[Music] good afternoon and welcome to the October session of our AEI Bradley lecture series and let me begin as I always do by reminding you of next month's lecture which will be on Tuesday November 10th Robert Jastrow will speak on God and the astronomers our lecturer this afternoon is Samuel P Huntington who is Eaton professor of the science of Government at Harvard University and is director of the John mo Land Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard's Center for international affairs professor Huntington has been a towering figure in American political science and especially in the study of military strategy comparative politics and political development for several decades I hope he doesn't mind my mentioning that he began teaching at Harvard over 40 years ago I was speaking to a young visitor from abroad at lunch today and I mentioned to her that I first encountered Professor Huntington when I was a freshman in college where I was assigned and already a highly reputed book which was simply called Huntington and Brzezinski their study of politics in the USA and the USSR and I told her when that was when I'd been a freshman and she said oh he must be quite elderly by now and I said no not in the not in the slightest he's younger in every respect I can think of than than I am his fields of study particularly qualify him to discuss the subject of this evening's lecture which I will leave for him to tell you more about but which bears the title The Clash of Civilizations I also want with jean-marc I also want to mention that I'm sorry that our biography that we've passed out emitted to mention the pinnacle of Professor Huntington's scholarly career which is that he is a member of the AEI Council of academic advisors following the lecture professor Huntington will take questions we will have our usual reception in the next room and as there is a very different kind of clash that will begin on television ad to 7:00 p.m. this evening I just want everyone to know that if you wish to stay we will run the debate on the television monitors and those who wish to a stay and watch them here would be we would be glad to have you Samuel Huntley thank you very much Chris I am flattered and very delighted to be here and I'm even more delighted that all of you are here the clash of civilizations is certainly a poor runner-up to the clash of candidates and recognizing the priority of the clash of candidates I will try to be relatively brief in my opening statement which I believe is what it's called in a debate isn't it and a plenty of time for these some questions before everybody wants to head for the TV sets when President Bush rejected the vision thing he created a vision vacuum and he thus provided a great opportunity for social scientists who have rushed in aware the president feared to tread and have proliferated visions models and paradigms of the post-cold war world these include Frank Fukuyama's a very imaginative concept of the end of history a rather conflicting model back to the future which involves intense intensifying conflicts between nation-states and an image of the decline of the nation-state by the conflicting poles of tribalism or a fragmentation on the one hand and globalism or interpenetration on the other each of these images I think catches aspects of the emerging reality some more successfully than others it is thus with some diffidence and hesitation that I add another picture to this gallery here I am convinced that these other visions miss in some respects crucial and central aspects of what global politics will be like in the coming years as Chris pointed out the title of this lecture carries a question mark which I take seriously and I hope you will too I offer not a prediction and hypothesis the issue I wish to deal is deal with is what will be the fundamental nature and source of conflict in this new world my hypothesis is that it 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 and groups of different civilizations the clash of civilizations will dominate global politics and let me say before I go any further that I don't think I'm entirely alone or original in setting forth this proposition max bellow of my colleague Kishore marble bonnie michael lind William Lind Michael Bay horse have all set forth somewhat similar arguments in somewhat different words they should not however be held responsible for my formulation of this argument well 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 which distinguishes them from German villages European communities in turn will share cultural features which distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities Arabs Chinese and Westerners however are not part of any broader cultural entity they constitute civilizations and so I would define a civilization as the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have a short of the human race now civilizations obviously may involve a large number of people as is case of China or a very small number of people as is the case with the Anglophone Caribbean a civilization may include several nation states as is the case with European Latin American and Arab civilizations are only one as is the case with Japan civilizations obviously blend and overlap and at least one civilization the West has two major variants the European variant and the North American one civilizations are nonetheless meaningful entities and while the lines between them are seldom sharp they are real civilizations are also dynamic are they rise and fall they merge and divide and as any student knows they also disappear now civilization identity I am arguing that will be increasingly important in the future and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among eight or nine major civilizations and the most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another now why may 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 importantly 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 that are the product of centuries and they will not disappear and here I guess I would dissent there from the very interesting lecture Chris by that which you sent me by VS Naipaul who talked about our universal civilization when he said Universal civilization however he meant Western civilization and I am sure there are several billion people out there who would dispute at the label he applies to Western civilization a second the world is becoming a smaller place the interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing these and these increasing interactions will I believe intensifies civilization consciousness and awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities within civilization North African immigration to France generated hostility among Frenchmen as well as at the same time a increased receptivity to immigration by good European Catholic poles Americans react far more negatively to Japanese investment here than to the larger investments from Canada and European countries the interactions among peoples of different civilizations thus enhance the civilization consciousness of people which in turn reinvigorates traditional differences in animosities stretching back into history third factor the processes of economic modernization and social change throughout the world a separate are separating a people in some sense from the traditional identities they also weaken the nation-state as a source of identity in almost every part of the world religion has moved in fulfill this gap or in the form in the form of movements which are labeled fundamentalist and such movements are found in Western Christianity Judaism was a Dutch Christianity and Hinduism as well as in Islam the unsecure ization of the world George Weigel has remarked is one of the dominant social facts in the late 20th century and this revival of religion provides a basis for identity and commitment that transcends national boundaries and yet unites civilizations for us the growth of civilization consciousness is in some sense enhanced by the dual role of the West on the one hand the West would appear to be at a peak of power at the same time however and perhaps as a result they returned to the roots phenomenon is occurring among non Western civilization's increasingly when he has references to trends towards a turn in wood and Asian ization in Japan the end of the Nehru legacy and the Hindus ation of India the failure of Western ideas of nationalism and socialism in the in the Middle East and hence the return to Islam and now a debate over westernization versus Russian ization in mr. Yeltsin's the country a West at the peak of its power thus confronts non West that increasingly have this the desire the will and the resources to shape the world in non-western ways first cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones and the former Soviet Union communists can become Democrats the rich can become poor the poor and the poor rich but Russians cannot become Estonians and as Ares 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 and it cannot be changed and as we know from Bosnia to the Caucasus to the Sudan the wrong answer can have deadly consequences finally among the factors that seems to me to be leading to an increased importance to civilizations there is in some cases an economic factor which Rhian reinforces civilization consciousness and differences Japan obviously constitutes not only a civilization but also a formidable economic entity the two variants of Western civilization are becoming economic entities and in something which I don't think has received a great deal of attention there would seem to be a quite possibly and even larger in the long term economic entity emerging in eastern Asia with China and its as the other China's in not just Hong Kong but Taiwan and Singapore increasingly become linked up with the home home country and it seems to me we can look forward to an economic a Chinese economic bloc as well as a possibly a Japanese economic bloc emerging in East Asia but if this conflict between civilizations develops it will in might and I think be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world and in some respects perhaps also a return to pre-modern patterns 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 will largely among princes as Emperor's absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs attempted to expand their bureaucracies their armies their economic strength and most importantly the territory they ruled in the process they created nation-states and beginning with the French Revolution the principle lines of conflict were between nations rather than princes this 19th century pattern lasted until the end of World War one at this point as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies first between fascism and Nazism on one side and liberal democracy and then in the second half of the century between Marxist Leninist 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 itself in terms of its ideology these conflicts between princes nation states and even ideologies were however almost entirely conflicts within Western civilization's William lend has called them Western civil wars with the end of the Cold War however international politics and moves out of its Western phase and its centerpiece becomes the interaction between the west and non-western civilizations and among and non-vash civilizations the Cold War began when the Iron Curtain divided Europe politically and ideologically it 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 as we emerge the most significant dividing line in Europe William Wallace suggested a couple of years ago 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 the Ukraine separating the Catholic Western Ukraine from the Orthodox eastern Ukraine swings westward separating transylvania from the rest of romania and then goes through Hugo Slavia almost exactly along the line now separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia in the Balkans of course this line corresponds with the historic boundary between Habsburg and Ottoman empires the people's to the north and west of the 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 people to the east and they may now look forward to increasing involvement in a common European economy and the consolidation of democratic political systems the peoples to the east and south of this line are orthodox a Muslim they historically belong to the Czarist or Ottoman empires and we're only lightly touched by the shaping events of the rest of Europe they are generally less advanced economically they seem much less likely to develop stable democratic political systems in some sense one could say the velvet curtain of culture has replaced the iron curtain of ideology as the most significant dividing line in Europe and obviously as the events in Yugoslavia have shown it is not only a line of difference but also at times a line of bloody conflict conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has of course been going on in seesaw our fashion for for 1300 years first with the surge of Islam into Western Europe in the eighth century then the Crusades and the eleventh and the 13th century then the rise of the Ottoman Turks from the 14th to the 16th centuries culminating in their siege of Vienna and then of course in the earth in the 19th and early 20th centuries the reestablishment by Britain and France of where the establishment by Britain in France of Western control over most of North Africa and the Middle East in this cease or affair after World War 2 the Western in some respects began to retreat the colonial empires disappeared our first Arab nationalism and then Islamic fundamentalism manifested themselves the West became heavily dependent on the Persian Gulf countries for its energy and the oil-rich Muslim countries became money rich and when they wanted to be weapons with rich several Wars occurred between the Arabs and Israel which was had been created by the West British and French forces invaded Egypt in 1956 American forces invaded Lebanon in 1958 subsequently American forces returned to Lebanon attacked Libya and engaged in various Middle military encounters with Iran Arab and Islamic terrorists supported by at least three Middle Eastern governments bomb Western Plains and installations and seized Western hostages this intermittent struggle between the Arabs and the West colonnade of course in 1990 when the United States and a massive army to the Gulf to defend some Arab countries against aggression by another this action obviously divided the Arab world between those governments allied with the US and on the other side portions of their own population and other governments who which opposed of the u.s. action Saddam Hussein and anti-western Muslims attempted to define the war as a war between civilizations in a famous tape that was very widely circulated in Saudi Arabia during the war of the Dean of Islamic Studies that the religious University in Mecca said and I quote it is not the world against the Iraq it is the West against Islam and of course the outcome of this war left many Arabs feeling humiliated and resentful at the dependence of Arab countries on the West for their security and at the superiority of Western military power this century o centuries old military interaction between the west and Islam it seems to me is unlikely to decline in the future and there are many reasons which I won't go into as to why it may become more virulent and increasingly there are people on both sides of this divide coming to see this interaction as a clash of civilizations I was interested to read a short while ago a statement by a leading Indian Muslim author who said and I quote the West next confrontation 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 and he is echoing the words which Bernhard Lewis wrote a year or two ago in his essay on the roots of Muslim rage where Lewis said and I now quote him we are facing a mood and a movement for transcending the level of issues and policies and the government's 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 historically the other great antagonistic interaction of Arab Islamic civilization has been with the pagan animist and now in Christian and now increasingly Christian black people's to the south in the past this antagonism was epitomized the image of Arab slave dealers and black slaves it has recently been reflected in the ongoing civil war in the Sudan between Arabs and blacks the fighting in Chad and the recurring riots and communal violence between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria the modernization of Africa coupled with the rapid spread of Christianity is likely to enhance the probabilities for violence in the future along this fault line on the northern border of Islam conflict has increasingly erupted between wasps addicts and Muslim peoples including obviously the carnage of Bosnia and Sarajevo the simmering violence between Albanian and Serb the tenuous relations between the Bulgarians and their Turkish minority the fighting between the Georgians on the one side and the up cousins and South Ossetia --nz on the other the unremitting slaughter of each other by Armenians and nazaries the tense relations between Russians and Muslims in Central Asia and the deployment of Russian troops to protect Russian interests in Azerbaijan and Tajikistan in Central Asia religion reinforces the revival of ethnic identities andrey stimulates russian fears about the security of their southern borders elsewhere in Asia the conflict of civilizations also appears to be deeply rooted 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 religions religious strife within India between increasingly militant Hindu groups on the one hand and India's very substantial Muslim minor and the other in East Asia China now seems to be pursuing a collision course with many if not most of its neighbors 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 in 1991 thumb shopping we reportedly asserted that a new Cold War in his foot words was underway between China and America the same phrase has been applied to the increasingly difficult relations between Japan and the United States here cultural differences exacerbate economic conflict people on each side allege racism on the other side but at least on the American side the antipathies in my view are not racial but cultural the basic values attitudes behavior patterns of the two societies could hardly be more different the economic issues between the US and Europe are no less serious than those between the u.s. and Japan but they do not have the same political salience and emotional intensity because the differences between American civilization and European civilization are so much less than those between American civilization and Japanese civilization clearly 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 civilizations of the West and between both of them and Japan on the Eurasian continent however the recent proliferation of ethnic conflict epitomized that the extreme and ethnic cleansing has not been totally random it has been most frequent and most violent between groups belonging to different civilizations in Eurasia one could say the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more catching fire this is particularly true along the boundaries of the Islamic crescent from the Bulge of Africa to Central Asia Muslims have also been involved in violent conflicts with Hindus in Kashmir Buddhists in Burma and Christians in the Philippines somehow Islam apparently tends to have rather bloody borders reason thus exists to think that the major conflicts of the future will be between peoples but from different civilizations but what if a people is unsure to which civilization it does or should belong this happens some countries and people's Accord in between they are what I would call torn countries most often these countries these are countries whose peoples whose leaders want their countries to be members of the West but whose history culture and traditions are non-western the most obvious and prototypical torn country is Turkey the late 20th leaders of Turkey have followed in the Ataturk tradition and define 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 a meat of Turkey has defined turkey as a Western society the elite of the West does not accept that definition turkey it is clear will not become a member of the European community and the real reason as president hosel has said and I'm quoting him now is that we are Muslim and they are Christian but they don't say that having rejected Mecca and then being rejected by Brussels a where does turkey look well perhaps the sama conned and a role as a leader of a Turkic civilization stretching from the borders of Greece to those of China during the past decade the Mexico has assumed a position somewhat similar it seems to me Mexico has abandoned its historic course of defining itself by its opposition to the United States and instead is trying to imitate the u.s. and join the u.s. in NAFTA and the Mexican a a lead has involved in a variety of fairly fundamental economic and reforms which eventually will lead back to political reforms sure while ago I was engaged in a discussion with a top advisor to president Salinas who described at length all the changes the Salinas government was was making in Mexico and when he finished I remarked that that's most impressive it seems to me that basically you want to change Mexico from a Latin American country into a northern American country and he looked up at me with surprise and said yes exactly that's precisely what we're trying to do but of course we can't say so publicly now that it seems to me is a remark which indicates the problems of a torn country globally at present of course the most important torn country is Russia the question of whether Russia is a part of the west or a leader of a distinct Slavic Orthodox civilization has been a recurring one in Russian history that issue and that debate was suppressed during the period of communist rule where the Russians imported a Western ideology adopted it to work to russian conditions then use that ideology to challenge the west but with the end of communism this debate is now of course reopened very vigorously within within Russia and I think it is fair to say it is rather unclear as to what the results of that debate will be it is perfectly possible that having rejected communism the Russians will now reject their both democracy as well and this could lead to the emergence of a traditional authoritarian nationalist Russia which would have very different goals from either a Marxist Russia or a democratic Russia and if as the Russians stop behaving like Marxists and begin behaving like Russians as a result the gap between Russia and the West could widen in a western Democrat could carry on an intellectual debate of some sort at any rate with a Soviet Marxist it would be virtually impossible to do so I think with a Russian traditionalist well as I mentioned the West has emerged as an extremely powerful position and this I think is in the process of bringing about a reaction among the non-western societies and the crucial a central conflict in many respects it seems to me in the coming years will be between the West on the one hand and an Islamic Confucian coalition on the other the action of a this Islamic Confucian coalition however is I think only symptomatic of a general reaction against the West on the part of non-western societies as the West uses its international and international institutions that controls its military power and its economic resources to run the world in what in ways that will maintain Western predominance protect Western interests and promote Western political and economic values that is the way at least in which the non-westerners I see this new world and I think one has to concede that there is a certain amount of element of truth in this I mean I'm impressed with the extent to which Western leaders who used to talk about the free world when we were conflicted in in engaged in our conflict with the Soviet Union now talk about the world community that's sort of a legitimizing collective euphemism to say we're acting on the on behalf of a much larger group and to make us feel good about what we are doing but people on the other side don't necessarily I see that see it that way and hence I think a central axis politics will be in the future and kishore marvel Bonny's phrase the conflict between the west and the rest now this conflict has its roots in Western power and in the feelings of Envy anger hate and attraction non-western peoples have toured the West some non-western groups like the leaders of torn countries may attempt to abandon their traditional values in culture and join the West the leaders of others societies may follow a course of isolation and attempt to insulate their civilization from penetration or corruption by the West more generally however non-western civilizations are likely to attempt to compete with the west by developing their own economic military and political power this conflict between the Islamic Confucian coalition and the West will I think be most notable in the military area what has focused and probably will focus largely although not exclusive exclusively on nuclear chemical and biological weapons ballistic missiles and other sophisticated means for delivering these weapons and the guidance intelligence and other electronic capabilities for achieving that goal the West promotes non-proliferation as the universal norm and non-proliferation treaties and inspections as a means of realizing that norm it also threatens a variety of sanctions against those who promote the spread of sophisticated weapons and proposes benefits for those who do not 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 have also absorbed to the full the response of the Indian defence minister when asked what lesson he learned from the Gulf War and he said don't fight the United States unless you have nuclear weapons non-western government's view nuclear weapons chemical weapons missiles probably erroneously as a potential equalizer of superior a Western conventional power atopy Iranian official has declared that all Muslim states should acquire nuclear weapons and a few years ago the president of Allah of Iran reportedly issued a directive calling for the development of quote offensive and defensive chemical biological and Radiological weapons and it would appear that North Korea Iran Iraq Libya Algeria are all involved in the efforts to develop nuclear weapons centrally important to the development of counter West military capabilities is the sustained expansion of Chinese military power and and the the expansion of the means to create military power and the expansion of its export of weapons and and weapons technologies to Middle Eastern countries it has done this in a variety of ways with a variety of countries and this I think one can say that a new form of arms competition is occurring between the Islamic Confucian coalition and the West in the old-fashioned arms race each side developed its own arms to balance or to achieve superiority in the competition with 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 that arms build-up but instead to delay or prevent it well in closing let me just first restate the main elements of my hypothesis and then spell out a couple of policy implications or possible policy implications for the leaders of Western civilization I am NOT arguing that civilization identities will replace all other identities that nation-states will disappear that each civilization will become a single coherent political actor or that groups within a civilization will not conflict and even fight with each other I am instead setting forth the hypotheses that differences between civilizations are real and important civilization consciousness is increasing the conflict between civilizations will supplant ideological and other forms of conflict as the dominant global form international relations historically a game played out within Western civilization will increasingly be d-rush turn eyes and become a game in which non-western civilizations are actors and not simply objects conflicts between groups and different civilizations will be more frequent more sustained and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization successful political security and economic international institutions will develop within civilizations but with rare exceptions and not across civilizations the paramount access of world politics will be the relations between the west and the rest and these relations will be highly conflictual focusing initially on the clash between the west and an Islamic Confucian coalition well if these hypotheses should be borne out what might be some of the implications for Western policy these I think can be divided between short term advantage and long term accommodation in the short term it would appear to me that to be in the interests of the West to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civilization particularly between the 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 attempt to promote and maintain cooperative relations with Russia and Japan to limit the expansion insofar as that is possible of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states to exploit the differences and conflicts among such States and to support in other civilization groups sympathetic to Western values and interests 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 today 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 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 the West consequently will increasingly have to accommodate to these non-western modern civilizations whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of the West for the West this will require a much more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying these other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests it also will require a major effort to work out arrangements for Western coexistence with these civilizations based on the common needs of an increasingly interpenetrated modern global society thank you very much sure sure should I recognize him or should you or what yeah first part which lays out the probable areas of conflict and then the second part which talks about the need for profound understanding of the other side and I've never quite understood no is the penultimate one I think all right and I've never understood quite how profound understanding of the other side will avoid the conflict that's laid out in the four part of the talk do you have some reasonable confidence that the kinds of clashes that seem to be emerging will as we understand things better or gradually be reduced no but it's it seems to me that it is the beginning of wisdom for people in our civilization or people in any civilization to try to understand the motives and basic philosophical assumptions and beliefs of people they're dealing with at the beginning of the Cold War after all in the 1940s and 1950s we made tremendous efforts both in our government and in our universities and elsewhere to study the Soviet Union and try to find out what sort of a beast we this was that we were dealing with and the operational code of the flip euro enormous vast literature and Russian and Soviet Studies programs and institutes and so forth and it seems to me that we ought to do something similar as we interact with other with other civilizations just to cite one example at my Institute at Harvard we have a work going on trying to look at the strategic cultures of non-western civilizations with people studying Chinese strategic culture indian strategic culture arab strategic culture and so forth and it seems to me there's a real issue here is to what extent do people in these other civilizations think about the international affairs the nature of foreign policy strategy and conflict in the same way that we do now obviously in some respects they do but it seems to me you can also make the argument that in perhaps in important respects they don't my colleague Stephen Rosen likes to make the point that deterrence which worked very well dealing with the Soviets who after all were fairly rational people were concerned with the calculating the correlation of forces and so forth and so on and acting in terms of materialistic balances of military power deterrence worked pretty well with them but that doesn't necessarily mean that the same sort of deterrence policies are going to work with people of different cultures and he argues that detail look at the record of deterrence from 1941 on down to 1990 I guess and the Gulf hasn't been that good and what I'm saying is that it seems to me if we're going to deal with these people whether it's in a cooperative or a conflictual way we should try to expand our understanding of their ways of soy think about the policy implications of your analysis I think we're kind of caught in a dilemma if on the one hand you say that nuclear chemical bacteriological radiological and so on is a great danger then that seems to sort of cut for a even more dramatic kind of regime of export controls and we've had before on the other hand if if we really want to reach to a Japanese type civilization that means bringing them rapidly into technology diffusion modernization sharing everything if so it's looking at kind of the diffusion of Technology and Export Control regimes how how deeply how how much can we really have a regime which develops and diffuses and westernizers modernizes and one that really sits on the kind of technologies that could feed some of these dramatic potential conflicts well I guess in terms of export that controls it seems to me by and large any control of that type can delay or postpone weapons developments and other societies I'd be very surprised if it if it was able to prevent it for any very considerable length of time the one clear case we have of where a country has been prevented from developing nuclear weapons is Iraq and it was attacked militarily twice by the first by the Israelis ten years ago and then by us to do this and I think if we're really going to be serious about preventing other countries from becoming about developing a nuclear capability will probably require some sort of action like that and I don't think we can or in most cases probably we should take that sort of pre-emptive or attempt to take that sort of pre-emptive action so I think the growth of non-western power is just going to occur and particularly now of course with all the incentives that at the moment the former Soviet republics have to sell weapons and technology yeah we ran a conference at a earlier this year entitled the new global popular culture and our I think general conclusion was that for good or for ill American popular culture was literally swamp in the world that there was a incredible wave of Americanization going on i I wonder particularly among young people all over the world not just in the in the in the Western countries and looked at television and movies and music and language and the how that carries ideas like markets and democracy and I wonder how important you think that electronic warfare is well I really on the spread of American popular culture around the world and especially that's is a rather curious there's a rather a curious reversal of roles taking place as non-western societies encountered the West in the past historically it was the elites of those societies which absorbed Western values when after l SE e or the sole bond military elites learned from the from the west and so forth and so on and the there was the popular groups that resisted remained attached to tradition traditional values and ways of belief and behavior patterns and so forth and so on and this is sort of the classic dichotomy you see reflected and reflected in all the literature on modernization and political development and so forth now it strikes me that you have in a sense almost a reversal and as you point out popular culture is we as a result of all these electronic developments is American popular culture in particular is spreading around the world I don't know what the impact of that and effects of that will be in terms of politics and economics but that is clearly a fact and yet at the same time it is among as I see it in many cases the elites in these non-western societies who are reacting against the West and certainly in the in the Middle East in talk to their was people in one arab country after another and I was at a conference on the challenge of democratization in the Arab world just a couple of weeks ago in in Cairo and and one person after another said the people who are really the heart at the heart of the Islamic fundamentalist movements are younger yuppie types the emerging technocrats first-generation college graduates and so forth and so on and they are the ones who are providing the fire and the intellectual leadership and the drive in the Islamic movements precisely the people who were more or less precisely the people who had an earlier point would have been sympathetic to the West so it seems to me you've had sort of a peculiar reversal of roles here between elite and mass and some and at least some societies yeah Frank it really seems to me that you're conflating two very different phenomena when you mix probably when you mix you know Islam with Confucian society and talk about some kind of a coalition it seems to me that you know there really is a basic problem in a fundamentalist Islamic society you know producing modern natural science or coexisting with modern natural science which is somehow you know necessary for the creation of our modern you know economic world and so you know in the short run there they're very blessed because they're sitting on a lot of oil they can't create a you know one megabit DRAM chip but they can turn on a spigot and you know watch the money pile up in a bank account and then they can buy the technology but in the long run that's not you know a civilization it seems to me that is really at all going to be compatible with with economic modernity the real challenge it does seem to me lies in countries like Japan and others in Asia where it's not just that it turns out that their traditional cultures are compatible with economic modernity but there's some evidence that they're more compatible or that you know they you know what survives from the traditional culture is actually better at producing you know high level of a technological society than ours but if you look at Asia you know the trends it just seems to me are very very contradictory I mean there is you know as you sighted this you know growing Asian consciousness on the other hand you know modernization theory in a way has worked better in Asia than in any other part of the world that you know the political democratization western-style individualism has been proceeding in lockstep with you know with the economic modernization so that the most you know economically advanced countries are the most you know Western in that sense you look at Thailand the people that we're supporting the pro-democracy movement there are precisely those yuppie you know the young kind of professional yuppie classes that have been you know thrown up as a result of Thailand's rapid economic modernization same thing goes in China and in many ways you know I did I mean in the end it seems to me that you are under estimating the kind of universalistic you know characteristics of Western civilization that make it not just the outgrowth of a particular you know peculiar European cultural religious system but you know kind of you know universals fit between aspects of that civilization and you know kind of broader human civilization and you know societies dealing with you know the problems of a workable you know technologically modern society you made possible and in some respects even valid obviously our civilizations are gonna work out their own compromises I guess I'm a little bit hesitant however about making predictions about what cultures permit or encourage or don't permit encourage I mean you say that Islamic culture you can't have economic real economic modernization well 30 25 years ago and before that people including max people were saying the same thing about Confucian society cultures they could never modernize now we're saying that they have modernized because they are confusion and I just as I say I'm a little bit suspicious about predictions that some cultures are inherently incapable of going along with modernization and when modernization occurs obviously this will involve not only bringing in some of the of the techniques and industrial skills of the West like that sure there'll be some rubble off of Western values too and the result will be a a some sort of a mix that but that's one set of issues and that is you know what does the final product is China's let us say modernizes obviously doing economically extremely rapidly what will be the nature of the mix that comes out at the end that's one issue the second issue is how will this entity there's much more powerful economic and military entity relate to the west and other civilizations I mean I would if I had to predict what in the long run was going to be the great conflict of the mid 21st century yeah would be a replay of the conflict between China and Japan now with the outcome being rather different than it was before yes two questions one is that we've talked or I've heard you say that most of the civilizations are becoming more religious and I've always thought of our own society the United States as being fairly religious Society except the elite but I don't in general see Western society becoming more religious so I wanted to ask you if you thought that was the case in our own civilization in Europe the West in general North America but my question has to do with the direction are we becoming more religious like other civilizations accept that and so far as Europeans begin to feel as they appear to be beginning to feel increasingly threatened by people coming from outside Europe and searching over their borders one reaction to that certainly it could be a one which would involve some sort of religious fundamentalism and the part of Protestants and/or Catholics in Western Europe I'm not saying that will happen it just couldn't happen sure okay yes I got two questions yeah the second one has to do with the rise of multiculturalism and that emphasis in the United States and I guess I I want to know is that for real or is it that those that the values of pluralism diversity tolerance are really just Western values so that multiculturalism is sort of the Western sheep's clothing well I don't know exactly do it that way it seems to me one could raise the issue which i think is raised by multiculturalism of the the westernization of the United States and Donnie seems to be is a trend that is happening in some respects and it that is something which we're going to have to live with in this society and I guess it strikes me that in so far as the United States increasingly becomes more heterogeneous with a larger and larger proportions of the populations looking at ancestral homes in either Latin America or in Asia that that this will raise once again a recurring issue in American history of what is the nature of the United States what is the basis of American unity and originally it seems to me it was a compound of two things one was a the Western really British anglo-saxon inheritance on the one hand and then a set of political values ideals and principles on the other and if as the first fades from the scene as it apparently will do it seems to me at the the second becomes all the more important and insofar as multiculturalism challenges and appears to me it does in many respects the basic principles and values of what has been the American creed that could be a very very real threat and the United States is really the only country the only country left in the world that defines its identity in terms of a political philosophy and there would be ruinous to this country if the consensus on that political philosophy and it was undermined one more oh yes I guess all right well go by seniority even though Michael had his hand up too it seems to me that the two different forms of your thesis that one could get from what you said one is a sort of revolutionary one the other is much more modest in in the Revolutionary form which I took you to be advancing for most of the talk it is that essentially a conflict between civilizations is going to replace the traditional conflicts of of international affairs conflicts between states in your recapitulation you went back took several steps back from that it seemed to me and went out of your way to emphasize that of course conflicts between states would still occur there's it's very important to know which is being discussed I think is it the case of this new and supplanting old the old or is it the case that the conflict between civilizations would will from now on in your opinion provide the dynamic for conflicts between states that they will continue to be as they were in the age of ideology the instrumentalities or the vessels by which the conflict between civilizations will play themselves out I may not be able to do it all right first of all nations states are clearly going to remain be around for for a while secondly I would argue as I think I did argue that the conflict between civilizations will become the dominant form of conflict replacing that of ideologies or nation or nation states as in the 19th century so what institutions will these conflicts play themselves out what they have two military the actors will be will in most cases be nation-states but there will be nation states of different civilizations after all most of the wars with which share international international politics with which international politics has been concerned have been conflict between Western Western European States really what I'm saying is now it'll be conflicts between civilizations where conflicts between occur between ethnic groups or nation-states it will normally be between between groups in different civilizations now I have a little test which I can put forth here I've got into arguments with people during the past year or so who have been predicting that there's going to be this great war even perhaps a nuclear war between the Ukraine and between Ukraine and Russia and I have on the basis of my assumptions about civilizations are sort of poop or didn't so there ain't no there's too much in common and they really basically in boys the part of the same civilization and so forth and so on and people are predicting you know they'll be fighting in the Black Sea paratroopers landing in Crimea now we'll see but that would be a test the Ukrainians and the Russians have more in common than say the Germans and the French had in 1914 that's I don't think that's the relevant question because the level of conflict has escalated up and in 1914 the French and the Germans only had each other to fight whereas now they're all these other peoples out there to fight [Applause] I can say in the future life send your questions or comments about this program to the American Enterprise Institute 11:50 17th Street Northwest 12th floor Washington DC the zip code is 2 0 0 3 6 c---span to proudly marks its sixth year telecasting live coverage of the united states senate c-span 2 is part of the c-span networks privately funded to serve the public by america's cable television companies next on c-span - it's a speech titled the revolution of women in politics the speaker is Marlene Johnson a Democrat who served as lieutenant governor of Minnesota from 1983 until 1991 MS Johnson's speech was part of a forum sponsored by George Washington University after an introduction we'll hear miss Johnson's speech to be followed by a question-and-answer period here now is our coverage of