THE IDEA OF the West was not first born in Europe and simply spread to other parts of the world. It was partly a product of reflection and rethinking by non-Western reformist intellectuals during the nineteenth century. While we are familiar with the grand theories on the civilization of the West formulated by Montesquieu and other European thinkers, we should recognize that non-Western intellectuals found these theories insufficient and noninclusive and insisted on a more universalist interpretation of the secrets of Europe’s progress. The result, as best seen in the writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Namik Kemal during the 1870s, was an optimist reformist ideology of progress and civilization that refuted any permanent association of universal civilization with climate, Christianity, race, or even imperialism. This global vision of non-Western intellectuals tied their reform projects to a fine formulation of the relationship between a vision of universal civilization and the historical experience of Europe that exhibited the culmination of this universal process of progress. Their vision of a universal West was closely linked with a desire to become equal members of the perceived civilized international society and to benefit from the security and prosperity this globalizing international society promised.
From the 1870s onward, even when Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals formulated critiques of aspects of European and American policies and societies, they began to frame this critique with reference to abstract universal ideals that they thought the intellectuals of the Western world would support. After the modernist rupture in Ottoman and Japanese thought, there was no rejection or critique of the West as an other or threat unworthy of respect. The idea of a universal West could no longer be ignored or rejected, even when European states and the Westernization process were criticized.
Anti-Western visions of world order were born of this non-Western idea of a universal West around the 1870s. The contradictions of the civilizing mission ideology and the crisis in the legitimacy of the imperial world order spawned the alternative visions of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought. Modern anti-Western discourses emerged originally to criticize the imperialist West for violating its own proclaimed standards of civilization. With the era of high imperialism in European history, symbolized by the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 and the subsequent scramble for Africa, non-Western intellectuals observed a dramatic change in the character of international society and its legitimacy structures, perceiving a more aggressive imperial West that did not abide by the standards of civilization. More important, the strengthening of the Christian and white-race identity in Europe led to a new European discourse of civilization, which proclaimed that no matter what reforms Chinese, Muslims, and Japanese implemented, they could never be equal to the Western societies because of the inferiority of their religion or their standing as members of the colored races. Precisely when Ottoman and Japanese elites were asking to universalize the international society by making it inclusive of non-Christian and nonwhite members, the new discourse of European racial and civilizational superiority was utilized to justify a more aggressive imperial world order as well as a more Christian, white, Western-defined notion of progress and modernity.
The contradictions between the Orientalist and racial ideologies of the high age of imperialism and the demands and expectations of non-Western elites for equality, autonomy, and inclusion facilitated a global debate on the characters, merits, and values of multiple civilizations, such as Western, Islamic, Indian, and Chinese. The idea of the existence of multiple world civilizations, with varying capacities and values, was initially proposed by Orientalists and empire apologists in Europe intent on proving the superiority of the West. But non-Western reformists and anti-colonial nationalists soon redefined and reemployed these imperial ideologies of civilization, sometimes with the help of European scholarship, to assert the equality of non-Western civilizations to the ideal Western one. Thus Orientalist categories of knowledge that posited a sharp distinction between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and whites versus the colored races were preserved in the anti-Western critiques of Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals. In the global debates on multiple civilizations, the argument of a standard of civilization never disappeared. Yet it took a new form when Muslims sought to prove that certain seemingly uncivilized aspects of the Islamic civilization were either a result of Western misinterpretation and misrepresentation or a cultural difference that did not violate the essential compatibility between Islam and modern civilization. Similarly, Japanese intellectuals asserted Japan’s equality with the West by emphasizing the legacy, greatness, and values of the Chinese or Asian civilization. In that sense, the literature on civilizations has always been intimately related to the debates on the normative values and power relations of a dynamic but unequal international order.
When the Eurocentric world order in the age of high imperialism experienced a loss of legitimacy, non-Western intellectuals developed two major lines of thinking and critique. On the one hand, both Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals separated the project of modernity from its Western application, thus further universalizing it. There were always different, and competing, projects of refashioning Eurocentric modernity among non-Western intellectuals. It was during this process that both a reactionary anti-Westernism and a naive West imitationism emerged as ideal-typical constructs that never matched the complexity of the process of translation and rethinking of the West in Ottoman Turkey and Japan. None of the Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals truly denied the necessity and inevitability of learning from Western modernity, even though many underlined the insufficiency of the West as a model for every aspect of reform. Similarly, no Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals believed they could completely transform into cloned Westerners in Eastern lands. Within the diversity of Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals, the ideal of locally reinterpreted and negotiated modernity became the mainstream position, first in practice and later on in theory as well.
On the other hand, as the process of refashioning modernity continued, through competing projects, pan-Islamic and pan-Asian intellectuals began to criticize the imperialist West for violating its own standards of civilization. Thus they used the legitimating values of Western hegemony, especially the notion of civilized norms, against the excesses of Western powers in international affairs. Many Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals were able to challenge the Western discourse of the civilizing mission with regard to their own societies, while they could easily mobilize the same discourse either in domestic reforms or in imperial expansion, a self-contradiction that accompanied anti-Western visions of world order. The critique of the imperialist West with reference to the ideals of the Enlightenment West, however, created synergies in the global public sphere that shaped the notion of a shared destiny of non-Western nations around the redefined metageographical categories of Eastern and Western civilization, facilitating identity bonds among Japanese, Chinese, and Muslim West Asian intellectuals.
It is against the background of a worldwide debate on the ideas of race, empire, civilization, progress, and humanity from the 1880s to the 1900s that the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 became a truly global moment, as interpretations of the meaning of the Japanese victory empowered non-Western nationalists and their critique of the Eurocentric world order. By shattering the discourse of the racial and civilizational superiority of the West over the East, and thus the legitimacy of European hegemony, the Russo-Japanese War confirmed that non-Western societies, if they followed the path Japan had taken, could indeed fulfill all the standards of civilization within a very short period of time. In some ways, the Japanese success in modernization proved that the promises of Western modernity were universal and applicable everywhere, irrespective of race, religion, and geography. In that sense, the moment of the Russo-Japanese War was Westernist, and it inspired pro-Western constitutionalist movements in Turkey, Iran, and China. The jubilant excitement of the Asian nationalists over the Japanese achievement was not about creating an alternative to the Western model of modernization. On the contrary, it was aimed at confirming the universality of modernity and the equality of all races in international affairs, a confirmation that contradicted the civilizing mission ideology of the European and American empires. The slogans of the “Asian Awakening,” which was identified with the period from the Russo-Japanese War to the outbreak of WWI in the writings of both Asian nationalists and European observers of Asia, already signaled the impending end of the Eurocentric world order.
The idea of an Asian awakening symbolized by the Russo-Japanese War also strengthened the alternative discourses of civilization formulated by pan-Asianist and pan-Islamic thinkers and contributed to the decolonization process. The example of Japan’s achievement of equality with the Western powers through military victory led to the view that Asian nationalists needed to gather military power through alliances against the Western powers in an international order devoid of moral principles. Intellectually, the Russo-Japanese War allowed nationalist and reformist intellectuals in Asia to resolve the tension between belief in the scientific values of social Darwinism and Spencerian determinism, on the one hand, and the desire to establish the equality of Asia with the West, on the other.
The impact of WWI on alternative visions of world order, especially pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought, thus has to be considered from the standpoint of Asian understanding of the 1904–1914 period as an era of Asia’s revival and awakening. By 1914 Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals had already developed their alternative discourse of civilization, which held that East and West both had value and their synthesis or harmony would result in a higher level of civilization in a Hegelian fashion. In that sense, Asian consciousness of the era as the “Awakening of the East” shaped the political implications of the perception of WWI as the “Decline of the West.” Both pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thinkers believed in a potential East-West synthesis by non-Western nationalism. Gradually, together with the idea of Western decline, the value of the East in the ambiguous yet popular slogan of East-West synthesis increased. It is at this juncture that Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals refined their own notions of race, culture, civilization, nation, and universality, some more sophisticated than European theories in terms of addressing the question of both the indispensability and insufficiency of the European model.
The widespread perception of international relations as a conflict between Crescent and Cross or as an encirclement of the Muslim world by a modern European Crusade played a crucial role in convincing the Ottoman public and the Ottoman political elite finally to endorse pan-Islamic projects as a realist policy option. Disillusioned by the response of European international society to the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 and the Balkan wars of 1912, segments of the Ottoman public-opinion elite depicted a realist pan-Islamism as a last resort of hope for the survival of the Ottoman state and the autonomy of the Muslim world. In fact, frequent critiques of the pro-Western Tanzimat diplomacy in the aftermath of the 1912 Balkan wars indicate the pessimistic mood of the Ottoman elite about the survival of the Ottoman state through appeals to international law and the policy of cooperation with the Western powers. This climate of opinion contributed to the Ottoman government’s decision to enter WWI on the side of Germany against the British, French, and Russian empires, the three empires that had large populations of Muslims under their colonial rule.
The Ottoman government’s utilization of pan-Islamism during WWI should not be seen as a triumph of the utopian and radical ideals of Islamic solidarity among the Western-educated Ottoman decision-making elite. It was rather an indication of the general legitimacy crisis of the world order, which pushed the Ottoman leaders, who came from a tradition of realist assessment of world trends and European diplomacy since the Tanzimat era, to decide that a pan-Islamic challenge to the Eurocentric world order, in alliance with Germany, was the only way to end the Western imperial assault on the Muslim world. The Ottoman government’s turn to pan-Islamism was not a reflection of a Muslim conservative reaction against the West but rather a symbol of the failures of the Eurocentric international society, which had forced an important Muslim-ruled state member of this society to formulate a radical alternative.
A similar estrangement from the West occurred among Japanese intellectuals and elites during WWI, despite the fact that the Japanese government entered the Great War on the side of the British Empire and did not endorse any pan-Asianist project. Pan-Asianist arguments that advocated an end to cooperation with the great powers became influential in Japanese public opinion during WWI especially because of the perception that, as a yellow race, Japan would never be treated equally by its white superpower allies. Moreover, during WWI, pan-Asian thought shifted from defensive culturalism to the assertion of a distinct Asian civilizational identity as an equal alternative to the West. When wartime Japanese pan-Asianists like Ôkawa Shûmei or the Indian pan-Asianist Rabindranath Tagore advocated the revival of Asian values and culture as an essential precondition for the decolonization of Asia and search for equality with the West, they were also relying on an influential current of romantic and pessimistic critiques of Western civilization in Europe and the United States, some representatives of which looked to Asia as a potential source of alternative civilization. In other words, the content of the discourse on the Asian civilization’s alternative nature to the West was shaped partly by self-reflection and self-critiques within the West rather than by a general rejection of Western modernity.
The alternative discourse of civilization perpetuated by pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist thought via a reverse Orientalist notion of a morally superior East and a materialist West was confirmed by the collapse of imperial diplomacy and the civilized image of Europe on the modern battlefields of the war. Thus, on the one hand, WWI strengthened the confidence of Asian intellectuals that they could rely on their moral, spiritual, and religious traditions to create a new global modernity that could save not only Asia but also the decadent and declining European civilization. On the other hand, however, the emergence of two other internationalist alternatives to the imperial world order—the compromised version of Wilsonianism at the League of Nations and the socialist internationalism championed by the Soviet Union—weakened the appeal of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian internationalism for the rising nationalist movements of the 1920s.
Pan-Islamism lost its earlier practical focus when the Turkish parliament in Ankara abolished the institution of the caliphate in 1924. Similarly, pan-Asianist political projects seemed to face a dead end when no one in the government endorsed them and a new generation of nationalist leaders in Asia showed little interest in Japan-centered projects of Asian solidarity.
Two of the main arguments of the pan-Islamic and pan-Asian visions of world orders—namely, their emphasis on the illegitimacy of the imperial order and their vision of Eastern-Asian-Islamic civilization—became a property of the larger intellectual climate of Asia in the decade after the end of WWI. During the 1920s and 1930s, because of the high moral ground of rising nationalist movements, imperialism was already without any credible supporters. Moreover, the interwar-era discourse on Eastern and Western civilizations had become the property of various nationalist movements and was not necessarily anti-Western, as liberal internationalism and a whole array of new religious movements put forth the ideal of harmony among civilizations as their transcendent universal mission. For example, the so-called pro-Western liberal internationalists of Japan made no attempt to deny the importance and reality of racial differences and civilizational boundaries in the international relations of the post-WWI period. Liberals, however, diagnosed the tensions between civilizations and races as a problem to overcome through dialogue in the new international order. Pan-Asianists and pan-Islamists, on the other hand, believed that conflict between the West and Asia was inescapable, a thesis they based on their conviction that the white or Christian powers would never give up their superiority and imperial possessions in Asia through dialogue. In particular, interwar-era Japanese pan-Asianists believed in the inevitable victory of Asian nationalism against the “declining West” and saw an opportunity to defend national interests if Japan took a historical position on the winning side of this conflict, thus accelerating the “retreat of the West” to its own advantage.
The complex history of pan-Asian visions of world order and Japanese imperialism has to be considered within the changing notions of the legitimacy of the evolving world order. Pan-Asianism and the ideas of the Japanese national mission and interest did not seem contradictory before the emergence of Wilsonianism and socialist internationalism. After WWI, the contradiction between Japanese pan-Asianism and the practices of the Japanese Empire became more obvious parallel to the rise of anti-Japanese nationalist resistance in East Asia. During the 1920s, the Asianist political movement in Japan had to clarify its position with regard to Japanese colonial control over other Asian societies that were supposed to become comrades in the struggle against white/Western domination. Their inability to oppose Japan’s own colonialism imperiled Japanese pan-Asianist attempts to establish links with rising nationalist movements, a fact best reflected in the failure of the Nagasaki pan-Asianist conference of 1926.
It would therefore be incorrect to characterize the official pan-Asianism of Japan after 1933 as a triumph of the Asian internationalism of the 1905–1914 period. Instead, its content should be viewed as a reinvention of Asianism in the context of Japan’s post-Manchurian Incident legitimacy crisis. It is in this context that Japan’s pan-Asianist links with non-Chinese Asia, including India, Indonesia, and the larger Muslim world, were supported, revived, and strengthened. The focus on Asianist links with West Asia, whether India or the Muslim world, became one of the ways to get around the obvious contradictions of Japan’s policies in Korea and China. The official pan-Asianism of Japan after 1933 employed the internationalist legacy of Asianism but subverted it to legitimize Japanese imperialism. Imperialism itself had gone out of fashion, and in order to justify Japanese rule in China, other ideologies were needed. Pan-Asianism could claim that Japanese imperialism was fulfilling the longtime expectations of Asian nationalists and divert attention from Japan’s own expansion in China to the memory of Asia’s confrontation with Western expansion and to a general critique of Eurocentrism in history, social theory, and culture. Ironically, the best way for Japan to act as an imperialist power in the changed political and ideological climate of the 1930s was to adopt the language of anti-imperialism. Instead of seeing this as a peculiarity of Japanese imperial style, however, we should remember that all forms of internationalisms, including liberal and socialist ones, are susceptible to such utilization by imperial projects.
Overall, the histories of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist visions of world order show that their anti-Westernism cannot be reduced to a conservative reaction against the liberal and democratic values of the West. Nor, however, can they be classified as automatic responses to Western imperialism. Both of these two opposing assessments have to be modified to accord with the changing imagery of the West in international history. The period from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century witnessed a radical transformation of both the global hegemony of the West and the meaning of Western civilization itself, a transformation that is crucial to understanding the anti-Western aspects of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist thought.
The very fact that pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism developed as challenges to the European imperial expansion in Asia during the last quarter of the nineteenth century is not sufficient to understand its content and legacy. The rejection of the unequal power relations between Europe and Asia required a critique of the ethos of the West’s “civilizing mission.” Opposition to the Eurocentric imperial order through a critique of its legitimizing discourse of civilization created an enduring legacy of anti-Western thought. This defensive form of anti-Westernism, however, which was almost apologetic in its claims of equality between East and West, simultaneously endorsed the universality of Western modernity in its vision of future convergence between Europe and Muslim or non-Muslim Asia. Thus anti-Western visions of world order embodied in pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought still made reference to universal values historically associated with the liberal and humanist traditions of the West, such as national autonomy, cultural diversity, and racial equality.
Anti-Westernism in Asia should also not be seen as a symptom of the Occidentalism virus originating in European romantic thought. Non-Western intellectuals developed several original ways of thinking about the West and its imperialism that later appropriated European romantic thought but could not be reduced to it. For example, it is only from the perspective of the global consciousness of non-Western intellectuals that we can understand why some of pan-Islamists and pan-Asianists were among the most enthusiastic admirers of Woodrow Wilson, despite their rejection of the League of Nations as an instrument for the reaffirmation of Western colonial hegemony. For them, the Wilsonian principles represented a moral critique of imperial power politics. Yet, at the same time, admiration of several representative figures of the Western world such as Wilson persisted alongside an essentializing rhetoric that saw the West as representing power politics devoid of universal ethics.
Several lessons from the history of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist thought can help us understand the recent revival of civilizational identities and contemporary anti-Western discourses. The first warns us of the political repercussions of adopting the myth of homogeneity for any nation or civilization, an assumption that was central to both of these anti-Western visions of world order. The continental cultural geographies of East and West or the Islamic world and the Western world remained rigid, essential units in the internationalist imagination of pan-Asianists and pan-Islamists, though these civilizational categories were initially not their own inventions. Non-Western intellectuals’ achievement in redefining and reemploying the discourse of civilization against Western hegemony in Asia made them very dependent on the epistemology of civilizational thinking.
Second, added to the myth of the homogeneity of Western civilization was the permanent association of the West with both modernity and the international order itself; this assumption, a legacy of the nineteenth-century ideology of Western supremacy, had become ingrained in pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist thought to the extent that all the critiques of the international system and the over-Westernization of global cultures were automatically phrased in terms of an anti-Western rhetoric. For pan-Islamists and pan-Asianists, the West did not just symbolize one culture out of a multitude of diverse global cultures. It also meant the global power of the white race and Christian Europe, an imperial international order, and an aggressive program of cultural change that could undermine the traditions of Asia or the Muslim world. For some non-Western intellectuals, this association engendered the practice of blaming the West for everything that went wrong in either the world system or the domestic social order.
Third, anti-Western critiques of pan-Asianists and pan-Islamists lost their progressive content when their audience became limited exclusively to the Japanese or Muslim public. Until 1914, some of the leading advocates of pan-Asianist and pan-Islamic thought, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Halil Halid, Said Halim Paşa, Sun Yat-sen, and Okakura Tenshin, were hoping to change Western policies toward the East by influencing Western public opinion through their progressive critiques. These non-Western critiques of the West did have some influence on European intellectuals. In fact, during the interwar period, many intellectuals in the West themselves became very critical of the imperial world order and the Westernization of the globe. Thus, when pan-Asianists like Ôkawa Shûmei wrote extensively about European colonialism and U.S. racism during the interwar period, they selectively overlooked the movements for self-reflection within the West. They followed the literature about the Western decline within Europe and the United States very closely but never treated this as an indication of the vibrancy and diversity of intellectuals and groups in the West. Instead, they treated Western critiques of the West as confirmation of a holistic denial of Western civilization.
In general, given the lack of dialogue between Western and Asian intellectual communities, there was little opportunity for constructive and positive effects to arise from the pan-Islamic and pan-Asianists criticism of Western modernity and racism. In the absence of communication between critics and their targets, criticism merely affirms exclusionary loyalty to culture, nation, or immediate community. These problems were not specific to Ottoman or Japanese relations with the West, nor were pan-Islamists and pan-Asianists alone to blame for this state of mutual “dis-communication.” Part of the problem can be located in the inequity that characterized the global public sphere and communication, which would not allow Asian or Muslim objections to Western violations of universal moral standards to reach Western audiences. In the absence of such international communication, all the progressive and humanist content in the non-Western critique of the West, rather than creating a dialogue that could represent a positive force of change, instead rebounded into a justification of nativist agendas.
Since the formative period of modern nationalist thought in the non-Western world occurred during the century extending from the 1860s to the 1960s, when Asian and African nationalists had to revolt against the West in order to fulfill the perceived and desired promises of universal modernity, various forms of the critiques of Western modernity, civilization, and imperialism became engraved into the foundational texts of non-Western nationalist thought. The memory of the imperial-era white race’s injustice to the colored races or the historical memory of the Christian imperial injustice to the Muslim world became part of the narratives of state building and nationalist redemption in Asia. As these nationalist narratives about the imperial domination of the West over the East have been taught to new generations in postcolonial Asia, from Turkey, Egypt, and Iran to India, China, and even Japan, the memory of Western outsiders’ humiliation of the yellow race or Muslims was kept alive throughout the post-colonial period. For example, when the leaders of the newly decolonized African and Asian nations met at the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in 1955, their speeches and statements reflected the continuing relevance of historical memories of colonial-era civilizational identities. Many delegates at the Ban-dung conference advocated the solidarity of non-Western People’s against the political collectivity called the West in a new pan-Arabic and pan-Asian rhetoric. Richard Wright, who attended the conference as the only African American journalist, expressed his astonishment at the speeches, characterizing the ideology of the conference in terms of a “Color Curtain,” which, in his observation, had taken precedence in Asian politics even over the “Iron Curtain” of the cold war.1 In the postcolonial period, the image of an untrustworthy and sinister West continued to exist as a trope in the intellectual histories of Asian societies, despite the fact that the international context that created this image had been radically transformed with the end of the Western empires.
The affirmation of a religious or racial identity, as seen in the emphasis on Islamic, Asian, or Eastern values, in the reverse Orientalist discourse of Eastern versus Western civilizations was both a strategic essentialism against the European discourses of race, Orient, and empire and a legacy of the universalism inherited from the non-Western humanistic traditions of Islam, Confucianism, or Buddhism. These intellectual imaginations contributed immensely to decolonization while becoming an essential part of the foundational texts of modern nationalism in Asia. It is therefore impossible to think of contemporary religious, national, and cultural movements in Asia without taking into account the legacy of the role played by pan-Islamic and pan-Asian discourses of civilization during nationalism’s formative age, namely, the 1880s to the 1930s. In fact, the popularity of the theories of Toynbee and Huntington in the Middle East and East Asia derives from this historical thinking. Furthermore, this embedded legacy of reverse Orientalist narratives is at the heart of the controversies surrounding historical revisionism in Japan. Hayashi Fusao’s claim that Japan’s Greater East Asia War was a response to Western expansion after the Opium Wars and hence should be seen as a stage in a hundred-year Asian war benefits from the widespread acceptance of this East-West conflict narrative.2 Both pan-Islamic and pan-Asian histories show that these narratives of a natural Eastern response to modern Western expansion are products of the 1890s and that the perception of events such as the Opium Wars, the invasion of Algeria, or the Indian Mutiny were different in their own times. In reality, the global image of the West changed several times, once around the 1880s and again at the end of WWI, though anti-Western formulations of the 1890s remained paradigmatic because of this era’s stature as the formative age of nationalist thought.
Postwar moments of denying the legacy of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist pasts by the Turkish and Japanese elite’s also reproduced the implicit Orientalist frameworks and became partly responsible for the revival of revisionism. Modern Turkey’s attempt, in a “Leave the Muslim World” mood, to dissociate itself from the pan-Islamic experience of WWI still relied on an East-West civilizational framework, arguing that the Eastern-Islamic civilization was dead and could not be modern and thus there was no path for Turkey other than trying to become a member of the Western civilization. Similarly, post-WWII Japanese “Leave Asia” arguments, symbolized by the figure of Maruyama Masao, carried assumptions of Asia’s inferiority in comparison to Japan’s progress through Westernization. As Takeuchi Yoshimi has warned, this second “Leave Asia” movement, like the first one symbolized by Fukuzawa Yukichi, was as problematic as expansionist Asianism, because it carried the political implications of the paradigm of the progressive West versus the developing East.
When thinking about the international impact and intellectual contradictions of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian projects in history, there is a need to question the legacy of Orientalism that shaped both the content of these ideologies and our contemporary thinking about them. This book has tried to avoid reproducing the Orientalist dichotomy seen in the source material in two ways. First, I have tried to show the unrecognized parallels between the predominantly Muslim Middle East and non-Muslim East Asia and thus move the discussion away from the question of primordial religious and racial identities and demonstrate that modern Western colonialism and its intellectual justifications were neither a Christian conspiracy against Muslims nor a white-race conspiracy against the yellow race. The idea of a clash between the West and the Muslims or between the white and colored races was, rather, a product of global moments and processes in the age of high imperialism, and there can be a non-Orientalist reading of this history. Second, this book has tried to shed light on the genealogies of anti-Western discourses as well as the civilizational thinking around them by problematizing the strategies and contradictions of Asian intellectuals’ reappropriation of Orientalism. From the 1880s onward, non-Western reformists became equally important in the global circulation of the ideas of East-West civilizational difference because they managed to employ the discourse of civilization for anticolonial and nationalist purposes.
The diagnosis of the problems in the international order that characterizes them as the product of conflicts and clashes among the values of different civilizational identities has survived through the end of the cold war. The overall completion of the decolonization process and opportunities for reconciliation and dialogue among intellectuals of colonized and colonizing nations could have dispelled the paradigms of the Christian West’s injustice to the Muslim world and the humiliation of the colored races by the white race. In fact, there has been a concerted effort on the part of international institutions such as UNESCO to fight against the scientific pretensions and political legacies of racism. Yet, while we do not talk about the clash between the white and colored races anymore, the idea of a continuing conflict between Islam and the West never really disappeared during the cold war and notably reappeared during the 1990s in the context of discussions about a possible “clash of civilizations.” The story of the survival and transformation of civilizational thinking about Islam and the West in the postcolonial period has complex reasons, ranging from the transmission of historical memory to the neocolonial realities of the post-WWII Muslim world, and as such it is a topic that deserves a separate monographic study.
The history of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian visions of world order until the 1940s, however, shows that anti-Westernism often reflected the global legitimacy crisis of the international system rather than a clash of civilizations. Similarly, the earlier period of anti-Westernism teaches us that, in understanding the contemporary roots of anti-Americanism, one should not focus attention only on marginal terrorist groups but listen to the critiques of mainstream Muslim intellectuals with regard to the failures of the international order and U.S. foreign policy. As the anti-Western thinkers of the earlier era emphasized the violation of so-called Western values by the Western powers, contemporary anti-American writings underline the contradiction between American values and American foreign policy. It is also true that there is an element of reverse Orientalism in both the anti-Westernism of the past and the anti-Americanism of today. The continuing reproduction of the polarity between East and West in contemporary critiques of the world system and its global inequalities relies on the legacy of the critique of Eurocentric hegemony by anticolonial nationalism and internationalism in Asia. Yet, beyond the discursive divisions, the response to both imperialism and anti-Western ideologies should rely on affirming shared universal values and strengthening international institutions that can implement global norms, not blaming one of the parties in the imagined civilizational geographies of the East or the West.
Culture and identity will continue to play a role in international relations and the perception of international problems. The idea of a dialogue of civilizations is therefore inspired by a noble goal and could play a role in defining and delimiting legitimate power. Yet the development of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist thought teaches us that the very notion of civilizations in international affairs has a specific history that can be traced back to nineteenth-century globalization, imperialism, and decolonization. Awareness of this history and its legacy should alert us to common causes and shared values that bind our search for peace and equality in the international community despite and beyond the diversity of civilizational and religious identities.