The Clash Within Civilisations: Coming to Terms with Cultural Conflicts (Routledge Ripe Studies in Global Political Economy)

The Clash within Civilizations

‘Dieter Senghaas is one of Germany’s leading radical theorists who has made major contributions to development, security and peace studies. He is an important scholar and his work merits a wide readership. This book offers an insightful and provocative account of the plurality of cultures, their reactions to modernity, the clash of civilizations, the scope for intercultural dialogue and tolerance and much else besides. It is an important contribution to the critique of cultural essentialism.’ Bob Jessop, Professor of Sociology, University of Lancaster Expanding upon, and engaging with, the influential theories of Francis Fukuyama in the The End of History and Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations, this book is a major, and controversial, contribution to these key contemporary debates. Dieter Senghaas examines some of the most significant political issues we face today: • • • •

how do societies cope with pluralization? can tolerance be a successful solution? what is the role of ‘culture’ in recent conflicts which have been described as culturally induced? will twenty-first-century world politics sink into cultural conflicts on a biblical scale?

Dieter Senghaas explores these questions within the context of the main non-Western cultural areas – Chinese political philosophy, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism – and goes on to reflect on the possibility of a constructive form of intercultural dialogue. Senghaas’s distinctive and radical approach will be of great interest and topicality to all those working in politics, international relations, sociology, cultural studies, development studies, religion and international political economy. Dieter Senghaas is an extremely highly regarded theorist. He is Professor of Peace, Conflict and Development Research at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies, University of Bremen. His previous publications in English include The European Experience.

Routledge/RIPE Series in Global Political Economy Series editors: Otto Holman, Marianne Marchand (Research Centre for International Political Economy, University of Amsterdam), Henk Overbeek (Free University, Amsterdam) and Marianne Franklin (University of Amsterdam)

This series, published in association with the Review of International Political Economy, provides a forum for current debates in international political economy. The series aims to cover all the central topics in IPE and to present innovative analyses of emerging topics. The titles in the series seek to transcend a state-centred discourse and focus on three broad themes: • • •

the nature of the forces driving globalization forward resistance to globalization the transformation of the world order.

The series comprises two strands: The RIPE Series in Global Political Economy aims to address the needs of students and teachers, and the titles will be published in hardback and paperback. Titles include: Transnational Classes and International Relations Kees van der Pijl Gender and Global Restructuring Sightings, sites and resistances Edited by Marianne H. Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan Global Political Economy Contemporary theories Edited by Ronen Palan Ideologies of Globalization Contending visions of a New World Order Mark Rupert

Routledge/RIPE Studies in Global Political Economy is a forum for innovative new research intended for a high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be available in hardback only. Titles include: 1. Globalization and Governance* Edited by Aseem Prakash and Jeffrey A. Hart 2. Nation-states and Money The past, present and future of national currencies Edited by Emily Gilbert and Eric Helleiner 3. The Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights The new enclosures? Christopher May 4. Integrating Central Europe EU expansion and Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic Otto Holman *Also available in paperback

The Clash within Civilizations Coming to terms with cultural conflicts Dieter Senghaas

London and New York

First published 1998 by Suhrkamp Verlag English translation first published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1998 Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main English translation © 2002 Dieter Senghaas All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Senghaas, Dieter The clash within civilizations : coming to terms with cultural conflicts / Dieter Senghaas. p. cm. – (Routledge/RIPE series in global political economy) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. East and West. 2. Civilization, Modern–1950– 3. Comparative civilization. 4. Philosophy, Comparative. 5. Pluralism (Social sciences) 6. Culture conflict. 7. Intercultural communication. 8. World politics–20th century. 9. World politics–21st century–Forecasting. I. Title: Clash within civilizations. II. Series. CB251 .545 2001 909.82'5–dc21 ISBN 0-203-99655-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–26228–3 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–26229–1 (pbk)

2001019947

Contents

Series editors’ preface

x

Introduction

1

PART 1

Pluralization and politicization: challenges for cultures 1 Intercultural philosophy today The intellectual and practical consequences of a restructured world 14 Coming to terms with civilization 15 The global decline of cultural essentialism 18 Conclusions 23 2 Is there a point in looking back? The relevance of classical Chinese philosophy for modern China The issue 24 Points of reference 26 Classical paradigms 27 Contradictions and complementarities 32 The narrowing of the philosophical discourse 33 Conclusions 33 3 The quest for innovation: Islam and the challenges of pluralism The current situation 35 The basic problem 36 Starting points for a productive treatment of plurality 38 Self-blockade by fighting the West 43

11 13

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4 Homelessness versus public order: inquiries on Buddhism Homelessness as an ideal 46 Society and world – simply residual categories? 49 How should Buddhism react to modernity? 51 Conclusions 54 5 From spiritual to modern plurality? Hinduism at a crossroads Spiritual plurality 56 Modern plurality? 57 The challenge 59 ‘Casteless’ Hinduism 61 6 Interim observations

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PART 2

Clash of cultures?

69

7 A clash of civilizations – an idée fixe? A clash of civilizations 71 The civilizations 71 Culture or economic deprivation? 74 Cultural coexistence 76

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8 The realities of cultural struggles Recollections 78 Contextualizing cultural conflicts 83 The West and the cultural struggles 88 Conclusions 90

78

9 On Asian and other values ‘Asian values’ 92 Collectivist values in a context of late development 93 Conditions of late modernization 97 Conclusions 99

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10 Interim observations

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PART 3

Communication about cultures

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11 Pleading for a reorientation of the intercultural dialogue The realistic reconstruction by Westerners of their own historical development 106

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Calling for a realistic insider’s view of Islam 108 Looking beyond the Christian–Muslim dialogue 110 The message of modernism – a proposal 115 Outlook 117 Notes Suggested reading Index

118 136 139

Series editors’ preface

The ‘return of culture’ has become a fact of life in International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy theorising. Since the early 1990s, a growing number of scholars – in both mainstream and critical IR/IPE theory – have been treating culture (however defined) as a factor in its own right rather than an explanation of ‘last resort’. Having said this, there are widely differing ways in which culture is re-entering reflections on the rapidly changing environment of the Global Political Economy. On the one hand, the re-articulation of identities (in terms of class, gender and race/ethnicity for instance) and the emergence of new emancipatory forces, forms and sites of resistance in a globalizing world are challenging persistent patterns of unequal distribution of power and welfare. On the other hand, the increasing prominence of cultural questions in the ‘New World Order’ is interpreted as a direct threat to the western world and its – supposedly – coherent cultural profile. An example of the latter view is the controversial thesis of the American political scientist, Samuel Huntington. According to him, the post-Cold War ‘New World Order’ can be characterized by its imminent nascent ‘clash of civilizations’; a cultural clash that is quite distinct from those between princes, nations and ideologies of previous eras. Whereas the latter conflicts took place primarily within the western world, the former will be a clash between either western and non-western civilizations or between non-western civilizations. For Huntington, this is evidence that international politics is finally moving out of its ‘western phase’. In a general trend towards de-secularization, religion will be the dominant factor in new forms of identity that, in turn, transcend national borders. These will eventually find their expression in seven major civilizations. Particularly important to his analysis is the ‘fault-line’ between the Western and the Islamic civilizations. Fault-line wars may also occur, however, between the Islamic world and other non-western civilizations since ‘Islam has bloody borders’. Not surprisingly, this thesis (first presented in a 1993 contribution to Foreign Affairs) has been heavily criticized. In this book, The Clash within Civilizations: Coming to Terms with

Series editors’ preface

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Cultural Conflicts, Dieter Senghaas provides an important response to Huntington from within a Western European and comparative cultural perspective. The RIPE Series in Global Political Economy is very pleased to present this latest book from the author of The European Experience: An Historical Critique of Development Theory (1985) to an English-speaking public. In The Clash within Civilizations, Senghaas takes a strong stand against the ‘geocultural fiction’ of Huntington. According to Senghaas, such clashes are more likely to occur within a culture/civilization rather than between two different ones. Based on a thorough knowledge of how both past and present non-western (Hindu, Confucian, Islamic) and western (Judaeo-Christian) cultures have developed, Senghaas argues that historically all civilizations have always been characterized by huge internal differences, if not conflicts, long before the advent of modernization. Internal political and ideological discrepancies have been an essential factor in the dynamics of their respective processes of development. Europe is no exception in this respect. The ideas of the Enlightenment, for instance, were contested and resisted from the moment they emerged. During any historical course of modernization, conflicts between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernizers’, and the respective social forces behind them, can take particularly violent turns. Senghaas argues that, in hindsight, (western) Europe managed to confront modernization’s main challenge in a relatively short period of time; namely, “how to facilitate co-existence in spite of pluralism and extensive politicization”. He argues that this challenge is also being faced by many non-western countries, in varying degrees, since decolonization. In contrast to the essentialist assumptions of cultural analyses like those of Huntington, Senghaas argues that the main fault-lines between and within cultures/civilizations are socio-economic, not geo-cultural. These fault-lines cut across societies from both within so-called western and nonwestern civilizations. For example, post-colonial societies experiencing severe problems in their development find themselves confronted with internal reassertions of ‘traditional’ norms and values, both real and imagined, which can also lapse into ‘a militant culturation of politics’ and ‘an “Algerianisation” of living conditions’. According to Senghaas, the more successful examples of post-colonial development show a relatively stronger capacity to cope with the growing complexity of political and cultural pluralism so typical of modernizing (or modern) societies. At all times, he notes that no one culture/civilization is an unproblematic, integrated whole but rather is torn by historical tensions and differences. In coming to terms with present and future cultural conflicts within civilizations (such as Islamic, Chinese or Buddhist), and particularly within and between the politics and belief systems of their particular societies, Senghaas advocates a dialogue that is inspired by what he calls intercultural philosophy. This is a philosophy based on, and rooted in the comparison of cultures that explicitly includes a better understanding of the

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Series editors’ preface

conflict-ridden history of western – European – processes of modernization (which included imperialism and colonialism) and its impact on today’s Global Political Economy. For Senghaas, this more realistic account of European history can avoid the dead-end debate between ‘cultural universalism’ and ‘cultural relativism’. One could add that coming to terms with the ‘crisis of civilization’ within the western world itself and building an intercultural dialogue also entails dealing with persistent underdevelopment in the contemporary world and its global, regional and societal modes of exclusion. Indeed, facing these cultural conflicts within (western) civilization – rather than imagining an enemy ‘from without’ – implies active confrontation with processes of neoliberal global restructuring. The RIPE Series in Global Political Economy is proud to be publishing this erudite and provocative response to the ‘clash of civilizations’ debate. Senghaas provides a timely riposte to some of the scare-mongering tendencies in widely-read western critiques and perceptions of non-western civilizations (that of Islam in particular); civilizations that are far more diverse and internally contested than this sort of analysis would allow. Otto Holman Marianne H. Marchand Henk Overbeek Marianne Franklin Amsterdam, May 2001

Introduction

In prognoses on the threatening or imminent international cultural conflict, or ‘clash of civilizations’, as expounded over the past few years in the academic community, in particular by Johan Galtung and Samuel Huntington, cultures or cultural regions, that is, ‘civilizations’, are always depicted as independent social spheres or even major actors in international politics. Even in everyday cultural dialogue, which is concerned less with the conflict between cultures than with a co-operative foray for cultural points of contiguity, cultures are treated as rigid structures, and cultural-essentialist assumptions largely determine discourse. Only thus can it be explained why in both academic and everyday discourse ‘Confucianism’, ‘Buddhism’, ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’ and finally ‘Western culture’ are treated indiscriminately as distinct civilizations or cultural regions as if they were definable, easily identifiable phenomena. Even at the international diplomatic level for instance, cultural-essentialist assumptions perpetuate the current cultural debate on ‘Asian’ and ‘Islamic’ as well as ‘Western’ values. Seemingly homogeneous, coherent cultural profiles are compared and often played off against each other – in a way no different, incidentally, from that in the international human rights dialogue.1 The process is understandable to the extent that it facilitates the survey of an otherwise totally unfathomable welter of illustrative material – a whole profusion of outstanding cultural evidence produced throughout the history of humankind – and also because it helps to categorize the unfamiliar into the simplest possible terms. It is tempting, for instance, to use a term such as ‘Confucianism’, which allegedly represents the whole of East Asian civilization, and thereby ‘overlook’ the whole range of contradictory, culturally determining convictions that were once the cause of bitter hostilities (the after-effects of which are still partly felt today). ‘Hinduism’ becomes a blanket term that is clearly arbitrary and artificial in the light of its rich cultural background. ‘Islam’ becomes monolithic (and for this reason alone is interpreted as a threat) although it is recognizable to anyone willing to take an unbiased look that it consists of factions that have always been more antagonistic than mutually amicable. The generally stylized self-portrayal of ‘the West’, moreover, which is frequently adopted

2

Introduction

by non-Westerners without a further thought, is also remarkable. ‘The West’ is depicted as a culture which has allegedly always been typified by the Enlightenment, individualism, democracy, human rights, freedom of conscience, pluralism, the right of free speech, sexual equality and so on as a matter of course. But rationalism and liberalism in Europe also had to endure the struggle against tradition, and did not prevail until relatively late, and only with extreme difficulty (and by no means irreversibly). This fact is just as easily ignored in the perception of both Europeans and nonEuropeans as the fact that the Enlightenment gave rise to powerful intellectual and political anti-Enlightenment and anti-modernist currents which are as much a part of European reality as the Enlightenment itself. Understandable as it may be, international cultural debate nevertheless cannot be fruitful under these premises, as the assumption of persistently powerful, extremely different cosmologies within the spiritual depths of individual civilizations is completely unrealistic.2 To the impartial observer, reality presents itself very differently in a number of ways. First, internal differentiations, if not conflicts, were a distinctive feature of all traditional cultures long before they came under the pressure of modernization from outside and from within. In Chinese philosophy, for instance, before it was thematically reduced to ‘state Confucianism’, there flourished ‘a hundred’ schools of thought. Original Buddhist thought had hardly been articulated before it diversified as widely as its teachings spread. Right from the beginning, the plurality of views, particularly in the divine world, was an innate feature almost unique to Hinduism. Such plurality is unknown to Islam, a religion of divine revelation, but this religion, too, has always been characterized by different schools of law and deep schisms. In the West, also, a process of spiritual differentiation began at an early stage, and only later, but then solidly underpinned by the consequences of an unprecedented phase of societal, economic, cultural and political modernization, did it finally culminate in the postmodern variety of modernity in the second half of the twentieth century. The process of differentiation in the traditional forms of each respective culture was in no way incidental or marginal, but was an essential component of their cultural self-assertion and the dynamics of their development. Without the intense intellectual confrontations over fundamental principles within each culture – perceived as disputes between rivalling schools of thought – the original cultural evidence which formed the crystal nucleus of later processes would possibly only have remained of local significance or even drifted into obscurity. Conflict was therefore an integral part and of far-reaching consequence in all the prominent cultures; it contributed – though to differing degrees – to the development of self-consciousness in traditional cultures, too, and thus in a sense to self-reflection.3 Classical Chinese philosophy, which can be interpreted as a perpetual dispute over the fundamental issues of public order, is a

Introduction

3

particularly fascinating, though not thoroughly representative, illustration of this. Second, Europe was the first civilization to be confronted with the challenges of material as well as intellectual modernization. From a comparative perspective, the historical development of European civilization, or at least the western part of Europe, seems to be an exceptional case – one could almost say a ‘miracle’.4 Unlike the great non-European civilizations, Europe did not run into the typical developmental cul-de-sac of ancient empires and their cultures.5 The dynamic of Europe grew from the bottom up out of a profusion of small, rivalling social forces. The dominant, centralizing forces were only intermittently stronger and as a rule remained relatively weak, helping the classic nation state to its final breakthrough only after several hundred years. Each of these somewhat fragmented secular and religious forces – imperial and royal dynasties, higher and lower aristocracies, the peasantry and municipalities, supraregional, regional and local religious powers (such as papacies, bishoprics and monastic orders) – made its own distinct endeavours to gain autonomy. This division of political power and the rivalries arising out of it helped at an early stage to prevent the untimely over-centralization that could be witnessed (though in most cases in cyclical patterns) in the ancient, nonEuropean empires. By their standards, the structure of Europe in its early, classical and feudal periods was ‘underdeveloped’ and peripheral.6 Centuries before the modern competitive economy (competitive capitalism) made its breakthrough, European development was shaped by political rivalry, by a profusion of battles that began as petty disputes but gradually built up into political elimination contests.7 These contests never took place on a continental scale, but remained on a local level, occasionally leading to victory for the stronger party, but more frequently, since the triumphs were only limited and followed by subsequent power deadlocks, they led to political compromise – to a cluster of ‘checks and balances’ as articulated in famous European legal documents such as the Magna Carta of 1215. Premodern plurality was thus, long before the Enlightenment set in, the elixir of European reality. To a certain degree, political rivalry in premodern Europe also had positive effects on the innovative potential of the societies concerned. Innovation was encouraged by the subsequent development of a competitive economy that extended over whole territories and was later to become a global phenomenon, making economic competition the quintessential logic of social systems. Thus emerged, step by step, the type of modern society that today determines life in all Western societies and is possibly now in the process of disintegration.8 The consequence of this lengthy transformation process from traditional European societies into modern societies was tantamount to a mass wave of human emancipation unparalleled in human history. This, too, is historically unique to Europe. The accelerated, unprecedented differentiation of

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Introduction

European culture following this emancipation was just as logical a consequence as the serious repercussions that a prior cultural differentiation process had on economic, social and political modernization. The transition into modernity was like a circular, cumulative causality chain.9 Viewed from a long-term perspective, this transformation in Europe had such profound and extensive effects that it would have been impossible to forecast the subsequent development of Europe in the light of its earlier history. However tempting it may be, in retrospect, to assume a linear development in European culture – and the temptation is indeed overpowering – it is indisputable that European development is characterized rather by discontinuities and innovations. Third, as a result of the successful colonialist and imperialist expansion of modernizing Europe and the dependency structures arising out of it, the non-European world was overcome by exogenous modernization pressures, some countries at an earlier stage, some a little later, and each to a greater or lesser degree.10 These modernization pressures were able to prevail because the power of resistance of traditional societies was very weak. Resistance was nevertheless noticeable, although it was usually violently suppressed. Throughout the non-European world, threatening and actual defeats provoked intellectual and political counter-reactions.11 Conceptually, they varied in their emphasis. One of the conceivable options chosen was the imitation of the West. By doing this it was hoped to catch up with European development and then beat off the West using its own weapons. In many societies a further option was to reconsider their own traditions and attempt to revitalize them. A third option was a combination of the first two with a view to preserving the societies’ own values while at the same time adopting new technologies and know-how. The fourth option is attributable less to the will of the actors than to fortunate circumstances: innovation as an unprecedented response to an unparalleled challenge. Of course, the real responses were as a rule not unilinear but a mingling of intellectual counter-projects and political practice. To the selfperception of the societies concerned they all signified transformation. This is especially true of the second option, that is the endeavour to revitalize tradition, for, unlike in traditional societies, the value of tradition had been subjected to scrutiny, which meant that it could no longer be simply taken for granted. And as the advocates of each option all assessed the situation differently and had different objectives they necessarily came into conflict with each other. This triggered a cultural struggle in the true sense of the term, that is debates and campaigns were fought over the modern organization of public order, inevitably raising questions about the cultural truisms of traditional societies.12 Fourth, the debate became more intense wherever internal – that is endogenous economic and societal – modernization processes took place or were deliberately staged as a consequence of challenges from outside.

Introduction

5

For although at first they were often only very fragile, these processes still brought about a repeat of the European experience, that is, the development of a modern societal profile in place of the traditional, mainly agricultural structure.13 Wherever there is a dramatic, long-term, quantitative decline in peasantry – initially in small numbers, but in some cases increasing at an astonishing rate – there arise modern social classes typical of industrial or service societies: the public administration, state class, private enterpreneurs, the middle classes, the industrial working classes, and more recently as the process of modernization advances, the professional classes. These new social classes correspond to different social strata, no differently than in Europe, each with its own particular interests and identities. Cultural differentiation is directly associated with this process; in nonEuropean societies, too, it is embedded in an increasingly socially mobile society as modernization progresses and gains a momentum of its own. This momentum, however, in combination with the consequences of a growing internationalization of information and communication, leads to either of two possible situations. On the one hand, where development succeeds, it leads to cultural modernization even within non-Western societies, and, on a long-term basis, to a general trend towards ‘postmodernity’. On the other hand, where development is more problematic, it culminates in a developmental crisis and an accentuation of the cultural struggle. The former situation can be witnessed today particularly in East and South-east Asia, and the latter especially in the Arabic–Islamic region, where in many cases, as a result of incoherent modernization and under the premises of a severe developmental crisis, power-political fronts have formed and the cultural struggle has reached the proportions of civil war. In isolated cases, such as in Algeria, militant front-line battles have actually turned into year-long bloody civil war. In either situation, the internal dynamic processes are compounded with influences from the international environment that become more and more difficult to resist. In the positive case described above, cultural modernization is accelerated by these influences, as it has a solid, modernized material foundation to build on; in the second case, these international influences cause even deeper socio-economic as well as cultural disarray. In both cases, although the starting points differ, the basis for traditional culture is eroded even further and can no longer be assumed to be intact. What arises in its place is a societal reality shaped by modernization, which may vary from one society to another, but which overlaps and penetrates traditional cultural patterns, in particular everyday customs, and in the long run possibly even causes their disintegration. The starting point for an international cultural debate thus ought to be the differentiation processes that are already taking place in traditional cultures virtually all over the world. The true cultural differentiation processes, including those of non-Western cultures, however, are the consequence of exogenous challenges, attempts to come to terms with them

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Introduction

and the modernization phase resulting out of these attempts. Like it or not, these external and internal pressures engender cultural transformation. It should therefore come as no surprise that international studies on the value profiles of societies have established that the salient cultural cleavages of the present are actually within the oft-cited civilizations and within individual societies, and certainly not between them.14 In particular, the studies reveal that across all civilizations the value profiles of societies at comparable levels of development tend to be similar rather than to differ, which suggests that the decisive factor for each value profile is therefore not the heritage of the civilization in question but the level of development it has reached so far. Consequently, the further the modernization process advances, the more difficult it becomes to deduce from the traditional value orientation of the originally dominant culture whether individualistic or collective values predominate in the societies of different civilizations. Rather, the degree of modernization and its consequences, as well as the type of modernization phase that has taken place, have to be taken into account. If, however, the difference between the value profile of a highly modernized and a less modernized society within one civilization is far greater than between the value profiles of societies at similar stages of development in different civilizations – certainly a verifiable, sociologically plausible situation – then the more recent international cultural debate would appear to be unrealistic, based as it is on the assumption of specific, homogeneous value profiles for each civilization, mostly derived from its own world religion and intellectual self-articulation, interpreted as an expression of the ‘cultural soul’ of each culture. What ought the alternative assumption to be? All over the world, modernization processes bring about the transformation of traditional societies, giving rise to new social classes and power coalitions each with its own demands, and new, mass-based intellectual currents. The resulting pressure to adapt and to break up the traditional culture also leads to further cultural differentiation. If these really are the fundamental facts of the case, then it is imperative for us to take a more discriminating approach, taking into account the developmental history and contextual background of a society, the context being defined by the considerably variable degrees and characteristics of modernization and modernity and even by mixed forms of tradition and modernity, as well as disarray caused by modernization. This statement is also directly relevant to one of the central points of contention in the international cultural debate, that is the dispute between ‘universalists’ and ‘cultural relativists’, particularly with reference to the international human rights dialogue. While the former emphasize the claim to universal validity of those ‘European values’ in particular that focus on the protection and the right to free development of the individual, the

Introduction

7

latter point to value orientations that differ vastly from one civilization to another, but especially to the difference between collectivist and individualist values. While collectivism is supposedly typical of non-Western cultures, individualism is exclusively associated with Europe. This controversy loses significance, however, if the findings described above are taken seriously. Then it would have to be borne in mind that European values, in so far as they refer unreservedly to all humans and are thus mass-oriented, have only relatively recently been accepted in the Western world as a matter of course. In this respect, Europeans today think and feel differently from their predecessors in Europe‘s long ‘prehistory’. It should especially be remembered that the practical application of these values, in such institutional mechanisms as form the basis of the democratic and social constitutional state, has been only very recent. ‘European values’ thus exist thanks to a modern and highly extraordinary set of circumstances.15 With regard to current cultural-relativist positions, especially those articulated in political discussions outside of Europe in relation to nonEuropean cultures, it should be taken into account that the assumed collectivist orientations correspond roughly with those characteristic of premodern Europe and also that, incidentally, collectivist orientations outside of Europe also lose ground as a modern societal profile begins to take shape in response to external and internal impulses. When this happens, modern value orientations develop or, as in the European case, a combination of value orientations with a tendency towards individualism. The current debate between universalism and cultural relativism can survive only because it has no historical perspective and ignores the concurrence of unsynchronous socio-economic and cultural development phases; and also because, explicitly or (as is more frequently witnessed) implicitly, the debate runs on the principal assumption of cultural essentialism, although what is really necessary is a situative approach that takes into account both the context and the developmental history.16 In other words, although modern European values developed within a particular context (mainly in north-western Europe and in some of the English colonies that later formed the USA), they are of general relevance not because there is a watertight, ultimate philosophical justification for them (there isn’t one!) but because the context within which they arose – that is, the transition from traditional societies to modern ones, accompanied by the gradual disintegration of traditional, collectivist value orientations and the emergence of value pluralism – has now become universal.17 This has universalized the fundamental issue with which all societies in the process of modernization are confronted, that is how to facilitate coexistence in spite of pluralism and extensive politicization.18 Modernization is an uneasy, conflict-laden process because it questions the traditional basis of economic reproduction and patterns of social

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Introduction

stratification, current collectivist value orientations and, consequentially, traditional forms of rule. This all happened in European history, and it is repeating itself today all over the world before our very eyes. Societies exposed to modernization come into conflict with themselves. The further modernization progresses, the harder it becomes for old and new societal groupings to find common ground for their identities and interests, and it certainly cannot be found in long-standing arrangements. In societies that are undeniably pluralistic, this throws the whole organization of public order open to discussion. Wherever modernization takes place and pluralism develops, one of the greatest cultural tasks is to find (or even invent) a public order that accommodates everyone’s needs. As traditional cultures have no knowledge of this modern form of plurality, this task inevitably implies the defiance of their own tradition. In this book, the process described above is referred to as ‘reluctant civilization’, or ‘civilizing contre cœur’. By that is meant that civilizations enter into conflict with themselves. The ‘issue of civilizing’ concerns modern conflict. The acceptance and toleration of plurality and the assurance that politicized groups are reliably protected by institutional means must be acknowledged as an unparalleled achievement of civilization. These problems first reached a critical level in Europe; the European solution, after a long drawn-out period of internal conflict, was found in the notion of human rights and in the concept of constitutional democracy and the welfare state. The same problems are repeating themselves today all over the world.19 What complex, and above all wise political and institutional, solutions will be found elsewhere in the light of increasingly complex societies, economies and cultures? New, constructive solutions would be nothing short of further civilizational achievements, a cultural feat accomplished under much more difficult external and internal circumstances than in Europe. In retrospect, Europe had a relatively long time to find a solution. It would be useful if the international cultural debate directed its attention to this universally urgent cultural task, and abandoned its tones of cultural essentialism by which it is least well served. This book is intended to contribute to the solution of such a task. In a first step the problems outlined in this introduction will be unfolded. In the first chapter I deliberately use the term ‘intercultural philosophy’ since it is also my intention to contribute with this book to this new and fascinating discourse which has been long overdue.20 Then five chapters follow in which – against the background of the argument unfolded – political issues are elaborated with regard to those civilizations or cultural regions on which the recent international cultural debate has continuously been focused.21 These issues, as we will see, differ widely, as do the individual cultures, the basic political and socio-cultural problems which are debated in Chapters 2–6.

Introduction

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A book that is intended as a contribution to the actual cultural debate cannot avoid commenting on the thesis of a threatening ‘clash of civilizations’. This thesis will be critically investigated in the second part of the book (Chapter 7). Moreover, a conceptual alternative will be presented (Chapter 8), which then will be discussed in more detail with respect to the actual debate on ‘Asian values’ (Chapter 9). Analytical differentiations on the notion of ‘cultural wars’ (which has been quite widespread in the debates within the Anglo-Saxon world) can be found in Chapter 10. In the third part I plead for a reorientation of the intercultural dialogue (Chapter 11). I do this by taking into consideration concrete experiences with such dialogues, which – if I correctly perceive reports on similar experience – do not seem to be due to mere idiosyncrasies of my own. I hope that this pleading as well as the perspectives to be developed in the first and second parts of the book will lead to a critical examination of the premises and modalities of the ongoing intercultural dialogue.

Part 1

Pluralization and politicization Challenges for cultures

1

Intercultural philosophy today

In a world that is becoming palpably more interdependent it is not surprising that a philosophy based on and rooted in the comparison of cultures, that is intercultural philosophy, is considered to be a new intellectual challenge. A comparable observation can be made in other areas; international lawyers, for instance, are now enquiring into the emergence of a ‘world law’ that is no longer founded on the principle of individual sovereign states and has an autonomous jurisdiction extending beyond the law of nations or international law. ‘Globalization’ and its effects, right down to the smallest social unit, have become a major analytical issue for economists, sociologists and political scientists. Moreover, the social sciences are gradually rediscovering comparative approaches as an ideal cognitive method, enabling them to acquire a truly transnational, international or even global perspective. In view of such similar intellectual endeavours, therefore, ‘intercultural philosophy’ is in good company.1 The world, however, has not only become more interdependent; it is quite different today from the way it was in past centuries and millennia, when philosophers reflected for practical as well as systematic purposes on the fundamental problems of life. Historically seen, most philosophical ideas developed in the context of traditional (that is pre-industrial) societies, whereas today the key intellectual challenges throughout the world arise out of a completely different context. On the one hand they are the result of the radical transformation of traditional societies (a phenomenon that affects four-fifths of humanity); and on the other they arise out of continuous change in societies that have already been through this transformation process. In view of the politico-theoretical and sociophilosophical substance of intercultural philosophy it is imperative to acknowledge this historically unprecedented process of radical global change over the past three centuries, if the resulting challenges and their effects on intercultural philosophy are to be perceived correctly. These circumstances and their implications will now be discussed.

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Pluralization and politicization

The intellectual and practical consequences of a restructured world International statistics now confirm the common knowledge that the number of human beings worldwide still living in an oikos (self-sufficient or subsistence) economy is steadily falling.2 Rural exodus, which has been taking place in Europe since 1750, has meanwhile spread throughout the rest of the world and with it, of course, ceaseless and ever-increasing worldwide urbanization, as recently documented by Habitat II, the last major UN Conference of the twentieth century. The integration of villages into extensive production circuits and large urban agglomerations implies an enormous widening of most people’s mental horizons and opportunities as well as more intensified communication. For the first time in history, ordinary people have the ability to organize more than their immediate surroundings. As a rule, this development is accompanied by an increase in literacy, heightening the average competence level of the population and allowing a ‘skill revolution’ to take place. This in turn serves as the basis for upward social mobility. Within this new environment people have been exposed to an increasing variety of media over the past few decades, which has enabled them to make comparisons with lifestyles and life expectancies in other parts of the world. It should therefore come as no surprise that all these structural and mental changes give rise to the emphatic demand for more political participation.3 Politicization is therefore an integral part of societal modernization, making political marginality and/or apathy, key characteristics of traditional societies, phenomena of the past. The longer and more far-reaching the process of change is, the more fragmented the societies undergoing such transformations are likely to become as interests, identities and contending ideas of justice, equity and ‘truth’ multiply. This process can be described as fundamental politicization: all social problems become political and all political issues become social. As a result, structures undergoing this transformation tend to be conflict-laden or violent, and peaceful coexistence becomes a key issue. How can societies, both modernizing and modern, learn to live in peace and stop civil wars becoming ‘normal’ or accepted as ‘a fact of life’? In other words, how can these societies learn to deal in a civilized way with the inescapable conflicts arising out of the pluralization of political interests and identities?4 The widespread, fundamental politicization of socially mobile societies and the demand for wide-ranging, effective and non-violent conflictmanagement did not exist in traditional societies. It is therefore not surprising that traditional philosophy (particularly with regard to political theory and social philosophy) does not deal with this problem. In traditional societies all over the world, philosophy was on the whole patriarchal, oligarchical and gerontocratic, but above all ‘cosmocentric’. Particularly in the mythology of very old civilizations, the ‘cosmos’, society

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and people were conceived holistically as an organic unity. The world was comprehended as a static, well-structured and well-organized hierarchy, in which roles and role-specific behaviour were rigidly predetermined. Historical thought was cyclical, though not in the sense sometimes used today, as these cycles always returned to the same point of departure – akin to the annual rhythm of nature or the cyclical occurrences in politics (for instance the rise, peak and decline of empires).5 If under cosmocentric premises nature and society, and especially communal and governing institutions, form a single organic unit, then conflicts must be considered to be dysfunctional. They are interpreted as the ‘great unrest under the sky’, bringing with them the threat of chaos or expressing already existing chaos. Counteractive reasoning is then understood as a contribution toward overcoming this chaos. Philosophy, particularly political or social philosophy, becomes a strategy for overcoming chaos and restoring cosmic order. There are fascinating endeavours to this end in the philosophical writings of ancient China, and some passages are still acknowledged as the most authoritative sources of anti-chaos thought.6 But, if it is permissible to draw such a comparison, do the works of half-traditional, half-modern authors living two and a half thousand years later really differ from these early philosophical endeavours? Does not Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, published in 1820, also focus on overcoming chaos? In accordance with his well-known three-tiered legal-philosophical construct, he locates the moral spirit primarily in the ‘family’. Anticipating and observing correctly the direction that modernity was taking, he goes on to diagnose dissension within ‘civil society’ and with it the loss of moral substance, concluding that the ‘state’ is the embodiment of morality, ‘the reality of the moral idea’ (§ 257). Be that as it may, traditional philosophy is inevitably too simplistic in the light of modern reality. Particularly with regard to political theory or social philosophy one cannot expect complex analyses from traditional philosophy since the complex face of modernity was unknown at the time of writing.7

Coming to terms with civilization What, then, is the modern answer to the modern reality of fundamental politicization? How can ‘modern chaos’ – the ongoing restlessness in modern society – be overcome? Historically, this problem was first experienced from around 1750 in that part of Europe in which this radical transformation first began. In retrospect, it can be understood as an historical embattled quest for solutions to new conflicts that were gradually taking on mass proportions. These conflicts arose in societies which were gradually losing the material, institutional and mental basis for unity, that is, the social hierarchy and static architecture once characteristic of the ancien régime.

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Pluralization and politicization

The modern solution to the ‘chaos problem’ was and still is a sixfold one which in its ideal form embraces the following six factors: First, the disarmament of politicized citizens and the institutionalization of a monopoly of force compels them to participate in discourse and ‘deliberative politics’. Second, the legitimization of the monopoly of force through the rule of law, establishes the rules of the game by which enduring and inevitable conflicts over material interests and identity can be settled. Third, the transition from traditional to modern societies prepares the ground for a number of expectations to be placed on the role of every individual. This gives rise to long, functionally differentiated chains of activities, offering every individual a broad range of roles, which as a rule helps in breaking down conflicts into tolerable proportions, thus promoting the control of affects. Fourth, as a consequence of increased social mobility, societies in transition give rise to the demand for democratic participation; this demand cannot be dismissed if a problematic build-up of conflicts resulting from forced non-participation is to be avoided. Fifth, what is more, in socially mobile, politicized societies debate on the issues of distributive justice and fairness is inevitable. Without endeavours in this direction, the rules governing public discourse and conflict management remain without material substance and thus without legitimization. Sixth, the synchronization of these factors forms the basis for the development of a political culture of constructive conflict management that permeates all spheres of life. None of these six factors, and much less their coincidence (‘the civilizational hexagon’),8 was predetermined in traditional European (let us say Western European) culture. The development of each component can be interpreted as an unintended process. Historically, disarmament was always the result of the victory or defeat of battles. The strong defeated the weak, the powerful established dominion over the subordinate. The rule of law has its roots in the compromises wrung out of conflict partners that were of course not popular, but amounted to short-term concessions in fragile power configurations. A self-determined existence in a short-range, easily comprehensible environment has always been preferred to a life dependent on functional systems operating at an extensive, abstract level. The conceptual differentiation between the systemic world and everyday life that is widely used in social theory today – as well as the early diagnosis of being ‘discontent’ in culture (as Sigmund Freud put it) in view of an environment which makes an illusion out of the ‘small is beautiful’ paradigm – points in this direction. Affect control is determined not by the pleasure principle but by the imperatives of systemic reality, thus by the reality principle. Furthermore, the struggle for increased participation has always come up against strong resistance. In a world of systemic inequali-

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power monopoly

rule of law

interdependencies and affect control

democratic participation

social justice and equity

constructive conflict management

Figure 1.1 The civilizational hexagon

ties, the struggle for distributive justice and fairness was often hard, bitter and bloody. Neither of the two was ever easily conceded, but rather both had to be wrung from those in power at the time. Finally, the culture of constructive conflict management was only able to emerge under the fortunate circumstances of all six components one by one becoming historical realities, combining synergetically and finally becoming emotionally acceptable and rooted. Only under such demanding terms was there a likelihood of the civilization of conflict – that is, the principally non-violent settlement of conflict despite fundamental politicization – becoming possible. The process itself can be understood only as the historical outcome of the many conflicts which took place within the European context in a sequence roughly corresponding to that described above. The result is a conflict-management construct with constitutional, institutional and material dimensions, which is shaped by specific mentalities and as a whole constitutes a civilizational artefact. It can plausibly be argued that the characteristics attributed to fundamental politicization – such as the claim to absoluteness, particularism and the emphasis on a unique identity, possessive individualism and lobbyism – are obvious and in a certain sense ‘natural’, while tolerance, the spirit of fair play, self-restraint, powersharing, willingness to compromise and the ability to empathize are ‘unnatural’ and more or less the ‘artificial’ outcome of arduous collective learning processes. It cannot be emphasized enough that even – and

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Pluralization and politicization

especially – in Europe all these civilizational achievements were possible only after conflict with the past and a long hard struggle against the strongholds of Europe’s old tradition. Initially, at least, these accomplishments were only tolerated half-heartedly, then gradually became accepted, and finally became consolidated in the notion of tolerance – the epitome of political culture.9 It would therefore be utterly wrong to interpret the civilizing of conflict, as witnessed in the public arena in Western societies today, as being the essence of Western culture. Neither the individual components of the civilizational hexagon nor their combination were genetically predetermined factors of European culture. This is no less true of those value orientations typically associated throughout the world today with ‘Europe’ and/or the ‘West’, that is rationality, individualism, pluralism and so on. These values are also the very late products of a prolonged development process – and are still by no means undisputed today. It thus seems rather absurd in the light of history to imagine, as Husserl did in 1935, that Europeans were blessed with an innate entelechy that has dominated the structural changes in Europe, bestowing upon Europe a sense of development into an ideal form of life and being that should henceforth serve as a shining paragon.10

The global decline of cultural essentialism Reluctant civilization/civilizing contre cœur – this finding is significant because it fundamentally contradicts the idea of cultural essentialism. There are numerous examples in European history (and more generally in the history of the Western world) of cultural conflicts which brought unintended results, and similar conflicts are now well under way in other parts of the world where, to varying degrees of intensity, societies are in the process of transformation. Traditional societies become socially mobile, unable to evade the ongoing politicization. The process differs from that which took place at an earlier stage in Europe (and the West) in that modernization beyond the West has always taken place in an international context defined by Europe. Since the era of colonialism and imperialism, Europe has been the source of worldwide economic and cultural rivalry and suppression, marginalizing and forcing the rest of the world into the periphery. This is why the influence of European modernity – a foreign, overpowering force in other cultural regions – has hitherto always been more dominant than the influence of other non-European cultures on European development. By the same token, the radical cultural change resulting from ongoing modernization outside of Europe cannot, as a rule, be imagined without the impact of Europe and the West.11 At the same time there have been, and still are, very different reactions to Europe and the West, which are by no means mutually exclusive, but can often be observed simultaneously or consecutively. There were, incidentally, similar reactions to the so-called early modernizers within the

Intercultural philosophy today 12

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European and Western world, so they are not unknown. The following four reactions are particularly characteristic.13 First, a modernistic-imitative reaction takes on the challenge of the West, seeing it as a model and local tradition (including traditional culture) as a burden. In this vein, the progressive intellectual and political movements in China in the first decades of the twentieth century radically criticized the traditional Chinese system and state Confucianism (and often even classical Confucianism). Both were stigmatized as being responsible for the structural backwardness of China, and particularly for the humiliation the country had suffered since the mid-nineteenth century. The solutions believed to be useful for overcoming the social-political malaise were, as in many other cases, quite varied: republicanism, nationalism, constitutionalism, socialism, democracy, anarchism and so forth. Practical endeavours at that time failed, but today a modernistic-imitative approach in two of the four threshold countries of East Asia – Korea and Taiwan – has proved to be strikingly successful. These newly industrializing countries (NICs) are currently even in the increasingly self-sustaining process of democratization. It is foreseeable that before long their political culture will hardly differ from that of Western countries. Over the last forty years, ‘civilizational hexagons’ have been emerging in this region at breathtaking speed.14 Second, wherever radical socio-political changes take place, guardians of the past of every persuasion appear on the scene: traditionalists, reactionaries, but generally conservatives.15 Their intention is to turn back the clock of history or at the very least to stop modernization. Gandhi could be assigned to this last category. His philosophy was parochial, anticommercial and egalitarian. He favoured small units, and thus consensual direct democracy on a small scale.16 Anti-modernists have always been particularly prominent in Russia since the earliest attempts at modernization. Like their predecessors, the anti-modernists of today still consider themselves supporters of ‘authentic slavonianism’ (whatever this may mean in concrete terms) and above all as anti-Westerners. This type of reaction can be observed all over the world where non-European traditions are confronted with Western ideas. Sometimes, movements back to the past are coupled with moderate endeavours to reform, as in the Islamic salafiya movement at the turn and in the first decades of the twentieth century.17 Third, wherever such transformations take place, semi-modernists are also present. They want to open the window to the West as far as possible to let in technological know-how, but at the same time they want to screen out ‘alien’ cultural influences as far as possible. Japan pursued such policies after the Meiji Restoration. Similarly, real socialism was spurred on by hopes of technological transfer without cultural crossover. The real socialist societal project represented a complete alternative to Western, bourgeois society, and propagated collectivism instead of individualism, the

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Pluralization and politicization

power monopoly of one party and the concentration of power, the Gleichschaltung of public opinion instead of a critical public, a planned economy instead of market competition, and so on. This did not rule out the attractiveness of Western investments and the purchase of Western technologies. Incidentally, in Germany during the 1920s and the 1930s ‘deep German values’ were still being propagated against the ‘shallow’ values of Western civilization. Today, this position, which welcomes industrial and technological modernization while upholding traditional values, is found in Islamic fundamentalist movements,18 and particularly in the ‘Singapore school’. The latter are also concerned with opening the windows wide to let in progressive technological and scientific know-how while holding up very closemeshed thought barriers against the despised Western values, the obvious consequence being censorship. In particular, Western individualism is excluded in order to maintain the ‘Asian orientation’ towards the family, clan, group or team. A sense of duty and public virtues is portrayed in strong contrast to the Western priority of protecting the rights of people as individuals rather than collectively. Consensus, harmony and unity are contrasted with allegedly dividing principles such as majority decisions. Eagerness to learn, hard work and thrift are set against the more hedonist values of postmodern Western society. The technological dimension of Western modernity is thus fully accepted and adopted, while the other dimension – that of modern private and public values – is totally rejected.19 It is the explicit aim of the state of Singapore, following Asian values, to develop such a hybrid project, regardless of the fact that these so-called ‘Asian values’ are in fact common values that can be found in every traditional society. Fourth, wherever there is an encounter between modernity and tradition and transformations take place, then there is also a need for innovation. In some cases, for example in West Africa directly after decolonization, this need is explicitly expressed. Political leaders such as Nkrumah (among others) reasoned correctly that post-colonial Africa was in need of a new identity, its own ‘African personality’. This identity, as was argued at the time, should be made up of three components: the traditional culture of Africa, Islam (wherever existent) and Western and Christian cultural assets. All three sources should be drawn on and combined to create a new consciousness. ‘Consciencism’ became the keyword for politico-cultural innovation. Comparable endeavours were made elsewhere, including attempts to achieve something new through epistemological authenticity. In the African context, Senghor attempted to establish an African form of rationalism, setting African ‘raison-étreinte’ or ‘raison-toucher’ against the analytical ‘raison-œil’ of European thought, that is a form of rationalism that sympathizes with reality but doesn’t dissect it.20 Islamists have also endeavoured to compile an ‘Islamic epistemology’ (nazariyat almarifa al-islamiya) as an authentic alternative to

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Western epistemology (for example Saif al-Din Abd al-Fattah Ismail of Cairo).21 The quest for innovation, however, raises more questions than answers. As an example, the Qur’an lays down the duty of mutual consultation: ‘Mutual consultation should be your duty’ (3: 159). How to define this duty, which was originally embedded in a tribalist culture, under modern circumstances is still an unresolved question. If this duty is seen as a conceptual basis for modern democracy, then what would the Islamic constitution of an ‘authentic Islamic democracy’ be like in a socially mobile and politicized community?22 A similar philosophical discourse is taking place in sub-Saharan Africa. Historical evidence, or sometimes only stylistic retrospectives, describe traditional African society with communitarianistic catchwords such as ‘palaver democracy’, consensus and solidarity, obligatory consultations, responsiveness of the authorized political leaders and so on. In this discourse, too, the question is raised what innovations are required to link up such traditional or imagined concepts of a ‘good political order’ with the modernization process in Africa.23 To cite another example: Singapore and for that matter the rest of East Asia are coming to a point where economic success based on extensive growth is reaching a deadlock. As similar development processes have shown, however, the shift from extensive to intensive growth demands socio-political innovation. To the dismay of the ‘Singapore school’, innovation is highly improbable without opening up politically and intellectually. Which direction will it take? Will public space in the future be structured differently from in the West? Will institutional and mental innovations of an (East) Asian kind really develop?24 Beyond the European and the Western world, fundamental conflicts over the direction of societal development, and especially the structure of public order, can be witnessed everywhere. These are cultural conflicts in the broadest sense of the term; they are no longer experienced within the West today, but they have in numerous ways determined recent European history. All over the world the European experience is being repeated. As soon as traditional cultures are confronted with modernization and societies thus face a structural, and consequently mental transformation, these cultures become subject to deep internal conflict. This was the case in Western Europe, and is now a global phenomenon.25 The scenario is well known: it begins with doubts about whether the traditional culture can sustain further development in the light of new challenges. The return to tradition and the emphasis on a real or imaginary cultural heritage are an obvious defensive reaction if the challenge of modernization is too overwhelming. Furthermore, the reversion to traditional culture is a way of preserving one’s identity while indulging unreservedly in technological progress. This combination is intended to help cushion the problems of

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Pluralization and politicization

adjustment and with it the anomic effects of modernization. As happened in China in the 1980s, the meeting of such currents gives rise to so-called ‘culture fever’.26 In the long run there will, however, be no alternative to imitation and/or innovation, for the complexity of policy, society, economy and culture is also growing outside Europe and the Western sphere, and in order to avoid chronic conflicts (that is civil wars), this new complexity must be matched by complex institutional arrangements and mentalities. East Asia is well ahead in this respect, having undergone a sound socio-economic modernization process. In other parts of the world, such as the Arabic–Islamic region, that are in the midst of an extensive, chronic development crisis, profound political and cultural disarray are almost inevitable – an ‘Algerianization’ of living conditions in every respect.27 It cannot be presumed, however, that from a global historical point of view modern innovations for overcoming the internal problems of coexistence in complex societies have been completely exhausted. On the contrary: in the coming decades four-fifths of humanity will probably be unwillingly faced with the task of finding adequate solutions to the problems of social mobilization and fundamental politicization. It is unlikely that all the solutions that finally prove to be viable will be time-honoured, Western solutions. Nor will they be taken straight from the drawingboard. A repetition of the European experience is far more probable, and that is that the arrangements that prove to be the most reliable will be the unintended result of political conflicts. Social and political philosophy have always been part of these conflicts, and they will remain so beyond Europe, too.28 Such conflicts will eventually destroy the very fundaments of cultural essentialism (although, as in Europe too, essentialist groupings will never cease to voice their own opinions). Figuratively speaking, it remains for us to become accustomed to using the plural of ‘Islam’, and for the purposes of intercultural dialogue to keep in mind the whole spectrum of Islamic realities: traditionalists, religious fundamentalists and those fundamentalists with a politico-statist thrust, reformers who place their hopes in reason and science, laicists, mystics and those to whom the Text (Qur’an) is the only acceptable authority (‘sola scriptura’). What is valid for Islam also applies to other cultures, and especially those who in the light of socioeconomic transformations are gradually modifying their traditions and shifting away from essentialist definitions in the cultural sphere. As a result of this process, non-European cultures are becoming more self-reflective than in the past. One side-effect of this could be the rediscovery of the diversity of their own cultures which has been concealed or lost over time. The political philosophy of ancient China, for example, is objectively much more diversified than that which is perceived under the superficial label of ‘Confucianism’. This philosophy actually comprised many rivalling schools of thought based on totally diverging paradigms (Confu-

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cianism, Daoism, Legalism, Mohism, Yangism, etc.). The abbreviated version known as state Confucianism is a more recent product.29

Conclusions Intercultural philosophy must face the realities of today’s world, particularly when in pursuit of politico-theoretical and socio-philosophical issues. This world is, however, completely different from the one that existed at the time when classical philosophy came into being. This is why all contemporary philosophies, and especially philosophies from non-European, non-Western cultures, must turn to the political, socioeconomic and cultural complexities emerging in their own environment. Such a confrontation will inevitably lead to differentiation processes which in the light of such historic changes it will be hard to confine to any form of cultural-essentialist straitjacket. It is this issue that creates such inner turmoil within cultures and their characteristic philosophical profiles; as a rule, it is hardly possible to reduce the many solutions put forward to a common denominator. Cultures, in the current, holistic sense of the word, and in the sense of civilizations, disintegrate, some earlier, some later; for some the process is slow, for others it is more accelerated; ultimately, however, this disintegration is irreversible.30 Intercultural dialogue must respond to this situation if it is to contribute towards a better understanding of the underlying problems and maybe even help overcome them successfully. The hopes for a fruitful intercultural dialogue, and thus for intercultural political and social philosophy, lie in the fact that all cultures today have undergone more inner conflict and turmoil than ever before in the past, with the result that they have become more self-reflective. Only under these conditions is it possible for a modern, fruitful intercultural dialogue to begin, not so much from culture to culture, however, but between cultural segments all over the world. Above all, cultural conflict – including conflict over democracy, human rights, a sense of political community and other values – will take place wherever it arises. ‘The West’ and ‘the rest of the world’ will not – in defiance of Huntington – be one of the main opponents.31 What, for non-Western cultures, will the actual substance of the challenges to emerging and expanding plurality and politicization be? This question will be discussed in the following chapters on the basis of four examples.

2

Is there a point in looking back? The relevance of classical Chinese philosophy for modern China

The issue Compared to all the states which currently exist, China looks back on the longest and most unbroken tradition. The fact that this extensive history, which really has no equivalent in any other part of the world, can be seen not only as a positive asset but also as a burden, has been discussed in China with ever increasing intensity since the middle of the nineteenth century. These discussions had immense practical socio-political significance as they involved the question of how China could be modernized in order to withstand the impact of imperialists – initially in the form of the Western powers and later on in the form of the Japanese – and thus develop at its own pace into a modern society. These discussions were not of a casual nature; they touched the existential foundations – political, economic, social, cultural and infrastructural – of the country. These discussions initiated a particular tradition of criticizing the Chinese tradition. The interpretations varied enormously. Various contrasting positions emerged based on differing premises, and with different stated aims: monarchists who hoped to strengthen (and later restore) the old empire rubbed metaphorical shoulders with anarchists. Blueprints for modernizing dictatorships were in competition with pleas for liberalism, republicanism, democracy and socialism. Many such concrete sociopolitical positions which focused on gaining and displaying power were marked by syncretism, that is practical philosophical and societal ideas, which in other countries (as in their place of origin, Europe) had been kept strictly separate, were amalgamated. The Chinese ‘cultural debate’ (in the broadest sense of the term) since the middle of the nineteenth century is not something peculiar to China. The variety of interpretations, the amalgamation of positions and high levels of syncretism can be observed in all societies in which intense public debates on development and/or modernization have taken place. In these societies the impact of early modernizers was always in conflict with the individual cultural traditions (the term, again, used in a broad sense including the characteristics of public order). In view of the relative stagna-

Is there a point in looking back?

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tion over a long period prior to 1911, that is during the twilight of the empire, it is obvious that the so-called ‘Confucian order’ (better characterized as neo-Confucian order) was on the defensive. It failed to formulate policies and tactics to manage the deficits of Chinese modernization successfully. Although in the process of a mildly self-critical discussion, neoConfucianism had not much intellectual leverage since it was rightly understood as being part of the problem rather than the solution. It was no less a calamity for the country, a cause of its decay, and ultimately it did not offer ideas on how to get out of the dead end in which the country found itself. Along with neo-Confucianism, Confucianism fell into disrepute: Confucianism, too, was often interpreted as part of the problem and not as the starting point for a solution. China’s tragedy was that the cultural debate prior to 1949, which revolved around the fundamental options for development of the country, was always highly politicized. This meant that they were necessarily entangled with the political conflicts of their era. This fact was further intensified by the victory of the Communist Party of China in 1949 and by the intellectual bias and lopsidedness that it brought with it. This ‘line struggle’ between the positions of Mao and Liù finally led to the dubious peak of Maoism through a campaign against Confucianism (and against Beethoven and other Western values) during the Cultural Revolution. Following an interlude of intensive cultural debate in the 1980s, a sort of ‘cultural fever’, the latest Chinese tragedy seems to be of a restoration of Confucianism. In more precise terms in the 1990s there was a reversion to one form or another of long-standing neo-Confucianism. As often seen in Chinese history, this reversion focuses on the re-establishment of the power of an out-of-date autocratic political regime. This is a regime which, seen even in a Sino-Marxist light, has in the face of dynamically developing productive forces outlived itself objectively.1 The result of this change, which had its origins in the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, was not simply to interrupt the cultural debate of the 1980s. By strengthening the absolute power of the Communist Party the chance of extending the cultural debate beyond the process undertaken in the 1980s of simply reproducing ideas from the first half of the century was lost. This was a wasted opportunity for China and the rest of East Asia to connect with the much older traditions, both positive and negative, of classical Chinese philosophy. This type of reconstruction could have laid an autochthonous foundation for the social and political development of the country, and furthermore contributed to the international cultural debate.2 However, is it now still seriously possible to take up classical Chinese philosophy, that is the philosophy of the time that Karl Jaspers referred to as the axis period3 (sixth to second century BC), as a source of inspiration or even as a practical guide?

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Points of reference Three links come to mind immediately. The first is the fact that classical Chinese philosophy is in itself more or less a philosophy for the management of crises.4 It could also be described as a chaos-management philosophy as it focused its practical attention on the re-establishment of public order when it had deteriorated to a critical point (or indeed to the foundation of public order when it was completely lacking). The focus was on the loss of morality, decency and propriety. Extravagance, corruption, moral misbehaviour and loss of the model character were denounced as part of the status quo. Smaller battles and bigger wars were the rule. Chinese historiography found its own term for these: ‘warring states’. The chaos they provoked (luan) is still present in the general consciousness, as is the ‘warlordism’ of the early decades of the twentieth century which could be compared to it. The classical Chinese philosophy tried to find solutions for overcoming the decay, decline and decadence of the old order. The dominant representatives of this philosophy wanted to prove their usefulness: they offered advice to the powerful of the time in order to convince them of their own project of chaos-management. Re-establishing order, in other words reestablishing peace, was one of the most important targets of Chinese thinking in that period. Furthermore, in today’s China the question of how and in which direction public order will or should develop in the coming decades is still at the top of the agenda – although on account of the political circumstances this is currently happening more or less subliminally. The second point is that these schools of thought in classical Chinese philosophy however had astonishing diversity. Slightly exaggerating this, the term ‘hundred philosophical schools’ is used to describe what is said to have been an intensive, continuous interchange of criticism and countercriticism over the course of several centuries. A growing tradition of selfcriticism, which characterized the period between 1850 and the first few decades of the twentieth century, was obviously already valid for the period of classical Chinese philosophy. There may never have been a hundred schools of philosophy, but the positions fought for were without doubt extremely contradictory. The debate was of an intensive and polemical nature with statement of position and counter-position, criticism and counter-criticism, comment and counter-comment.5 Spiritual pluralism: what an autochthonous starting point for today’s developing socioeconomic pluralistic China! This situation makes undifferentiated present discussions on ‘Confucianism’ in China somewhat dubious, as any unthought-through essentialistic argument on culture is deprived of its foundation. Third, some significant points of departure which concentrate on the possibility of establishing public order and social stability permanently are of special interest here. They concern various propositions for a socio-

Is there a point in looking back?

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politically comprehensive ‘project of chaos-management’. The following considerations focus on these propositions.6

Classical paradigms Chaos-management 1 If morality in a society has gone awry, moral sermonizing can be the medium of re-establishing ‘moral community’ (in Tonnies’s sense of community). In face of a threatening or actual loss of morality, what may be considered necessary could be characterized as a ‘push of virtue’. Reverting to an utopic morally determined past may seem to be the answer. This, one might say, may have been the premise of Confucius (551–479 BC). His intent was to focus on li, a term with a variety of different translations or interpretations: tradition, rites, politeness, decency, etiquette, good behaviour, ceremonies, decorum, even religion. All of them together stood for the fundamental idea of ‘good morals’ in Confucian thought. With singular linguistic consistency Confucius fought for the ‘correction of terms’. This was essentially the struggle against the decline in morality which itself was seen as a result of the impoverishment of language. Confucius gives the impression of having been a linguistic realist: the correct memory and definition of morals are capable both of reflecting their essence and of transmitting an unquestionably valid point of orientation for practical behaviour. Whatever the case may be, the memory of a past with an assumed collective moral integrity creates a position that allows a critical and continuous surveillance of the present. What then is the criticism? The thinking of both Confucius and his followers was characterized by a strong personalization of problems, such as the neglect of morality of key personalities. The principal butt of such criticism was the emperor who, being the true son of heaven, should be a wise ruler, be it as the Good Shepherd or (perhaps without misunderstanding the term) as the human despot. This introduces the most interesting part of the Confucian paradigm. The emperor has a heavenly mandate. This is carried on to the people via officials. If the people get restless, if they revolt, or even rebel, their voice must be taken as the voice of heaven – vox populi ⫽ vox Dei – although in Confucianism the Deus is not God in the sense of JudeoChristian religion but more as an ‘immanent transcendence’ (such as dao). Restlessness or rebellion of the people can be seen as a litmus test for the ruler, a test of his moral and practical qualities. If he fails, or if he misuses his power by exploitation, corruption and luxury, he loses his legitimacy – in the modern sense of the word. He can then rightfully be opposed, though Confucian followers do not generally plead for such action. They would, however, accept the deposition of a tyrant, if the necessity is created through immoral behaviour on the part of the ruler.

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It is not an overstatement to call this ‘quality control’ of the ruler an inherent part of the Confucian paradigm. Mencius (372–281 BC) made this point even more explicitly and in doing so made legitimate rulership his central theme. Corresponding considerations are also to be found in the works of Xun Zi (310–230 BC), the third main follower of Confucius. It is clear that neither the ruler, as an institution, nor his powers are questioned, nor is the graded order between heaven, ruler, officials and people with their varying allocations of li in any way doubted. The one questioned is the ruler himself; he is the one who is directly criticized and assigned personal guilt. In the case, therefore, of the failure of the ruler, the situation can still be dealt with effectively and order can be reestablished simply by replacing the central figure, that is the ruler himself. If the worst came to the worst, it was thinkable to contemplate a replacement of the ruler, but with the absolute preclusion of the questioning of the li – the determined order including a ruler with ultimate power. It has rightly been pointed out that this method of argument does not leave any space for comparative constitutional analysis à la Aristotle (who was also of the axis period of Jasper). Aristotle was known to have weighed up the pro and contra of varying constitutional arrangements and therefore was, at least in this respect, ultra-modern.7 This analytical option was not, however, open to the Confucian paradigm. The implication that the latter is only apologetic or affirmative and incapable of visualizing human dignity (at least according to existing prejudices) would, however, deny the fundamental impetus of this paradigm. The quality control of the ruler happens for the benefit of the people, that is for the benefit of each single individual. The Confucian paradigm is, however, overshadowed by the insinuation of a ‘true order of things’; individuals are embedded in an overall order. But Confucius himself and his followers, including those who engaged in the critical discussion of his ideas, were realists who often described the real state of their society with surprisingly polemical openness, and without attempts to make it look better than it actually was. But although they had ‘the people’ in mind, these philosophers cannot be described as ‘democrats’ in the modern sense of the word. Confucius, his followers and his opponents regarded themselves as ‘consultants’: they conveyed their opinions to the ruler on behalf of the people. In their counselling of the ruler they acted as the advocates of the people.8 They were idealists with an acute sense for reality, who had the natural assumption that true order can last only if the well-being of the people is secured.9 The Confucian paradigm is very much familiar with the correlation between the misuse of power, the exploitation of people, corruption, luxury on the part of the ruling classes and the growing impoverishment of the masses (here: the peasants). This reflects a critical interrelation that seems to be completely modern; on a pre-democratic level, problems of the legitimization of power are seen against the background of social welfare. Mencius’ thesis considering the elimination of a tyrant seems to fit into this picture,

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too. In this sense, Kim Dae-jung did not overinterpret Mencius in his recent argument with Lee Kuan Yew by seeing in him a relevant classical autochthonous theorist for today’s democratic movement in East Asia.10 Chaos-management 2 If the Confucian paradigm is to be seen as one based on the criticism of the ruler (that is that a well-ordered society is dependent on a well-behaved emperor who is a model character and who influences the people accordingly), the alternative Daoist paradigm can be regarded as one that criticizes ruler, culture and civilization. The simple fact that a society needs morality, or even sermonizing on morality, is considered to be an expression of decadence. Morality, civilization, rulership and laws are all seen as interference with the natural course of events. It is this interference which produces chaos as it is in no way equipped to manage the imbalances which are produced. This led to the following paradoxical statement in the Daoist paradigm: ‘The best way to reign is not to reign.’ Daoists are against institutions, against laws – especially penal laws: they despise any form of action and in modern terms they reject technocracy and negate rulership. The real art of reigning is not to act. Not activity or action, for which the late follower of Confucius Xun Zi pleaded, but the praise for passivity is at the centre of the argument. Not the li but the wuwei represent the guiding principle and the opposite of intended action – ‘nonaction’ that smoothly follows the undefinable dao. This paradigm seems to be characterized by the idea that everything is self-regulating; controlling results from self-control, and everything happens in the smallest possible circuit: ‘small is beautiful’. Criticism of the ruler, therefore, does not make sense in this paradigm. Criticism of the actual system of rule rather than the quality of the one emperor or the other is of importance. The focus of the Daoist paradigm is therefore at the much more fundamental systems level, rather than the level of the practical political form of rule of the day. The abolition of civilization altogether with the system of rule is the target, which logically makes the control of the quality of the rulership superfluous. The Daoist paradigm is based on distance from public activity, to action itself, and it is therefore a paradoxical offer for the management of the problem of public order. Taken seriously it resembles a plea for the natural life of a hermit who worships and follows dao. When the Daoist paradigm is used to criticize Western civilization it is usually interpreted as a protest against civilizational pathologies. This is incorrect. It should be considered as a fundamental perspective for the re-establishment of public order, even though this establishment is understood as self-regulative.

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Chaos-management 3 The third perspective in chaos-management, that of legalism or legism, is completely different. This paradigm finds fault not with the excesses of civilizational institutions but rather with their lack of efficacy. The legalist paradigm does not focus on moral sermonizing like the Confucian paradigm, neither does it regard the family as the undeniable stronghold of collective socialization. Withdrawal from action, that is the non-action of the Daoist paradigm, holds no appeal here either. It is based on the power and efficacy of institutions and laws – especially penal laws and the threat of punishment. This threat of negative sanctions and the principle of deterrence are considered the principal means for establishing social order. Positive sanctions do not have any major significance in legalist thought. The decisive regulative mechanisms for the coexistence of people, who are understood as potential anarchists, are sanction-imposing laws (fa) and not the li of Confucius. To control ‘the tigers’ is of utmost importance, and putting them into the necessary cage can be achieved only by institutions that threaten with sanctions and penalties.11 The legalist paradigm, carried by positivistic attitudes, supports authoritarian solutions which are applicable to all: the officials and the people. Only the emperor himself, in his absolute power (ex auctoritate), can enact new laws. He was, however, supposed to stay in the background and let his officials do the work, while he surrounded himself in the aura of non-action. This enables him to demand an explanation from his officials for a failure of his own policy and punish them severely, without drawing blame on himself: feigned inactivity as a stratagem! In the legalist paradigm human beings as a whole are regarded as basically evil; an attitude portrayed in its most exemplary form by the leading legalist Han Fei Zi (280–233 BC). Perfectibility of the human kind is unimaginable. This element of the legalist paradigm stands in sharp contrast to the Confucian paradigm. It also differs from the writings of the teacher of Han Fei Zi, Xun Zi who, disagreeing with Confucius and Mencius, stated that human beings are evil but that, influenced by institutions working as civilizational bridges (themselves artificial constructions), the development of a certain perfectibility of the human kind is comprehensible and realizable. However, according to Xun Zi institutions can work as civilizing media only if they are linked to the li, that is if they are carried by moral principles. This latter attitude does not appeal to legalism at all. The Confucian picture of man as being able to learn, open to instruction, and capable of creatively influencing his own perfectibility through activity – in fact the picture of ‘man’ as a zoon politicon – is totally absurd for legalism. Equally incomprehensible is the appeal for yi, for rightfulness or righteousness defined by Xun Zi as ‘doing the right thing’.

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Chaos-management 4 The Mohist paradigm of Mo Di (Micius; 479–381 BC) is of a completely different nature. Being universalistically orientated, it focuses on general love without status differences. Its appeal is in its combination of containing both ethical and materialistic components. The thesis is essentially that general love leads to general usefulness. To expand on this: if everybody was imbued by love, everybody would be useful to everybody else. A natural result of this would be social self-regulation. The paradigm is not carried only by love itself but by the combination of mutual love that manifests itself in mutual usefulness. A society that is based on this correspondence (jian) is quite different from a society that is strife-torn and divided (bie). The li orientation of the Confucian paradigm is replaced by the ren orientation. This can be described as humaneness and good-will, as kindness, magnanimity and altruism. These qualities are not regulated by traditions and standards, as in the li orientation, they have to be discovered by each human being personally. Individual effort rather than instructions leads to ren. The Mohist paradigm therefore pleads for an autonomous rather than a heterogeneous ethic. Confucius, though, had already formulated ‘Do as you would be done by!’12 The Mohist paradigm has, incidentally, a markedly critical attitude to society. Being familiar with the European history of ideas, it resembles in many ways the criticism of the eighteenth-century physiocrats about the ancien régime. They strongly criticized the parasitic extravagance of the ruling classes of their time. Mo Di extended this criticism to include not only extravagant love of splendour but also the fine arts and music in particular (the epitome of art). ‘To have music is wrong!’ Fine arts, at least, even cultural goods of any kind are not necessary for ‘the benefit of the people’. Puritanism is therefore the order of the day. Chaos-management 5 If ‘benefit’ is interpreted as egoism or ‘possessive individualism’, yangism comes into play, and with it the paradigm of Yang Zhu (440–360 BC). This is a rational choice paradigm which was explicitly directed against the li, ren and yi orientations. ‘Everything for myself’ – wei wo – is essentially the utilitarian orientation of an egoistic ‘cultivation of one’s own life’. The yangism paradigm should perhaps not be seen as a serious leading alternative for the creation of public order as it represented an outsider position. Public order never was an argument in this purely hedonistic line of thought. Nevertheless, it represents a very interesting orientation in an environment that as a rule conveyed totally different attitudes and alternatives (li, ren, yi, fa). Yangism stands in stark contrast to what is generally considered to be the core of the Chinese tradition.

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Contradictions and complementarities These five paradigmatic perspectives are by no means a complete list of the different schools of thought in classical Chinese philosophy. However just, this brief list of the most essential paradigms indicates the remarkable broad-ranging diversity. Both reflection on and rejection of tradition, as well as moderate discontinuity of tradition and the creation of new practical social orientations, are present. Moral sermonizing stands side by side with moral criticism and appeals for activity run alongside reasoning for non-action. Institutions are highly praised and totally condemned. Rulership is criticized, but is on the other hand also highly esteemed. Apart from the general criticism of rulership, heavy and personal criticism of individual rulers is to be found. There are arguments against parasitic splendour (Mo Di) and on the other hand there is some sense for affluence (Xun Zi). Pleas for heterogeneous ethics can be found alongside arguments for autonomous ethics. Diversity is not lacking though neither is polemical criticism. Especially remarkable is the openness with which all this criticism is put forth reciprocally. However, all these discourses are not arguments for a ‘pluralistic society’. Some positions (the Confucian, the Daoist and the Mohist paradigms) give the feeling that harmony, community and self-regulation on the foundation of li, ren and yi are fixed points in a desired order. None of the accounts includes any hint of an open and pluralistic playground for political or social action. In legalism ‘plurality’, if the term can be applied here at all, is defined as the total of malice and chaos that has always been understood as something to be stemmed and controlled and not as something of intrinsic value. The problem of order in yangism evaporates in self-satisfying hedonism. It would not be wrong to regard these positions as autocratic or oligarchic or gerontocratic and furthermore as patriarchal. All these positions, perhaps with the exception of yangism, have one thing in common. They all recognize the difference between high and low, between nobility and people, whereby the ordinary people take a fourth place in the hierarchy and are judged as being rather stupid. But they have to be treated well! Neither in classical Chinese philosophy nor in reality was there ever any form of democracy in the sense of functioning institutionalized procedures of participation, control, voting apparatus and elections in the public space, all of which were present in the oligarchic Greek democracy of the very same period. This fact corresponds to those interpretations which rightly stress the critical potential in Chinese thought and especially the potential links which could make for a modern political community. It must be pointed out that the European political and philosophical development had until the last two and a half centuries little space either for pluralist-democratic thinking (in the modern sense of the phrase) and/or for democratic constitutionalism.

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The narrowing of the philosophical discourse In the period between the second century BC and the second century AD these contradictory positions amalgamated into ‘neo-Confucianism’. This was essentially the undoing of classical Chinese philosophy and of the paradigms of Confucianism, Daoism and legalism.13 A cosmologically focused state doctrine was the outcome of this amalgamation. This was demonstrated by Dong Zongshu (179–104 BC), with heaven at the top, the mandate of heaven being bestowed on the ruler (the emperor), the officials acting to carry out his will and finally the people at the bottom of everything. The interweaving of this neo-Confucianism with Daoist and Buddhist ideas took place only in the subsequent centuries. An image of the world, the society and the human being was created in which everything was placed in a hierarchical scale: nature, heaven, ruler, people, individual. This can be perceived as a revival either of cosmocentric thought or as sociomorphic and/or anthropomorphic thinking as the projections vary from cosmos to the individual and vice versa. Everything is connected to everything else, ‘interrelated’, in a strictly hierarchical order.14 This tendency led to the loss of paradigmatic or positioned differentiations typical in classical Chinese thought. However, a new form of critical questioning of the Confucian doctrine of the state via criticism of the ruler is observable, albeit intermittently – for instance the writings of Bao Jingyan in the third and fourth centuries AD. His position, however, was later overrun by representatives of the classical neo-Confucianists such as Zhu Xi (1130–1200).

Conclusions Looking back, what can be gained for the ongoing cultural debate from these observations? First, it seems to be questionable to understand civilizations as homogeneous and closed. Closer examination, particularly of Chinese philosophy, indicates diversity differentiation, and amazingly contradictory positions. It documents consistent critique of tradition, a fact (self-critique) which is known to have paved the way for the modern age in Europe. Second, even if, as has been the case in China, diversity has been degraded to relative one-sidedness which remained more or less determining until the middle of the nineteenth century, it is always useful to remember the diversity which existed previously. This diversity documents early signs of Enlightenment in the European sense of the term. Chinese society, at least its intellectual leaders, enlightened themselves through the debate between different schools of thought. Thus the impetus of Enlightenment does not have to be imported from outside as has often mistakenly been thought in China. In this regard China can easily go back to its own cultural inheritance. Third, with reconstructive intentions, links are to be found right across

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the range of paradigms which are relevant to the current debate. One would be the criticism of ruler and rulership; another the legalist idea of a generally valid law; a third would be the egalitarian anthropology based on the equality of human beings (as in Mencius and Xun Zi); a fourth would be the idea of autonomous action and judgement even in the presence of one’s superiors; another would be the social-utilitarian reason of state with its responsibility to act on behalf of the good of the general public; political commitment to morality and utility; and finally the golden rule taken from the term ren: reciprocity. This is incidentally a rule which is valid irrelevant of tradition, status and context. In relation to the idea of pluralistic society there could be a link to the concept of the dignity of individuals, simply on account of their being human. Another link could be the idea that the exercise of power is bound to respect individual dignity and that, therefore, the privilege of arbitrary patronage does not exist. Legitimate emotional and intellectual reservations exist in respect not only to state measures but also explicitly with regard to the arch-Confucian sphere of respect – the family (xiao) – and with respect to the loyalty of officials to their ruler (zhong). Special emphasis should be placed on the fact that these ideas are not foreign transplants, they are indigenous Chinese produce. There were no contacts with the world outside China during the axis period. It can, therefore, be stated with complete justification that there are sufficient though not exhaustive links in classical Chinese philosophy, which make a modern understanding of human rights possible. They certainly did not spring from a corresponding culture-genetic predisposition (which Europe did not have either), rather they are the result of China’s very own internal philosophical debates.15 This is and remains an intellectual asset which will sooner or later provoke relevant memories of the past, something which is particularly probable under conditions of emerging modernity. Such development should be politically accepted in modernizing China, it should even be publicly encouraged. Seen from the point of view of political leaders, there are currently good reasons to prevent this from happening in China. These are reasons which may be justifiable from a legalistic point of view, but they are also reasons which were brilliantly and thoroughly criticized by the internal Chinese debate two and a half thousand years ago.

3

The quest for innovation Islam and the challenges of pluralism

All traditional cultures face the difficulty of having to tackle an ever more pluralistic world. As a result, the obstinacy of the individual cultures comes into conflict with the increasing plurality of lifestyles and values. There are two ways of solving this conflict: defence or innovation. In the first case, the obstinacy of the individual culture will be intensified; traditionalism and orthodoxy prevail. The second case will lead to renewal, through the adaptation of identity to meet the requirements of new circumstances and challenges. The Islamic world, particularly, is increasingly confronted with this problem.

The current situation For decades dramatic processes of social and economic differentiation have been affecting the Islamic region. Here, as in every corner of the world, social mobilization has penetrated the cultural and political spheres, and has politicized societies. However, in contrast to East Asia, transformation processes have so far mostly ended in a development crisis, which does not allow for the broad-based, upward social mobility to the extent expected in cases of successful socio-economic development. Social change within a deepening development crisis, however, is not a favourable precondition for appreciating the pluralization of value orientation. On the contrary: such conditions tend to cause defensiveness against overdue cultural innovations. This is particularly striking when the transformation touches all areas of life and when upward mobility – with the exception of a small circle of careerists and nouveaux riches – seems to be blocked completely.1 In this case, understandably, defensiveness is discernible not only in the lower classes but also in the middle classes, the reason for this being that the middle classes tend to be much more socially mobile, and are therefore frustrated by the prevailing circumstances. It is as a result of this situation that the middle classes also belong to the social strata from which the fundamentalists recruit. This situation is particularly characteristic of many Arabic–Islamic

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societies (it developed into the actual civil war in Algeria, and is becoming critical in Egypt), where broad Islamic movements have become active and have taken on much greater importance than the overly vocal militant wings. Such movements can by no means be reduced to a common denominator since they are characterized by different features: gaining political power by instrumentalizing religion, activating the religious community for reasons of solidarity, revitalizing one’s own traditional values, struggling against the Western ‘devil’ or a mixture of these elements. Under these circumstances pluralism of values will, of course, not be highly appreciated. Rather, such pluralism is usually understood as the core problem, that is as an expression of cultural decadence and thus a repetition of pre-Islamic ‘ignorance’ and moral rottenness (jahiliya) but not as a productive ‘asset’.2 The problems which give rise to the actual development crisis – the denial of pluralism within an environment of growing social mobilization and loss of economic substance – are, however, not caused only by present circumstances. This denial is, taking up a term by Arkoun, also based on the ‘hegemonic Islamic reason’,3 that is on a particular self-image of Islam that not only has been predominant recently but has deep historical roots and still seems to appeal to the masses. What is this Islamic self-image all about? Why is the bridging between Islam and a positively appreciated pluralism of values so complicated?

The basic problem Islam is substantially founded upon the Qur’an, ‘the Text’, and this text is believed to have been conveyed, by the revelation of God, to the prophet Muhammad. Therefore the Qur’an, correctly, is often referred to as inverbation of God or ‘scripturizing’ of God.4 As many scientists in the field of Islam have stated, this premise has considerable implications: the resulting image of the world, of society and of humanity is ‘theonomous and community-oriented’. Following a prevailing Islamic self-conception: there exists a revealed divine right whose scope comprises all social and human spheres (sharia) and to which the community of the believers (umma) has to submit. The claim is comprehensive and the corresponding thinking holistic, especially with regard to ‘the Text’ and to the messages emerging from the words and acts of the prophet (hadiths). If this thinking is buttressed by power and strives to realize ‘the rule of God’ as, for example, defined by Maududi (hakimiyat Allah), it tends more or less to totalitarianism, that is the opposite model of pluralism of values.5 So in the first place, at least with regard to the ideal type of hegemonic Islamic reason, neither the individual per se (or the plurality of individuals with their different mentalities, identities and interests) nor individual subjects (or separate groupings) are able to use actively the autonomous power of definition. It is rather the collective, the umma, guided by and

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oriented towards revelation, that becomes the scene of sharia-abiding believing, thinking and acting. Modifying the term ‘reason of state’, in this connection one could speak of the ‘reason of religion’6 giving comprehensive orientation and defining a morally binding distinction between the permissible and the forbidden.7 Although this hegemonic Islamic self-image, which today is often elaborated with apologetic intention but also referred to by critics, has prevailed during the history of Islam, it has not remained undisputed. However, those who interpreted this orientation less rigidly and who, aside from revelation, assigned great importance or even a special position to human reason, remained, irrespective of their transitional historic or current prominence, peripheral figures who were never particularly successful against a power-monopolizing orthodoxy, especially when such orthodoxy utilized theological reasoning for political purposes. (Sometimes dissenting movements were quite prepared to buttress their position politically, as, for example, in the case of the ‘rationalist’ Mu’tazilites.8) In other words, the specific interpretation of Islam became hegemonic because the history of alternative-rationalist elaborations, from Mu’tazilites through Averroes and from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the present day, has remained a history of failures.9 This history is tinged with tragedy; starting from the premises of a theonomous and community-oriented understanding of Islam, diverging opinions, new interpretations or even attempts at modern, or critical, interpretation of the Qur’an were almost instinctively reproached for apostasy: endangering life and limb of the dissenters. Corresponding processes in the past and present refer to the vicious circle which Fatema Mernissi described as the ‘paradigm of heresy’: assuming the correct sharia-abiding interpretation and reassured by hegemonic-Islamic reason, diverging interpretations are defined as heresy or apostasy. Thus an open controversial dispute is prevented, and the advocates of rationalist positions find themselves exposed to mental and physical persecution.10 Therefore, it is logical that the theonomous and community-oriented line, as well as the corresponding fight against an alternative (that is more rationalist interpretations), contributed substantially to the ‘essentializing’ of Islam.11 In this connection ‘essentializing’ means to be committed to a hypostatized ‘reason of religion’ and its wide-ranging consequences. Furthermore, it means to think in terms of a closed, as opposed to an open, society; to be oriented collectivistically, not individually; to obey the Godgiven order and thus to have a strong sense of duty rather than a concern with the rights of the individual; to start from the sovereignty of God and to be sceptical (possibly to the point of denial) about the idea of the ‘sovereignty of the people’, to understand plurality of values as an expression of moral confusion, not as an inevitable result of a pluralizing society and world. So ‘essentialized Islam’ is missing the mental and, in particular, institutional safety nets for real plurality. Starting from the ‘pure’, that is

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the hegemonic, doctrine, the denial or rejection of plurality at worst turns into persecution. Where this does not happen, pragmatic insight and practical wisdom may prevail. But from the theonomous and communityoriented point of view, such schools of thought and behaviour are, in principle, subject to criticism. This is due to the view that they are opportunistic and not to be reconciled with Islamic law. However, are there any prospects for bridging the gap between the cultural heritage of Islam and the requirements of modern plurality in a constructive way?

Starting points for a productive treatment of plurality In the Islamic region the question arises as to how, considering its history and its burden resulting from cultural preconditioning, a productive relation to modernity and one of its main characteristics – plurality – can be created. The implied issue is not that of denying one’s own cultural origin, which would lead only to an abstract confrontation of a new orientation with the predominant historical-cultural legacy; rather it is a matter of building a mental and emotional bridge between this historical legacy and the requirements of modernity. In doing so, the following points may be of some help. First, modifying a consideration by al-Azm, one could say: in view of the ‘pure doctrine’, bridge-building between Islam and plurality, particularly between Islam and pluralism of values, is in principle impossible, but in practice feasible.12 In spite of all orientation to the one ‘text’ as the heart of Islamic heritage, controversial interpretations have been taking place since the seventh century, which, though not openly pluralist with regard to values, could be defined as ‘pluralist’ within their own environment. While essentialized Islam is perceived to be monolithic, especially with respect to pointedly fundamentalist positions, the history of Islam (like, by the way, any other cultural history) has always been characterized by disputes, controversial opinions in theology and law, even by schisms and related deep and often militant antagonisms. Furthermore, Islam from its very beginning has been a multifaceted phenomenon including explicitly formulated, conflicting and, often enough, belligerent positions all of which have relied on, and remain reliant upon, justification through the same documents. Sunna, Shi’ah, sufism and other approaches to the document regarded as revealed disclose that even a religion such as Islam, which ideally sees itself as a unity (one umma), cannot escape pluralist interpretation.13 Understanding this not only as a historic fact but in principle, that is as theologically inescapable, may be an important prerequisite for a productive relationship to pluralism. If its own basis, the divine revelation conveying itself by means of the Arabic language, can be comprehended only with the help of pluralistic and sometimes extremely controversial interpretations, and if this fact could be accepted without

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any reservations or could even be appreciated positively, then plurality could also become a self-evident point of reference for less fundamental aspects of human existence and coexistence. Second, al-Azm asked whether Islam was ‘secularizable’ and answered (as referred to above): dogmatically no, historically yes. Considering the historic yes, he (unlike the above-mentioned first point) did not refer to the controversial plurality within Islamic religion but to the fact that in reality most Islamic societies have gone through a secularization process which for dogmatic reasons is actually inadmissible. Al-Azm regards that process as gradual and creeping: involving the governmental and legal system, the school system and the armed forces as well as other social spheres. The radical break which the Turkish leader Atatürk pushed through in 1924 with regard to a general secularization of Turkey, following France as the laicist model, is atypical rather than representative of the Islamic world. If, however, there were no gradual and creeping secularization, present Islamist movements would be incomprehensible; without far-reaching secularization trends the Islamist accusation of jahiliya, of moral decay of existing Islamic societies, would be completely unfounded. Thus, actual secularization and Islamist protest against this process go hand in hand – a fact which furnishes proof of al-Azm’s thesis. Third, if the possibility is accepted that during Islamic history the predominant patterns of thought on Islamic reason – called hegemonic reason by Arkoun – were aligned with the power holders, that is with the centralized power and its hegemonic demands, then the understanding of this fact and the critique of such a power-related reason could become another starting point for coping with plurality productively. If analysed critically, the dogmatic and reductionist narrowmindedness of conventional Islamic reason (orthodoxy) would become apparent; as well as the fact that the current discourse on the Qur’an unfolded its own semantic power by adjusting itself to the reason of religion and eliminating imaginable alternatives, though some of these alternatives were actually temporarily realized. Above all, the problematic sacralization of sharia and the essentialist denotations attributed to it would become transparent if the historical circumstances and existential experiences which gave rise to sharia were retrospectively disregarded.14 Fourth, since this problem – the critique of Islamic reason within the Islamic religion – has, during the history of Islam, been virulent at times, ‘rational’ positions that remained marginal during this history would have to be ‘rediscovered’ or at least reactivated for current use as historical evidence for alternative interpretations. This process would be of some importance, even though it can be assumed that the positions called rational within the debate on Islam are mostly embedded in theonomous and community-oriented lines of reasoning, that is their advocates were not radical rationalists (in today’s sense). Furthermore, these rationalists, of course, were concerned about abiding by Islamic law, about a decent and

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‘truly Islamic society’ as a substantive concept; they were not concerned about, or dealing with, plurality. In this school of thought, however, reason did play a more prominent role than before and afterwards in orthodoxy. The original group of ‘philosophers of reason’ (for the reasons just mentioned the term should be used only very carefully) included al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes and Ibn Khaldun (who tended this way and without the previously stated reservation); centuries later al-Tahtawi, al-Afghani, M. Abduh, M. R. Rida – and, outside the Arabic–Islamic region in South Asia, M. Iqbal.15 These ‘philosophers’ can be characterized in the same way that Annemarie Schimmel characterized a group of Cairo modernists linked to the journal Manar (the so-called Manar group): ‘Their message has been that Islam is able to adjust to modern civilization with no serious problems; all problems could be solved by newly interpreting Qur’an and tradition.’16 Fifth, and directly connected to point four, those positions which dare to face the conceptual bridging of modernity and Islam are of special help. Obviously this bridging can succeed only after having previously criticized the hegemonic Islamic reason in Arkoun’s sense and, more explicitly, as a result of a detailed critique of those elements of sharia which are not consistent with the requirements of the modern age. Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na’im presented such a critical examination of sharia17 and understands such critique as an advocacy for ‘Islamic reformation’. He considers a critical investigation of sharia as imperative because, on the one hand, sharia first took shape – a different conception is hardly possible – under very specific historical circumstances, which nevertheless had powerful, long-term political effects. On the other hand, a critical debate is regarded as overdue because essential orientations contained in sharia no longer correspond to the existential life experience of today’s people as, for example, the assumption of gender inequality in legal and other respects, doubtful legal procedures, especially in Islamic criminal law, a missing constitutionalist orientation which prevents the bridging from Islam to the rule of law, discrimination against people who are not Muslims within Islamic societies, and further incompatibility of principles of sharia and modern international law, the latter being based on a general renunciation of violence and the aim of the support of fundamental freedoms and human rights. Considering these sensitive points, the question arises whether Islam, and in particular sharia, can be brought together with modern legal developments. Can Islam be brought into agreement with a public order founded on separation of powers? And can fundamental freedoms as, for instance, the freedom of religion in Islam be imagined as a basic value at all? An-Na’im and other authors emphasize that, from the point of view of traditional, established, orthodox sharia, such values are not conceivable at all, they even have to be condemned. And they stress that, without sub-

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stantial self-criticism directed towards a conceptual reorientation, a correspondence or congruence between modern legal principles and Islam is inconceivable. In other words, a modern Islamic society is inconceivable without taking account of the principles of modern constitutionalism.18 Gender inequality can no longer be justified rationally (if there have ever been rational reasons). In pluralizing societies, refusing their basic rights to those people who do not follow one’s own religion amounts to an invitation to civil war. Criminal law has to correspond to the principles of humanity. And relations to other states and societies or cultural regions have to be regulated in accordance with modern requirements of coexistence; thus in principle they have to start from prohibition of violence; and militant religious proselytizing has to be renounced on principle. All these concrete orientations are founded on basic human rights, the respect for and support of which become a matter of national and international peace. Where sharia contradicts them – an-Na’im assumes this for the points above-mentioned – fundamental self-criticism is both necessary and overdue.19 Sixth, striving for an appropriate theology of reform aiming at an ‘Islamic reformation’, an-Na’im refers to the fact that within the Qur’an, Mecca texts differ from Medina texts, not however because they had been revealed in different places and at different times, but mainly because the messages were conveyed to a different audience.20 The Mecca texts were intended for people in general; those from Medina, articulated after the exodus from Mecca (hijra), especially for believers who felt themselves to be in dire straits. Therefore, Mecca texts are more cosmopolitan, while Medina texts stress the difference between inside and outside, between believers and non-believers, between umma and the rest of the world. They were directed towards the mobilization of inner loyalty and the defence against enemies from outside. Therefore, the historical context has to be considered; the very reason that sharia cannot be interpreted as the direct and invariable expression of divine will. However, such contexts change, thus requiring new interpretations for a spiritually alive Islam. For this, all attempts could be useful that work out the historicity and contextuality of the ‘text’ by applying modern linguistic and decontructivist methods.21 In view of the text-fixation and text-weighting of Islamic culture, in particular as far as the revelation is concerned, such methodological endeavours have often been interpreted as a pernicious provocation. Such modern scientific analysis of the text of the Qur’an, however, does not have to lead to its dissolution; it may even result in a concentration of the very religious content of Islam. A parallel can be drawn to such approaches which comprehend the Bible in all its historicity and context. Dealing with the ‘text’ in this way to a certain extent aims at the clearing of historical burdens, at the differentiation between the essence or core on the one hand and the time-bound surface on the other hand. It does not

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disgrace the text by explaining its sacralization as a consequence of political instrumentalization. What it emphasizes especially is the fact that the text had been revealed under specific circumstances in a concrete language to a particular audience. It is necessary to reflect on these circumstances when trying to make clear the difference between the accidental meaning of a statement and its underlying idea. However, such a text-critique hits a sensitive point in the self-image of the umma, which can be seen in the reactions to individual attempts. Quite prominent is the case of Abu Zaid, a Muslim author, whose exact aim is historicizing and contextualizing or, as it is called today, deconstructing the text, in this case the Qur’an.22 The defensiveness against and the persecution of authors such as Abu Zaid show that the ‘inverbation of God’, as it supposedly took place in the Qur’an, induces a scripturalist interpretation and, thus, causes the sacralization of the text and consequently the fight against and denial of all non-scripturalist interpretations. Seventh, an-Na’im starts from the position that a strictly defined secularism will not have any chance in Islamic societies because people of this cultural area still identify with Islam to a considerable degree. According to his understanding, the bridging between Islam and modernity is therefore a matter of ‘Islamic reformation’, not of securalization. Nevertheless, there are, of course, secularist positions stating – as Fuad Zakariya puts it – that secularization is a necessity dictated by reason for every modern society, and a political and social necessity for the current Islamic society:23 while religions aspire to universality, for politics diversity is essential. It is the task of politics to make room for multifaceted opinions and to organize them in a democratic way. So mingling politics and religion inevitably leads to a dead end. Religious ideals are poisoned and corrupted by politics, and vice versa; religion is not capable of regulating a world dominated by secular mechanisms. Moreover, it becomes apparent that freedom and democracy prosper much better under a secular government than under a religious one, because a religious government makes it easy for powerholders to misuse the sacred for justifying their actions, for concealing their errors by pretending infallibility. ‘As soon as politics pretends that absolute truth is its very basis, elementary human rights, in the first line, the freedom of belief and the freedom of thought, are suspended, if not liquidated.’ Secularization refuses to make man or woman into a God or into an unfailing being. It realizes the limits of human reason and knows of the inadequacy of political and social systems. Being aware of this inadequacy, it looks for possible improvements and reforms, and thus strives for a more just and human world. ‘To the contrary the doctrines of those who fight against secularization have a completely different denominator: a deep contempt of man or woman.’ For Islamists the original sin in politics consists in legitimizing the autonomy of individuals’ or groups’ political authority. This contempt of the people and this hatred for democracy find their institutional expression in the principle of consultation

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(shura): consultation replaces democracy. One has, however, to bear in mind that consultation is by no means binding, it lies in the sovereign’s discretion, and it functions from top down, not from bottom up; that is it is not democratically legitimized. One could add to this reasoning that secularization does not – as often assumed – necessarily have to be identified with the French experience of exaggerated laicism. Secularization in the Islamic region could take the German experience as an example, or rather the Scandinavian or the British one (in the latter cases even state churches exist!). If already existing secular states are taken as empirical points of reference, then the pernicious image of the ‘ungodly secular state’ produced by Islamists disappears. States where the basic right of the freedom of religion prevails and a strict separation between state and religion does not exist (what actually exists is functional differentiation including overlaps) could inspire modern solutions in the Islamic region. This, of course, entails taking note of the variability of existing secular states.

Self-blockade by fighting the West Corresponding constructive points of reference are obvious, in particular the fact that Western societies were once in a similar situation. Additionally, in these societies – in contrast to the experiences in the early Christian period in the Middle East – politics, state and religion were mixed up; religion was used for state purposes. A secularization movement would not have been necessary in the West if there had not previously been a symbiosis between politics and religion. Furthermore, the history of the Western constitutional state would not have been so difficult, lengthy, and even painful, if the freedom of religion had been regarded from the very beginning as a natural basic right in the Western Christian culture.24 This was not, however, the case, particularly in the early modern period: Cuius regio, eius religio was the war-prone key word before secularization started! Essential lessons could be learned from a broad range of Western experiences, for example the political instrumentalization of religion, religious wars, constitutional struggles for fundamental freedoms and rights, the sense of tolerance generalizing slowly despite still incompatible ideological positions. The latter include, for example, the inevitability of pluralism in the modern world; institutional and procedural arrangements of conflictregulation as a medium of conflict-management taking into consideration substantial ideological clashes; overlaps and mixed organizational schemes that embody neither the rule of God nor a pure laicist state and so on. It is understandable why such a positive orientation to Western experiences is currently absent in the Islamic world, although such ignorance is quite detrimental. Western culture has long been experienced as the starting point for cultural marginalization. Western programmes in the guise of marxism, socialism, the post-colonial secular state, nationalism and diverse

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doctrines of development have caused Islamic societies to manoeuvre themselves into a blind alley – this is at least their own (though problematic) self-perception. Besides, processes of development which are claimed in the Islamic world to be simply repeating the European experience (which is not true) have not succeeded. The gap between the poor and the wealthy increases; kleptocratism and clientelism spread; authoritarianism and despotism characterize political regimes. Moreover, the West is perceived with its pathologies, but not with the life chances it offers to most people. Thus, the West, entirely understandably if so perceived, provokes defensiveness. Why then adopt modern methods of cognition promoted in the West today, such as historicizing, contextualizing and deconstructivist analytical approaches? Do such approaches not suggest themselves as mental poison, as a further contribution to jahiliya, or moral decay? Superficially, it may be the case. Some findings, however, are inescapable: Islam itself has nolens volens created a plurality of interpretations to the point of schism. Islamic societies, too, are subject to an irreversible process of social mobilization, that is socio-economic and socio-cultural pluralization; and isolating oneself against the influence of a pluralizing world, not only in the West but also in the Far East, is no longer possible. So there is no alternative for the Islamic world other than to face the challenge, that is to find appropriate forms of self-articulation and corresponding institutional arrangements for conflict-regulation in ever more pluralistic societies.25 In doing so, historical experience will repeat itself: progress and retrogression, gradual changes and sudden breaks, nonviolence and militant behaviour will exist side by side. Finally, the point will be to face the civilizing task in a way that finally results in a humane orientation.26 Put simply: monopolistic claims of whatever kind, fighting, and excluding plurality, will not be of help to Islamic civilization.

4

Homelessness versus public order Inquiries on Buddhism

Buddhist philosophy (or religion) still enjoys considerable popularity in many parts of the world; surprisingly enough, an increasing resonance can be observed in the Western hemisphere: Beyond the West, traditional orientations and the marked adaptability of Buddhism to varying local circumstances have played an important role in its survival over a period of more than two and a half thousand years. The attraction Buddhism has to some Westerners seems to be related to the fact that it is seen as a counterpoint to the Western way of thinking and living.1 Buddhism is understood as a ‘peaceful’ and ‘green’ lifeorientation that is not overloaded by metaphysical burdens. Karl Jaspers wrote several decades ago: ‘A glow of peacefulness lies over Asia in spite of all gruesome and awful things that happened and happen there as everywhere else. Buddhism became the only world religion which does not know violence, persecution of heretics, inquisition, witch trials and crusades.’2 This latter observation might be exaggerated, as the last fifteen years in Sri Lanka definitely show another picture – that of a highly influential variety of the Singhalese Buddhism under aggressively militant, even racist premises that are based on a doctrine of superiority. Buddhism, therefore, is obviously not immune to militancy in itself, however paradoxical this observation might be. In this it has the same fate as other life philosophies and religions where a certain faction is instrumentalized by, or itself develops into, a militant political movement.3 More interesting than these observations, however, is the question that will be discussed below, that is the question of the Buddhist image of public order. Since Buddhism has manifested itself in many contradictory varieties the question has certainly to be directed to the original interpretation, to that of Gautama Buddha himself. In spite of all the different accentuations which Buddhism has experienced over the centuries, all these varieties still have a lot in common, a fact that justifies a concentrated look at its original articulation.4 The core question that arises could be formulated as follows. Has Buddhism, being emphatically focused on the redemption of the individual, a clear image of a public order that is congenial to its basic orientation? And

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moreover, is it possible to discern images in Buddhism that form a constructive argumentative bridge between its original orientation and the demands of the modern world, especially the pluralistic composition of that world? In other words, does Buddhism contain a political theory and is it open to the challenges of modern political theory which has been struggling for a long time with the imperatives of coexistence in pluralistically fissured societies? These questions are highly interesting for Buddhist-based societies undergoing the process of modernization, but also for the intercultural dialogue which is focused on finding foundations for peaceful coexistence under the premises of a politicized pluralistic world.

Homelessness as an ideal Buddhism stands for the teachings of redemption (soteriology): the life of the individual – it implies – is full of suffering, but there is a way out of the suffering and disaster in life. It can be found by detaching oneself from the world and by overcoming self-centredness. If both are achieved, the endless cycle of suffering and reincarnation can be ended. The individual changes into a Buddha, into an enlightened being. The self-cognition of Buddha, his enlightenment under the fig tree, is generally summarized in four sentences, ‘the four noble truths’.5 The first truth emphasizes the fact that the human existence in accordance with its nature is full of suffering (dukkha). All events in life are marked by suffering, easily seen even by a superficial observer. Birth, illness, death, again and again the same restless life and death, endless: this is the basic suffering. Life is furthermore full of grief, of disappointments, of hate. Even joy is poisoned as it is connected with worries, or it means suffering for others, or it is based on circumstances that create suffering; this dubious joy cannot cause release or at least satisfy our search for happiness.6 Everything, moreover – the world and the life of the individual – is subject to unsteadiness, that is change and transitoriness, which is the reason for suffering. The human being wants to cling to conditions, things and other people as they are familiar and offer security. But this clinging becomes the onset of suffering: the wish to keep a firm hold on everything that is familiar is doomed to failure as all these things are transitory: they are subject to constant change. Change is part of life and, thus, inevitable. The second truth describes the creation of suffering: at its root lies desire (‘thirst’) and blindness (‘ignorance’). This world seduces the human being to cling to life as soon as it stimulates his [sic] senses and with it determines the lines of his conscious-

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ness. The more his thirst intensifies and the more tempting his desires become, the more will he identify himself with the world, the more deeply rooted will his ineradicable conviction become that he is a personality and not only the chance sum of automatic events, and that it is his true self that stands behind every empirical occurrence of the world giving it its cohesion. If the human being succumbs to this error he clings all the more to the routine that connects him to all that is in this world and which seems to give his existence consistency and wealth. He assumes to be able to retain and rescue himself by clinging to this very world with the intention of obtaining joy and happiness and, if possible, even to escape death somehow. But this only leads to more bonds and an inevitable repetition of reincarnations.7 In spite of stating ever-present suffering and in spite of the knowledge of its origin the third noble truth says the following: it is possible to be released from this suffering. The elimination of suffering signifies the achievement of a condition which no longer shows any characteristics of our empirical thinking. It is a condition in which blindness is eliminated, in which desire is silenced; there is no reincarnation and no creation, no inconstancy, no transience, no death. What remains is a condition of complete strength, pureness, peace, immortality, bliss. It is the seclusion from the world, the far island, the place that offers refuge and shelter. In Buddhism this condition is called nirvana. Nirvana is the opposite of the world, and therefore it cannot be positively and definitely described. It is the absolute in contrast to our composed world; it is the transcendence, the completely different, that cannot be comprehended and explained in terms and expressions of this world. Nirvana is the condition of total liberation from defilement and every link to the world, liberation from ignorance and from desire, removal from the world and dissolving of the empirical person emptied of its own self.8 In the fourth noble truth the road is shown which leads to nirvana. It is the path subdivided into eight steps that leads to the elimination of suffering. It demands right opinion (right insight), right motive (right way of thinking), right speech, right behaviour, right way of living, right effort, right attention and right immersion (right meditation). The important issue is to see things as they are, as true as possible. Furthermore, it is necessary to become conscious of one’s own motives that determine the individual behaviour. Right behaviour means never to act so that another being is harmed. The means for living should be gained without damage to others. Right effort can be seen as intellectual endeavour, as the cultivation of thought and sentiments. Right attention and right immersion are

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interpreted with the consciousness of emotional and mental processes, with self-knowledge, self-realization and spirituality, with training of consciousness, that is with mediation as a means for liberation. Mediation and immersion lead the human being to enlightenment after having passed its most important stages. The first stage of immersion liberates him from desire; the second focuses on the concentration of the mind which gains an interior unity by the elimination of thought and consideration; the third stage of immersion concentrates on the overcoming of any joy and any concrete feeling; the fourth stage finally leads to the disappearance of well-being that is due to the consciousness of the body and the inner sense organ. At the end there remain only the pure enlightenment, the pure and empty consciousness and the undisturbed equanimity. In this condition the Buddhist reaches the highest enlightenment in a mystic intuition and acquires absolute wisdom.9 With the eightfold path to the right life, especially with its seventh and eighth component regarding the training of the consciousness, an arduous way to redemption is predestined. As already shown by this short outline it is a path full of requirements. It does not surprise, therefore, that in Buddhism this path was originally left only to monks. It is, therefore, also correct to state that the real Buddhist is the mendicant monk (bhiksu) who dedicates most of his time to meditation and immersion and purifies his mind from any kind of defilement, blindness and desire. Poverty, celibacy and limitless peaceableness are the basic principles of his life. It was also the task of monks to preach the Buddhist doctrine, to explain it and to introduce the novices to the methods of meditation.10 The path of redemption requires, therefore, ideally, homelessness, which meant that future monks had to leave house and home, wife and children, also the extended family common in those times and, by joining the community of monks, to abandon the world completely in order to find in this homelessness a way out of all suffering and disaster in life. However, ‘The human being enters this state of homelessness in order to detach himself from the world, not to remodel it.’11 In the original Buddhism remarkable accentuations can be found. The extensive suffering in life, in which the entire world including the human being is involved, is not hermetically sealed. There is a tiny opening – a break that opens a highly arduous path of redemption which liberates from greed, hate and blindness. Furthermore, in spite of denying the I and the self, as they are without substance and therefore remain a fiction, human beings are on their own with regard to the path of redemption. Meditation and immersion are highly individual efforts. The escape from the circle of suffering reincarnations, that is the enlightenment and redemption, can be achieved only on account of these individual efforts.

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Thus, the individual effort is demanded in order finally to overcome the self and its egocentrism. Even if everything is overshadowed by the premises of transitoriness, of frailty, of non-permanence, of futility, at the end of the path of redemption there is the chance of permanence and peace: nirvana. Against the danger of being overwhelmed by the world and its chronic entanglements stands the possibility of withdrawing the self from this very world.12 So far, so good. But is the world now left to itself?

Society and world – simply residual categories? First of all it has to be stated that the monks do not lead a life of complete isolation as they live within a spiritual community: the sangha, the community of the cloister. With regard to sociality this is of paradigmatic significance in Buddhism.13 The community is open to everybody, a fact that has a fundamental, even revolutionary importance in societies based on castes. Equality, therefore, is one of its basic principles. The inner organization is built not on authoritarian power structures but on deliberation and consensual decisions. The sangha is, therefore, a selfadministrative community of equivalent human beings which signals the potential equality of all people. However, it cannot be overlooked that the sangha community is not self-reliant but a mendicant order. The monks depend for their subsistence on the alms of other people who do not have the privilege of concentrating on the individual path of redemption in their present existence. Intended or not by Gautama Buddha himself, a spiritual aristocracy characteristic in original Buddhism was therefore established. If the sangha concept can consequently be derived from the philosophical assumptions of Buddhism, the question remains how the rest of the society should be constructed, and especially by what public order it should be defined. The first thought that comes to mind is that the sangha, even if it is withdrawn from the world and focuses on the individual redemption of its members, is still a model for the remaining society, that is for most of the people. A positive influence should radiate from the sangha, thus transmitting its own life principles to the non-sangha society. It can furthermore be assumed that the sangha acts in an advisory capacity. On its path to enlightenment it can more simply and effectively than the other members of society transmit congenial orientations of coexistence, even if its realization beyond the sangha community remains imperfect. Following on from this, the thought is not unrealistic that this society should, even if only in tendency, be organized like the sangha community itself: harmonious, consensual, consulting. And the consideration that in spite of the principle of equality of humankind such a society could be led by a genuinely wise and kind ruler is a natural conclusion. This ruler

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should be inspired by the Buddhist doctrine and act in accordance with it. He, too, will have to acknowledge that the cosmos has its own order, its own law to which he, as everything else, is subject. His tasks will include modern measures for the security of public order, which are to be executed in the ‘right way of thinking’. The ‘law of determined formation’ already teaches that violence and criminality can be stemmed only if the ruler succeeds in counteracting or eliminating poverty as, according to this law, poverty produces theft, theft leads to counteraction by arms, use of arms leads to killing, and killing produces lies. If therefore poverty can be eliminated, this vicious circle can be thwarted. The main issue is to supply the required material necessities that enable people to lead a Buddhist life. The endeavours of the ruler, therefore, have to concentrate on an enlightened welfare policy. If that endeavour fails, the ruler will have to be replaced in order to maintain a well-organized community. The chances of ruling such a community successfully can be increased by taking specific precautions. They include, first of all, regular and wellattended council meetings: Autocratic rule would correspond to egocentrism; deliberation, however, would reflect the complex character of reality. Second, as in the sangha so in a larger community: peaceable consent as the desirable orientation of action is emphasized. A third point would be to stick to dependable laws: everything which has been proved should not be altered. Respect for old people, aversion to violence against women, maintenance of monuments and fostering of traditions as well as protection and hospitality of strangers in the country are further points of orientation in successful ruling.14 In this way a symbiotic arrangement of successful ruling is ideally created. The ruler distinguishes himself by excellent personal qualities, especially on account of his selflessness, his uprightness and his inclination and engagement for justice, equity and fairness. He protects the community of monks (sangha) and seeks their advice. The shining example of the ruler and the sangha is conveyed to the people. This good behaviour can be expected especially if the ruler takes care of the well-being of broad masses: he helps the people and the people offer him their respect – as long as their well-being is guaranteed. If the ruler becomes egoistic, and if the people fall back into poverty, the well-balanced arrangement between ruler, sangha and people collapses. In an ideal case this could be thought of as the foundation of a dhamma-oriented society. In a nutshell it would mean a moral community, the inner spirituality of which could be assumed to run along the same lines; at the same time congenial behaviour in the individual as well as in the collective would be observed. To put it differently: the interests of the individual and the interests of a group do not necessarily have to be contradictory for a Buddhist, it must not be a situation of ‘either, or’. The latter is only the case in a society where

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the people have not yet found their way out of ignorance and therefore still feel cut off from the whole.15 However, the social and political reality did not as a rule demonstrate this ideal situation. The outlined relation between ruler, sangha and people is based on idealistic assumptions. It is more realistic to suppose that both ruler and ruling class are egotistic and do not deserve respect; that the people are exploited and do not benefit from the paternalistic welfare policy, with the result that they withdraw legitimacy from the ruler; that the sangha tends to follow the more powerful, thus replacing enlightened deliberation by the production of power ideology.16 It seems obvious that, seen historically, the relations between the ruler (state) and the sangha have been extremely varied. A conformity of both can be observed in Lamaism in Tibet, in the fusion of state and sangha in the northern Wei dynasty of China especially between 460 and 464 as well as in Korea between 550 and 664. In another case a legal authority over the sangha can be determined during the Chinese Tang dynasty with demonstrations of support and regulation but also of persecution. There were times where the sangha was successful in warding off the demands of the Chinese emperor, thus maintaining its own autonomy. A mutual abandonment of interference between state and sangha can be observed in India before Ashoka declared Buddhism as the most tolerant of state religions.17 Critical Buddhists claim that well-meaning kings have been a rarity in history and that the sangha more often than not lost its significance as the moral figurehead of society. The result was then a profitable collaboration with the powerful, a development that obviously mostly took place when the beggar monks started to lead a settled form of existence.

How should Buddhism react to modernity? The message of Buddha to humankind consists of a practical doctrine of redemption. Its main theme is the redemption from aspects of being which cause suffering; the release from desire, hate, blindness, stubbornness, stupidity and complacency. Buddha wanted to teach about the withdrawal from worldliness that leads to enlightenment and redemption. ‘It was no way the intention of Buddha to develop a philosophy for the study of worldly interrelations that once again would only enchain the mind with new bonds.’18 It is, therefore, only logical and comprehensible, in the light of the doctrine of redemption, that especially in its original interpretation Buddhism did not have any feeling for policy-theoretical or state-philosophical questions. This fact is also documented in other interpretations and analyses of Buddhism: in the secondary literature, in which no discussions can be found on a public order congenial to Buddhism.19 If they exist at all they

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are mainly focused on new political conditions of a traditional society and not on a modernizing environment in Buddhist communities. It is now possible to forge an argumentative link between Buddhism and public order in the context of traditional society. This is possible, as in other high mythologies and religions, through the idealistic construction of a good and benevolent ruler who walks the path to enlightenment; a ruler who deserves legitimacy as long as the ruler is able to guarantee the welfare of the people. In addition, the community of monks, the sangha, can offer informative orientation to the ruler as well as to the people, orientation which the people, busy on the treadmill of everyday life, cannot find by themselves. Even if this construct is freed from idealism it cannot be applied to modern aspects of life. These are determined by socially mobile, pluralistically organized, politicizable and politicized societies. All those drives the Buddhist doctrine recognizes in an individual – its being driven by a variety of aspirations (samskaras) such as desires, inclinations, interests, intentions and personal wishes – can also and all the more so be found in interest groups of modern societies, which organize themselves in parties and lobbyist units. The modern political background is defined by exactly this variety of wants. Walking the ‘eightfold path to the right life’ at an individual level will hardly allow the overcoming of this variety of endeavours at the collective level in the political sphere, even if the purification of the people from compulsive instincts might be desirable. All that the community of monks can achieve within a lifetime or, most likely, within several existences after reincarnations (enlightenment and redemption) remains somewhat unlikely and unreflected with regard to the samskaras within the public sphere. The original Buddhism cannot be made responsible for this argumentative gap. It assumes a traditional environment and takes its relatively static general outlines as more or less given, despite the facts of continuous reproduction and death. This enables Buddhism to concentrate its reflections on the individual path of enlightenment – a fact that was overcome in later varieties of Buddhism, especially in Mahayana Buddhism, without, however, turning the construction of public order into a topic of thorough discussion. This gap in the argument remains symptomatic for contemporary Buddhism. Even if it is problematic this fact is perfectly understandable: a doctrine that concentrates so intensely on the enlightenment of the individual and the liberation from entanglements and wants can hardly get involved in constitutional discussions, into institutional limitations or in the organizational management of collective endeavours via parties and lobbyist groups. The original programme – the redemption of the individual from the forced cycle of reincarnation, and the examination of the construction of the public order which is determined by a proliferating variety of wants that have to be channelled – are completely contradictory points of view.

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The first requires the renunciation of the world that creates the variety of wants – a renunciation that is conceivable and also practically possible, at least for a limited number of human beings. The second, the world of endeavours that manifests itself in collective interest groups, is an inevitable reality that cannot be eliminated. If this reality is not accepted and coped with, the Buddhist doctrine serves only as a means to satisfy purely private wishes. This problem has at least been recognized in contemporary Buddhist literature. Sulak Sivaraksa writes in his ground-breaking book on a Buddhist version for the renewal of today’s society: In making Buddhism more relevant for the contemporary world, it is important not to compromise on the essentials, such as the ethical precepts (sila). However, these ethical precepts need to be rethought in order to make sense of life in contemporary societies. Buddhists traditionally have lived in rather simple societies, largely agrarian, as is still often the case in Southeast and South Asia. In such societies, ethical issues may also be simple. One can say, ‘I am a good person. I don’t kill. I don’t steal. I don’t commit adultery. I don’t lie.’ But, when the society becomes much more complex, these simple interpretations of ethical norms don’t work so well.20 Sivaraksa’s discourse communicates in a most sympathetic manner a philanthropic socio-political engagement: in the political sphere he pleads against dogmatism in the self-manifestations of Buddhists. In accordance with Buddhist tradition he rejects any form of violence. He declares himself against the accumulation of worldly goods as long as millions of people are hungry. One of his central issues is sympathy as well as true speech and right behaviour. The environment has to be treated with care. As can be expected, Sivaraksa’s orientations are gentle and green, but in his examination of the modern environment and in his endeavours to create a modern and humane society he does not present any specific ideas with respect to the construction of a public order congenial to Buddhist thinking. This difficulty might be due to the fact that such ideas cannot be elaborated without considering an institutional arrangement. Institutions, however, are bound to be durable, fixed and mostly oligarchic structures. This fact is seen worldwide. Buddhist thinking, however, considers the world as an open process. It does not know a durable substance: no entities, only the momentary existence. Institutions, however, especially if they are stable and durable, stand for ‘substantiality’. This is especially valid for constitutions that are able to offer a long-lasting management of conflicts by channelling and cushioning the samskaras in the public space. Thus, it must be assumed that for social-politically engaged modern Buddhist authors one or other variant of a democratic constitutional state

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of Western design is taken as a desirable political frame for their own societies, even if this is not explicitly articulated. Where this attitude towards the structuring of public order is registered, and with it a bridge between Buddhism and modernity, this correlation can from a pragmatic point of view be seen as an acceptable solution. The outlined gap in the argument remains, however, due to the initial self-articulation of the Buddhist dogma of redemption. Therefore it can be stated that Buddhism does not have a congenial political theory. This causes its weakness, and it reinforces its tendency to follow the powers that be, a fact that was often observed in the history of Buddhist societies.21 This position, however, favours one of the strong points in Buddhism: a high social-political engagement of the individual or of Buddhist dissidents, who stand for the core values of Buddhist life philosophy, but also for the values of modernity: for equality and solidarity as well as for compassion and freedom.22

Conclusions The problem described is not only one of Buddhism in societies that are recognized as Buddhist. It is of general significance for all Buddhist people, even if they live in the Western hemisphere. Just as in countries with a Buddhist origin, questions arise as to whether the path of redemption and the existence as a citizen, or better as state citizen, are compatible. The difference between Western countries and those in which Buddhism is of quantitative significance can be seen in the fact that Western societies are as a rule based on fixed political and legal premises: Buddhist people are regarded as normal citizens in a democratic constitutional state, where it is obviously not possible not to be a citizen. But they evaluate governmental activities according to their own lines of reasoning, that of the original Buddhist thinking. They know the difference between the ‘wheel of power’ and the ‘wheel of love’, and they know that only the latter can thoroughly determine the world of spiritual communities. They see, therefore, no alternative other than to get involved in power. The activities of the state are accepted or criticized according to the degree they correspond to individual moral ideas of Buddhists. Does the state promote moral order? Does the state consider the wants and the wishes of all the people? Does the state promote their welfare? Answers to these questions determine the behaviour of Buddhist people in Western societies. But they are raised within a predetermined political framework in which the plurality of endeavours, the relevant public samskaras, are not doubted but rather are widely accepted.23 Will the development in the core Buddhist countries also be determined by this conceptually unjustified, but in practice already realized, compromise between ‘homelessness’ and public order? With regard to Buddhism this question will remain an open one.

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A specialist on Asian philosophy and especially on Buddhism, Thomas Cleary, has formulated this remaining, probably insoluble problem as follows: If the idea of competition finds fertile ground within institutional structures this, in the end, will always lead to a failure of realizing a lively Buddhism, no matter what impression reaches the outside world. There exists in a way a leak, a breaking point which does not allow a concentration on the truth.24 A socially mobile, politicized world, however, cannot be conceived without competitive ideas or without managing conflicts within constitutionally accepted institutional structures. Therefore, a problem will remain for Buddhism which is far from being merely marginal.

5

From spiritual to modern plurality? Hinduism at a crossroads

Spiritual plurality Experts widely agree on the characterization of Hinduism as ‘the most multifaceted religious entity currently known’.1 This spiritual ‘broadmindedness’ even induced one observer to call the term ‘Hinduism’ a misnomer: The word Hinduism is not a self-description of an Indian religion but rather an invention of Europeans. It was supposed to label the religion of the Hindus, but unfortunately those who coined the term had insufficient knowledge about the religion. It was not realized rapidly enough that they had several religions. As a result Hinduism has subsequently been written and talked about as one of the major world religions. For some time it was thought that Hinduism would really exist. Today it is clear, though there is an unwillingness to admit it, that Hinduism is nothing more than an orchid cultivated by European scholarship. It is much too beautiful to be weeded, but it nevertheless remains a synthetic plant: it does not exist in nature.2 A point in favour of this ‘shocking claim’ is that there is no dogma, belief or ritual which all Hindus share: ‘In India religious beliefs and rituals can differ from one village to the next’, another observer states. He emphasizes that it is impossible to identify a particular historical figure as the founder of Hinduism. As a result it is impossible to draw parallels to Jesus in Christianity, Muhammad in Islam or Buddha in Buddhism. In contrast to Christianity and Islam where the Bible and the Qur’an constitute fixed points of reference, Hinduism is based not on a single script but on many which convey no uniform doctrine.3 Since Hinduism presents itself as the sum of a number of religions, It is up to the individuals whether they are atheists, pantheists or theists, whether they regard Vishnu or Shiva as the ruler of the universe etc. Correspondingly, there is no generally binding theory about the genesis of the world or its material or immaterial components,

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about the nature of the soul or about its relation to the body etc. Additionally behaviour is not subject to fixed rules that are equally compelling for all. For this reason there is immense diversity in religious practice, just to mention some of many variations which could be used as examples: there are Hindus who eat meat and others who are vegetarians; there are some who have ecstatic orgies and others who abandon themselves to the highest asceticism.4 And this spiritual plurality is not only visible from the outside. ‘Hindus put emphasis on this characteristic of their religion and cite the unlimited diversity of objects of worship and the multitude of means permitted to gain salvation.’5 The observation of this polymorphism within Hinduism has recently been highlighted in the reform-oriented interpretation of Hinduism by Ram Adhar Mall. For his interpretation he chose a theme from one of the oldest scripts of Hinduism, the Rig Veda: ‘The True is the One. Wise men put it differently.’6 This means that within Hinduism, as Mahatma Gandhi once said, in principle there are different ways to attain truth and realize God. Besides this Hindus do not apply this broadminded view only to their own religion (which incidentally had the effect of preventing any largescale intra-Hinduist religious wars); they also relate to other religions on the basis of the same perspective. In this spirit Mall says: Every believer is allowed to believe in being on the right path. It is however presumptuous, arrogant and blasphemous to believe that another is on the wrong one. Believe and let believe, pray and let pray are fundamental attitudes which animate the ecumenical spirit among the world religions. This attitude itself is however not a religion; it conveys to the mind a spirit of tolerance which ought to motivate, lead and guide all religions.7 Thus, a distinction must be made between equality of religions and regarding each as being of the same value. From the Hindu perspective this means that spiritual plurality and tolerance become synonyms. There is therefore a clear distinction between Hinduism and those religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam which have an inherent exclusionary claim to truth.8 Taking such a premise as the basis, the question has to be asked whether a bridge exists between this remarkably pluralist orientation of Hinduism and modern plurality.

Modern plurality? At first glance, such bridging seems simple because modern plurality is founded on a multitude of interpretations of ‘truth’. This multitude,

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however, is understood not only as an inevitable spiritual fact but also as a social fact. Creating public order which guarantees peaceful coexistence, despite a plurality of ideas, truths, beliefs, ideologies and projects which result from a social situation of modernity, becomes the decisive problem. As a result it must be noted that conventional Hinduism is, unsurprisingly and without reproach, deficient; a characteristic which it has in common with all traditional cultures.9 However, even for modern Hinduism, particularly in an environment of modernization, it is still true what was said about historic Hinduism: ‘Differences are tolerated but also hierarchical. [Hindu] Tolerance takes for granted that the dominant hierarchical order is accepted.’10 Hierarchical order signifies the caste system that is still a striking characteristic of the Hindu cultural area.11 A caste system in which the idea of social inequality of human beings crystallizes and is reinforced institutionally is, however, the opposite of an open society based on social mobility that is representative of modern plurality. It is therefore possible to go along with the formulation of Mall: It has often been claimed that one has to belong to a caste to be a Hindu. This interpretation of Hinduism is incorrect because originally castes simply constituted different labels with respect to professions. Many neo-Hindu doctrines explicitly deny the membership of a caste as essential to Hinduism. One can be a Hindu without caste system. Besides the Vedic beliefs, there are other convictions binding those who profess Hinduism: the belief in the immortality of soul, the karmic law, and the possibility of some form of redemption.12 Nevertheless the historical and actual situation is obvious: for Hindus cosmos is a systematic whole in which, as von Glasenapp emphasizes, the living beings which fill the universe are, from birth on, strictly divided according to their capabilities and functions: a lion is assigned different duties and rights from a cow, a god different ones from a human, a spirit different ones from those living in hell, etc.13 Furthermore, humans are divided from each other. At the head of the human race are their highest representatives, Brahmins, followed by less important ‘warriors’ (kshatriyas), who are then followed by farmers (vaishyas). These three groups are supported by a fourth caste, the shudras, who include the casteless as well as persons regarded as pariahs or ‘untouchables’ carrying on trades thought of as dishonest or impure. Experts on the caste structure emphasize that these four main castes subdivide into more than three thousand sub-castes.14 While, as Mall states, the caste system is not ideally constitutive for Hinduism or at least for being a Hindu, Hinduism is in reality inconceivable without the social order of castes, its inherent notion of hierarchy and

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ascription of worth, its attribution of purity and impurity and the corresponding division of labour. Obviously in reality there is a major discrepancy between spiritual tolerance – a characteristic of the Hindu faith which has allowed it to absorb new spiritual ideas easily – and social intolerance whose basis is the strict classification of people according to ascriptive values; rigid social stratification directed against open plurality. The facts therefore seem to be paradox: In Hinduism, as stated by von Glasenapp, believers are allowed greater freedom of belief than in any other metaphysical system. The only demand of its adherents is the belief in an ethical world-order which is continuously self-regulated through the consequential power of guilt and merit, the karmic law. Whether Hindus imagine this ethical world-order as an automatically acting eternal law, or whether they simply assume that god manifests itself either as a metaphysical being or as some type of physical being, or as a mixture of these conceptions, is left to their discretion. The same is true for the decision as to whether one of the numerous deities of the pantheons of Vishnu or Shiva or indeed one of the other gods is superior to all the others. Furthermore, no institution dictates that Hindus should believe that there are eternal spiritual monads with particular qualities, that the material world developed out of a primary spirit, out of primary matter or from atoms. There is no dictate that good works or knowledge or the love of god will lead to salvation, or that the state of the redeemed is characterized by transfigured sublimation or by the complete sacrifice of individual identity. This broadminded point of view concerning metaphysical issues, however, is opposed by rigid caste rules that mould every detail of every person and deeply affect all aspects of their personal lives.15 But is this really a paradox? Or does a symbiotic relation exist between spiritual tolerance and social intolerance which is based on the power structure of Hindu society? Social reality in past and present India suggests such a thesis. It is also underlined by the early rise of anti-Brahmin reformatory movements such as Jainism and Buddhism: neither of these acknowledged the spiritual superiority of the Brahmans, the highest Aryan class, or the caste system, although this attitude did not undermine the astonishing survival and persistence of this system.16

The challenge In his interpretation cited above, Mall illustrated how it is possible to imagine Hinduism without the burden of the caste system. What he wishes to elaborate are the ideas from Hinduism which could ideally be included in ‘world ethics’. These include particularly the ‘idea of the One having many names’, that is the sense of spiritual plurality within which there is distinction without discrimination.17 So far, so good. But is it possible simply to abstract from the ‘plague of castes’ (as Mall puts it)? It is impossible to conceive of modern plurality without the premise of

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human equality. However, the reality of Hindu society is that such equality is unknown; each caste has a superiority complex in relation to their caste inferiors. Society is dominated by inclusion and exclusion and is defined by a code of conduct and corresponding ritual order specific to each caste. A person is a Hindu not through choice, but rather by birth; each person is born within a specific, exclusively defined caste and grows up observing its social conventions.18 Phenomena which can currently be observed in India, such as the increasingly radical social plurality resulting from mobilization and politicization, and the other far-reaching challenges of modernization, have yet to be dealt with by Hinduism. However, the Hindu world will not be able to escape from the pressure resulting from the social and political problems caused by these processes. The tactic of avoidance has been successful up to now for various reasons: 75 per cent of the Indian population lives in the countryside where the caste system still functions; the caste system has become leaky only in the cities. The secular state, part of the colonial heritage adopted by the first generation of leaders of independent India, constitutionally grants the equality of both caste and casteless Hindus. Within this framework, the social conflict inherent in the distinction of caste and casteless Hindus was politically cushioned by, for example, the still hotly debated quota system, which works in favour of the latter (‘positive discrimination’). The effect of such regulations, however, remained limited. Furthermore, this secular state is currently under attack from Hindu fundamentalism whose representatives comprehend the constitutional and political concessions to the non-Hindu community as a danger to hindutva, a politicized Hindu identity which aggressively insists on the moral superiority of Hindus as against all other groups.19 It is doubtful whether in the long term Hinduism will be able to get rid of the structures, mechanisms and above all the solid interests of social exclusivism. (This is the main aim of Hindu reformists.) The idea of Hinduism without castes, however, is up to date in every respect. Whether spiritual plurality can aid the attempt to achieve a breakthrough either of the idea or of the reality of modern plurality is, in view of internal cultural conflict created by changes in social reality, one of the most interesting and urgent questions for Hinduism. The current political climate in India gives cause more for concern than for hope. Radicalization is to be observed within the conflicting parties: that is the consolidation of fundamentalist Hindu positions and a weakening of secularist and modernist ones.20 This process is also evident in non-Hindu groups: particularly in Muslim groups who are less familiar with the secular state for dogmatic reasons; in Sikh groups whose fundamentalist representatives intend to found an independent ‘Khalistan’, and finally in Christian groups in the north-east of India who also insist on their own identity (‘Christistan’).21 Where the mentality and political power of the conflicting parties moves towards fundamentalist positions, escalation is liable to occur rapidly.22 Today conflict is

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particularly marked in the militant confrontations between Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists.23 The process which is long overdue may appear to be a contradiction in terms; that is the detachment of Hinduism from the caste system. This would be tantamount to destroying the traditional power system. It would be a process undertaken by Hinduism against its own tradition, which is marked by a symbiosis between Hinduism and the caste system. The spiritual plurality conception would have to undergo modernization which would lead to conflict with the position of fundamentalists who claim the superiority of Hindus. There is, moreover, a dangerous threat: the marginalization of a quarter of the population through the rigid social order (the caste system), which up until now may have cushioned the effects of modernization, may in the future contribute directly to the escalation of social conflict. Eventually the mass of the casteless (two hundred million people) will not accept tradition and caste-bound conditions.24 A sober analysis demands the following statement: increasing modernization, social mobilization and politicization have led to conditions of structural and cultural violence which, as they currently exist in India, cannot be stabilized in the long run. Owing to cumulative conflicts, this structural and cultural violence will, sooner or later, probably become physical violence. When this happens, the paragon of spiritual plurality – tolerance – may be destroyed along with the widely spread Hindu ideal of non-violence (ahimsa). This dialectic inherent in Hindu society draws attention to the fact that Hinduism is at a crossroads because it represents a more and more outdated social structure. Therefore, attempts to reform Hinduism are overdue for spiritual and political reasons.

‘Casteless’ Hinduism How could such an attempt, which was guided by the basic principles of Hinduism, but which avoided the trap of a socially intolerant caste system, be constituted? Recently Arvind Sharma has made a relevant suggestion.25 His considerations start from the explicit premise that the modern world consists of societies of people who are literate, geographically and socially mobile, and have a life expectancy of about three times that of people in traditional societies. For Sharma these characteristics are important because they enable him to reinterpret the original idea of karma and rebirth and, thus, to detach the Hindu lifestyle from the conventional caste system. The central aspect of caste membership is that it is determined by birth and remains the same until death. The karma of the previous life determines the caste of the present one; although it is possible to change castes during the course of several lives, it is by and large unchangeable during a single lifetime. In accordance with this conception, the transition to another caste happens at birth and is thus the determining factor for the new life.

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In his reinterpretation Sharma starts from the assumption that life was short in premodern societies, and possibilities of influencing its form and thus accumulating good karma were limited. So a fatalistic interpretation of the idea of karma was more likely; the classification of people by (re)birth and the resulting confrontation with lifelong (though lasting only a few years) consequences was inevitable. Birth determined one’s caste, and there was little chance to escape this fate. Objective circumstances made the concept of karma static. Now, Sharma advocates making it dynamic. The possibility of social mobility, combined with sufficient effort, makes it possible to realize several ‘lives’ during one lifetime and therefore to escape the predetermined social status; that is to escape the lifelong caste restriction. Contrary to the inexorable constraints of the traditional static concept of karma, this dynamic concept emphasizes the free will. This means that the individual can overcome not only the status predetermined by birth but also the status throughout life, through continuing activity and increasing competence, continually overcoming the level previously reached. According to this conception of karma, in a socially mobile society rebirths happen during the course of the same life: so that karma, caste and the idea of human predestination by birth are detached, without needing to give up the idea of karma itself. Sharma writes: I suggest that, for our times, we consider all the four varnas [castes] as contained in all of us . . . The idea is that all varnas are contained in every individual from now on instead of every individual being comprised within only one of the varnas.26 This idea of ‘internalization of the four castes in every single individual’ includes a fourfold obligation for every Hindu. As a Brahmin every Hindu has to be, at least to some extent, familiar with the holy books and rites of Hinduism; as a kshatriya one is liable to military service and has to participate in the political process; as a vaishya one has to learn and carry on a profession; and as a shudra eventually one has to do some kind of manual work or service. Sharma’s considerations suggest a further reinterpretation. Beside caste system and human predetermination by birth, a further characteristic of Hindu thought is the notion of so-called stages of life (ashramas). According to this notion, ‘man’ should pass through four stages during his life: first the stage of a student, then that of the father of a family, of a hermit and of a wandering ascetic. Again Sharma’s point is to make the basic idea dynamic. He proposes to relate the four ashramas to one day, that is to understand each day as a whole life. In the earliest morning, for example, one studies the holy books; in the morning and afternoon one earns one’s living; the evening is spent together with one’s loved ones; at night one meditates in order to free oneself from the distractions of the day. In case

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this relation of the life stages to one single day seems too radical, they can also be related to one week or to another period of time. Sharma regards it as imperative that an originally static central concept of Hinduism – that of fixed stages during the life span – is, without giving up the basic intention, made dynamic through reinterpretation. The first interpretation in particular should deprive the conventional caste system of its foundation. Both interpretations are distinguished by taking a basic concern of a particular philosophy of life seriously and therefore do not abandon it. The attempt may appear slightly artificial or (even) far-fetched. However, something which speaks for it is the fact that this kind of reinterpretation may prove to be more promising than frontal attacks for the decoupling of Hinduism and the caste system. If this is the case it will also be a more effective method of bringing about the reform of Hinduism (as it is currently practised). Whether these ideas for reinterpretation will be able to provide the necessary impetus to reform, or whether they are too politically ‘lightweight’, only the future will show.

6

Interim observations

If one looks at political history as it really took place in traditional cultures (including Europe’s premodern history), then one finds that generally the different forms of governance were all variations of autocracy, defined as a form of rule ‘in which the jurisdiction substantially lies with one single representative, who rules arbitrarily, but not necessarily tyrannically, with neither personal nor institutional restrictions, and in particular without the participation, assent or control of the subjects’.1 The real historical dynamics of autocracy encompassed the possibility of extreme despotism and tyranny, but also transitions to oligarchic arrangements. ‘Democratic’ rule, understood as rule by public assembly, only existed once in the city-states of ancient Greece (whereby only the full citizens counted as the demos, but not the majority, who were without rights).2 However, in all traditional cultures there were ideal concepts of ‘good rule’, based in the main on the notion of a ‘good ruler’, who had a duty to provide for ‘the people’. The good ruler was seen as the representative of an overarching order that each culture interpreted differently. In India and East Asia this order was conceived as cosmic (dharma, dao); to prophetic religions it was divinely manifest, especially (although not indisputedly) with regard to the Islamic concept of sharia. Equally, each culture had its own concepts as to what constituted a failed ruler – the ruler’s failure to fulfil the duty to provide security and welfare, susceptibility to corruption, the dangers and realities of tyranny – and on the basis of these ideas they also had concepts of justice and equity, and sometimes even the duty to depose a ruler who had yielded to the temptations of self-gain, wastefulness and despotism. As already explained, such notions were explicitly articulated in China, although they were extremely controversial. In ancient Indian thought, disorder, bad harvests, storms and similar phenomena (especially famines) were thought to be the consequence of behaviour contrary to dharma. The king could be banished and put to death in such cases, and replaced by one more fortunate. In the original form of Buddhism this issue was not a matter of great concern, but it shows that nevertheless even here conceptions of cosmically induced legitimacy with quite practical consequences existed.

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With all due caution in making comparisons, it is possible to identify in the observations recently made by Bernard Lewis on Islam a rough approximation with the concepts of public order found in all traditional cultures. With regard to traditional Islamic ideas of ‘legitimate rule’, Lewis observes that an examination of the rich political literature of Islamic scholars reveals a conception of sovereignty that is far removed from the despotism often attributed to Islam by outside observers. According to Sunnite lawyers, the supreme leadership of the community – the caliphate – is based on contract and consensus. The appointment of a new caliph is agreed through a ‘Bay’a’ between the ruler and his subjects. This word is often translated as ‘oath of allegiance’, which is however a misunderstanding. ‘Bay’a’ is actually derived from an Arab word that connotes sale and purchase, and is therefore better translated as ‘contract’ or even ‘business transaction’. The ‘Bay’a’ establishes a reciprocal bond of obligation. The subjects pledge to obey their ruler, but the ruler also has obligations towards his subjects. Much of what is categorized as ‘citizens’ rights’ in western political thought appears in Moslem writings as ‘duties of the ruler’. If the ruler does not fulfil, or is unable to fulfil these obligations, then the contract can in principle be annulled. Although extremely seldom, this is certainly known to have happened. The duty to obey is extensive and demanding, but it is not unlimited. There are two sayings attributed to the Prophet that are always quoted in this connection. One goes: ‘Never obey a creature in defiance of its creator’ – that means: never obey a human command that violates the Divine Law. The other saying points in the same direction: ‘There is no obedience in sin’. This not only implies a right to disobedience, as is common in western thought, but also a divine command to disobey the sinful orders of a sinful ruler. Both the murderers of Sadat and those who overthrew the Shah cited this saying in their defence. The totalist claims to autocracy could, however, only be restricted to a certain extent by this rule. The Holy Law itself grants the caliph almost absolute power and lays down no criteria for determining whether a command – and the ruler in question – is sinful or not. But rebellions and the deposition of rulers are not unknown in Moslem history, and the principle is still valid today.3 Common tendencies are identifiable throughout all the traditional high cultures not only in regard to the political constitution of a ‘good society’. There are also commonalities in moral commands, as documented by the ‘Golden Rule’, which is well known all over the world.4 However, in view of the challenges of plurality and politicization, as Sulak Sivaraska correctly points out, notions of this kind are too simplistic.5

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Nevertheless, as has been made clear in the previous chapters, the welter of problems arising out of plurality and politicization is demonstrated with extremely varied emphasis according to the perspective of each traditional culture. Classical Chinese culture, as it is expressed in its philosophical works, is rich in potential points of departure in this respect. The intellectual range of Chinese social philosophy, particularly with regard to the controversial debate over requirements for a public order, is astonishing. In these debates certain points of view are comparable with the role that ancient Greek philosophy plays in European discourse. Some modern-day issues, such as the essential requirements for legitimate rule, are discussed with remarkable astuteness. But of course, as with historical discourses in Europe, it is necessary to bring these debates up to date and put them into the context of present-day problems. In the light of the potential within China’s own tradition (including its immanent critique of tradition), the endeavours currently witnessed in China to revive State Confucianism for the sake of keeping a party dictatorship in power can be seen as intellectually and politically regressive. This trend is accompanied by a move towards ‘consumer culture’ and Western mass culture that is not prevented but even encouraged by the Communist Party. However, a revival of the cultural debate of the 1980s (‘cultural fever’), and experiences comparable with those made in the century prior to that are not unlikely. The continuing modernization of China, which still epitomizes official Chinese policy, will increase pressure for political reform. Should modernization be hit by a crisis (for example, as a result of an overheated economy), fundamental questions concerning political regulation will certainly resurface. Islamic societies in the Arab region and in western Asia are dominated by widespread development crises. Here one can witness an extreme politicization of culture (religion), or a militant culturalization of politics. As a consequence, earnest endeavours to build a bridge between Islam and modernism are at present generally doomed to fail. Nor can it be assumed to be certain, as is often claimed, that Islam in South-east Asia will be more open to the demands of modernism. Here especially, developments in Indonesia will be paradigmatic. Will Indonesia follow in the footsteps of eastern Asia and South-east Asia and become the breeding ground for a modern, tolerant form of Islam? Or will a militant form of fundamentalism gain ground in the most populous Islamic country in the world as a result of a not improbable immense developmental crisis? Although Indian Muslims make up the second largest Islamic community in the world, they still represent a minority under the pressure of strong Hindu fundamentalism. Experiences with ethnopolitical conflicts have shown that such circumstances tend to provoke defensive attitudes and dogmatism rather than an openness to discourse on modernization and innovation. As other comparable situations have proved, such oppression reinforces the fixation on

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a particular ‘text’ and on a traditionalist and orthodox heritage. Both factors restrict and weigh heavily on Islamic discourse. In comparison with Islam, Buddhism cannot be said to have a definite view on the organization of public order. It is not encumbered with dogmas in the same way, although its leaders in various countries have often been known to have an opportunistic leaning towards those in power. However, it is precisely this bias that often initiates the establishment of critical social movements among Buddhists who disapprove of making commitments and advocate justice, democracy and human rights. As Buddhism is reputedly less dogmatic and is inspired more recently in some groups by strong socio-ethical motives, it ought – despite its inherent detachment from modern phenomena – to welcome the opportunity of a link-up to modernism (including a healthy critique of it). Whether such bridges will lead to institutional innovations, however, remains to be seen. These innovations are, following on from the previous chapter, the crux of the issue for Hinduism, for the principle of ‘homo hierarchicus’, that is the categorization of humans into castes, cannot be upheld in a socially mobile society.6 Nevertheless, it is fascinating to see how in India the adoption of typically Western political institutions (parliamentarianism and the secular constitutional state) has helped cushion the social consequences of caste privilege and discrimination, as these institutions offer the chance for power to shift and change despite the caste system, thus possibly helping to defuse potential social conflicts. However, the question arises, and is fervently discussed in India, whether these institutions will continue to exist should the ethnic conflicts remain virulent, or possibly even escalate. Or will the experience of the Islamic world, in which the post-colonial secular state often proved to be instable (and, moreover, inefficient with regard to development policy), be repeated? Or can one even conceive of India or other ‘pluralist societies’ without secular state institutions to cushion virulent ethnic conflicts as anything but potentially explosive? These reflections bring us to the question how one can understand the conflict between cultures – cultural struggles, where they are claimed to exist, but also where they really do exist. In the following three chapters I shall endeavour to find an answer.

Part 2

Clash of cultures?

7

A clash of civilizations – an idée fixe?

A clash of civilizations Standing on the threshold of the twenty-first century, are we about to begin an era that is characterized by a clash of civilizations? This question was raised in 1993 by Samuel Huntington in a widely discussed article.1 The title of that article included a question mark, whether seriously or rhetorically intended. In the subsequent book the clash of civilizations, however, became the very definition of the new order of world policy in the twenty-first century. No question mark any more!2 The original idea was aimed at understanding world policy after the end of the East–West conflict, no longer, or not in the first place, in categories of power political conflicts, of arms race, of fighting for scarce economic resources or as an ideological system antagonism. Instead, Huntington intended to introduce into the analysis of international policy a completely new way of looking at it as a clash of cultures. That paradigmatic perspective has now changed without reservations into a statement of fact. In the future international policy will – according to Huntington – really be characterized by a clash of civilizations, at the macro- as well as at the micro-level. With this contention a merely provocative thesis that at first seemed to be based on a plausible suggestion was accentuated once more and, thus, by implication will become more exposed to critical scrutiny. The clash of civilizations – does it really exist or is it emerging?

The civilizations Although Huntington places civilizations into the centre of attention, very little can be learned about them. He states only that in today’s world we may find five or probably seven different cultural areas: the Sinic, Japanese, Hinduistic, Islamic and Western civilizations, in addition probably some Latin American and African civilizations (this latter being marked with a big question mark). Thorough interpretations of these civilizations are not given by Huntington, with one major exception. According to Huntington the essence of Western civilization is based on the following

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factors: the classical inheritance (Greek rationalism, Roman law and so on), Catholicism and Protestantism, the variety of European languages, the division of church and state power, rule of law, social pluralism, representative public bodies and individualism. Huntington rightly emphasizes that these factors, or a combination of them, have been the very foundation for the Western individuality. With a slight exaggeration he even argues that these characteristics are Western but not modern in the Western world. The modern age and modernization (understood as industrialization, urbanization, literacy, education, prosperity and social mobility as well as complex and diversified professional structures) are of a more recent design, the essential cultural characteristics of the West being much older. Only incidental notes can be found about the Sinic civilization, especially about the Confucian ethos which is taken for granted in many Asian societies. This ethos is equated with values such as authority and hierarchy, the submission of rights and interests of the individual under the collective, the importance of consent, the avoidance of confrontation, facesaving and generally the supremacy of the state and the society over the individual. Asian people, moreover, according to Huntington, tend to consider the evolution of their societies over long periods, over centuries or even millennia. The maximization of long-term profits is said to have first priority. These attitudes form a contrast to those of the American people: the primacy given to liberty, equality, democracy and individualism as well as to their tendency to mistrust government, to oppose authority, to strengthen a system of checks and balances, to declare human rights sacred, to forget the past, to ignore the future and to concentrate on the maximization of profits in the immediate present. Islamic civilization is nearly left out by Huntington. This is the more surprising as it is not Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism that he regards as the main problem but Islam itself, supposedly a civilization completely different from all the others. Huntington emphasizes that Muslim societies and states located at the cultural fault lines of the world have been shown to be excessively violent: he argues that Muslim war enthusiasm and readiness to use violence cannot now be denied either by Muslims or nonMuslims. An obvious conclusion would therefore be that Islam per se has a violent character. In a book on the clash of civilizations it is surprising that the readiness of civilizations to fight is not explicitly thematized. Occasional comments and historical references to crusades (Christian) and ‘sacred wars’ (Islamic) as well as to the tendency in Chinese statesmanship to think in categories of hegemony instead of the balance of power cannot replace a systematic analysis. Such analysis would have to find an answer to the question what actually causes conflict behaviour, as well as a crusade mentality, or, contrarily, restraint or a readiness for dialogue in individual civilizations (taken as ‘actors’) and why, especially in the case of a clash of civilizations,

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the readiness for conflict and violence, for aggression and violent behaviour, emerge from the very ‘soul of culture’ (paideuma) of individual civilizations. Assuming, as Huntington obviously does, the existence of a recognizable and moreover intact ‘soul of culture’ in individual civilizations, only a very detailed analysis of such culture profiles could give hints as to their inherent bellicosity. Such analysis is, surprisingly, not given, thus changing his paradigm at the macro-level into a pipe dream without foundation: This book which regards the clash of civilizations as the crux of international policy does not explain why specific civilizations or the states representing them have to clash at all as a consequence of cultural characteristics. Assuming that Huntington’s essential characteristics of Western civilization (the only one that is described in some detail) are well founded, one cannot well explain the extensive history of wars in Europe, or the colonial and imperial aggression and violence of Europe in its relation to the rest of the world. The weakness of Huntington’s argument at the macro-level is the more obvious where he points out concrete world political conflict lines. Beyond the Western sphere he especially sees two essential events. One is ‘Asiatic Affirmation’ – meaning the economic and political rise of East Asia and South-east Asia to form a new centre of gravitation of world policy and the world economy. The second one is ‘Islamic Resurgence’, that is the revival of Islam as a political power. Huntington constructs a collusion of Confucianism and Islamism, combining their mutual forces in their cultural disputes with the West. But such intercultural disputes, according to Huntington, do not include only political fight over human rights but also the fight over the non-proliferation of means of mass extermination. The Confucian component of this track is represented by China and North Korea, the Islamic component by Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and Algeria. The relationship of this construct (so far only ‘discovered’ by Huntington) to the Sinic or Islamic ‘soul of culture’ (or civilization), however, remains somewhat undefined, especially in view of the fact that the arms trade of these governments may well be analysed in powerpolitical or economic categories. The interpretation of these occurrences as a ‘clash of civilization’, that is as conflict behaviour generated by the individual civilization, can be regarded only as a redundant explanation. Thus the argument becomes disappointingly arbitrary. Above all, it remains without a cultural foundation as, in spite of being focused on culture: It does not offer links between culture on the one hand and concrete behaviour at the global political level on the other. A major weakness of Huntington’s argument is that he assumes civilizations to be some kind of ‘beings’ at the macro-level. In a nutshell, he argues essentialistically in terms of culture even if he demonstrates some sense of history and conflict. Finally, he regards civilizations as not adaptable and changeable over centuries. Deep down, they remain constant, and they tend to process external influences so as to guarantee continuity. The

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ahistorical assumptions about culture, especially about deep culture or the soul of culture, produce a view of variable events as something always predestined by the deep structure of individual civilization. A lack of a proper analysis of culture thus develops into a predilection for culturalistic argument. In other words: if one focuses on civilizations or especially a ‘clash of civilizations’, a substantial analysis of the individual civilization should be the very foundation of the argument. One would then have to admit the observable ambiguity of each civilization in the present as well as in the past, and that holistic statements have never been analytically useful and cannot be justified today in the face of growing cultural conflicts within civilizations.

Culture or economic deprivation? Huntington’s analysis includes the macro- as well as the micro-level. He sees the effects of cultural problems not only in world policy between cultural core states but also at a regional and subregional level and, naturally, in internal conflicts. All ethnopolitical or ethnonationalistic conflicts can, as a rule, be used as illustrative material. If they escalate, these conflicts are characterized also by cultural and especially by religious dimensions. But in this respect also Huntington’s analysis remains superficial. In spite of the broad-range existing research on ethnicity his analysis does not consider that cultural and, as a rule, religious factors are rarely of great relevance at the very beginning of a conflict escalation. Socio-economic problems with no prospects of a solution are more important. In most such cases, long-standing and frustrating social and economic discrimination is involved – a discrimination that repeats itself at the political and cultural level. Such a situation can be observed with respect to minorities discriminated against all around the world. Minorities are pushed into marginal social and economic positions; they are deprived of the chance of upward mobility otherwise possible in a modernizing society. Under today’s conditions, however, this refusal of any modernization and upward mobility cannot be kept up for long. Educational opportunities for minorities can lead to social mobility, open up new horizons and create rising expectations. But only if the discrepancy between education and blocked chances for upward mobility is felt as frustration and only if this deprivation is registered as a collective problem rather than just an individual one, will policy be culturalized or culture politicized. This transition becomes inevitable if minorities are explicitly discriminated against by the majority in order to counteract their social and economic demands. Even if such a policy is counterproductive today, it can be observed resulting everywhere in ethnopolitical conflicts in the course of modernizing processes. This context precisely defines their ‘modernity’. These conflicts are highly virulent politically and they develop a dynamic of hate as discrimination grows.

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One cannot deny the cultural character of such conflicts. And the fault lines running diametrically through societies are of great relevance. The cultural factors, in these conflicts, however are generally not very significant at the beginning of the conflict, which is incited by socioeconomic factors. Only as a result of escalation can they, later, become independent factors with a genuine impetus. This is effectively proved by the fact that, in spite of the specific cultural orientation to be observed on both sides of a fault line, comparable problematic socio-economic contexts develop more or less identical conflict dynamics. In other words, when a conflict that is culturally influenced but not determined by culture escalates, it is not relevant whether it runs along Confucian versus Hinduist or Islamic versus Christian–Western orientations. Such cultural orientations seem to be interchangeable: Catholicism and Protestantism in Northern Ireland, Buddhism and Hinduism in Sri Lanka, and so on. These orientations do, of course, differ, but within an escalating dynamic of a conflict based on cultural differences culture seems to be interchangeable. Even if in comparable conflict escalations second- or third-class factors can become first-class ones, as research has shown, Huntington’s analysis of fault line conflicts at the micro-level misplaces the cultural factors in a kind of culturalistic approach not well rooted in reality. Huntington seems to have fallen prey to a superficial analysis at the micro-level, all the more astonishing as he once worked in comparative development research. Among the development problems only demography is mentioned and it gets more attention in his book than in his earlier article. Wherever demography explodes, that is societies gain a majority of young people, with a social mobilization (urbanization and literacy) occurring at the same time, a very dangerous and explosive social situation emerges. According to Huntington, this is the take-off point and especially the sounding-board of fundamentalist movements and political militancy of any kind. This observation is correct but has to be part of a wellfounded analysis of the different dimensions lying, as a rule, underneath an escalating development crisis, as can be observed in many parts of the Third World and especially in societies divided by fault lines. Fault lines do occur at the micro-level, but they are not automatically based on cultural differences in cases where Protestants, Buddhists, Muslims on one side and Catholics, Hindus, Christians on the other side confront each other. They are created by socio-economic problems involving systematic discrimination. Distribution conflicts, in these cases, form the core of the conflicts and must be judged as primary factors. The chances for education, upward mobility, qualified positions, for status, incomes and political participation are essential, rather than the kind or intensity and even less the contents of religion. Religion gains momentum and becomes a rallying point, a resource in desperation, only when promising life perspectives do not emerge otherwise. In the latter case, a

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distribution conflict tends to become a conflict of identity, but in its very core it still remains a conflict of distribution. This is a common dynamic in modernizing societies which, because they lack economic substance, have not found an internal social balance, resulting in unbearable injustice. Then the time may come when the culturalization of policy or the politicization of culture are considered to be a ready-made means for political dispute. But then hardly anything will be felt or heard of the soul of culture: audible instead will be political slogans, culturally phrased in order to induce a corresponding sounding-board to vibrate. In protracted development crises cultural revivalism will be of growing importance. This situation will be typical for most Islamic societies in the foreseeable future. Where, on the other hand, the development is positive – as for instance in East Asia – this ‘revival of culture’ will be only transitional. Successful societies inevitably become pluralistic societies, although in an unplanned way. This also changes, naturally, their ‘cultural soul’ (if it is ever identifiable) into a pluralistic one. The question of identity, however, does not go away. On the contrary, it becomes a permanent point of discussion – without a chance to solve it. This leads to a perfectly acceptable situation, to an endless self-reflection about identity – a condition well documented today in Western societies.

Cultural coexistence At the end of his book Huntington comes close to a plea for exactly this kind of permanent self-reflection. How can coexistence be conceived in view of a multipolar and multicultural world? The author warns the West against considering genuine Western values as universal. For him, these values are indeed most valuable. Yet, they should not be imposed on others, as any step in this direction would be counterproductive. What Huntington underestimates, however, is the fact that Western values are also met with approval in other, non-Western societies. Not primarily because they originated in the West, but because they are oriented towards the protection of individuals and their integrity. In all non-Western societies there have been and there will be political and humanistic movements orientated to values, which, by chance or not, have their roots in Western civilization. These movements are of great value and far more important than interventionist policies. However, in places where such new cultural orientations grow on the spot, they may become permanent. This principle of restraint, of non-interventionism, in the name of which Huntington pleads for a multicultural and multipolar world, is worth thinking about even if there are border cases for legitimate intervention, as in cases of confirmed genocide. Also the principle of joint mediation – introduced as a second possibility by Huntington – can be accepted as he sees it as a means to de-escalate fault-line conflicts. Finally, Huntington

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pleads for common principles: people of all civilizations should look for values, institutions and practices they have in common with others in order to reinforce them. In this connection the programme for a world ethos by Hans Küng comes to mind: the formulation of generally binding minimal standards.3 According to Huntington this is absolutely necessary, not only in order to restrict the clash of civilizations but also in order to strengthen civilized behaviour generally. All over the world he sees civil behaviour in many respects declining and barbaric attitudes gaining ground. Forgetting for a moment his own grim analyses of a prospective clash of civilizations, Huntington finally pleads for an understanding and cooperation between the leading politicians and intellectuals of all civilizations. Following Michael Walzer, Huntington makes a difference between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ morality.4 The first is a morality with maximum standards, the second the morality that is meant to allow coexistence in pluralistic and complex situations, especially in foreign relations on a global level. To apply ‘thick’ morality to international relations involves cultural imperialism, which is no longer accepted in today’s world and which would lead to cultural conflicts wherever pursued. ‘Thin’ morality on the other hand allows coexistence – in decency and dignity. At the very end Huntington pleads for openness, collective learning, even cultural innovation – normative orientations which seem in discrepancy with his culturalistic assessment of the main development trend in our world: the clash of civilizations. This, indeed, is a strange ending which somehow requires a new da capo.

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The realities of cultural struggles

Despite its questionable line of reasoning, the theory of an impending ‘clash of civilizations’ is still widely acknowledged. Even if there is little substance to it, as has been argued in the previous chapter, a discussion of the issue is long overdue. The following reflections should help to develop a different perspective.1

Recollections Let us begin with a quotation: The superiority [Europe] has long maintained has tempted her to plume herself as the mistress of the world, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have in direct terms attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America – that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere. Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the European. It belongs to us to vindicate the honour of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world! The above statement was made by Alexander Hamilton in the well-known Federalist Papers (no. 11).2 It is not difficult to put into a modern context. One has only to replace the word ‘Europe’ by ‘the West’; if one then substitutes ‘Muslims’ for ‘Americans’, whom he is addressing, and imagines the author to be not Hamilton but one of today’s well-known fundamentalist Islamic authors, for example Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), then the quota-

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tion could indeed be of recent origin. One would then only need to write ‘the Islamic states’ in place of the ‘thirteen states’, perhaps replace ‘the great American system’ with ‘the Muslim community’, that is the umma, or – reducing the context to the Arabic–Islamic region – ‘the Arab nation’, the idea of a united Arab community. If culture is understood as the totality of typical life forms of a population, including its underlying mental constitution and values, then the circumstances described by Hamilton do in fact constitute a cultural conflict – in political terms, a cultural struggle. What, then, was the conflict between Britain and its American colonies all about? Those who in the course of this conflict became ‘Americans’ perceived Europe as the embodiment of an old, worthless world order from which the first had fled in 1620, the year of the landing of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’. In the eyes of the Puritan colonists who left Europe, the old world order was characterized by feudal despotism, a class society in the extreme, the arrogant excesses of the gentry and the outright exploitation of the masses. Moreover, Europe was regarded by those on the other side of the Atlantic as ‘rotten’, as morally dissolute. European potentates sold their subjects like goods, other European potentates bought them up to deploy them in the struggle against the inhabitants of the English colonies in the North American continent. It is well known that there was a good deal of truth in what was said about Europe. The Americans’ own world, emblematic of a ‘new world order’, as an ‘Empire of Liberty’, stood in stark contrast to the old world in every respect. The freedom of the individual, guaranteed by enforceable protective rights, combined with a multitude of voluntary associations, which decades later astonished Alexis de Tocqueville, and created the foundation for a ‘civil society’. Its key to success was a combination of individualism and solidarity, underpinned and structured by political self-determination, that is legitimate public powers, which had their origin in the tenet of religious freedom, but also supported by economic self-determination within the state (‘taxation only with representation’) and flanked by a sovereign decree on foreign economic policy, which was understood to be imperative for the domestic economy to thrive. Thus stood the New World and the Old World in opposition, primarily in the minds of the protagonists at first, who took advantage of the increasingly popular printed media at the time (local newspapers) to propagate their ideas. These ideas, however, would not have met with any response if both the political leaders and the civilians had not agreed in their assessment of the situation. The ‘New World’ – or even ‘the New World Order’ – was a projet in Sartre’s sense of the term, that is, a blueprint for future life. This project had clearly identifiable components: a specific vision of humanity and of society, notions of an appropriate political order or constitution; educational and infrastructural development programmes; a concept for an economic policy with a special emphasis on

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promoting the domestic industries, including a concept for a foreign economic policy that would guarantee domestic development (over which Friedrich List and the ‘federalists’ later found themselves in general agreement). The main requirement for the whole programme was political sovereignty, that is political self-determination. This was a concept for a development programme or project in the broadest sense of the term. It was the beginning of something completely new, on the one hand growing out of resistance to despotic Europe, on the other hand devised autonomously. And it was going to be something better. The Americans’ image of themselves as a ‘chosen people’, that is, their sense of mission, which probably originated with this founding myth, was in fact, as was remarked at the time, not just a myth, and certainly not mere fiction. For, as history would later show, the project was an historic one, being founded as it was on a secular development (although at the time this was barely recognizable). The ‘Modernism Project’ was not understood as merely a matter for the dissenting intellectual elite, as in the European siècle de lumières, but as a project and a political process based on widespread consent, that is the consent of the masses. This first historic case exemplifies the most important factors of a cultural struggle: resistance to foreign determination, hence the antihegemonial, anti-imperial, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist attitude. Such a resentful attitude serves to raise the self-awareness of a suppressed group, in the sense of Paulo Freire’s concept of concienciación, and, over and above that, aims at the empowerment of effective opposing forces. The anti-attitude is complemented by the group’s own blueprint for future life and society, which also reveals political innovation. The whole process is therefore very comprehensive, embracing as it does the political, social and economic order – and all under the premise of self-defined rationales. That is why, in this context, culture cannot be reduced to ‘the totality of intellectual and artistic expressions of life of a community or a nation’, as defined in the Duden (the authoritative German dictionary). Culture comprises not only the old, rejected order but also the new public order to which the respective society aspires. As far as blueprints and alternative blueprints for public order are concerned, culture is not merely one dimension among others but the essence of political order, because the purpose of such conceptions is to shape actively the many spheres of life. Culture is thus emphatically political. This example shows how the combination of anti-attitudes, and designs for a better future – among both the elite and the masses – can make a cultural struggle into an historic confrontation. In the case of America, the instigators were not punished, but rewarded by history. This does not often occur, but precisely for this reason there is a lot to be learned from it. Tu felix America! Let us now recall a second example: the struggle of sub-Saharan Africa for decolonization and independence more than 150 years later. Here, too,

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resentment was inevitably dictated by events, and especially from the 1950s there was an increase in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist propaganda and political movements in the same vein. But forward-looking ideas were also expressed and had some influence on the political debates. They can be described with certain formulas, more than mere catchwords, that consolidated progressive ideas.4 For example, the notion that in Black Africa a renewal – founded on an eclectic mix of its own tradition and external influences (Christian missionary work and Islamic influences, the legacy of the modern colonial administrations and the secular state) – must take place now that it was in the process of decolonization, was summarized in the term ‘consciencism’ coined by Nkrumah. It meant the creation of a new, coherent consciousness out of a cluster of utterly different fragments of experience (‘structural heterogeneity of consciousness’) – that is, a new, African identity or ‘African personality’ – not only at the individual level but at the state, or even pan-African, level. In this way the concept of the ‘African personality’ was brought directly in association with the concept of ‘pan-Africanism’. Here, too, political sovereignty ensuing from successful decolonization was the decisive requirement for the project. ‘Seek ye first the political Kingdom and all other things shall be added unto it.’ Thus were the words chiselled into stone in the centre of Accra (Ghana) in 1957 for all to read. The fate of this project is familiar; like so many other projects, it went the way of the post-colonial state, from its liberating departure to ideology of power, only to disappear finally into oblivion. Yet the example of America cited above points to reasons for this failure. Above all, there was a lack of concepts for promoting the economic independence required as a foundation and support for the cultural project. The circumstances exemplified here by Africa (and particularly West Africa), match numerous other instances. Such histories can be found wherever political groups of any kind (tribes, peoples, colonies and so on) revolted against foreign rule, entered into an anti-colonial struggle and, following decolonization, sought political sovereignty. Anti-attitudes play a decisive part, but equally important are endeavours to create a separate identity. Wherever decolonization movements were organized in colonies or informal dependencies, that is where ‘peripheries’ revolted against ‘centres’ – voicing their protest and ultimately not seldom staging militant uprisings against the colonialists and so-called mother countries – these processes also constituted cultural struggles, even those which were little more than extreme anti-colonial campaigns.5 Such processes were witnessed also in the nineteenth century, accompanied by programmatical doctrines representative of the period; however, they were of no general historical significance until the twentieth century, particularly after 1945. To a certain extent, south-eastern Europe played a precursory role in this respect in the late nineteenth century; here, particularly in Romania, lies the birthplace of more advanced doctrines on

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the relationship between centres and peripheries. It was here that imperatives related to development policy were formulated;6 the need for building a cultural identity was also identified. The seeds were sown for many varieties of what was later labelled developmental socialism (African, Arab, Indian, Indonesian and so on) in a similar context. More radical forms of developmental socialism, such as that of marxist communism (for example the Vietnamese or Chinese forms), also have their historical roots here.7 This brings us to a third recollection. It is curious that in current debates on the East and West, conflict is interpreted as a – now resolved – conflict over ideologies, while the allegedly imminent ‘clash of civilizations’ is seen as a conflict of cultures, and the ‘cosmologies’ with which they are identified, emerging out of the depths of history. But what was the East–West conflict? From a contemporary perspective in 1917 or 1950, and even today in retrospect, the East–West conflict concerned two opposing visions of humanity and society (and their respective realities) that were, from the point of view of political regulation, utterly incompatible. For the West, individualism and pluralism stood, and today still stand, for the fundamental constituents of modern society, with the division of powers as a principle of political order, open public debate as an intrinsic value (including the modern notion of the media as the ‘fourth pillar of power’ complementing the executive, the legislative and judiciary powers). At the same time, science, justice and administration are seen as impartial, neutral spheres; the market and culture as spheres of activity with a status and logic of their own; and finally, in the economic sphere, market-dictated prices, private ownership and orientation to comparative advantage. The eastern, really existing socialist side was characterized by collectivism, the Gleichschaltung of politics, society, economy and culture – resulting in the concentration of power; intended partiality in science, justice and administration; and, in the economic sphere, prices imposed by the political administration, collective ownership and a state monopoly over foreign trade. The valuation of political, social, economic and cultural conflicts, inevitable in modern societies, also vastly differed. In the West, conflicts are as a rule regarded as inevitable and endemic events that cannot be eradicated, but can be regulated through various forms of conflict management. In the East, conflicts were understood as a disturbance and dysfunctional. Regulatory mechanisms were underdeveloped, there were few self-regulatory safety nets and the most extreme disturbances were responded to mainly with repression. Thus two projects stood in opposition to each other. In the light of this cluster of factors, one can indeed speak of a cultural struggle, for the conflict over how public order should be structured had extremely broad ramifications (as with any comparable case). It had social, economic and cultural dimensions which each side defined according to its own rationales and preferred forms of regulation. The fact that the two antagonistic developmental projects, outlined here using just a few key aspects, were

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the core of the rivalry between the systems in East and West ultimately became clear when one of the two projects, real socialism, folded and the accumulated weaponry abruptly lost its ‘aim’ and purpose. Despite all indications that the conflict was militarized in the extreme, and even gained momentum through the arms race, it must be remembered that militarization was a derivative and not the source of the conflict.8 Like the others dealt with above, this conflict, too, arose on the periphery, born of resistance and defence against the repressive economic and cultural rival at the centre. Anti-imperialism became the epitome of really existing socialism, embodying at the same time its own particular political, social, economic and cultural perspective. The fact that it ultimately failed is irrelevant with respect to the circumstances out of which it had arisen. Just as in the conflict between America and England discussed above, the East–West conflict involved two opposing self-images and manifestos. The fatal blow was dealt to really existing socialism when, contrary to what was prophesied in the classic doctrine, it took up the historic struggle against the threat of, or already existing, peripheralization. Real socialism was in this respect by all means innovative, but its attempt to cope with the socio-economic and cultural complexities of modernization, which it had in fact produced itself, failed miserably. This failure put an end to the alternative project to that of the West, that is, the attempt to create an East European, real socialist form of modernism. The rivalry of the two systems that was founded on this opposition became redundant, and with it the underlying cultural struggle.

Contextualizing cultural conflicts First, it is possible to identify the basic pattern of politically relevant cultural conflicts common to the conflicts recalled here. At an abstract level, the following circumstances are the decisive preconditions for cultural struggles: •

• •

the development of hierarchical relations between the centre and the periphery, with a gradually increasing imbalance of power, in particular an imbalance of economic and technological competence persistent rivalry, especially in economic and cultural issues, leading to the victimization of the dominated side the threat of structural peripheralization arising out of these two processes, forcing the victim of structural dependency into open colonization, informal dependency, penetration and other similar conditions, with serious socio-economic, but also psychological, consequences for the victim.

As a rule, a situation such as this will provoke a defensive reaction, out of which counter-projects develop. Both consequences are most likely to

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occur if the society in question has already begun a process of social mobilization, or is transforming fast, for instance, from a subsistence economy into an economy based on the division of labour; or when there is rural depopulation and massive urbanization; when an education programme overcomes widespread illiteracy. The spread of waged employment, urban living and a general standard of education are the modern foundations for an equally widespread growth in political awareness – and that also means political resistance to the colonial or quasi-colonial situation characterized here.9 Second, the surrounding circumstances and the subject of this increased political awareness can be described as developmental nationalism, and this is manifested in various forms.10 One area of experience in this connection is that of primary developmental nationalism, which includes the example of America and England cited above. This is a type of nationalism witnessed during the emergence of today’s OECD societies, and which led to the development of ‘state nations’ (‘état-nation’, as in the case of France) and to nation states (as in the case of Germany). It is well known from the history of western and northern European nation states, from the histories of the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, that a separate territory, with boundaries defined by the state and through culture, played an important role in the progress of all these societies. Japan is also a prominent example in this respect; at a time when the dominant Latin American elites were throwing themselves into the arms of European civilization in a form of selfcolonization, deeming independence to be futile, and even fighting vehemently against it, Japan reflected on its own culture and, despite all attributes borrowed from the West, began to produce a project of its own. Within those societies that later linked up to form the OECD world, there was a relatively even balance between anti-attitudes and an independent national project. Anti-attitudes were initially directed against Britain, historically the first society and economy to take off. The development of each of these countries – varying in detail – can be paraphrased with the title of a classic work on development theory by Friedrich List: The National System of Political Economy – a publication that gives prominence to the cultural content of development processes.11 Finding a way out of peripheralization is much more difficult. This is the experience underlying so-called secondary developmental nationalism in south-western Europe, southern Europe, south-eastern Europe, eastern Europe and Ireland, as well as in what is now customarily called the Third World. The example of Africa discussed above is to some extent representative of this category. Many succession states of the Soviet Union can now also be added to this group, especially the Transcaucasian and Asian republics, whose liberation from the former Soviet Union was tantamount to an act of decolonization. After all, conflict cases such as that of

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Chechnya within Russia today are similar situations – and they are all decolonization attempts.12 The success or failure of secondary developmental nationalism, that is of post-colonial development projects, is of direct relevance to the current complexity of cultural conflicts. The East Asian development, which led to a fundamental modernization of the economies concerned, concomitant with relevant social restructuring, can be described as successful. Within a few decades, traditional societies were given a modern social profile. The modernization of the East Asian political system, in particular its pluralization and democratization, is in progress. To a certain extent, albeit in a different sequence, it is a repeat of the West European experience. And yet, why is it that the ‘Asian values’ are propagated in this region, in some cases quite militantly, in opposition to Western values? Asian values (such as the high value placed on the family, groups and collectivities, a sense of order and public moral, respect for the authority of certain persons, rank or age, and so on), in combination with a modern, efficient and internationally competitive economy, are seen as the expression of a specific type of ‘Asian modernism’. In actual fact, however, propaganda for so-called Asian values is a reluctant rearguard action fought by those groups who helped the societies in this region of the world on to a relatively successful route to development using a mixture of economic and educational dictatorship. Societies in the throes of modernization, and consequently tending towards individuation, at some point begin to demand co-determination in issues of public concern. Asian values serve to fight off these demands. Those to whom this propaganda for Asian values is addressed are therefore not the West and Western values but emancipated, well-educated Asians, especially those in the new middle classes. The conflict is thus primarily an internal one – and this is indeed remarkable – based on a relatively successful path of development.13 The exact opposite can be witnessed in sub-Saharan Africa, the subject of the second recollection. The reasons for the dramatic failure of African development policy are today just as transparent as the reasons for the successful development of East Asia. Wholesale breakdown is not uncommon, and even the achievements of colonialism such as roads, railways, ports, public buildings and so on on which many of these countries depended are meanwhile making substantial losses. It is hard to describe this disintegration in detail: one could call it a kind of ‘retribalization’, accompanied by retraditionalization. In many places, ethnicization seems to be an inescapable fate. However, some steps have been taken towards democratization, although professional Africa experts are probably somewhat premature and over-euphoric in their assessments of these measures. Democratization without a reliable institutional network can easily lead to ethnopolitical conflicts which in difficult economic situations always have

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the potential to wreak havoc. The question whether one can label this situation a cultural conflict must probably remain unanswered. Another group is of more significance for the discussion at hand, and that is those Third World societies outside of East Asia and the African continent in which the post-colonial state produced a mixture of success and failure – the overall result being a development crisis of everincreasing proportions. The success lay in the temporary phase of intense modernization in the course of these societies’ development, accompanied by a period of pronounced upward social mobility. This upward mobility can today, however, no longer be translated into job security and a high social status, and particularly not into positions in the oversized post-colonial state administrations and state industries, which were well-established collecting tanks for the first post-colonial elite generation and their descendants. Moreover, the development of these societies as a rule did not have a broad enough impact, which led to more extensive marginalization, and, ultimately, to failure.14 For good reasons, the political representatives of the post-colonial status quo are now held responsible for this failure. This has put them in a doubly dangerous position between two stools – between the frustrated, politicized, upwardly mobile middle classes and the ever-increasing numbers in the marginalized poverty classes. Third, this situation thus gives rise to new fundamental conflicts over the direction the development project should take, and in fact over the development project as a whole. Nor do they only concern trivial questions on this variation or that, the whole question of power is at stake. This in turn is coupled with increasingly critical social problems for which, other things being equal, there is currently no hope of a solution. This welter of problems marks the birth of tertiary developmental nationalism, in reaction to the failure of the secondary form, and the starting point for a militant culturation of politics. The reasons why developmental nationalism becomes the driving force for culturation is that it symbolizes the development crisis as a whole; it can emerge in defensive reaction to particularly strong or even overpowering influences from abroad; but it can also simply be driven by machiavellian motives, an obvious strategy and proven means to influence and power. This phenomenon can be witnessed on a wide scale. It is notorious in Islamic states, particularly in the Arabic–Islamic region, in Iran and increasingly in Pakistan. It is potentially explosive in India, where Hindu forces and Islamic groups, but also Sikhs, are involved in militant clashes. For the last fifteen years or more a bloody civil war has been fought in Sri Lanka between Sinhalese and Tamils as a result of tertiary developmental nationalism (now involving political forms of Buddhism and Hinduism, whatever their actual role in the conflict may be).15 Most such conflicts are today taking place within states. Some are less intense, some extremely militant, but all clearly have cultural components. These are conflicts in which minorities politically, economically, socially

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and culturally discriminated against rise up against a majority population in resistance to political assimilation. As a rule, the point of departure of such conflicts is a broad array of negative experiences, an accumulation of constant frustration over a diversity of issues. The cultural conflict inherent in the broader conflict is easily emotionalized (for instance in issues concerning education and language policy) and often acts as a trigger for a general escalation of the conflict.16 Cultural conflicts of a different nature take place in ethnoplural societies, in particular in the ASEAN region, where minorities (the Chinese communities, for example) thrive economically but are politically marginalized while the majority population is politically dominant but economically only second- or third-rate. This combination is known also in other parts of the world. It used to be preponderant in East Africa (with the dynamic Indian minority in the active economic sectors). The conflict is articulated through social envy, and given momentum through racism. In highly industrialized countries, too, it is not unknown. In Los Angeles it has been visible in the bloody clashes between upwardly mobile, dynamic Koreans and the traditionally black lower-class inhabitants. Another type of conflict that arises out of apartheid regimes should also be mentioned in this context. This is a situation in which a majority population is dominated by a minority which tries to marginalize the majority, as happened in Kosovo. Today this type of conflict is rare, but it clearly contains a cultural component, because any form of apartheid politics is particularly active in the cultural sector, for example in the prohibition of the majority language at school and university, in public administration, in the judiciary and in particular in the police. Culturally motivated resistance to cultural overpowering is characteristic of this type of conflict. In all these case types, the political reference back to culture – to language, religion, history and mythology, that is, reality and fiction – is clearly understandable. It should be taken into account that this is a modern phenomenon, the result of modern development crises.17 Culture in the broad sense thus enters into the political game when an accumulation of frustrations gives rise to doubts about the post-colonial development project as a whole, and there are objective (and not just agitatory) reasons for drawing up a new development project. In regions that are, notwithstanding the existing minorities, more culturally homogeneous than heterogeneous, as in the Arabic–Islamic region, and reference is made back to one source only – in this case the Qur’an – then a fundamental debate on political regulation is the obvious choice. Is the development crisis not the logical consequence of neglecting one’s own roots, one’s own Islamic identity, as commanded by the Qur’an? This is a question that is seldom voiced in that part of the world for purely rhetorical reasons.18 Cultural conflicts come into play wherever conflict groups – with justification – become ethnopolitically aware, as often occurs in ethnoplural

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societies, and where language, religion, an historical awareness and also ethnic identity – individually or in combination – become the focal point for conflicts.19 Cultural conflicts arise also when, for want of other power resources, language, religion and history are mobilized and instrumentalized for specific purposes. But the cultural sources are resorted to not for their own sake but for the sake of power, and the interpretation of the sources is not inspired by the relevant text, but by power. The orthodox interpretation of what are taken to be authentic sources then becomes the subject of the cultural struggle. And that, incidentally, was never any different in early Europe.

The West and the cultural struggles Where does the West come into play in these conflicts? As ‘the West’, represented by individual states, was the starting point for modern colonialism, imperialism and neo-colonialism, it will remain ever-present in cultural struggles throughout the world as long as post-colonial antiprojects rise and fall. That was, and will always remain, the first point of reference. The second point of reference comprises the post-colonial elites, who serve as bridgeheads for the West in their own countries, and, even where they refused or still refuse to accept this role, are still held to be so. Almost inevitably, the struggle against the corrupt, profiteering post-colonial elite who only obstruct subsequent generations also becomes a confrontation with the West.20 This is particularly true of countries such as India, in which the secular state was taken over as a legacy of colonialism by the post-colonial elite, and superficially still exists, but is increasingly seen as one of the causes of the development crisis and not as a means to its solution. If the secular state is not seen as a helpful basis on which to overcome the problems of coexistence in pluralistic societies, but is rejected as a transplant from the West, then the West as a whole becomes the subject of dispute. This may have no direct consequences for the West, but is of great significance to the conflict in progress. The West also plays a role because the so-called development crisis is today almost everywhere, even in the West, interpreted – or rather misinterpreted – as brought about by maintaining a eurocentric orientation. In fact, the development policies in post-colonial societies did not have the same priorities that formed the basis for the European path of development.21 This misunderstanding, however, is quite clearly insurmountable; it reveals an astonishing ignorance of economic history. Out of the above three points there ensue a variety of projections on the West that are often articulated in no uncertain terms. If, as has so often happened, ‘the West’ (or sometimes just a single state, particularly the USA) is declared to be evil and censured, then there is often an element of autistic self-centredness involved, which, like any autistic form of hostility,

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holds a strong potential for escalation and momentum. Autistic hostility is intensified and reinforced if an additional emotional element is brought into play, for instance in reaction to hostage dramas, terrorism, death sentences (fatwa) and so on. Nevertheless, despite all the real and/or projected reasons for such conflicts, one should not overlook the fact that the scene of the conflicts in present-day cultural struggles actually remains where they come into existence, and that geocultural conflicts are not identifiable, although the number of open conflicts with cultural components has increased more recently. What is particularly striking is that there are no cleavages between Islam on the one hand and the West on the other. Nor can there be any for the simple reason that Islam, as a monolithic entity, exists only in the fictional umma but not as a political reality. ‘Islam’ in the singular is a construction; it is more accurate – as was acknowledged in the title of a recent book – to speak of ‘Islamic worlds’. At present one can distinguish a theocracy and state of virtue in Iran and the Sudan, a politically opportunistic interpretation of Islam in Iraq, open repression in Syria, enlightened absolutism in Jordan, a secular, typical post-colonial state in Egypt meanwhile under threat from within, and a singularly interesting version in Libya – an Islamic regime that the orthodox would characterize as heretical. If one adds the particular forms of Islam that have developed in the Maghreb, parts of sub-Saharan Africa and particularly in Asia, then the heterogeneity of political Islam becomes patently clear.22 Despite often similar development crises, this heterogeneity in turn translates into extremely diverse forms of cultural struggle. The situation in Libya, for example, is hardly comparable with that in Iran, but nevertheless both regimes are often perceived as identical (Islamistic fundamentalist). The West, indeed, is similarly heterogeneous. Certainly, in many respects, the West is universally ‘Western’, but only in rare exceptional cases do all Western countries pursue a common policy. Policies on Yugoslavia over the past decade are all too obviously a case in point,23 and there are no indications that Western politics will be any different in the future – the Persian Gulf region being the only exception. In this case, though, oil and not culture is the determinant of political action. Nor are there any signs of geocultural conflicts fundamentally and thoroughly reshaping the macro-structure of international politics. Particularly unfounded is the construction of a Confucian–Islamic ‘connection’: until now, this has been ‘sighted’ only by Huntington,24 whom it nevertheless helped to international prominence. Extravagant theories on ‘geoculture’, whether true or false, always guarantee widespread attention in the media.25

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Conclusions Politicized cultural conflicts, described as cultural struggles in this chapter, existed long before recent discussions of them began, as the recollections at the beginning of the chapter were intended to show. Other cases could have been cited, for instance the contending sides that emerged in the cultural struggle subsequent to the French Revolution – which one historian in retrospect labelled with the certainly exaggerated term ‘world civil war’.26 If one looks further back in history, one can identify a cultural struggle – perhaps the first in history – in the Maccabees’ resistance to the enforced hellenization of Judaea by the Seleucid kingdom. The Old Testament (2 Macc. 6) contains a dramatic account of how the Temple of Jerusalem was forcefully transformed into a shrine dedicated to Zeus, and of the prohibition of the Jewish law by the Seleucid conquerors. It also describes how a culturally motivated Judaean resistance movement arose out of this situation and led a successful Maccabean revolt (167 BC). An historiographic synthesis of modernism from the point of view of cultural struggles has yet to be written.27 It should by no means be restricted to that period of history that now is described – and rightly so – as a world civil war, that is the global conflict between liberalism and communism in the years between 1917 and 1989.28 The realities of cultural struggles were much more diverse and multifaceted, and they still are today. And there is no indication that this will change in the foreseeable future. It would indeed be remarkable if, at a time when everywhere societal, economic and cultural macro-structures are breaking apart (a phenomenon incorrectly labelled postmodernism, although it is in fact only the most recent variety of modernism), the major civilizatory spheres, that is, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Orthodox Christianity and Western Christianity and so on, were to become the very determinants of history. Although the development of even larger and more extensive regions as a result of ever-increasing material and informational networks is without a doubt conceivable in the economic sphere, it is not really likely in the cultural sphere. Rivalries, struggles over political elimination and hegemony within the different cultural regions will be far more decisive than the supposed common interest of fictive mass collectives.29 One needs only to take a look at the Islamic–Arab region since the 1950s to realize this. These circumstances, which empirical findings confirm, have one advantage, and that is that the actual conflicts as a rule remain manageable, so that it is possible to have some influence on the course of events, even if some protacted conflicts may convey the impression that cultural struggles were more or less insoluble. Sadly, Ireland, Kashmir, Bosnia, Tibet and many other such cases give unfortunate cause for such an impression. Nevertheless, there will be no clash of civilizations or cultural regions – and how, indeed, could there be? There will be cultural struggles in many places. But it would be wrong to inflate the realities of such cul-

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tural struggles into a geocultural fiction, or to confuse the theory of the clash of civilizations with reality. In view of empirical findings, this conclusion is imperative; moreover, from a political perspective, and especially from the point of view of peace politics, it is strongly advisable.

9

On Asian and other values

For several years ‘Asian values’ have been increasingly turning up in international debates about prospectively emerging cultural conflicts on a world scale. In particular, in discussions on human rights they keep on being conceptually confronted with Western values. And also in debates on development issues the positive influence of ‘Asian values’ on economic growth and modernization is often pointed out. As far as political order is concerned, ‘Asian values’ are said to refer to a specific definition of democracy that is not comparable to the Western notion of democracy. These values are, moreover, extolled as a guarantor against the social pathologies of the Western type of modernity. And, finally, it is even predicted that the clash of Asian and Western values could be the beginning of a new systemic competition or even antagonism in international politics.1 Which values are these and what does this discussion imply?

‘Asian values’ Today ‘Asian values’ are especially propagated in East Asia and South-east Asia:2 different from ‘Western individualism’, the integration of the individual into a comprehensive existential collective is conceptually emphasized. This collective is supposed to be the family, or rather a family clan or network. The group is considered to be important in working life. In both – family and work group – the individual is considered to be embedded, or aufgehoben in Hegel’s terminology: the dignity of the individual is assumed to be fundamentally based on its symbiotic relations with encompassing collectives. An additional argument emphasizes order and public morale in comparison with egoistic freedom-orientation or ‘possessive individualism’ that is regarded as typical for Western people. And public political philosophy focuses on the collective as point of reference and not so much on the need for protecting the single individual. On this basis it becomes understandable that the duties of the individual to the larger community are considered more important than the rights of the individual. Along with this understanding of public order, naturally, goes a high

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estimation of person- and role-specific authority: in such thinking the good sovereign appears by definition to be a good patriarch. Authority thus established is not limited by specific governmental principles protecting the individual (like the ‘division of power’) but by ethical practices which for their part are supposed to be sanctified by conventions and traditions. In case rule manifests itself as tyrannical or not favourable for public welfare, legitimate resistance (opposition) is – abstractly seen – possible (as also clearly postulated in early Confucian and other premodern thinking): Its transformation into definite political praxis, however, is not easy since unity, harmony and consent are highly regarded. Majority decisions are considered to be problematic as they might be an expression of discord, itself strengthened by such patterns of decision-making. Thus, the nation seen as a team (and not as a society divided into conflicting interest groups) corresponds to the ideal picture of such public order. On the social and economic level, educational studiousness, hard work and economy are regarded as values without which successful development is not possible. Now, this summarized description of ‘Asian values’ may easily be judged as being slightly overdrawn. But all these items can be found either singly or in some combination within a multitude of official or officious statements and reports, recently especially in Singapore and in Malaysia (which have become centres of propaganda for ‘Asian values’) – and most recently also in Beijing.3 However, ‘Asian values’, so defined, are not unfamiliar to the Western world. It could be said: These values that are currently propagated by some officials in East and South-east Asia are totally identical with European values of the past. Further, it is remarkable that they have a considerable correspondence to ‘Islamic values’ as they are openly proclaimed today in the Arabic–Islamic world and in Iran. And in our fast-living world, who still remembers the controversial debates on public order between East and West after 1950? Those who do will find many parallels between values propagated by the exponents of really existing socialism and ‘Asian values’. Besides, every traditional society, with no exception, whether premodern or pre-industrial, has always been based on corresponding values. What then is ‘Asiatic’ in ‘Asian values’?

Collectivist values in a context of late development In traditional societies collectivist values reflect the ‘natural order of things’. Such societies are based on subsistence or self-sufficient economies from which the individual cannot escape. As a rule such a society is hierarchically and parternalistically structured, based on a clearly defined gradation of authority. Emancipation of the individual in terms of social mobility is not possible since such collectives neither know nor allow

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social mobilization. In such a context, therefore, the collective itself and duty-orientation towards the collective seem to be ‘natural’ points of reference. And since all important philosophies and religions of the past have come to life in such traditional social constellations it is not surprising that they have all propagated collectivistic values. In this regard Western Europe is no exception. What today in international debates about cultural issues is declared to be ‘European’ or ‘Western’ is, as a rule, the very late result of a secular, conflict-ridden development process and not European by origin. This observation concerns especially the gradual, but not at all smoothly evolutionary, formation of individualistic mentalities and corresponding pluralistic structures in polity, society and economy. It can be applied especially to the so-called typical Western characteristics of public order such as checks and balances, civil rights, division of power, majority principle, protection of minority rights and so on. These principles do not reflect, so to speak, original ‘cultural genes’ of Europe for the simple reason that Europe itself has originally also been deeply collectivistic, that is ‘Asiatic’ in the above sense. This fundamental fact is clearly confirmed in general by Europe’s history, and in particular by those conservative, restorative and even reactionary political movements which emerged in Europe at a time when the old European order (the ancien régime) was in the process of disappearing as a result of far-reaching socio-economic restructuring processes. In such movements there was a lot of nostalgia (‘the good old times’) longing for the preservation of ‘Asian values’ right in the heart of Europe; and even today such nostalgia is still present in some political discourse within Europe and the Western world in general. To summarize: each principle referred to above had to be fought for in a century-long political struggle against Europe’s own tradition. Where unity, harmony, order and duty have later been deliberately propagated outside occidental modernity, this happened and still happens as a rule in reaction to the Western European modernizing process. In such contexts collectivistic ideals have been articulated and used as a political instrument in order to catch up with modernity by way of corresponding collective efforts. Development ideologies of ‘late modernizers’ are, thus, broadly focused on the mobilization of collectivistic ideals such as overarching national developmental goals. This feature had been particularly prominent in Leninistic doctrines of really existing socialism, here far more than in many more moderate versions of African, Arab or Asian socialism. But also in the corporatist development dictatorships at the European periphery between the two World Wars (that is in southern, south-eastern and eastern Europe) a comparable collectivism can be observed: in such developmental (‘catch-up’) doctrines class solidarity, corporatism and nationalism were deliberately opposed to the ‘individualistic and anarchistic capitalism of Western Europe’. To overcome unequal development between (in the language of the 1930s) ‘plutocratic’ and ‘proletarian’

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nations, collectivist developmental dictatorships were considered to be inevitable.4 Looking back, these values as they have been propagated at the periphery of Europe and within the Third World look very ‘Asian’ in the same way that the newly propagated ‘Asian values’ have a flavour well known from European autocracy. Therefore, it is not surprising that ‘Asian values’ as conceptualized today were already long ago recognized as political assets in development policy in East and South-east Asia – as for instance in Sun Yat-sen’s development programme after the turn of the twentieth century or in the development ideology of Sukarno and other Asian leaders of the postcolonial era. Here a well-known historical experience has been repeating itself: the fight against a threatening or already existing peripheralization of a particular state, society or economy within the existing centre–periphery structured world economy, using collectivist anti-colonial and/or anti-imperialistic developmental doctrines as a means of counteracting peripheralization.5 But also the actual belated propagation of ‘Asian values’, although emerging from a different context, is not really surprising: successful development has a widespread impact on the modernization of polity, society, economy and culture. Such development threatens in the long run that class or elite which has successfully pushed forward the development process under autocratic authoritarian or dictatorial premises. Successful modernization always signifies the change of traditional communities into societies with new social, economic and cultural differentiations of an even higher complexity, resulting in an ongoing social and intellectual emancipation of more and more people. This is an irreversible process with positive feedback loops. Despite all collectivist development doctrines, in such situations severe conflicts over questions of individual self-realization, of equity and political participation, inescapably emerge.6 Now, under progressively changing socio-economic conditions of ongoing modernization processes, the once mobilizing collectivistic values necessarily develop into a status-quo ideology catering to the interests of the dominant old class. Within a context of considerable development successes, such a political class will, then, defend itself against new political, social and economic demands of emerging social groups (representing the modern, upwardly mobile part of society) that are fighting more and more for a broader participation in public affairs, which means: for liberal values. This has been the politico-historic scenario in Western Europe (and the Western world in general). What we observe in East and South-east Asia is basically its repetition. So there are good reasons why the propaganda for ‘Asian values’ within East and South-east Asia ‘only’ reflects a transitional crisis within the context of successful development. It reflects the self-defence of the representatives of the long-prevailing autocratic or dictatorial regimes against their own societies which more and more emancipate themselves via

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ever-differentiating interest groups, parties and social associations – what is rightly called an emerging self-organizing civil society. That context is very different from the one out of which ‘Islamic values’ are propagated: Islamism has been propagated for about twenty years in a political, socio-economic and cultural environment characterized by chronic and profound development crises for which at the moment no promising way out seems to offer itself (Algeria, Egypt and so on). This fact is well known to the most sophisticated proclamators of ‘Asian values’, but this does not mean that corresponding political consequences ensue. To the question whether development without democracy can be achieved, Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore) recently answered in a German weekly magazine: If you refer to democracy of American or German origin, I would say: Yes, development without democracy is possible. You do not necessarily need elections, conflicting opinions and a regular change of parties in policy. If you, however, refer to industrialization, innovation and creativity in society you have to promote productive capacities in each generation. You need brains that can create new products, new services, new artistic designs. It means that you need a certain openness and flexibility in your educational system and in your society in order to enable individuals, smaller and larger groups to make decisions on their own. What we need is the opposite of a planned society or a planned economy. And to the question whether a free market would be possible without free policy, Lee answered: A free market is followed by free thinking to direct it. Many people, large groups of managers, engineers, experts get used to make their own decisions. I think, they will also like to have a say in the social sphere, in economic life and about how they are governed. Political participation, therefore, will become inevitable; good governance is in need of participation.7 When will modern East Asia routinely, without basic disputes, comply with civil rights and democracy? Taking the time dimension into appropriate consideration the answer seems easy in regard to East Asia and parts of South-east Asia. East Asia has experienced unbelievable economic modernization pushes with widespread social impacts within only thirty years. Corresponding developments in industrialized Europe needed a hundred years and more.8 With regard to political development, political modernization took much more time in Europe than in East Asia, including essential changes such as Reformation, Enlightenment and several political revolutions. Therefore, it seems only a question of time – probably another

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ten to twenty years – before democracy and human rights, especially the institutionally secured defence of individual basic rights, will become a generalized, so to speak ‘natural’, element of the East Asian political culture. Constitutional democracy and human rights (the rule of law) will then have a solid foundation within East Asian societies as they will no longer be mere proclamations but the institutional answer to political demands by more and more groups and individuals. It is, however, certain and natural that this process and its final result will show local cultural specificities. This experience is even characteristic for development within Europe: although Finland, Portugal, Ireland and the Netherlands (and all the other countries) can be considered to be institutional articulations of the modern ‘democratic constitutional state’, their specific features based on their individual national history remain quite distinctive. With East Asia it will be just the same. In that respect, the West, therefore, can view the Far East with great calm. Development successes inevitably result in irreversible consequences: a modernizing or already modernized society can only temporarily be manipulated by autocratic and dictatorial means. Time for such political order runs out as successful modernization proceeds. As can be observed today in Taiwan and South Korea, the developmental dictatorship of the past decades has been getting out of date; it has objectively become obsolete.9 Anyone who in view of this development, then, predicts a clash of Asian and Western values in the sense of systemic antagonism will misjudge the historical and political-economic context. The crucial point will be the fact that emancipated, competent and politically organizing Asians – managers, unionists, workers, service traders, academics, lawyers, doctors and so on – have political aims and values that will more and more differ considerably from the currently propagated catalogue of ‘Asian values’ and will resemble those values for which progressive political forces have fought in the Western world during the last 150 years. You may call these values Western but for systematic reasons it makes more sense to call them simply modern.10

Conditions of late modernization The fundamental experience of Europe is, thus, actually repeated in East Asia. In order to set free productive capacities, at first institutional and social changes, even revolutions are necessary. They eliminate the structural self-blockages found in traditional societies. After 1945 these changes have taken place in East Asia under capitalist and communist circumstances. Before and after, ‘Asian values’ have characterized this cultural area throughout. This shows that, taken separately, such values are not able to lead to a corresponding development dynamic. For hundreds of years just the opposite seems to be far more plausible: such values have

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been for a long time part of the self-blockage syndrome instead of being the speeding-up engine for social and economic development. After removing the structural blockages (basically after the Second World War), the development more or less ran along the same lines as in European history: in Europe defeudalization was the condition for setting free new growth capacities and a broad-based development dynamic. Where defeudalization was not possible, or more precisely where – as in the Eastern half of Europe – even refeudalization took place (‘second serfdom’), modern development did not happen.11 Today nobody denies that some ‘Asian values’ (such as educational studiousness and team work) have been very important for the development process in East Asia during the past four decades (as they have been crucial in Europe’s modern development history). But in such assessment the tremendous individualization process to be observed in East Asia at the same time is mostly left out of the picture like any other features which resemble European development processes: agricultural reform first, industrialization later; a clever mixture of export-orientation and import-substitution industrialization; interventionist government; neomercantilistic foreign economy policy during a long-term take-off period and so on. Taking all these familiar characteristics of European and East Asian development into consideration, there are no good reasons why the democratic constitutional state should not also become a characteristic of East Asia.12 South Korea and Taiwan are experiencing such change today. The development in China, however, is far more difficult to prognosticate, because there is nobody within or out of China who could answer the question how a dictatorial regime and a population of about 1.3 billion people can be democratized without serious problems. There has been some propaganda of ‘Asian values’ emerging from Beijing recently. Within the context of dynamic development as it can be currently observed in China, this propaganda should be taken as a sign of neo-Confucian Leninism in order to fight against those political forces in society, economy and culture that intend to realize a cautious and slow opening up of the political system as well, thus complementing economic and social modernization with some first steps of cultural and political modernization. As these political forces can rely on a continuously growing capitalist economic foundation and since their opponents have to act from a dwindling, stagnating platform of obsolete planned economy, the political success of the first group cannot, obviously, be taken for granted, but in the long run their political basis is a much better one than that of the reforming forces for example in eastern Europe, the period of Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s included. These reforming forces in Eastern Europe had no emerging economic power potential of their own, and, of course, no dynamically growing economy; they were rather faced with the growing chaos of so-called ‘transformation economies’.13

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Conclusions ‘Asian values’ cannot be taken literally: in their original substance such values represent nothing but a variant of values as they are typical for each traditional society: family and collectives as reference groups, paternalism, an explicit sense of duty, authority-fixation and industriousness (including over-exertion, without which a survival in subsistence economies was never possible). On this level of discourse you could easily talk of Anatolian, Swabian, Berberian or Lombardian values or, more generally, of traditional values instead of ‘Asian values’. In a secondary sense ‘Asian values’, like other collectivist values, have entered national mobilization ideologies directed against the West (‘modernity’), but at the same time serving constructively as an instrument for delayed development efforts aiming at catching up with Europe. Historically such collectivistic development ideologies could be observed on each continent and in each culture zone of the world, peripheral Europe included. Explicitly or implicitly they have mostly been socialisticcorporatistic in their orientation, rooted in national projects with the postcolonial state and its characteristic developmental bureaucracy as basis. The failure of the post-colonial project in some places has contributed to the culturalization of the political scene, today distinctly observable in large areas of the Islamic world, but also under Hinduistic premises in India or under Buddhist premises in Sri Lanka. In most such cases power struggles are to be found at the base of this culturalization. The latter emerges whenever transformation processes (‘social mobilization’) are speeding up and, at the same time, far-reaching development successes cannot be expected in the near future. In such a context the intonation of traditional (Islamic or other) values is an expression of frustration and despair for which there are many objective reasons resulting from basic development crises. Precisely this context is, however, not representative for East Asia and parts of South-east Asia. In these areas development success determines the rhythm of politics, including the transition from autocratic or dictatorial regimes to those where the rule of law and democracy will finally prevail. And while the leading representatives in some of these Asian countries loudly proclaim ‘Asian values’ with the idea of counteracting the political implications of ongoing deep social changes, the process of political democratization cannot be contained in the face of powerful new social and economic actors.14 Within the specific context of successful development this process is irreversible and will, finally, result in some democratic-constitutional state with an Asian flavour.

10 Interim observations

Cultural struggles, understood as embittered political clashes over the organization of public order, are a reality. They are not, as argued in debates over Huntington’s theory, geoculturally determined in the style of ‘Islam versus the West’. Today, after the conclusion of the decolonization process, during which they played a specific role with respect to developmental policy, cultural struggles now take place within various, mainly medium and lower-level contexts, that is as a rule within individual societies and their sub-categories. Here they undergo different degrees of intensity, which can be categorized as follows. First, the term ‘cultural struggle’ is most frequently mentioned in the context of the ‘culture wars’ taking place in the USA. No mention has been made of this in the arguments of the previous chapters, which may come as a surprise considering the vehemence with which public and academic debates take place in the USA. The reason for omission is that the term ‘culture wars’ is grossly exaggerated in the light of what the ‘wars’ are actually all about – at least so far, and with the obvious exception of extremist positions. It actually refers to public conflicts within the – admittedly not uncontroversial – constitutional framework over the growing cultural and political awareness and empowerment of minorities and marginal groups in American society. It is not the principle of the constitution which is at issue but simply the fact that its universalistic promise has not been fulfilled. Put differently, the whole process would be highly improbable if the experience of persistent discrimination did not provide such groups with legitimate grounds to become clearly politically aware for the first time, and to struggle for recognition.1 These struggles are concerned with achieving political participation and fair chances in education and the economy, that is they are ultimately a customary issue of democratic politics. The fact that identity, or identity conflicts come to the fore in these struggles – that not only material issues and incompatibilities are articulated – results from the fact that ‘culture wars’ are typically the result of multidimensional discrimination. The campaigns over ‘identity politics’ thereby have the function of helping to eliminate the syndrome of discrimination altogether both conceptually and

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through agitation. The reference to identity and the political instrumentalization of identity become a power resource of the hitherto politically voiceless or powerless. Conflicts of this type would become critical only if as a result of militant escalation the underlying conditions for the conflict as laid down by the republican-democratic constitution were no longer accepted. Second, this is precisely what happens in ethnopolitical conflicts within pluralistic societies when minorities fail to attain roughly the same opportunities in political, social, economic and cultural terms as the majority population. As explained in a discussion of Huntington earlier, such conflicts become cultural issues if endeavours to achieve improved political participation, equal opportunities of upward mobility in education, the economy and equality with regard to social security remain unsuccessful. Then it is understandable if, in view of a history of suffering, an affected group grasps universalistically inspired solutions as an ideological manifesto. In some countries such conflicts are buffered by specific regulations, for instance by the guarantee of minority rights, through the status of autonomy or consociational arrangements, that is one variety or another of consensual democracy.2 Third, in other, more virulent cultural struggles of the present day, the issue is not one of opportunities for optimization or optimization itself. The translation of ‘Asian values’ into societal, economic, cultural and above all legal terms would mean constructing a new societal order fully in line with these values; here a multidimensional societal blueprint is proposed with the intention to put it into effect. The chances of success are slim, as already argued in the previous chapter, but that is not of interest here. What is relevant is that a societal blueprint has been propagated and set in opposition to others on cultural grounds. The issue here is the development of an ambitious alternative project that could potentially be implemented by force. This situation can be witnessed not just in Asia. Islamists, especially militant fundamentalists, inciting opposition to the secular state (as seen today particularly in Egypt or in Turkey), envision ‘theocratic rule’ as an absolute alternative. Nor is it a question of making the odd change on the outskirts of society; it is rather a matter of completely reconstructing public order, that is drawing up a new constitution including all the policy areas such as education, media, criminal law and so on. The consequences of such an alternative are visible today wherever it prevailed and was implemented (Iran, Sudan, Taliban Afghanistan). Whether such a project is the expression of true religious convictions or just the product of politically opportunistic calculation – or whether it is a combination of both – is a question that at this point can remain unanswered. The clash between projects and counter-projects, as Israel has shown over the past two or three decades, is extremely volatile. This struggle in

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Israel, now highly political and dividing the whole population into two camps, also concerns the organization of public order. The issue at stake is whether the country should continue to have a secular constitution (notwithstanding certain special religious regulations), as advocated by liberal Zionists, or whether a public order should be implemented that is inspired by and institutionalized along the lines of ‘Jewish Law’ (halakah), as called for by the ultra-orthodox and religious nationalists.3 But internal social differentiations are also at the root of the cultural struggle in Israel, for instance the difference between immigrant Jews from Europe and those from Arabic countries, or those who have immigrated from the Soviet Union or Russia over the past twenty-five years. In broad terms, these differentiations are identical with those between the middle and lower classes. But the social differences between the opponents in this case do not appear to be as grave as they usually are in pluralistic societies, which is why it seems that in Israel – under the utmost consideration of power-political strategies by the political parties – the genuine cultural content of this cultural struggle has a more prominent status than in any other cultural struggle taking place today. Moreover, the case of Israel makes it clear that the implementation of the ultra-orthodox and religious-nationalist option would be nothing short of constitutional regression, for in a modern society such as Israel an option such as this could be implemented only by force. It is plain, then, that in discussions over current cultural struggles the different contexts and intensities of the struggles must be made perfectly clear. Moreover, it must be remembered that modern societies have various ways of dealing with plurality. The main requirement for such variability is the acceptance of plurality as a matter of principle. In extreme cultural struggles this acceptance is called into question. If already existing plurality is to be eliminated, or repressed where it is in the process of emergence, then the alternative projects can be implemented only under totalitarian rule. In a worst case situation, there is a lot to lose. The worst case scenario is not a fictive geocultural cleavage, and not a ‘culture war’ such as those fought in the USA. The worst case is when attempts are made to impose premodern, and especially theocratic, projects upon societies that are in the process of modernization or already modernized. Such endeavours are diametrically opposed to the civilization of modern conflicts.

Part 3

Communication about cultures

11 Pleading for a reorientation of the intercultural dialogue

The following observations on the dialogue between Christians and Muslims, or between Western modernism and Islam, will probably appear untimely, in the sense of Friedrich Nietzsche, who first coined this term, ‘against the time and thus to the time and, hopefully, in favour of a coming time’.1 This reflection was first inspired by the observation that the marginal utility of the dialogue in question as it is to be observed in countries of Western Europe is declining. If, initially, that dialogue provided new information and stimulated new findings and insights, it has meanwhile become such a routine affair that both analytically and practically it is hardly possible to generate any new points of view. Furthermore, a curious role game can be observed in the course of this dialogue. On the whole, the Muslim participants are not hard-boiled representatives of Orthodox Islam, be it in the traditionalist, Islamist, integrationalist or fundamentalist sense (all of which are often hard to differentiate). Believers or non-believers, they are as a rule representatives of a ‘modern Islam’ (whatever that may mean in detail). Nevertheless – and it can be explained only in group-dynamic terms – it is precisely these ‘modernists’ who in dialogues with Westerners get caught up in a position in which their philosophical arguments are roughly consistent with the same Islamist arguments which they would tend to resist in local political discussions, particularly since they themselves are often the target of Islamist propaganda. The Western participants in the dialogue are not seldom characterized by their naïve criticism of modernism, the uneasy product of which they see themselves as. Their criticism is naïve because they are often unaware – or do not want to become aware – of its implications. Thus, two ‘dialogue partners’ come together, the one side – the Muslims – appealing for understanding of points of view which cannot be their own (if one reads their statements, they are indeed not their own), and the other side – the ‘goodwilled Westerners’ – with not much more to offer than self-accusations. A dialogue such as this, intellectually exhausted and at a dead end, holds no promise for the future apart from its routine continuation and its repetitiveness. Are there any ways out of this situation, and could the concentration on specific central themes help?

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The realistic reconstruction by Westerners of their own historical development In the usual dialogues between Christians and Muslims, or between Westerners and people from the Islamic world (and from other cultures), there is a lack of feeling for the historical dimension of the development of the West. In actual fact, the history of the Western world is mentioned only with reference to colonization and imperialism – which they are, of course, fully justified to condemn. As a rule, however, the West is discussed as if the product of its development, ‘modernism’, is the belated and conclusive result of an initial ‘modernism project’. This ‘project’ is implied to be authentically Western, as if its course was predestined by cultural genes or chromosomes, so to speak, and had gradually unfolded, accelerated by occasional genetic transitions (such as revolutions), but otherwise inevitable in its development. Discourse on some central aspects of the Western world, as Westerners themselves see it today – rationalism, secularism, individualization and so on – is to a great extent moulded by such assumptions as these. In reality, all the essential characteristics of today’s Western world are far more the product of highly contradictory and conflict-ridden development processes than a self-developed product predetermined by cultural genes. Not only were the paths of development within Europe very varied (with north–south and east–west divisions as well as many dividing lines within those regions); furthermore, within each single development path the historical outcome of each process was always dependent on factors which were by no means identical. The decisive factors were various configurations of political, social, economic and cultural groups and their corresponding intellectual currents.2 The development of Europe included – in some parts earlier than others – an historically unprecedented political, social, economic and cultural transformation. Traditional societies were modernized; illiterate societies with people living on the verge of subsistence became societies with competent, self-conscious urban populations who became aware of their new interests and identities and then became politically active and organized. This reconstruction was like a prolonged period of emancipation, which even in the West is still not concluded today.3 Above all, it was never an automatic process. Furthermore, the liberation of the people from their intellectual self-bondage became relatively stable only where there was reliable support from materially and/or institutionally secure groups. This substantial history of European paths of development was shaped by power groups, each with varying degrees of effectiveness. The landed gentry, the peasantry, the church and the monarchy set the stage initially; the bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the new middle class were relatively later products of the reconstruction process. Nothing was certain from the outset – neither basic liberties and human rights nor the constitutional

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state, neither democratization nor the emancipation of women, neither the orientation to rationalism nor the assumption that conflicts were legitimate and ‘only’ needed constructive processing, and so on. It would also be wrong to assume that European development was equal to a triumphal march of the modernists and that the traditionalists had only ever been on the retreat, fighting battles which they had lost from the outset. Some of what are regarded as Western achievements are only fairly recent and some even very recent. In 1215, the year of the Magna Carta (a document fundamental to the development of Europe), individual protective rights were established, but not in today’s sense. It was rather a question of defending the ancient feudal rights of English barons against the arrogant power of one who had dared to establish himself as the supreme head of the state by military means.4 It took centuries and many changes before the constellation of that year – King John and the English barons, who felt their status threatened – was replaced by the line-up we know today – the constitutional state and citizens with legally guaranteed individual protective rights. The separation of state and church familiar today was hardly derived from the biblical recommendation to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, to God the things that are God’s’. The secular state was by no means the inevitable result of European culture; on the contrary, this type of state had to be secured in the face of immense resistance, as is revealed for instance by the fact that the Lutheran church made peace with the secular state only after the Second World War, and the Catholic church did not do so until after the second Vatican Council in the 1960s.5 The fact that women’s emancipation was a late product and not an early phenomenon of modernism hardly needs pointing out, as it is made obvious by current discussions. There are a number of further examples of this kind.6 The point, then, is that the ‘development of Europe’, ‘modernism’, or simply ‘the West’ must be thought of in their real historical context, that is, in the context of far-reaching conflicts between existing and newly developing power groups, of progressive and reactionary developments, but also of many unavoidable compromises between collective actors who were not strong enough to gain hegemonial victories singlehandedly. They therefore by necessity had to channel developments towards constitutional arrangements in the sense of checks and balances, that is power control and the distribution of force – and in the majority of cases they did this reluctantly, so to speak: contre cœur. While the intercultural dialogue today is emphatically marked by a kind of ‘profile essentialism’ – in that the West is assumed to have certain distinctive inherent or ‘eternal’ features – the rediscovery of the real history of modernism could be helpful to Westerners in adjusting their own image of the West. It could also help Western participants in intellectual debates with other cultures to avoid falling into the similar trap of making profile-essentialist projections.7 This trap is stumbled into in almost every intercultural dialogue. A second recommendation may also be useful.

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Calling for a realistic insider’s view of Islam One of the fateful aspects of current Christian–Muslim dialogues is its fixation on ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. It is remarkable that almost without exception the term ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ is strongly criticized, but that the dialogues are nevertheless saturated by this terminology. Evidently neither the term nor the phenomenon itself can be avoided. Criticism of the term, however, often also leads to the denial of its actual existence, or it is simply retermed as ‘Islamism’ or ‘Integrism’. Regardless of the terminology, the debate itself remains utterly fragmentary. This can be illustrated by the simple fact that the very people who most strongly criticize the term ‘fundamentalism’ and regard it as the source of a new enemy image have as yet done nothing towards documenting the whole spectrum of thought in the Islamic world.8 Why is one conference held after the other – with the best of intentions – on the issue of ‘fundamentalism’ (and always with a similar criticism of the concept), and why no dialogue with the representatives of a modern, democratic form of Islam on their own visions? These representatives of modern Islam see themselves faced with a reality which traditionalists and fundamentalists are evading in their own specific ways. Islamic societies are also in a dramatic process of reconstruction – a social change sweeping across all fields of society, economy and culture. New social classes are forming; society and the economy are becoming more differentiated; the level of competence of the population is increasing. This growing social, economic and cultural complexity raises the question how the vast diversity of interests and identities arising out of it can be handled politically.9 Traditionalists have one or another variation on the old order in mind, thereby living under the illusory assumption that the political order of the ancien régime could even survive the circumstances of a changing society. Fundamentalists (who do exist, regardless of whether the term is appropriate or not) use the social illnesses resulting from the modernization process as a justification for their machiavellian strategy to seize power. Their response to growing complexity is – as is generally typical for fundamentalists – relatively simple: to overcome it by the one or other variant of despotic and totalitarian reduction of complexity.10 It goes without saying that such tactics are being discussed within Islamic societies, and political struggles for and against them are in progress. A conflict such as this is – as in Europe in the past – part of the transition process. But this is no reason for carrying out a distorted dialogue or a pseudo-dialogue about it. An intellectual debate should rather be dealing intensively with the concepts of the democratic representatives of the Islamic world; not because it is presumed that they are the ‘better Muslims’, but primarily out of simple curiosity. How do writers, scientists, politicians, the representatives of

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social and especially religious groups envisage a desirable political constitution for their increasingly complex societies? It is clear that ancient texts can offer no inspiration, not even the Qur’an. Like all comparable texts (and subsequent texts based on it), the Qur’an too was tied into the context of traditional society. Whatever ideas existed about order in this type of society, they can only be unrealistic and too simple for a modern society or one in the process of modernization. In other words, ancient texts can still – perhaps especially today – inspire individuals to virtuous behaviour, but cannot be used as a source for drafting an ideal or viable, modern social or economic system. As it is, a modern social order cannot be intrinsically virtuous. Should one want to make it virtuous, then one would be pleading for despotism – even if it were in the name of a republic of virtues. It is therefore extremely fascinating to enquire what constructive ideas are being considered in other cultures such as the Islamic, on how to cope with this objective complexity of problems. It has already been explained that Europe needed centuries to come to terms with it in its own way. As a rule, people from the Islamic world who are abreast with current social developments and racking their brains over the question are not likely to come up with clear-cut solutions. However, their thoughts and proposals for a solution are of great significance to those directly experiencing the changes, as they offer desirable options which flow into the political debate. An appraisal of forward-looking thinking in the Islamic world (and elsewhere) – first by simply acknowledging its existence, making translations and organizing dialogues – is much more promising for the future than a continuation of distorted debates on fundamentalism. In fact, in view of the situation explained at the beginning, the clear demand should even be to hold no more conferences on Islamic fundamentalism. Not because the phenomenon of political fundamentalism does not exist within the Islamic world (on the contrary), but because this fixation leads the dialogue astray and forces the Islamic representatives, as we have seen, into difficult roles, and also because it gives rise here in the West to a curious picture of Islam: fundamentalism is on the one hand often trivialized, on the other it is often overexaggerated, but endeavours towards modernizing Islam are completely overlooked. It is vitally important to hold discussions with theorists and political power groups who are struggling to establish forward-looking policies which do not insinuate or even stage-manage regressive solutions – vitally important for us, but also for the democratic Islamic representatives from the Islamic world. Redirecting the debate in this way also means avoiding the danger of unwittingly becoming the useful idiot of fundamentalists. What is more, conditions for a new dialogue are not unfavourable, as we shall see below. Contrary to common assumptions, there is at present no potentially highly explosive line of conflict between the Islamic world and the West – neither the beginnings of one nor a developing one, nor even a nascent

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phalanx-like confrontation.11 Of the conflicts that do exist, some are moderate, some are sporadic build-ups, and some are really severe conflicts in Arabic–Islamic countries or within the Islamic world as a whole. These are in fact modernization conflicts, similar to those which took place in Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, albeit under different circumstances and with a different cultural profile. Within these current local conflicts, the Islamic–Christian component hardly plays more than a marginal role if one disregards the Coptic Christians in Egypt, the Sudan, the Lebanon and the Philippines (which is nevertheless over 90 per cent Christian). As a rule, the conflicts are focused on political conflicts within the individual Islam community, which seldom functions like an umma. In general, the conflicts between secular Western states and the Islamic minorities within Western societies have also remained marginal. So, as already stated, the starting position is quite favourable. This basic situation, both here and in Islamic countries, must be emphasized because here in the West the theory of ‘the demonization of Islam’ is gaining in popularity, and, moreover, is helping to renew the fixation on a supposed ‘Occident–Orient conflict’. This is particularly often expressed by the very people who are endeavouring to promote a dialogue with Muslims. At the same time it is not seldom claimed that this new enemy image is a Machiavellian contrivance to replace the old concept of the communist enemy. The fact is overlooked that the demonization of communism has hardly held any sway since the 1960s, not even during the so-called ‘Second Cold War’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That is why, when the East–West conflict ended in 1898/90, there was neither among the elites nor among the masses any evidence that an enemy image had been lost. By then, the demonization of communism, dating from the 1950s and 1960s, had only marginal significance. There was therefore no demand for a substitute. The demonization of a new enemy side, that is substituting Islam for communism, is to a large extent imagined. A realistic concept of Islam, however, cannot be formed if people here in the West see themselves confronted with a fantasized enemy image and not with the realities of Islam (or, to put it more correctly, the different forms of Islam).12

Looking beyond the Christian–Muslim dialogue Nevertheless, the Christian–Muslim dialogue still urgently needs a broader horizon. The following four observations may be of use here. First, if Muslims around the world are threatened today, then it is not within the Islamic–Christian sphere but in Hindu majority communities, that is in India. There, where Muslims represent a ‘minority’ of 120 million people, many types of conflict are taking place which are abstractly imagined in Christian–Islamic regions. The extent of conflict there is of considerable significance, as it is possible that it could spread to epidemic

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proportions without any chance of escape. The conflict is already influencing local political contexts (‘communalism’), and in parts escalating with deplorable intensity. All the essential elements of ethnopolitical conflict can be observed in India. Both sides are disputing each other’s right to exist, and the idealization of each group is followed by the declaration who is its enemy. The greater the extent of such psychodynamic demarcations, that is the more autistic the conflict becomes, the greater the endeavours of each side to redefine its collective identity symbolically, for instance by creating a myth about its origins and history.13 At the same time, the power strategists are using such ethnopolitical symbolizations to encourage ethnopolitical awareness even where it had previously not existed. ‘Imagined communities’ turn into militarized conflict parties defining themselves in ethnopolitical terms.14 Attention should be drawn to the escalating conflict between Hindus and Muslims because it is a real and not an imagined one and it also has international implications with the threat of conventional and possibly even nuclear war between India and Pakistan. In addition, it is worth pointing out that this is a clash between two very different cosmologies. The differences between Hinduism and Islam are far greater than those between Islam and Christianity. The conflict is also disastrous in so far as it is being borne out by grass-roots movements (as is the conflict between Hindus and Sikhs). Manipulators at the top would not have a chance without the astonishingly diverse response from below. And as Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, but also the politically less influential Christians, Buddhists, Parsees and Jainists, have no alternative but to maintain their old forms of local coexistence or to find new ones, events in India are of the utmost exemplary significance. Up until now the secular state left behind by the old colonial power provided a framework within which this coexistence was organized. If this is questioned, what will replace it? A hegemonial solution (‘Hindustan’) would be catastrophic and would mean widespread civil war.15 Second, looking beyond the horizons of one’s most immediate problems also means perceiving real lines of conflict where Muslims and Christians play only a marginal role, in other words where other communities are fighting each other. What is pushing them into these conflicts? The conflict which has escalated in Sri Lanka between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils could be cited as an example here. What can be learned from it? Again, the initial circumstances of the conflict are comparable with those of other ethnopolitical conflicts. The astonishing fact here, though, is that the clash involves two parties both of whose cosmological backgrounds are based more emphatically than almost any other in the world on non-violence. In particular, a militant, political form of Buddhism must really appear to be a contradiction in terms. The conflict in Sri Lanka is therefore an example of the extent to which even cosmologies which originally embodied the precept of restraint in cases of conflict can be used

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as intellectual weapons. The causalities which in such cases are often lightly assumed must especially be reconsidered in the light of the Sri Lankan conflict. Did such conflicts begin as clashes between cosmologies, cultures and/or religions, in a sense rooted in the different sources and origins of the respective cultures? Or are they not rather a case of modern development conflicts with identifiable modern interest groups? These are, for instance, old elites being pushed aside (a modern phenomenon!); newly arising elites confronting the power assertions of the post-colonial elites whom they regard as Westernized, corrupt state officials who have secured all the privileges for themselves; new professionals (often engineers and scientists) who find their access to elitist positions blocked and often act as the spearhead of fundamentalist movements; marginal groups in urban centres used as the sounding-boards of unsuccessful candidates for the elite classes and so on.16 Third, the variable meaning of cultural values in the development process also becomes clear if one takes a comparative look at East Asia. This is a cultural region which in recent times can be regarded to a large degree as Europe’s successor in economic and social, and meanwhile also in political terms. The reasons for this do not primarily lie in Confucianism, and certainly not in neo-Confucianism, which is now nothing more than one of many intellectual trends. The real reason for this ‘succession’ is that, over the past few decades and for reasons which can all be named, a successful economic modernization process has taken place in East Asia which has since then led to a modern social structure.17 The complete range of aspects that generally make up such a structure can be seen more and more clearly in East Asia: a quantitative reduction of the peasantry; an increase in private businesses uncoupling themselves from state administration but still remaining connected to it; a growing class of wage-earners whose political influence increases to the degree that demand for them exceeds supply; a striving middle class; an increasingly self-conscious intelligentsia. These social classes in East Asia are today demanding, even fighting for, their right to participate in making political opinions and decisions. And they are succeeding at a much faster rate than their European predecessors did because the momentum of the reconstruction process of these societies is much greater than that of the relatively drawn-out process in European societies, and because their political endeavours to gain powerful positions are backed by increasing economic weight.18 The pluralization of political systems which can be observed in East Asia today, especially in Taiwan and South Korea, is thus a political reflection of the institutional adaptation of old autocratic and despotic regimes to an increasingly complex socio-economic and cultural reality.19 As in European history, this adaptation is no easy process, but heavily ridden with conflict. Here, too, its direction is not linear but irregular, although its prospects are good because it was preceded by a regrouping of the old

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societies into strong new socio-economic groups. This basic fact of socioeconomic restructuring is not affected by the present ‘Asian crisis’. At the same time, the current debate on so-called ‘Asian values’ which can be followed in East Asia, but particularly in Singapore (South-east Asia), should not be misinterpreted. The ‘Asian values’ proclaimed today are similar to the old European values of the past. Unity, harmony and consensus are preferred to pluralism; majority voting and the protection of minorities are declared alien; discipline is more highly rated than liberty, which is regarded as selfish; the group, in particular the family, is put in a higher category than the individual, duty higher than rights, authority or the rule of the wise men (‘gurucracy’) higher than parliamentarianism and constitutionalism. Power is restrained not by its distribution but by ethical practices which in turn are sanctified by traditions and conventions. The good ruler at the state level is likened to a good family father. If he proves to be a tyrant, then resistance is conceivable and legitimate – at an abstract level, but only there. The political philosophy of ‘Asian values’ places ‘stability first and democracy later’. This was also the philosophy of the early European rulers, and echoes of it can be perceived in Europe even today. While such concepts, as already stated, are familiar to European history – and, in point of fact, completely concurrent with ‘Islamic values’ – they have in East Asia (and, for the present, in South-east Asia, too) a specific power-ideological function. They are the typical expression of a legitimation crisis of outdated authoritarian regimes in economically relatively successful countries. ‘Asian values’ serve to ward off the political demands of the new social classes, especially the new middle class and the wageearners. In China they have the additional function of justifying the continued existence of the Communist Party’s monopoly rights. ‘Asian values’ are thus an expression of neo-authoritarianism, promulgated when the outdated authoritarianism of the autocratic regime, that is the development dictatorships, is called into question by society.20 However, although ‘Asian values’ are propagated, they are also a sign of retreat. They serve as the ideological spearhead against demands for further democratization from new social groups who also want an active role in political development. In all probability, these values will have no future in East Asia because, in contrast to Third World countries, the demands of a growing number of upwardly mobile social groups are based on a differentiating economy. The new demands are therefore not formulated in the abstract context of basic liberties or simply human rights, but are bolstered by economic and social conditions. Fourth, the process in East Asia is interesting because it contrasts strikingly with the history of Realsozialismus, or really existing socialism. Really existing socialism was also a development programme with autocratic devices. The concentration of power, the monopoly rights of one party, the Gleichschaltung of society, economy and culture, were

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interpreted not as the expression of totalitarianism but as the epitome of progressive development policy in the construction of socialist societies. The aim was to produce ‘Socialist Man’, or, still better, ‘Soviet Man’. ‘Republik, das ist nicht viel, Sozialismus ist das Ziel’ (A republic alone is not enough; the real aim is socialism) was an old slogan even within socialist movements in the West. Why did really existing socialism fail, and why is East Asia so successful? There are many reasons, but in the context of this discussion there is one of decisive interest. In terms of social statistics, really existing socialism undoubtedly led to the modernization of societies: The illiterate learned to read and write, peasants became urbanites with new and varied professions; upward social mobility was possible everywhere. However, the rulers of really existing socialism were under the illusion that upwardly mobile, intelligent and competent people could still be treated like children. The discrepancy between professional competency and political infantilization, aggravated by the dramatic consequences of economic mismanagement, was overcome by repression for a long time. However, as had been predicted at an early stage, in the absence of structural reforms it inevitably led to revolutionary transformations, which might even have resulted in a short-lived victory for the counter-revolution.21 The whole course of events is instructive for the dialogue discussed here. First, it contrasts strikingly with developments in East Asia. But the similarity of some variants of Islamic fundamentalism to the ideology of really existing socialism are also obvious, for instance in its high regard for the concentration of power, the concept of an homogeneous moral community as the fundamental principle in politics, society, economy and culture, and the proposition that not the reprehensible bourgeois values of the West but their own, ‘authentic’ values should be achieved. Unfortunately, even the now outdated discussion on bourgeois Western human rights versus socialist human rights is being repeated, except that now ‘Islamic’ or, particularly in China, ‘Asian’ human rights have taken the place of ‘socialist human rights’. However, while socialist human rights were originally proclaimed to maintain the control of already gained power positions and to ward off the claims to power of new social groups and in particular a pluralistic democratization process, ‘Islamic values’ are as a rule propagated for the purpose of gaining power. Once gained, these values would be functionalized by power to the same purpose as they were under really existing socialism – they would be transformed into a power ideology. To sum up, one can see that for various reasons it would be useful to look beyond the horizon of current Christian–Muslim dialogues. One could learn that the real threats to Muslims lie somewhere other than in their relations to the West, and above all in their own societies and in Hindu regions of India. One could also see that exactly the same conflicts in

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which Muslim societies are struggling and suffering today are also taking place in non-Islamic regions, and even in places where non-violence (in principle) is part of the traditional cultural message. What unites the Islamic societies and these societies is the breakdown in their post-colonial development, in other words, a development crisis. In East Asia, where the crisis could be averted as a result of cleverly managed development policy, there are in consequence no signs of phenomena such as fundamentalism. Rather, what one sees is a drive towards socio-economic modernization followed by a thrust towards political modernization in the shape of democratization and the establishment of constitutional states. Muslims who regard ‘the West’ as ‘rotten’ could learn a lot from this process, and even historically unaware Westerners could discover in it aspects which roughly compare with their own history. Unfortunately, in the course of its development, really existing socialism missed the chance of political modernization and collapsed as a result. This is no trivial experience, either! Lessons and more lessons. These and others have not yet been considered in the dialogue under discussion here, and they could be so useful, especially in view of the following final remarks.

The message of modernism – a proposal The term ‘modernism’ can evoke many associations: scientification, technology, rationalism, individualization and so on. If one wishes, one can also associate the complete range of social diseases and pathologies with the term, as happens in most Christian–Muslim dialogues – alienation, loss of collective moral standards, sexual permissiveness and lasciviousness, postmodern ‘anything goes’, crime and so on. The extreme of criticism and self-accusations is the theory of modernity as ‘modern fundamentalism’.22 The latter theory, in particular, misjudges the fact that modernism always evolved from criticism and self-criticism. Seen as a whole (and not just selectively), modernism in its tendency can be compared to an antifundamentalist programme. It began with criticism of the feudal order, and in the past few decades it has arrived at the last variant of selfcriticism – postmodernism, which however would be misunderstood if it wasn’t attributed to modernism itself.23 In the centuries in between, events gave rise to a wavelike pattern of developments. The Enlightenment provoked Romanticism, Impressionism prompted Expressionism, individualism gave rise to communitarian counter-movements, capitalism led to socialism as a political platform, the liberal constitutional state gave way to the constitutional welfare state. And modernism was never satisfied with itself, beginning exclusively and with a restricted scope, then gradually broadening out and becoming more and more comprehensive. While it originally involved a few members of the educated and the propertied classes, ‘the People’ became the upholders and beneficiaries of modernism

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only as a result of a continuous process of modernization. Only very recently was modernism correctly, if a little belatedly, revealed by feminists to be an all-male event, with the consequence that, even with regard to gender relations, modernism is now gradually becoming more inclusive. Such diversity of modernism is its very attractiveness – its movements, counter-movements and its radiation. There is one little-regarded consequence of these facts. Because modernism is in many ways equal to an emancipation process, the growing plurality of identities and interests, of self-images and world views has always been its inevitable result. However, where social mobility and political awareness and involvement are allowed, and where plurality is no longer a novel, elitist phenomenon but has turned into a mass phenomena of divided and riven societies, one is forced to consider the question of coexistence. How is it possible, under such circumstances, to establish modalities for the constructive management of conflict which, despite the existing plurality, allow reliable, non-violent agreements in the public arena? Because in borderline cases, unhindered pluralism without institutional safeguards, that is without a recognized and accepted legal framework, can mean civil war.24 Although this was not intended for a long time, European modernism was like an incessant struggle over the normative, procedural, material and psychological preconditions for successful coexistence. It is a history of many failures, but at the same time also the history of the democratic constitutional state which was never and nowhere linear in its development and was never an automatic process with a fixed purpose. In this process political innovations occurred, as for example institutionally secured protective rights and basic individual liberties, the division of power, a public order based on political pluralism and so on. None of these experiences can be handed on easily or even through missionizing to the rest of the world. But they remain an available asset. For the problems of coexistence are also arising in the rest of the world at an increasing rate and often in a much more potentially explosive combination than in the past in Europe. The growing numbers of civil wars prove this fact. No society in the world in the throes of modernization can evade the question of coexistence. The assumption of homogeneous collectives, as in the case of the umma or other similar concepts, is a misjudgement or suppression of the problem and heavily burdens the task of overcoming it. Furthermore, in many parts of the world politicization is intensifying without the corresponding institutional mechanisms to cushion its effects. And in many other parts of the world, unfortunately, the material basis which has always been necessary for such mechanisms is shrinking. The potential for political conflict is therefore highly explosive, and the temptation in such circumstances to evade the problem by simple, fundamentalistic means such as despotism or dictatorship is great. Europe has experienced much suffering in this respect in the past, and a lot of useful lessons could be learned from that experience, too.

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Outlook Intercultural dialogue would indeed benefit from perceiving the real history of Europe in all its complexity, so as not to succumb to an essentialist world view. In the words of Dieter Oberndörfer, who sees the ‘open republic’ as a European achievement: The democratic constitutional state itself was neither in Europe nor in Germany the inevitable and logical result of European history and culture. On the contrary, it only prevailed after long struggles against the dominant traditions. It is not so very long ago that in Germany even the help of the Allied Forces was required to this end.25 The acknowledgement of an irrefutable fact such as this opens the eyes to the increasingly diverse conflicts over political and socio-cultural issues outside of Europe and the West, and helps ward off the tendency to ontologize other cultures regardless of the worldwide increasingly pluralistic reality of societies. Essentialist images of the distant and unfamiliar then present themselves, today more than ever before, in a problematic light, because they are to a large degree imagined constructs. Prospects for a fruitful intercultural dialogue are, thus, greater if it is based on realistic images of one’s own culture and other cultures. Here and there a central task is the conceptual debate over political pluralism and its institutionalization. In view of the fundamental politicization of the world, the real focal point of international cultural debate is the reflection on how to facilitate a reliable, civilized form of modern conflict. The argumentative but also the political cleavages run right through all societies, and above all they ignore cultural boundaries, which have never been outstandingly clear-cut anyway. The emergence of a worldwide controversy over a culture offers a unique chance for cultural dialogue, based on self-reflective cultures, to become truly international.26 All mental barriers must be removed if full advantage is to be taken of such an opportunity. The consequence of these reflections is irrefutable, and was articulated recently by Roman Herzog in connection with foreign cultural policy-making as follows: Intercultural dialogue begins with the perception of differences within the cultures themselves. When we present the plurality of our culture abroad, we are at the same time exhibiting – in an unassuming way – possibly the most decisive historic and political experience that Germany and Europe have made. That experience is that tolerant, cooperative and civilized coexistence is possible. The indirect, but decisive lesson that can be put across through the work of our foreign cultural policy is the very same lesson in tolerance that took us Europeans so long and cost so much blood to learn.27

Notes

Introduction 1 Until only recently, similar assumptions were made in discussions over ‘socialist’ versus ‘Western’ values: such assumptions also once determined the now forgotten debate, which was still quite prominent in the 1920s, over ‘German’ as opposed to Western values. 2 This conclusion does not contradict the idea of ‘depth phenomenology’ of cultural analysis, as advocated, for example, by Heinrich Rombach in: Drachenkampf. Der philosophische Hintergrund der blutigen Bürgerkriege und die brennenden Zeitfragen, Freiburg 1996, pp. 92ff.; however, the ahistoricity, or ahistoric hypostatization, of relevant findings do pose a problem, especially the assumption that the ‘deep cultural characteristics’ identified in such findings are direct behavioural determinants. 3 Thus, as Dirk Baecker observes with regard to traditional cultures, ‘Culture is misunderstood if it is believed to be some sort of reservoir of generally accepted values. Rather, it is a product of debate over values. Something is culturally established if it is said to be taken for granted although in reality it has been quite strongly questioned for a long time.’ Cited from ‘Meditation über die Lücke. Kultur als Symptom des Unvordenklichen und die verschiedenen Versuche seiner Bewältigung’, in: Frankfurter Rundschau, 4 March 1997. 4 See Eric Lionel Jones: Das Wunder Europa. Umwelt, Wirtschaft und Geopolitik in der Geschichte Europas und Asiens, Tübingen 1991; John A. Hall: Powers and Liberties. The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West, Harmondsworth 1986. 5 See Karl August Wittfogel: ‘Die Theorie der orientalischen Gesellschaft’, in: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 7, 1938, pp. 90–122. 6 See Samir Amin: Classe et nation dans l’histoire et la crise contemporaine, Paris 1979. 7 See Norbert Elias: Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, 2 volumes, Frankfurt am Main 19863, especially vol. 2. 8 This is the assumption of Ulrich Beck in: Was ist Globalisierung?, Frankfurt am Main 1997. 9 See Karl W. Deutsch: ‘On Nationalism, World Regions and the Nature of the West’, in Per Torsvik (ed.): Mobilization, Center–Periphery Structures and Nation-Building (publication in honour of Stein Rokkan), Oslo 1982, pp. 51–93. 10 From the point of view of development theory, the term ‘peripheralization pressure’ would be more precise; this had also taken effect within Europe. See Dieter Senghaas: The European Experience. An Historical Critique of Development Theory, Leamington Spa/Dover, NH 1985, pp. 13ff.

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11 See Ludger Kühnhardt: Stufen der Souveränität. Staatsverständnis und Selbstbestimmung in der ‘Dritten Welt’, Bonn 1992. 12 This process can be observed all over the world. The process in China, for example, has recently been documented in an excellent, well-informed monography by Beate Geist: Die Modernisierung der chinesischen Kultur. Kulturdebatte und kultureller Wandel im China der 80er Jahre, Hamburg 1996. A volume evaluating studies of this kind on a global scale has yet to be published. 13 A more precise formulation of ‘fragile’ in development theory terms would be: resulting in structural heterogeneity. See Dieter Senghaas (ed.): Peripherer Kapitalismus. Analysen über Abhängigkeit und Unterentwicklung, Frankfurt am Main 19772. 14 See Geert Hofstede: Cultures and Organizations. Software of the Mind, London 1994; and especially Thomas Meyer: Identitäts-Wahn. Die Politisierung des kulturellen Unterschieds, Berlin 1997, pp. 84ff. 15 It should also be emphasized, as Johannes Schwartländer and Heiner Bielefeldt remind us, that ‘the history of human rights is not primarily founded on an optimistic belief in progress, but the experience of concrete privation, or, to be more precise, the experience of the denial of liberty. This is a structural injustice, historically not least founded in various modernization crises.’ The authors mention religious wars, political repression through absolutist police states, social misery in the industrial revolution and so on; cited in: Christen und Muslime vor der Herausforderung der Menschenrechte, Bonn 1992, pp. 22–3. In a similar vein, Otfried Höffe emphasizes that the West first created diseases such as colonialism, religious intolerance and the absolutist state which made human rights necessary as a form of therapy; thus argued in Fundamente einer globalen Zivilisation, in Werner Weidenfeld (ed.): Dialog der Kulturen, Gütersloh 1997, pp. 52–3. See also Rainer Tetzlaff on this issue in: ‘Die “Universalität” der Menschenrechte in Theorie und Praxis’, in Tetzlaff (ed.): Menschenrechte und Entwicklung, Bonn 1993, pp. 11–52. 16 Wolfgang Huber argues in a similar vein in: ‘Menschenwürde und Menschenrechte als Grundelemente einer zukünftigen internationalen Ordnung’, in: Leviathan, vol. 22, no. 1, 1994, pp. 47–59; also Ernst-Otto Czempiel: ‘Zwischen Ideal und Realität: die Menschenrechte’, in: Merkur, vol. 50, no. 9/10, 1996, pp. 905–17; Gunter Schubert: ‘Die Universalität der Menschenrechte und die liberale Demokratie im “Kampf der Kulturen” ’, in: Welttrends, no. 12, 1996, pp. 35–51. 17 See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann: Modernität, Pluralismus und Sinnkrise. Die Orientierung des modernen Menschen, Gütersloh 1995; Peter L. Berger (ed.): Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Konflikt und Vermittlung in pluralistischen Gesellschaften, Gütersloh 1997. 18 With these difficulties in mind it can be argued, as Wolfgang Welsch puts it, that ‘the conception of human rights represents the only practicable model – at a cultural and state level – that we know of for problematic situations such as these. This seems to me – with a view to the dire condition of the world today – to legitimate a situative and pragmatic universalization of this so-called “European” conception.’ Cited from ‘Europazentrismus oder Universalität? Über die Menschenrechte und die Gefahr einer rechtstheoretischen Kolonisierung’, in: Frankfurter Rundschau, 3 September 1996. 19 See Jürgen Habermas’s most recent observation: ‘But today, other cultures and world religions are exposed to the challenges of modern society in a similar way to Europe in the past, when human rights and the democratic constitutional state were in a sense invented . . . The European conception of human rights was the answer to a problem which other cultures now face today, and Europe when it was forced to overcome the political consequences of

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denominational schisms. The rivalry between religious creeds is flaring up again today within traditional societies. Also in societies which are comparatively culturally homogeneous, a reflexive reform of traditional, ruling dogmas is gradually becoming imperative.’ Cited from ‘Der intellekturelle Diskurs über Menschenrechte. Vermeintliche und tatsächliche Probleme’, in: Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit, vol. 38, no. 7, 1997, pp. 164–6. 20 See Dieter Senghaas: ‘Interkulturelle Philosophie angesichts der Fundamentalpolitisierung der Welt’, in Ram Adhar Mall and Norbert Schneider (eds): Ethik und Politik aus interkultureller Sicht, Amsterdam 1996, pp. 55–70. 21 The density of my argument makes it necessary to work with those categories that have initially been assessed as problematic. 1 Intercultural philosophy today 1 On intercultural philosophy see in particular Ram Adhar Mall: Philosophie im Vergleich der Kulturen, Darmstadt 1995; Franz M. Wimmer: Interkulturelle Philosophie. Geschichte und Theorie, Vienna 1990; Wimmer: Vorlesungen zu Theorie und Methode der Philosophie im Vergleich der Kulturen, Bremen 1997; Wimmer (ed.): Vier Fragen zur Philosophie in Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika, Vienna 1988; see also the series edited by Heinz Kimmerle and Ram Adhar Mall: Studies in Intercultural Philosophy, published in Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA, by Editions Rodopi B.V. For an earlier discussion see Ram Adhar Mall and Heinz Hülsmann: Die drei Geburtsorte der Philosophie: China, Indien, Europa, Bonn 1989, part I. For a useful critical literary report see Georg Stenger: ‘Interkulturelles Denken. Eine Herausforderung für die Philosophie’, in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 103, 1996, pp. 90–103 (part I) and pp. 323–38 (part II). 2 For an excellent publication on the structure and dynamics of traditional societies, written from a comparative perspective and synthesizing many findings, see Patricia Crone: Pre-industrial Societies, Oxford 1989. 3 The secular transformation processes named here are subsumed under the term ‘social mobilization’. For a definitive essay see Karl W. Deutsch: ‘Soziale Mobilisierung und politische Entwicklung’, in Wolfgang Zapf (ed.): Theorien des sozialen Wandels, Königstein 1979, pp. 329–50; see also Zbigniew Brzezinski: Macht und Moral. Neue Werte für die Weltpolitik, Hamburg 1994, part II. 4 For more thorough discussions see Christian von Krockow: Soziologie des Friedens, Gütersloh 1962, and Dieter Senghaas (ed.): Den Frieden denken. Si vis pacem, para pacem, Frankfurt am Main 1995. See also Rudolf Burger: ‘Multikulturalismus im säkularen Rechtsstaat’, in: Leviathan, vol. 25, no. 2, 1997, pp. 173–85. For a discussion of the development of the theory see Heiner Bielefeldt: Neuzeitliches Freiheitsrecht und politische Gerechtigkeit, Würzburg 1990. 5 On the cosmological orientation of high mythology see Ernst Topitsch: Vom Ursprung und Ende der Metaphysik, Vienna 1958. See also Francis X. D’Sa: ‘Das Recht, ein Mensch zu sein, und die Pflicht, kosmisch zu bleiben’, in Johannes Hoffmann (ed.): Begründung von Menschenrechten aus der Sicht unterschiedlicher Kulturen, Frankfurt am Main 1990, pp. 157–85, esp. pp. 169ff. On the cyclical structure of traditional oriental societies see Karl A. Wittfogel: ‘Die Theorie der orientalischen Gesellschaft’, in: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 7, 1938, pp. 90–122. 6 On China see the following chapter. Overcoming chaos is also a subject of interest in Hinduism; see Ernst Pulsfort: Was ist los in der indischen Welt? Das Drama auf dem indischen Subkontinent, Freiburg 1993, p. 41, and his interpre-

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tation of the concept of dharma; see also Hans-Joachim Klimkeit: Der politische Hinduismus, Wiesbaden 1981, pp. 5ff. Chaos was also a medieval topos; see Otto Gerhard Oexle: ‘Friede durch Verschwörung’, in Johannes Fried (ed.): Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im Hohen und späten Mittelalter, Sigmaringen 1996, pp. 115–50, especially pp. 143ff. For my first comments on this issue see Dieter Senghaas: ‘Interkulturelle Philosophie angesichts der Fundamentalpolitisierung der Welt’, in Ram Adhar Mall and Norbert Schneider (eds): Ethik und Politik aus interkultureller Sicht, Amsterdam 1996, pp. 55–70, esp. pp. 64ff. The ‘civilizational hexagon’ is explained at some length in my book: Wohin driftet die Welt? Über die Zukunft friedlicher Koexistenz, Frankfurt am Main 1994, pp. 17–49. Nothing in this connection is routine or self-explanatory. Even tolerance is repeatedly confronted with new and formidable experiences, for instance with the growing presence of non-Christian religious communities in Europe. Cf. Peter Meinhold: Die Begegnung der Religionen und die Geistesgeschichte Europas, Wiesbaden 1981, pp. 55ff. Edmund Husserl: Die Krisis des europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie, Weinheim 1995 (re-ed., p. 28). The original statement runs: ‘Ich meine, wir fühlen es (und bei aller Unklarheit hat dieses Gefühl wohl sein Recht), dass unserem europäischen Menschentum eine Entelechie eingeboren ist, die den europäischen Gestaltenwandel durchherrscht und ihm den Sinn einer Entwicklung auf eine ideale Lebens- und Seinsgestalt als einen ewigen Pol verleiht.’ As a result of these circumstances, Europe/the West developed a tendency to project its own ideas on to the non-European world of what it was like, as certainly became clear in the debate on so-called ‘orientalism’. The Confucius reception in Europe since the seventeenth century is also paradigmatic. In contrast, the relatively precise reception of the European spiritual world outside of Europe is often quite astonishing. In the European/Western world it is often forgotten that right from the beginning the impulse for modernism provoked anti-modernism. If modernism called everything into question, anti-modernism demanded that no questions be asked. Modernism and anti-modernism always belong together. This was the case in Europe and is apparent elsewhere today. I shall restrict myself to a few illustrative examples. See also Syed Hussein Alatas: ‘Über Vermittlung und Vermittler’, in: Zwischen den Kulturen, Special Issue 8 of Soziale Welt, Göttingen 1992, pp. 197–218. Richard Robison and David S. G. Goodman (eds): The New Rich in Asia. Mobile Phones, McDonalds and Middle Class Revolution, London 1996. See also Jürgen Rüland: ‘Keine Chance für Demokratie in Asien?’, in: Welttrends, no. 12, 1996, pp. 53–80. See also my contribution entitled ‘Hexagon-Variationen’, in Norbert Ropers and Tobias Debiel (ed.): Friedliche Konfliktbearbeitung in der Staaten- und Gesellschaftswelt, Bonn 1995, pp. 37–54. In this respect, too, the parallelism between the European experience and current processes elsewhere is remarkable. Thus, the chapter entitled ‘Die Ordnungsvorstellungen der theokratischen’ Revolution in Johann Baptist Müller: Religion und Politik, Berlin 1997 (ch. IV) reads like a treatise on current Islamist fundamentalism and all its ramifications, although Müller is actually writing about de Maistre, de Bonald and Donoso Cortés and their reactions to the French Revolution. Similar associations are evoked when reading Günter Meuter: Der Katechon. Zu Carl Schmitts fundamentalistischer Kritik der Zeit, Berlin 1994, or a report by Oexle on the medieval, anti-Enlightenment, antirationalist and anti-individualist thoughts of German historians. See Otto Gerhard Oexle: Das Mittelalter und das Unbehagen an der Moderne, in Oexle:

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Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeichen des Historismus, Göttingen 1996, pp. 137–62. See Johan Galtung: Der Weg ist das Ziel. Gandhi und die Alternativebewebung, Wuppertal 1987. On Russia see Hans-Joachim Torke: Einführung in die Geschichte Russlands, Munich 1997; on the salafiyya movement see Reinhard Schulze: Geschichte der islamischen Welt im 20. Jahrhundert, Munich 1994. On similar intellectual trends in Iran see Mehrzad Boroujerdi: Iranian Intellectuals and the West. The Triumph of Nativism, New York 1996. See Bassam Tibi: Islamischer Fundamentalismus, moderne Wissenschaft und Technologie, Frankfurt am Main 1992. See Chapter 9. I have drawn attention to this process in Africa in an earlier contribution. See Dieter Senghaas: ‘Politische Innovation. Versuch über den Panafrikanismus’, in: Zeitschrift für Politik, vol. 12, 1965, pp. 333–55. See the explanation in Ferhad Ibrahim and Heidi Wedel (eds): Probleme der Zivilgesellschaft im Vorderen Orient, Opladen 1995. See Chapter 3 on the issue in general and the case of Iran see Daryush Shayegan: Le regard mutilé. Pays traditionnels face à la modernité, Paris 1989. On this discourse see the contributions from Africa in Heinz Kimmerle and Franz M. Wimmer (eds): Philosophie et democratie en perspective interculturelle, Amsterdam 1997. Particularly instructive is Kwame Gyekye: ‘Traditional Political Ideas. Their Relevance to Development in Contemporary Africa’, in: Ghanian Philosophical Studies, vol. I, Washington 1992, pp. 241–55, and Kwasi Wiredu: ‘Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics. A Plea for a Non-Party Polity’, in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.): Postcolonial African Philosophy, London 1997, pp. 303–12. On the continual problem of mediating between tradition and the current demands in an African context see Paulin J. Hountondji: ‘Reason and Tradition’, in H. Odera Oruka and D. A. Masolo (eds): Philosophy and Cultures, Nairobi 1983, pp. 132–9, and more fundamentally Kwame Gyekye: Tradition and Modernity. Philosophic Reflections on the African Experience, Oxford 1997. See Paul Krugman: ‘The Myth of Asia’s Miracle’, in: Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 6, 1994, pp. 62–78, and Chee Soon Juan: Dare to Change. An Alternative Vision for Singapore, Singapore 1994. Jürgen Habermas argues in the same direction in: ‘Der interkulturelle Diskurs über Menschenrechte. Vermeintliche und tatsächliche Probleme1, in: Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit’, vol. 38, no. 7, 1997, pp. 164–6. See also Hans Maier: Wie universal sind die Menschenrechte?, Freiburg 1997. For reflections on the societal problems arising out of this conflict see Michael Walzer: On Toleration, London 1997. For a comprehensive review see Beate Geist: Die Modernisierung der chinesischen Kultur. Kulturdebatte und kultureller Wandel im China der 80er Jahre, Hamburg 1996. See Christine Köfer: Die Algerienkrise, Frankfurt am Main 1997. For an example from the Islamic world see Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Toward an Islamic Reformation. Civil Liberties, Human Rights and International Law, Syracuse 1989; from the Buddhist world, Sulak Sivaraksa: A Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society, Bangkok 19943; for a Confucianist one see the work by Chee cited in note 24. For a contribution from the Hindu perspective see Arvind Sharma: Hinduism for Our Times, Delhi 1996. For an African perspective see the new publication by Kwame Gyekye cited in note 23. Tradition and Modernity is of paradigmatic significance, as it broaches the problem under consideration from the point of view of philosophy, history,

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current affairs and fundamental concepts. On these discussions see the following chapters. 29 See the following chapter. 30 Clifford Geertz most likely had something similar in mind in his publication on a ‘fragmented world’. See his lectures, held in Vienna and as yet available only in German: Welt in Stücken. Kultur und Politik am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna 1996. On the consequences of emerging cleavages within cultures (and with some interesting case studies) see Peter L. Berger (ed.): Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Konflikt und Vermittlung in pluralistischen Gesellschaften, Gütersloh 1997. 31 See Chapter 7. 2 Is there a point in looking back? 1 Beate Geist gives profound information about the debate of the 1980s and the so-called ‘cultural fever’ including a detailed review of earlier decades of the twentieth century: Die Modernisierung der chinesischen Kultur. Kulturdebatte und kultureller Wandel im China der 80er Jahre, Hamburg 1996. On earlier decades see also Luis Gutheinz: China im Wandel. Das chinesische Denken im Umbruch seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, Munich 1985; Hermann Halbeisen: Demokratie ohne Volksherrschaft. Aspekte des politischen Denkens chinesischer Liberaler in der Nanking-Zeit, 1927–1937, Bochum 1991. 2 A relevant attempt (including Chinese contributions) can be found in Silke Krieger and Rolf Trauzettel (eds): Konfuzianismus und die Modernisierung Chinas, Mainz 1990. See also Wang Gungwu: The Chineseness of China, Oxford 1991, as well as Robert E. Allinson (ed.): Understanding the Chinese Mind. The Philosophical Roots, Oxford 1989. 3 Karl Jaspers: Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Munich 1949. 4 Especially informative regarding this point is Ralf Moritz: Die Philosophie im alten China, Berlin 1990, because he relates history of thought and real history. 5 In an interesting study Gregor Paul investigated how far critical rationalism (Popper) corresponds with classical Chinese philosophy. See Gregor Paul: Die Aktualität der klassischen chinesischen Philosophie. Rationalitätskonzepte im frühen Konfuzianismus, im Neo-Mohismus und im Legalismus, Munich 1987. A recent French overall survey can be found in Anne Cheng: Histoire de la pensée chinoise, Paris 1997. 6 Besides the documents of classical Chinese philosophy which are available in English or German translations, the following general surveys are of great help. From the Chinese point of view: Yu-Lan: The History of Chinese Philosophy, 2 vols, Princeton 1973; Kung-chuan Hsiao: A History of Chinese Political Thought, 2 vols, Princeton 1979; Laurence C. Wu: Fundamentals of Chinese Philosophy, London 1978; Tu Wei-ming: ‘Der Konfuzianismus’, in Arvind Sharma (ed.): Innenansichten der grossen Religionen, Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 641–769. German treatises are: Hubert Schleichert: Klassische chinesische Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main 19902; Ralf Moritz: ‘Die Philosophie im alten China’, Berlin 1990; Heiner Roetz: Die Chinesische Ethik der Achsenzeit, Frankfurt am Main 1992; Roetz: Konfuzius, Munich 1995; Gregor Paul: Asien und Europa. Philosophien im Vergleich, Frankfurt am Main 1984, parts 5 and 6; Paul: Aspects of Confucianism, Frankfurt am Main 1990. For a summary see Wolfgang Ommerborn and Peter Weber-Schäfer: Die politischen Ideen des traditionellen China, in Pipers Handbuch der politischen Ideen, vol. 1, Munich 1988, pp. 41–84. Instructive is also Hans Küng and Julia Ching: Christentum und chinesische Religion, Munich 1988. Recommendable on the subject are

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Harald Borges: Drache, Einhorn, Phönix. Über altchinesisches Denken, Stuttgart 1993; Ernst Schwarz: Die Weisheit des alten China. Mythos – Religion – Philosophie – Politik, Munich 1994. A newer English introduction to the issue (starting from a classical work) is Roger T. Ames: The Art of Rulership. A Study of Ancient Chinese Political Thought, Albany 1994. See the afterword in the book by Hubert Schleichert cited in note 6. See Heiner Roetz: ‘China und die Menschenrechte. Die Bedeutung der Tradition und die Stellung des Konfuzianismus’, in Gregor Paul und Caroline Y. Robertson-Wensauer (eds): Traditionelle chinesische Kultur und Menschenrechtsfrage, Baden-Baden 1996, pp. 37–55, esp. pp. 52ff. See Elbert Duncan Thomas: Chinese Political Thought, New York 19682, ch. VI. Kim Dae-jung: ‘Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia’s Anti-democratic Values’, in: Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 6, 1994, pp. 189–94 (re-published in: Democratization and Regional Cooperation in Asia, ed. by Kim Dae-jung, Peace Foundation, Seoul 1996, pp. 53ff.). See also Theodore de Bary: The Liberal Tradition in China, Hong Kong 1982. See Fu Zhengzuan: China’s Legalists. The Earliest Totalitarians and the Art of Ruling, New York 1996. Confucius: Gespräche des Meisters Kung (Lun Yü), ed. by Ernst Schwarz, Munich 19946, p. 108 (talk XV.23). See Wolfgang Ommerborn and Peter Weber-Schäfer, op. cit. (note 6). John Henderson: The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology, New York 1984, in this connection speaks of ‘correlative thinking’. On the cosmological thought of socio-morphic or anthropomorphic versions in prephilosophical documents or early documents of philosophy see still Ernst Topitsch: Vom Ursprung und Ende der Metaphysik, Vienna 1958. Especially informative recently are Gregor Paul and Caroline Y. RobertsonWensauer (eds), op. cit. (note 8); Michael C. Davis (ed.): Human Rights and Chinese Values. Legal, Philosophical, and Political Perspectives, Oxford 1995; Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming (eds): Confucianism and Human Rights, New York 1998, as well as Thomas A. Metzger: ‘Mit Zweifeln des Westens. Die Chinesen glauben an eine universale Moral’, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 December 1993. See now also Gregor Paul: ‘Wai ru nei fa: nach aussen konfuzianisch, innerlich legalistisch. Oder: Theorie und Schein der Humanität und inhumane Wirklichkeit’, in Gregor Paul (ed.): Die Menschenrechtsfrage. Diskussion über China – Dialog mit China, Göttingen 1998, pp. 39–61. With regard to the concept of human rights, Sven-Uwe Müller in his recent study Konzeptionen der Menschenrechte im China des 20. Jahrhunderts, Hamburg 1997, particularly elaborated the difference between China (‘orientation towards collective goods’) and the West (‘orientation towards the protection of rights’). However, the consideration of the contradictory internal Chinese debates remains inadequate, and the fact that the ‘Western paradigm’ represents the result of lengthy political conflicts and that present constitutional regulations have been achieved only after such conflicts is not analysed.

3 The quest for innovation 1 See Bassam Tibi: Die Krise des modernen Islam. Eine vorindustrielle Kultur im wissenschaftlich-technischen Zeitalter, Frankfurt am Main 1991; Tibi: Der Islam und das Problem der kulturellen Bewältigung sozialen Wandels, Frankfurt am Main 1985.

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2 An informative monograph in this connection is Gilles Kepel: Der Prophet und der Pharao. Das Beispiel Ägypten. Die Entwicklung des muslimischen Extremismus, Munich 1995. 3 Mohammed Arkoun: Pour une critique de la raison islamique, Paris 1984; Arkoun: Rethinking Islam, Boulder 1994. 4 Jacques Berque: Der Koran neu gelesen, Frankfurt am Main 1996. 5 Bassam Tibi has insisted on this fact for years. See recently by this author: Der religiöse Fundamentalismus im Übergang zum 21. Jahrhundert, Mannheim 1995. On some problems see Angelika Hartmann: ‘Der islamische “Fundamentalismus”. Wahrnehmung und Realität einer neuen Entwicklung im Islam’, in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, no. 28, 1997, pp. 3–13, as well as Asad Abukhalil: ‘The Incoherence of Islamic Fundamentalism. Arab Islamic Thought at the End of the 20th Century’, in: Middle East Journal, vol. 48, no. 4, 1994, pp. 677–94. 6 Martin Forstner: ‘Inhalt und Begründung der Allgemeinen Islamischen Menschenrechtserklärung’, in Johannes Hoffmann (ed.): Begründung von Menschenrechten aus Sicht unterschiedlicher Kulturen, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 249–73, esp. p. 269. See also Seyyed Hossein Nasr: ‘Der Islam’, in Arvind Sharma (ed.): Innenansicht der grossen Religionen, Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 387–538; Nasr: Ideal und Wirklichkeit des Islam, Munich 1993. 7 An instructive insight into the dimensions and diversity of the permissible and the impermissible is given by Youssef Qaradhawi: Le licite et l’illicite en Islam, Paris 19923. 8 With regard to this, see Fatema Mernissi: Die Angst vor der Moderne. Frauen und Moderne zwischen Islam und Demokratie, Hamburg 1992, pp. 49ff. 9 Bassam Tibi: Der wahre Imam. Der Islam von Mohammed bis zur Gegenwart, Munich 1996. 10 Phrased thus in an account of a lecture by Fatema Mernissi, published in: Civil Society (Cairo), vol. 3, no. 31, October 1994, p. 13. 11 On this see Aziz al-Azmeh: Die Islamisierung des Islam, Frankfurt am Main 1996. On the theological and practical significance of this fact see Malika Zeghal: Gardiens de l’Islam. Les oulémas d’Al-Azhar dans l’Egypte contemporaine, Paris 1996. 12 Sadik J. al-Azm: ‘Is Islam Secularizable?’, in: Jahrbuch für Philosophie des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover, vol. 7, Vienna 1996, pp. 15–24. See by the same author: Unbehagen in der Moderne. Aufklärung im Islam, Frankfurt am Main 1993; ‘Aufklärung im Orient?’, in: Frankfurter Rundschau, 18 April 1995. 13 Informative in this connection is Tilman Nagel: Staat und Glaubensgemeinschaft im Islam. Geschichte der politischen Ordnungsvorstellungen der Muslime, 2 vols, Munich 1981. 14 So explicitly the ideology-critical perspective submitted by Arkoun (see note 3). 15 See the respective essays in Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy, ed. by Brian Carr and Indira Mahalingam, London 1997, part VI. See also Anke von Kügelgen: Averroes und die islamische Moderne. Ansätze zu einer Neubegründung des Rationalismus im Islam, Leiden 1994. 16 Annemarie Schimmel: Der Islam. Eine Einführung, Stuttgart 1990, p. 119. 17 Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na’im: Toward an Islamic Reformation. Civil Liberties, Human Rights and International Law, Syracuse 1990. Other authors prominent in the Arabic world are introduced in detail in the informative book by Lorenz Müller: Islam und Menschenrechte. Sunnitische Muslime zwischen Islamismus, Säkularismus und Modernismus, Hamburg 1996. See also Rotraud Wielandt: ‘Menschenwürde und Freiheit in der Reflexion zeitgenössischer muslimischer Denker’, in Johannes Schwartländer (ed.): Freiheit der Religion.

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Christentum und Islam unter dem Anspruch der Menschenrechte, Mainz 1993, pp. 179–209. These problems are instructively handled also by Gudrun Krämer: ‘Islam, Menschenrechte und Demokratie’, in Albrecht Zunkter (ed.): Weltordnung oder Chaos? Beiträge zur internationalen Politik, Baden-Baden 1993, pp. 331–46. See also Ivonne Yazbeck Haddad: Islamists and the Challenge of Pluralism, Washington 1995 (series: Occasional Papers of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University). All substantial points mentioned are fully discussed in the book by an-Na’im cited in note 17. On the interesting attempt to convey an insight into Islam facing modernity in Indonesia, see Robert William Hefner: ‘Islamische Toleranz. Der Kampf um eine pluralistische Ethik im heutigen Indonesien’, in Peter Berger (ed.): Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, Gütersloh 1997, pp. 399–446. With regard to this point, an-Na’im follows his teacher Moahmoud Mohamed Taha: The Second Message of Islam, Syracuse 1987. Owing to his theses, Taha had been accused of apostasy in Sudan and was executed in 1985 – a case in point for the above-cited paradigm of heresy by Mernissi. See the exemplary book by Muhammed Abed al-Jabri: Introduction à la critique de la raison arabe, Paris 1994, and on this author Michael Gaebel: Von der Kritik des arabischen Denkens zum panarabischen Aufbruch, Berlin 1995. Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid: Islam und Politik. Kritik des religiösen Diskurses, Frankfurt am Main 1996. On throwing light on Abu Zaid’s methodical efforts as well as the political and human consequences, see Navid Kermani: Offenbarung als Kommunikation, Frankfurt am Main 1996. See also my talk with Abu Zaid: ‘Die islamische Welt und die Moderne’, published in: Entwicklung – Kulturen – Frieden. Visionen für eine neue Weltordnung, ed. by Stiftung Entwicklung und Frieden, Bonn 1996, pp. 21–36. On the instrumentalization of the discourse on Islam by the orthodoxy for the purposes of political control and in particular the case of Abu Zaid, see now Rotraud Wielandt: ‘Wurzeln der Schwierigkeit innerislamischen Gesprächs über neue hermeneutische Zugänge zum Korantext’, in Stefan Wild (ed.): The Qur’an as Text, Leiden 1996, pp. 257–82. Lorenz Müller, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 227–314, reports a further attempt at reinterpreting Qur’an and Islamic tradition in a way congenial to Abu Zaid: the work of Muhammad Shakhrur. Fuad Zakariya: ‘Säkularisierung – eine historische Notwendigkeit’, in Michael Lüders (ed.): Der Islam im Aufbruch? Perspektiven der arabischen Welt, Munich 1992, pp. 228–45. The following quotations are drawn from this article. See also Zakariya.: Laïcité ou islamisme. Les arabes à l’heure du choix, Paris 1989. For other secularist positions (though with certain reservations) see Lorenz Müller, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 213–35, discussing especially the work of Muhammad Said al-Ashmawi. See now the essays in: Entstehen und Wandel verfassungsrechtlichen Denkens, suppl. 11 of the journal Der Staat, Berlin 1996. A wide survey of the pertinent discussions is presented in Andreas Meier: Der politische Auftrag des Islam. Programme und Kritik zwischen Fundamentalismus und Reformen. Originalstimmen aus der islamischen Welt, Wuppertal 1994; Gudrun Krämer: Gottes Staat als Republik, Baden-Baden: 1999; Lorenz Müller, op. cit. (note 17). See also Robert D. Lee: Overcoming Tradition and Modernity. The Search for Islamic Authenticity, Boulder 1997; Richard K. Khuri: Freedom, Modernity and Islam, Syracuse 1998; Erdmute Heller and Hassouna Mosbahi (eds): Islam, Demokratie, Moderne. Aktuelle Antworten arabischer Denker, Munich 1998.

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4 Homelessness versus public order 1 Johan Galtung: Buddhism. A Quest for Unity and Peace, Honolulu 1988. 2 Karl Jaspers: Vernunft und Freiheit. Ausgewählte Schriften, Stuttgart 1959, p. 469. 3 On Sri Lanka see Jakob Rösel: Die Gestalt und Entstehung des Singhalesischen Nationalismus, Berlin 1996. 4 For more information on the history and variants of Buddhism see Edward Conze: Der Buddhismus. Wesen und Entwicklung, Stuttgart 199510; Conze: Buddhistisches Denken. Drei Phasen buddhistischer Philosohpie in Indien, Frankfurt am Main 1988; Hans Küng and Heinz Bechert: Christentum und Weltreligionen – Buddhismus, Munich 19952; Peter Gäng: Was ist Buddhismus, Frankfurt am Main 1996; Volker Zotz: Geschichte der buddhistischen Philosophie, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1996; Ulrich Schneider: Der Buddhismus, Darmstadt 19974; Ram Adhar Mall: Buddhismus. Religion der Postmoderne?, Hildesheim 1990; as well as Masao Abe: ‘Der Buddhismus’, in Arvind Sharma (ed.): Innenansichten der grossen Religionen, Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 11–108. On Buddhism in the context of Indian philosophy see Ram Adhar Mall and Heinz Hülsmann: Die drei Geburtsorte der Philosophie: China, Indien, Europa, Bonn 1989, pp. 204–20. For a collection of sources on original Buddhism see Gautama Buddha: Die vier edlen Wahrheiten, ed. and translated by Klaus Mylius, Munich 19945, as well as Edward Conze (ed.): Im Zeichen Buddhas. Buddhistische Texte, Frankfurt am Main 1957. 5 The following is based on the compact account by A. Theodor Khoury: ‘Buddhismus’, in Emma Brunner-Traut (ed.): Die fünf grossen Weltreligionen, Freiburg 1991, pp. 40–61. 6 Ibid., p. 42. 7 Ibid., p. 44. 8 Ibid., p. 46. 9 Ibid., p. 47. 10 Ibid., p. 48. 11 According to Klaus Mylius in his introduction to the original Buddhist texts quoted in note 4; here p. 37. 12 See also Michael Carrithers: Der Buddha. Eine Einführung, Stuttgart 1996. 13 See also Volker Zotz: Buddha, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1991, esp. pp. 92ff. 14 Ibid., p. 97. 15 Verena Reichle: Die Grundgedanken des Buddhismus, Frankfurt am Main 1994, p. 61. 16 See Heinz Bechert: Buddhismus, Staat und Gesellschaft in den Ländern des Theravada-Buddhismus, Frankfurt am Main 1966, esp. vol. 1, as well as exemplary out of a huge literature Somboon Suksamran: Political Buddhism in Southeast Asia, London 1977. 17 See Masao Abe, op. cit. (note 4), p. 73. 18 Klaus Mylius, op. cit. (note 4), p. 35. 19 The fact can be found even there where one, at least following the book titles, might expect the opposite. See, for example, Charles Wei-hsun Fu and Sandra A. Wawrytko (ed.): Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society. An International Symposium, New York 1991. 20 Sulak Sivaraksa: A Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society, Bangkok 19943, p. 357. 21 On this fact special emphasis is put by Sulak Sivaraksa in the book cited in note 20. 22 Representative of this orientation is the broad literature published by the Dalai

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Lama. See e.g. Einführung in den Buddhismus, Freiburg 1993; Der Weg zur Freiheit, Munich 1996. 23 A discussion illustrating the problems of Buddhist orientation in Western societies which are described here can be found in Subhuti: ‘Going Forth and Citizenship’, in: Western Buddhist Review, vol. 1, 1994 (without page, taken from Internet: http://www.fwbo.org/wbr/citizenship.html). 24 Thomas Cleary (ed.): Dhammapada. Die Quintessenz der Buddha-Lehre, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 83. Therefore it is not surprising that early Buddhist philosophical assumptions had again and again been met with doubts, scepticism and even rejection for philosophical and practical reasons, which brought about the development of diverse schools in Buddhism. See Gregor Paul: ‘Buddhistische Glücksvorstellungen. Eine historisch-systematische Skizze’, in Joachim Schummer (ed.): Glück und Ethik, Würzburg 1998, pp. 47–68. 5 From spiritual to modern plurality? 1 Helmuth von Glasenapp: Die fünf Weltreligionen, Munich 19932, p. 15. See also Heinrich von Stietencron: ‘Die Erscheinungsformen des Hinduismus’, in Dietmar Rothermund (ed.): Indien. Kultur, Geschichte, Politik Wirtschaft, Umwelt. Ein Handbuch, Munich 1995, ch. IX; Arvind Sharma: ‘Der Hinduismus’, in Arvind Sharma (ed.): Innenansichten der grossen Religionen, Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 291–386; Peter Schreiner: ‘Hinduismus’, in Emma BrunnerTraut (ed.): Die fünf grossen Weltreligionen, Freiburg 19914, pp. 19–38. For a general survey see also Ram Adhar Mall: Philosophie im Vergleich der Kulturen, Darmstadt 1995, pp. 108ff. 2 Heinrich von Stietencron in Hans Küng and Heinrich von Stietencron: Christentum und Weltreligionen: Hinduismus, Munich 1995, pp. 25–6. 3 Andreas Becke: Hinduismus zur Einführung, Hamburg 1996, p. 10. 4 Von Glasenapp, op. cit. (note 1), p. 17. 5 See ibid. 6 Ram Adhar Mall: Der Hinduismus. Seine Stellung in der Vielfalt der Religionen, Darmstadt 1997. 7 See ibid., p. 5. 8 See the book by Küng and Stietencron cited in note 2. 9 See the argument in Chapter 1 above. 10 Monika Böck and Aparna Rao: ‘Aspekte der Gesellschaftsstruktur Indiens: Kasten und Stämme’, in Rothermund (ed.), op. cit. (note 1), pp. 111–31, esp. p. 126. 11 Ernst Pulsfort: Was ist los in der indischen Welt? Das Drama auf dem indischen Subkontinent, Freiburg 1993, ch. 3. 12 Mall, op. cit. (note 6), p. 4. On the caste system see the early analysis by Ram Adhar Mall: Studie zur indischen Philosophie und Soziologie, Meisenheim am Glan 1974, pp. 151–81. 13 Von Glasenapp, op. cit. (note 1), p. 19. 14 See Böck and Rao, op. cit. (note 10), as well as Pulsfort, op. cit. (note 11). 15 Von Glasenapp, op. cit. (note 1). pp. 26–7. 16 Since the middle of the nineteenth century the attempts of so-called neo-Hinduism to mediate conceptually between Hinduism and modernity point in the same direction. For a survey see Becke, op. cit. (note 3), ch. 3. On Jainism see von Stietencron, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 152ff., on Buddhism ibid., pp. 154ff. 17 Mall, op. cit. (note 6), p. 126. 18 This perspective is fairly clearly derived from the political thinking in ancient India. For some information see Hans-Joachim Klimkeit: Der politische Hinduismus, Wiesbaden 1981, ch. 1.

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19 See Hugh van Skyhawk: ‘Hinduismus und hindutva’, in: Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, vol. 146, no. 1, 1996, pp. 113–27; Jürgen Lütt: ‘Der Hinduismus auf der Suche nach einem Fundament’, in Hermann Kodranek (ed.): Die verdrängte Freiheit. Fundamentalismus in den Kirchen, Freiburg 1991, pp. 218–39. For an actual assessment of the situation see also Amartya Sen: ‘The Threats to Secular India’, in: New York Review of Books, 8 April 1993, pp. 26–32. On the prehistory of the hindutva movement see the work by Klimkeit cited in note 18, chs II–VI. 20 See Shalini Randeria: ‘Hindu-Fundamentalismus: Zum Verhältnis von Religion, Geschichte und Identität im modernen Indien’, in Georg Elwert et al. (eds): Kulturen und Innovationen, Berlin 1996, pp. 333–62; Christophe Jaffrelot: ‘Le syncrétisme stratégique et la construction de l’identité nationaliste hindoue’, in: Revue française de Science Politique, vol. 42, no. 4, 1992, pp. 594–617. 21 See Pulsfort, op. cit. (note 11), chs 5, 6 and 7. 22 Throwing light on this see Sudhir Kakar: Die Gewalt der Frommen. Zur Psychologie religiöser und ethnischer Konflikte, Munich 1997. 23 Christian Weiss et al. (eds): Religion – Macht – Gewalt. Religiöser Fundamentalismus und Hindu–Moslem-Konflikte in Südasien, Frankfurt am Main 1996. It is remarkable that reports on the changes in the system of political institutions in India, resulting from social awakening of the lower classes of the population, have accumulated recently. Erhard Haubold, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 5 December 1997, writes: ‘What has been beyond any doubt for centuries, i.e. the domination of Brahmins, today is questioned by sub-castes, untouchables, Muslims and other minorities whose political emancipation has been aided by universal suffrage. Such “empowerment” of the “unwashed classes” gives the high establishment the creeps and explains the increasing fragmentation of political parties which are often only of regional importance and attack the federal parliamentary system . . . And the new rulers of the “unwashed classes” make no secret of their having little time for democratic polite phrases because they had to wait for power for such a long time.’ 24 See the articles in the book cited in note 23. See also Felix Wilfred: ‘Soziale Institution und Protestbewegungen in Indien’, in Johannes Hoffmann (ed.): Die Vernunft in den Kulturen. Das Menschenrecht auf kultureigene Entwicklung, Frankfurt am Main 1993, pp. 223–45. 25 Arvind Sharma: Hinduism for Our Times, Delhi 1996. 26 See ibid., p. 46. 6 Interim observations 1 Manfred G. Schmidt, Wörterbuch zur Politik, Stuttgart 1995, p. 92 2 See Christian Meier: Athen. Ein Neubeginn der Weltgeschichte, Munich 19972. 3 Bernard Lewis: ‘Demokratie und Religion im Nahen Osten: Ist der Islam mit einer westlichen Politikauffassung unvereinbar?’ in: Frankfurter Rundschau, 29 November 1997. 4 Golden Rule: ‘Don’t do unto others what you don’t want others to do unto you.’ For a synopsis of various versions of this rule see Hans Küng and KarlJosef Kuschel (eds): Erklärung zum Weltethos. Die Deklaration des Parlamentes der Weltreligionen, Munich 1993, p. 82. 5 See Chapter 4 above. Reflections of this kind can also be found in Kwame Gyekye: Tradition and Modernity. Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience, Oxford 1997, esp. pp. 135ff. 6 Louis Dumont: Homo hierarchicus. Le système des castes et ses implications, Paris 1966.

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7 A clash of civilizations – an idée fixe? 1 Samuel P. Huntington: ‘The Clash of Civilisations?’, in: Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3, 1993, pp. 22–49. 2 Samuel P. Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York 1996. 3 Hans Küng: Projekt Weltethos, Munich 1990. 4 Michael Walzer: Thick and Thin. Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Notre Dame, IN 1994. 8 The realities of cultural struggles 1 In this chapter I continue with the reflections I began in ch. 4 of my book Wohin driftet die Welt? Über die Zukunft friedlicher Koexistenz, Frankfurt am Main 1994. The chapter in question is entitled ‘Is an international cultural struggle imminent?’ (pp. 96ff.) 2 The Federalist Papers, no. 11, New York 1961. 3 On Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential fundamentalist authors of Egyptian origin, see Gilles Kepel: Der Prophet und der Pharao. Das Beispiel Ägypten. Die Entwicklung des muslimischen Extremismus, Munich 1995, pp. 35ff. 4 For an early, more detailed account see Dieter Senghaas: ‘Politische Innovation. Versuch über den Panafrikanismus’, in: Zeitschrift für Politik, vol. 12, 1965, pp. 333–55. On the more general problem of cultural self-awareness see Ludger Kühnhard: Stufen der Souveränität. Staatsverständnis und Selbstbestimmung in der ‘Dritten Welt’, Bonn 1992, pp. 35ff. and passim. 5 For early, pathbreaking analyses see John H. Kautsky (ed.): Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries. Nationalism and Communism, New York 1962. 6 Cf. Roman Szporluk: Communism and Nationalism. Karl Marx versus Friedrich List, New York 1988. 7 See also Bassam Tibi: ‘Politische Ideen in der “Dritten Welt” während der Dekolonisation’, in: Pipers Handbuch der politischen Ideen, vol. 5, Munich 1987, pp. 361–402. 8 See Dieter Senghaas: Konfliktformationen im internationalen System, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ch. II. 9 See Karl W. Deutsch: ‘Abhängigkeit, strukturelle Gewalt und Befreiungsprozesse’, in Klaus Jürgen Gantzel (ed.): Herrschaft und Befreiung in der Weltgesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main 1975, pp. 23–46. 10 The following differentiation between primary, secondary and tertiary developmental nationalism is described in full within the context of comparative nationalism research in ch. II of my book cited in note 1. 11 Friedrich List: Das nationale System der Politischen Ökonomie, Tübingen 1959 (first published 1841). 12 Hélène Carrère d’Encausse: La gloire des nations et la fin de l’Empire soviétique, Paris 1990. 13 See Chapter 9 below. 14 In this respect, the early Latin American analyses have proved to be completely correct. See, for example, Aníbal Quijano: ‘Marginaler Pol der Wirtschaft und marginalisierte Arbeitskraft’, in Dieter Senghaas (ed.): Peripherer Kapitalismus, Frankfurt am Main 1974, pp. 298–341. 15 For a comparison see Mark Juergensmeyer: The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, Berkeley 1993. 16 Resistance to assimilation is a category that below is placed in contrast to resistance against cultural overpowering. Both categories refer to completely differ-

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19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27

28 29

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ent contexts, as explained in my Friedensprojekt Europa, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ch. 4. See the still pathbreaking work of Peter Waldmann and Georg Elwert (eds): Ethnizität im Wandel, Saarbrücken 1989; Eckhard J. Dittrich and Frank-Olaf Radtke (eds): Ethnizität, Opladen 1990. In addition to the book by Kepel cited in note 3, see also now the extremely informative selection of original essays written from Islamic points of view in the book edited by Andreas Meier: Der politische Auftrag des Islam. Programme und Kritik zwischen Fundamentalismus und Reformen. Originalstimmen aus der islamischen Welt, Wuppertal 1994. Also useful is Hanna Lücke: Islamischer Fundamentalismus – Rückfall ins Mittelalter oder Wegbereiter der Moderne? Die Stellungnahme der Forschung, Berlin 1993. For an instructive monographic investigation of general theoretical significance see Theodor Hanf: Koexistenz im Krieg. Staatszerfall und Entstehen einer Nation im Libanon, Baden-Baden 1990. Here, too, the book by Kepel cited in note 3 is particularly instructive, especially his discussion of the concept of jahiliya, which expresses the supposed moral and ethical decline of Islamic societies. This is substantiated in Dieter Senghaas: The European Experience, Leamington Spa/Dover, NH 1985; see also Ulrich Menzel and Dieter Senghaas: Europas Entwicklung und die Dritte Welt. Eine Bestandsaufnahme, Frankfurt am Main 1986, esp. ch. 1. Gernot Rotter (ed.): Die Welten des Islam, Frankfurt am Main 1993. See also Dale F. Eickelmann and James Piscatori: Muslim Politics, Princeton 1996. Marie-Janine Calic: Krieg und Frieden in Bosnien-Hercegovina, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ch. VI. Cf. Chapter 7 above. A similarly extravagant theory concerns the ‘War of Civilizations’. S. Bassam Tibi: Krieg der Zivilisationen, Hamburg 1995. In contrast, the debate in no. 4, 1994, of the Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch, a special issue on ‘cultures and conflicts’, is refreshingly well balanced. On related contributions by H. Kesting, R. Schnur and others, see the summary by Thomas Michael Menk: Gewalt für den Frieden, Berlin 1992, pp. 363ff. Although there are occasional instructive studies, for example on the cultural struggle that arose directly out of the Enlightenment movement, see Christoph Weiss (ed.): Von ‘Obskuranten’ und ‘Eudämonisten’. Gegenaufklärerische, konservative und antirevolutionäre Publizisten im späten 18. Jahrhundert, St Ingbert 1997. A more recent discourse-theoretical application of the perspective developed here for explicating the genocide in Rwanda (1994) can be found in Jörg Marx: Völkermord in Rwanda. Zur Genealogie einer unheilvollen Kulturentwicklung. Eine diskurstheoretische Untersuchung, Hamburg 1997. Cf. Ernst Nolte: ‘Das Zeitalter des Kommunismus’, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Supplement ‘Bilder und Zeiten’ of 12 October 1991. Johan Galtung also assumes that mass collectives have the capacity to act. See his contribution: ‘Konfliktformation in der Welt von morgen’, in: Friedensbericht 1992, Vienna 1992, pp. 229–61.

9 On Asian and other values 1 A well-balanced analysis is given by Rüdiger Machetzki: Ostasiens Herausforderung, in Karl Kaiser and Hanns W. Maull (eds): Deutschlands neue Aussenpolitik, vol. 2: Herausforderungen, Munich 1995, pp. 81–102. 2 On the problem and discussion see Werner Draguhn and Günter Schucher

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4 5 6

7

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(eds): Das neue Selbstbewusstsein in Asien: Eine Herausforderung?, Hamburg 1995; Seah Chee-Meow (ed.): Asian Values and Modernization, Singapore 1977; Südostasien Informationen (Special Issue on Asian Values), vol. 12, 1996, no. 1; Wolfgang S. Heinz: ‘Gibt es ein asiatisches Entwicklungsmodell? Zur Diskussion über “asiatische Werte” ’, in: Berichte des Bundesinstituts für ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien, no. 55, 1995; Manfred Mols and Claudia Derichs: ‘Das Ende der Geschichte oder ein Zusammenstoss der Zivilisationen?’, in: Zeitschrift für Politik, vol. 42, no. 3, 1995, pp. 225–49; Werner Pfennig: ‘The Asian Identity. Western Views’, in: Democratization and Regional Cooperation in Asia‚ ed. by Kim Dae-jung Peace Foundation, Seoul 1996, pp. 165–207. Thomas Heberer: ‘Ostasien und der Westen. Globalisierung oder Regionalisierung’, in: Asien, no. 63, April 1997, pp. 5–35; Manfred Pohl: ‘Kultur und Entwicklung’, in Peter J. Opitz (ed.): Grundprobleme der Entwicklungsregionen, Munich 1997, pp. 169–89; Eun-Jeun Lee: ‘Asiatische Werte als Zivilisationsleitbild?’, in: Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, no. 2, 1997, pp. 130–40; ‘Asien zwischen Wirtschaftswachstum und Demokratie’, in: Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit, vol. 38, no. 12, 1997 (Special Issue). An empirical survey of how the debate on Asian values is responded to and accepted can be found in David I. Hitchcock: Asian Values and the United States. How Much Conflict?, Washington (Center for Strategic and International Studies) 1994. Tommy Koh presented an often-cited list of Asian values in his essay ‘The 10 Values That Undergird East Asian Strength and Success’, in: International Herald Tribune, 10 December 1993. See also Chandra Muzaffar: Human Rights and the New World Order, Penang 1993. A rejoinder to arguments such as Koh’s can be found in King Dae-jung: ‘Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia‘s Anti-Democratic Values’, in: Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 6, 1994, pp. 189–94. What is not mentioned in this list is the other side of ‘Asian values’ in the actual reality of East and South-east Asian societies: corruption, nepotism, lack of transparency (especially in banking business), lack of reliable democratic institutions such as independent justice and a free press. These facts form the background of the crisis into which the authoritarian states of the region have run since autumn 1997. On the subject see Petra Kolonko: ‘Asiatische und andere Werte’, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 24 October 1997, and Henrik Bork: ‘Kursverlust asiatische Werte’, in: Frankfurter Rundschau of 28 November 1997. See Mihail Manoilesco: Die nationalen Produktivkräfte und der Aussenhandel, Berlin 1937. See the argument in the previous chapter. See Gunter Schubert, Rainer Tetzlaff and Werner Vennewald (eds): Demokratisierung und politischer Wandel. Theorie und Anwendung des Konzeptes der strategischen und konfliktfähigen Gruppen, Münster 1994; Jürgen Rüland: ‘Keine Chance für Demokratie in Asien?’, in: Welttrends, no. 12, 1996, pp. 53–80. In: Die Zeit, no. 49, 2 December 1994, p. 7. See also Ian Buruma: ‘Asiatische Werte? Zum Beispiel Singapur’, in: Merkur, vol. 50, no. 3, 1996, pp. 109–203 as well as Eric Jones: ‘Asia’s Fate. A Response to the Singapore School’, in: The National Interest, Spring 1994, pp. 18–28. See also Sebastian Heilmann: ‘Menschenrechte und Staatsmacht in Ostasien’, in: Nord-Süd aktuell, vol. 9, no. 12, 1995, pp. 275–82. See Robert A. Scalapino: ‘Democratizing Dragons: South Korea and Taiwan’, in: Journal of Democracy, vol. 4, no. 3, 1993, pp. 70–83; Linda Chao and Ramon H. Myers: ‘The First Chinese Democracy. Political Development of The Republic of China on Taiwan, 1986–1994’, in: Asian Survey, vol. 34, no. 3, 1994, pp. 213–30

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10 See Corazon Aquino, Oscar Arias and Kim Dae-jung (eds): Democracy in Asia. Its Problems and Prospects, Seoul 1995; Richard Robison and David S. G. Goodman (eds): The New Rich in Asia. Mobile Phones, McDonalds and Middle-Class Revolution, London 1996; Michèle Schmiegelow (ed.): Democracy in Asia, Frankfurt am Main 1997. 11 See Ulrich Menzel and Dieter Senghaas: Europas Entwicklung und die Dritte Welt. Eine Bestandsaufnahme, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ch. 2. 12 See also Eun-Jeung Lee: Konfuzianismus und Kapitalismus. Markt und Herrschaft in Ostasien, Münster 1997; on the contrary Francis Fukuyama: Konfuzius und Marktwirtschaft. Der Konflikt der Kulturen, Munich 1995, puts forward culturalist arguments. 13 See Theodore de Bary: ‘The New Confucianism in Beijing’, in: The American Scholar, vol. 94, no. 2, 1995, pp. 175–89. Interesting reading, though underestimating the implications of modernization and overdrawing the cultural determination of the Chinese development, is Oskar Weggel: China im Aufbruch. Konfuzianismus und politische Zukunft, Munich 1997. 14 See also Manfred Pohl: ‘Südostasien. Autoritärer Pluralismus und wirtschaftliche Dynamik. Konfuzianische Gesellschaftsideale contra westliches Wertesystem?’, in: Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit, vol. 36, no. 2, 1995, pp. 40–3; Alan Dupont: ‘Is There An “Asian Way”?’, in: Survival, vol. 38, no. 2, 1996, pp.13–34; and as a voice from Singapore Chee Soon Juan: Dare to Change: An Alternative Vision for Singapore, Singapore 1994. 10 Interim observations 1 The literature on ‘culture wars’ in the USA is almost impossible to survey. See more recently Arthur M. Schlesinger: The Disuniting of America. Reflexions on a Multicultural Society, New York 1992; Todd Gitlin: The Twilight of Common Dreams. Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars, New York 1995; Martin E. Marty: The One and the Many: America’s Struggle for the Common Good, Cambridge 1997. For a theoretical discussion see especially Charles Taylor: Multikulturalismus und die Politik der Anerkennung, Frankfurt am Main 1993. 2 Various modalities for cushioning this type of conflict are discussed in Milton Esman: ‘The Management of Communal Conflict’, in: Public Policy, vol. 21, 1993, pp. 49–78; Theodor Hanf: Koexistenz im Krieg. Staatenzerfall und Entstehen einer Nation im Libanon, Baden-Baden 1990, pp. 21–65; summarized in Ulrich Schneckener and Dieter Senghaas: ‘Auf der Suche nach friedlicher Koexistenz. Modelle zur Bearbeitung ethno-nationaler Konflikte in Europa’, in: Working Paper no. 8, 1997 of the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies, University of Bremen. See also Michael Walzer: On Toleration, London 1997, ch. 1. 3 On this conflict see Alan Mittleman: ‘Jüdischer Fundamentalismus. Religion, Politik und die Transformation des Zionismus’, in: Auslandsinformationen, no. 9, 1996, pp. 35–50, published by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Reports on domestic affairs in Israel also appear regularly in the supplement of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 11 Pleading for a reorientation of the intercultural dialogue 1 Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben’, in: Werke, Darmstadt 1963, vol. 1, p. 210.

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2 Dieter Senghaas: The European Experience, Leamington Spa/Dover 1985. This book is now available in Arabic translation: Urubba: Durus Wa Namadhidsch, Damascus (Sociological Studies Series, vol. 22) 1996. 3 On this topic see now Ulrich Beck et al.: Reflexive Modernisierung. Eine Kontroverse, Frankfurt am Main 1996. 4 S. G. R. C. Davis: Magna Carta, London 19927. 5 On this topic see most recently Hans Maier: Wie universal sind die Menschenrechte?, Freiburg 1997. 6 For example, within the Western world before the First World War there existed only three countries with unlimited universal suffrage, and suffrage for women was basically an achievement of the twentieth century! 7 See Hella Mandt: ‘Die offene Gesellschaft und die Wurzeln des zeitgenössischen Fundamentalismus’, in: Staatswissenschaften und Staatspraxis, vol. 4, no. 2, 1993, pp. 175–96. 8 In German publications there is one favourable exception to be mentioned here: Andreas Meier: Der politische Auftrag des Islam. Programme und Kritik zwischen Fundamentalismus und Reformen. Originalstimmen aus der islamischen Welt, Wuppertal 1994. 9 See Chapter 3 above. 10 Bassam Tibi: Der religiöse Fundamentalismus im Übergang zum 21. Jahrhundert, Mannheim 1995. 11 See Chapter 7 above. 12 In that respect a German book edited by Gernot Rotter: Die Welten des Islam. Neunundzwanzig Vorschläge, das Unvertraute zu verstehen, Frankfurt am Main 1993, is quite illuminating. 13 Ernst Pulsfort: Was ist los in der indischen Welt? Das Drama auf dem indischen Subkontinent, Freiburg 1993. 14 Thomas Meyer: Identitäts-Wahn. Die Politisierung des kulturellen Unterschieds, Berlin 1997. 15 Amartya Sen: ‘The Threats to Secular India’, in: New York Review of Books, 8 April 1993, pp. 26–32. 16 On this phenomenon see Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds): Fundamentalisms Observed, Chicago 1991. 17 Ulrich Menzel: In der Nachfolge Europas. Autozentrierte Entwicklung in den ostasiatischen Schwellenländern Südkorea und Taiwan, Munich 1985. 18 Ulrich Menzel and Dieter Senghaas: Europas Entwicklung und die Dritte Welt. Eine Bestandsaufnahme, Frankfurt am Main 1986, part II. 19 See Chapter 9 above. 20 On China see Dieter Senghaas: ‘Wie geht es mit China weiter?’, in: Leviathan, vol. 24, no. 1, 1996, pp. 78–92. 21 Dieter Senghaas: op. cit. (note 2), ch. 6. 22 A controversy in that respect can be found in Sybille Fritsch-Oppermann (ed.): Fundamentalismus der Moderne? Christen und Muslime im Dialog, Loccum 1996. 23 Wolfgang Welsch: Unsere postmoderne Moderne, Berlin 19934. 24 On this problem see the contributions in Dieter Senghaas (ed.): Den Frieden denken. Si vis pacem, para pacem, Frankfurt am Main 1995. 25 Dieter Oberndörfer: Die politische Gemeinschaft und ihre Kultur, in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, nos. 52/53, 1996, pp. 37–46, here on p. 44. See also for a more general survey Albert O. Hirschmanny: Denken gegen die Zukunft. Die Rhetorik der Reaktion, Frankfurt am Main 1995. 26 Wolf Lepenies argues in a similar vein: ‘Selbstkritische Moderne. Neue Leitbilder im Kontakt der Kulturen’, in: Internationale Politik, vol. 51, no. 3, 1996, pp. 3–14. See also Martin Fuchs: ‘Universalität der Kultur. Reflexion, Interak-

Notes

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tion und das Identitätsdenken – eine ethnologische Perspektive’, in: Manfred Brocker and Heino Heinrich Nau (eds): Ethnozentrismus. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des interkulturellen Dialogs, Darmstadt 1997, pp. 141–52. 27 From the speech given by the former President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Roman Herzog, on the awarding of the Goethe Medals on 22 March 1998 in Weimar.

Suggested reading

Beck, Ulrich: Was ist Globalisierung?, Frankfurt am Main 1997. Berger, Peter L. (ed.): Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Konflikt und Vermittlung in pluralistischen Gesellschaften, Gütersloh 1997. Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas: Modernität, Pluralismus und Sinnkrise. Die Orientierung des modernen Menschen, Gütersloh 19962. Brocker, Manfred and Nau, Heino Heinrich (eds): Ethnozentrismus. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des interkulturellen Dialogs, Darmstadt 1997. Brzezinski, Zbigniew: Out of Control. Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century, New York 1993. Calliess, Jörg (ed.): Der Konflikt der Kulturen und der Friede in der Welt. Wie können wir in einer pluralistischen Welt zusammenleben?, Loccum 1995. Calliess, Jörg (ed.): Wodurch und wie konstituiert sich Frieden? Das zivilisatorische Hexagon auf dem Prüfstand, Loccum 1997. Dahrendorf, Ralf: The Modern Social Conflict, London 1988. Die Gruppe von Lissabon: Grenzen des Wettbewerbs. Die Globalisierung der Wirtschaft und die Zukunft der Menschheit, Munich 1997. Draguhn, Werner (ed.): Neue Industriekulturen im Pazifischen Asien, Hamburg 1993. Featherstone, Mike: Undoing Culture. Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity, London 1996. Featherstone, Mike (ed.): Global Culture. Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London 1990. Featherstone, Mike, Lash, Scott and Robertson, Roland (eds): Global Modernities, London 1995. Forndran, Erhard (ed.): Religion und Politik in einer säkularisierten Welt, BadenBaden 1991. Friedman, Jonathan: Cultural Identity and Global Process, London 1994. Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History and the Last Man, New York 1982. Galtung, Johan: Peace by Peaceful Means. Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization, London 1996. Geertz, Clifford: Welt in Stücken. Kultur und Politik am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna 1996. Habermas, Jürgen: Die Einbeziehung des Anderen. Studien zur politischen Theorie, Frankfurt am Main 1996. Herzog, Roman: Preventing the Clash of Civilizations, New York 1999. Hofstede, Geert: Interkulturelle Zusammenarbeit, Wiesbaden 1993.

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Huntington, Samuel P.: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York 1996. Husserl, Edmund: Die Krisis des europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie (1935), Weinheim 1995. Inglehart, Ronald: Modernization and Postmodernization, Princeton 1997. Jaspers, Karl: Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Munich 1949. Juergensmeyer, Mark: The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, Berkeley 1993. Kallscheuer, Otto (ed.): Das Europa der Religionen, Frankfurt am Main 1996. Kramer, Dieter: Weltkulturen und Politik. Überlegungen zur Dynamik internationaler Kulturbeziebungen, Duisburg 1997 (INEF-Report, no. 25). Kramer, Dieter (ed.): Viele Kulturen – eine Welt, Frankfurt am Main 1995. Kühnhardt, Ludger, Die Universalität der Menschenrechte, Bonn 19912. Küng, Hans: Weltethos für Weltpolitik und Weltwirtschaft, Munich 1997. Lee, Eun-Jeung: Konfuzianismus und Kapitalismus. Markt und Herrschaft in Ostasien, Münster 1997. Lütterfelds, Wilhelm and Mohrs, Thomas (eds): Eine Welt – Eine Moral? Eine kontroverse Debatte, Darmstadt 1997. Maier, Hans: Wie universal sind die Menschenrechte?, Freiburg 1997. Mall, Ram Adhar: Philosophie im Vergleich der Kulturen, Darmstadt 1995. Marty, Martin E. and Appleby, R. Scott: Herausforderung Fundamentalismus. Radikale Christen, Moslems und Juden im Kampf gegen die Moderne, Frankfurt am Main 1996. Matthes, Joachim (ed.): Zwischen den Kulturen?, Special Issue 8 of Soziale Welt, Baden-Baden 1992. May, Hans and Fritsch-Oppermann, Sybille (eds): Menschenrechte zwischen Universalisierungsanspruch und kultureller Kontextualisierung, Loccum 1993. Menzel, Ulrich: Globalisierung versus Fragmentierung, Frankfurt am Main 1998. Meyer, Thomas: Identitäts-Wahn. Die Politisierung des kulturellen Unterschieds, Berlin 1997. Mokre, Monika (ed.): Imaginierte Kulturen – reale Kämpfe. Annotationen zu Huntingtons ‘Kampf der Kulturen’, Baden-Baden 2000. Northrop, F. S. C.: The Meeting of East and West. An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding, New York 1947. Oberndörfer, Dieter: Die offene Republik. Zur Zukunft Deutschlands und Europas, Freiburg 1991. Paul, Gregor: Asien und Europa. Philosophien im Vergleich, Frankfurt am Main 1984. Robertson, Roland: Globalization. Social Theory and Global Culture, London 1992. Rosenau, James: Turbulence in World Politics, Brighton 1990. Ross, Marc Howard: The Culture of Conflict. Interpretations and Interests in Comparative Perspective, New Haven 1993. Sandole, Dennis J. D.: Capturing the Complexity of Conflict. Dealing with Violent Ethnic Conflicts of the Post-Cold War Era, London 1999. Schmale, Wolfgang (ed.): Human Rights and Cultural Diversity, Goldbach 1993. Schweidler, Walter (ed.): Menschenrechte und Gemeinsinn – westlicher und östlicher Weg?, St Augustin 1998. Schubert, Gunter, Tetzlaff, Rainer and Vennewald, Werner (eds): Demokratisierung und politischer Wandel, Münster 1994.

138

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Senghaas, Dieter: Wohin driftet die Welt? Über die Zukunft friedlicher Koexistenz, Frankfurt am Main 1994. Shute, Steven and Hurley, Susan (eds): Die Idee der Menschenrechte, Frankfurt am Main 1996. Tetzlaff, Rainer (ed.): Menschenrechte und Entwicklung, Bonn 1993. Tibi, Bassam: Krieg der Zivilisationen. Politik und Religion zwischen Vernunft und Fundamentalismus, Hamburg 1995. Unsere kulturelle Vielfalt. Bericht der ‘Weltkommission Kultur und Entwicklung’, ed. by Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission, Bonn 1996. Vogt, Wolfgang R. and Jung, Eckard (eds): Kultur des Friedens, Darmstadt 1997. Von Glasenapp, Helmuth: Die fünf Weltreligionen, Munich 19932. Wallerstein, Immanuel: Geopolitics and Geoculture, Cambridge 1991. Walzer, Michael: Lokale Kritik – globale Standards, Berlin 1996. Walzer, Michael: On Toleration, London 1997. Weidenfeld, Werner (ed.): Dialog der Kulturen, Gütersloh 1997. Weidenfeld, Werner and Rumberg, Dirk (eds): Orientierungsverlust. Zur Bindungskrise der modernen Gesellschaft, Gütersloh 1994. Welsch, Wolfgang: Unsere postmoderne Moderne, Berlin 19934. Wimmer, Franz M.: Interkulturelle Philosophie. Geschichte und Theorie, Vienna 1990

Index

Abduh, M. 40 absolutism 89 action, autonomous 34 affect control 16 al-Afghani 40 Afghanistan 101 Africa 71, 122n23, 122n28; communitarianism 21; decolonization 80–1; political sovereignty 81; post-colonialism 20–1; rationalism 20; secondary developmental nationalism 84 Africa, sub-Saharan 21, 80–1, 85–6, 89 Africa, West 20, 81 ahimsa (non-violence) 61 Algeria 5, 36, 73, 96 Algerianization 22 America 78, 79, 80; see also USA anthropology, egalitarian 34 anti-attitude 80, 81, 84 anti-Brahmin movements 59 anti-colonialism 81 anti-fundamentalism 115 anti-imperialism 81, 83 anti-modernism 19, 121n12 apartheid 87 Arabic–Islamic region: development crisis 5, 22; development nationalism 86–7; modernization conflicts 110; pluralism 35–6; Qur’an 87; rivalry 90; see also Islam Aristotle 28 Arkoun, Mohammed 36, 39, 40 arms race 83 ASEAN region 87 Ashoka 51 ashramas (stages of life) 62–3 Asia, East: Asiatic Affirmation 73; cultural modernization 5; dao 64;

democracy 29, 97; development 85; development crisis 21, 95–6; human rights 97; individualization 98; modernization 22, 85, 96, 97–8, 115; newly industrializing countries 19 Asia, South-east: Asiatic Affirmation 73; cultural modernization 5; development crisis 95–6; Islam 66 Asian values 92–3, 99, 113, 132n3; collectivism 20, 85, 99, 113; education 98; family 20, 99; ideology 113; legal terms 101; modernization 97; transitional crisis 95; and West 97 Asiatic Affirmation 73 aspirations 52, 54 assimilation: politics 87; resistance 130–1n16 Atatürk, Mustapha Kemal 39 aufgehoben (embedded individual) 92 Australia 84 authority 72, 93, 99, 113 autocracy 64, 95, 97 autonomy 34 Averroes 40 Avicenna 40 al-Azm, Sadik J. 38, 39 Baecker, Dirk 118n3 Bao Jingyan 33 Bay’a 65 Beijing, China 93, 98 bhiksu (Buddhist monk) 48 bie (strife-torn society) 31 Bielefeldt, Heiner 119n15 Bosnia 90 Brahmin caste 58, 62 Britain 43, 79

140

Index

Buddha, Gautama 45–6, 49 Buddhism 127n4; adaptability 2, 45; anti-Brahmin 59; China 33; citizenship 54; dhamma-oriented society 50–1; eightfold path 47–9, 52; enlightenment 46, 48, 51; ethics 53; four noble truths 46–8; Hinduism 111–12; homelessness 48; India 111; individualism 45–6; institutions 53; meditation 47–9; militancy 45; modernity 51–4; nirvana 47, 49; politics 54; poverty 50; public order 45–6, 50, 51–2, 67; redemption 46, 51, 52–3, 54; reincarnation 46, 47, 48–9, 52–3; respect 50; rulership 49–50, 52, 64; samskaras (aspirations) 52, 54; sangha 49–50, 51, 52; social welfare 50; socio-politics 53–4; Sri Lanka 45, 75, 99, 111–12; violence 53; West 45, 128n23 Cairo modernists 40 caliphate 65 Canada 84 capitalism 94 caste system 129n23; Hinduism 58–9, 60, 61, 67; reinterpretation 61–2; social mobility 67 Catholic church 107 centre/periphery approach 81–2, 83, 95; see also peripheralization chaos-management: China 26–31; Chinese philosophy 15, 26, 27–31; Confucianism 27–9; Daoism 29; Europe 15–16; legalism 30; medieval 121n6; Mohist paradigm 31; yangism 31 Chechnya 85 Chee Soon Juan 122n24, 122n28 China: Asian values 93; Beijing 93, 98; Buddhism 33; chaos management 26–31; Communist Party of China 25, 66, 113; Cultural Revolution 25; culture fever 22, 24–5, 66, 123n1; democratization 98; emperor 27, 30; history 24, 26; institutions 30; legalism 30, 32, 34; modernization 19, 24–5, 34, 66, 119n12; neoConfucianism 25, 33, 98; political philosophy 22–3; public order 31; social welfare 28–9; spiritual pluralism 26; Tang dynasty 51; Tiananmen Square massacre 25;

tyranny 27; Wei dynasty 51; see also Confucianism Chinese philosophy 123–4n6; chaos-management 15, 26, 27–31; crisis management 26; development 25; diversity 26, 32, 33; public order 2–3, 66 Christianity 31, 79, 107; Egypt 110; India 60, 111; and Islam 105, 106, 110; state 107 citizenship 54, 65, 107 civil society 79, 96 civil wars 116 civilization: abolition 29; changes 73–4; clash 1, 72–3, 82; conflict 72–3; culture 1–2; Islam 72, 73; reluctant 18–19; West 71–2 civilization hexagon 16–18, 19, 121n8 Cleary, Thomas 55, 128n24 coexistence 76–7, 116 Cold War, Second 110 collective learning 77 collectivism: Asian values 20, 85, 99, 113; development 93–7, 99; Europe 94; family 92, 99; and individualism 7, 19–20, 36–7, 72, 92; Islam 36–7; social mobility 93–4; socialism, really existing 19–20, 82–3; tradition 93; umma 116 colonialism 88 commonalities of principles 77 communalism 111 communication, internationalization 5 communism 82, 90, 110 Communist Party of China 25, 66, 113 communitarianism, Africa 21 community 27, 36, 49–51, 65; see also sangha; umma competition, systemic 92 concienciación 80 conflict 2–3; civilization 72–3; culture 22, 23, 71, 75, 83–8, 90; distribution 75–6; dysfunctional 15; East–West 82; ethnopolitics 74, 101; fault lines 75–6; geocultural 89, 100; global 90; identity conflict 76, 100; ideology 82; India 60–1; minorities 86–7; modernization 7–8, 110; political 90, 92, 116; religion 75–6; societal development 21 conflict management 16, 17 Confucian–Islamic connection 89 Confucianism: chaos-management 27–9; Chee 122n28; consultation

Index

141

28; diversity 1, 2, 22–3; ethos 31, 72; family 34; Islam 73; li 27, 28, 31, 32; non-proliferation 73; personalization of problems 27; quality control of ruler 27–8; respect 34; state Confucianism 19, 23, 66; structural backwardness 19 Confucius: autonomous ethic 31; Europe 121n11; humanity 30; li 27; realism 28 consciencism 81 consciousness 81 consciousness training 48 consensus 65, 72 consent 93 constitutionalism 41, 97, 99, 107 consultation: Confucianism 28; Islam 21, 42–3 contract 65 Coptic Christians, Egypt 110 corporatism 94, 99 cosmic order: dao 27, 29, 64; dharma 50–1, 64, 121n6 cosmocentricism 14–15, 33 crisis management 26 Cultural Revolution 25 culture: China 22, 24–5, 66, 123n1; civilization 1–2; coexistence 76–7; conflict 22, 23, 71, 75, 83–8, 90; definition 79, 80, 118n3; differentiation 3–4, 5; discontent 16; discrimination 87; disintegration 23; essentialism 18–23; innovation 77; modernization 5–6; politics 76, 80, 90; public order 80; relativism 6–7; revival 76; soul of 73, 74, 76; struggles 79, 82, 88–9, 100; tradition 4; West 1–2, 43–4 culture wars, USA 100, 133n1

desire 46–7 despotism 64 determined formation, law of 50 deterrence, legalism 30 development 119n13; Asia, East 85; catch-up doctrines 94; centre/periphery approach 95; collectivism 93–7, 99; democracy 96; elites 95; Europe 105; social classes 95; socialism, really existing 114; unequal 94–5 development crisis: Arabic–Islamic region 5, 22; Asia, East 21, 95–6; Islam 35, 66; modernity 87; postcolonialism 86; Singapore 21; West 44, 88 developmental nationalism 130n10; primary 84; secondary 84–5; tertiary 86–7 developmental socialism 82 dhamma-oriented society 50–1 dharma (cosmic order) 50–1, 64, 121n6 dictatorships 94, 97 differentiation: conflict 2–3; culture 3–4, 5; intercultural philosophy 23; Islam 35; social 102 disarmament 16 discipline 113 discontent/culture 16 discrimination 75–6, 87, 100–1 disintegration of culture 23 distribution conflicts 75–6 distributive justice 16, 17 Divine Law, Islam 65 divine right, Islam 36 dominance, social class 95 Dong Zongshu 33 dukkha (suffering) 46–7, 51 duty 94, 99

dao (cosmic order) 27, 29, 64 Daoism 29, 33 decolonization 80–1, 84–5 defeudalization 98 democracy: ancient Greece 64; Asia, East 29, 97; constitutional 97, 99; development 96; Islam 42–3, 108–9; newly industrializing countries 19; participation 16 democratic constitutional states 99 democratization 85, 98 demography 75 demonization 110 dependency, structural 83

East–West 82, 92, 93, 94 Eastern values 93 education 39, 74, 84, 98; see also literacy egalitarian anthropology 34 egocentrism 49 egoism 31, 92 Egypt: Cairo modernists 40; Coptic Christians 110; Islamic movements 36, 96, 101; post-colonial 89 elites 84, 88, 95, 112 emperor of China 27, 30 enlightenment, Buddhist 46, 48, 51 Enlightenment, Europe 2, 33, 115

142

Index

epistemology 20–1 equality 49, 60, 100 essentialism 18–23, 37–8, 107 ethics 31, 32, 53, 59, 72, 93 ethnicization 85 ethnoplural societies 87 ethnopolitics: conflict 74, 101; cultural conflicts 87–8; democratization 85–6; India 111; modernity 74 eurocentrism 88 Europe: America 78; ancien régime 15, 94; autocracy 95; capitalism 94; collectivism 94; Confucius 121n11; defeudalization 98; development 105; economic/cultural rivalry 18; Enlightenment 2, 33, 115; human rights 119–20n19; modernization 3–4; nation states 84; nationalisms 84, 94; peripheralization 84–5; politics 3–4, 15–16; power groups 105–6; social mobility 22; values 7 Europe, Eastern 98 Europe, South-eastern 81–2 evil 30 exclusivism, Hinduism 60 experience/fragmentation 81 Expressionism 115 fa (laws) 30, 31 family 15, 20, 34, 92, 99 al-Farabi, Abu Nasr 40 farmer caste 58, 62 al-Fattah Ismail, Saif al-Din Abd 21 fault line conflicts, socio-economic problems 75–6 federalism 80 feminism/modernism 116 feudalism 107 force, monopoly of 16 fragmentation 14, 81, 90, 123n30 France 43, 84 free markets 96 Freire, Paulo 80 Freud, Sigmund 16 fundamentalism: Hinduism 60–1; Islam 20, 61, 101, 108, 109–10; modern 115; power 108 Galtung, Johan 1 Gandhi, Mahatma 19, 57 Geertz, Clifford 123n30 Geist, Beate 119n12, 123n1 gender inequality 40, 41 genocide 76

geocultural conflict 89, 100 Germany 20, 43, 84 Ghana 81 von Glasenapp, Helmuth 58, 59 god: dao 27; Hinduism 59; rule of 36; sovereignty 37 Golden Rule 65, 129n4 Gorbachev, Mikhail 98 Greek democracy 64 guardians of the past 19 gurucracy 113 Gyekye, Kwame 122n23, 122n28 Habermas, Jürgen 119–20n19 Habitat II 14 hadiths (words and acts of prophet) 36 hakimiyat Allah (rule of God) 36 halakah (Jewish Law) 102 Hamilton, Alexander 78 Han Fei Zi 30 harmony 93, 94 hedonism 32 Hegel, G. W. F.: Philosophy of Law 15 Herzog, Roman 117 hierarchy 58–9, 72, 83; see also caste system Hinduism 1–2, 61–3, 71; Buddhism 111–12; caste system 58–9, 60, 61–2, 67; diversity of practice 56–7; exclusivism 60; fundamentalism 60–1; god 59; and Islam 61, 66–7, 110–11; karmic law 58; marginalization 61; meditation 62–3; modern pluralism 57–60; modernity 128n16; modernization 58; politics 99; public order 58; redemption 58; Rig Veda 57; Sharma 61–2, 122n28; Sikhs 111; spiritual pluralism 56–7; tolerance 57, 59; Vedic beliefs 58; world ethics 59 hindutva (Hindu identity) 60 Höffe, Otfried 119n15 homelessness, Buddhism 48 human rights 119n18; Asia, East 97; European 119–20n19; history 119n15; Müller 124n15; universalism/relativism 6–7; Western/socialists 114 humanity: Confucius 30; equality 34; evil 30; Islam 36, 41; predetermination 62 Huntington, Samuel: The Clash of Civilizations 1; common principles

Index 77; Confucian–Islamic connection 89; cultural areas 71–4; cultural conflict 23, 100; fault line conflicts 75; mediation 76–7 Husserl, Edmund 18, 121n10 Ibn Khaldun 40 identity 76, 81, 105 identity conflict 76, 100 identity politics 100–1 ideology: Asian values 113; conflict 82; national mobilization 99; socialism, really existing 114; status-quo 95 immortality of soul 58 Impressionism 115 India: Ashoka 51; Buddhism 111; caste system 129n23; Christianity 60, 111; colonialism 88; conflict 60–1; developmental nationalism 86; dharma 64; ethnopolitics 111; Gandhi 19, 57; Islam 66–7, 110–11; Jainism 111; Parsees 111; quota system 60; radicalization 60; social pluralism 60; state/sangha 51; see also Hinduism individual protective rights 107 individualism: affect control 16; Buddhism 45–6; capitalism 94; and collectivism 7, 19–20, 36–7, 72, 92; pluralism 35, 82; possessive 92; samskaras 52; solidarity 79 individualization 98 Indonesia 66 industriousness 99 inequality 16–17, 40, 41 injustice 76 innovation 20, 21, 77, 83 institutions 30, 53 integration, Islam 105 intercultural philosophy 13, 23, 120n1 interdependence 13 international law 13, 40 international politics 92 internationalization of communication 5 Iqbal, M. 40 Iran 73, 86, 89, 101 Iraq 73, 89 Ireland, Northern 75, 90 Islam 1–2, 66, 71; armed forces 39; and Christianity 105, 106, 110; civilization 72, 73; collectivism 36–7; Confucianism 73; constitutionalism 41; consultation

143

21, 42–3; democracy 42–3, 108–9; demonization 110; development crisis 35, 66; differentiation 35; diversity 89; Divine Law 65; divine right 36; education 39; in Egypt 36, 96, 101; epistemology 20–1; essentialism 37–8; fundamentalism 20, 61, 101, 108, 109–10; and Hinduism 61, 66–7, 110–11; humanity 36, 41; in India 66–7, 110–11; innovation 21; integration 105; interpretations 37, 38–9, 44; legal system 39, 41; Meier 131n18; middle classes 35; modern 105, 108–10; modernity 42, 66; modernization 41, 109; morality 36; an-Na’im 122n28; orthodoxy 37; philosophers 40; pluralism 22, 35, 38; politics 42–3, 99; public order 65; Qur’an 21, 22, 36; reason 36, 39–40; salafiya movement 19; secularization 39; self-image 37; sharia (divine right) 64; social mobility 35; sovereignty 65; state 39; tertiary developmental nationalism 86–7; theonomous/community-oriented 36, 37, 39–40; values 96, 114; West 43–4, 105, 106 Islamic Resurgence 73 Israel 101–2 jahiliya (moral rottenness) 36, 39, 44 Jainism 59, 111 Japan 19–20, 71, 84 Jaspers, Karl 25, 45 Jewish Law 102 jian (self-regulated society) 31 Jordan 89 Judaea 90 judgement/autonomy 34 justice, distributive 16, 17 karma 58, 61–2 Kashmir 90 Khalistan, Sikh groups 60 Kim Dae-jung 29, 124n10 Koh, Tommy 132n3 Korea, North 51, 73 Korea, South 19, 97, 98, 112–13 Koreans in USA 87 Kosovo 87 kshatriyas (warriors) 58, 62 Küng, Hans 77

144

Index

laicism 43 Latin America 71, 84 Lebanon 110 Lee Kuan Yew 29, 96 legal system, Islamic 39, 41 legal terms, Asian values 101 legalism 30, 32, 34 Leninism 94, 98 Lewis, Bernard 65 li (good morals) 27, 28, 31, 32 liberalism 90 Libya 73, 89 life stages 62–3 List, Friedrich 80; The National System of Political Economy 84 literacy 14, 75, 84, 105, 114 Liù Shaoqi 25 Lutheran church 107 Maccabees 90 Maghreb 89 Magna Carta 106 Mahayana Buddhism 52 Malaysia 93 Mall, Ram Adhar 57, 59 Manar group 40 Mao Zedong 25 marginalization 61, 74, 86, 100 al-Maududi 36 mediation 76–7 meditation: Buddhism 47–9; Hinduism 62–3 Meier, Andreas 131n18 Mencius 28–9, 30, 34 Mernissi, Fatema 37 middle classes 35, 86 migration: see rural–urban migration militancy 45, 75, 86–7 militarization 83 minimal standards 77 minorities 74, 86–7, 101 Mo Di (Micius) 31 modern society 57–60, 82, 102 modernism 80, 105; antifundamentalism 115; antimodernism 19, 121n12; feminism 116; fragmentation 90; socialism, really existing 83 modernity: Buddhism 51–4; development crisis 87; ethnopolitics 74; Hinduism 128n16; history of 90; Islam 42, 66; tradition 20 modernization 4–5, 6; Arabic–Islamic regions 110; Asia, East 17–18, 22,

85, 96, 115; Asian values 97; China 19, 24–5, 34, 66, 119n12; conflict 7–8, 110; culture 5–6; Europe 3–4; Hinduism 58; imitative 19; injustice 76; Islam 41, 109; late 94, 97–8; pluralism 8; politicization 14; socioeconomic 115; tradition 105 Mohist paradigm 31 moral community 27, 50–1 morality: commonalities 65; dissolute 79; Islam 36; society 29; state 15, 54; thick/thin 77 Muhammad, Prophet 36 Müller, Sven-Uwe 124n15 Muslim fundamentalists 61, 66–7; see also Islam Mu’tazilites 37 mutual consulation, Qur’an 21, 42–3 mutual love 31 an-Na’im, Abdullahi Ahmed 40, 41, 42, 122n28 nation 93 nation states 84 national mobilization 99 nationalisms 84, 94 neo-Confucianism 25, 33, 98 neo-authoritarianism 113 New World/Old World 79 New World Order 79–80 New Zealand 84 newly industrializing countries 19 Nietzsche, Friedrich 105 nirvana (release from suffering) 47, 49 Nkrumah, K. 20, 81 non-action 29 non-intervention 76 non-proliferation treaties 73 non-violence 61 Oberndörfer, Dieter 117 obligations 65 OECD world 84 Old World/New World 79 oligarchy 64 openness 77 orthodoxy, Islam 37 paideuma (soul of culture) 73 Pakistan 73, 86, 111 Parsees 111 participation, democracy 16 paternalism 99 patriarchy 93

Index peasantry 5 peripheralization 84–5, 118n10; see also centre/periphery approach Persian Gulf 89 personalization of problems 27 Philippines 110 philosophy 14–15, 22–3, 40; see also intercultural philosophy pleasure principle/reality principle 16–17 pluralism: Arabic–Islamic region 35–6; Hinduism 57–60; individualism 35, 82; Islam 22, 35, 38; legalism 32; modern society 102; modernization 8; politics 66, 112–13; premodern 3; social 60; spiritual 26, 56–7; umma 38 plutocracy 94–5 political awareness 84, 105 political philosophy 22–3 politicization 14, 15–16, 117 politics: assimilation 87; Buddhism 54; conflict 90, 92, 116; culture 76, 80, 90; deliberative 16; Europe 3–4, 15–16; Hinduism 99; identity politics 100–1; international 92; Islam 42–3, 99; pluralism 66, 112–13; religion 36, 42; selfdetermination 79–80; social problems 14; tradition 64; see also ethnopolitics post-colonialism: Africa 20–1; Asia 95; cultural conflict 85; development crisis 86; Egypt 89; elites 88; failures 99 postmodernism 90 poverty 50, 86 power: Europe 105–6; fundamentalism 108; legitimizing 28–9; socialism, really existing 113–14 predetermination of humanity 62 profit maximization 72 proletarian nations 94–5 public order: Buddhism 45–6, 50, 51–2, 67; China 31; Chinese philosophy 2–3, 66; culture 80; East/West 92, 93, 94; Hinduism 58; Islam 65; Israel 102; structure 82 Puritanism 31, 79 quality control of ruler 27–8 quota system, India 60 Qur’an: Arabic–Islamic region 87; deconstructed 42; interpretations 37, 41–2; Islam 21, 22, 36;

145

Mecca/Medina texts 41; mutual consulation 21; traditional society 109 Qutb, Sayyid 78 radicalization, India 60 rational choice 31 realism, Confucius 28 reality principle/pleasure principle 16–17 reason: Africa 20; human 37; Islam 36, 39–40 reciprocity 34 redemption: Buddhism 46, 51, 52–3, 54; Hinduism 58 refeudalization 98 reincarnation: Buddhism 46, 47, 48–9, 52–3; Hinduism 61–2 religion: conflict 75–6; politics 36, 42; reason of 37; solidarity 36 ren orientation (good-will) 31, 32, 34 renunciation of worldliness 51, 53 resistance: assimilation 130–1n16; history of 90; legitimate 93 respect 34, 50 retraditionalization 85 retribalization 85 Rida, M. R. 40 Rig Veda 57 right way of living, Buddhism 47–8, 50 rights, minorities 101 rivalry 18, 83, 90, 120n19 Romania 81–2 Romanticism 115 rule of law 16, 97 rulership: Buddhism 49–50, 52, 64; Confucianism 27–8; criticism 34; extravagance 31; goodness 64; legitimacy 28–9, 64; obligations 65; quality 27–8, 50, 64; respect 34; sangha 52; zhong 34 rural–urban migration 14, 84, 105, 114 Russia 19, 102; see also Soviet Union sacralization 39, 42 el-Sadat, Anwar 65 salafiya movement, Islam 19 samskaras (aspirations) 52, 54 sangha (community of Buddhist monks) 49–50, 51, 52 Sartre, Jean-Paul 79 Scandinavia 43 Schimmel, Annemarie 40 Schwartländer, Johannes 119n15

146

Index

secularization 39, 42, 43 Seleucid kingdom 90 self-image, Islam 37 self-reflection 76–7 self-regulation 29, 31 self-determination 79–80 self-organization 96 semi-modernists 19–20 Senghor, L. S. 20 Shah of Iran 65 sharia (divine right) 36, 37, 39, 40, 64 Sharma, Arvind 61–2, 63, 122n28 Shi’ah Islam 38 shudras (Hindu caste) 58, 62 Sikhs 60, 86, 111 Singapore: Asian values 93, 113; development crisis 21; hybrid values 20; Lee Kuan Yew 96 Singapore school 20, 21 Sinic civilization 71, 72, 73; see also China; Chinese philosophy Sivaraksa, Sulak 53, 65 skill revolution 14 social classes: development 95; dominance 95; Israel 102; middle classes 35, 86; modern 5; solidarity 94 social mobility: caste system 67; collectivism 93–4; democratic participation 16; demography 75; education 14; European experience 22; Islam 35; karma 62; minorities 74; modernization 86; non-Europe 5; politicization 18, 99, 116 social order 30, 32; see also public order social sciences 13 social-utilitarianism 34 social welfare 28–9, 50 socialism: African 94; Arab 94; Asian 94; developmental 82; human rights 114; really existing 19–20, 82–3, 94, 113–14; values 118n1 socialist-corporatism 99 society: community 49; family 15; fragmentation 14; modern 57–60, 82, 102; morality 29; sangha 49–50; state 15, 34; traditional 109 socio-economic problems 75–6, 115 socio-politics, Buddhism 53–4 solidarity 36, 79, 94 soteriology 46 sovereignty 37, 65, 80, 81 Soviet Union 84–5, 102

spiritual pluralism 26, 56–7 Sri Lanka: Buddhism/Hinduism 45, 75, 99, 111–12; tertiary developmental nationalism 86 state: Christianity 107; Islam 39; morality 15, 54; sangha 51; society 15, 34; supremacy 72 state nations 84 status-quo 95 subsistence economies 14, 84, 105 Sudan 89, 101, 110 suffering 46–7, 51 sufism 38 Sukarno, Ahmed 95 Sun Yat-sen 95 Sunnite Islam 38, 65 suppressed groups 80 Syria 73, 89 al-Tahtawi 40 Taiwan 19, 97, 98, 112–13 Tang dynasty, China 51 technological progress 21–2 theocracy 89, 101 Third World 84, 86, 95 Tiananmen Square massacre 25 Tibet 51, 90 de Tocqueville, Alexis 79 tolerance 57, 59 Tonnies, F. 27 totalitarianism 36 tradition: collectivism 93; culture 4; guardians of the past 19; modernity 20; modernization 105; politics 64; Qur’an 109; technological progress 21–2 transformation economies 98 transitoriness 46 Turkey 101 tyranny 27, 28–9, 64, 93 umma (community of believers) 36–7, 38, 42, 89, 110, 116 unity 93, 94 universalism 6–7, 76 untouchables 58 urbanization 75, 84, 105 USA: culture wars 100, 133n1; developmental nationalism 84; marginalization 100; projections on 88–9; racism 87 vaishyas (farmers) 58, 62 values 6, 7; Asia 20, 92; collectivism

Index

147

93–7; Islam 96, 114; socialism 118n1; universal 76; Western 76, 92, 118n1 varnas: see caste system Vedic beliefs 58 violence 53, 73

94; values 76, 92, 118n1; see also East–West; Europe; USA women’s emancipation 107 world ethics 59 worldliness renounced 51, 53 wuwei (non-action), Daoism 29

Walzer, Michael 77 warrior caste 58, 62 Wei dynasty, China 51 wei wo (utilitarian egoism) 31 Welsch, Wolfgang 119n18 West: and Asian values 97; Buddhism 45, 128n23; civilization 71–2; conflict 82; cultural struggles 88–9; culture 1–2, 43–4; development crisis 44, 88; global influence 119n15; hostility against 88–9; human rights 114; Islam 43–4, 105, 106; policy differences 89; public order 92, 93,

xiao (family) 34 Xun Zi 28, 29, 30, 34 Yang Zhu 31 yangism 31, 32 yi (doing the right thing) 30, 31, 32 Yugoslavia 89 Zaid, Abu 42 Zakariya, Fuad 42 zhong (ruler) 34 Zhu Xi 33 Zionism 102