By Eric Vandenbroeck and
co-workers
Though our world
seems to be unified as never before by technology, trade, and telecommunication,
it remains politically segmented and culturally compartmentalized. Also
individual submission to a collective defined by nation, clan, or faith and his
readiness to resort to murder for his community's sake, rampant throughout the
West in centuries past, is very much alive in large parts of Asia, Africa, and
the Middle East. This is not to ignore Basque terrorism in Spain or
Catholic-Protestant bloodshed in Northern Ireland, let alone America's wars of
choice in Iraq. But the willingness to kill and be killed for a
self-transcending cause is no longer typical for the West.
A bloody drama of
national revivalism is found in the post-Soviet space left behind by an empire
that had suppressed so many nations within its vast borders in the wake of the
Crimean War (1853-56), and especially through Stalin's forcible Russification
policy in the 1930s. Here is a short list: violent clashes in Moldova (between
Moldavians, Gagauz, and Russians), war in Chechnya (between Muslim separatists
and the Russian army), a three-way battle in Georgia (between Abkhazis, Ossetians, and the "titular" majority),
the endless struggle over Nagorno Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan, once
forced to live together under the same imperial roof.
The collapse of former
Yugoslavia in the 1990s is part of the same postimperial, postcommunist
story. Stitched together after World War I from various parts of the Ottoman
and Habsburg empires, the "Land of the South Slavs" was in fact a
Serb dominion. Held together by Tito's charismatic leadership, communist
ideology, and Soviet pressure from the outside, this tenuous construction was
destined to crumple after the marshall's death in
1980 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The bent-twig backlash obeyed an
almost mechanistic dynamic. Communism, a handy tool of the largest ethnic group
(Russians in the Soviet Union, Serbs in Yugoslavia) had sought not just to
repress but even to eliminate minorities in the greatest assimilationist
project of them all. Forging a "new man," communism would demolish
and replace all other identities with a single proletarian one. Once the
ideology cracked, only force was left. Boris Yeltsin's and Vladimir Putin's war
against the Chechens was cut from the same cloth as Slobodan Milosevic's
against Slovenia, Croatia, Muslim Bosnia, and Kosovo.
Nor was the
suppression of the Yugoslav war of succession, circa 1991-99, by NATO warplanes
the end of the "wounded nationalism" story. When the tide of power
turns, yesterday's victims rerum the favor to their former overlords, as the
Croatians and Kosovars did to the Serbs once Belgrade's grip was broken by
NATO. It is either submission or ethnic cleansing-or the international
protectorate that has taken the place of Yugoslavia. In the post-Soviet space,
there are bent twigs in everyone of the fifteen
successor republics-from the twenty million Russians, who still live there, to
a multitude of ethnic minorities strewn across Moscow's former underbelly and
within Russia itself.
But there is more.
Invariably, the greater powers smell both risk and opportunity in these
tortured climes, and so a widening conflict is the natural counterpart of local
score settling. NATO was drawn into Yugoslavia to protect Muslims against
Serbs, as well as itself against a tide of Balkan refugees. In the post-Soviet
space, it is terrorist bases, on one side of the ledger, and oil and gas, on
the other, that have sucked in Russian and American forces-sometimes, as in
Kyrgyzstan, in one and the same country. Outside powers will naturally
manipulate (and munition) local forces for their own ends, assuring the
persistence of the conflict. And they might clash themselves. Thus bent twigs
can eventually shake the entire tree, as so many peripheral conflicts have done
by spilling out from the wings to center stage. (The best example is still the
Seven Years' War, which had begun as a Franco-British colonial war over North
America.)
Then there is the
failed modernization phenomenon, virulent in the Islamic realm· that stretches
from the Maghreb via the Levant into the Persian Gulf and beyond to Pakistan
and Afghanistan. Wounded nationalism in this part of the world flows from the
failure of keeping up. It is compounded by the painful encounter of backward
societies with the West-first France and Britain, then the United States and
Israel-that is short on triumph and long on humiliation.
Israel is the only
country in the neighborhood that has mastered the trials of economic and
cultural modernization; hence it is an honorary member of Westernized Nations.
Starting out barely ahead of its Arab neighbors half a century ago, Israel has
jumped from an agrarian economy to a high-tech one without passing through the
intermediate stage of industrialization. Though born and weaned in war, the
country has not succumbed to the "garrison state," evolving instead
into a fractious, but stable, liberal democracy. The "Little Satan"
has won every passage of arms with its Arab neighbors since 1948. Though tied
by peace treaties to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians, Israel remains a
painful reminder of Arab weakness. Israel's GDP is almost as big as that of the
four Arab "front states" combined; its per capita income is fifteen
times higher than Egypt's or Syria's.
The frustration
inflicted by Israel is compounded tenfold by the United States, the power that
casts the largest shadow over the Middle East. In the 1950s, the United States
wrested the imperial mantle from Britain and France; by the early 1970s, when
Sadat's Egypt sent Soviet troops packing, the United States had extruded its
last great-power rival from the area. Ever since the mid-1950s, America has
acted in the Middle East as Britain had in Europe: it has stymied the ambitions
of whoever sought to unify Arabia under a single antiAmerican
will.
The United States
undid coups in Lebanon and Iran in the 1950s and discreetly helped its
surrogate Israel beat Arab armies in the 1960s and 1970s. Having dislodged the
Soviet Union from Egypt in the 1970s, Washington masterminded the containment
of Iran throughout the 1980s, initially by aligning sub rosa with Saddam's
Iraq. Thereafter, it recruited a global coalition against Iraq in the First
Iraq War. In the Second Iraq War, the United States escalated from containment
to regime change, a move that might yet go down in history as the most potent
factor of transformation ever. Unlike eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Britain in Europe, the United States organized not only war but also peace on
its Middle Eastern turf. From the Camp David accords in 1977 onward, Washington
goaded Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians into accommodation with Israel while
isolating or punishing those-Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran-that would rally the
Arab-Islamic world against the Great and the Little Satan.
The failure to keep
up has sharpened the frustration of societies that have stumbled on the path of
modernization. The natural fallback position was aggressive nationalism. Syria,
Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Algeria have been the classic instances of failure,
with Iran arriving at calamity from a different ideological direction. The five
Arab states all tried Soviet-style modernization with an Arabic script.
"In an endeavor to copy the Soviet model, embryonic heavy industries were
established from the banks of the Nile to the Sahara, but they soon proved
incapable of competing on the world market and turned into financial black
holes."22 They tried one-party rule and totalitarian mobilization in order
to raze religious, ethnic, and familial pillars of authority. To hold it all
together, Nasser, Assad, Saddam, et al. wrapped themselves in the cloak of
all-Arab nationalism on the welltried theory that
enemies abroad are a despot's best friends at home.
How shall we count
the ways in which that part of the world warred against itself and against
Israel, the stranger in its midst? In the name of the umma, the "Arab
nation," the Egypt of Nasser confronted the West over Suez in 1956 and
triggered war with Israel in 1967, while seeking to subvert neighboring regimes
and intervening openly in Yemen. Mter coming to power
through bloody coups, Hafiz Assad of Syria and Saddam Hussein of Iraq competed
for the mantle of hegemony in the 1970s and 1980s, never mind that
"Baathist" was the label of both one-party regimes. In the same
period, Yasir Arafat's PLO tried to gain control over Jordan and Lebanon, only
to be bloodily rebuffed by King Hussein in 1970 and the Israeli army in 1982.
Iraq attacked neighbors twice: Iran in 1980, Kuwait in 1990. In the 1990s,
Egypt and Libya kept skirmishing along their common border. Mohammad Reza Shah
Pahlavi, who ruled Iran from 1941 to 1979 with a short interruption, came at
the game from another direction. His was not a socialist but a
"white" revolution. Like his Arab colleagues, he prescribed a regimen
of state-sponsored industrialization. Like them, he suppressed domestic, above
all religious, dissent, by disenfranchising the Shia clergy. Like the others,
who were emulating Europe's totalitarians, he tried to catapult a back ward
society into modernity by leveling competing centers of traditional authority.
The difference was the "white" coloration of a revolution that
wagered on capitalist development and alliance with the United States on the
road to regional mastery.
The outcomes,
however, were not that different. Modernization-the forced march into
industrialization and secularization failed to triumph on all fronts: economic,
political, cultural. At opposite geographical extremes, Iran and Algeria paid for
the attempt with the "return of the repressed": with an Islamist
revolution in Tehran, with an unending revolt of the faithful in Algeria. While
Algeria resisted, Iran fell to the Khomeinist revolution of 1979. Afterward, a
familiar pattern unfolded: revolutionary regimes naturally slip into
revolutionary foreign policies. Like the Soviet Union of the Comintern period and revolutionary France, the Khomeinists
resorted to the classic repertoire: subversion of neighbors, terror against
dissidents abroad, financial and military support for insurgent forces,
confrontation with the two "Satans,"
America and Israel.
Egypt keeps battling
the Muslim Brotherhood in a country where population growth consistently
outpaces economic growth. Beset by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the secular (and
once socialist) PLO sought to perpetuate its supremacy by way of patronage
politics and police-state repression until the death of its leader-for-life,
Yasir Arafat, when his successors began to experiment with democratic procedures
under U.S. pressure. Syria's Hafez al-Assad dealt with his Muslim Brotherhood
by reducing their stronghold Hama to rubble in 1982. Afterward, Syria retracted
into totalitarian torpor; upon his death in 2000, when his son Bashir took
power, it evolved into a dynastic dictatorship. The counterpart of frozen
domestic politics was stony-faced hostility to Israel, even as other
Arabs-Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians-moved toward accommodation with this
Western wedge in their midst.
Iraq, another avatar
of failed Soviet-style modernization, remained the victim of "socialism in
one family," the Takriti clan, until the U.S.
army destroyed that regime by war. To secure its hold on a country where power
was monopolized by the minority Sunni (about 15 percent of the population), the
Saddamite regime resorted to classic imperialism
along the advice that Shakespeare's Henry IV gave to his son and successor:
"busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels." Saddam attacked Iran in
1980, Kuwait in 1990-all the while wrapping himself in the banner of Arab
nationalism. The Saudi Wahhabis hold on to power with a mix of cultural
self-isolation, petrodollars, and reactionary clericalism. Politically,
Pakistan is a bomb waiting to explode. Until dislodged by the U.S. military, the
Taliban ruled Afghanistan with an ideology that made postKhomeini
Iran look positively progressive.
If failed
modernization-the inability to combine development with ethnic inclusion and
mass participation-has been the curse of the Arab-Islamic world, nationalism
wedded to faith or ideology has served as the universal cure. For nationalism,
especially when married to the other great integralist ideology-religion-is the
mother of all identities and loyalties. The us-against-them mechanism insulates
societies from change and discredits internal rivals. Nor is this an invention
peculiar to this region; recall the similar drama that unfolded during the age
of European nationalism, which reached its murderous climax in the fusion of
communism, fascism, and Nazism-secular religions all-with xenophobia and
chauvinism. ward society into modernity by leveling competing centers of
traditional authority. The difference was the "white" coloration of a
revolution that wagered on capitalist development and alliance with the United
States on the road to regional mastery.
The outcomes,
however, were not that different. Modernization-the forced march into
industrialization and secularization failed to triumph on all fronts: economic,
political, cultural. At opposite geographical extremes, Iran and Algeria paid
for the attempt with the "return of the repressed": with an Islamist
revolution in Tehran, with an unending revolt of the faithful in Algeria. While
Algeria resisted, Iran fell to the Khomeinist revolution of 1979. Afterward, a
familiar pattern unfolded: revolutionary regimes naturally slip into
revolutionary foreign policies. Like the Soviet Union of the Comintern period and revolultionary
France, the Khomeinists resorted to the classic repertoire: subversion of
neighbors, terror against dissidents abroad, financial and military support for
insurgent forces, confrontation with the two "Satans,"
America and Israel.
Egypt keeps battling
the Muslim Brotherhood in a country where population growth consistently
outpaces economic growth. Beset by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the secular (and
once socialist) PLO sought to perpetuate its supremacy by way of patronage
politics and police-state repression until the death of its leader-for-life,
Yasir Arafat, when his successors began to experiment with democratic
procedures under U.S. pressure. Syria's Hafez al-Assad dealt with his Muslim
Brotherhood by reducing their stronghold Hama to rubble in 1982. Afterward,
Syria retracted into totalitarian torpor; upon his death in 2000, when his son
Bashir took power, it evolved into a dynastic dictatorship. The counterpart of
frozen domestic politics was stony-faced hostility to Israel, even as other
Arabs-Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians-moved toward accommodation with this
Western wedge in their midst.
Iraq, another avatar
of failed Soviet-style modernization, remained the victim of "socialism in
one family," the Takriti clan, until the U.S.
army destroyed that regime by war. To secure its hold on a country where power
was monopolized by the minority Sunni (about 15 percent of the population), the
Saddamite regime resorted to classic imperialism
along the advice that Shakespeare's Henry IV gave to his son and successor:
"busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels." Saddam attacked Iran in
1980, Kuwait in 1990-all the while wrapping himself in the banner of Arab
nationalism. The Saudi Wahhabis hold on to power with a mix of cultural
self-isolation, petrodollars, and reactionary clericalism. Politically,
Pakistan is a bomb waiting to explode. Until dislodged by the U.S. military,
the Taliban ruled Afghanistan with an ideology that made postKhomeini
Iran look positively progressive.
If failed
modernization-the inability to combine development with ethnic inclusion and
mass participation-has been the cutse of the
Arab-Islamic world, nationalism wedded to faith or ideology has served as the
universal cure. For nationalism, especially when married to the other great
integralist ideology-religion-is the mother of all identities and loyalties.
The us-against-them mechanism insulates societies from change and discredits
internal rivals. Nor is this an invention peculiar to this region; recall the
similar drama that unfolded during the age of European nationalism, which
reached its murderous climax in the fusion of communism, fascism, and
Nazism-secular religions all-with xenophobia and chauvinism.
A third type of
nationalism is found in North Korea, Cuba, Libya, and Myanmar, countries that
have dug in against the changes sweeping the world since the fall of the Berlin
Wall. Their economic base is preindustrial. Their politics is totalitarian,
ranging from the charismatic version of Castro's Cuba and Gadhafi's Libya to
junta rule in Myanmar to the Stalinist personality cult of Kim Jong Il's North
Korea. With the exception of Myanmar, these nations have typically resorted to
aggressive foreign policies at one time or another. Cuba and Libya have gone
through a typical cycle that mirrors the biology of their leadership. In their
younger days, Cuba and Libya emulated revolutionary regimes throughout history,
exporting their ideologies by open or covert intervention as far away as
Angola. In their dotage, these revolutionary leaders swung to the opposite extreme:
rigorous self-isolation, reinforced, it should be added, by the quarantine
thrown up around them by the United States.
North Korea represents
a different variant. Instead of bureaucratizing, diluting, or dispatching the
totalitarian model, as the Soviet Union did in the 1980s, Kim Jong 11, who
assumed power in 1996, tried to keep alive the revolutionary flame ignited by
his father, Kim 11 Sung, who had ruled since 1948. The result has been a
virulent nationalism, as manifested in the bellicose confrontation with North
Korea's neighbors and their American allies, as well as in Pyongyang's quest
for nuclear weapons. Throughout the fossil-state segment, high-pitched
nationalism serves a purpose that is both obvious and familiar. By conjuring up
images of implacable foreign enemies actually, by provoking real
enmity-integralism abets the Gleichschaltung of the populace and secures
totalitarian rule.
A fourth type of
integralism is found mainly in Africa-in those states (the vast majority) that
arose from the ruins of colonialism after World War II. Virtually all of them
lack a homogenous ethnic base, given that the carving up of Mrica
in the nineteenth century drew borders following the commercial interest and
the military reach of the European powers rather than ethnic or tribal
boundaries. The bill came due as soon as the foreign overlords had departed,
first and most dramatically in the Congo war of the 1960s and the Angola wars
of the 1970s, whose successors have continued to torture Central Africa all the
way into the twenty-first century.
The general pattern
has been endlessly repeated. In the institutional vacuum left behind by the former
overlords, postcolonial power is assumed by an ethnically or tribally based
regime, majoritarian or not. These regimes proceed to favor their own in the
distribution of material and symbolic benefits while excluding other groups. In
due time, armed insurrections follows, which leads to bloody repression. Both
sides are typically armed and abetted by outside powers for motives strategic
or economic-a dynamic that outlived the Cold War. If the insurgents win, the
cycle is repeated with victims and persecutors changing places. If the test of
strength remains inconclusive, domestic war turns into bloody routine, as in
the former Congo, in Sudan and Angola. In the worst case, as in Rwanda in the
mid-1990s, failed states resort to genocide by machete and machine gun.
The postcolonial
mayhem that continues to tear apart Mrica actually
does not deserve the "nationalism" label. It is rather a subnational
or intrastate phenomenon, be it ethnic, tribal, or religious. The battles
normally unfold not between but within states, usually failed ones. The source
of disaster is the inability to reconcile ethnic with political borders or to
strike a balance between factions by admitting the rebels to the troughs of
political and economic power. A rights-based democracy might help, as would an
economy that mutes Hobbesian strife with the plenty generated by growth. Yet,
economic performance and democratic institutions are routinely the first
victims of tyranny and revolt.
many, Japan, and the
United States all began to overtake those of the established great powers,
especially in those sectors related to war making during the industrial age:
iron, steel, energy-manufacturing in general. Take Germany: from unification in
1871 to the eve of World War I, German coal output rose sevenfold, approaching
parity with Britain. Steel production grew tenfold, and exports leaped by a
factor of almost five.23 Eventually, iron and steel would be forged into guns
and navies.
The pattern was
reinforced by demographic expansion. Japan's population went from 30 million in
midcentury to 45 million in 1900. The U.S. population quadrupled during that
period, and Germany's went from 40 million at the time of unification to 60
million in 1900. All three also profited from surging food production. Rapid
railroad construction brought the "breadbasket"
of the Ukraine closer to Germany. In post-Civil War America, where the largest
immigration wave ever, emanating from eastern and southern Europe, was washing
ashore, the transcontinental railroad opened the West to the plow. Most
important, all three countries managed to shake off their worst political
handicaps: weak or conflict-ridden states. In the United States, the Northern
victory certified the supremacy of the Union in 1865. In Japan, 250 feudal domains
were fused under the Meiji restoration in 1871, in the same year the Bismarckian Reich had turned twenty-five states into one.
In all three, the first fruits of political unification were an enormously
enlarged single market. The way was now open for breathtaking economic growth
and the rapid rise to global power.
Though these events
unfolded oceans apart, the similarities were striking. As the landed
aristocracy-a formal one in Germany and Japan, an informal one in the American
South-lost its hold, power was concentrated in Berlin, Tokyo, and Washington.
Industrialization-statist in Japan, laissez-faire in the United States, a blend
of both in Germany-began to hammer agrarian economies into manufacturing ones.
The Meiji administration literally invented a state religion, replacing
Buddhism with a cult of national deities. In Germany, the Bismarckian
state drew the Lutheran Church into an alliance of altar and throne by granting
it official status and financial largesse. In the United States, it was the
civic religion of "Americanness," celebrated on the altar of
assimilation, which welded together state and secular faith. In all three
countries, universal education sought to instill a nationalist ethos; in the
United States, millions of schoolchildren began to recite the Pledge of
Allegiance after 1892.
By the turn of the
twentieth century, two to three decades after national and economic
unification, the trio began to bestride the global stage as claimants to
great-power status. Japan unleashed war against China in 1894, wresting trade
and territorial concessions from the country one year later. To stop Russian
advances in Manchuria and Korea, Japan attacked the Russian fleet at Port
Arthur in 1904, which presaged the assault on Pearl Harbor thirtyseven
years later. In 1905, Japanese forces sank the Russian Baltic Fleet in the
Tsushima Strait. Korea was annexed in 1910; Manchuria was occupied in 1931. Six
years later, Japan attacked China. And in 1941, the target was of course the
United States.
In Germany, the
"New Course" and the Weltpolitik of Wilhelm II were married to the
First Naval Bill (1898), which was clearly directed against Britain, the
guardian of Europe's balance of power. Six years later, the Second Reich began
to build a new class of battleships that were bigger and better armored than
anything in the British arsenal. As Wilhelmine Germany proclaimed its right to
a "place in the sun," it began to meddle in Africa and the Middle
East. In 1905, at about the same time that Japan sank the Russian fleet,
Germany began to prepare for hegemonial war by basing its strategy on the
notorious Schlieffen Plan: attack first in the west and then, after defeating
France, in the east.
Curiously, a solid
democracy like the United States, beholden not to the Kaiser but to a
Constitution and to Congress, embarked on a similar road paved by prodigious
economic growth since the Civil War. What the ideology of Weltpolitik did for
Wilhelmine Germany, Manifest Destiny did for the ebullient United States.
Agitating for a naval buildup, the German Plottenverein
found its American counterpart in the likes of Alfred T. Mahan, the naval
theoretician who had an enormous impact on U.S. strategic thinking. Closely
read in Germany, Mahan argued that greatness demanded a mighty bluewater navy with bases around the world. By 1898, myth
and muscle would propel the United States toward real, not just rhetorical,
empire. It took Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spain, turned
Panama into a protectorate, annexed the Hawaiian Islands, and sought to impose
its Open Door policy on the European powers carving up China. Physical
expansion was wrapped into an even more expansive ideological cloak.
Theodore Roosevelt,
the new president, articulated it in a message to Congress in 1904:
"Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening
of ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require
intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere, the
adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United
States, .. to the exercise of an international police power."24 The
Europeans, notes Ernest May, "had now to reckon with a seventh great
power. "25
Rising-state
nationalism, so well-documented in the nineteenth century, is also the most
dangerous variant of the twenty-first century. In, fossil states like Cuba,
failed states like Rwanda, or botched modernization experiments in the Arab
world make for mischief and misery. But they cannot unhinge the global order in
the way Japan, Germany, and the United States did at the end of the nineteenth
century-or a few decades later, the Soviet Union, which followed a similar
trajectory, First, it was consolidation of state power under Lenin, then forced
industrialization under Stalin. Forcible expansion completed the three-step
process. The first victims were Poland and the Baltics at the outbreak of World
War II, the rest of Eastern Europe plus one-half of divided Germany followed at
the end of the war.
Today, even a
nuclearized Iran or North Korea cannot tilt the global balance in any
appreciable way. For that, it takes more than nuclear weapons; otherwise,
nuclear powers like Israel and Pakistan would have pulled off such a momentous
feat already. In the twentyfirst century, only China
has both the assets and the ambitions to overturn the world's hierarchy of
power. With one billion people and a surging economy, India is clearly a
candidate member of the great power club, but it is a reluctant giant, not yet
a gate-crasher. China is the most obvious claimant because it approximates most
closely the history of the nineteenth century's highfliers. Indeed, the
parallels are uncanny. Like Germany, Japan, the United States, and Soviet
Russia in the past, China first had to unify state and nation by surmounting
fragmentation or internal bloodshed. The task was as gruesome in China as it
had been in the United States and in revolutionary Russia, which were almost
torn asunder by civil war. Mter a million deaths, the
Chinese civil war ended with the Communist victory of 1949; the aftershock came
in the guise of the Cultural Revolution, which raged through the country in the
1960s and 1970s. Like Meiji Japan, China opened up to world trade and foreign
investment in the wake of Deng Xiaoping's rehabilitation in 1977. At the same
time, Beijing began shifting from Soviet-style management toward fitful
microeconomic and fiscal reform. Its highlights were the privatization of
agriculture, the partial liberalization of manufacturing, and a tax reform that
allowed (more or less) private enterprises to compete on a more equal footing
with the state-run sectors. Unsurprisingly, these moves soon triggered
stupendous economic growth.
Taking off in the
1990s, the Chinese economy has grown at an annual average of 7 percent, while
growth in the industrial world was stuck in the 2 percent range (with the
United States growing faster, and Europe and Japan more slowly). Chinese energy
produc acquire, you cannot. Not so nationalism, a
bottomless well that will never run dry. All can drink from it without clashing
over who gets what and how much-there is more than enough for all. Even better,
as they gulp down the intoxicating liquid, all persons are all alike. Whether
rich or poor, mighty or meek, they are one another's equals in the community of
fate that is the nation. Nationalism delivers an "us against them"
creed that wraps strife in the vast cloak of a common identity. The promise of
community on the cheap explains how quickly regimes resort to the tool of
busying "giddy minds with foreign quarrels" and how eagerly such a
heady brew is lapped up by a people tortured by deepening rifts of income and
status.
In the United States,
it was "jingoism"; in Germany it was Deutschland über
alles. And so it is in China, whose nationalism comes
with an even sharper edge. If German Weltpolitik and American Manifest Destiny
reflected overconfidence, Chinese nationalism is powered by an overweening
feeling of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers near and far, which
stretches backwards for centuries. Add in the Chinese case, a generous dollop
of Social Darwinism, the conviction that one's race or nation must prevail over
lesser ones. These ideas also animated British and American nationalism in the
late Victorian era, but their bloody consequences at the turn of the twentieth
century were well-nigh modest when compared with Japanese and German
imperialism a few decades later. Their chauvinism was fueled not only by past
grievances-the forced "opening of Japan," the punitive peace of
Versailles-but also by a consuming sense of racial superiority that would
eventually set the world aflame.
Contemporary Chinese
nationalism feeds on a similarly flammable mixture of shameful memories,
cultural, if not racial superiority, and the battle cry of "Never
again!" Add finally another combustible: the waning of communism as the
country's reigning ideology. In 1999, an American China watcher warned,
"Since the Chinese Communist Party is no longer communist, it must be even
more Chinese."27 Fearful of losing its grip, the regime is appealing to
wounded pride while conducting a foreign policy that is at once muscular and
petulant. Slights, even inadvertent ones like the American bombing of the
Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, are pumped up into mortal insults,
followed by frenzied demonstrations against the embassies of the enemy du jour.
By wrapping itself in the flag, the regime dons a sturdy armor that defies
dissent. The intimidating message is: Whosoever criticizes the Party, betrays
the nation.
Is it just a
"defensive nationalism," as other observers have claimed?28 If it is,
the "defensive perimeter" of Chinese grand strategy is drawn with
ever bolder strokes. China not only threatens war over Taiwanese "secessionism";
it also lays claim to territories around Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
At a minimum, Beijing's signal to Washington is "Roll over, America; the
Pacific from here to Midway is our lake." At a maximum, the best defense
is hegemony, which is the oldest tale in the history of the world. From the
Athenian empire to the tsarist empire, it was always defensive necessity that
drove expansion. Claiming that he merely wanted to break Habsburg's
encirclement of France, Louis XIV spent his whole life trying to conquer the
rest of Europe. Similarly, Napoleon started out intending to safeguard the
revolution against the monarchical powers and ended up at the gates of Moscow.
When Stalin tried to lay his hands on all of Europe after World War II, he similarly
invoked the sacred right of self-defense.
In short, East Asia
contains all the ingredients for a remake of the nineteenth-century European
drama. Though the United States is the paramount power in the Pacific, though
it is allied to regional players like Japan, Thailand, South Korea, and Taiwan,
the contours of a competitive security system, a.k.a. multi polarity, have been
long in the making. The obvious revisionist in this game is China, a nation
forging ahead along all dimensions of power: economic, military, and
diplomatic. It sees itself surrounded by an alliance network woven by the
United States. In the west, it faces the stirring giant of India, in the south
a quietly rearming Japan (with the third-largest surface navy in the world), in
the north a defrocked Russian superpower hankering for reinstatement. Apart
from its territorial claims against lesser neighbors, it seeks to "bring
home" Taiwan, a ward of the United States. (The "ingathering" of
nationals under foreign rule has been a classic obsession-and pretext-of
expansionist powers.) Finally, China faces a nuclear threat from all sides:
globally from the United States, regionally from Russia, India, and Pakistan,
and farther down the road from might-be nuclear powers like Japan and the two Koreas.
All of this hardly makes for a status quo policy.
Will this new drama
of rising powers end in the same way as its nineteenth- and twentieth-century
predecessors-in the devastation of global war? More engaged and less skittish
than Britain's, more generous and less self-serving than Bismarck's solution to
the problem of primacy without supremacy would be a start.
But as we stated on
this website last month when we were just completing the research for this four
part investigation, it appears to be the Pentagon's view that China is
following the Soviet model. The Americans think that the Chinese counter to
U.S. capabilities, like the Soviet counter, will not be to force a naval
battle. Rather, China would use submarines and, particularly, anti-ship missiles
to engage the U.S. Navy. In other words, the Chinese are not interested in
seizing control of the Pacific from the Americans. What they want to do is
force the U.S. fleet out of the Western Pacific by threatening it with ground-
and air-launched missiles that are sufficiently fast and agile to defeat U.S.
fleet defenses.
Such a strategy
presents a huge problem for the United States. The cost of threatening a fleet
is lower than the cost of protecting one. The acquisition of high-speed,
maneuverable missiles would cost less than purchasing defense systems. The cost
of a carrier battle group makes its loss devastating. Therefore, the United
States cannot afford to readily expose the fleet to danger. Thus, given the
central role that control of the seas plays in U.S. grand strategy, the United
States inevitably must interpret the rapid acquisition of anti-ship
technologies as a serious threat to American geopolitical interests.
But why China is
pursuing this strategy? The usual answer has to do with Taiwan, but China has
far more important issues to deal with than Taiwan. Since 1975, China has
become a major trading country. It imports massive amounts of raw materials and
exports huge amounts of manufactured goods, particularly to the United States.
China certainly wants to continue this trade; in fact, it urgently needs to. At
the same time, China is acutely aware that its economy depends on maritime
trade -- and that its maritime trade must pass through waters controlled
entirely by the U.S. Navy.
China, like all
countries, has a nightmare scenario that it guards against. If the United
States' dread is being denied access to the Western Pacific and all that
implies, the Chinese nightmare is an American blockade. The bulk of China's
exports go out through major ports like Hong Kong and Shanghai. From the
Chinese point of view, the Americans are nothing if not predictable. The first
American response to a serious political problem is usually economic sanctions,
and these frequently are enforced by naval interdiction. Given the imbalance of
naval power in the South China Sea (and the East China Sea as well), the United
States could impose a blockade on China at will.
Now, the Chinese
cannot believe that the United States currently is planning such a blockade. At
the same time, the consequences of such a blockade would be so devastating that
China must plan out the counter to it, under the doctrine of hoping for the
best and planning for the worst. Chinese military planners cannot assume that
the United States will always pursue accommodating policies toward Beijing.
Therefore, China must have some means of deterring an American move in this
direction. The U.S. Navy must not be allowed to approach China's shores.
Therefore, Chinese war gamers obviously have decided that engagement at great
distance will provide forces with sufficient space and time to engage an
approaching American fleet.
Simply building this
capability does not mean that Taiwan is threatened with invasion. For an
invasion to take place, the Chinese would need more than a sea-lane denial
strategy. They would need an amphibious capability that could itself cross the
Taiwan Strait, withstanding Taiwanese anti-ship systems. The Chinese are far
from having that system. They could bombard Taiwan with missiles, nuclear and
otherwise. They could attack shipping to and from Taiwan, thereby isolating
her. But China does not appear to be building an amphibious force capable of
landing and supporting the multiple divisions that would be needed to deal with
Taiwan.
In our view, the
Chinese are constructing the force that the Pentagon report describes. But we
are in a classic situation: The steps that China is taking for what it sees as
a defensive contingency must -- again, under the worst-case doctrine -- be seen
by the United States as a threat to a fundamental national interest, control of
the sea. The steps the United States already has taken in maintaining its
control must, under the same doctrine, be viewed by China as holding Chinese
maritime movements hostage. This is not a matter of the need for closer
understanding. Both sides understand the situation perfectly: Regardless of
current intent, intentions change. It is the capability, not the intention,
that must be focused on in the long run.
Therefore, China's
actions and America's interpretation of those actions must be taken extremely
seriously over the long run. The United States is capable of threatening
fundamental Chinese interests, and China is developing the capability to
threaten fundamental American interests. Whatever the subjective intention of
either side at this moment is immaterial. The intentions ten years from now are
unpredictable.
As the Pentagon
report also notes, China is turning to the Russians for technology. The Russian
military might have decayed, but its weapons systems remain top-notch. The
Chinese are acquiring Russian missile and aircraft technology, and they want
more. The Russians, looking for every opportunity to challenge the United
States, are supplying it. Now, the Chinese do not want to take this arrangement
to the point that China's trade relations with the United States would be
threatened, but at the same time, trade is trade and national security is
national security. China is walking a fine line in challenging the United
States, but it feels it will be able to pull it off -- and so far it has been
right.
The United States is now
back to where it was before the 9/11 attacks. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
came into office with two views. The first was that China was the major
challenge to the United States. The second was that the development of
high-tech weaponry was essential to the United States. With this report, the
opening views of the administration are turning into the closing views. China
is again emerging as the primary challenge; the only solution to the Chinese
challenge is in technology.
It should be added
that the key to this competition will be space. For the Chinese, the challenge
will not be solely in hitting targets at long range, but in seeing them. For
that, space-based systems are essential. For the United States, the ability to
see Chinese launch facilities is essential to suppressing fire, and space-based
systems provide that ability. The control of the sea will involve agile
missiles and space-based systems. China's moves into space follow logically
from their strategic position. The protection of space-based systems from
attack will be essential to both sides.
There is an old saw
that generals prepare for the last war. The old saw is frequently true. There
is a belief that the future of war is asymmetric warfare, terrorism and
counterinsurgency. The Chinese challenge in the Pacific dwarfs the remote odds
that an Islamic, land-based empire could pose a threat to U.S. interests. China
cannot be dealt with through asymmetric warfare. The Pentagon is saying that
the emerging threat is from a peer -- a nuclear power challenging U.S. command
of the sea.
Each side is
defensive at the moment. Each side sees a long-term possibility of a threat.
Each side is moving to deflect that threat. This is the moment at which
conflicts are incubated.
Sociology of the New Nationalism in China Today P.2: Six Questions, more Answers
Sociology of the New Nationalism in China Today P.2: It's a Conspiracy Theory.
Sociology of the New Nationalism in China Today P.3: The Chinese Dilemma.
Sociology of the New Nationalism in China Today P.4: "Foreign Powers".
Sociology of the New Nationalism in China Today P.5: Tradition.
Sociology of the New Nationalism in China Today P.6: New Propaganda.
Sociology of the New Nationalism in China Today P.7: Final Analysis.
Sociology of the New Nationalism in China Today P.8: So what next.
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