The year 2012 is drawing to its end. Was it a happy or sad year? Will the year 2013 be a happy or sad year? Toward the end of each year major international news media select 10 world news events. The criterion for selection is usually newsworthiness. I have selected five events on the basis of the degree of seriousness and impact on international peace. They are the Arab spring; the Israel-Palestine conflict; the territorial disputes in Northeast Asia and the South China Sea; the leadership changes in the four great powers (the U.S., Russia, China and Japan); and the continued financial crisis in the U.S. and Europe.

Last year the Arab spring started in Tunisia and spread to other parts of the Arab world and has not ended yet. The democratic revolutions in Libya and Egypt have been going through a painful process, while the Syrian civil war is yet to reach its climax and the demand for democracy in Bahrain is gathering the momentum.

The critical question in the Arab crisis is whether the Arab democratic movement will pave the way to Western democracy. Even experts cannot confidently predict the future course of the Arab spring. Islamic civilization is so deeply rooted in the Middle East that Western civilization can hardly penetrate into the Arab world.

To make it worse, within Islam there is almost another civilizational conflict between Shia and Sunni. In addition, these Muslims are divided into numerous tribal and ethnic groups. In a word, Arabs identify themselves with their religious, primordial and national ties simultaneously or sequentially.

Under the circumstances, even the forces of globalization and democratization can hardly affect these primary identities. Moreover, the intimate ties between the U.S. and Israel reinforce Arab identity. As long as the nature of Arab identity persists, the Arab world will remain anti-Western and unstable.

The Palestine-Israel conflict is directly related to Arab identity. No Arab country will abandon its anti-Israeli policy. The conflict between Muslim civilization and Hebrew civilization is severe as that between Muslim civilization and Western civilization. Therefore, it is not surprising that when the military clash flared up again between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, all Arab states sided with Hamas. As far as the Arab world is concerned, the ideological conflicts over the political system within Arab states are less important than civilizational and primordial clashes.

Recently, the territorial disputes between South Korea and Japan over Dokdo Islands on the one hand and between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands on the other have flared up. In the South China Sea a similar territorial dispute has broken out again between China and the Philippines and others. Their innate desire for territorial imperative might have driven them to the conflicts. But their territorial desire is intricately tangled with their historical antagonism.

Nationalism is the foundation stone for all these historical and territorial disputes. Nationalism makes power politics among states inevitable. South Korea and China suspect that Japan is trying to return to its old imperialist design, while Japan suspects that China is beginning to revive its old China-centered world. The Philippines and the other Southeast Asian countries involved in their territorial dispute have the same suspicion toward China.

On the other hand, China insinuates that the U.S. uses these territorial disputes to consolidate its security ties with Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asian countries against China. These instances prove that the balance of power politics among states is a universal rule of conduct in international relations.

All the four great powers claim that they practice democracy but they select their heads of state quite differently. The U.S. and Japan have chosen their leaders according to the Western democratic process, but China has chosen its leader through the ruling communist party and Russia through the “sovereign” democratic process. Putin says that Russia has the Russian democratic system which is based on Russian tradition and needs and different from the Western model. Its basic purpose is to safeguard Russian national sovereignty.

Here we find that there are three types of democracy: Western, communist and hybrid. When the Third World type of democracy is included in the category of democracy, Western democracy can hardly be accepted as a universal value.

Now, the EU and the U.S. are going through an unprecedented financial crisis, and this crisis affects every nation on earth because the international economic order is controlled by the U.S. and other major Western countries. The main cause is that financial capitalism has destroyed the self-adjusting free market mechanism.

The above show that different civilizations, primordial groups, and nation-states persist and that when democracy is not accepted universally and the existing international financial system is not reformed, the above five issues will not be solved.

Peace on earth is difficult to realize.

By Park Sang-seek

Park Sang-seek is a professor of the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University. ― Ed.