A Small World?

"The West: Unique, Not Universal" by Samuel P. Huntington, in Foreign Affairs (Nov.-Dec. 1996), 58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.

As Coca-Cola, Big Macs, Hollywood action-adventure movies, and Western-style elections have spread to the most remote cor- ners of the earth, some observers have con- cluded that the world is moving toward a sin- gle, universal, basically Western culture. This is a dangerous illusion, argues Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard University and the author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).

Though the West was the first civilization to "modernize," the process (which involves industrialization, urbanization, and the spread of literacy, education, and wealth) need not imply Westernization, he points out. Indeed, many of the West's most distinc- tive characteristics are premodern. "Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, and, to a lesser degree, Iran have become modern societies without becoming Western soci-eties. China is clearly modernizing, but cer- tainly not westernizing." Civilizations have always borrowed from one another, in ways that enhance their own culture, he observes. China's absorption of Buddhism from India, for example, resulted not in the "Indian-ization" of China but in the Sinification of Buddhism. Something similar, he maintains, is happening in Japan and other non-Western societies today, with regard to selected aspects of Western culture.

In the past, Huntington points out, many leaders of non-Western societies invoked Wes- tern values such as self-determination, freedom, and democracy in their efforts to ward off dom- ination by the West. Today, their successors denounce attempts to promote those same val- ues as Western "human rights imperialism."

Much of the world is now becoming, in fundamental ways, "more modern and less Western," Huntington says. With respect to the central cultural features of religion and language, "the West is in retreat." As a pro- portion of the world's population, Western Christians, who now make up about 30 per-cent, are steadily losing ground, and before long will be surpassed by Muslims. Similarly, although English has become the lingua franca of international commerce, the English-speaking part of the world's population has shrunk (to less than eight percent in Western leaders, Huntington writes, should 1992). attempt not "to reshape other civilizations in

"The time has come," Huntington the image of the West-which is increasingly declares, "for the West to abandon the illu- beyond their ability-but to preserve and sion of universality and to promote the renew the unique qualities of Western civiliza- strength, coherence, and vitality of its civi- tion." Greater Western unity is essential. The lization in a world of civilizations." The West United States must abandon dreams ofa Pacific should pursue its own interests, rather than Century and adopt "an Atlanticist policy of advance those of other peoples, and the close cooperation with its European partners, Western nations should avoid intervening in one that will protect and promote . . . the pre- conflicts in which they have no direct stake. cious and unique civilization they share."