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People must open their eyes to the right path

Iranian college students' democratic demonstrations have lasted over a week in Tehran. After the 1979 Iranian Revolu-tion, the late supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini formed a religious government in accordance with the Koran. He strongly rejected Western culture and killed those who held views different from his own. Today, those youngsters' fight against the Islamic regime seems somewhat abrupt. As we admire their bravery, the movement also leads us to think: When will the tide of democracy advance to all the tyrannical areas of the world? Will this really happen someday?

The Cold War confrontation between the communist and capitalist camps is over. American author Francis Fukuyama's book The End of History and The Last Man, predicted that confrontation between different cultures will no longer exist. According to Fukuyama, the lifestyle of Western democracy and capitalism will be unstoppable, and is likely to eventually be accepted by all nations.

On the other hand, the American academic Samuel Hunting-ton, in The Clash of Civiliza-tions and the Remaking of World Order, said that the world will never evolve into a single civilization. "Social identity will be increasingly important in the future and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations ... The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another," he said.

The Sept. 11 attacks were seen by many as disproving Fukuyama's prediction. Some even mocked him by calling the incident the end of "the end of history."

Apart from an Islamic civilization that constantly confronts the West, Singapore's promotion of "Asian values" is also a reason for East Asian countries to walk their own way and compete with the West -- while they simultaneously pursue free-market wealth and refuse political liberalization.

In response to such criticism, Fukuyama pointed out in an article in the Wall Street Journal that the Islamic world's anger over the West is in fact irrelevant to the difficulty of cultural integration. Rather, it's a result of the rage caused by the prosperity and arrogance of the West and the decline and adversity of the Islamic world that had a glorious history in the past. Fukuyama, however, underestimated the complexity of the issue.

Various contradictions do exist between Western culture and other countries. But the source of conflict is not some cultural factors that are absolutely incompatible with Western democracy. The real problem is bullying imperialism. But it's extremely difficult to resolve the consequences of such unequal relations. Besides, if the strong continues to bully the weak and never gives up dominating others, we can never dismiss the sadness in a thousand years and world peace will never be achieved.

Fukuyama is too naive. The confrontation between communism and capitalism in the past should never be interpreted merely as a cultural conflict, because it was in fact a conflict of a higher class bullying the lower one. The situation remains when the oppressors and those being oppressed are replaced by different races or nations. As a result, those being oppressed can create and expand this sentiment of sorrow to arouse and manipulate their people. So people of those weak countries often bring greater misfortune to themselves.

If we want to avoid future conflicts, apart from praying that those leading powers will have a conscience, people of those weak countries should also open their eyes and take the right path, so as to have a brighter future.

Lin Li is an associate professor in the Graduate Institute of European Studies at Tamkang University.

TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
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