Ian Buruma doesn't believe in the 'clash of civilisations' theory so popular since September 11th. In fact, the 'connoisseur of political mentalities' tells Fintan O'Toole, we are all really the same.
It made sense that Ian Buruma was in Dublin just after the Dutch general election in which a large chunk of the vote went to the followers of an assassinated right-wing populist and just before the Irish one in which the familiar political system was virtually demolished. As the author of several political chronicles, most recently Bad Elements, a portrait of China through its dissidents, he is a connoisseur of political mentalities. What he does perhaps better than anyone else is to see countries and political systems through the eyes of those who identify with them.
"I could never write a book about abstract politics," he says between bites of sandwich in the temporarily deserted haunt of politicians that is Buswell's Hotel opposite Leinster House. "It would bore me and I wouldn't be very good at it. I'm interested in writing about people and seeing the world through the eyes of others." That interest has made him, among other things, the most distinguished interpreter of Asia to Europe and the US.
Though you wouldn't guess from his accent, which is a perfect example of what used to be called BBC English, he grew up in Holland of English and Dutch parentage and is a Dutch citizen. At least some of his interest in the way people define themselves through culture, history and politics comes from that double inheritance.
"To what extent the Dutch background informs my views I don't know, but having two different backgrounds clearly shapes one's views. From the moment one is conscious, one always sees things through two different cultural perspectives, and one is always aware that there are different languages, that people talk about things in different ways, and so forth. This can happen in many different ways, but if you grow up feeling through language, through nursery rhymes and so on, part of two different cultures, you are bound to be influenced by that." Growing up Dutch and English gave him "a fascination" for those intersections between private feelings and public allegiances where politics really happens.
"You start to think what it is that makes people feel they belong to one thing or another, what is it that shapes them? It always fascinated me to see how people see themselves. The very first book I wrote (A Japanese Mirror), which is about Japanese popular culture - heroes and villains in movies - was really look a look at how the Japanese imagine themselves to be in their fantasy world. And by the same token, a book I wrote about how the Japanese and the Germans look at their wartime past (Wages of Guilt) is about the same topic. And my last book, about Chinese dissidents (Bad Elements), is somewhat the same - it's about politics, of course, but also about how people feel about China and Chinese-ness."
His interest in China goes back to student days, but he never wanted to become a Sinologist. The statistics for pig-iron production held no fascination for him, and neither did the interpretation of who was sitting in which place at which Communist Party banquet and what it might say about internal power struggles. He was drawn instead to Japan, going to Tokyo in 1975 as a film student.
"It gave you time to be a dilettante and dabble in things. I dabbled in an enormous number of things - I was in a dance group, I was in a theatre group, I was an assistant to a fashion photographer, I made documentary films - none of it very good, but it's a wonderful way to learn about yourself and what you want to do." Living in Japan until 1981 and then in Hong Kong until the late 1980s, however, did teach him one of the basic principles that underpins all of his work: the notion that people are rather alike.
"The one thing that I learned perhaps more than anything else is that things that look very different and strange are very often to do with language, and if you speak people's language they suddenly start looking very much more like us. The more I lived in Japan, and also in Hong Kong, the less strange people in east Asia seemed to me. So the idea that somehow they showed me a completely different model of living and that that left a permanent mark - I can't claim anything of that sort.
"It's more, I think, that you see through the exotic varnish the closer you get to it. Sure, social systems are different and people have different politics, but that's true inside Europe too. People really are pretty similar."
He is thus deeply sceptical of one of the main models for interpreting the state of the 21st-century world, especially after September 11th: Samuel Huntington's notion that there is a clash of civilisations between Islam and Christendom.
"I'm very much against the thesis of the clash of civilisations, partly because it doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's not at all clear what the different civilisations are that are supposed to be clashing. Huntington, the author of this thesis, somehow puts Latin America in one category and Christendom in another, as though Latin America is not part of Christendom.
"I think it's much too simple an explanation. There are very rare examples in history - maybe they don't exist at all - of people who go to war purely for reasons of culture or religion. Culture and religion are always brought in as ways to mobilise people and whip up emotion and all that, but they are not the reasons wars start. They start because of tyranny or greed or land - the traditional reasons. Differences in civilisation rarely explain a great deal."
Nor does he buy the notion that the world's troubles are mostly fuelled by reactions against globalisation. "There is a homogenising tendency clearly. If you walk through the centre of Paris or Dublin or Barcelona, you see more or less the same shops now.
"Does this make the Irish feel less Irish in a way that they find threatening? This I doubt a bit because I think there are still differences, there always will be. People invent new differences, new variations on the same thing. So I don't see that as a huge threat.
"Also, the countries where these kinds of crises are becoming acute and are leading to violence and political pathology are the ones that are least affected by the Nike and Benetton phenomenon. Places like the Sudan and Algeria and Afghanistan have barely been affected by this at all. You would expect, if the homogenisation of global culture and multi-national company products and Hollywood films were the real problem, then we would be seeing mass-uprisings in places like Bangkok and Hong Kong, and that's not happening. The core of these problems is political.
"And to the extent that globalisation is a political problem, it's that people feel that sovereignty is being undermined because too much power is being wielded by unaccountable institutions."
In any case, as we ought to know from Northern Ireland, violence can be sustained even when cultural differences are infinitesimally small. "The worst violence is usually by people who are very similar. That's why civil wars are often so brutal. They're so brutal because people are so similar. In order to make it easier on yourself to suddenly butcher your neighbour and rape your neighbour's daughters and wives, you have to dehumanise and humiliate them, and in some way it makes it easier."
IN KEEPING with these underlying ideas, his new book on China is fascinating, not least because it shows how the Communist authorities and the dissidents in the US, Hong Kong, Taiwan and in the homeland itself, occupy the same mental universe. They share, for example, a strain of nationalism in which there is little sympathy for the independence of Tibet or Taiwan.
Buruma explores, without either romance or mockery, the reality of dissent: the feuds, the distortions of exile, the huge gulf between the older dissidents and the young student leaders who fled after Tienanmen Square in 1989. But he is alsoalive to the importance of stubbornness in the process of political change.
"Most dissidents are not easy people to begin with, and then they are damaged by their experiences. You have to be oddball to run those kinds of risks. I would never claim to have that kind of courage myself. The more I've dealt with these people, the more I'm reminded of accounts in my childhood of people who lived under German occupation.
"The sort of people who went into the Resistance were not, on the whole, nice, well-adjusted men and women. They were religious nuts, idealists, adventurers, people who might under different circumstances even have gone into organised crime.
"Something has to make you want to take such risks. They may not be the ideal people to have in a government in a peaceful democracy, but that's not really their role as I see it. Their role is to be stubborn and stick up for certain principles, to keep the flame alive."
Bad Elements by Ian Buruma is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£20 sterling)