Samuel Huntington, in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, proposes that the international world order will be increasingly dominated by conflicts not between kings, nation states or ideologies, but rather by friction between different civilizations. At the same time, globalization is increasingly bringing awareness of and desire for economic success and integration to the farthest corners of the world. In today’s post-Cold War order, how will these two powerful forces — ethnicity and economics — dominate the coming millennium?

Reality proves that the world today is not, as many hoped it would be after the Cold War, a perfectly stable and prosperous community. There are constant clamors for economic prowess, as well as continuing and violent struggles between different groups for accepted identities.

In the words of one of the seminar’ s guest speakers, Dr. Ken Jowitt, “The most dramatic disconnection in the aftermath of the Cold War is the antagonistic juxtaposition of global economic integration and local ethnic fragmentation.” These two concerns will obviously lead to circumstances in which one must be sacrificed for the other. The question then becomes what kind of societies will pick the economic success? Who will pick the cultural unification and identity? What are the trade-offs? Using as a powerful metaphor the title of Thomas L. Friedman’s book, will countries choose The Lexus or the Olive Tree?

The general consensus of experts and seminar participants alike was that rarely will there be a situation in which a society can survive without embracing aspects of each of these forces. In looking at the specific cases of Canada and Turkey, it is obvious that French-Canadians are, for the most part, willing to sacrifice the economic security of remaining a part of unified Canada in order to be identified as a distinct cultural group. In Turkey, on the other hand, the Islamic movements are muted and idle in favor of the maintenance of the economic success Turkey enjoys in maintaining its identity as part of the Western world. Therefore, there is no exact answer, no predetermined formula, as to which force will always predominate.

If in an ideal society both forces are integrated, what then is the role of America in such a debate? Because the United States enjoys a unified identity as well as global economic success this issue does not necessarily affect the American domestic situation. However it does play a role in the formation of U.S. foreign policy. In considering our actions in international situations, we must decide whether or not it is within our role to impose our cultural and moral identity on others and to deal with the forces of the world economy, or whether we should step back and let each country decide for itself where its priorities lie.

Each of the Vail Valley Institute’s eighth annual seminar speakers emphasized different sides of this debate as important factors in determining the future of the international community. Each provided different perspectives stemming from their own experiences and careers. The following summaries of their speeches provide an in-depth analysis of how they think ethnicity and economics will shape the next millennium.

RETURN TO TOP

A baby is born today, somewhere in the world. What is the most important factor in determining the economic success of this baby? Is it his or her genes? Is it his or her parents? How she or he is educated? I suggest to you that the most important factor in the economic success or failure of this child is the culture that this child is born in.

This is going to be upsetting to some of you and maybe even absurd to some of you. But let me read to you from Davis Landis’ book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. “If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference.” After exploring the whole wealth and poverty throughout the last thousand years of history, he comes to the conclusion that culture makes all the difference.

Culture is very hard to talk about. I spent six months of my honeymoon in South America back in 1963. My wife and I were fascinated by the fact that there the dependency theory really held sway. The South Americans were really saying that they had to get rid of the influence of the United States and start off on their own path as a people.

Years later I read a book by Larry Harrison called Underdevelopment is a State of the Mind. Now there are certain things Larry won’t tell you about himself, but he went with the Kennedy Administration to South America with the normal liberal attitude that dependency theory made sense. Larry is very smart, and he started thinking about culture and the reasons why certain peoples and certain countries succeed disproportionately and other countries or cultures fail disproportionately. He has written that in fact there are some significant cultural differences, differences in values, that well may account for the disparities between the economic success of the Northern Hemisphere and the sort of lack of economic success, until recently, of South America.

Let me add to that another book, Francis Fukuyama’s Trust, which takes a subset of what Larry is talking about and says, and I quote: “One of the most important lessons that we can learn from the examination of economic life is that a nation’s well-being as well as its ability to compete is conditioned by a single, pervasive, cultural characteristic, and that is the level of trust inherent in that society.”

When Fortune magazine did a study of the 150 largest corporations in Asia, it found that only one of them is Chinese-owned and that is a Taiwanese state-owned oil company. And yet Fukuyama says that the Chinese culture is a magnificent wealth-creating culture due to something in its Confucian values. But Fukuyama goes on to say that what is striking about Chinese industrialization is the great difficulty that Chinese family businesses seem to have in making the transition from the family to what is needed to become a large-scale economic unit, and that is professional management. And that he claims is because in the Chinese culture the radius of trust only extends within the family.

However in Japan, which is another Confucian culture, when a Japanese businessman or woman goes to work they work for themselves, they work for their family, they work for their company, but they also work for their country. And so there is solidarity, an organizational value to trust people outside your own immediate family, and that is what Fukuyama says makes all the difference. And he says “There is a strong inclination on the part of the Chinese to trust only people related to them and conversely to distrust anyone outside family. This lack of trust outside the family makes it hard for unrelated people to form organizations including economic enterprises that succeed on the level that they do in the United States, Germany and Japan. The Chinese family “provides the social capital with which to start out new businesses but it also constitutes a major structural constraint on these enterprises and this prevents them from evolving into durable large scale institutions.”

The United States, then, has great social capital because in our American culture we trust people outside our families. The normal feeling we have is that we trust people until we are proven differently. People talk about Wayne laboratories as one of the examples of this. Wayne laboratories was one of the great American success stories of the eighties, started by a Chinese immigrant to the United States who built up this phenomenal organization. In 1984 he decided to retire and instead of turning the company over to the professional management staff he had built, he turned it over to his oldest son in, Fukuyama argues, the Chinese tradition. Four years later Wayne Laboratories had lost 90% of their capital and the following year they had their first losing year. But you see how the idea of nepotism based on a lack of trust outside the family can play a very important role in the long-term creation of wealth.

How does this then affect domestic policy? I am intrigued that many of the highest family incomes in the United States belong to minorities that have been discriminated against: Japanese Americans, Jews, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans. Every one of these cultural groups had to fight discrimination and racism. Now I know that this is again a tough subject, I know there is racism and discrimination, but the existing dialogue I would suggest to you is not adequate to fully keep this country great and to describe the magnitude of the problem we’re dealing with here. Here in Colorado approximately 50% of our Hispanic students drop out of school before completing their degrees. America cannot afford to lose 50% of its fastest growing sub-group. Minority failure is a larger problem than white racism while white racism is clearly there.

Shelby Steel and some of the other black scholars point out that the average Jewish family came to the United States with $14 of assets. He argues that there are two alternatives: one is salvation through society by passing more civil rights law, more affirmative action law; the other is individual salvation. You can work hard, you can educate yourself, and do how these other groups have done and prosper. He says that history tells us that the most successful cures of poverty come from within; that outside help, other laws, will help but they will not solve, because they can discourage effort and create a crippling sense of incapacity. What counts, Steel says, is work, thrift, honesty, patience, and tenacity. The bottom line he writes, is “there is no endowment so effective as self-endowment.”

Glen Riley, the black scholar, says “that it is now beyond dispute that many of the problems of contemporary Black American life lie outside the reach of effective governmental action and require for their successful resolution actions that can only be undertaken by the black community itself. These problems involve at their core the values, attitude and behavior of individual blacks.” He goes on to say that “too much of the political energy, talent and imagination of an abounding Black middle class is being channeled in the struggle against the enemy without while the enemy within goes relatively unchecked.”

I think that those are important concepts that really deserve debate and why these two seemingly disparate subjects — ethnic background and economic success — do go together in determining a nation’s success. Culture is a wonderful non-racist explanation because it has nothing to do with genes. Daniel Patrick Moynihan says, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

RETURN TO TOP

Globalization is not simply a new economic phenomenon but has been going on for 500 years. It is the single most important factor in world political, economic, cultural and ecological history over the last half millennium and the underlying factors that have propelled it have just begun to kick in. Globalization is not over. It is intensifying even as we speak.

Globalization is multifaceted. For most of human history people were on separate tributaries on streams and swamps of a giant river system. What has happened over the last 500 years is that the rafts and webs of branchism upon which different societies have lived have now come together into one central river. The World Wars, imperialism, and decolonization have seen these separate human communities collide. We now see ourselves on a combined jumble of separate rafts that are wedged together.

Looking into the future, we cannot see very well. We do see, however, that the pace of the flow of the river is picking up. An acceleration and intensification is occurring. The river is narrowing at the same time it is speeding up. Are there going to be rocks? Are there going to be rapids? Are there going to be waterfalls? We have to look to the future. We need to be focused on problem solving because history is moving rapidly. Major collisions are certainly ahead of us.

When we look at this raft we see that it is a giant cluster of many different features, but that there is a definite core which is the liberal West. The people at the edge of the raft are dying of diseases that are preventable and they are barely hanging on. We at the center are above water. We cannot, however, have the notion that we are separate in some fundamental way from the rest of the raft. The theme of borders disappearing is going to be the dominant reality. Different factors are flowing to different parts of the raft and our capacity to steer and to solve problems is going to depend on what goes on both at the core and in the rest of the raft. We must expand what has worked at the core to the global level. Global governance, global institutions and global problem solving are necessary.

Originally there was a multipolar system of the great powers in Europe and elsewhere. In the past half-century, however, we have had a bipolar situation. In terms of military, economic and political power we now are in a unipolar world. We are in a very unusual situation in terms of modern politics in that there is no real balance of power. The United States is militarily and economically hegemonic. The realist view is that the future is very clear and predictable: the United States is going to start pushing people around and these people are not going to like that and they are going to begin resisting the United States. This will lead to a return to a multipolar system.

The alternative narrative I want to defend is a liberal theory that gets much less play. It says that what fundamentally matters is not really the atmosphere of anarchy. That is important, but the real story has to do with what has been going on at the unit level with domestic politics. According to this narrative we see that for most of history, states have been various parts of imperial and statist hierarchies. They have been systems of internal hierarchical domination. But in early modern Europe we began to see anomalous regimes that were different internally. Over time the liberal states have become dominant and we see in the current situation that there is a web of these liberal states at the center of which is the United States.

Outside this network there are still hierarchical units still very much in crisis due to their relationship with the core. I suggest that the image of this system is no longer unipolar but now “unitent.” There are poles in a tent and the highest pole is the United States, but that pole is constrained by a tent. The interesting and important political story is this web of international institutions which has grown up among the liberal states. This is something that Americans need to become more familiar with. We have forgotten that at the moment of our greatest success our mindsets are increasingly dominated by these kind of realisms.

Let me briefly lay out some of the key features of this. At the beginning, the American founders recognized that the European model of hierarchical units in an anarchic system could occur in North America. They wanted to systematically avoid that. In order to do that they established a federal union of states with a lot of sovereignty and autonomy but joined together in ways that the problems of interstate competition would no longer be so violent. Initially the United States was at the periphery.

The United States wanted to stay out of all these conflicts but over time has gotten drawn into these European-type wars. At the end of these wars the United States strove never to restore the balance of power or the Westphalian system of anarchy. The American agenda has always been to establish institutions that connect states and to abridge anarchy, not to create a new hierarchy but rather to create a system of reciprocal governance to solve the actual problems that we face.

Looking at the current discourse in the United States I am shocked and disappointed by the Americans and the dominant elites in Washington who are turning their backs on this accomplishment of the American system. American international institutions are not threats to American sovereignty. They are the fullest and finest expression of our pragmatic tradition of federal republicanism in the global industrial era. We have to have various types of reciprocal international government.

The political component of this argument is fundamentally misleading in many ways and I want to champion an alternative, again of the American Western Liberal position. There are several fundamental problems with the notions that Samuel Huntington, in his piece on “The Clash of Cultures,” has laid out, such as the idea that we have Islam versus Hinduism versus Western Christendom and that they are somehow separate and distinct from one another and are going to clash with one another. When we look inside the circles of states what we actually see is patchworks. We see that these different civilizations are very much syntheses of elements that are shared with others. Civilizations and cultural forms have been borrowing and innovating and combining various ways throughout history. This basic image of separate civilizations is misleading.

As Huntington points out the core of these civilizations is religion; it is what gives civilizations their distinctive heritages. What is interesting about them is that they have two layers. At the core is a fundamental ethical position that is essentially identical between civilizations: the golden rule. While these civilizations are different in an exterior way at the ethical core they are fundamentally the same in the content of human right: respect for the human dignity of the individual. I therefore see the interesting clash not between these separate civilizations but rather more within each of them as a struggle going on to define themselves. The real clash of civilizational dynamic is going on within states, not between.

What is the software, the core, the unipole, the unitent of this liberal civilization? We can look at the United States and in many ways see the fullest evolution of this. The United States is different as a nation because it is not an ethno-national identity. At the core of American national identity are an ideology of liberalism and pragmatism, a problem-solving approach to governance and culture, and a focus on individual liberty.

John Dewey suggests we look at politics and society in a fundamentally different way. He sees all of the different cultures, all of these different arrangements, as solution sets to problems. We look at these different cultures and civilizations and that’s what they are — solutions to problems that have occurred at various points in the past. He says if we are going to survive in the industrial era, we have to more rapidly and more self-consciously perform this process of problem solving, and that is basically what pragmatism is. It is an understanding of politics and society as a series of experiments.

What does this liberal pragmatist view say about the focus that we continually see on the past? History obviously matters a great deal but the idea that just because something was done some way in the past is no reason for us in the present, for that reason alone, to continue to revere it. There was once a time when there were no Muslims, when there were no Christians. All the languages and cultural forms that we have were innovations at some point. Are we going to stop innovating? Are we going to cling to the products of previous solutions now? That strikes me as fundamentally stupid. Why is this even appealing? Why are so many people clinging to the past in these ways?

This is obviously a complex story but one point is that these other civilizational regions outside this liberal core continue to be subject to various types of domination. One of the reasons there is this cultural backlash against the West and against human rights is that human rights are threatening to empower women. They are threatening to overturn these convenient structures of domination. When it comes to male/female relations the basic operating code in most of these other civilizations is that women should be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. These discourses about cultures are really ideologies of people with interest in preserving their domination.

Everything I have said has in some sense been about putting the present in the perspective of the past. I want to stop focusing on what happened in the past and start focusing on the real problems that we face now.

There is a formula that has been developed by Holdron and Aerlick that I present. Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology x Institutions. When we look at the current situation with regard to ecology, in a generalization we basically have to cut our impact by half given the myriad of interconnected ecological problems. How are we to do that? I believe the best available technology that is economically feasible if universally implemented would largely solve the problem. I do not simply mean gadgets to control pollution. I mean the weaving together of the fabric of buildings, of energy systems, of transportation systems. We have prototypes of economically feasible technologies that would largely solve the problem. How are we going to do that? It comes down to institutions. We need to have institutions, and this goes back to the theme of globalism, international institutions and American leadership.

The United States is in a position of hegemony now because it has taken the lead in solving major problems created by the industrial revolution. We have to continue to exercise leadership, not go back to little America. We alone have the possibility of exercising leadership. If this planet is going to make it through the next half-century or so without a major catastrophe, American leadership is going to be required. This means that we as Americans have to adapt an ethic of responsibility as a solution set which we should take the lead in applying.

RETURN TO TOP

There is a controversial question implicit in this conference theme of ethnicity and economics: Why is it that some countries and some ethnic groups do better than others? With respect to nations the notion of better applies not only to prosperity but also to political freedom and social justice. If we fail to understand what causes the gap in human well-being between poor and richer nations and between under-achieving and high-achieving ethnic groups in the United States, the gap will be far more difficult to close.

This gap is suggested by the following data: Half or more of the adult populations of twenty-three countries, mostly in Africa, are illiterate. Half or more of women are illiterate in 35 countries. Life expectancy is below 60 years in 45 countries. Children under 5 die at a rate in excess of 100 per 1000 in at least 35 countries. The most inequitable income distributions in the world are found in poorer countries, particularly in Latin America.

No one factor explains these troubling data. The factor I believe to be the most powerful is cultural values and attitudes that have usually evolved over centuries, shaped particularly by religion, geography and climate, and the vagaries of history. It will help to understand what I am driving at if you try to visualize what Canada and the United States would look like today if Spain and Portugal had colonized the territory they now occupy. And what Mexico, Central America and South America would look like today if they had been colonized by Britain. The differences between Argentina and Australia suggest the answer.

Which aspects of culture shape human progress? My book The Pan-American Dream identifies ten values, attitudes, or mindsets that distinguish progressive from static cultures, the first of which is time orientation. The progressive culture emphasizes the future; the static culture, the present or past. Future-orientation implies a progressive world view, influence over one’s destiny, rewards in this life to virtue and positive sum economics.

Work is the second factor. It is central to the good life in the progressive culture and a burden in the static culture. In the former, work structures daily life and diligence, and creativity and achievement are rewarded not only financially but also with satisfaction and self-respect.

The third factor is frugality. It is the mother of investment and financial security in progressive cultures, a threat to the egalitarian status quo in static cultures. The fourth factor is education. It is the key to progress in progressive cultures and is of marginal importance (with the exception of the elites) in static cultures. Merit is the fifth factor. It is central to advancement in the progressive culture, whereas connections and family are what count in the culture that resists progress.

The sixth factor is community. The radius of identification and trust extends beyond the family to the broader society in the progressive culture, while the family circumscribes community in the static culture. Societies with a narrow radius of identification and trust are more prone to corruption, tax evasion, and nepotism and are less likely to engage in philanthropy. Trust is an indispensable factor not only in an economic sense but also in a political sense. Economies do not work well where trust does not exist. The presence of trust is also indispensable to the learning of democratic institutions.

The next factor is the ethical code that tends to be more rigorous in the progressive culture. This is followed by the factor of justice and fair play which are universal, impersonal expectations in the progressive culture. In the static culture, justice, like personal advancement, is often a function of who you know, or how much you can pay. The ninth factor is the way that authority is viewed. It tends toward dispersion and horizontality in the progressive culture; toward concentration and verticality in static cultures.

The final factor is secularism. The influence of religious institutions on civic life is small in progressive cultures whereas the influence in static cultures is often substantial. Heterodoxy and descent are encouraged in the former; orthodoxy and conformity are encouraged in the latter. In a very practical economic sense, it is something which influences the number of entrepreneurs that a culture produces. If a culture is orthodox and conformist the whole idea of descent and creativity is likely to be suppressed.

These 10 factors evoke the Protestant ethic that Alexis de Toqueville linked to the success of American Democracy and that Marks Faber identified as the engine of capitalism. However they also to an extensive degree evoke many different ethics, especially the Confucian and Jewish. This suggests that there is a universality to the values that comprise a progressive culture, as well as to the values that comprise the culture that gets in the way of progress.

These ten factors are obviously generalized and idealized and the reality of culture variation is not black and white but rather a spectrum in which colors fuse into one another. Few countries would be graded ten on all the factors just as few countries would be graded one. Nonetheless, virtually all of the advanced democracies in high-achieving ethnic groups would receive substantially higher scores than virtually all of the third world countries.

I am going to pose eleven questions, the answers to which emphasize the cultural factors. The first one is why are Canada and the United States so far ahead of Latin America not only with respect to prosperity but also to the strength of their democratic institutions and the degree of social justice? The answer lies chiefly within the contrast between British and Iberian culture. What explains the Hispanic underachievement in the United States? Hispanic underachievement in the United States reflects Latin America’s culturally rooted underdevelopment, for example with respect to education.

What explains the East Asian miracles? Export-oriented economic policies are clearly relevant to the post-WWII success of the so-called “Dragons.” But these miracles are chiefly the consequence of Confucian-Tao ancestor worship values common to the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans — values that promote hard work, frugality, discipline, merit, education and achievement. These same cultural factors also largely explain the success of Chinese, Japanese and Korean immigrants to the United States and elsewhere.

Why was it not until after WWII that first Korea, then Taiwan and finally China itself experienced sustained high economic growth? What is the answer to the riddle of why the Chinese do succeed outside China and perform so poorly inside? The answer lies in the elements of the culture of authoritarianism as well as disdain of economic activity that have produced governments that suffocated economic development until the threat of communism to South Korea and Taiwan after WWII and until the demise of China.

What do the transformations of Turkey, Spain, the province of Quebec and Ireland all have in common? The answer is secularization. What is the relationship between race and culture? Why are all black countries poor and mostly authoritarian? As far as I know there is no connection between race and culture. Africa’s problems are largely the consequence of a traditional culture that impedes progress.

What is the evidence that leads to the conclusion that there is no link between race and culture? Most of the French slaves in what would become Haiti and the British slaves in Barbados came from the same region of West Africa, presumably from the same genetic pool. Haiti became independent in 1804 and has lived most of its troubled history substantially isolated from the rest of the world. Today Barbados is a prosperous, stable democracy. Culture obviously trumps race.

The eighth question: Does the slavery experience still make itself felt in Haiti? While living and working in Haiti I was continually conscious of the Haitian worldview that perpetuated slavery values. There is a comportment of the Haitian elite who often behave as the French masters did in the colonial period and there is also evidence of such tendencies in the behavior of the masses as distrustful, fatalistic, pessimistic and resentfully submissive to authority.

The ninth question: What explains black underachievement in the United States? Until the second half of the 20th century there is little doubt that racism and its institutions were the chief obstacles to upward mobility for blacks, particularly in the South. But a racial revolution has taken place in the second half of the 20th century in the United States, especially in white attitudes about race. Today the principle problem is the residue of slavery in the values and attitudes of blacks, above all those who have not found a way into the mainstream.

The tenth question: If culture is so powerful, how has Spain, the source of the culture largely responsible for Latin American’s underdevelopment, been transformed into a prosperous democracy? The Spanish case is a strong reminder that culture changes. It is transmitted from generation to generation not in the genes, but in instruments of cultural transmission like the home, the school, the church, the media. There are a number of factors that contributed to Spain’s transformation such as the trauma of the civil war, the opening of the Spanish economy and secularization. We can summarize the process by saying that in the 2nd half of the 20th century Spain truly became a European country.

Cultural values and attitudes have played a far greater role in promoting or deterring human progress than most people realize. It is a potential explanation for the frustratingly slow pace of progress of most poor countries at the tragic cost of human returns during the past several decades. The same is true of underachieving minorities in the United States and elsewhere.

The final question is what can be done to accelerate progressive cultural change both in the third world and for underachieving minorities? Middle East expert Bernard Lewis asked “When people realize that things are going wrong, there are two questions they can ask: One is what did we do wrong? The other is Who did this to us?” The latter leads to conspiracy theories and paranoia, the first question leads to another line of thinking, how do we put it right?

RETURN TO TOP

We have left the world of Cold War clarity organized around clear and persistent connections between issues, allies and enemies and have entered a frontier world that is filled with disconnections, a world of substantial, consequential and unrelated conflicts. The most dramatic disconnection in the aftermath of the Cold War is the antagonistic juxtaposition of global economic integration and local ethnic fragmentation of what is called globalization and travelization.

Many scholars point to the appearance of a medieval-like rupture in the world today between global and local levels. In Benjamin Barber’s words our world is moving in two diametrically opposed directions. On the one hand it is moving toward an emotional and violent world of ethnicity and local identity and on the other hand toward a global financial world of cosmopolitan mobility and civility. Because this disconnected development is novel, substantial and unsettling, one finds something of a growth industry in theories attempting to explain and respond to it.

The first theory is Frank Fukuyama’s thesis. The West, it appeared to Fukuyama, had solved the three basic problems of the human condition before the demise of communism: war, poverty and equality. Fukuyama expects violent wars outside the West to be nasty instances of self-limiting tribalism that will succumb in the long run to the global, political, economic and cultural power, prestige and productivity of the West.

Robert Kaplan offers a fundamentally different view of how the world has developed. He says we are descending into a criminal anarchy. He argues that local ethnic violence will trump global economic finance. In Kaplan’s imagination the criminal anarchy of a Sierra Leone, Bosnia or Chechnya is the future of the entire world. The problem with his theory is that criminal anarchy in countries like Sierra Leone and Chechnya are much more likely to implode locally than explode globally.

There is a third theory about the post-Cold War world and that is Samuel Huntington’s borrowed notion of clashing civilizations. Huntington’s theory is a soft-tongued polemic with a nice dogmatic edge that absolutely rejects Fukuyama’s optimistic view of universalism, something that Huntington characterizes as false, immoral and dangerous.

My view of Huntington’s notion of clashing civilizations is that the whole book argues that China is going to clash with the United States. I would suggest that his theory is in turn false, quixotic and misguided. First, false: According to Huntington in the aftermath of the Cold War countries of similar religions and cultures will rally Hatfield-like against other religious cultures who are called McCoys.

The problem with this theory is that there is no evidence for it as well as a lot of evidence against it. It completely fails to explain why the West today — Protestant, Catholic and secular — is currently allied with orthodox Christian Bulgaria, Romania and Greece against Orthodox Christian Serbia in favor of Muslim Kosovars. The thesis also completely fails to explain why the Christian West is identified and allied with the Jewish State of Israel.

The theory is also quixotic. Huntington’s adamant assertion of religious primacy, of cultural primacy, is a Don Quixote-like denial and rejection of what is one of the dominant realities of late 20th Century, namely the appearance of a global capitalist economy. Huntington doesn’t like economics. His emphasis on civilizations is not just descriptive, it is prescriptive. It is the kind of world he wants — a world that emphasizes the defense and assertion of identity, not of grubby, material, business interests. It is nothing if not remarkable that in both his article and his book he pays scant attention to globalization. I suspect very strongly that the way Huntington sees it has a great deal to do with his aristocratic disdain for a world in which economics and ethnicity appear to have displaced the grand issues of ideology and politics.

His theory is also misguided. Huntington’s recommendation that the West emphasizes its self-contained quality is at best misguided and at worst perverse because if adopted it will directly contribute to the demise of Western civilization and bring about the very Dark Ages he worries about in his book. The question is how. The defining feature of Western civilization is not pragmatism but individualism. We are the only culture in human history based on the individual. Huntington wants the West to become a non-biodegradable cultural bunker minimizing its interactions with other civilizations for fear that they will contaminate or defeat us when in fact the birth of Western civilization has always been directly related to regular interaction with other civilizations.

Huntington’s world of clashing civilizations is worse than the new world disorder it is designed to replace. The Soviet Union was based on one notion — the Breshnev Doctrine — that said that they had the right to intervene politically and military in any other communist state. Huntington resurrects Breshnev. He says that the core state in every civilization should have the right to interfere in its zone to make sure that the zone stays culturally coherent.

What are the implications of this idea? Following Huntington’s implication Russia should impose its rule on the Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece because they are all members of the so-called orthodox Christian civilization. In Huntington’s scheme cultural identity will subordinate the global capitalist economy to a series of autarchic, self-contained, mutually suspicious civilizations. It is both ironical and perverse that in Huntington’s scheme just at the point in history when we have defeated the Soviet Union he wants the West to become North Korea. North Korea has a single doctrine. It’s called Cho Chang. This means that North Korea should be culturally, politically and militarily isolated from the rest of the world.

If one at looks Fukuyama, Kaplan and Huntington, it is obvious that they want to prophesy the future. When things are uncertain and unsettled we look for a highly competent answer and these theorists provide it. I would suggest prophecy should be left to prophets. Perhaps a better way to move from the present to the future is to show how the present split between the global and the tribal has emerged from our recent past.

For the last 200 years the nation state has been the major locus of power production and loyalty in the world. It is where power has been generated, production has been achieved, and loyalty has been directed. It is an absolutely remarkable invention which has been effective for two hundred years. The present disconnection between the globalizations of Microsoft and Mackenzie and the tribalization of Kosovo is due in my mind to a simultaneous process: the stretching of the nation state in the West and its shrinking in the rest, globalization in one and tribalization in the other. An explanation of this dichotomous world must focus on three developments in the post-cold War world period.

First the explanation must focus on the collapse of fictitious nation states largely in Africa. They were neither nations nor states, but rather limited countries each with a flag, an airport, and a seat in the United Nations, which are falling apart with the absence of the discipline imposed by the Cold War.

The second development is the implosion of fragile nation states in many countries of the former Soviet Empire, nation states that were subject for more than half a century to surveillance, intrusion and suspicion which both gutted society, economy and state. In many of these states you see a collapse and in others implosion. There can also be a transformation of nation states to Western values and culture.

These three developments — collapse, implosion and transformation — have brought about the disconnection between globalization and tribalization. The successful transformation in the West is the primary basis of globalization and the failure in many parts of the rest is primarily, not exclusively, due to tribalization.

The fact of the matter is that the nation state, particularly in the West, has for two hundred years combined the effective and the affective. It has combined production and identity. The transformation of the nation state in the West and the disintegration of the nation state in the rest has torn that relationship apart. The major challenge of the next twenty years is how the affective dimensions of loyalty are going to be integrated with the effective principles of production and the generation of power.

How do we go about trying to do this? As a rule history is composed of intrinsically diverse entities. We have had the lesson of the Cold War, and we took this anomaly in world history to be the rule. But the tidy reality of the Cold War is no longer the case. The post-Cold War world has developments that are not uniform, tidy or limited but rather contradictory, unrelated and opposing. The world we live in now is not chaotic. It is the norm of world history. Furthermore, even if the developments in the world today are largely disconnected, they are not absolutely disconnected. There is a central point of power production, innovation and prestige in the world and it is called the Western world, namely the western European countries and the United States.

The Huntingtonian assertion that the West is currently in decline is wrong. In 1999, the United States and the European Union stand out as the most economically productive, technologically innovative, scientifically advanced, long-lived, best-paid and politically democratic civilizations in history. This is quite remarkable and a unique reality. At its core globalization is essentially, not exclusively, Westernization and Americanization. Whether or not the West responds to the rupture between global economics and tribal ethics depends on, more than anything else, the United States of America.

We can respond in four ways. We can continue the Clinton foreign policy of responding to national, local, global, and regional issues by ad hoc measures. We can adopt a very different foreign policy and respond in a stingy and sterile Sam Huntington manner by creating a Western cultural, military, political and economic bunker.

There is a third foreign policy route we can take that is of a diametrically different course and should be considered seriously, and that is to make the entire non-Western world, beginning with Eastern Europe, Western.

There’s a fourth choice that is not as dramatic but still very good. While recognizing that there are disconnected worlds, we can also realize that in the midst of this undoubtedly confusing, promising and threatening world there is a central reality that is the starting point for moving forward. It is called the nation state. In the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century the nation state remains the most valuable site of economic discovery, social equity, cultural continuity and individual liberty. It is the strategic point of interaction and integration for economics and ethnic identity.

RETURN TO TOP

It is important to look at the two subjects of ethnicity and economics and to ask what role each plays in the world today as well as to say something about how the two fit together. The eternal role of ethnicity is as a group identity. Man as we know from Aristotle is a social anima and life is lived within groups larger than family: the tribe, the clan, the lineage. Ethnicity might be defined as people to whom we feel connected even though we have not met them. This is actually a traditional definition not of ethnicity but of nationality and I will be using the two terms synonymously.

What role is ethnicity playing in the world now? Why are people interested in it? It has to do with the way the world is organized into sovereign states theoretically formed on the basis of nationality. The basic unit in the international community is supposed to be this nation state. It is clear that the organization of the planet into multinational states no longer exists. Having said that, it is not clear what the new world of nation states really is because it cannot be and therefore is not neatly divided into homogeneous nation states. And yet the 20th Century has tried to make such divisions, an effort that is the source of much of the strife, bloodshed, turmoil and war we have seen in this century. As the great multinational states that dominated the world have collapsed, a scramble has ensued to redraw sovereign borders, which has led precisely to strife between ethnic and national groups.

After World War I the great European multinational empires collapsed. After World War II, the metropolitan overseas empires collapsed and that too led to bloodshed, some of which still goes on. In the wake of the Cold War, the last great Communist empires collapsed and as in the previous two instances there has been violence and bloodshed, most notably in the former Yugoslavia.

It is worth pointing out that a related reason for the post-Cold War strife and disorder is that many of the post-colonial states were not really nation-states but mini multinational empires sustained by the Cold War itself. One group would dominate several others within an internationally recognized territory, and that dominance was aided by the superpowers in the form of economic and military aid and also by the prevailing norm of the inviolability of existing borders. The aid from the superpowers is gone and the norm of inviolability is weakened, and so we see civil strife groups trying to get out from under those that have dominated them in Asia and in Africa. This then is the post-Cold War disorder. Sovereignty is being parceled out in ways that make it impossible to satisfy everybody: the rise of ethnicity giving rise to disputes that lead to war.

The second subject is economics whose current significance goes beyond the eternal goals of food and shelter. At the end of the century the world has reached an unusual but perhaps not permanent consensus on the one best way to organize economic life. That one best way is the market system. The market system as we know from differences between and among Europe, North America and East Asia comes in different varieties, but all of the economies in these regions operate according to the same basic principles. And the consensus that this is the best way to organize economic life stems from a simple fact: the success of this system.

The Cold War was a contest, among other things, between two different methods of organizing economic life. And the communist method was defeated by the market system. The Soviet Union, the citadel of command, non-market, communist economic order could accept the economic superiority of the United States and West Germany, an eternal fact going back far beyond and before the Communist revolution in Russia.

Moscow could even accept the fact that Japan was considerably in advance of any communist country in economic terms. But when South Korea, a country of no particular consequence before the second half of the 20th Century surged ahead of even the Soviet Union economically, a certain kind of panic set in among the Soviet leaders. This led to the reform set in motion by Mikhail Gorbachev which through a variety of unintentional twists and turns destroyed communism politically and discredited thoroughly the communist method of organizing economics.

An important part of the market system or the consensus underpinning it is that national economies benefit from the relatively free-flowing of goods and capital. The international economy is like an electrical grid and the task of every sovereign state is to fashion a plug or adapter that will enable it to plug into this grid and gain access to its benefits. And so, at this moment, the aspiration to do so is almost universal.

There are only a few dissidents, only a few odd outlyers, like Cuba and North Korea. This of course does not mean that every one of the hundred and ninety or so sovereign states can fashion a working market economy or that even those that try will succeed in doing so. But there is a norm in the international economic arena that did not previously exist.

How do ethnicity and economics as I define them fit together? They might seem like opposites and in some ways they are. Ethnicity is the essence of the past, economics and globalization the wave of the future. Ethnicity is retrograde, narrow, reactionary; economics, the market, globalization, progressive. But I would argue that the two are complementary and sequential.

A market economy requires a stable, legitimate, competent government. It requires working state machinery of a certain kind. And the state, the government, must have some basis for legitimacy. There must be some basis for drawing borders and for people accepting the rule of the state. Nationalism or ethnicity does seem to provide a fairly solid government which can then fashion the kind of economy that can lead to the necessary kind of progress that can plug into the international economic order and gain its benefits.

Thus, the hope in the first part of the next century for those parts of the world that have been burdened by political instability in Eastern Europe and in what we know as the third world can follow the pattern set by Western Europe, North America, and Japan in the last half of this one. The hope is for them to organize an effective and legitimate state on as close to a national basis as possible and then to build the institutions that make it possible to take advantage of the new economic rules.

How do ethnicity and economics fit together? They fit together quite simply. We know the rules that must be followed, the norms that must be internalized and the institutions that must be built in order to achieve economic progress, but what factor predisposes a culture and nation to build these institutions and follow these rules? The answer comes down to culture. Not culture as something immutable but culture as something that suffuses daily life.

RETURN TO TOP

The best contribution I can make to this Seminar is to look at the choices we face as Americans. As we reflect on the threats to peace we must keep in mind that America’s many other interests in the world must be accommodated. We are emerging from the most far-reaching financial crisis the world has known in over half a century. In addition, there is global warming, disputes over genetically modified agriculture, drugs, terror, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

These issues all crowd our agenda and call for attention. The end of the Cold War has not produced peace and quiet; rather it has been followed by a messy world filled with religious strife, proliferation, threats and economic disruption in an increasingly challenged environment. Americans today are reminded that there is no respite in their complicated engagement in the world. The forces of globalization and the revolution in information technology pushes us deeper and deeper into contact with the world and therefore our responsibility for world affairs extends.

More troubling is our inability to define the patterns in our disorderly world. We sense the tectonic plates are shifting, but absent are the easy solutions, the Manichean struggles between ourselves and the Kaiser’s Germany, fascism or communism. There are no more simple verities. We are beset as a people by ambiguity. I can share observations drawn from my career in our nation’s diplomatic service that will help you consider the choices that we as Americans must face as this century ends and the next begins.

We as Americans are fundamentally a curious people; we have our strengths and inconsistencies. Americans can be moody. In the 1970’s and 1980’s I was beset with arguments that the best days of America were behind us. Happily this mood has been replaced by a buoyant optimism about our economy and therefore about ourselves and as a consequence our place in the world. Our optimism gives us energy to pursue our interests with vigor.
Americans also distrust authority and these feelings have returned with a vengeance in recent years. The Vietnam War bankrupted the authority of our government and our national leaders, especially in foreign affairs. Watergate and more recently the sorry Lewinsky affair have undermined the standing of our President. Taken together these impulses have made Americans wary of engagements abroad, particularly those recommended to us by our Presidents, and adverse to take risks, especially military ones, where lives are at stake.

But Americans, I would argue, also have a touch of idealism. This is an attribute, when taken too far, which can lead to wrong choices and moralism. We must be careful that one absolutism does not confront another. As our agenda as a nation becomes increasingly dominated by single-issue constituencies we face real risks. There are many dangers in a single-issue focus. Essentially we are denied the ability to make choices and identify priorities for we are unable to see the forest for the trees. This, as we prepare for the next century, deserves our attention and a degree of change.

Our distrust for authority, though, has other negatives. Disinclination to public service is one of them, and an excessive reliance on the choices the media has given us is another. In foreign affairs the media has given us a degree of oversimplification. The movie industry itself has tended to worsen this situation as Hollywood routinely serves up films which remind us that public policy is about manipulation. Such bad habits have not been overcome by our institutions of higher learning. Interest in regional studies and scholarship in foreign languages have declined. We do not teach adequately political economy — the ability to integrate ideas and shape policy and strategy.

Core to our political being as a democracy is what people believe is right as well as what leaders convince them is right. Time and again Americans have made the right choices. America’s leaders can, in my judgment, move this country in the right direction if the issues are correctly defined and properly carried out. Transparency is critical. George Bush took us to war in the Gulf and he went to Congress to do so. Bill Clinton took us via NATO to Kosovo by explaining the stakes. He was successful to a point where I believe Americans were willing to support the commitment of ground forces rather than let Milosevic prevail. Gone are the cries for closed-ended peacekeeping commitments in Kosovo.

Of course all of us as Americans still can and must do more to make the right choices. We need to strengthen our ability to understand those choices, insisting on responsibility and sophistication in our media, strengthening our academic institutions and providing incentives to young Americans to understand the world and insisting on a commitment to internationalism from our elected representatives.

Like all people we have our quirks. But 36 years of representing the American people abroad has given me the confidence that as a nation we have the wit to look after our interest and to do good in the world. But it helps as we proceed to understand the key questions that face us as a nation.

Let me first address the nature of power. Few can challenge the proposition that the United States is the sole remaining superpower. At the same time we would be in error to fail to understand that our power is relative and shared in a multipolar world with Japan and Europe, China and Russia, and increasingly with the merchant powers like India and Brazil.

A sense of partnership is every bit as important to the protection of American interests as is our ability to preserve and use our nation’s power. Power is a privilege and a benefit, it is not a burden. If you think that the weight in cost of national power and superpower status is anything but an advantage, ask the Russians what it feels like to lose superpower status. The reputation of superpower status is itself a power multiplier giving us a privileged hearing in every capital of the world.

I would further argue that there is a muddle in our land over the nature of American power. Too often power is narrowly defined as military might, overlooking the other key components of economic power and moral authority. Indisputably we have dominant military power. Our military gives us the ability to defend ourselves and our allies if we are attacked. More importantly it gives us the ability to deter attack, and when all else fails, as it did in Kuwait and Kosovo, it gives us the power to coerce.

But military power alone does not ensure national standing. Why? Because military strength is difficult to use, especially in a democracy, and failure to use it when necessary invites fresh challenges and serial crises. A huge military advantage, furthermore, can frighten others and force them to coalesce in opposition. Our military advantage can further encourage others to develop counter strategies which are hard to contain. Most seriously however, the excessive reliance on military strength can lead to the wrong choices. An excessive reliance on force means that problems can only be treated when they become crises. That should certainly not be our desired outcome.

National power is also a function of economic capability. It is undeniable that our economy is a tremendous source of influence for the United States in the world. Like military power, though, economic strength is limited. If you think economic capacity provides influence without the other aspects of power, ask the Japanese what they do when they try to carry their point of view in world councils. Economic power is also variable in its nature. Today’s strength can mutate into tomorrow’s weakness.

Economic power can also give the illusion of decisive strength and lead to serious errors of policy. I argue that our enchantment with sanctions — the economic equivalent of warfare — is one such error. Sanctions have multiplied in recent years, deployed in the place of serious diplomacy and with unintended consequences. These sanctions have undermined United States markets and competitiveness and in the new century we must give careful thought before we deploy them as an instrument of national power.

The third element of power is moral authority. Moral authority flows from a nobility of purpose. It gives the ability to influence decisions others make, it flows from the willingness to act in partnership, to stand by friends, to pursue goals broadly understood to be in the common good, such as human rights, a cleaner environment, a more open world trading system, health, education, better governments.

Moral authority gives the ability to obtain compliance with objectives important to the United States without the use of force. It was precisely that moral authority that the former Soviet Union did not enjoy, and in fact no nation has enjoyed it more generously than has the United States, for it is the essence of our position of leadership in the world.

Let me close with a reflection on diplomacy, the conduct of which flows directly from national power. Foreign policy is our reaction to forces we do not control. It is about creating order out of disorder. Diplomacy is our first key line of defense, as important as our military defenses. Diplomacy is preventative. It aims to identify issues, engage and contain them, and seek compromise before a solution degenerates into a crisis. And once a crisis erupts, diplomacy is the art of finding our way through a hailstorm. It is also about building post-crisis stability. Diplomacy proceeds from a political conception. It is of course feckless to argue that it exists at all if its not backed up with authority, with economic strength and with military power.
The practice of diplomacy permits the pursuit of a broad range of goals. But it is successful when it proceeds from a conception of the whole and not simply an aggregation of the parts of this nation’s single issues. Diplomacy is about actions, it is about deeds. We have developed a very bad habit of expressing our views on virtually every subject in the world and we risk becoming unbearable nags, infuriating those we seek to influence. Restraint is a better practice; diplomacy is often better served in quiet doses. Diplomacy has also got to be dynamic, about much more than preserving the status quo. It proceeds from a recognition of the value of balance.

Diplomacy in our disorderly world is bilateral, and it is also multilateral. As a nation we are going through a bad period, a time of doubt about multilateral diplomacy, about the value of the United Nations and other international institutions. We are wrong. The United States prospers in a rule-based world. Rules can only be established multilaterally and for this reason we have been at the origin of the World Trade Organization, the Human Rights Commission, the Refugee Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the International Court of Justice, all of which bodies offer incentives for good behavior and disincentives for bad.

International organizations are diplomatic multipliers for the United States. We owe the United Nations the respect we are not giving it. Our hostility provokes hostility toward the United States. We need to remember that tomorrow’s foreign ministers around the world are to be found in today’s UN representatives.

In influencing the world’s economy and coping with ethnic conflict, we as Americans must be concerned with stability and the maintenance of order. Our policy must know its limits and not exceed the limits available to us. We cannot afford to fail once we commit ourselves to action. Our policy should have at its disposal men and women of skill and discernment and they should have the necessary resources. Before, during and after the Cold War we have had abiding national interests, values and friends. We should stand by them, taking into account the democratic imperative that no policy will survive without public support. That said, we should be ready to act when we can reach consensus. Yet we also have to live with the awkward reality that the United States must pick and choose and occasionally appear to act in a contradictory manner.

In the final analysis, American military, economic and even moral strength is not enough to ensure our success and survival. We must be smart and purposeful. In the next century our success will be measured by our ability to mobilize wealth and military strength, authority, intelligence and diplomacy to preserve a world which is at peace and is congenial with our values and our beliefs.

RETURN TO TOP