Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies

Analyzing East/West Power Politics in Comparative Cultural Studies

Analyzing East/West Power Politics in Comparative Cultural Studies William H. Thornton HUNTINGTON AND CULTURAL REALISM In the post-Cold War thought of Samuel Huntington, culture has supplanted ideology as the shaping force of global politics (“Erosion” 39). Unlike the postmodern culturalist, who celebrates “difference” as an unequivocal virtue, Huntington’s cultural politics is marked by multipolar and multicivilizational strife (Clash 21). Nevertheless he partakes in the cultural imperative that has become almost synonymous with postmodernism in foreign affairs: international relations, security studies, and international economics (Mazarr 177). Political realists find themselves in a bind, for it was on their watch that culture was strictly marginalized (Lapid 3). Drawing on comparative cultural studies (see Tötösy in this volume), in this paper I explore the place of culture in East/West power politics and I argue to preserve the strategic potency of political realism while putting culture back on Asia’s geopolitical map. This requires that “classical” and “neo-” realism alike be revised in favor of a new “cultural realism”: a post-Cold War melding of geopolitical strategy and geocultural negotiation, or what Joseph Nye has called “hard power” and “soft power” (181). As here employed, the term “cultural realism” carries a double meaning, tied at once to geopolitical and literary/cultural discourses. Its concern with the emic channels of local knowledge owes much to postmodern realism in cultural theory. The politics of postmodern realism—as developed in my Cultural Prosaics: The Second Postmodern Turn and previous studies such as “Cultural Prosaics” and “Cross216 Cultural”—is congruent with Bakhtinian cultural dialogics rather than the epistemological anarchy of deconstructionist or Foucauldian theory (see Thornton Cultural, Chapter Six). The latter school of thought powerfully influenced Edward Said, but could not be sustained where Said turned his attention to the particulars of cultural politics. His Covering Islam, as Bryan Turner points out, is built upon a solidly realist epistemology (6). On its geopolitical side, cultural realism is a manifestation of what Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil call, in their anthology of that title, The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (1996). The term “cultural realism ” has been applied specifically to Chinese cultural politics by Alastair Johnston (1995), who argues that a tradition of realpolitik lies beneath China’s cloak of Confucian-Mencian moderation. This inclines China to be much faster than most states to use force in territorial disputes. Johnston considers this cultural proclivity to be heightened by improvements in China’s military capabilities . Here I broaden the application of “cultural realism” to the whole question of East/West geopolitics, qualifying rather than replacing the standard realist concern with balance of power relations. Johnston’s insights, for example , lend cultural depth to the realist admonitions of Bernstein and Munro (1997) concerning China’s destabilizing impact on the current Asian balance of power. Globalists tend to overlook the inertia of the bureaucratic and authoritarian tradition that traces to the Qin dynasty, and the isolationism that traces to the Ming (builders of the Great Wall). In this study, however, cultural realism is equally concerned with traditional and emerging relations between political cultures, e.g., the Chinese and the Vietnamese. It is thus the perfect medium for “soft power” analysis. This “soft” realism offers a timely corrective to the cultural tunnel vision of both globalism and classical realism. The latter, according to Hans Morgenthau , has been distinguished by the subordination of all factors that lie outside a rational calculation of “interest defined in terms of power” (Morgenthau 5). This is supposed to render politics “autonomous” by purging realism of “irrational” elements such as religion and moral valuations. “Neo-” or “structural ” realism, as developed by Kenneth Waltz (1979), begins with that same purgation but moves farther toward what is considered a scientific geopolitics, one in which the basic balancing act of realism operates systemically and without any necessary conscious intent (see Sheehan 194; Forde 142). Francis Fukuyama denigrates realism for treating: Analyzing East/West Power Politics in Comparative Cultural Studies 217 nation-states like billiard balls, whose internal contents, hidden by opaque shells, are irrelevant in predicting their behavior. . . . International politics, then, is not about the interaction of complex and historically developing human societies, nor are wars about clashes of values. . . . [Nonetheless the] earlier generation of realists like Morgenthau, Kennan, Niebuhr, and Kissinger allowed some consideration of the internal character of states to enter into their analyses , and...