amuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the Summer 1993
issue of
Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a
surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was
intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about "a new
phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war, Huntington's
terms of argument seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. He
very clearly had his eye on rivals in the policy-making ranks,
theorists such as Francis Fukuyama and his "end of history" ideas, as
well as the legions who had celebrated the onset of globalism,
tribalism and the dissipation of the state. But they, he allowed, had
understood only some aspects of this new period. He was about to
announce the "crucial, indeed a central, aspect" of what "global
politics is likely to be in the coming years." Unhesitatingly he
pressed on:
"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental
source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily
ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among
humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.
Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs,
but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between
nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of
civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between
civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."
Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion
of something Huntington called "civilization identity" and "the
interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations,"
of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets
the lion's share of his attention. In this belligerent kind of
thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran
Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in
its title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage." In both articles, the
personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam" is
recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity
and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto
bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist
getting the upper hand over his adversary. Certainly neither
Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics
and plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major
contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or
interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility
that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in
presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. No, the West
is the West, and Islam Islam.
The challenge for Western
policy-makers, says Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets
stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular. More
troubling is Huntington's assumption that his perspective, which is
to survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary
attachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if everyone
else were scurrying around looking for the answers that he has
already found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who
wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are
not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the
myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and
that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only
to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one
of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible
history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously
compressed and constricted warfare that "the clash of civilizations"
argues is the reality. When he published his book by the same title
in 1996, Huntington tried to give his argument a little more subtlety
and many, many more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse
himself and demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he
was.
The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold
war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has
persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the
terrible events of September 11. The carefully planned and
horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass
slaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into
proof of Huntington's thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it
is--the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band
of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes--international luminaries
from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles,
and in the latter's case have used Huntington's ideas to rant on
about the West's superiority, how "we" have Mozart and Michelangelo
and they don't. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology for
his insult to "Islam.")