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If you were Slobodan Milosevic, would you turn yourself over to the United Nations war crimes tribunal?
Do you think you'd get a fair trial?
Is there any chance you would be acquitted?
My purpose in posing these questions is not to defend the odious Yugoslav president. The question is, how genuinely international are the world bodies we are forming, such as the tribunal investigating war crimes in Yugoslavia and its former states? Is there any chance this tribunal would indict the U.S. president for bombing power plants in Serbia, an act that could leave Serbs freezing in the dark this winter?
No doubt the rules say that aerial bombing isn't a war crime, while ethnic cleansing is, so the U.S. is off the hook. But let's be honest: No matter what they did, no American is ever going to stand before an international war crimes tribunal.
And remember, what we see as ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the Serbs saw as suppression of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a terrorist group set to break up their country. Through Serb or Russian eyes the war crimes charges probably look like victor's justice, and the UN like a tool of the U.S.
Such different perspectives is the theme of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, written by Harvard University political scientist Samuel Huntington.
He says many international bodies that a Canadian would see as upholding universal values are, in fact, upholding American-European values. To the Chinese or Saudis, an insistence on respect for human rights and individual liberty may be seen as cultural imperialism.
The International Monetary Fund's insistence that countries around the world run their economies on an open market system is perhaps the best example. Is the IMF imposing universal values, or is it a form of economic imperialism?
Take an even newer international body, the World Trade Organization.
The WTO has just ordered the Europeans to start accepting hormone-treated North American beef, even though many Europeans object to such meat. The Europeans will probably comply, since they're part of a culture that believes in free trade. But at some point, some country is going to say, 'to heck with the WTO.'
Mr. Huntington doesn't deny that the world is rapidly becoming more interconnected, and a lot of world bodies are laying down global rules. What he denies is that this system is making the world a safer or cozier place, and that the rules -- free trade, open markets, human rights, war crimes prosecution -- are universal values. They are Western values.
And being Westerners, we see them as things all people should believe in, but they may not, says Mr. Huntington. And the power of the West to impose these values on the rest of the world, he says, is gradually fading.
We think of the UN as being a noble disinterested body that can act on behalf of the whole of humanity. Yet that is not how it appears to many from non-Western countries, given the over-representation of the West on the Security Council.
The Gulf War against Iraq was cloaked in a UN resolution, but was really an American military action. For people in Islamic countries, that war was proof that the UN does America's bidding, not the world's.
Mr. Huntington predicts that the world will be interconnected by trade and technology, but permanently divided into civilizations with different cultures. The dominant civilizations he lists are: Chinese (including Vietnam, Korea, etc.), Japanese, Hindu (India), Islamic, Orthodox (Russia and other Slavic states), African, Western, and Latin American (an offshoot of Western civilization).
The author argues that these civilizations are permanent entities that all the IMFs and American movies and Internet sites in the world won't fundamentally change. People will always see the world through the prism of their particular culture, and its value system. All we can do is try to respect each other's ways of doing things, and get along as well as is possible.
It's a challenging theory with a lot of truth to it. Many Canadians think the world should model itself on us and adopt our values. Many of us don't want to consider how Russians see the Yugoslav bombing, or how the Middle East views the sanctions against Iraq.
But there are universal values, more than Mr. Huntington acknowledges. Asians may prefer a more orderly Singapore-style country than we do; followers of Islam may expect government and religion to be closely allied. But all people want security from arbitrary arrest, schools for their kids and food on the table. They want rulers who aren't brutal or corrupt.
While feminism is a Western concept, the desire of women for greater control over their lives is universal. Give women the chance to have a little independence, be they in Bangladesh or Mali or Bolivia, and miracles happen. This is not just my Western bias speaking:It's true.
The challenge is to craft global institutions that promote genuinely universal values while avoiding slipping into cultural imperialism or kowtowing too much to the Western nations that fund them. As many non-Westerners will tell us, we haven't got it right yet.