|
|
| |
US-CHINA: QUEST FOR
PEACE
Part 1: Two nations, a world
apart
By Henry C K Liu
The
United States, the world's sole remaining superpower, is
facing the reality of the limits of power, both military
and economic, in its unilateral pursuit of global
geopolitical objectives.
The US needs to
recognize that it cannot win its "war on terrorism" with
military force alone, however overwhelming. While the
notion of preemptive defense can serve as a convenient
pretext for outright aggression, a widening gap between
the enormity of US power and the legitimacy of its use
erodes support for US policies even by its allies. This
gap acts to stimulate rising resistance by asymmetrical
warfare of which terrorism is a central component.
The US needs to re-examine the moral
prerequisite of its power. Unhappy experience with the
war on poverty and the war on drugs should alert US
policymakers to understand that to win the war on
terrorism, the root causes of terrorism, the
institutionalized socioeconomic inequities that lead to
widespread rage fanned by hopelessness among the
oppressed, must first be eliminated. Under current
circumstances, conditions in East Asia have the
potential of providing a model for a new and equitable
economic order for the rest of the world.
World
peace in the 21st century depends on long-range
accommodation between the US and China, because US-China
relations are the fulcrum for enduring peace in East
Asia, a region with potential for enormous growth or, if
improperly handled, for world-shattering destructive
conflict. A stable East Asia contributes fundamentally
to the prospect of world peace based on this new
equitable world order.
The United States and
China, the two dominant players in East Asia, are both
blessed with structural strengths and invincible
resolves that manifest in national pride justified by
solid achievements. China, as a rising power after
almost two centuries of continuous decline, has finally
repositioned itself within reach of fulfilling its aim
of restoring its four-millennia-old historical destiny
as a great civilization. The US in two short centuries
has become a science and technology powerhouse that has
produced the largest share of the world's modern
scientists while China is a fountainhead of ancient
philosophy that remains relevant after two millennia.
Science and technology have turned the US into an
economic and military superpower. Yet the largest number
of scientists in the world under 30 years of age now
live and work in China, and Chinese students are the
largest ethnic group in graduate schools in the United
States.
Still, China, drawing on Chinese
philosophical underpinning, has managed to survive the
unprecedented onslaught of a century of Western
imperialism backed by superior technology. Mao Zedong, a
radical Marxist-Leninist, succeeded in ridding China of
Western imperialism mainly because of his deep
understanding of Chinese history and philosophy. Despite
the fact that the US can boast having more scholars on
Chinese studies than any other nation outside of China,
the thought-control effects of the McCarthy era have yet
to subside fully after five decades, making an objective
understanding of China elusive to most US scholars.
China, on the other hand, suffers from its share of
naive infatuation with American modernity without full
understanding. The result is bilateral amity for the
wrong reasons and bilateral hostility.
The two
nations are fundamentally different. Yet national
differences need not be the cause of irreconcilable
conflict if nations treat their differences with mutual
respect and symbiotic tolerance. Throughout history,
wars have been fought among nations of similar political
ideology as much as between nations of different
ideologies. Wars between monarchies and wars of
inter-capitalist rivalry are two obvious examples.
The United States is a relatively young nation
among modern-day great powers, while China is the oldest
continuous nation in history. The US is a new society
founded on individualism, while China is an old
civilization based on timeless social hierarchy. Chinese
convention in addressing mail puts the country first,
province next, then county, then city, then street, then
house number, and finally the individual recipient. The
US/Western convention is the reverse, putting the
individual recipient first and making the sorting of
mail an irrational undertaking. The US is naturally
modern because it does not have much of a past to
update, while China's long history renders the
acceptance of modernity a conscious and uphill struggle.
China has five times the population of the US and only a
fifth of the United States' cultivatable land. The US is
a two-ocean land, while China is land-locked on its
west. Chinese rivers run west to east, while US rivers
run north to south. The US is a land of immigrants who
sought freedom and opportunity in a new world, while
China is a land of emigrants with sizable overseas
ethnic-Chinese communities all over the world; these
overseas Chinese communities are more traditional than
their kinfolk who stayed in China. The US aims to be a
melting pot of diverse immigrant cultures, while China
has 55 officially recognized national minorities living
on 60 percent of its land, whose separate ethnic
identities are protected from assimilation by law and
policy. In addition to the majority ethnic Han
nationality, China has a combined minorities population
of more than 100 million among its total population of
1.3 billion. In the US, a tradition of power coming from
wealth has emerged and is generally condoned, whereas
Chinese culture considers natural the tradition of
wealth coming from power.
Throughout much of its
history, the United States has regarded China with a
sense of racist superiority based on ignorance. For the
past half-century, the US has conducted its relations
with China on the assumption that a self-proclaimed
democratic nation cannot develop lasting harmonious
relations with a communist state except as an
accommodating geopolitical ploy against another
communist state. With the end of the Cold War and the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, China re-emerged
naturally to the top of the United States' enemy list
due to unspoken US racial phobia and paranoia, until the
events of September 11, 2001, which launched the US "war
on terrorism" with an alternative enemy in the form of
extremist Islamic fundamentalism. US policy of moral
imperative on China had been part of its global crusade
to spread democracy. Such an approach in foreign policy
is both fraudulent and dangerous.
The US sees
itself as having been founded on principles of
democracy. It enshrines in its foreign policy the aim of
promoting democratic values globally and has justified
going to war many times in recent decades in the name of
defending democracy around the world. Yet the word
"democracy" cannot be found in the US constitution. In
Article IV, Section 4 of the constitution is the
following clause: "The United States shall guarantee to
every State in this Union a Republican Form of
Government." For a "republican form of government" to
exist in any of the United States, the Union must first
exist as a confederacy and not a national democracy. In
the US constitutional regime, the guarantee clause of "a
republican form of government" to each state prevents
the federal government, which is a creature of the
constitution, from extending or construing its
constitutional rights and powers to invade the areas
that are to remain under the sovereignty of the
individual Free States.
The clause means to
protect the sovereignty of each Free State within the
Union. It aims to protect the equal right of all
citizens within a state to determine the way they will
manage their lives and property as they pursued their
happiness. The founders of the nation believed that this
equal right was "an inalienable right" endowed by the
Creator. This belief was made self-evident by the
absence of extreme economic inequalities in the new
American society. The founders also believed that this
equal right belonged to all citizens of individual
states, except slaves. It was commonly referred to by
the founders as a citizen's "Right of Conscience" or
"Liberty of Conscience". Thus economic equality was the
foundation of political democracy in America.
In
1776, the people of the 13 Colonies fought and won from
the British crown the right to exist in relative
economic equality as a Union of Free States. Their
victory also meant that the citizens of each of the Free
States, which were the inheritors of the 13 Colonies,
had the right to enjoy their "Rights of Conscience"
without interference from a super-government.
The first central government in the new nation
was established by the Articles of Confederation, which
after being severely amended to strengthen the powers of
the individual states was adopted by the Continental
Congress in 1777. The Articles reflected a popular
distrust of central authority. Aside from foreign policy
and defense, the Confederation was given no authority to
levy taxes or to regulate interstate trade. Its revenue
would come from requisitions on the states. No provision
was provided for executive and judiciary branches of
federal government. All powers were vested in Congress,
with each of the 13 states allotted one vote, regardless
of size, and nine votes out of 13 were needed for all
decisions. The Articles could not be amended without the
consent of all 13 states.
Historians sympathetic
to a strong government portray the Confederation era,
which lasted from 1781 to 1789, as an unhappy period of
economic depression and internal conflict without
constructive political leadership. A small but
influential group led by Alexander Hamilton and James
Madison and supported by merchants and large landowners,
many of whom were war profiteers, began working for an
effective federal government.
The Federal
Convention had its first meeting in Philadelphia on May
25, 1787, to draft a new US constitution, with delegates
from all 13 states except Rhode Island, most of whom
belonged to wealthy and conservative classes elected by
the state legislatures and not directly by the people.
The Convention wanted to create a central government
strong enough to maintain national security, pay
national debts, promote economic development and protect
US interests abroad. Conceding to popular sentiment in
favor of state rights, the Convention aimed to reserve
local sovereignty for the states and grant national
sovereignty to the federal government to form a workable
federal system.
Being conservatives of privilege
and education, the delegates wanted to limit outright
majority rule, in the belief that it would endanger
property rights and prevent wise and meritorious
leadership. The prevalent sentiment was a distrust of
democracy. Meeting behind closed doors, and with the
proceedings kept from the public, many spoke their true
feelings. Edmond Randolph of Virginia spoke for the
delegates when he said "the evils under which the United
States labored" were due to "the turbulence and follies
of democracy". Madison declared that the aim was to
"protect the minority of opulence against the majority".
Noting that all political conflicts have an economic
basis, a Marxist view preceding Karl Marx by half a
century, Madison explained the theory on which the
constitution was based as balancing political power
among all economic groups to prevent any one economic
group from acquiring dominant control of government and
then oppressing all others.
The states were
deprived of the right to issue money, in the form of
sovereign credit. A sovereign who cannot issue sovereign
credit is not much of a sovereign. The states were
forced to finance their developmental needs through
debt. With the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve as a
central bank, the issuance of money as sovereign credit
was removed even from the federal government and placed
in the hands of a privately controlled, politically
independent public agency. The federal government was
also placed in the position of having to finance its
deficits through debt, instead of issuing sovereign
credit. In time, the Federal Reserve came to adopt a
monetary policy based mainly on the setting of
short-term interest rates to control money supply, in
essence using permanent structural unemployment as the
main tool to protect the value of money. The states were
also prohibited from passing any law that impaired the
obligation of contracts. The federal power to enforce
contracts became one of the most important items in the
whole constitution, and the sanctity of contracts is the
foundation of the US system, not democracy.
Thomas Jefferson believed that the "Right of
Conscience" clause was the most important clause of the
constitution, not the enforcement of private contracts.
He so stated in a letter to the Methodist Episcopal
Church at New London, Connecticut, dated February 4,
1809: "No provision in our Constitution ought to be
dearer to man than that which protects the rights of
conscience against the power of its public functionaries
..." Jefferson was apprehensive of government policies
that would alter structurally the widespread economic
equality of the new society.
Conditions at the
time of the founding of the nation were such that, with
determination and hard work, everyone could carve out a
decent living from the fertile land abundantly
available, by producing most of the necessities of life.
They needed to sell only a small portion of their
surpluses to pay taxes and to buy gunpowder, salt, metal
and a few luxuries such as tea and coffee and fine
cloth. While some became richer than others, everyone
was financially independent and not dependent on
employment by others for livelihood. This was the
American spirit of freedom and democracy, self-evident
under conditions that have long since ceased to exist.
Increasingly, Americans have been victimized by debt
collection and foreclosure when their income and
earnings potential are reduced by government policy
induced structural changes in the national economy. The
sanctity of private contracts, coupled with government
policies that favor moneyed interests, increasingly
threaten economy democracy and financial freedom in the
name of free markets, which have become more free than
market participants and non-participants. The myth of
American freedom and democracy, however, endures.
When 11 of the 13 original states adopted the US
constitution, the people of nine of those 11 separate
Free States believed that the constitution had been
written in such a way as to protect their right to
continue to practice all of the liberties that they had
won from their colonial master as listed in the founding
principles of the Declaration of Independence. That
protection was based on the principle that any and all
state constitutions in the Confederation were to be seen
only as rules for the elected state leaders, not laws
against the people. The US constitution was therefore
also a job description for the elected leaders at the
federal level, limiting them to the prescribed power to
govern the states only in the areas outlined by the US
constitution. The people of nine of the 11 Free States
believed that the US constitution had been worded in
such a way as to build a wall of protection around each
state to protect the internal affairs of that state and
the free people within it from federal intrusion.
Applying this principle also to the state level
meant that all other areas that had not been
specifically assigned to the elected leaders of the
individual states by state constitutions were to remain
with the people of those states without question. They
believed that there was no need for a Bill of Rights
because they had stated in their founding document that
a constitution could exist only as long as it produced a
federal government that supported all the founding
principles of their republic. For in the new
constitution of their republic, the guarantee clause of
"a republican form of government to each state" would
always mean that the federal government was required to
support the fundamental principle that each state was a
Free State within the Confederation as in 1776, with the
right to exist and operate as a free sovereign republic
in all areas not listed in the federal constitution of
the Confederation. The clause "a republican form of
government" is the main clause in the constitution that
prevents the federal government from consolidating the
Free States into one national state. Because of that
clause, the republic will always be seen as a
Confederation of Free States and not as a consolidation
of people into one super-state. The Confederation will
always be known as "The United States of America" and
not the "The United State of America", as noted in
Hamilton's Letter No 84 of The Federalist Papers
and Madison's Speech to Congress.
Nine of
the 13 Free States were convinced that existing
protection was adequate; five ratified the constitution
with the understanding that it should be amended with a
Bill of Rights; two were not convinced at all. To obtain
unity in the Confederation, James Madison had to
compromise his position with the 11 states and introduce
an additional Bill of Rights for additional protection
in order to get the two remaining Free States to join
the confederacy. The elected leaders of the 11 Free
States had failed to convince those of the two remaining
Free States that the guarantee of "a republican form of
government" to each state was enough to protect
individuals and their states from their federal
government.
"The error seems not sufficiently
eradicated that the operations of the mind as well as
the acts of the body are subject to the coercion of the
laws," said Thomas Jefferson. "But our rulers can have
no authority over such natural rights, only as we have
submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never
submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for
them to our God. The legitimate powers of government
extend to such acts as are injurious to others"
(Jefferson Himself, edited by Bernard Mayo, page
81, University Press of Virginia). "And can the
liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have
removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds
of the people that these liberties are of the gift of
God?" (Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, 2:229-30)
God has always been present in US politics even
though the separation of church and state is a founding
principle of the Union. The Pilgrims came to America not
to escape God but to search for freedom to found their
own church. Yet the church, a clerical unit of religion,
is an institutional preemption of the universality of
God. When the First Amendment of the constitution
mandates that Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, it rejects only organized
religion in the form of churches from politics, but not
God.
US democracy is a development of US history
and a unique and peculiar form of government applicable
only to conditions of the New World. Over the span of
two centuries, those conditions have been fundamentally
altered. As the United States has grown stronger, its
citizens have over time surrendered more of the freedom
that their forefathers had cherished, notwithstanding
Americans' self-image as a free people. It is hard for
the US to spread democracy abroad when democracy has
been declining at home since its founding.
For
leaders such as Jefferson and Madison, the aim of
Republicanism was to maintain the ideals of the
independence movement: through popular government, based
on the inalienable rights of man, to protect the
interests of the masses rather than of a privileged
upper class. They believed that the doctrine of "implied
powers" would undermined the constitutional limitation
of federal authority upon which popular liberty
depended. The doctrine of "strict construction" of the
meaning of the wording of the constitution was the
guarantee for freedom.
Alexander Hamilton was
openly unsympathetic to the spirit of democracy.
Hamilton, in his Report on Public Credit of 1790,
recommended that the national debt ($50 million)
inherited from the Confederation be funded at face value
and that the federal government should also assume the
debts of the states ($20 million). The Treasury should
raise enough money through taxation to make regular
interest payments and eventually to pay off the
principal. Such a policy strengthened the federal
government by winning support from all public creditors
and provided the moneyed class with capital for new
enterprises. The public opposed Hamilton's plan because
public debt certificates by then were held mostly by a
small number of speculators who had bought up the debts
from war veterans at heavily discounted rates, by as
much as 80 percent. Hamilton considered this transfer of
wealth from the masses to a select few as justifiable by
the greater good of providing the quick capital
formation needed by the budding economy. Congress voted
in favor of Hamilton's plan, aided by the fact that a
majority of the House members themselves were
speculative holders of public debt certificates.
The proposal to assume state debts was passed by
Congress, with Hamilton striking a deal with Jefferson
to locate on the Potomac rather than further north of
the young nation's new capital, to be named after George
Washington. Hamilton influenced the congressmen from
Pennsylvania to drop their opposition to moving the
capital from Philadelphia to Washington, while Jefferson
influenced the congressmen from Virginia not to oppose
Hamilton's state-debt proposal. The deal held despite
the fact that the debts of the northern states were much
larger than those of the south, thus a federal
assumption would benefit mainly northern businesses,
many of which were financed by Philadelphia banks.
In his Report on Taxation, Hamilton
recommended that the government should raise money
through an excise tax on whiskey, in addition to
tariffs, not for moral or economic reasons, but to
strengthen federal power throughout the back country.
Hamilton viewed federal taxes as a development tool to
force people to participate in the money economy by
making it impossible for them to live merely by
subsistence farming, the foundation of economic
independence.
Hamilton promoted the Bank of the
United States to issue notes that would circulate paper
money as legal tender, to extend government credit to
enterprises to expand the economy. Jefferson opposed the
bank on the grounds that the chartering of it had not
been explicitly authorized by the constitution and the
bank would give excessive power over the national
economy to a small group of private investors at the
expense of the masses. Hamilton nipped economic
democracy in the new nation in the bud, and justified it
as merely allocating sovereign credit to where it would
do the most good for the national economy. Criticizing
the laissez-faire doctrine of Adam Smith, Hamilton
argued that infant industries in a young country needed
protection and that the United States needed to protect
itself from British economic hegemony with protective
tariffs, grants of monopoly rights and direct subsidies
to manufacturing through an industrial policy.
In political theory, Hamilton believed in
government by the wise, the rich and the well-born, and
in aristocratic control as opposed to democracy.
Historians acknowledge the Hamiltonian program as being
primarily responsible for making the United States an
industrial power by favoring the industrial and
financial north over the agricultural south. The
resultant divergence of economic interests expressed
itself in political conflicts that finally erupted in
the Civil War almost a century later, in 1861.
Henry Clay's American System took Hamilton's
program of economic nationalism away from the upper
class elite and offered it to the masses by making the
federal authority a champion of the people, rather than
a captured device of narrow sectional interests. Through
representative democracy advocated by Jefferson, Clay
advocated measures designed to strengthen the young
nation, enhancing its economic independence from foreign
countries with protective tariffs, and promoted national
unity by developing a reciprocal relationship between
agriculture and industry and the establishment of a
nation bank to finance domestic development.
Internationalist shipping interests in New England,
represented in Congress by Daniel Webster, opposed
Clay's program of economic nationalism.
With the
growth of nationalism after the War of 1812, the US
Supreme Court under chief justice John Marshall, a
Hamiltonian with a deep distrust of democracy, gave
legal confirmation to the expansion of federal
authority. In the case of McCulloch vs Maryland
in 1819, the court affirmed Hamilton's "implied power"
theory of the constitution and asserted that the federal
government was fully sovereign within its own sphere and
not merely a creature of the states. The judiciary,
composed of nine men who defied historical facts,
asserted that the United Stated had been created by the
people, not by the states, based primarily on the first
sentence of the constitution, which reads: "We, the
People of the United States, in order to form a more
perfect union ...", notwithstanding that the document
was signed by the states. The court further ruled that
in pursuing any end that was legitimate and
constitutional, the federal government could adopt any
means not explicitly prohibited by the constitution.
Rule by law as interpreted by nine politically appointed
justices has since been the modus operandi of the US
political system, not rule of law.
The current
occupant of the White House owes his tenancy to the
Supreme Court, not to the voters, the majority (by
539,897 votes) of those who actually voted (103,380,929)
did not vote for him, and 48.8 percent of those eligible
to vote did not bother to vote at all. The claim that US
prosperity and power come from democracy and freedom is
not substantiated by historical facts. Having risen to
the status of superpower through central authority and
economic nationalism, the United States now regards
other nations that follow the historical US model,
rather than the myth of American democracy and freedom,
with moralistic hostility.
China, on the other
hand, has always been governed by the concept of a
Mandate of Heaven, based on precepts of primitive
communism organized through a hierarchical social order
and a central political authority. The Chinese nation
was not founded on any written constitution drafted by a
few individuals, however enlightened. Freedom is not an
indigenous social or political concept in traditional
Chinese culture. While local autonomy and tolerance for
indigenous customs have always been the modus operandi
in Chinese government structure, the concept of "free
states" is alien to China's political culture, as is the
concept of free individualism in Chinese social
philosophy. Confucianism sees as its main function the
curbing of runaway individualism and the prevention of
atrophy in social hierarchy.
The economic
miracle of the so-called Asian Tigers of the 1990, which
ended with the 1997 Asian financial crisis engineered
from outside the region, was built not on Western-style
democracy, but on revitalized Confucianism. And the
miracle was nearly destroyed by Western free-market
fundamentalism. China, like other developing economies,
needs a Hamiltonian program of central authority and
economic nationalism to resist US hegemony just as the
young US nation did to resist British hegemony.
Societies express freedom in different
historical and social contexts. It is when freedom is
curtailed below the level of societal expectation that
people feel deprived of freedom. The image Americans
hold of themselves as being more free than other people
is merely collective narcissism. In reality, they are
merely more free in their own peculiar ways. Many
Americans, for example, have been conditioned to view
freedom from want as not part of their natural right
even though the means of individual economic
self-sufficiency have been systematically taken away
from them by corporate capitalism since the nation's
founding. Today, US workers become unemployed not
because they are freeloaders but because management
preserves profits through massive layoffs that are
rationalized as improved productivity. The high return
on investments held in their own retirement accounts are
driving workers into unemployment. A sound economic
model would have improved productivity translated into
economic growth with more demand for workers rather than
increased unemployment.
In China, the issue of
political freedom did not occupy a high place in any
political debate prior to the influx of Western cultural
hegemony. In Chinese culture, individual freedom is
regarded as a form of antisocial attitude and democracy
as a form of mob rule. No Chinese dynasty was ever
founded on freedom and democracy; all were founded on
order, stability, benevolence and tolerance. Governments
fell not from failing to receive a majority of votes,
but from their failure to fulfill the Mandate of Heaven,
which is linked to people's right of freedom from want.
In a society of social hierarchy, people are not
conditioned to blame themselves for their economic
failings; they rightly blame ineffective government and
the unjust socio-political system. In Chinese political
culture, massive unemployment cannot be explained away
as structurally inevitable by economic rationalization,
let alone the claim that it is necessary to combat
inflation to reserve the value of money.
The
Nationalist Revolution of 1911 led by Sun Yatsen, a
Chinese-American, a medical doctor and a Christian,
imported Abraham Lincoln's rhetorical "of the people, by
the people, for the people" to Chinese revolutionary
politics with the same naivete as his campaign against
Buddhist superstition through Christian fanaticism, with
the approving support of American missionaries. The
revolution failed because it offered a solution that was
irrelevant to Chinese historical conditions. It fell to
Mao Zedong, who understood that the fate of the Chinese
nation was inseparable from the welfare of the Chinese
peasants, to save China from Western oppression.
The current revival of the US crusade of making
the world safe for freedom and democracy in its own
image is a dangerous delusion of grandeur. Like all
crusades in the past, this one will also cause great
destruction and misery.
The historical Crusades
were a long series of military expeditionary campaigns
with a religious pretext sanctioned by the pope that
took place during the 11th through 13th centuries. They
began as Catholic endeavors to capture from the Muslims
holy Jerusalem, which the Christians had never
controlled politically in their entire history, even
during Jesus' triumphant entry into the city almost two
millennia ago. The Crusades developed into extended
territorial wars devoid of Christian morals. Later
Crusades were called against the remaining pagan nations
of Europe such as the Polabians, a member of a Slavic
people formerly dwelling in the basin of the Elbe and on
the Baltic coast of Germany and Lithuania, and against
heresy, as in the Crusade against Bohemia of 1418-37.
The Crusades gave birth to nationalism in Europe
that subsequently plunged the world into the Napoleonic
Wars and the two World Wars of the 20th century. They
allowed the papacy to consolidate its systematic
dominion over the known world. They demoralized the
Crusaders rather than saving the souls of those against
whom they crusaded. They changed Christian Europe more
than the Islamic Middle East. They weakened Christianity
more than Islam. When the Crusades began, feudalism was
the social order in Europe. When the Crusades finally
closed more than two centuries later, feudalism was in
decay throughout Europe, and had largely disappeared
from the most progressive parts of it. The war needs of
the petty knights and great nobles led to the pawn or
sale of their estates, and their prolonged absence gave
previously weak sovereigns a rare opportunity to extend
their authority. And in the adjoining camps of national
armies on Islamic soil, pride of nation became a
destructive force.
European kings gained power
through the Crusades by consolidating the nobles under
them. Towns grew as serfs bought their freedom by
serving in the Crusades and bringing back ill-gained
wealth. Towns were granted charters in the king's
absence or by the king's need for money to support the
wars. Town merchants benefited from increased war
expenditures and loaned money to finance costly
expeditions. The Crusades forged the birth of capitalism
and the increased use of coined money and established a
gold standard in Europe, which plunged the European
economy into prolonged depressions. National taxes, not
just feudal fees, were established.
European
culture was enriched by war contacts with the East. The
cotton paper-making process replaced importing
parchment; the amount of writing increased, laying the
foundation for the Enlightenment. The handkerchief, an
Arab invention, was introduced to Europe. The guitar and
the violin were introduced, and Arabic numerals,
decimals and spherical trigonometry, algebra, sine and
tangent, physics and astronomy, the pendulum, optics and
the telescope all benefited European culture, albeit at
excruciatingly high cost.
George W Bush's new
Crusade may also change the United States more than the
rest of the world. When his new Crusade finally ends,
capitalism, like feudalism of the old Crusades, may well
subside if not disappear from the world, and a new
economic democracy aspired to by the founders of the US
may well be revived.
The Crusades failed in all
three of their geopolitical objectives. The European
Christians failed to win the Holy Land. They also failed
to check the global advance of Islam. The schism between
the East and the West in the Christian world was not
healed by the focus on a common foe. Eastern Orthodox
Christians saw the Crusades as attacks also on them by
the Western Church of Rome, especially after the sack of
Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. Countries of
Central Europe, despite the fact that they also belonged
to Western Christianity, were the most skeptical about
the idea of Crusades. Many cities in Hungary were sacked
by passing Crusader armies. Poland and Hungary were
subjected to conquest from the Teutonic Crusaders.
There is symmetry between crusade and jihad. In
the Islamic world, the term "jihad" has positive
connotations that include a much broader meaning of
general personal and spiritual struggle, while the term
"crusade" has negative connotations. In truth, the
Crusaders committed atrocities not just against Muslims
but also against Jews and even other Christians. For
example, the Fourth Crusade never made it to Palestine,
but instead sacked Constantinople, the capital of the
Christian Byzantine Empire. Many religious relics and
artifacts taken from Constantinople are still in the
hands of Roman Catholics, in the Vatican and elsewhere.
This Crusade served to deepen the hard feelings between
Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Western Christianity.
The Byzantine Empire eventually recovered
Constantinople, but its strength never fully recovered,
and the Byzantine Empire finally fell to the Ottomans in
1453.
The saintly objectives of the Crusades
were transformed into causes of great evil. As a school
of practical religion and morals, the Crusades were no
doubt disastrous for most of the Crusaders. The
campaigns were attended by all the usual demoralizing
influences of war and the long sojourn of armies in an
enemy's country.
The vices of the crusading
camps were a source of deep shame in Europe. Popes
lamented them. Like Robert McNamara, who almost
single-handedly led the United States into a quagmire of
fantasy escalation to win an unwinnable war in Vietnam
and later confessed his errors and regrets in public
long after retirement, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)
exposed the evils of the Crusades long after he preached
in favor of a Second Crusade. At Easter 1146 at Vezelay,
Bernard preached his sermon in front of King Louis VII
of France, who became inspired to take up the cross and
spent the years 1147-49 conducting the Second Crusade.
Many writers have since set forth the fatal mistake of
those who were eager to make a conquest of the earthly
Jerusalem while forgetful of the City of God as
annunciated by Saint Augustine. "Many wended their way
to the holy city, unmindful that our Jerusalem is not
here." So wrote the Englishman Walter Map after
Saladin's victories in 1187.
The schism between
the East and the West was widened by the insolent action
of the popes in establishing Latin patriarchates in the
East and their consent to the establishment of the Latin
empire of Constantinople. The institutional memory of
the indignities heaped upon Greek emperors and
ecclesiastics has not yet faded. Another evil was the
deepening of the contempt and hatred in the minds of the
Mohammedans for the doctrines of Christianity. The
savagery of the Christian soldiers, their unscrupulous
treatment of property, and the bitter rancor in the
crusading camps were a disgraceful spectacle that left a
lasting and bitter image for the peoples of the East.
While the Crusades were still in progress, the objection
was made in Western Europe that they were not followed
by spiritual fruits, but that on the contrary, the
Saracens, who had invaded France in the 8th century and
occupied Sicily from the 9th to the 11th century, were
converted to blasphemy rather than to the faith.
The Crusades gave occasion for the rapid
development of the system of papal indulgences, which
became a dogma of the medieval theologians. The
practice, once begun by Urban II at the very outset of
the movement, was extended further and further until
indulgence for sins was promised not only for the
warrior who took up arms against the Saracens in the
East, but for those who were willing to fight against
Christian heretics in Western Europe. Indulgences became
a part of the very heart of the sacrament of penance,
and did incalculable damage to the moral sense of
Christendom. To this evil was added the exorbitant
taxation levied by the popes and their emissaries.
Matthew of Paris, an English historian and a monk of St
Albans, in his Chronica majora complained of this
extortion for the expenses of the Crusades as a stain
upon that holy cause.
As for the Crusades'
contribution to the development of commerce, the
enterprise of the Italian ports would in time have
developed by normal incentives of Eastern trade and the
natural impulse of marine enterprise even without the
Crusades. The spell of ignorance and narrow prejudice
would have been broken without war, and to the mind of
Western Europe, a new horizon of thought and acquisition
would have opened, and within that horizon would have
lain the institutions and ambitions of modern Western
civilization. The modernity that liberated the West,
which some Western scholars accuse the Muslim world of
lacking, was in no small way detonated by exposure to
Eastern culture. After the lapse of six centuries and
more, the Crusades still have their stirring negative
lessons of wisdom and warning that the Bush team would
do well to examine.
The United States hopes to
see China as a reluctant ally in its crusade against
terrorism, notwithstanding the fact that prior to
September 11, 2001, when terrorism hit US soil on a
devastating scale, the US was covertly sponsoring
anti-China terrorism by separatists. Terrorism is not a
universal problem, notwithstanding claims to that effect
from US neo-conservatives. The terrorism faced by the
two nations is fundamentally different: that against
China is from separatist forces, until recently
sponsored by the US, while that against the US is from
diverse forces opposed to US global hegemony. Since
September 11, the US has hoped to see China as an
important ally in its war on global terrorism, while
China sees the US anti-terrorism campaign as a chance to
improve relations with the US and perhaps moderate
ongoing anti-China postures on the part of the US. Both
nations hope that cooperation against terrorism can
serve as a new strategic framework for US-China
relations.
Yet the legacy of the past has all
but ruled out an objective, realistic US policy toward
China. US policymakers have carried into the 21st
century a legacy of the US-China relationship as an
unequal one between patron and client, in which
moralizing coercion is a necessary part. Good versus
evil remains a vocal theme in US policy on China.
Yet sanitized of past illusion, a symbiotic
relationship between the US and China is not only
possible, but also rational, precisely because the two
nations are different in ways that need not be
threatening to each other. To move on to that track, the
United States needs to stop viewing China through the
eyes of an ideological missionary and deal with China on
its own terms. China will not change its national
character merely to appease US national prejudice, any
more than the US will sacrifice its national interests
to appease China.
There are, however, residual
Cold War issues that continue to lock US-China relations
on an unconstructive path that holds more costs than
benefits for both sides. The most serious of these is
the issue of Taiwan, which has been a de facto US
aggression against Chinese sovereignty for more than
five decades. Without a quick and constructive
resolution of the Taiwan issue, the future of the
US-China relationship cannot lead to any positive
outcome. And quite possibly, it may end in war.
Next: The Taiwan time bomb
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New
York-based Liu Investment Group.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contactcontent@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
