato expansion, his theory, carefully considered, suggests otherwise. Inviting Orthodox or Islamic countries to join the Western alliance (allied against Russia) doesn't make sense if the world is to keep its multipolar equilibrium. A weak or victimized Russia run over roughshod will not engender long term stability. Constructively engaged, Russia, at least in cultural terms, is better situated to exert influence in Serbia and help maintain peace in the Slavic areas of the Balkans. The UN Security Council did not become a tool of the Western effort to punish Serbia because, for all its bureaucratic faults, it reflects a truly multipolar world. The leading members of non-Western civilizations such as China and Russia and Japan cannot be expected to line up behind the United States in support of military intervention because they don't see the world the same way. Only in the most extraordinary cases of roguish external aggression, such as Iraq invading Kuwait, or North Korea going amok, can the United Nations be expected to fall into line behind the US. Thus for many conflicts, UN intervention is essentially no intervention. While the UN has been chided for its inability to prevent civil wars, genocide and refugee floods, in systemic terms at least, it has contributed to keeping peace among nations. While the Security Council is dominated by Western countries, Russia and China have veto power, making it too democratic for American unilateralists. In a world governed by multipolarity, the ideal is to each his own (civilization); -- live and let live. The toughest thing about adhering to multipolarity, even if it is good for balance on the macro level, is that our hearts demand intervention when values we cherish, or people we identify with are under attack. Ditto for the other guys. There is no easy objective measure of right and wrong in most civil wars, as the varied reactions of Russians and Americans in regards to the Kosovo crisis makes clear. In many cases, not getting involved is good for "us", and arguably even good for "them" since intervention, as the Nato air campaign so painfully demonstrates, may worsen a war and increase total casualties. Still, our patience is stretched to the limit when horrors are committed and brought home to us at the dinner table via television. Depending on whether or not an event is photographed, non-interference seems unconscionable and Machiavellian; -- it reeks of live and let die. Of course we don't yet live in a truly multipolar world, so many of Huntington's predictions have yet to be tested. The one glaring exception to multipolarity and "mind your own business rule" in today's world of course is the US, (although Nato permits former imperial powers Britain, France and Germany gleefully tag along for the ride.) World peace, or at least geo-political balance, is bound to get a bit wobbly if Nato does not immediately stop killing. In a desperate campaign flawed at almost every level, Nato is foolishly trying to project its influence beyond its natural zone of vital interests. In this sense it is the Western countries, not Islamic, or Orthodox or Chinese civilizations that pose the greatest threat to global stability and peace in the world today. The author was a 1997-8 Nieman Fellow and is currently a research fellow at Harvard University. � Zoran.Net 1999, all rights reserved "The Truth" About War in Kosovo (Zoran.Net) ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller, German Writer (1759-1805) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. 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