The Clash of Civilizations
Introduction:
New York: Simon & Schuster. Readers of this journal have undoubtedly encountered other reviews of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and know that it is not a work of history. But Huntington belongs to that dwindling cohort of political scientists who not only know their history but also believe that contemporary world politics cannot be understood apart from it.
What is more, since experts on international affairs must address not only the foreign policies of all the great powers, but also all the domestic influences that help shape those policies, serious diplomatic historians and political scientists must necessarily be generalists.
It is no accident that world historians of the caliber of Arnold Toynbee and William H. McNeill have been among the keenest observers of contemporary global trends and that political scientists of Huntington’s caliber are sober students of history.
A final point of convergence lies in the fact that such “big thinkers”—and one might add Carroll Quigley, Adda Bozeman, Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others to the list—have all insisted that the civilization, not the nation-state, race, class, or gender, is the most fundamental unit of human interaction over the lounge duree´. What Huntington has to say about civilizations today, therefore, is of keen interest to historians, however much they may challenge the author’s specific formulations
What is more, since experts on international affairs must address not only the foreign policies of all the great powers, but also all the domestic influences that help shape those policies, serious diplomatic historians and political scientists must necessarily be generalists.
It is no accident that world historians of the caliber of Arnold Toynbee and William H. McNeill have been among the keenest observers of contemporary global trends and that political scientists of Huntington’s caliber are sober students of history.
A final point of convergence lies in the fact that such “big thinkers”—and one might add Carroll Quigley, Adda Bozeman, Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others to the list—have all insisted that the civilization, not the nation-state, race, class, or gender, is the most fundamental unit of human interaction over the lounge duree´. What Huntington has to say about civilizations today, therefore, is of keen interest to historians, however much they may challenge the author’s specific formulations
Clash of Civilizations at first times :
Huntington was not alone in predicting that old cultural cleavages would come to the fore once the cold war’s artificial ideological bipolarity disappeared. In a review of Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987) I myself suggested that the five-hundred-year “civil war” within the West might give way to inter civilization conflict, and in a 1989 article I imagined that the end of the cold war might permit a secularized “Christendom” to re imagine itself civilization embodying There are groups with shared values, whether religious, political, or social.
But so thoroughly has Huntington documented the emergent clash of civilizations that. he is justified in his claim to have fashioned a new Kuhni an paradigm.
But so thoroughly has Huntington documented the emergent clash of civilizations that. he is justified in his claim to have fashioned a new Kuhni an paradigm.
Huntington’s paradigm works :
The question is whether Huntington’s paradigm works. The anecdotal evidence he offers is impressive, ranging from the ethnic religious conflict in the Balkans (in which Russia supports the Serbs, and Turkey and Iran the Bosnians) to the prospects for expansion of NATO, European resistance to Muslim immigrants, the congeries of Sino American disputes, and the widespread resistance to Western universals such as human rights, free trade, environmentalism, nonproliferation of nuclear and biological weapons, and women’s issues.
His theory of cultural conflict would seem to explain the new world disorder much better than do traditional liberal, realist (balance of power), or modernization theories. But to sustain the argument, Huntington needs to show that the process of Westernization, which according to Francis Fukuyama must soon lead to the triumph of Euro-American technology and values everywhere, is a myth.
English may be the world’s commercial tongue, the Internet may link us all, and the economy may truly be global, but “convergence”—another cold war conceit—is a chimera. Huntington thus distinguished modernization, a purely material process, from Westernization a value-laden process against which Muslims, Asians, Russians, and perhaps Africans increasingly rebel.
The great enterprise of non-Western peoples in the present age, he says, is to modernize while at the same time preserving the distinctive cultural heritages that define them over against the rest of the human race: “We will be modern but we won’t be you” (p. 101).
His theory of cultural conflict would seem to explain the new world disorder much better than do traditional liberal, realist (balance of power), or modernization theories. But to sustain the argument, Huntington needs to show that the process of Westernization, which according to Francis Fukuyama must soon lead to the triumph of Euro-American technology and values everywhere, is a myth.
English may be the world’s commercial tongue, the Internet may link us all, and the economy may truly be global, but “convergence”—another cold war conceit—is a chimera. Huntington thus distinguished modernization, a purely material process, from Westernization a value-laden process against which Muslims, Asians, Russians, and perhaps Africans increasingly rebel.
The great enterprise of non-Western peoples in the present age, he says, is to modernize while at the same time preserving the distinctive cultural heritages that define them over against the rest of the human race: “We will be modern but we won’t be you” (p. 101).
Dividing the world into civilizations:
Is an old amusing game. Huntington settles on nine: Western, Latin American, sub-Saharan African, Islamic, Hindu, Sinic, Buddhist
Japanese, and Orthodox. This taxonomy is based on his postulate to the effect that “the. most important distinctions among people are not ideological, political, or economic.
We in the West have liked to believe, on the basis of Christian prophecy or Enlightenment reason, that the march of “civilization” (in the singular) would in time encompass all peoples, and that seemed plausible during the centuries of Western hegemony.
But that era is ending. Western technological, economic, and military dominance is waning, the percentage of “white people” within the human race peaked around 1910 and is fast declining, and the reassertion of non-Western traditions, especially in religion, is everywhere evident. As Huntington sees it, Gill es Kepel’s “la revanche de Dieu” has trumped Fukuyama’s “end of history.” That is where history comes in, for Huntington justifies his drawing of boundaries on the basis of centuries- and sometimes millennia-old memories of bygone clashes of civilizations rooted in racial and religious diversity and stoked by demographic surges and migrations.
The missionaries of Rome and Byzantium split early Medieval Europe and migrations. The missionaries of Rome and Byzantium split early Medieval Europe into two civilizations, and the line between them is as sharp as ever. The flood tides of Islamic, Hispanic, and Chinese imperialism and Tokugawa Japan’s self-imposed isolation likewise forged cultural boundaries that are as relevant now as in the seventeenth century. Latin America and Africa, Huntington grants, are more problematical in terms of cohesion and self-image, but in terms of world power neither are they of moment at present.
But that era is ending. Western technological, economic, and military dominance is waning, the percentage of “white people” within the human race peaked around 1910 and is fast declining, and the reassertion of non-Western traditions, especially in religion, is everywhere evident. As Huntington sees it, Gill es Kepel’s “la revanche de Dieu” has trumped Fukuyama’s “end of history.” That is where history comes in, for Huntington justifies his drawing of boundaries on the basis of centuries- and sometimes millennia-old memories of bygone clashes of civilizations rooted in racial and religious diversity and stoked by demographic surges and migrations.
The missionaries of Rome and Byzantium split early Medieval Europe and migrations. The missionaries of Rome and Byzantium split early Medieval Europe into two civilizations, and the line between them is as sharp as ever. The flood tides of Islamic, Hispanic, and Chinese imperialism and Tokugawa Japan’s self-imposed isolation likewise forged cultural boundaries that are as relevant now as in the seventeenth century. Latin America and Africa, Huntington grants, are more problematical in terms of cohesion and self-image, but in terms of world power neither are they of moment at present.
The truth behind various civilizations:
What is momentous is the fact that most civilizations have core states devoted to protecting their respective values: the United States is the Western core state, and China Japan, Russia, and India are others.
In the future, as in the per-Colombian (or at least per industrial) past, two types of conflicts will define world politics. The first, “fault line conflicts,” will rage wherever civilizations meet or overlap, for instance in “cleft states” such as the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Turkey, and Mexico.
Where no core state exists to harness its coreligionists (as is the case with Islam), such conflicts may be especially hard to control. The second, “core-state conflicts,” have the potential to ignite world war. They may emerge, in Huntington’s view, from precisely the sort of imposition of values on another civilization characteristic of Wilsonian diplomacy.
In the future, as in the per-Colombian (or at least per industrial) past, two types of conflicts will define world politics. The first, “fault line conflicts,” will rage wherever civilizations meet or overlap, for instance in “cleft states” such as the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Turkey, and Mexico.
Where no core state exists to harness its coreligionists (as is the case with Islam), such conflicts may be especially hard to control. The second, “core-state conflicts,” have the potential to ignite world war. They may emerge, in Huntington’s view, from precisely the sort of imposition of values on another civilization characteristic of Wilsonian diplomacy.
In other words, the very policies the United States may deem necessary to pacify the world such as pressing for human rights in Asia, may strike other core states as intolerable meddling in “their” civilization and so provoke a violent reaction.
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