The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (85 page)

Third, some regional hegemon must be capable of persuading or forcing weaker nations to accept its “representation” of their cultural and political interests. Even Huntington would probably find it hard to conceive of a Slavic-Orthodox civilization without Russia, a Hindu civilization without India, or a Confucian civilization without China. In fact, where no contender for hegemony exists, as in the case of the Buddhist nations, Huntington does not count the civilization as a “player” at all.

Pan-nationalist militancy, in other words, is not a spontaneous growth but a response to political subordination, cultural humiliation, and blocked economic development. The case of Germany illustrates that process. It took Napoleon’s conquests to provoke the construction of a Germanic political identity, and Prussian hegemony to give that identity institutional expression. It took British and French imperialism to convince Germans that, as the German nationalist Ernst Hasse wrote in his work
Deutsche Politik
, they “had the same right to expand as other great peoples, and that if not granted this possibility overseas, [they would] be forced to do it in Europe.” And it took a combination of the Versailles system, the Great Depression, and the collapse of liberal and socialist alternatives to convert pan-German nationalism into Nazi racial supremacy. By the same token, if the Islamic-Confucian alliance so feared by Huntington should materialize to challenge Western power, or if Slavic-Orthodox peoples should reunite around a hegemonic Russia, cultural values and the “will to power” will have far less to do with such developments than with the inability of Western-dominated peoples to satisfy their basic needs for identity, security, and development.

Why, indeed, unless basic human needs are unfulfilled, should those who participate in different cultures fight? While human history surely provides examples of violent cultural and civilizational conflict, more prevalent still are stories of culture-groups avoiding, tolerating, or accommodating each other; merging with other groups to form new entities; or absorbing or being absorbed by others. In fact, from the perspective of conflict resolution, Huntington has got things exactly backwards. Struggles between social classes and between different levels of the power-knowledge hierarchy can be very difficult to resolve. Conflicts based primarily on cultural differences alone are easier to settle. That is because the parties to intercultural conflicts generally seek goods such as identity and mutual recognition, which are not in short supply, and because the clash of cultural values or world-views is not nearly as absolute as Huntington implies. Hindus and Muslims in India do not generally make war on each other simply because one group loves cows and the other eats them. One can imagine any number of sociopolitical systems that would permit cow-lovers and cow-eaters, those who worship in temples and those who worship in mosques, to recognize each other’s identities and interact without massacring each other. The principal obstacles to Hindu-Muslim peace in India are not incompatible cultural values but social and political conditions that allow each group to believe that it can survive only at another’s expense. Without altering the conditions that make it impossible to satisfy basic human needs, conflicts like that one cannot be resolved. Huntington’s pessimism with regard to resolving civilizational conflict is evidently based not only on his cultural relativism, but on the silent assumption that, in the brave new post-Cold War world, this sort of system-change is impossible.

We disagree. In response to Huntington’s dark vision of civilizational struggle, we answer: Destructive conflict between identity groups, including pan-nationalist or civilizational groupings, can be averted and can be resolved if they do occur. But a violent clash of civilizations could well result from our continuing failure to transform the systems of inequality that make social life around the globe a struggle for individual and group survival—systems that feed the illusion that either one civilization or another must be dominant. Pan-national movements remain, as they have been in the past, misguided responses to foreign domination and native misgovernment. In our view, Huntington’s call for the global defense of Western interests against competing civilizations therefore represents the worst sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Nevertheless, his rhetorical question, “If not civilizations, what?” deserves an answer. Satisfying basic human needs on a global basis will require a powerful movement for social change—a movement waiting to be born.

 
1
.  Samuel P. Huntington,
“The Clash of Civilizations?”
,
Foreign Affairs
, 72:3 (Summer 1993): 21-49.

 
2
.  Samuel P. Huntington,
“If Not Civilizations, What? Paradigms of the Post-Cold War World,”
Foreign Affairs
, 72:5 (November-December, 1992); 190.

 
3
.  John Burton, ed.,
Conflict: Basic Human Needs
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

Fukuyama, Francis.
Wall Street Journal
. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Nov 7, 1996. pg. A20, 5 pgs.

In 1993, Samuel Huntington published an article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”, which quickly became the leading paradigm for post-Cold War world politics. In that article, Mr. Huntington—one of the country’s most distinguished political scientists—set off a heated debate by asserting that the ideological struggles of the Cold War have given way to cultural clashes among the world’s seven or eight great civilizations. Western, Islamic, Chinese, Hindu, Orthodox, Japanese and possibly African cultures would now constitute the major fault lines of global conflict.

With “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” (Simon & Schuster, 367 pages, $26), Mr. Huntington has now answered his many critics with a book-length amplification of the original article. The book is dazzling in its scope and grasp of the intricacies of contemporary global politics. Readers not already familiar with issues dividing Serbs and Albanians or Tamils and Hindus might feel a bit overwhelmed at the sheer volume of information conveyed here.

Mr. Huntington has underscored a basic truth that many of his critics don’t want to accept: After the Cold War, we will all have to be more conscious of cultural issues in world politics. Religion has not disappeared from the world stage; in many places (not least the U.S.) it remains an important source of cohesion and identity. Nevertheless, Mr. Huntington’s argument continues to suffer from two flaws that lead him to take an unduly pessimistic view of world politics.

The first concerns the way he draws cultural boundaries around very large units like “the West” or “Islam.” In fact, civilizations have nowhere replaced nation-states as the primary actors in world politics: A Chinese-Iranian agreement to transfer missile technology does not constitute an alignment of Confucianism and Islam. Consciousness of belonging to a larger civilization is at least plausible in the case of the Islamic world. In Asia, by contrast, Mr. Huntington has taken far too seriously rhetoric about “Asian values” from leaders like Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad or Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew, whose policies are based on simple national interest.

Mr. Huntington’s emphasis on civilizations obscures the smaller cultural identities that often divide nations within a single civilization. The world is beset not by thundering clashes of civilizations but by petty clashes of sects within weak nation-states. (One of the book’s tables shows there have been more conflicts in the early ’90s between subgroups within civilizations than between the civilizations themselves.)

The more serious flaw in Mr. Huntington’s argument is his assertion that modernization and Westernization are distinct phenomena. The Chinese or Iranians can have technologically advanced industrial economies, he argues, and yet not share any of the West’s cultural and political norms concerning pluralism, the separation of religion from political life, individualism or democracy. People in the West, then, are deluded in believing that their basic values are universal, or at least the universal result of modernization.

There is considerable reason to question this view. It is not an accident that modernity was born not in the Middle East or India but in the West, where the development of free institutions liberated men from the strictures of traditional authority and allowed them to apply reason to the mastery of politics and nature. To the extent that non-Western societies like Japan, Korea and now China have been able to modernize, it is because they either have already absorbed important elements of Western culture (like rationalism) or else have found analogs in their own cultures to Western values like the work ethic, secular politics and religious toleration. There is a strong empirical correlation between development and stable democracy. Mr. Huntington himself suggests that as China develops it will create an educated middle class that is likely to demand greater political participation. Of course the modernizing process will not result in the total homogenization of otherwise disparate cultures, but culture can survive in a variety of subpolitical or apolitical forms while adapting to a modernity that will look essentially Western.

Mr. Huntington argues that the West should stop believing that its values are universal and deal with the outside world in cultural rather than ideological terms. This view leads to some unsettling policy conclusions—e.g., that we ought to align ourselves with an authoritarian Croatia rather than a democratizing Ukraine, simply because the former is part of Western Christendom while the latter is part of the Orthodox world. Moreover, it is unclear whether it will be possible to sustain free institutions at home if we take so relativistic a view of our own values. The Declaration of Independence stated not that Westerners are created equal but that all men are created equal, and that this is a “self-evident truth” rather than a prejudice of Anglo-Saxon culture.

Mr. Huntington rightly attacks multiculturalism in the U.S. But if the Western tradition does not represent a universal value, why should it be “privileged” (as the deconstructionists say) over the non-Western traditions of the other ethnic and racial groups making up the country? If we take Mr. Huntington too seriously, the clash of civilizations may start at home.

Mr. Fukuyama is a professor of public policy at George Mason University.

Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity
by Samuel Huntington

BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Samuel P. Huntington, author of “Who Are We?,” what‘s the book about?

SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON, AUTHOR, “Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity”: The book is about America. And you‘ll notice that it is a question, and it‘s a question which I grapple with in the book as to what American national identity means, how it has changed over the years.

LAMB: Before I ask you about this book, I want to bring folks up to date on where you‘ve come from. The book that you can read most about in your life is—and I know there‘ve been several . . .

HUNTINGTON: Yes.

LAMB: By the way, what book is this for you that you‘ve just written?

HUNTINGTON: Oh, well, it‘s hard to say, 12th or 15th or something like that, because I‘ve edited books and written books and co-authored books, and so forth.

LAMB: The book called “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” . . .

HUNTINGTON: Right.

LAMB: What year did it come out?

HUNTINGTON: In 1996.

LAMB: And what was it about?

HUNTINGTON: Well, it was basically about the nature of post-cold war global politics. During the cold war and during most of the 20th century, in addition to power playing a role in international relations, ideology played a role in international relations. And what I argue in this book on the clash of civilizations is that ideology is out now. It is not important. But culture is, and civilizations are the broadest cultural entities in the world, and we have maybe eight or so major civilizations, and that international politics now is being shaped by the interactions among these civilizations, and cultural factors are playing a role in shaping the patterns of alliances and antagonisms among states, much as ideology did in the 20th century.

LAMB: You made some people mad, some people very mad, and Edward Said, who‘s now deceased, wrote a piece in “The Nation” magazine. He didn‘t like the fact that you put the West against Islam.

HUNTINGTON: Well, I am very careful in the book not to divide the world in two. And as a matter of fact, I quote Said approvingly on this point in the book. And I see global politics as being interactions among the eight or so major civilizations, and obviously, Islam and the West are two of the most important, and their relations over the centuries, since—for the past 1,300 years or so, have varied. At times they‘ve been peaceful, at other times there‘s been conflict. And clearly, there is a very important Islamic resurgence going on in the world now, as Muslims from Morocco straight through to Indonesia are becoming more and more conscious of their Islamic identity and are asserting it in a variety of ways, and some of which, but only a small part of which, are violent. And that is why we are seeing this militant Islamic extremism manifest itself.

LAMB: Where were you on September the 11th?

HUNTINGTON: I was on my way to Washington . . .

LAMB: To do what?

HUNTINGTON: . . . flying from Boston to Washington for a board meeting of a foundation I‘m involved in. And I had the chilling thought that I—realized later that the terrorists in Boston‘s Logan Airport were exactly—were there at exactly the same time I was and—but happily, taking—for me, taking another plane. But that was quite a day.

LAMB: At what point were you in the air? Had it happened already?

HUNTINGTON: No. No.

LAMB: You were earlier.

HUNTINGTON: Yes. Yes.

LAMB: And then . . .

HUNTINGTON: Well, it began happening just as we—as we arrived. And when we got to this meeting, somebody had a TV on, and you know, we all became fixated on that.

LAMB: When did you first learn who did it?

HUNTINGTON: Oh, I can‘t remember that. I mean, it was . . .

LAMB: Well, I guess . . .

HUNTINGTON: The news came out—you know, in—scattered—in such scattered fashion. The one plane had crashed. Something may have happened to another plane. And then the second plane went into the World Trade Center. When that happened, everybody said, you know, This isn‘t an accident.

LAMB: My real question, though, was when did you first—when you first learned that there were Arabs involved, and fundamentalists, did you—were you surprised?

HUNTINGTON: Well, I was shocked. And now, of course, we knew that al Qaeda had been responsible for earlier attacks on the United States, including one on the World Trade Center. So when you put it in that context, the basis for surprise diminishes considerably.

LAMB: Well, I guess I was really asking, in conjunction with the book . . .

HUNTINGTON: Yes.

LAMB: . . . “The Clash of Civilizations,” did that just make sense to you, then, based on what your own theory was?

HUNTINGTON: Yes. Well, it—unfortunately, yes. And like most of my books that I‘ve written in the past, what I tend to do in my books—and this is true of “Who Are We?”—is to look at situations and analyze phenomena which, for one reason or another, people are uneasy with or don‘t want to focus on or want to avoid. This was true in my first book on the soldier and the state, and it was denounced because I said we‘ve got to work out a new way of handling civil-military relations in this country. But after a few years, it became the accepted book on civil-military relations, and it‘s still in print now after 30 years or more and is commonly referred to as the classic work. And I think this book, “The Clash of Civilizations,” was attacked by a variety of people when it first—first came out, as was the—my “Foreign Affairs” article, which came out four years before on the same subject. But since September 11, people—people have been applying the adjective “prescient” to “The Clash of Civilizations” book. And as I say, it‘s unfortunate that it turned out to be relevant, so relevant now.

LAMB: How did you get into this business?

HUNTINGTON: This business being what?

LAMB: Well, several things—teaching, one, and writing books that people will read.

HUNTINGTON: Well, I—I went to Yale as an undergraduate and into the Army, then a year at the University of Chicago, then went to Harvard. And I was . . .

LAMB: What year did you go to Harvard?

HUNTINGTON: In 1948, as a graduate student. I was relatively young, at that point, and the—I went into graduate work in political science, international relations because—as a result of World War II. When I was a young teenager, this suddenly struck me that international relations was a very important subject, and so I have pursued that ever since and have written a variety of books and other things on it.

LAMB: Where did you . . .

HUNTINGTON: I teach courses on it.

LAMB: Where did you grow up?

HUNTINGTON: In New York City, in Astoria in Queens, went through the New York City public schools.

LAMB: What about your parents? What‘d they do?

HUNTINGTON: Well, my father grew up on a farm in Maine and came down to New York and went to the Columbia school of journalism and became an editor of publications dealing with the hotel industry.

LAMB: And the Huntington name—well, before you do that, the—your mother.

HUNTINGTON: Well, she grew up in New York City and was a short story writer.

LAMB: The Huntington name—how far back does it go in America?

HUNTINGTON: Well, Simon and Margaret (ph) Huntington sailed from England to the United States in 1633. They were part of a group of settlers from Norwich, England, who arrived in Boston and then went on to found Norwich, Connecticut. Simon died on the way over, but there were four sons, and almost all Huntingtons in the United States are descended from those four sons.

LAMB: Is there a large Huntington family that you‘re connected to?

HUNTINGTON: Well, not intimately, no. I have some close—very few close Huntington relatives, but there‘s a huge Huntington conglomerate, all told, with—there‘s a Huntington Family Association, which tries to maintain contact with—among the Huntington‘s, and so forth and so on.

LAMB: You have been a Harvard professor for how many years?

HUNTINGTON: I guess going on 50. I started teaching at Harvard full-time in 1950, but—and was—became an assistant professor, but then when I came up for promotion to tenure, I was turned down, in part as a result of that first book I mentioned, “The Soldier and the State,” which infuriated some of the faculty members. And so I went off and taught at Columbia for four years, and then Harvard saw the error of its ways and persuaded me to come back. And so I‘m just at 50—50 years total at Harvard.

LAMB: And are you currently teaching?

HUNTINGTON: Oh, yes. Yes, a full load.

LAMB: Do colleges make decisions about whether to give tenure to professors based on what they think, what side they‘re on?

HUNTINGTON: Well, they shouldn‘t, and the—all sorts of things, obviously, come into tenure decisions. I think, certainly, at a place like Harvard, merit far excels anything else. And that has become more and more the case over the decades. Back in the 1950s, when I was turned down for tenure, it was much more of a personal sort of decision. And people—the senior professors making the decision would, at times, certainly, make decisions on whether you just liked a person or not, not on the quality of the work.

LAMB: What did you do in the Carter administration?

HUNTINGTON: I had the title of Coordinator of Security Planning at the National Security Council, working with my friend, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the national security assistant to Carter. And Brzezinski, when he was appointed, asked me to come down and work with him, which I did for two years.

LAMB: What did you do in the Johnson administration?

HUNTINGTON: In the Johnson administration, I was a consultant to the State Department, and in particular, to the Policy Planning Council, and was asked to write a report on the problems of getting political stability in South Vietnam. This was at the height of the war, in 1967. And so I went out and spent a couple of months in South Vietnam and traveled around and came back and wrote a report which I think was one of the more damning documents, as far as our then policy was concerned. I remember briefing people—one group of people on it, and the top person in the White House concerned with Vietnam, when I had finished, said, Well, if what you say is right, everything we‘re doing is wrong. So . . .

LAMB: You worked with Henry Kissinger in the past?

HUNTINGTON: I don‘t think I‘ve ever really worked with Henry Kissinger.

LAMB: I mean, you—did you teach . . .

HUNTINGTON: I‘ve known . . .

LAMB: Did you teach together?

HUNTINGTON: No. No. But I‘ve known Henry for decades and decades. Yes, he‘s a good friend.

LAMB: Because he endorses your book.

HUNTINGTON: Yes. Yes. Yes. Well . . .

LAMB: This book, “Who Are We?,” has what premise?

HUNTINGTON: Well, the basic reason I wrote it is that it seemed to me in the 1990s, looking at what was going on in this country at that time, that there were various challenges to American national identity that had developed, a whole variety of different ones. And the—and I think that one could argue that there had been some core elements in American national identity. I identify four in the book that were present historically, that—these were race, ethnicity, culture and what is general called the “American creed,” a set of values and political beliefs articulated by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and by many other leading figures.

Happily, race and ethnicity, which were central for a couple of centuries, at least, in defining America, have faded—just about disappeared. And that leaves us with our culture and our creed, and I argue that the creed is a product of the culture, and hence, the attacks on the culture or changes in our culture are—could be of some—some consequence. And one of the important distinctions I made in the book, I think, is that between settlers and immigrants because we always refer to ourselves as—like to refer to ourselves as a nation of immigrants, and that is—that‘s true, but it‘s a partial truth.

Immigrants are people who go from one society to another society. There has to be a recipient society. And I argue that the basic American culture was brought over in the 17th and 18th century by people from Britain, and it had these what I—these British origins, and it was basically, I argue, an Anglo-Protestant culture because America was a 98 percent Protestant country in the 17th and 18th century. And these were dissident Protestants, by and large, who were leaving in part because they were persecuted in Britain. And the ideas and values and culture and institutions and customs they brought with them have been the core culture of the United States.

Now, obviously, there are all sorts of other cultures here, sub-cultures. But most countries do have something that could be called a mainstream or core culture, and it seems to me that over the years, our core culture has been this Anglo-Protestant culture of the original settlers, although obviously, it‘s evolved and changed and been affected by the waves of immigration that we‘ve had, who‘ve contributed to it in a whole variety of positive ways. But it still is basically the—the culture of the original settlers.

LAMB: So today, what‘s the real difference in this country? For instance, you point out in your book that there are 38 million Mexican-Americans.

HUNTINGTON: Well, no, 38 million Hispanics, I think.

LAMB: Hispanics.

HUNTINGTON: Yes, a large portion . . .

(CROSSTALK)

LAMB: OK, what impact has that had on us?

HUNTINGTON: Well, I think the Mexican immigration and the Hispanic immigration generally during the period since the 1960s is a phenomenon we‘ve never really had before. We‘ve had previous waves if immigrants in the mid-19th century and in the decades before World War I. After World War I, we pretty much shut down immigration. Congress passed very restrictive laws. But then in the 1960s, I think very happily, we opened up, changed those laws. And the laws that were enacted, the Immigration Act, weren‘t supposed to have quite the effect which they did have, but they opened the door to this very widespread immigration that we‘ve had since the mid-‘60s. And a heavy component of that has been the Hispanic, and particularly Mexican immigration. And this is the first time in our history that we have had a majority of the immigrants coming into this country speaking a single non-English language.