The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (90 page)

Assuming that Internet use in Islamic countries will grow significantly during the coming years, the ummah—the worldwide Islamic population—might become a virtual community with technology-based cohesion. Whether this population will be insular or participate in the larger global community will be a crucial factor in determining the future character of Islam. Those observers who believe that the clash of civilizations will occur might consider any new unification within Islam to be a threat, while those who are skeptical about the clash theory might argue that the Internet will enhance the potency of globalizing influences and lead Islamic states and people toward greater integration with the rest of the world.

Online news providers will be players in this process. Despite the efforts of some governments, such as that of Saudi Arabia, to block access to certain online news venues, the Internet is increasingly hard to obstruct. It may help to democratize intellectual life in ways that no government officials (or religious leaders) can wholly control. News is becoming more of a global product, and, as with satellite television channels, the Internet could help defuse civilizational clashes by providing information that undermines myths and stereotypes. IslamOnline and many other sources are available to those in the West and elsewhere, serving as educational tools that provide insights about Islamic life. Even without relying on mainstream news media, the individual news consumer can get information directly from sources such as this as well as from governments, NGOs, interest groups, bloggers, and others.

So much information is available that it is bound to have some effect. Whether it can offset deep-rooted hostility and misunderstanding remains to be seen.

The continued debate about the clash theory gives news organizations, particularly in the United States, an opportunity to reassess post-Cold War—and now post-9/11—alignments of political and cultural forces throughout the world. In doing so, the news media, like policymakers and the public, should guard against accepting convenient stereotypes and judging civilizational differences in simplistic ways. When Huntington’s first clash article appeared in 1993, it seemed to support inchoate fears and reinforce Western predispositions about “the others.” But just because the public may be prepared to accept an idea does not mean that the news media should treat it uncritically.

One problem with the news media’s and public’s view of Huntington’s clash theory is that excerpts can be found to suit the political mood of the moment, regardless of how they fit into the broader context of his work. Huntington has contributed to this problem by sometimes using sweeping statements that are the academic equivalent of the politician’s soundbite—rhetorically stirring, intellectually imprecise. For example: “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”
[41]
Why is this a “problem for the West”? Who are these “people” who are so convinced?

The news media’s treatment of Huntington’s outlook may render it even hotter and more simplistic. Media versions of Huntington’s ideas have come to be regarded by some as conventional wisdom and have elicited responses from Islamic leaders. Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia, observed that “the current perception in the West that not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims is not only morally and politically corrupt, but also factually unsustainable.” Ceric also said that Islam should not be labeled a “terrorist religion,” because “the violent small minority of any faith does not represent the peaceful great majority of that faith.”
[42]

Huntington’s clash is not solely between the West and Islam. In
The Clash of Civilizations
, he provided maps and descriptions of his version of how the world is divided. He wrote, “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist, or Orthodox cultures.”
[43]
Scholars and policymakers are also looking beyond Islam as they try to anticipate where crises may arise. Zbigniew Brzezinski has written about “the volatile character of Japanese and Korean nationalisms” that “could turn anti-American, igniting a regional Asianist identity that defines itself in terms of independence from American hegemony.”
[44]
That analysis may be speculative, but such a problem for the United States certainly is possible. This is just the kind of issue that news organizations should examine and plan coverage for before the crisis explodes, rather than waiting and then having to respond frantically.

Even in the Islam-West relationship, facets of civilizational clashes exist beyond those of greatest concern to Huntington. Citing findings of the World Values Survey, scholars Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris write that “when it comes to attitudes toward gender equality and sexual liberalization, the cultural gap between Islam and the West widens into a chasm.”
[45]
This is yet another approach to cultural conflict that the news media must deal with if they are going to present a comprehensive picture of the state of the world to the public.

Meanwhile, there are those who for their own purposes may wish to foster a violent clash of civilizations. A case can be made that this is a goal of al Qaeda, and if so, the chances of reaching that goal are enhanced by the opinion among many Muslims that the purpose of the United States in Iraq is in part “to weaken the Muslim world.”
[46]

Emerging from these and other plausible examples of civilizational conflict, current or prospective, is a complex mandate for 21st-century journalism. For starters, the volume of international news coverage must become more consistent. Anyone thinking that the 2003 Iraq War might mark a lasting turnaround in international news coverage probably will be disappointed. News coverage of major crises evaporates quickly. Using coverage around the time of the 1991 Gulf War as an example, the Tyndall Report found that network news coverage of Iraq went from 1,177 minutes during January 1991 to 48 minutes in August of that year.
[47]
Coverage of Afghanistan also illustrates the short attention span of many news organizations. According to the Tyndall Report, in November 2001 Afghanistan received 306 minutes of coverage; in January 2002, 106 minutes; in February 2002, 28 minutes; in January 2003, 11 minutes; in March 2003,
one
minute. Comparable declines occurred in American newspapers, and the dropoff is even more precipitous if the coverage appearing in
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
is excluded.
[48]

The news media today confront an international community that is more amorphous than in the past. Today’s “bad guys” (as defined by Western governments and media) such as al Qaeda may have no home that can be identified on a map. That produces disorientation among policymakers and news executives alike. It is hard to plan policy or design news coverage without being able to rely on traditional tools such as maps and lists of foreign ministry officials around the world.

Further complicating the task of understanding the world are the evolving communities of interest, such as the European Union and Mercosur, which make coverage of transnational entities important. Other aspects of globalization take that a step farther, as supranational economic and political interests become more significant. Giant corporations transcend nationality and are governed through cyberspace. Humanitarian emergencies in remote places that would have escaped notice in the past now come into the world’s living rooms as “virtual” crises. Non-state “armies” of terrorists compensate for their small numbers by being able to disregard borders and use media to enhance the impact of their actions.

These issues extend beyond the civilizational conflicts that Huntington describes. Policymakers and journalists have similar interests in grappling with these matters. The 9/11 Commission’s report addressed the need to engage in a “struggle of ideas.”
[49]
News coverage is part of that. While governments decide how to adapt to these new realities, the news business must realign its own priorities if journalists are to help the public develop a better sense of what is going on in the world.

Samuel Huntington’s definitions may be questioned and his conclusions challenged, but he performed a considerable service by pushing policymakers and journalists toward undertaking a more sophisticated analysis of how the world works. Perhaps the result will be more thoughtful policy and more comprehensive news coverage. Any improvement along these lines would be welcome.

 
1
.  Patrick E. Tyler and Don Van Natta Jr., “Militants in Europe Openly Call for Jihad and Rule of Islam,”
The New York Times
, 26 April 2004, p. A1.

 
2
.  Samuel P. Huntington,
“The Clash of Civilizations?”
Foreign Affairs
, 72 (Summer 1993), 22.

 
3
.  Samuel P. Huntington,
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p.
20
.

 
4
.  Bernard Gwertzman, “Memo to the
Times
Foreign Staff,”
Media Studies Journal
, 7 (Fall 1993), 34.

 
5
.  CNN interview with Peter Arnett, March 1997, “Transcript of Osama bin Laden interview by Peter Arnett,”
http://ncws.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/binladen/binladenintvw-cnn.pdf
; ABC interview with John Miller, May 1998,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/interview.html
.

 
6
.  Fouad Ajami, “The Summoning,”
Foreign Affairs
, 72 (September/October 1993), 25.

 
7
.  Richard A. Clarke, “The Wrong Debate on Terrorism,”
The New York Times
, 25 April 2004, p. WK15.

 
8
.  Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit,
Occidentalism
(New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 126.

 
9
.  Ibid., p. 147.

10
.  Charles A. Kupchan,
The End of the American Era
(New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 70.

11
.  Zbigniew Brzezinski,
The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership
(New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 59.

12
.  Thomas L. Friedman,
The Lexus and the Olive Tree
(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999), p. xvii.

13
.  Thomas L. Friedman, “War of Ideas, Part 2,”
The New York Times
, 11 January 2004, p. WK15.

14
.  Shibley Telhami, “Arabs Increasingly Define Themselves as Muslims First,”
Daily Star
, 16 July 2004.

15
.  Niall Ferguson, “Eurabia?”
New York Times Magazine
, 4 April 2004, p. 14.

16
.  Samuel P. Huntington,
“If Not Civilizations, What?”
Foreign Affairs
, 72 (November/December 1993), 93.

17
.  Adeed Dawisha, “Arab Nationalism and Islamism: Competitive Past, Uncertain Future,”
International Studies Review
, 2 (Fall 2000), 89.

18
.  Ervand Abrahamian, “The U.S. Media, Samuel Huntington, and September 11,”
Middle East Report,
No. 223 (Summer 2002), p. 62.

19
.  Howard Kurtz, “For Media After Iraq, A case of Shell Shock,”
The Washington Post
, 28 April 2003, p. A1.

20
.  Jim Lobe, “Iraq Blotted Out Rest of the World in 2003 TV News,”
Inter Press Service News Agency
,
http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=21802
.

21
.  Doctors Without Borders, “Top 10 Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories of 2003,”
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/reports/2003/top10.html
.

22
.  Terence Smith, “The Unreported Stories,”
The News Hour
, 4 March 2002.

23
.  Lucinda Fleeson, “Bureau of Missing Bureaus,”
American Journalism Review
, 25 (October/November 2003), 34.

24
.  Dwight L. Morris & Associates, “America and the World: The Impact of September 11 on U.S. Coverage of International News,” survey conducted for the Pew International Journalism Program, June 2002, p. 3.

25
.  Ibid., p. 9.

26
.  Ibid., p. 12.

27
.  Ibid., p. 3.

28
.  Ibid., p. 17.

29
.  Ibid., pp. 13-14.

30
.  Project for Excellence in Journalism, “The War on Terrorism: The Not So New Television News Landscape,” 23 May 2002,
http://www.journalism.org/resources/research/reports/landscape
, p. 2.

31
.  Morris and Associates, “America and the World,” p. 22.

32
.  David Shaw, “Foreign News Shrinks in Era of Globalization,”
Los Angeles Times
, 27 September 2001, p. A20.

33
.  Brian Whitaker, “Battle Station,”
Guardian
, 7 February 2003.

34
.  Mohammed el-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar,
Al-Jazeera
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2002), p. 100.

35
.  Neil Hickey, “Perspectives on War,”
Columbia Journalism Review
, March/April 2002, p. 40.

36
.  el-Nawawy and Iskandar, p. 20.

37
.  Huntington,
The Clash of Civilizations
, p.
177
.

38
.  Abrahamian, p. 63.

39
.  Gary R. Bunt,
Islam in the Digital Age
(London: Pluto Press, 2003), p. 211.

40
.  Internet World Stats, Usage and Population Statistics,
http://www.internetworldstats.com
.

41
.  Huntington,
The Clash of Civilizations
, p.
217
.

42
.  Mustafa Ceric, “Islam Against Terrorism,” speech delivered to the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, Vienna, Austria, 14 June 2002.