The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order Read Online Free PDF Page B

Muslim nations to provide 18,000 troops to protect Bosnian Muslims;
      •   the intensification of the war between Armenians and Azeris, Turkish and Iranian demands that the Armenians surrender their conquests, the deployment of Turkish troops to and Iranian troops across the Azerbaijan border, and Russia’s warning that the Iranian action contributes to “escalation of the conflict” and “pushes it to dangerous limits of internationalization”;
      •   the continued fighting in central Asia between Russian troops and mujahedeen guerrillas;
      •   the confrontation at the Vienna Human Rights Conference between the West, led by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, denouncing “cultural relativism,” and a coalition of Islamic and Confucian states rejecting “Western universalism”;
      •   the refocusing in parallel fashion of Russian and NATO military planners on “the threat from the South”;
      •   the voting, apparently almost entirely along civilizational lines, that gave the 2000 Olympics to Sydney rather than Beijing;
      •   the sale of missile components from China to Pakistan, the resulting imposition of U.S. sanctions against China, and the confrontation between China and the United States over the alleged shipment of nuclear technology to Iran;
      •   the breaking of the moratorium and the testing of a nuclear weapon by China, despite vigorous U.S. protests, and North Korea’s refusal to participate further in talks on its own nuclear weapons program;
      •   the revelation that the U.S. State Department was following a “dual containment” policy directed at both Iran and Iraq;
      •    p. 39 the announcement by the U.S. Defense Department of a new strategy of preparing for two “major regional conflicts,” one against North Korea, the other against Iran or Iraq;
      •   the call by Iran’s president for alliances with China and India so that “we can have the last word on international events”;
      •   the new German legislation drastically curtailing the admission of refugees;
      •   the agreement between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk on the disposition of the Black Sea fleet and other issues;
      •   the bombing of Baghdad by the United States, its virtually unanimous support by Western governments, and its condemnation by almost all Muslim governments as another example of the West’s “double standard”;
      •   the United States’ listing Sudan as a terrorist state and indicting Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and his followers for conspiring “to levy a war of urban terrorism against the United States”;
      •   the improved prospects for the eventual admission of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia into NATO;
      •   the 1993 Russian parliamentary election which demonstrated that Russia was indeed a “torn” country with its population and elites uncertain whether they should join or challenge the West.
     
    A comparable list of events demonstrating the relevance of the civilization paradigm could be compiled for almost any other six-month period in the early 1990s.
    In the early years of the Cold War, the Canadian statesman Lester Pearson presciently pointed to the resurgence and vitality of non-Western societies. “It would be absurd,” he warned, “to imagine that these new political societies coming to birth in the East will be replicas of those with which we in the West are familiar. The revival of these ancient civilizations will take new forms.” Pointing out that international relations “for several centuries” had been the relations among the states of Europe, he argued that “the most far-reaching problems arise no longer between nations within a single civilization but between civilizations themselves.” [17] The prolonged bipolarity of the Cold War delayed the developments which Pearson saw coming. The end of the Cold War