Clash of Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations is a thesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War world. The American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. It was proposed in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled The Clash of Civilizations?, in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

The phrase itself was earlier used by Albert Camus in 1946, by Girilal Jain in his analysis of the Ayodhya dispute in 1988, by Bernard Lewis in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled The Roots of Muslim Rage and by Mahdi El Mandjra in his book La première guerre civilisationnelle published in 1992. Even earlier, the phrase appears in a 1926 book regarding the Middle East by Basil Mathews: Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations. This expression derives from clash of cultures, already used during the colonial period and the Belle Époque.

Huntington began his thinking by surveying the diverse theories about the nature of global politics in the post–Cold War period. Some theorists and writers argued that human rights, liberal democracy, and the capitalist free market economy had become the only remaining ideological alternative for nations in the post–Cold War world. Specifically, Francis Fukuyama argued that the world had reached the end of history in a Hegelian sense.

Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict. In his thesis, he argued that the primary axis of conflict in the future will be along cultural lines. As an extension, he posits that the concept of different civilizations, as the highest category of cultural identity, will become increasingly useful in analyzing the potential for conflict. At the end of his 1993 Foreign Affairs article, The Clash of Civilizations?, Huntington writes, "This is not to advocate the desirability of conflicts between civilizations. It is to set forth descriptive hypothesis as to what the future may be like."

Major civilizations according to Huntington

thumb|center|750px|The clash of civilizations, according to Huntington (1996); The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order<br> (Western [[Christendom)

(Orthodox Christendom)

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Huntington divided the world into the major civilizations in his thesis as such:

Huntington argues that the Islamic civilization has experienced a massive population explosion which is fueling instability both on the borders of Islam and in its interior, where fundamentalist movements are becoming increasingly popular. Manifestations of what he terms the Islamic resurgence include the 1979 Iranian revolution and the first Gulf War. Perhaps the most controversial statement Huntington made in the Foreign Affairs article was, "Islam has bloody borders". Huntington believes this to be a real consequence of several factors, including the previously mentioned Muslim youth bulge and population growth and Islamic proximity to many civilizations including Sinic, Orthodox, Western, and African.

Non-Western countries can attempt to achieve isolation in order to preserve their own values and protect themselves from Western invasion. However, Huntington argues that the costs of this action are high and only a few states can pursue it.
According to the theory of bandwagoning, non-Western countries can join and accept Western values.
Non-Western countries can make an effort to balance Western power through modernization. They can develop economic/military power and cooperate with other non-Western countries against the West while still preserving their own values and institutions. Huntington believes that the increasing power of non-Western civilizations in international society will make the West begin to develop a better understanding of the cultural fundamentals underlying other civilizations. Therefore, Western civilization will cease to be regarded as universal but different civilizations will learn to coexist and join to shape the future world.

Core state and fault line conflicts

In Huntington's view, intercivilizational conflict manifests itself in two forms: fault line conflicts and core state conflicts.

These conflicts may result from a number of causes, such as: relative influence or power (military or economic), discrimination against people from a different civilization, intervention to protect kinsmen in a different civilization, or different values and culture, particularly when one civilization attempts to impose its values on people of a different civilization. If this were to happen, it would, according to Huntington, be the first to redefine its civilizational identity.

Influence

The clash of civilizations theory is known to have a substantial scholarly and policy impact. It has been widely cited, both in academic studies, and by various political figures, with studies documenting specific influences of the clash of civilizations theory. The war on terror has been theorized as both an accurate prediction of the theory, and as a result of both Western and Islamist leaders adopting the premise of a clash between their cultures. The theory has been described as a paradigm that is particularly prevalent in right wing politics across Western democracies, and was viewed as part of the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign. The theory has been used to describe right-wing ideology in Israel, particularly to justify clashes between Jews and Palestinians. It had been observed as influencing the worldview of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Islam. The clash of civilizations had also influenced Viktor Orbán in his rejection of multi-culturalism and in adding restrictions for Muslim immigration.

Criticism

The book has been criticized by various academic writers, who have empirically, historically, logically, or ideologically challenged its claims. Political scientist Paul Musgrave writes that Clash of Civilization "enjoys great cachet among the sort of policymaker who enjoys name-dropping Sun Tzu, but few specialists in international relations rely on it or even cite it approvingly. Bluntly, Clash has not proven to be a useful or accurate guide to understanding the world." Other books, written for the general public, similarly challenge Huntington's contentious claims. For example, in his work Identity and Violence: The illusion of destiny, The Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen advances several critiques of Huntington's main concept of an inevitable Clash along civilizational lines. He argues that violence occurs when individuals see each other as having a singular affiliation (e.g., Hindu, Muslim, Christian), as opposed to multiple affiliations: e.g., Hindu, woman, housewife, mother, artist, daughter, member of a particular socio-economic class etc. In this sense, and to the detriment of civilization distinctiveness, it is argued that all of these dimensions can, and should be a source of a personal identity.

Moreover, in an article explicitly referring to Huntington, the same scholar Amartya Sen (1999) argues that "diversity is a feature of most cultures in the world. Western civilization is no exception. The practice of democracy that has won out in the modern West is largely a result of a consensus that has emerged since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and particularly in the last century or so. To read in this a historical commitment of the West—over the millennia—to democracy, and then to contrast it with non-Western traditions (treating each as monolithic) would be a great mistake."

In his 2003 book Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman argues that distinct cultural boundaries do not exist in the present day. He argues there is "no Islamic civilization nor a Western civilization", and that the evidence for a civilization clash is not convincing, especially when considering relationships such as that between the United States and Saudi Arabia. In addition, he cites the fact that many Islamic extremists spent a significant amount of time living or studying in the Western world. According to Berman, conflict arises because of philosophical beliefs various groups share (or do not share), regardless of cultural or religious identity.

Timothy Garton Ash objects to the "extreme cultural determinism... crude to the point of parody" of Huntington's idea that Catholic and Protestant Europe is headed for democracy, but that Orthodox Christian and Islamic Europe must accept dictatorship.

The clash of civilizations has been criticized as promoting an ideologically conservative attempt to maintain the imperial gains from Western colonialism. Edward Said issued a response to Huntington's thesis in his 2001 article, The Clash of Ignorance. Said argues that Huntington's categorization of the world's fixed civilizations "omits the dynamic interdependency and interaction of culture". A longtime critic of the Huntingtonian paradigm, and an outspoken proponent of Arab issues, Said (2004) also argues that the clash of civilizations thesis is an example of "the purest invidious racism, a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims" (p. 293).

Noam Chomsky has criticized the concept of the clash of civilizations as just being a new justification for the United States "for any atrocities that they wanted to carry out", which was required after the Cold War as the Soviet Union was no longer a viable threat.

In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari called the clash of civilizations a misleading thesis. He wrote that Islamic fundamentalism is more of a threat to a global civilization, rather than a confrontation with the West. He also argued that talking about civilizations using analogies from evolutionary biology is wrong.

Nathan J. Robinson criticizes Huntington's thesis as inconsistent. He notes that according to Huntington, "Spanish-speaking Catholic-majority Spain is West, while Spanish-speaking Catholic-majority Mexico is not part of Western civilization, and instead belongs with Brazil as part of Latin American civilization." Robinson concludes, "If you look at the map and think these divisions make sense, which you might, it is because what you are mostly seeing here is a map of prejudices. [Huntington] indeed shows how a lot of people think of the world, especially in America."

The literary criticism podcast If Books Could Kill raises the concern that Huntington may be seen as publishing genocide apologia, uncritically repeating verbatim the assertions of Serbian soldiers during the Bosnian genocide that ethnic cleansing is necessary due to the high Muslim Albanian birth rate.

In his 1993 article, Huntington wrote that "If civilization is what counts … the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each other for centuries". 29 years later, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Intermediate Region

Huntington's geopolitical model, especially the structures for North Africa and Eurasia, is largely derived from the Intermediate Region geopolitical model first formulated by Dimitri Kitsikis and published in 1978. The Intermediate Region, which spans the Adriatic Sea and the Indus River, is neither Western nor Eastern (at least, with respect to the Far East) but is considered distinct. Concerning this region, Huntington departs from Kitsikis contending that a civilizational fault line exists between the two dominant yet differing religions (Eastern Orthodoxy and Sunni Islam), hence a dynamic of external conflict. However, Kitsikis establishes an integrated civilization comprising these two peoples along with those belonging to the less dominant religions of Shia Islam, Alevism, and Judaism. They have a set of mutual cultural, social, economic and political views and norms which radically differ from those in the West and the Far East. In the Intermediate Region, therefore, one cannot speak of a civilizational clash or external conflict, but rather an internal conflict, not for cultural domination, but for political succession. This has been successfully demonstrated by documenting the rise of Christianity from the Hellenized Roman Empire, the rise of the Islamic caliphates from the Christianized Roman Empire and the rise of Ottoman Empire from the Islamic caliphates and the Christianized Roman Empire.

Opposing concepts

thumb|left|upright|[[Mohammad Khatami, reformist president of Iran (in office 1997–2005), introduced the theory of Dialogue Among Civilizations as a response to Huntington's theory.]]

In recent years, the theory of Dialogue Among Civilizations, a response to Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, has become the center of some international attention. The concept was originally coined by Austrian philosopher Hans Köchler in an essay on cultural identity (1972). In a letter to UNESCO, Köchler had earlier proposed that the cultural organization of the United Nations should take up the issue of a "dialogue between different civilizations" (). In 2001, Mohammad Khatami, then Iranian president, introduced the concept at the global level. At his initiative, the United Nations proclaimed the year 2001 as the "United Nations Year of Dialogue among Civilizations".

The Alliance of Civilizations (AOC) initiative was proposed at the 59th General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005 by the Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and co-sponsored by the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The initiative is intended to galvanize collective action across diverse societies to combat extremism, to overcome cultural and social barriers between mainly the Western and predominantly Muslim worlds, and to reduce the tensions and polarization between societies which differ in religious and cultural values.

References

Bibliography

Barbé, Philippe, L'Anti-Choc des Civilisations: Méditations Méditerranéennes, Editions de l'Aube, 2006,
Barber, Benjamin R., Jihad vs. McWorld, Hardcover: Crown, 1995, ; Paperback: Ballantine Books, 1996,
Blankley, Tony, The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?, Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2005
Harris, Lee, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History, New York, The Free Press, 2004
Harrison, Lawrence E. and Samuel P. Huntington (eds.), Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, New York, Basic Books, 2001
Haynes, Jeffrey, ed. A Quarter Century of the" clash of Civilizations". Routledge, 2021.
Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations?, in "Foreign Affairs", vol. 72, no. 3, Summer 1993, pp. 22–49
Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996
Huntington, Samuel P. (ed.), The Clash of Civilizations?: The Debate, New York, Foreign Affairs, 1996
Kepel, Gilles, Bad Moon Rising: a chronicle of the Middle East today, London, Saqi Books, 2003
Köchler, Hans (ed.), Civilizations: Conflict or Dialogue?, Vienna, International Progress Organization, 1999 (Google Print)
Köchler, Hans, After September 11, 2001: Clash of Civilizations or Dialogue? University of the Philippines, Manila, 2002
Köchler, Hans, The "Clash of Civilizations": Perception and Reality in the Context of Globalization and International Power Politics, Tbilisi (Georgia), 2004
Pera, Marcello and Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Senza radici: Europa, Relativismo, Cristianesimo, Islam [transl.: Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Perseus Books Group, 2006 ], Milano, Mondadori, 2004
Peters, Ralph, Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Stackpole Books, 1999
Potter, Robert (2011), 'Recalcitrant Interdependence', Thesis, Flinders University
Sacks, Jonathan, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, London, Continuum, 2002
Toft, Monica Duffy, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and the Indivisibility of Territory, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2003
Tusicisny, Andrej, "Civilizational Conflicts: More Frequent, Longer, and Bloodier?", in Journal of Peace Research, vol. 41, no. 4, 2004, pp. 485–498 (available online)
Van Creveld, Martin, The Transformation of War, New York & London, The Free Press, 1991
Venn, Couze "Clash of Civilisations", in Prem Poddar et al., Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures—Continental Europe and its Empires, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

External links

"The Clash of Civilizations?" – Original essay from Foreign Affairs 1993
"If Not Civilizations, What? Samuel Huntington Responds to His Critics", Foreign Affairs, 1993

Clash of Civilizations

Major civilizations according to Huntington

Core state and fault line conflicts

Influence

Criticism

Intermediate Region

Opposing concepts

See also

Other civilizational models

Individuals

Other

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links