The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (82 page)

In the longer term other measures would be called for. Western civilization is both Western and modern. Non-Western civilizations have attempted to become modern without becoming Western. To date only Japan has fully succeeded in this quest. Non-Western civilizations will continue to attempt to acquire the wealth, technology, skills, machines and weapons that are part of being modern. They will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their traditional culture and values. Their economic and military strength relative to the West will increase. Hence the West will increasingly have to accommodate these non-Western modern civilizations whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of the West. This will require the West to maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect its interests in relation to these civilizations. It will also, however, require the West to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others.

 
1
.  Murray Weidenbaum,
Greater China: The Next Economic Superpower
?, St. Louis: Washington University Center for the Study of American Business, Contemporary Issues, Series 57, February 1993, pp. 2-3.

 
2
.  Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,”
The Atlantic Monthly
, vol. 266, September 1990, p. 60;
Time
, June 15, 1992, pp. 24-28.

 
3
.  Archie Roosevelt,
For Lust of Knowing
, Boston: Little, Brown, 1988, pp. 332-333.

 
4
.  Almost invariably Western leaders claim they are acting on behalf of “the world community.” One minor lapse occurred during the run-up to the Gulf War. In an interview on “Good Morning America,” Dec. 21, 1990, British Prime Minister John Major referred to the actions “the West” was taking against Saddam Hussein. He quickly corrected himself and subsequently referred to “the world community.” He was, however, right when he erred.

 
5
.  Harry C. Triandis,
The New York Times
, Dec. 25, 1990, p. 41, and “Cross-Cultural Studies of Individualism and Collectivism,”
Nebraska Symposium on Motivation
, vol. 37, 1989, pp. 41-133.

 
6
.  Kishore Mahbubani, “The West and the Rest,”
The National Interest
, Summer 1992, pp. 3-13.

 
7
.  Sergei Stankevich, “Russia in Search of Itself,”
The National Interest
, Summer 1992, pp. 47-51; Daniel Schneider, “A Russian Movement Rejects Western Tilt,”
Christian Science Monitor
, Feb. 5, 1993, pp. 5-7.

 
8
.  Owen Harries has pointed out that Australia is trying (unwisely in his view) to become a torn country in reverse. Although it has been a full member not only of the West but also of the ABCA military and intelligence core of the West, its current leaders are in effect proposing that it defect from the West, redefine itself as an Asian country and cultivate close ties with its neighbors. Australia’s future, they argue, is with the dynamic economies of East Asia. But, as I have suggested, close economic cooperation normally requires a common cultural base. In addition, none of the three conditions necessary for a torn country to join another civilization is likely to exist in Australia’s case.

S
AMUEL
P. H
UNTINGTON
is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. This article is the product of the Olin Institute’s project on “The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests.”

Huntington, Samuel P.
Foreign Affairs
. New York: Nov/Dec 1993.Vol.72, Iss. 5;  pg. 186, 9 pgs.

Abstract (Document Summary)

The dramatic events of the past 5 years have made the Cold War paradigm intellectual history. There is clearly a need for a new model that will help people to order and to understand central developments in world politics. “The Clash of Civilizations?” is an effort to lay out elements of a post-Cold War paradigm. As with any paradigm, there is much the civilization paradigm does not account for, and critics will have no trouble citing events that it does not explain and would not have predicted. However, the debates the civilizational paradigm has generated around the world show that, in some measure, it strikes home. Wherever one turns, the world is at odds with itself. Thus, at issue is what could be responsible for these conflicts if it is not the differences in civilizations themselves. In the end, faith and family, blood and belief are what people identify with and what they will fight and die for. That is why the clash of civilizations is replacing the Cold War as the central phenomenon of global politics and why a civilization paradigm provides, better than any alternative, a useful starting point for understanding and coping with the changes going on in the world.

Full Text (4098 words)

Copyright Council on Foreign Relations Nov/Dec 1993

When people think seriously, they think abstractly; they conjure up simplified pictures of reality called concepts, theories, models, paradigms. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, William James said, only “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.” Intellectual and scientific advance, as Thomas Kuhn showed in his classic
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, consists of the displacement of one paradigm, which has become increasingly incapable of explaining new or newly discovered facts, by a new paradigm that accounts for those facts in a more satisfactory fashion. “To be accepted as a paradigm,” Kuhn wrote, “a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.”

For 40 years students and practitioners of international relations thought and acted in terms of a highly simplified but very useful picture of world affairs, the Cold War paradigm. The world was divided between one group of relatively wealthy and mostly democratic societies, led by the United States, engaged in a pervasive ideological, political, economic, and, at times, military conflict with another group of somewhat poorer, communist societies led by the Soviet Union. Much of this conflict occurred in the Third World outside of these two camps, composed of countries which often were poor, lacked political stability, were recently independent and claimed to be nonaligned. The Cold War paradigm could not account for everything that went on in world politics. There were many anomalies, to use Kuhn’s term, and at times the paradigm blinded scholars and statesmen to major developments, such as the Sino-Soviet split. Yet as a simple model of global politics, it accounted for more important phenomena than any of its rivals; it was an indispensable starting point for thinking about international affairs; it came to be almost universally accepted; and it shaped thinking about world politics for two generations.

The dramatic events of the past five years have made that paradigm intellectual history. There is clearly a need for a new model that will help us to order and to understand central developments in world politics. What is the best simple map of the post-Cold War world?

“The Clash of Civilizations?” is an effort to lay out elements of a post-Cold War paradigm. As with any paradigm, there is much the civilization paradigm does not account for, and critics will have no trouble citing events—even important events like Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait—that it does not explain and would not have predicted (although it would have predicted the evaporation of the anti-Iraq coalition after March 1991). Yet, as Kuhn demonstrates, anomalous events do not falsify a paradigm. A paradigm is disproved only by the creation of an alternative paradigm that accounts for more crucial facts in equally simple or simpler terms (that is, at a comparable level of intellectual abstraction; a more complex theory can always account for more things than a more parsimonious theory). The debates the civilizational paradigm has generated around the world show that, in some measure, it strikes home; it either accords with reality as people see it or it comes close enough so that people who do not accept it have to attack it.

What groupings of countries will be most important in world affairs and most relevant to understanding and making sense of global politics? Countries no longer belong to the Free World, the communist bloc, or the Third World. Simple two-way divisions of countries into rich and poor or democratic and nondemocratic may help some but not all that much. Global politics are now too complex to be stuffed into two pigeonholes. For reasons outlined in the original article, civilizations are the natural successors to the three worlds of the Cold War. At the macro level world politics are likely to involve conflicts and shifting power balances of states from different civilizations, and at the micro level the most violent, prolonged and dangerous (because of the possibility of escalation) conflicts are likely to be between states and groups from different civilizations. As the article pointed out, this civilization paradigm accounts for many important developments in international affairs in recent years, including the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the wars going on in their former territories, the rise of religious fundamentalism throughout the world, the struggles within Russia, Turkey and Mexico over their identity, the intensity of the trade conflicts between the United States and Japan, the resistance of Islamic states to Western pressure on Iraq and Libya, the efforts of Islamic and Confucian states to acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, China’s continuing role as an “outsider” great power, the consolidation of new democratic regimes in some countries and not in others, and the escalating arms race in East Asia.

In the few months since the article was written, the following events have occurred that also fit the civilizational paradigm and might have been predicted from it:

—the continuation and intensification of the fighting among Croats, Muslims and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia;

—the failure of the West to provide meaningful support to the Bosnian Muslims or to denounce Croat atrocities in the same way Serb atrocities were denounced;

—Russia’s unwillingness to join other U.N. Security Council members in getting the Serbs in Croatia to make peace with the Croatian government, and the offer of Iran and other Muslim nations to provide 18,000 troops to protect Bosnian Muslims;

—the intensification of the war between Armenians and Azeris, Turkish and Iranian demands that the Armenians surrender their conquests, the deployment of Turkish troops to and Iranian troops across the Azerbaijan border, and Russia’s warning that the Iranian action contributes to “escalation of the conflict” and “pushes it to dangerous limits of internationalization”;

—the continued fighting in central Asia between Russian troops and Mujaheddin guerrillas;

—the confrontation at the Vienna Human Rights Conference between the West, led by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, denouncing “cultural relativism,” and a coalition of Islamic and Confucian states rejecting “West universalism”;

—the refocusing in parallel fashion of Russian and NATO military planners on “the threat from the South;

—the voting, apparently almost entirely along civilizational lines, that gave the 2000 Olympics to Sydney rather than Beijing;

—the sale of missile components from China to Pakistan, the resulting imposition of U.S. sanctions against China, and the confrontation between China and the United States over the alleged shipment of nuclear technology to Iran;

—China’s breaking the moratorium and testing a nuclear weapon, despite vigorous U.S. protests, and North Korea’s refusal to participate further in talks on its own nuclear weapons program;

—the revelation that the U.S. State Department was following a “dual containment” policy directed at both Iran and Iraq;

—the announcement by the U.S. Defense Department of a new strategy of preparing for two “major regional conflicts,” one against North Korea, the other against Iran or Iraq;

—the call by Iran’s president for alliances with China and India so that “we can have the last word on international events”;

—new German legislation drastically curtailing the admission of refugees;

—the agreement between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk on the disposition of the Black Sea fleet and other issues;

—U.S. bombing of Baghdad, its virtually unanimous support by Western governments, and its condemnation by almost all Muslim governments as another example of the West’s “double standard”;

—the United States listing Sudan as a terrorist state and the indictment of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and his followers for conspiring “to levy a war of urban terrorism against the United States”;

—the improved prospects for the eventual admission of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia into NATO.

Does a “clash of civilizations” perspective account for everything of significance in world affairs during these past few months? Of course not. It could be argued, for instance, that the agreement between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli government on the Gaza Strip and Jericho is a dramatic anomaly to the civilizational paradigm, and in some sense it is. Such an event, however, does not invalidate a civilizational approach: it is historically significant precisely because it is between groups from two different civilizations who have been fighting each other for over four decades. Truces and limited agreements are as much a part of the clashes between civilizations as Soviet American arms control agreements were part of the Cold War; and while the conflict between Jew and Arab may be circumscribed, it still continues.

Inter-civilizational issues are increasingly replacing inter-superpower issues as the top items on the international agenda. These issues include arms proliferation (particularly of weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them), human rights, and immigration. On these three issues, the West is on one side and most of the other major civilizations are on the other. President Clinton at the United Nations urges intensified efforts to curb nuclear and other unconventional weapons; Islamic and Confucian states plunge ahead in their efforts to acquire them; Russia practices ambivalence. The extent to which countries observe human rights corresponds overwhelmingly with divisions among civilizations: the West and Japan are highly protective of human rights; Latin America, India, Russia, and parts of Africa protect some human rights; China, many other Asian countries, and most Muslim societies are least protective of human rights. Rising immigration from non-Western sources is provoking rising concern in both Europe and America. Other European countries in addition to Germany are tightening their restrictions at the same time that the barriers to movement of people within the European Community are rapidly disappearing. In the United States, massive waves of new immigrants are generating support for new controls, despite the fact that most studies show immigrants to be making a net positive contribution to the American economy.

One function of a paradigm is to highlight what is important (e.g., the potential for escalation in clashes between groups from different civilizations); another is to place familiar phenomena in a new perspective. In this respect, the civilizational paradigm may have implications for the United States.
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Countries like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia that bestride civilizational fault lines tend to come apart. The unity of the United States has historically rested on the twin bedrocks of European culture and political democracy. These have been essentials of America to which generations of immigrants have assimilated. The essence of the American creed has been equal rights for the individual, and historically immigrant and outcast groups have invoked and thereby reinvigorated the principles of the creed in their struggles for equal treatment in American society. The most notable and successful effort was the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1950s and 1960s. Subsequently, however, the demand shifted from equal rights for individuals to special rights (affirmative action and similar measures) for blacks and other groups. Such claims run directly counter to the underlying principles that have been the basis of American political unity; they reject the idea of a “color-blind” society of equal individuals and instead promote a “color-conscious” society with government-sanctioned privileges for some groups. In a parallel movement, intellectuals and politicians began to push the ideology of “multiculturalism,” and to insist on the rewriting of American political, social, and literary history from the viewpoint of non-European groups. At the extreme, this movement tends to elevate obscure leaders of minority groups to a level of importance equal to that of the Founding Fathers. Both the demands for special group rights and for multiculturalism encourage a clash of civilizations within the United States and encourage what Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., terms “the disuniting of America.”

The United States is becoming increasingly diverse ethnically and racially. The Census Bureau estimates that by 2050 the American population will be 23 percent Hispanic, 16 percent black and 10 percent Asian-American. In the past the United States has successfully absorbed millions of immigrants from scores of countries because they adapted to the prevailing European culture and enthusiastically embraced the American Creed of liberty, equality, individualism, democracy. Will this pattern continue to prevail as 50 percent of the population becomes Hispanic or nonwhite? Will the new immigrants be assimilated into the hitherto dominant European culture of the United States? If they are not, if the United States becomes truly multicultural and pervaded with an internal clash of civilizations, will it survive as a liberal democracy? The political identity of the United States is rooted in the principles articulated in its founding documents. Will the de-Westernization of the United States, if it occurs, also mean its de-Americanization? If it does and Americans cease to adhere to their liberal democratic and European-rooted political ideology, the United States as we have known it will cease to exist and will follow the other ideologically defined superpower onto the ash heap of history.
[2]