How talk of a clash of civilisations with China serves America’s (and the West's) purpose

  

Vasilis Trigkas is an Onassis Scholar and research fellow in the Belt & Road Strategy Centre at Tsinghua University

 During my early graduate years at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, a Chinese professor castigated America as having the memory of a goldfish which, consequently, handicapped its strategic community with historic myopia. The professor argued that Chinese strategists, drawing on five millennia of civilisational continuity, see international politics in the longue durée., or long term.

An astute American student objected, arguing that the US, as the natural heir to Greece and Rome, also enjoys a multi-millennial history. He insisted that walking down Washington DC’s National Mall and reading the Federalist papers would provide sufficient evidence to back his thesis. Seemingly, two civilisations clashed in the classroom.

Steve Bannon, the leader of the US alt-right, has long seconded the new clash-of-civilisations approach and taken it to new strategic heights. When in the White House, he held study sessions where the administration’s senior officers discussed Graham Allison’s book on the Thucydides trap, which argued for the inevitability of war between China and America.

“We are Athens and the Chinese are Sparta,” Bannon often declared, adding that the US would have to compete with a civilisation which holds very different values than its own and has an equally competitive strategic culture, as evidenced in classics like Sun Tze’s The Art of War, where the acme of strategy is to win without fighting.

Bannon’s view has found strong support in the State Department, with its director of policy planning, Dr Kiron Skinner, recently declaring that the US must prepare for an unprecedented clash of civilisations with China. “This is a fight with a really different civilisation and a different ideology and the United States hasn't had that before,” she said.

Civilisational fault lines are, however, porous and strategically elastic and have often been arbitrarily defined in such a way as to mobilise domestic support against a rising geopolitical rival.

When the Spartans declared war against Athens, they proclaimed that they did so to liberate the Greeks from Athenian oppression, and in the process of fighting the Athenians, the Spartans willingly and without a second thought allied with a foreign civilisation and arch-enemy of the Greeks: the Achaemenid Persians. Eventually, when the Spartans defeated Athens, they just replaced Athenian imperialism with their own extractive rule.

Less than a century after the Peloponnesian war, Demosthenes, antiquity’s most celebrated orator, issued his philippics in the Athenian agora, trying to mobilise the Athenians against the rise of Philip of Macedon. “Do not allow the barbaric Kingdom of Macedonia to hegemonise the Greeks,” he declared in oratorical perfection celebrated to this day, strategically neglecting that the Macedonians spoke Greek, worshipped Greek gods, bore Greek names, and participated in the Greeks-only Olympic games.

Fast forward to AD1536, and the king of France, Francis I, allied with the Ottoman sultan Suleiman I to fight the Italians, France’s fellow Europeans. Shared culture – even shared Catholicism – did not dislodge the European warring states’ geopolitical priorities. The Franco-Ottoman alliance shook European intellectuals to their core. Swiss diplomat and historian Carl Jacob Burckhardt famously called it "the sacrilegious union of the lily and the crescent”.

Caught in the Mediterranean’s new geopolitical balance was Crete, the source of the Minoan civilisation. The Cretan heirs to Europe’s first advanced civilisation, going back to the third millennium BC, were eventually annexed by the Ottomans and remained under Ottoman domination for 300 years.

From classical antiquity to modernity, definitions about what constitutes a civilisation are strategically elastic, and civilisational unity has often been subordinated in nation-states’ relentless pursuit of security. The clash-of-civilisations thesis established in Harvard University’s Samuel Huntington’s seminal book has indeed become a popular catchphrase, but lacks scientific attestation.

The ongoing effort in the US State Department to issue a new “Letter X” and frame Sino-US rivalry as a clash of civilisations should be seen not as a scientific retort but, rather, as an effort to mobilise US domestic support and most importantly unify the Occident at a time of intensifying hegemonic competition between Washington and Beijing. It is not a Huntington’s world; it’s Mearsheimer’s.

Dr Skinner’s argument that Russia is part of the “West” – a case which Huntington clearly dismissed in his book – is hence not surprising, given the realpolitik imperative of a reverse Nixon; that is, of a Washington-Moscow axis to contain China. Definitions about the boundaries of a civilisation are thus morphed at the will of shrewd strategists and easily manipulated for other means.

In the Indo-Pacific region, for instance, Japan and India are part of the American security system, the civilisational basis for for their inclusion in America’s alliance deriving from their shared democratic polity. In the case of a strategic overture to authoritarian Russia, civilisational amity could be based on shared traits in literature, fine arts and religion.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe meets US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in April. Japan and India are part of the American security system in the Indo-Pacific region, the civilisational basis for their inclusion in America’s alliance deriving from their shared democratic polity.

China is also playing the civilisational geopolitical game. While it rebukes US efforts to divide the world based on civilisational fault lines or race, it is using its own racial definition of “Chineseness” to attract ethnic Chinese across the globe and promote the Chinese Communist Party’s goals, as evidenced in the campaigns spearheaded by the United Front.

This week, the Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos will be the only European head of state invited to address the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilisations in Beijing, organised under the personal aegis of Chinese President Xi Jinping. As Greece’s classical texts have repeatedly incubated humanistic renaissance and scientific enlightenment in the West, Pavlopoulos will have a prime opportunity to frame the debate about what constitutes a civilisation, drawing on the original contributions of Hellenism: the West’s cradle.

Huntington’s pseudo-theory had expelled Greece from the West. Pavlopoulos – a proven intellectual, and one of Europe’s most renowned legal theorists – can reassert Greece’s Western identity, and in the spirit of cosmopolitanism speak to Asians as a cultural interpreter of the Occident.

To be sure, however inspiring and symbolically relevant, a speech will not suffice to neutralise the structural conditions that urge systemic rivals into a cutthroat Mearsheimerian competition.

However, it can at least provide a lucid framework for a strategic discussion about the common origin and ultimate destiny of human civilisation beyond the dangerous rhetoric of a conflict of civilisations. Most importantly, it could stress the long-held belief in Hellenism that culture is not based on nature but on nurture; not on genes but on ethics.