The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (83 page)

A civilizational approach explains much and orders much of the “bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion” of the post-Cold War world, which is why it has attracted so much attention and generated so much debate around the world. Can any other paradigm do better? If not civilizations, what? The responses in
Foreign Affairs
to my article did not provide any compelling alternative picture of the world. At best they suggested one pseudo-alternative and one unreal alternative.

The pseudo-alternative is a statist paradigm that constructs a totally irrelevant and artificial opposition between states and civilizations: “Civilizations do not control states,” says Fouad Ajami, “states control civilizations.” But it is meaningless to talk about states and civilizations in terms of “control.” States, of course, try to balance power, but if that is all they did, West European countries would have coalesced with the Soviet Union against the United States in the late 1940s. States respond primarily to perceived threats, and the West European states then saw a political and ideological threat from the East. As my original article argued, civilizations are composed of one or more states, and “Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs.” Just as nation states generally belonged to one of three worlds in the Cold War, they also belong to civilizations. With the demise of the three worlds, nation states increasingly define their identity and their interests in civilizational terms, and West European peoples and states now see a cultural threat from the South replacing the ideological threat from the East.

We do not live in a world of countries characterized by the “solitude of states” (to use Ajami’s phrase) with no connections between them. Our world is one of overlapping groupings of states brought together in varying degrees by history, culture, religion, language, location and institutions. At the broadest level these groupings are civilizations. To deny their existence is to deny the basic realities of human existence.

The unreal alternative is the one-world paradigm that a universal civilization now exists or is likely to exist in the coming years. Obviously people now have and for millennia have had common characteristics that distinguish humans from other species. These characteristics have always been compatible with the existence of very different cultures. The argument that a universal culture or civilization is now emerging takes various forms, none of which withstands even passing scrutiny.

First, there is the argument that the collapse of Soviet communism means the end of history and the universal victory of liberal democracy throughout the world. This argument suffers from the Single Alternative Fallacy. It is rooted in the Cold War assumption that the only alternative to communism is liberal democracy and that the demise of the first produces the universality of the second. Obviously, however, there are many forms of authoritarianism, nationalism, corporatism and market communism (as in China) that are alive and well in today’s world. More significantly, there are all the religious alternatives that lie outside the world that is perceived in terms of secular ideologies. In the modern world, religion is a central, perhaps the central, force that motivates and mobilizes people. It is sheer hubris to think that because Soviet communism has collapsed the West has won the world for all time.

Second, there is the assumption that increased interaction—greater communication and transportation—produces a common culture. In some circumstances this may be the case. But wars occur most frequently between societies with high levels of interaction, and interaction frequently reinforces existing identities and produces resistance, reaction and confrontation.

Third, there is the assumption that modernization and economic development have a homogenizing effect and produce a common modern culture closely resembling that which has existed in the West in this century. Clearly, modern urban, literate, wealthy, industrialized societies do share cultural traits that distinguish them from backward, rural, poor, undeveloped societies. In the contemporary world most modern societies have been Western societies. But modernization does not equal Westernization. Japan, Singapore and Saudi Arabia are modern, prosperous societies but they clearly are non-Western. The presumption of Westerners that other peoples who modernize must become “like us” is a bit of Western arrogance that in itself illustrates the clash of civilizations. To argue that Slovenes and Serbs, Arabs and Jews, Hindus and Muslims, Russians and Tajiks, Tamils and Sinhalese, Tibetans and Chinese, Japanese and Americans all belong to a single Western-defined universal civilization is to fly in the face of reality.

A universal civilization can only be the product of universal power. Roman power created a near-universal civilization within the limited confines of the ancient world. Western power in the form of European colonialism in the nineteenth century and American hegemony in the twentieth century extended Western culture throughout much of the contemporary world. European colonialism is over; American hegemony is receding. The erosion of Western culture follows, as indigenous, historically rooted mores, languages, beliefs and institutions reassert themselves.

Amazingly, Ajami cites India as evidence of the sweeping power of Western modernity. “India,” he says, “will not become a Hindu state. The inheritance of Indian secularism will hold.” Maybe it will, but certainly the overwhelming trend is away from Nehru’s vision of a secular, socialist, Western, parliamentary democracy to a society shaped by Hindu fundamentalism. In India, Ajami goes on to say, “The vast middle class will defend it [secularism], keep the order intact to maintain India’s—and its own—place in the modern world of nations.” Really? A long
New York Times
(September 23, 1993) story on this subject begins: “Slowly, gradually, but with the relentlessness of floodwaters, a growing Hindu rage toward India’s Muslim minority has been spreading among India’s solid middle class Hindus—its merchants and accountants, its lawyers and engineers—creating uncertainty about the future ability of adherents of the two religions to get along.” An op-ed piece in the
Times
(August 3, 1993) by an Indian journalist also highlights the role of the middle class: “The most disturbing development is the increasing number of senior civil servants, intellectuals, and journalists who have begun to talk the language of Hindu fundamentalism, protesting that religious minorities, particularly the Muslims, have pushed them beyond the limits of patience.” This author, Khushwant Singh, concludes sadly that while India may retain a secular facade, India “will no longer be the India we have known over the past 47 years” and “the spirit within will be that of militant Hinduism.” In India, as in other societies, fundamentalism is on the rise and is largely a middle class phenomenon.

The decline of Western power will be followed, and is beginning to be followed, by the retreat of Western culture. The rapidly increasing economic power of East Asian states will, as Kishore Mahbubani asserted, lead to increasing military power, political influence and cultural assertiveness. A colleague of his has elaborated this warning with respect to human rights:

[E]fforts to promote human rights in Asia must also reckon with the altered distribution of power in the post-Cold War world. . . . Western leverage over East and Southeast Asia has been greatly reduced. . . . There is far less scope for conditionality and sanctions to force compliance with human rights. . . .

For the first time since the Universal Declaration [on Human Rights] was adopted in 1948, countries not thoroughly steeped in the Judeo-Christian and natural law traditions are in the first rank: That unprecedented situation will define the new international politics of human rights. It will also multiply the occasions for conflict. . . .

Economic success has engendered a greater cultural self-confidence. Whatever their differences, East and Southeast Asian countries are increasingly conscious of their own civilizations and tend to locate the sources of their economic success in their own distinctive traditions and institutions. The self-congratulatory, simplistic, and sanctimonious tone of much Western commentary at the end of the Cold War and the current triumphalism of Western values grate on East and Southeast Asians.
[3]

Language is, of course, central to culture, and Ajami and Robert Bartley both cite the widespread use of English as evidence for the universality of Western culture (although Ajami’s fictional example dates from 1900). Is, however, use of English increasing or decreasing in relation to other languages? In India, Africa and elsewhere, indigenous languages have been replacing those of the colonial rulers. Even as Ajami and Bartley were penning their comments,
Newsweek
ran an article entitled “English Not Spoken Here Much Anymore” on Chinese replacing English as the lingua franca of Hong Kong.
[4]
In a parallel development, Serbs now call their language Serbian, not Serbo-Croatian, and write it in the Cyrillic script of their Russian kinsmen, not in the Western script of their Catholic enemies. At the same time, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have shifted from the Cyrillic script of their former Russian masters to the Western script of their Turkish kinsmen. On the language front, Babelization prevails over universalization and further evidences the rise of civilization identity.

Wherever one turns, the world is at odds with itself. If differences in civilization are not responsible for these conflicts, what is? The critics of the civilization paradigm have not produced a better explanation for what is going on in the world. The civilizational paradigm, in contrast, strikes a responsive chord throughout the world. In Asia, as one U.S. ambassador reported, it is “spreading like wildfire.” In Europe, European Community President Jacques Delors explicitly endorsed its argument that “future conflicts will be sparked by cultural factors rather than economics or ideology” and warned, “The West needs to develop a deeper understanding of the religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations, and the way other nations see their interests, to identify what we have in common.” Muslims, in turn, have seen “the clash” as providing recognition and, in some degree, legitimation for the distinctiveness of their own civilization and its independence from the West. That civilizations are meaningful entities accords with the way in which people see and experience reality.

History has not ended. The world is not one. Civilizations unite and divide humankind. The forces making for clashes between civilizations can be contained only if they are recognized. In a “world of different civilizations,” as my article concluded, each “will have to learn to coexist with the others.” What ultimately counts for people is not political ideology or economic interest. Faith and family, blood and belief, are what people identify with and what they will fight and die for. And that is why the clash of civilizations is replacing the Cold War as the central phenomenon of global politics, and why a civilizational paradigm provides, better than any alternative, a useful starting point for understanding and coping with the changes going on in the world.

 
1
.  See, for instance, the map in
Die Welt
, June 16, 1983, p. 3

 
2
.  For a brilliant and eloquent statement of why the future of the United States could be problematic, see Bruce D. Porter, “Can American Democracy Survive?,”
Commentary
, November 1993, pp. 37-40.

 
3
.  Bilahari Kausikan, Asia’s Different Standard,”
Foreign Policy
, Fall 1983, pp. 28-34. In an accompanying article Aryeh Neier excoriates “Asia’s Unacceptable Standard,” ibid., pp. 42-51.

 
4
.  In the words of one British resident: When I arrived in Hong Kong 10 years ago, nine times out of 10, a taxi driver would understand where you were going. Now, nine times out of 10, he doesn’t.” Occidentals rather than natives increasingly have to be hired to fill jobs requiring knowledge of English.
Newsweek
, July 19, 1993, p. 24.

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. His article “The Clash of Civilizations?” appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of
Foreign Affairs
, and several responses to it were published in the September/October 1993 issue.

Foreign Policy Fall 1994 n96 p113(16)

Rubenstein, Richard E.; Crocker, Jarle

Abstract (Document Summary)

Samuel Huntington predicts that future military confrontations will take place between clashing civilizations rather than between nations. He describes a world system composed of eight civilizations: Western, Japanese, Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and African. However, his theory has several flaws. One is the fact that conflicts are occurring within civilizations as well as between them. Establishing global equity in meeting human needs can avert clashes between civilizations.

Full Text

COPYRIGHT 1994 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

With the end of the Cold War, scholars and policymakers face a daunting task: how to craft a new paradigm capable of revealing the principal sources of conflict and collaboration in a rapidly changing international system. In “The Clash of Civilizations?”,
[1]
Samuel Huntington boldly offers to fill that theoretical vacancy. Huntington’s model of competing civilizations seeks to provide an analysis of current international conflicts, a method of predicting future strife, and a solid theoretical foundation for constructing foreign policy. While considerably in vogue abroad, the “clashing civilizations” thesis has encountered substantial resistance at home. Even so, few critics appear to have examined the theory’s underlying assumptions and long-range implications or accepted the author’s challenge to suggest a more comprehensive and useful paradigm.

This essay takes up Huntington’s challenge. Its purpose is to answer three questions critical to an evaluation of his theory:

 
•
  Is the model of “clashing civilizations” a new paradigm?

 
•
  How well does it account for the causes of conflict in the post—Cold War world?

 
•
  Is it the best paradigm for the job, or are there more promising theories in view?

Huntington’s thesis is simply stated: The international system, formerly based on major Soviet, American, and Third World power blocs, is in transition to a new system composed of eight major civilizations. They are the Western, Japanese, Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and—“possibly,” says the theorist—African. “Civilization,” in his lexicon (as in that of his predecessors, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee), denotes the broadest practical basis for human cultural affiliation short of species consciousness. Culture, not class, ideology, or even nationality, will differentiate the contending power blocs of the future. The trend in each bloc is toward greater civilizational “consciousness.” The major wars of the future will be fought along civilizational “fault lines,” like those separating Western Croatia and Slovenia from Muslim Bosnia and Slavic-Orthodox Serbia, or Muslim Pakistan from Hindu India. Western policy, in the context of the new order, will necessarily be directed toward maintaining world hegemony by destabilizing hostile civilizations militarily and diplomatically, playing them off against each other in the “balance of power” mode, and learning to live with global diversity.

Assuming, for the moment, that there are eight (and only eight) civilizations, why must their future relations be oriented toward conflict? On the one hand, says Huntington, “differences do not necessarily mean conflict.” But civilizations will clash because they embody incompatible political and moral values; for example, Western ideas of individualism and democracy run counter to the beliefs of many non-Western civilizations. Even so, one might ask, why not live and let live? Why should clashing values generate political and military confrontation? Huntington does not answer that question directly. He assumes that politicized civilizations are power blocs, each of which naturally struggles for survival, influence, and, where necessary, domination. Fortunately, the West is now on top, but other civilizations are finally developing the economic, military and cultural capacities to challenge Western hegemony and reshape the world through the lens of non-Western values and beliefs. (It is that vision of non-Western ascendancy that makes Professor Huntington’s essay so appealing to many politicians in the Third World.) “The West against the Rest” therefore describes the most likely fault line of future civilizational relations.

Is this a new paradigm or a mere modification of the Cold War model that Huntington claims to have discarded? Certain differences seem obvious: The primary units of international conflict are now said to be civilizations, not states; the world of clashing civilizations is multipolar, not bipolar; and the major players are united by cultural affinity rather than by class or ideology. But beneath the surface of the new world-picture, familiar mechanisms are at work. Huntington’s thinking remains bounded by the assumptions of political realism, the dominant philosophy of the Cold War period. For him, as for earlier realists, international politics is, above all, a struggle for power between coherent but essentially isolated units, each of which seeks to advance its own interests in an anarchic setting. Huntington has replaced the nation-state, the primary playing piece in the old game of realist politics, with a larger counter: the civilization. But in crucial respects, the game itself goes on as always.

The results of that continuity are peculiar. It is as if Galileo had explained his telescopic observations by recourse to Aristotelian physics. Huntington’s civilizations are essentially superstates motivated by the same imperatives of insecurity and self-aggrandizement as were their Cold War and historical predecessors. As a result, the policies generated by his new paradigm are not easily distinguished from those inspired by the old order of competitive states and ideological blocs. For example, since the safest place in an anarchical system is on top or in alliance with a hegemon, Huntington counsels Westerners to be wary of disarmament, lest other civilizations take advantage of Western demilitarization to alter the fundamental balance of power. He also advises the West to develop “a more profound understanding” of other civilizations, to identify “elements of commonality,” and to learn to coexist with others. But “peaceful coexistence” of that sort was a basic principle of Cold War strategy. Its context was a ceaseless struggle for power in which diplomacy was, in effect, a continuation of war by other means. Huntington’s advice—coexist, but keep your powder dry—remains firmly within the power-struggle paradigm.

What is new, given the triumphalism of much post-Cold War writing, is Huntington’s pessimism. In an interview with
New Perspectives Quarterly
, he said the West must now face a world in which, “despite its current preponderance in economic and military power, the balance of power is shifting into the hands of others.” That Spenglerian pessimism has Social Darwinist as well as realist roots; in the struggle for survival and supremacy, victory belongs to the civilization most culturally unified, most determined, and best adapted to the pursuit of global power. Therefore, Huntington sees multiculturalism—“the de-Westernization of the United States”—as a grave threat to U.S. and Western interests. If . . . 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]
The theorist insists that affirmative action and policies favoring multiculturalism threaten “the underlying principles that have been the basis of American political unity.” But the issue, for the moment, is not whether he is promoting nativism. It is whether he is offering us a new dish or warmed-over Cold War pie.

 Unfortunately, the answer seems plain. Although Huntington’s defense of 100 per cent Americanism is made in the context of an alien civilizational (as opposed to alien communist) plot, both the alleged threat and the recommended responses are depressingly familiar. The Soviet menace may have vanished, but new enemies—in particular, the dreaded “Confucian-Islamic connection”—now endanger America’s global interest. Two responses are therefore required: a movement of cultural unification and revitalization, and a renewed commitment to military, political, and cultural collective security. First, we must deal with the enemy within, already defined by the theorist as unassimilated non-white immigrant groups. Second, seeing that “the West against the Rest” is a recipe for disaster, Westerners will have no choice but to contract defensive alliances with more simpatico or compliant civilizations against the more ambitious and alien powers. Huntington advises the West to “incorporate” East European and Latin American cultures, to “maintain cooperative relations” with Russia and Japan, and to “strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values.” He offers us no reason to expect his civilizational system to remain multipolar—and there is no reason at all that it should. The old Cold War is dead, he loudly declares. Then—sotto voce—Long live the new Cold War!

In responding to Huntington’s vision, we do not maintain that cultural differences themselves are politically meaningless. Cultural similarities or differences can become the basis for massive political mobilization—but only in response to exogenous factors that the theorist has not considered. It is a mistake to dismiss Huntington’s vision of global civilizational strife as fantastic: Its realization is all too possible. But it is essential to provide a better explanation of the conditions that could generate a violent clash of civilizations.

Ultimately, Huntington’s claim to have produced a new paradigm depends upon his ability to defend the distinction between political ideology, the basis for the old world order, and cultural values, the foundation of “civilization.” The theorist puts it clearly in a response to his critics entitled, “If Not Civilizations, What?”, maintaining that what ultimately counts for people is not political ideology or economic interest. Faith and family, blood and belief, are what people identify with and what they will fight and die for. And that is why the clash of civilizations is replacing the Cold War as the central phenomenon of global politics. Distinct cultures, in his view, create differences of value that are far more difficult to reconcile than mere conflicts of interest or ideology. Huntington appears to consider such cultural commitments primordial. He would have us believe, for example, that even if the Chinese decide to take the capitalist road, their “Confucian” values will forever remain alien to those of the West. Moreover, by associating “faith” with “family” and “belief” with “blood,” he suggests that cultural values are inextricably bound up with ethnic identity. Finally, he conflates ethnicity with civilization, assuming that all Muslims, for example, are part of a vast ethnic group whose primordial values lead them inevitably to persecute heretics, veil women, and establish theocratic regimes.

Each link in that chain of assumptions raises questions that Huntington does not appear to have considered, much less answered. Are his eight civilizations ethnic groups writ large, or are they unstable, multiethnic formations unified (if at all) as much by elite coercion, economic interest, and ideology as by a common culture? Are the “values” that he discusses ancient and highly resistant to change, or are they rather ideological constructions of relatively recent vintage—shifting syntheses capable of rapid alteration in response to changing events? It seems that Huntington has misunderstood the process of cultural change and value-formation. He seems wholly unaware that, as anthropologist Nigel Harris put it in his
Beliefs in Society
, “culture is not some external straitjacket, but rather multiple suits of clothes, some of which we can and do discard because they impede our movements.” Nor does he recognize the extent to which modern anthropological theory has undermined the distinction between cultural tradition and ideology. As anthropologist Kevin Avruch notes in the October 1992 issue of
Ethnic and Racial Studies
: “Traditions” . . . and “nations” . . . are recent and modern because they are continually caught up in processes of social and cultural construction. They are invented and reinvented, produced and reproduced, according to complex, interactive, and temporally shifting contingencies of material conditions and historical practice. They are products of struggle and conflict, of material interests and of competing conceptions of authenticity and identity. They are rooted in structures of inequality. The apparently requisite patina of antiquity is somehow connected . . . to the need for authentic identity.

Huntington’s civilizations, it seems clear, are ideological constructs as “recent and modern” as nations, and equally rooted in “structures of inequality.” The cultural materials available to define a politicized “civilization” are so rich, varied, and contradictory that any political definition reflects choices made by modern leaders in response to modern problems. For example, the tendency to characterize Indian culture as exclusively Hindu fails to reflect the current problems of upper-caste Indians besieged by lower-caste and lower-class demands.

Similarly, modern Islamism is very much a product of the twentieth century. No doubt, some of the raw materials used in its construction date back to the time of the Prophet. Other materials, from oil revenues and electronic communications to the economic theories of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, are quite new. But even the older traditions do not represent imperishable values so much as attitudes and customs themselves the products of earlier change. The survival of those customs reflects their plasticity—their capacity to participate in the creation of new culture. And which customs are chosen for continuation or revival by twentieth-century Islamicists depends on their conception of “relevance,” not on the dictates of unalterable tradition. The veiled Muslim woman who watches television at home, goes shopping in public, attends political rallies, or works in an office is neither the “emancipated” woman of the West nor the secluded woman of Islamic tradition. Indeed, the extent to which older gender roles and attitudes can be or should be preserved is continually debated, even in fundamentalist circles.