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A Look Back At A Predicted 'Clash Of Civilizations'

It was 20 years ago that Samuel Huntington's essay on what he termed "the clash of civilizations" was first published in the journal Foreign Affairs. The essay predicted the next frontier of global conflict would occur along cultural cleavages — most prominently between the Islamic world and the West. Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose and Robert Siegel discuss how perceptions of the essay have changed over time.

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Samuel Huntington and the Geopolitics of American Identity: The Function of Foreign Policy in America’s Domestic Clash of Civilizations

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Emad El-Din Aysha, Samuel Huntington and the Geopolitics of American Identity: The Function of Foreign Policy in America’s Domestic Clash of Civilizations, International Studies Perspectives , Volume 4, Issue 2, May 2003, Pages 113–132, https://doi.org/10.1111/1528-3577.402001

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The clash of civilizations thesis’s true origins lie partly in problems Samuel Huntington sees brewing in his own country. His thesis is to a considerable extent an externalization of these troubles—an attempt to solve them through international means, while serving U.S. national interests in tandem. As a scholar of American exceptionalism Huntington is—explicitly and openly—concerned about the political unity and cultural homogeneity of his country in the absence of the existential threat of world Communism. He sees “multiculturalism” and excessive immigration threatening America’s dominant Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, English culture and its libertarian political values. Right-wing “anti-federalism” is threatening the authority and very existence of the federal government, while “commercialism,” the elevation of commercial interests above all else among economic and political elites, intensifies the class conflict roots of much anti-federalism. The solution to these myriad problems is a foreign threat, whether real or perceived; hence, the clash of civilizations.

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The Clash of Civilizations?

By samuel p. huntington, the next pattern of conflict.

World politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be—the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years.

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.

Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern international system with the Peace of Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were largely among princes—emperors, absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mercantilist economic strength and, most important, the territory they ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution the principal lines of conflict were between nations rather than princes. In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, "The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun." This nineteenth-century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, neither of which was a nation state in the classical European sense and each of which defined its identity in terms of its ideology.

These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, "Western civil wars," as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its centerpiece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.

THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATIONS

During the cold war the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds. Those divisions are no longer relevant. It is far more meaningful now to group countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.

What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? A civilization is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilizations. A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies. People can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and boundaries of civilizations change.

Civilizations may involve a large number of people, as with China ("a civilization pretending to be a state," as Lucian Pye put it), or a very small number of people, such as the Anglophone Caribbean. A civilization may include several nation states, as is the case with Western, Latin American and Arab civilizations, or only one, as is the case with Japanese civilization. Civilizations obviously blend and overlap, and may include subcivilizations. Western civilization has two major variants, European and North American, and Islam has its Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions. Civilizations are nonetheless meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are seldom sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time.

Westerners tend to think of nation states as the principal actors in global affairs. They have been that, however, for only a few centuries. The broader reaches of human history have been the history of civilizations. In A Study of History , Arnold Toynbee identified 21 major civilizations; only six of them exist in the contemporary world.

WHY CIVILIZATIONS WILL CLASH

Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.

Why will this be the case?

First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion. The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes. Differences do not necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily mean violence. Over the centuries, however, differences among civilizations have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts.

Second, the world is becoming a smaller place. The interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness and awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities within civilizations. North African immigration to France generates hostility among Frenchmen and at the same time increased receptivity to immigration by "good'' European Catholic Poles. Americans react far more negatively to Japanese investment than to larger investments from Canada and European countries. Similarly, as Donald Horowitz has pointed out, "An Ibo may be ... an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in what was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he is simply an Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an African." The interactions among peoples of different civilizations enhance the civilization-consciousness of people that, in turn, invigorates differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch back deep into history.

Third, the processes of economic modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local identities. They also weaken the nation state as a source of identity. In much of the world religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled "fundamentalist." Such movements are found in Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as in Islam. In most countries and most religions the people active in fundamentalist movements are young, college-educated, middle-class technicians, professionals and business persons. The "unsecularization of the world," George Weigel has remarked, "is one of the dominant social facts of life in the late twentieth century." The revival of religion, "la revanche de Dieu," as Gilles Kepel labeled it, provides a basis for identity and commitment that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations.

Fourth, the growth of civilization-consciousness is enhanced by the dual role of the West. On the one hand, the West is at a peak of power. At the same time, however, and perhaps as a result, a return to the roots phenomenon is occurring among non-Western civilizations. Increasingly one hears references to trends toward a turning inward and "Asianization" in Japan, the end of the Nehru legacy and the "Hinduization" of India, the failure of Western ideas of socialism and nationalism and hence "re-Islamization" of the Middle East, and now a debate over Westernization versus Russianization in Boris Yeltsin's country. A West at the peak of its power confronts non-Wests that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to shape the world in non-Western ways.

In the past, the elites of non-Western societies were usually the people who were most involved with the West, had been educated at Oxford, the Sorbonne or Sandhurst, and had absorbed Western attitudes and values. At the same time, the populace in non-Western countries often remained deeply imbued with the indigenous culture. Now, however, these relationships are being reversed. A de-Westernization and indigenization of elites is occurring in many non-Western countries at the same time that Western, usually American, cultures, styles and habits become more popular among the mass of the people.

Fifth, cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones. In the former Soviet Union, communists can become democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians cannot become Estonians and Azeris cannot become Armenians. In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was "Which side are you on?" and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between civilizations, the question is "What are you?" That is a given that cannot be changed. And as we know, from Bosnia to the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can mean a bullet in the head. Even more than ethnicity, religion discriminates sharply and exclusively among people. A person can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim.

Finally, economic regionalism is increasing. The proportions of total trade that were intraregional rose between 1980 and 1989 from 51 percent to 59 percent in Europe, 33 percent to 37 percent in East Asia, and 32 percent to 36 percent in North America. The importance of regional economic blocs is likely to continue to increase in the future. On the one hand, successful economic regionalism will reinforce civilization-consciousness. On the other hand, economic regionalism may succeed only when it is rooted in a common civilization. The European Community rests on the shared foundation of European culture and Western Christianity. The success of the North American Free Trade Area depends on the convergence now underway of Mexican, Canadian and American cultures. Japan, in contrast, faces difficulties in creating a comparable economic entity in East Asia because Japan is a society and civilization unique to itself. However strong the trade and investment links Japan may develop with other East Asian countries, its cultural differences with those countries inhibit and perhaps preclude its promoting regional economic integration like that in Europe and North America.

Common culture, in contrast, is clearly facilitating the rapid expansion of the economic relations between the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the overseas Chinese communities in other Asian countries. With the Cold War over, cultural commonalities increasingly overcome ideological differences, and mainland China and Taiwan move closer together. If cultural commonality is a prerequisite for economic integration, the principal East Asian economic bloc of the future is likely to be centered on China. This bloc is, in fact, already coming into existence. As Murray Weidenbaum has observed,

Despite the current Japanese dominance of the region, the Chinese-based economy of Asia is rapidly emerging as a new epicenter for industry, commerce and finance. This strategic area contains substantial amounts of technology and manufacturing capability (Taiwan), outstanding entrepreneurial, marketing and services acumen (Hong Kong), a fine communications network (Singapore), a tremendous pool of financial capital (all three), and very large endowments of land, resources and labor (mainland China).... From Guangzhou to Singapore, from Kuala Lumpur to Manila, this influential network—often based on extensions of the traditional clans—has been described as the backbone of the East Asian economy.[1]

Culture and religion also form the basis of the Economic Cooperation Organization, which brings together ten non-Arab Muslim countries: Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. One impetus to the revival and expansion of this organization, founded originally in the 1960s by Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, is the realization by the leaders of several of these countries that they had no chance of admission to the European Community. Similarly, Caricom, the Central American Common Market and Mercosur rest on common cultural foundations. Efforts to build a broader Caribbean-Central American economic entity bridging the Anglo-Latin divide, however, have to date failed.

As people define their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they are likely to see an "us" versus "them" relation existing between themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion. The end of ideologically defined states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union permits traditional ethnic identities and animosities to come to the fore. Differences in culture and religion create differences over policy issues, ranging from human rights to immigration to trade and commerce to the environment. Geographical propinquity gives rise to conflicting territorial claims from Bosnia to Mindanao. Most important, the efforts of the West to promote its values of democracy and liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military predominance and to advance its economic interests engender countering responses from other civilizations. Decreasingly able to mobilize support and form coalitions on the basis of ideology, governments and groups will increasingly attempt to mobilize support by appealing to common religion and civilization identity.

The clash of civilizations thus occurs at two levels. At the micro- level, adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations struggle, often violently, over the control of territory and each other. At the macro-level, states from different civilizations compete for relative military and economic power, struggle over the control of international institutions and third parties, and competitively promote their particular political and religious values.

THE FAULT LINES BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS

The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed. The Cold War began when the Iron Curtain divided Europe politically and ideologically. The Cold War ended with the end of the Iron Curtain. As the ideological division of Europe has disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has reemerged. The most significant dividing line in Europe, as William Wallace has suggested, may well be the eastern boundary of Western Christianity in the year 1500. This line runs along what are now the boundaries between Finland and Russia and between the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through Belarus and Ukraine separating the more Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox eastern Ukraine, swings westward separating Transylvania from the rest of Romania, and then goes through Yugoslavia almost exactly along the line now separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia. In the Balkans this line, of course, coincides with the historic boundary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The peoples to the north and west of this line are Protestant or Catholic; they shared the common experiences of European history—feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution; they are generally economically better off than the peoples to the east; and they may now look forward to increasing involvement in a common European economy and to the consolidation of democratic political systems. The peoples to the east and south of this line are Orthodox or Muslim; they historically belonged to the Ottoman or Tsarist empires and were only lightly touched by the shaping events in the rest of Europe; they are generally less advanced economically; they seem much less likely to develop stable democratic political systems. The Velvet Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ideology as the most significant dividing line in Europe. As the events in Yugoslavia show, it is not only a line of difference; it is also at times a line of bloody conflict.

Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. After the founding of Islam, the Arab and Moorish surge west and north only ended at Tours in 732. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the Crusaders attempted with temporary success to bring Christianity and Christian rule to the Holy Land. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Turks reversed the balance, extended their sway over the Middle East and the Balkans, captured Constantinople, and twice laid siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Ottoman power declined Britain, France, and Italy established Western control over most of North Africa and the Middle East.

After World War II, the West, in turn, began to retreat; the colonial empires disappeared; first Arab nationalism and then Islamic fundamentalism manifested themselves; the West became heavily dependent on the Persian Gulf countries for its energy; the oil-rich Muslim countries became money-rich and, when they wished to, weapons-rich. Several wars occurred between Arabs and Israel (created by the West). France fought a bloody and ruthless war in Algeria for most of the 1950s; British and French forces invaded Egypt in 1956; American forces went into Lebanon in 1958; subsequently American forces returned to Lebanon, attacked Libya, and engaged in various military encounters with Iran; Arab and Islamic terrorists, supported by at least three Middle Eastern governments, employed the weapon of the weak and bombed Western planes and installations and seized Western hostages. This warfare between Arabs and the West culminated in 1990, when the United States sent a massive army to the Persian Gulf to defend some Arab countries against aggression by another. In its aftermath NATO planning is increasingly directed to potential threats and instability along its "southern tier."

This centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent. The Gulf War left some Arabs feeling proud that Saddam Hussein had attacked Israel and stood up to the West. It also left many feeling humiliated and resentful of the West's military presence in the Persian Gulf, the West's overwhelming military dominance, and their apparent inability to shape their own destiny. Many Arab countries, in addition to the oil exporters, are reaching levels of economic and social development where autocratic forms of government become inappropriate and efforts to introduce democracy become stronger. Some openings in Arab political systems have already occurred. The principal beneficiaries of these openings have been Islamist movements. In the Arab world, in short, Western democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces. This may be a passing phenomenon, but it surely complicates relations between Islamic countries and the West.

Those relations are also complicated by demography. The spectacular population growth in Arab countries, particularly in North Africa, has led to increased migration to Western Europe. The movement within Western Europe toward minimizing internal boundaries has sharpened political sensitivities with respect to this development. In Italy, France and Germany, racism is increasingly open, and political reactions and violence against Arab and Turkish migrants have become more intense and more widespread since 1990.

On both sides the interaction between Islam and the West is seen as a clash of civilizations. The West's "next confrontation," observes M. J. Akbar, an Indian Muslim author, "is definitely going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin." Bernard Lewis comes to a similar conclusion:

We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.[2]

Historically, the other great antagonistic interaction of Arab Islamic civilization has been with the pagan, animist, and now increasingly Christian black peoples to the south. In the past, this antagonism was epitomized in the image of Arab slave dealers and black slaves. It has been reflected in the on-going civil war in the Sudan between Arabs and blacks, the fighting in Chad between Libyan-supported insurgents and the government, the tensions between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the Horn of Africa, and the political conflicts, recurring riots and communal violence between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. The modernization of Africa and the spread of Christianity are likely to enhance the probability of violence along this fault line. Symptomatic of the intensification of this conflict was the Pope John Paul II's speech in Khartoum in February 1993 attacking the actions of the Sudan's Islamist government against the Christian minority there.

On the northern border of Islam, conflict has increasingly erupted between Orthodox and Muslim peoples, including the carnage of Bosnia and Sarajevo, the simmering violence between Serb and Albanian, the tenuous relations between Bulgarians and their Turkish minority, the violence between Ossetians and Ingush, the unremitting slaughter of each other by Armenians and Azeris, the tense relations between Russians and Muslims in Central Asia, and the deployment of Russian troops to protect Russian interests in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Religion reinforces the revival of ethnic identities and restimulates Russian fears about the security of their southern borders. This concern is well captured by Archie Roosevelt:

Much of Russian history concerns the struggle between the Slavs and the Turkic peoples on their borders, which dates back to the foundation of the Russian state more than a thousand years ago. In the Slavs' millennium-long confrontation with their eastern neighbors lies the key to an understanding not only of Russian history, but Russian character. To understand Russian realities today one has to have a concept of the great Turkic ethnic group that has preoccupied Russians through the centuries.[3]

The conflict of civilizations is deeply rooted elsewhere in Asia. The historic clash between Muslim and Hindu in the subcontinent manifests itself now not only in the rivalry between Pakistan and India but also in intensifying religious strife within India between increasingly militant Hindu groups and India's substantial Muslim minority. The destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in December 1992 brought to the fore the issue of whether India will remain a secular democratic state or become a Hindu one. In East Asia, China has outstanding territorial disputes with most of its neighbors. It has pursued a ruthless policy toward the Buddhist people of Tibet, and it is pursuing an increasingly ruthless policy toward its Turkic-Muslim minority. With the Cold War over, the underlying differences between China and the United States have reasserted themselves in areas such as human rights, trade and weapons proliferation. These differences are unlikely to moderate. A "new cold war," Deng Xaioping reportedly asserted in 1991, is under way between China and America.

The same phrase has been applied to the increasingly difficult relations between Japan and the United States. Here cultural difference exacerbates economic conflict. People on each side allege racism on the other, but at least on the American side the antipathies are not racial but cultural. The basic values, attitudes, behavioral patterns of the two societies could hardly be more different. The economic issues between the United States and Europe are no less serious than those between the United States and Japan, but they do not have the same political salience and emotional intensity because the differences between American culture and European culture are so much less than those between American civilization and Japanese civilization.

The interactions between civilizations vary greatly in the extent to which they are likely to be characterized by violence. Economic competition clearly predominates between the American and European subcivilizations of the West and between both of them and Japan. On the Eurasian continent, however, the proliferation of ethnic conflict, epitomized at the extreme in "ethnic cleansing," has not been totally random. It has been most frequent and most violent between groups belonging to different civilizations. In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.

CIVILIZATION RALLYING: THE KIN-COUNTRY SYNDROME

Groups or states belonging to one civilization that become involved in war with people from a different civilization naturally try to rally support from other members of their own civilization. As the post-Cold War world evolves, civilization commonality, what H. D. S. Greenway has termed the "kin-country" syndrome, is replacing political ideology and traditional balance of power considerations as the principal basis for cooperation and coalitions. It can be seen gradually emerging in the post-Cold War conflicts in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia. None of these was a full-scale war between civilizations, but each involved some elements of civilizational rallying, which seemed to become more important as the conflict continued and which may provide a foretaste of the future.

First, in the Gulf War one Arab state invaded another and then fought a coalition of Arab, Western and other states. While only a few Muslim governments overtly supported Saddam Hussein, many Arab elites privately cheered him on, and he was highly popular among large sections of the Arab publics. Islamic fundamentalist movements universally supported Iraq rather than the Western-backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Forswearing Arab nationalism, Saddam Hussein explicitly invoked an Islamic appeal. He and his supporters attempted to define the war as a war between civilizations. "It is not the world against Iraq," as Safar Al-Hawali, dean of Islamic Studies at the Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, put it in a widely circulated tape. "It is the West against Islam." Ignoring the rivalry between Iran and Iraq, the chief Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for a holy war against the West: "The struggle against American aggression, greed, plans and policies will be counted as a jihad, and anybody who is killed on that path is a martyr." "This is a war," King Hussein of Jordan argued, "against all Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq alone."

The rallying of substantial sections of Arab elites and publics behind Saddam Hussein caused those Arab governments in the anti-Iraq coalition to moderate their activities and temper their public statements. Arab governments opposed or distanced themselves from subsequent Western efforts to apply pressure on Iraq, including enforcement of a no-fly zone in the summer of 1992 and the bombing of Iraq in January 1993. The Western-Soviet-Turkish-Arab anti-Iraq coalition of 1990 had by 1993 become a coalition of almost only the West and Kuwait against Iraq.

Muslims contrasted Western actions against Iraq with the West's failure to protect Bosnians against Serbs and to impose sanctions on Israel for violating U.N. resolutions. The West, they alleged, was using a double standard. A world of clashing civilizations, however, is inevitably a world of double standards: people apply one standard to their kin-countries and a different standard to others.

Second, the kin-country syndrome also appeared in conflicts in the former Soviet Union. Armenian military successes in 1992 and 1993 stimulated Turkey to become increasingly supportive of its religious, ethnic and linguistic brethren in Azerbaijan. "We have a Turkish nation feeling the same sentiments as the Azerbaijanis," said one Turkish official in 1992. "We are under pressure. Our newspapers are full of the photos of atrocities and are asking us if we are still serious about pursuing our neutral policy. Maybe we should show Armenia that there's a big Turkey in the region." President Turgut Özal agreed, remarking that Turkey should at least "scare the Armenians a little bit." Turkey, Özal threatened again in 1993, would "show its fangs." Turkish Air Force jets flew reconnaissance flights along the Armenian border; Turkey suspended food shipments and air flights to Armenia; and Turkey and Iran announced they would not accept dismemberment of Azerbaijan. In the last years of its existence, the Soviet government supported Azerbaijan because its government was dominated by former communists. With the end of the Soviet Union, however, political considerations gave way to religious ones. Russian troops fought on the side of the Armenians, and Azerbaijan accused the "Russian government of turning 180 degrees" toward support for Christian Armenia.

Third, with respect to the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, Western publics manifested sympathy and support for the Bosnian Muslims and the horrors they suffered at the hands of the Serbs. Relatively little concern was expressed, however, over Croatian attacks on Muslims and participation in the dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the early stages of the Yugoslav breakup, Germany, in an unusual display of diplomatic initiative and muscle, induced the other 11 members of the European Community to follow its lead in recognizing Slovenia and Croatia. As a result of the pope's determination to provide strong backing to the two Catholic countries, the Vatican extended recognition even before the Community did. The United States followed the European lead. Thus the leading actors in Western civilization rallied behind their coreligionists. Subsequently Croatia was reported to be receiving substantial quantities of arms from Central European and other Western countries. Boris Yeltsin's government, on the other hand, attempted to pursue a middle course that would be sympathetic to the Orthodox Serbs but not alienate Russia from the West. Russian conservative and nationalist groups, however, including many legislators, attacked the government for not being more forthcoming in its support for the Serbs. By early 1993 several hundred Russians apparently were serving with the Serbian forces, and reports circulated of Russian arms being supplied to Serbia.

Islamic governments and groups, on the other hand, castigated the West for not coming to the defense of the Bosnians. Iranian leaders urged Muslims from all countries to provide help to Bosnia; in violation of the U.N. arms embargo, Iran supplied weapons and men for the Bosnians; Iranian-supported Lebanese groups sent guerrillas to train and organize the Bosnian forces. In 1993 up to 4,000 Muslims from over two dozen Islamic countries were reported to be fighting in Bosnia. The governments of Saudi Arabia and other countries felt under increasing pressure from fundamentalist groups in their own societies to provide more vigorous support for the Bosnians. By the end of 1992, Saudi Arabia had reportedly supplied substantial funding for weapons and supplies for the Bosnians, which significantly increased their military capabilities vis-à-vis the Serbs.

In the 1930s the Spanish Civil War provoked intervention from countries that politically were fascist, communist and democratic. In the 1990s the Yugoslav conflict is provoking intervention from countries that are Muslim, Orthodox and Western Christian. The parallel has not gone unnoticed. "The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has become the emotional equivalent of the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War," one Saudi editor observed. "Those who died there are regarded as martyrs who tried to save their fellow Muslims."

Conflicts and violence will also occur between states and groups within the same civilization. Such conflicts, however, are likely to be less intense and less likely to expand than conflicts between civilizations. Common membership in a civilization reduces the probability of violence in situations where it might otherwise occur. In 1991 and 1992 many people were alarmed by the possibility of violent conflict between Russia and Ukraine over territory, particularly Crimea, the Black Sea fleet, nuclear weapons and economic issues. If civilization is what counts, however, 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. As of early 1993, despite all the reasons for conflict, the leaders of the two countries were effectively negotiating and defusing the issues between the two countries. While there has been serious fighting between Muslims and Christians elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and much tension and some fighting between Western and Orthodox Christians in the Baltic states, there has been virtually no violence between Russians and Ukrainians.

Civilization rallying to date has been limited, but it has been growing, and it clearly has the potential to spread much further. As the conflicts in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia continued, the positions of nations and the cleavages between them increasingly were along civilizational lines. Populist politicians, religious leaders and the media have found it a potent means of arousing mass support and of pressuring hesitant governments. In the coming years, the local conflicts most likely to escalate into major wars will be those, as in Bosnia and the Caucasus, along the fault lines between civilizations. The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations.

THE WEST VERSUS THE REST

The West is now at an extraordinary peak of power in relation to other civilizations. Its superpower opponent has disappeared from the map. Military conflict among Western states is unthinkable, and Western military power is unrivaled. Apart from Japan, the West faces no economic challenge. It dominates international political and security institutions and with Japan international economic institutions. Global political and security issues are effectively settled by a directorate of the United States, Britain and France, world economic issues by a directorate of the United States, Germany and Japan, all of which maintain extraordinarily close relations with each other to the exclusion of lesser and largely non-Western countries. Decisions made at the U.N. Security Council or in the International Monetary Fund that reflect the interests of the West are presented to the world as reflecting the desires of the world community. The very phrase "the world community" has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing "the Free World") to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western powers.[4] Through the IMF and other international economic institutions, the West promotes its economic interests and imposes on other nations the economic policies it thinks appropriate. In any poll of non-Western peoples, the IMF undoubtedly would win the support of finance ministers and a few others, but get an overwhelmingly unfavorable rating from just about everyone else, who would agree with Georgy Arbatov's characterization of IMF officials as "neo-Bolsheviks who love expropriating other people's money, imposing undemocratic and alien rules of economic and political conduct and stifling economic freedom."

Western domination of the U.N. Security Council and its decisions, tempered only by occasional abstention by China, produced U.N. legitimation of the West's use of force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait and its elimination of Iraq's sophisticated weapons and capacity to produce such weapons. It also produced the quite unprecedented action by the United States, Britain and France in getting the Security Council to demand that Libya hand over the Pan Am 103 bombing suspects and then to impose sanctions when Libya refused. After defeating the largest Arab army, the West did not hesitate to throw its weight around in the Arab world. The West in effect is using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will maintain Western predominance, protect Western interests and promote Western political and economic values.

That at least is the way in which non-Westerners see the new world, and there is a significant element of truth in their view. Differences in power and struggles for military, economic and institutional power are thus one source of conflict between the West and other civilizations. Differences in culture, that is basic values and beliefs, are a second source of conflict. V. S. Naipaul has argued that Western civilization is the "universal civilization" that "fits all men." At a superficial level much of Western culture has indeed permeated the rest of the world. At a more basic level, however, Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations. 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. Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction against "human rights imperialism" and a reaffirmation of indigenous values, as can be seen in the support for religious fundamentalism by the younger generation in non-Western cultures. The very notion that there could be a "universal civilization" is a Western idea, directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another. Indeed, the author of a review of 100 comparative studies of values in different societies concluded that "the values that are most important in the West are least important worldwide."[5] In the political realm, of course, these differences are most manifest in the efforts of the United States and other Western powers to induce other peoples to adopt Western ideas concerning democracy and human rights. Modern democratic government originated in the West. When it has developed in non-Western societies it has usually been the product of Western colonialism or imposition.

The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be, in Kishore Mahbubani's phrase, the conflict between "the West and the Rest" and the responses of non-Western civilizations to Western power and values.[6] Those responses generally take one or a combination of three forms. At one extreme, non-Western states can, like Burma and North Korea, attempt to pursue a course of isolation, to insulate their societies from penetration or "corruption" by the West, and, in effect, to opt out of participation in the Western-dominated global community. The costs of this course, however, are high, and few states have pursued it exclusively. A second alternative, the equivalent of "band-wagoning" in international relations theory, is to attempt to join the West and accept its values and institutions. The third alternative is to attempt to "balance" the West by developing economic and military power and cooperating with other non-Western societies against the West, while preserving indigenous values and institutions; in short, to modernize but not to Westernize.

THE TORN COUNTRIES

In the future, as people differentiate themselves by civilization, countries with large numbers of peoples of different civilizations, such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, are candidates for dismemberment. Some other countries have a fair degree of cultural homogeneity but are divided over whether their society belongs to one civilization or another. These are torn countries. Their leaders typically wish to pursue a bandwagoning strategy and to make their countries members of the West, but the history, culture and traditions of their countries are non-Western. The most obvious and prototypical torn country is Turkey. The late twentieth-century leaders of Turkey have followed in the Attatürk tradition and defined Turkey as a modern, secular, Western nation state. They allied Turkey with the West in NATO and in the Gulf War; they applied for membership in the European Community. At the same time, however, elements in Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and have argued that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern Muslim society. In addition, while the elite of Turkey has defined Turkey as a Western society, the elite of the West refuses to accept Turkey as such. Turkey will not become a member of the European Community, and the real reason, as President Özal said, "is that we are Muslim and they are Christian and they don't say that." Having rejected Mecca, and then being rejected by Brussels, where does Turkey look? Tashkent may be the answer. The end of the Soviet Union gives Turkey the opportunity to become the leader of a revived Turkic civilization involving seven countries from the borders of Greece to those of China. Encouraged by the West, Turkey is making strenuous efforts to carve out this new identity for itself.

During the past decade Mexico has assumed a position somewhat similar to that of Turkey. Just as Turkey abandoned its historic opposition to Europe and attempted to join Europe, Mexico has stopped defining itself by its opposition to the United States and is instead attempting to imitate the United States and to join it in the North American Free Trade Area. Mexican leaders are engaged in the great task of redefining Mexican identity and have introduced fundamental economic reforms that eventually will lead to fundamental political change. In 1991 a top adviser to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari described at length to me all the changes the Salinas government was making. When he finished, I remarked: "That's most impressive. It seems to me that basically you want to change Mexico from a Latin American country into a North American country." He looked at me with surprise and exclaimed: "Exactly! That's precisely what we are trying to do, but of course we could never say so publicly." As his remark indicates, in Mexico as in Turkey, significant elements in society resist the redefinition of their country's identity. In Turkey, European-oriented leaders have to make gestures to Islam (Özal's pilgrimage to Mecca); so also Mexico's North American-oriented leaders have to make gestures to those who hold Mexico to be a Latin American country (Salinas' Ibero-American Guadalajara summit).

Historically Turkey has been the most profoundly torn country. For the United States, Mexico is the most immediate torn country. Globally the most important torn country is Russia. The question of whether Russia is part of the West or the leader of a distinct Slavic-Orthodox civilization has been a recurring one in Russian history. That issue was obscured by the communist victory in Russia, which imported a Western ideology, adapted it to Russian conditions and then challenged the West in the name of that ideology. The dominance of communism shut off the historic debate over Westernization versus Russification. With communism discredited Russians once again face that question.

President Yeltsin is adopting Western principles and goals and seeking to make Russia a "normal" country and a part of the West. Yet both the Russian elite and the Russian public are divided on this issue. Among the more moderate dissenters, Sergei Stankevich argues that Russia should reject the "Atlanticist" course, which would lead it "to become European, to become a part of the world economy in rapid and organized fashion, to become the eighth member of the Seven, and to put particular emphasis on Germany and the United States as the two dominant members of the Atlantic alliance." While also rejecting an exclusively Eurasian policy, Stankevich nonetheless argues that Russia should give priority to the protection of Russians in other countries, emphasize its Turkic and Muslim connections, and promote "an appreciable redistribution of our resources, our options, our ties, and our interests in favor of Asia, of the eastern direction." People of this persuasion criticize Yeltsin for subordinating Russia's interests to those of the West, for reducing Russian military strength, for failing to support traditional friends such as Serbia, and for pushing economic and political reform in ways injurious to the Russian people. Indicative of this trend is the new popularity of the ideas of Petr Savitsky, who in the 1920s argued that Russia was a unique Eurasian civilization.[7] More extreme dissidents voice much more blatantly nationalist, anti-Western and anti-Semitic views, and urge Russia to redevelop its military strength and to establish closer ties with China and Muslim countries. The people of Russia are as divided as the elite. An opinion survey in European Russia in the spring of 1992 revealed that 40 percent of the public had positive attitudes toward the West and 36 percent had negative attitudes. As it has been for much of its history, Russia in the early 1990s is truly a torn country.

To redefine its civilization identity, a torn country must meet three requirements. First, its political and economic elite has to be generally supportive of and enthusiastic about this move. Second, its public has to be willing to acquiesce in the redefinition. Third, the dominant groups in the recipient civilization have to be willing to embrace the convert. All three requirements in large part exist with respect to Mexico. The first two in large part exist with respect to Turkey. It is not clear that any of them exist with respect to Russia's joining the West. The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism was between ideologies which, despite their major differences, ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality and prosperity. A traditional, authoritarian, nationalist Russia could have quite different goals. A Western democrat could carry on an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be virtually impossible for him to do that with a Russian traditionalist. If, as the Russians stop behaving like Marxists, they reject liberal democracy and begin behaving like Russians but not like Westerners, the relations between Russia and the West could again become distant and conflictual.[8]

THE CONFUCIAN-ISLAMIC CONNECTION

The obstacles to non-Western countries joining the West vary considerably. They are least for Latin American and East European countries. They are greater for the Orthodox countries of the former Soviet Union. They are still greater for Muslim, Confucian, Hindu and Buddhist societies. Japan has established a unique position for itself as an associate member of the West: it is in the West in some respects but clearly not of the West in important dimensions. Those countries that for reason of culture and power do not wish to, or cannot, join the West compete with the West by developing their own economic, military and political power. They do this by promoting their internal development and by cooperating with other non-Western countries. The most prominent form of this cooperation is the Confucian-Islamic connection that has emerged to challenge Western interests, values and power.

Almost without exception, Western countries are reducing their military power; under Yeltsin's leadership so also is Russia. China, North Korea and several Middle Eastern states, however, are significantly expanding their military capabilities. They are doing this by the import of arms from Western and non-Western sources and by the development of indigenous arms industries. One result is the emergence of what Charles Krauthammer has called "Weapon States," and the Weapon States are not Western states. Another result is the redefinition of arms control, which is a Western concept and a Western goal. During the Cold War the primary purpose of arms control was to establish a stable military balance between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. In the post-Cold War world the primary objective of arms control is to prevent the development by non-Western societies of military capabilities that could threaten Western interests. The West attempts to do this through international agreements, economic pressure and controls on the transfer of arms and weapons technologies.

The conflict between the West and the Confucian-Islamic states focuses largely, although not exclusively, on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missiles and other sophisticated means for delivering them, and the guidance, intelligence and other electronic capabilities for achieving that goal. The West promotes nonproliferation as a universal norm and nonproliferation treaties and inspections as means of realizing that norm. It also threatens a variety of sanctions against those who promote the spread of sophisticated weapons and proposes some benefits for those who do not. The attention of the West focuses, naturally, on nations that are actually or potentially hostile to the West.

The non-Western nations, on the other hand, assert their right to acquire and to deploy whatever weapons they think necessary for their security. They also have absorbed, to the full, the truth of the response of the Indian defense minister when asked what lesson he learned from the Gulf War: "Don't fight the United States unless you have nuclear weapons." Nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and missiles are viewed, probably erroneously, as the potential equalizer of superior Western conventional power. China, of course, already has nuclear weapons; Pakistan and India have the capability to deploy them. North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Algeria appear to be attempting to acquire them. A top Iranian official has declared that all Muslim states should acquire nuclear weapons, and in 1988 the president of Iran reportedly issued a directive calling for development of "offensive and defensive chemical, biological and radiological weapons."

Centrally important to the development of counter-West military capabilities is the sustained expansion of China's military power and its means to create military power. Buoyed by spectacular economic development, China is rapidly increasing its military spending and vigorously moving forward with the modernization of its armed forces. It is purchasing weapons from the former Soviet states; it is developing long-range missiles; in 1992 it tested a one-megaton nuclear device. It is developing power-projection capabilities, acquiring aerial refueling technology, and trying to purchase an aircraft carrier. Its military buildup and assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea are provoking a multilateral regional arms race in East Asia. China is also a major exporter of arms and weapons technology. It has exported materials to Libya and Iraq that could be used to manufacture nuclear weapons and nerve gas. It has helped Algeria build a reactor suitable for nuclear weapons research and production. China has sold to Iran nuclear technology that American officials believe could only be used to create weapons and apparently has shipped components of 300-mile-range missiles to Pakistan. North Korea has had a nuclear weapons program under way for some while and has sold advanced missiles and missile technology to Syria and Iran. The flow of weapons and weapons technology is generally from East Asia to the Middle East. There is, however, some movement in the reverse direction; China has received Stinger missiles from Pakistan.

A Confucian-Islamic military connection has thus come into being, designed to promote acquisition by its members of the weapons and weapons technologies needed to counter the military power of the West. It may or may not last. At present, however, it is, as Dave McCurdy has said, "a renegades' mutual support pact, run by the proliferators and their backers." A new form of arms competition is thus occurring between Islamic-Confucian states and the West. In an old-fashioned arms race, each side developed its own arms to balance or to achieve superiority against the other side. In this new form of arms competition, one side is developing its arms and the other side is attempting not to balance but to limit and prevent that arms build-up while at the same time reducing its own military capabilities.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE WEST

This article does not argue that civilization identities will replace all other identities, that nation states will disappear, that each civilization will become a single coherent political entity, that groups within a civilization will not conflict with and even fight each other. This paper does set forth the hypotheses that differences between civilizations are real and important; civilization-consciousness is increasing; conflict between civilizations will supplant ideological and other forms of conflict as the dominant global form of conflict; international relations, historically a game played out within Western civilization, will increasingly be de-Westernized and become a game in which non-Western civilizations are actors and not simply objects; successful political, security and economic international institutions are more likely to develop within civilizations than across civilizations; conflicts between groups in different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization; violent conflicts between groups in different civilizations are the most likely and most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global wars; the paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between "the West and the Rest"; the elites in some torn non-Western countries will try to make their countries part of the West, but in most cases face major obstacles to accomplishing this; a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states.

This is not to advocate the desirability of conflicts between civilizations. It is to set forth descriptive hypotheses as to what the future may be like. If these are plausible hypotheses, however, it is necessary to consider their implications for Western policy. These implications should be divided between short-term advantage and long-term accommodation. In the short term it is clearly in the interest of the West to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civilization, particularly between its European and North American components; to incorporate into the West societies in Eastern Europe and Latin America whose cultures are close to those of the West; to promote and maintain cooperative relations with Russia and Japan; to prevent escalation of local inter-civilization conflicts into major inter-civilization wars; to limit the expansion of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to moderate the reduction of Western military capabilities and maintain military superiority in East and Southwest Asia; to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests; to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions.

In the longer term other measures would be called for. Western civilization is both Western and modern. Non-Western civilizations have attempted to become modern without becoming Western. To date only Japan has fully succeeded in this quest. Non-Western civilizations will continue to attempt to acquire the wealth, technology, skills, machines and weapons that are part of being modern. They will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their traditional culture and values. Their economic and military strength relative to the West will increase. Hence the West will increasingly have to accommodate these non-Western modern civilizations whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of the West. This will require the West to maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect its interests in relation to these civilizations. It will also, however, require the West to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others.

[1] Murray Weidenbaum,  Greater China: The Next Economic Superpower? ,   St. Louis: Washington University Center for the Study of American Business, Contemporary Issues, Series 57, February 1993, pp. 2-3.

[2] Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage,"  The Atlantic Monthly , vol. 266, September 1990, p. 60;  Time , June 15, 1992, pp. 24-28.

[3] Archie Roosevelt,  For Lust of Knowing , Boston: Little, Brown, 1988, pp. 332-333.

[4] Almost invariably Western leaders claim they are acting on behalf of "the world community." One minor lapse occurred during the run-up to the Gulf War. In an interview on "Good Morning America," Dec. 21, 1990, British Prime Minister John Major referred to the actions "the West" was taking against Saddam Hussein. He quickly corrected himself and subsequently referred to "the world community." He was, however, right when he erred.

[5] Harry C. Triandis,  The New York Times , Dec. 25, 1990, p. 41, and "Cross-Cultural Studies of Individualism and Collectivism," Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, vol. 37, 1989, pp. 41-133.

[6] Kishore Mahbubani, "The West and the Rest,"  The National Interest , Summer 1992, pp. 3-13.

[7] Sergei Stankevich, "Russia in Search of Itself,"  The National Interest , Summer 1992, pp. 47-51; Daniel Schneider, "A Russian Movement Rejects Western Tilt,"  Christian Science Monitor , Feb. 5, 1993, pp. 5-7.

[8] Owen Harries has pointed out that Australia is trying (unwisely in his view) to become a torn country in reverse. Although it has been a full member not only of the West but also of the ABCA military and intelligence core of the West, its current leaders are in effect proposing that it defect from the West, redefine itself as an Asian country and cultivate close ties with its neighbors. Australia's future, they argue, is with the dynamic economies of East Asia. But, as I have suggested, close economic cooperation normally requires a common cultural base. In addition, none of the three conditions necessary for a torn country to join another civilization is likely to exist in Australia's case.

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• SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. This article is the product of the Olin Institute's project on "The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests."
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Islam & the West: Testing the Clash of Civilizations Thesis

31 Pages Posted: 11 Jul 2002

Pippa Norris

Harvard University - Harvard Kennedy School (HKS); University of Sydney

Ronald F. Inglehart

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - Institute for Social Research (ISR); National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow)

Date Written: April 2002

In seeking to understand the root causes of the events of 9/11 many accounts have turned to Samuel P. Huntington's provocative and controversial thesis of a "clash of civilizations", arousing strong debate. Evidence from the 1995-2001 waves of the World Values Study provide survey evidence allowing us, for the first time, to sift the truth in this debate by comparing attitudes and values in 75 societies around the globe, including many Islamic and Western states. The results confirm the first claim in Huntington's thesis: culture does matter, and indeed matters a lot, so that religious legacies leave their distinct imprint on contemporary values. But Huntington is essentially mistaken in assuming that the core clash between the West and Islamic worlds concerns democracy, as the evidence suggests striking similarities in the political values held in these societies. It remains true that Islamic nations differ from the West on issues of religious leadership, but this is not a simple dichotomous clash, as many countries around the globe display similar attitudes to Islam. Moreover the original thesis fails to identify the primary cultural fault line between the West and Islam, concerning the social issues of gender equality and sexual liberalization. The values separating Islam and the West revolve far more centrally around Eros than Demos.

Keywords: Political Science

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Pippa Norris (Contact Author)

Harvard university - harvard kennedy school (hks) ( email ).

79 John F. Kennedy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 United States 617-495-1475 (Phone) 617-496-2850 (Fax)

University of Sydney ( email )

University of Sydney Sydney, NSW 2006 Australia

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - Institute for Social Research (ISR) ( email )

Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248 United States

National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow)

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Why Do Arab States Lag the World in Gender Equality?

By Pippa Norris

• Saudi Arabia
• United Arab Emirates

25 years on, Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' theory has been refuted

Almost exactly 25 years ago, Foreign Affairs magazine published by far the most influential academic treatise of the modern era: Samuel Huntington’s "The Clash of Civilisations". This article helped to shape the world and launch wars.

But how does it read 25 years later? Ultimately, it has been academically worthless - a moral abomination and an intellectual catastrophe.

Here's a reminder of Huntington's confidently expressed thesis:

"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in the 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 civilisations. The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future."

Islam and the West

The most influential part of Huntington's theory concerned Islam. Huntington argued that with the end of the Cold War between Soviet Russia and the West, it would be replaced by a new struggle between two irreconcilable enemies: Islam and the West.

Huntington asserted that identity, rather than ideology, lay at the heart of contemporary politics. "What are you?" he asked. "And as we know, from Bosnia to the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can mean a bullet in the head." He added that "Islam has bloody borders". 

The Huntington thesis has inspired a flourishing publishing industry; countless books are calls to arms in the supposed war against Islamism

Huntington drew on the work of the famous Orientalist historian Bernard Lewis , who coined the phrase "clash of civilisations" when he wrote in 1990: 

"We are facing a mode and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilisations - the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judaeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both."

Like Huntington, Lewis was a partisan. Writing in the wake of the Iranian revolution and the displays of rage on the streets of Tehran (by no means unwarranted given longstanding US support to the shah's bloody repression), Lewis' reductionism was shameless. He wrote as though 1.5 billion Muslims all thought the same way and had nothing to think about except animosity towards the West.

The role of 9/11

So, have Huntington's and Lewis' predictions been realised? Are Muslims collectively at war with the West in the way that these two American sages predicted? Is there indeed a clash of civilisations, as not just Huntington but so many others believe?

Certainly, the events of 9/11, when al-Qaeda launched a ferocious attack on the US, gave massive credibility to Huntington's bleak analysis. The wave of Western attacks on Muslim countries in the years that followed appeared to reinforce it, along with the devastating terrorist attacks on London, Paris and other Western cities.

In Celsi us 7/7 , cabinet minister Michael Gove writes: "The war in which [extremists] enlisted is the conflict of our times, a struggle between liberal values and resurgent totalitarianism." Douglas Murray's  The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam , which portrayed Christian Europe sinking under waves of Muslim immigrants, is a bestseller. 

But while the events of 9/11 seemed to have fulfilled Huntington's prophecy, in reality, they did not. The real clash is between the US and al-Qaeda or the Islamic State (IS), not between the US and Islam.

IS and al-Qaeda on the fringes

We have not witnessed a single one of the world's 50 Muslim-majority countries declare war on the US, nor have we seen an Islamic coalition forming. When one did emerge in 2017, it was Saudi-led and sponsored by the US.

Regardless of how violent and expansive the terror phenomenon is today, with IS and al-Qaeda active in many countries, these groups remain on the fringes of Islam. Major Islamic powers follow realism in conducting their international relations, while the only pan-Islamic grouping, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, is little more than a forum for empty rhetoric.

The Saudi regime remains America's most loyal ally in the region, even though it adopts the worst fundamentalist interpretation of Islam

Turkey oscillates between Russia and the US, and its armed forces are the second-largest force in Nato. Despite Islamic overtones, Iran's policy is nationalistic. Although its clash with the US is escalating, Iran's biggest struggles today are geopolitical (ie against Saudi Arabia), while Europe (ie the other half of the "West") has scrambled to improve relations with Tehran.

The Saudi regime remains America's most loyal ally in the region, even though it adopts a literalist interpretation of Islam - Wahhabism - and its main adversaries are other Islamic powers, such as Turkey, Iran and Qatar.

The politics of religion

Many credible analysts in the Arab world hold the US responsible for creating the conditions that allowed terror groups such as IS to exist in the first place, when they invaded and occupied Iraq and did away with all state institutions.

Above all, Huntington was wrong to claim that religion is the determinant factor in warfare. The politics of religion are certainly used as a tool, but they are not an end in themselves. But Huntington mattered. His thesis that the civilised world was fighting "radical Islam" provided the Western military-industrial complex with a global, systemic, multinational enemy that replaced communism.

The West (the US and Europe) formed a coalition with Islamist forces against the Syrian government, a secular regime. The US, Britain and France have supplied arms directly to groups that could be considered Islamist, and have turned a blind eye to their allies arming overtly radical groups, including IS and al-Qaeda.

Former US vice president Joe Biden described this situation in a speech at Harvard University in 2014: "Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria ... What were they doing? They were so determined to take down [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad, and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of tonnes of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad - except that the people who were being supplied, [they] were al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis who were coming from other parts of the world."

Propaganda efforts

Meanwhile, in southern Syria, it is no secret that Israel supports Syrian rebels across the disengagement line in the Golan Heights, and that a significant portion of those rebels are Islamists - including the group formerly known as al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's branch in Syria.

Also in Syria, the US has been cooperating fervently with another largely Muslim, albeit secular, group: the Kurds. The US coordinates its Syria policies closely with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, and before the flare-up over the Kurds, with Turkey.

Therefore, the conflict in Syria is not a clash of civilisations, for all the religious missionary zeal of groups such as IS. In fact, Sunni Muslims are the main target of IS , which labels most of them apostates because they have not joined the ranks of the reborn Caliphate.

Despite all its propaganda efforts, IS is still, and will always remain, a fringe group - despite attracting thousands of disenfranchised youth. We must not forget that there are more than 1.5 billion Muslims in the world today, the vast majority of whom lead normal lives. 

Huntington supporters might argue that the Syria war is an intra-civilisational war within the Islamic civilisation. This analysis is inaccurate at best. Yes, the world of Islam has been struggling to redefine itself since the official end of the Caliphate in 1924, but the struggle in Syria is largely a clash of interests, even though it might appear otherwise.

A struggle for dominance

Iran supports Shia militias in Syria and Yemen - but it also supports Sunni Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Even though Iran is a Shia power, we see top Shia leaders in Iraq, such as Muqtada al-Sadr, working closely with the Saudis to counterbalance Iranian influence .

Wahhabi Saudi Arabia had no issue in receiving those Iraqi Shia leaders and in supporting the right-wing Christian party - the Lebanese Forces, which massacred thousands of Muslims in the 1970s and 80s during Lebanon's civil war years - just because it aligned itself with Saudi policy in Lebanon.

The Saudi-Iranian clash is not an intra-civilisational war, but a geopolitical struggle for dominance in the region. The same could be said about Turkish policies, despite President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's fiery rhetoric. Turkey is at odds with the major Sunni powers of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and it is working ever more closely with Iran. 

Twenty-five years after the "clash of civilisations," the explanatory power of Huntington's thesis is still doubtful. His "prophecy," even though it was vindicated to an extent by the events of 9/11, can be easily refuted by every keen observer of international relations.

-  Peter Oborne  won best commentary/blogging in 2017 and was named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He also was British Press Awards Columnist of the Year 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying , and Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran .

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: A Syrian rebel fighter takes part in combat training in the northern countryside of Idlib province on 11 September (AFP)

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The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel P Huntington

Table of Contents

Last Updated on November 28, 2018 by Karl Thompson

Samuel P. Huntington sees ‘civilizations’ as the most significant grouping in global society, rather than ‘nation states’, or ‘global religions’, although there are often close relationships between religions and Huntington’s concept of ‘civilizations’.

Globalization has resulted in the world becoming a smaller place, which means that there are increasing interactions between ‘civilizations’, which intensifies ‘civilization consciousness’.

According to Huntington, increasing contact between civilizations often has the effect of emphasising differences rather than similarities, which can cause an increasing amount of conflict in the world.

What are ‘Civilizations’?

For Huntington, civilizations are ‘cultural entities’ differentiated from each other by history, language, cultural traditions and, most importantly, religion.

As Huntington sees is, sources of identity which are not based on religion have declined. Political identities matter less since the collapse of communism, and increasing international travel has weakened national identity, ‘civilizational identity’, based mainly on religion has stepped in to fill the gap.

Clashes between civilizations

Huntington believes that there will increasingly be clashes between civilizations, because these identities are based mainly on ethnicity and religion, and thus foster an ‘us and them’ type of identity.

Religion as a more significant cause of conflict…

At the moment, Western civilization is dominant, however, as the ‘Islamic’ and ‘Hindu’ civilisations develop more potent nuclear capabilities (Pakistan, India) and as the world shrinks further, this dominance is likely to decrease, which opens the possibility for more serious conflicts.

Haralambos and Holborn: Sociology Themes and Perspectives, edition eight.

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What We Get Wrong About the Clash of Civilizations

Few arguments about the shape of the post-Cold War international system have been met with as much passion and debate as the one articulated in Samuel Huntington’s 1996 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order . His core argument was that future conflicts would be shaped by cultural and civilizational differences rather than ideology. It seemed barbaric and out-of-touch during the 1990s, then all too prescient in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Yet until today, no administration has come close to embracing a Huntingtonian view of the world; both the Bush and Obama administrations rejected it, highlighting repeatedly that America was fighting violent extremists, not Islam itself.

Even as he took the oath of office, however, President Donald Trump committed to his campaign promise to explicitly link Islam and terror, using the Republican shibboleth “radical Islamic terrorism” in his inaugural address. [i] Many of the new president’s advisors appear to endorse a Huntingtonian view of the world, an impression confirmed by the administration’s earliest acts, executive orders which seek to reduce Muslim immigration and build a wall on the southern border.

Unfortunately, there is a key reason why prior administrations rejected Huntington’s worldview: it provides a remarkably poor guide to a complex world. Worse still, the way that Trump’s advisors appear to have absorbed Huntington’s work – by accepting his worldview, but not his policy recommendations – points to a particularly dangerous direction for U.S. foreign policy in the next four years.

Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations

Huntington’s argument itself is often oversimplified. After all, even the phrase The Clash of Civilizations is enough to form a rudimentary picture of a world of cultural strife. Yet Huntington was building on a much longer intellectual heritage, drawing from the writings of Toynbee, Bagby, and others. Huntington posited that, with the collapse of ideological struggle at the end of the Cold War, Western-style modernization is, in effect, the only game in town. Yet while Francis Fukuyama confidently predicted that this meant the ‘end of history’ was nigh, [ii] Huntington instead pointed to the growing salience of culture to argue that the wars of the future will be fought between civilizations. Indeed, for Huntington, culture was paramount. As he noted, cultural characteristics cannot be altered as easily as ideology, class, or other factors. [iii]

And while he made a few nods to balance-of-power considerations – he allowed that states may ally across civilizational lines when necessary – Huntington argued that future conflicts will be primarily found in civilizational borderlands and driven by opposition to Western economic and military dominance in the rapidly growing non-West. Many of the factors that he drew upon to build his argument are indisputable: the Western world is disproportionally wealthy, overrepresented in international institutions, and militarily powerful, though its dominance is declining. [iv] Too, his argument that economic modernization does not necessarily result in Western-style liberal democracy is all too apparent to observers of the failed Arab Spring. And there is likely something to his assertion that states which share a cultural background may be more likely to cooperate: similar arguments have been made by political scientists to explain alliances. [v]  

But for all that Huntington’s theory is well grounded in philosophy and history, his empirical evidence is surprisingly weak. As Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out, most of the bloodiest wars of the twentieth century took place within civilizations rather than between them. [vi] Huntington relied heavily on evidence from the 1990s, particularly conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf, arguing that involvement in these conflicts was mostly driven by civilizational “kin-rallying.” Yet these cases tend to be unconvincing. The period since 2001 seems to bear him out more effectively: opposition to the West in the Middle East is certainly growing. [vii] Yet conflict in the Muslim world over the last decade, most notably the Arab Spring, has also been driven by internal factors. Today’s civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen were shaped by the tension between modernization and westernization, and worsened by intracivilizational conflict among Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other regional actors. 

And while Huntington largely dismissed realist views of world politics, the events he cited – most notably resistance to Western global dominance – could as easily be explained as a process of realist balancing by rising powers like China against the global hegemon. Huntington was correct that both Russia and China have attempted to build larger regional alliances, whether ideological, economic, or military. Yet both have been unsuccessful: the states of Central Asia have repeatedly pursued multi-vector foreign policies, seeking ties with Europe, the United States, and China, not a recreation of Soviet-era economic and political ties. Meanwhile, under pressure from China, Asian states have sought closer defense ties with the United States, most notably Vietnam. In both cases, these dynamics suggest less cultural or civilizational ties between states, and more the reaction of small states concerned about a rising regional hegemon.

Many of the worst flaws of Huntington’s argument – oversimplifying complex dynamics and demeaning the role of power politics – are replicated by today’s proponents of his theory. Just as Huntington’s book tortuously attempted to fit the Gulf War into his civilizational paradigm, [viii] overlooking the fact that half the region sided with external actors to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, so today we see arguments which attempt to link all violent actors in the Islamic world as one, from the Muslim Brotherhood, to Al Qaeda, to Hezbollah. In his book Field of Fight, Trump’s new National Security Advisor Michael Flynn makes this argument, presenting fragmentary evidence of occasional opportunistic contact between Hezbollah and al Qaeda as proof that Sunni and Shi’a extremists form a coherent and committed axis of opposition to the United States. [ix] Occam’s razor suggests instead that it is possible for these groups to dislike each other as much as the United States, and to work against the West for independent reasons.

A Huntingtonian Administration?

Despite their flaws, Huntington’s ideas continue to resonate. The ongoing war on terror, the rise of ISIS, and America’s seemingly never-ending military presence in the Middle East all serve to drive the narrative of a war between civilizations. Previous administrations have, however, strongly resisted accepting the deeper themes of Huntington’s work, particularly the idea that modernization does not necessarily lead to democratization. Indeed, perhaps the most insidious idea in Huntington’s work is his belief that there is an inherent contradiction between non-Western cultures and liberal values. [x] The administration of George W. Bush, strongly influenced by neoconservative ideals, and that of Barack Obama, which tended towards liberal internationalism, both rejected this idea in the strongest terms. Yet while any attempt to divine the foreign policy direction of the Trump administration is little more than Kremlinology at this point, there is no denying that both he and his top advisors appear far more comfortable with the idea that non-Western cultures cannot accept liberalism.

Take Michael Flynn, a retired Lieutenant General, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and now Trump’s National Security Advisor. In a 2016 book co-authored with Michael Ledeen, Flynn argued that “We’re in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people, most of them inspired by a totalitarian ideology: Radical Islam.” [xi] Flynn and his co-author paint a remarkably Huntingtonian picture: an anti-Western alliance of Islamic extremists (both Sunni and Shi’a), tied to China, North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela by arms sales, proliferation, and hatred of the United States. Like Huntington, Flynn believes that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.” [xii] But where Huntington used data to show this trend and argued that it is likely a temporary effect of demographic shifts, Flynn suggests that Islamism – by which he means Islamic political thought of any variant – is a violent and totalitarian ideology.

The president’s new Chief Strategist, Stephen Bannon, goes further in arguing that the United States should take an aggressive stance against radical Islam, placing it in the context of historic conflict between civilizations. In one 2014 interview, Bannon noted: “If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers… kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours, or other places.” [xiii] Indeed, Bannon’s comments often omit the “radical” modifier, describing Islam itself as a threat darker than fascism and communism. [xiv] Neither Flynn nor Bannon confine their civilizational worldview to the Islamic world. For both, China is viewed as an expansionist threat to the West, particularly in terms of trade.

And like Huntington – whose work on immigration a critic once pithily described as “Patrick Buchanan with footnotes” [xv] - Bannon appears to believe that immigration poses a direct threat to Western identity, no matter how economically successful the immigrants. Bannon has even praised Alexander Dugin, proponent of Eurasianism, a Russian strand of traditionalist, nationalist, far-right political thought. [xvi] Certainly, some in the administration have contradicted these sentiments, most notably James Mattis, Secretary of Defense, but there has been little internal opposition to the flurry of internal executive orders and decisions which appear drawn from this Huntingtonian worldview. In just over seven days, the new administration has sought to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and implemented draconian and potentially illegal new immigration restrictions.

A Warning, Not a Roadmap

Notably, Trump’s team has rarely made an explicit connection to Huntington’s work. Flynn’s book does not cite it, though he has used the phrase in (now deleted) tweets, while Bannon employs the language of Huntington – with frequent allusions to the “Judeo-Christian West” – but does not explicitly credit his ideas. And there is another major difference between Huntington’s work and the Trump administration’s apparent worldview. The original “clash of civilizations” article generated a furor among those who believed that Huntington was advocating this future. Yet as the author himself pointed out, the article title included a rarely noticed question mark. [xvii] Huntington was not advocating civilizational conflict; instead, he feared it, seeking to prevent an overextended United States from making crucial mistakes in the complex post-Cold War world.

Much of Huntington’s book focused on the concrete steps needed to prevent civilizational conflict. While some of these have not aged well – his argument in favor of NATO expansion now seems particularly poorly thought out – his central arguments remain pertinent. In addition to maintaining Western military and economic supremacy, Huntington argued that policymakers must recognize that Western intervention “is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world.” [xviii] Many of the ideas proposed by the new administration fly directly in the face of Huntington’s recommendations: the cancellation of the TPP may push Japan closer to China; Trump’s disastrous quarrel with Mexico undermines Huntington’s admonition to build better ties with Latin America: the intensification of the War on Terror will stir further popular opposition to U.S. intervention in the Middle East; and the choice to agitate on behalf of Taiwan will worsen relations with China.

Understanding these points of divergence does not require acceptance of Huntington’s theory. Indeed, many of Huntington’s ideas are inimical to liberal values, from his distasteful views on immigration and multiculturalism to his argument that the West should seek to hobble the economic development of countries elsewhere. [xix] But it is important to understand these ideas. Trump’s administration appears to bring U.S. foreign policy another step closer to embracing a Huntingtonian view of the world; senior administration members genuinely appear to believe the United States is engaged in an existential civilizational struggle. Yet they also seem unaware of Huntington’s cassandraic warnings against pursuing actions which are more likely to provoke conflict with other states than prevent them. If the administration continues down this path, the results may be grim.

[i] Trump, Donald. “Inaugural Address.” Speech, January 20, 2017. https://www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural-address .

[ii] Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History.” The National Interest , Summer 1989.

[iii] Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993).

[iv] Huntington identifies seven civilizations: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Slavic-Orthodox, Western, and Latin American. Notably, he argues that neither Russia nor Latin America is Western despite their European heritage.

[v] See, for example, Haas, Mark L. The ideological origins of great power politics: 1789-1989 . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

[vi] Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. “The Modernizing Imperative: Tradition and Change.” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 4 (1993).

[vii] Wike, Richard, Bruce Stokes, and Jacob Poushter. “America’s Global Image.” Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. June 23, 2015. http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/06/23/1-americas-global-image/ .

[viii] Huntington, Samuel P. The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order . New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996: 246-252.

[ix] Flynn, Michael T., and Michael Ledeen. The field of fight: how we can win the global war against radical Islam and its allies. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016.

[x] Huntington (1996): 58.

[xi] Flynn (2016):8.

[xii] Huntington (1996): 258.

[xiii] Feder, J. Lester. “This is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World.” Buzzfeed News, November 16, 2016. https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world .

[xiv] In a January 2016 radio interview, Bannon commented: “This is in 1938. This is when Europe’s looking down the barrel of fascism – the rise of Mussolini in Italy, Stalin and the Russians and the communist Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union. And obviously Hitler and the Nazis. I mean you’re looking at fascism, you’re looking at communism. And to say that – what so blows me away is the timing of it. You could look in 1938 and say “Look it’s pretty dark here in Europe right now, but there’s something actually much darker. And that is Islam.” See “Breitbart News Daily.” January 6, 2016. https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/breitbart-news-daily-dr-thomas-williams-january-6-2016?in=breitbart/sets/breitbart-news-daily-january-6 .

[xv] Wolfe, Alan. “Native Son: Samuel Huntington Defends the Homeland.” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 3 (2004).

[xvi] It is, however, interesting to note that neither Flynn nor Bannon are as friendly towards Russia as recent media coverage implies. Both interpret Russia as a potential ally in the fight against jihadism – though Flynn doubts Russia can make a substantive contribution here – but not as a longer-term ally or indeed a member of the West. In this, Huntington’s portrayal of Russia as both the core of its own civilization and a state torn between joining the West and reasserting its own Slavic identity again seems prescient.

[xvii] Huntington, Samuel P. “If Not Civilizations, What? Samuel Huntington Responds to his Critics.” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 5 (1993).  

[xviii] Huntington (1996): 312.

[xix] Huntington’s views on immigration are laid out more explicitly in Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Also from this issue

Emma Ashford reviews the thesis of Samuel Huntington’s 1996 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order . She also looks at some of the responses it has received, both positive and negative. She finds that Huntington’s thesis, while rough in itself, is apt to be simplified still further by policymakers. Above all, she urges us to remember that Huntington did not mean to champion the West within a clash of civilizations; he hoped, rather, to avert any such clash in the first place. Huntington viewed Western intervention as potentially destabilizing and apt to precipitate a clash of civilizations, by no means necessary, that he sought to avoid. We simplify his message at our own peril.

Response Essays

Paul Musgrave finds in clash of civilizations theory little more than an unseemly fantasy. Why, he asks, are we still talking about this? Empirically, the supporting evidence is weak. The world is becoming more peaceful, not more violent, over time. And Huntington’s theoretical framework hasn’t been the starting point for significant research breakthroughs. Rather, it’s more commonly used as target practice in teaching students how to recognize weak arguments. In a sense, however, we are stuck with the clash of civilizations, because it is a politically popular idea, and because some version of it seems to inform an a growing share of American foreign policy. We must take care, Musgrave agrees, that its description of civilizational conflict does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Trump administration is not precisely Huntingtonian, says Alina Polyakova, and the differences matter more than one may appreciate at first. Stephen Bannon has described the key conflict in the world today as the one between traditionalist nationalism and secular, modernizing globalism. Yet that’s a conflict taking place within the West, not across Huntington’s civilizational lines. Intriguingly, Huntington cautioned that if Russia ever became ascendant as a champion of tradition and nationalism, its interests would fail to align with ours, and in that case Russia would make an inappropriate ally, even for a conservative United States. Polyakova finds this an apt warning for our own time.

Zack Cooper looks at Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and asks: Where’s Asia in all of this? He notes that Huntington did have an answer. Asia contains many different civilizations in the Huntingtonian paradigm. It therefore makes for a natural site of conflict. U.S. administrations have repeatedly tried to focus their foreign policy on Asia, only to be detoured by events in the Middle East. But it mischaracterizes Huntington’s work to imagine that conflicts in the Middle East were the necessary upshot of his theories.

The Conversation

• An Illiberal International? Or a World of State Power? by Emma Ashford

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Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations

• World History
• Clash of Civilizations

by James Graham

Published: May, 2004

In the post Cold War world few articles have influenced how Western and especially American policymakers view the world more than Samuel P. Huntington's 1993 article, " The Clash of Civilizations? ". Published in the influential Foreign Affairs journal the article suggested the world was returning to a civilization dominated world where future conflicts would originate from clashes between 'civilizations'. The theory has been broadly criticised for oversimplification, ignoring indigenous conflicts and for incorrectly predicting what has happened in the decade since its publication. The claim made by many that September the 11th has vindicated Huntington is simply not supported by the evidence. Published while a post Cold War world was searching for a new prism to view international relations through ensured it has however proved influential.

Who was Samuel P. Huntington?

- Born: April 18 , 1927 - Based at Harvard University from 1950-2007 - Founder and co-editor of the quarterly journal, Foreign Policy - C.V. reads like a description of the US foreign policy machinery - Recieved $US 4,719,832 over 15 years from the John M. Olin Foundation, a right wing think tank that grew out of a chemicals and munitions business. - Policy adviser to U.S. Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter

Huntington's thesis outlines a future where the "great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural" (Huntington 1993:22). He divides the world's cultures into seven current civilizations, Western, Latin American, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu and Slavic-Orthodox (Huntington 1993:26). In addition he judged Africa only as a possible civilization depending on how far one viewed the development of an African consciousness had developed. These civilizations seem to be defined primarily by religion with a number of ad hoc exceptions. Israel is lumped together with the West, Buddhist states and the whole religion is completely ignored.

Huntington argues that the end of ideological confrontation between liberal democracy and communism will see future conflict occurring along the borders between civilizations at a micro level. At a macro level he predicts conflict occurring between states from different civilizations for control of international institutions and for economic and military power (Huntington 1993:29). He views this mix of conflict as normal by asserting that nation-states are new phenomena in a world dominated for most of its history by conflicts between civilizations. This is a dubious statement as inter-civilizational conflict driven mainly by geo-political factors rather than cultural differences is an equally if not more persuasive way to view much of history.

The theory at least differentiates between non-Western civilizations rather than grouping them together. He also explains how the West presents pro-Western policies as positive for the entire world and that the very idea of a universal culture is a Western idea. This he argues is evidenced by most important Western values like human rights often being the least important values to other civilizations.

His escape from a Eurocentric bias is however only temporary. He completely fails to account for indigenous cultures even though one can argue they collectively comprise a separate civilization (Fox 2002:430). The article also predicts future conflicts will be started by non-Western civilizations reacting to Western power and values ignoring the equally plausible situation where Western states use their military superiority to maintain their superior positions. The policy prescriptions he suggests to counter this perceived threat equate to increasing the power of the West to forestall any loss of the West's pre-eminence. Thus he suggests the Latin American and Orthodox-Slavic civilizations be drawn further into the Western orbit and the maintenance of Western military superiority (Huntington 1993:47).

By simplifying the world Huntington's theory ignores culture's inclination to be fast changing and multi-dimensional (Herzfeld 1997:116). Most Western states are now multi or bi-cultural and becoming more so. They are thus potentially part of multiple civilizations, a situation he brushes over by designating religion as the deciding factor. A secular Arab immigrant living in an Arab community in England is just one example where this designation is inappropriate. Indeed situated in a highly religious country with a significant number of Christian fundamentalists he states confidently that the world is becoming un-secularised. His evidence to backup this claim is circumstantial a common fault with most of his supporting evidence and thus is as best highly tenuous.

Like many sweeping theories Huntington's suffers from being too vague to address many specific issues. His anecdotal approach is simply not robust enough to account for the explanations and arguments he presents (Fox 2002:423). A systematic quantitative analysis conducted by Jonathon Fox for the period 1989-2002 concluded that the exact opposite of what Huntington predicted actually occurred (Fox 2002:425). Not only did Fox find that civilizational conflicts were less common than noncivilizational conflicts but the end of the Cold War had no significant effect on the ratio between the two (Fox 2002:426). Traditional methods like the level of discrimination in a society and the characteristics of a regime proved more useful in analysing ethnic conflict than Huntington's Clash of civilizations. Most damning of all was the finding that where civilizational conflict did occur it was more likely to be between groups that were culturally similar (Fox 2002:429), that is within the same civilization and not between them. These findings directly contradict Huntington's theory.

The danger of the Clash of Civilization thesis is presented by the term "clash of civilizations" which is intuitively understandable. This has ensured the theory has been used to increase the fear in the West of an Islamic movement perceived as increasingly powerful and anti-Western. It is this fantasy that has provided much of the rationale for trying to limit and control the expansion of the Islam and Confucian civilizations of which the war on terror is but the latest and most extreme example. These policies were advocated by Huntingdon in the article to reduce the threat specific civilizations were perceived to hold (Huntington 1993:47). A reasonable argument can thus be made that this article and the storm of interest it created, generated a self-fulfilling prophecy. The power to make real what one merely theorises is immensely dangerous. When that theory is based on flawed and circumstantial evidence it is disastrous.

The clash of civilizations thesis while original and persuasive distorted reality. Its many flaws have been exposed by events since its publication. The theory has however forced people to examine more seriously non-Western cultures. Unfortunately the conclusions many have drawn from these examinations have been the wrong ones as they were conducted from the starting premise of a 'clash of civilizations.' Such is the power of a well written and persuasive article to distort individual's perception of culture and conflict.

References Cited

Fox , Jonathon, Ethnic minorities and the clash of civilizations: A quantitative analysis of Huntington's thesis. British Journal of Political Science, 32(3):415-435.

Herzfeld , Michael, 1997. Anthropology and the politics of significance. Social Analysis, 4(3):107-138.

Huntington , Samuel, 1993. The clash of civilizations. Foreign Affairs, 72(3):22-49.

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Huntington vs. Mearsheimer vs. Fukuyama: Which Post-Cold War Thesis is Most Accurate?

This is an excerpt from  The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ 25 Years On: A Multidisciplinary Appraisal.  Download your free copy  here

In the aftermath of the Cold War – a 45-year ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union – several scholars forecasted the future of conflict and geopolitics post-1991. Three prominent books – Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations , John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics , and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History , all with compelling theses, provide a roadmap as to possible future outcomes. These three books have been selected, in part, because Huntington actually criticizes the main theories of the two others authors in Chapter one of his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Huntington 1997, 31, 37).

Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man , outlines the success of democracy and free-market capitalism as the dominant ideology that would proliferate throughout the world after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the representative death of communism as a viable ideological position (Fukuyama 1992). In a sense, warfare in the post-Cold War is unlikely given the rise of democracy and interdependence, Fukuyama argues. Since democracy is the final form of human government, debating Karl Marx’s admonition that communism would replace capitalism; Fukuyama effectively argues the opposite of Marx that capitalism has triumphed. Fukuyama also argues that although democracy is not a panacea to cure all problems of humanity, it is the final form of government.

John Mearsheimer’s book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics , provides an overview of the international system from a structural realist (also known as a neo-realist) perspective, specifically offensive realism. In contrast to early classical realist scholars like Hans Morgenthau, Mearsheimer argues that the structure of the international system is a cause of war, not necessarily moral concerns, or the particular characteristics of a given leader. In contrast to other structural realists like Kenneth Waltz, Mearsheimer argues that – on the questions of how much power states want to accumulate – states want as much power as they can get, rather than what he terms defensive realists who contend that states are interested in maintaining the balance of power (Mearsheimer 2001, 22).

Mearsheimer’s core predictions circulate around the changing dynamics in geopolitics as related to ‘great powers’. Mearsheimer argues that conflict is a fact of the international system because ultimately the dynamics of great power politics lead to wars over dominance of the system. Mearsheimer’s book concentrates on an almost 200-year period from the start of the Napoleonic Wars, 1792, to the end of the Cold War, 1991. He argues that three central wars occurred – the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and World War II – when the international system of balance of power politics was both unbalanced and multipolar (Mearsheimer 2001, 357). Thus, even though Mearsheimer does not directly discuss the post-Cold War world, his theory provides predictive power as to what will happen in the future based on characteristics that, he argues, have held over time. In the post-Cold War world, other ‘great powers’, given enough time, will seek to balance the power of the United States. The world is particularly conflict-prone when a multipolar world arises, especially if the balance-of-power becomes unbalanced (Mearsheimer 2001). Thus, when Mearsheimer published his book in 2001, the US was clearly the only superpower in the world.

Finally, Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ article in Foreign Affairs spawned such furious debate in 1993 that Huntington published a full-length book in 1996 to assuage his critics (Huntington 1993; Huntington 1997). Revolving around nine civilizations, Huntington argues that the future of warfare would be fought along civilizational ‘fault lines’. The civilizations include the West, Latin America, Africa, Orthodox, Sinic, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and Japanese. From the 1993 article to the 1996 book, Huntington added Japanese as a separate civilization, and changed Confucian to Sinic. One of the most controversial components of Huntington’s argument is the line ‘Islam has bloody borders’ (Huntington 1993, 35) inferring that the Islamic civilization in particular tends to become violently embroiled with other civilizations on its periphery. The case here is based on wars such as the Yugoslav war, conflict in Sudan and Iraq, as well as the Philippines.

Each thesis provides compelling reasons as to the future of the world, especially during the post-Cold War period. Huntington and Mearsheimer, in particular, utilize a theoretical argument in order to provide a forecast of the future. This is the major upside of using an accepted theory because it allows for predictions despite the fact that no scholar can readily predict what will actually happen. As John Mearsheimer is fond of saying, ‘the leaders of tomorrow are in the fifth grade today, and we have no way of predicting how they will act. But, theory provides us with a framework of their expected behaviors’. [1]

Now that an overview of each scholar’s major post-Cold War thesis has been presented, this chapter will first assess the arguments of Fukuyama and Mearsheimer as to their predictive power. Which topics and events has each author correctly predicted, and which topics and events has each author missed; in essence, which theory is most accurate? Given that this volume is an assessment of the work of Samuel Huntington, special attention is paid to the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis in the latter half of the chapter, but always with a comparison of Fukuyama and Mearsheimer in the background. Ultimately, I argue that each scholars’ prediction has, at periods of time in the post-Cold War era, looked very strong, whilst, at other times, their predictions have either not come to fruition, or been incorrect. Each thesis is still salvageable, but democracy is currently on the decline, which undercuts Fukuyama; great power competition has still not really emerged, which undercuts Mearsheimer; and civilizational identity remains limited, which undercuts Huntington. For each scholar, however, is known for their comprehensive grasp of history, so their work should be assessed regularly to see if their predictions correctly prognosticated events in the long term.

Which Theory is Most Accurate?  

At various points since the formal end of the Cold War in 1991, each of the scholars’ predictions has looked at times like a successful explanation of the current era, but also, at other times, like respective theses that missed the central explanatory factors of the period – prognosticating after all is a very difficult endeavor. Fukuyama’s thesis looked strong throughout the 1990s with the proliferation of democracies and states adopting free-market principles, even with requisite state protections (perhaps best called mixed economies). However, with 9/11, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ theory began to take hold as a better explanation of why geopolitical actions happened the way they did. Moreover, with the rise of China, and the resurgence of Russia – both utilizing an illiberal model of governance – Fukuyama’s thesis was likewise challenged by Mearsheimer’s prediction that other states would attempt to balance the power of the hegemon. Despite the challenges, parts of Fukuyama’s thesis still hold in that democracy remains an appealing force in world politics. Even though democracy has declined for the eleventh straight year, 87 of the 195 measured countries are still labelled as ‘free’ (Freedom House 2017). Tangentially, Fukuyama’s work also buttresses the Democratic Peace Theory (DPT), which layers his prediction with a Churchillian argument that democracy is the best form of government despite its flaws. Although Fukuyama did not construct the DPT, his positions on democracy strengthened the DPT by emphasizing the importance of democracy as the final form of human government. The DPT still holds if democracy and war are given strict definitions, and if intrastate conflicts are omitted. These two points show that Fukuyama’s End of History thesis is at the very least still relevant today.

For Fukuyama, democracy is central. The DPT posits that mature democracies do not go to war with other mature democracies (see Doyle 1986; Doyle 2005). The monadic version of the theory – assessing whether or not democracies are peaceful or not compared to non-democracies – is the argument that, yes, democracies are generally more peaceful than any other type of regime. For the monadic theory, the actual evidence however is at best mixed since democratic countries like the United States and the United Kingdom still frequently go to war against non-democracies. However, some evidence exists as to support the dyadic version of the theory – assessing whether mature democracies are more peaceful when surveying their likelihood of going to war against other mature democracies – that, yes, democracies do not really go to war with each other. In general, the dyadic version of the DPT is upheld statistically, and in the academic literature. Depending on how democracy and war are defined, it is possible to argue that the DPT has held from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the present – a span of over 200 years. There are numerous cases that might upend this thesis, but if a democracy is defined as a mature democracy replete with robust democratic institutions, and a history of competitive elections. If war is defined as 1,000 battle-related deaths per year, rather than 25. Finally, if civil wars, or intrastate wars, are omitted, then the veracity of the dyadic version of the DPT might still hold. Fukuyama’s adherence to democracy buttresses the concept that mature democracies are the final form of government due to a range of social goods for the people, but also in minimizing interstate violence in the future.

What undercuts Fukuyama’s thesis, however, is the stubbornness of China to reform even with significant per capita economic growth; Russia’s backsliding into authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin; Turkey’s authoritarianism under President Recep Erdoğan; and numerous strongmen that have emerged even since 2010 such as President al-Sisi of Egypt. In a sense, the 2010s have been dominated by an authoritarian resurgence where the strongman figure is seen as necessary in order to provide stability in a tumultuous economic and security environment around the world. In 2008, Fukuyama defended his thesis arguing that while autocracy has increased, especially in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, authoritarian leaders can only go so far – ‘If today’s autocrats are willing to bow to democracy, they are eager to grovel to capitalism’ (Fukuyama 2008). In his op-ed in The Washington Post , Fukuyama concedes that democracy is not necessarily the end of history given the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, but he argues that this challenge may subside or be defeated.

The work of John Mearsheimer is still largely untested for two main reasons. First, because US power remains central to security discussions in Europe – his theory rests on a return to great power rivalry in Europe, which, he argues, would return if the United States vacated its troops from the continent. Second, because the US remains the sole superpower, even if great power rivals are emerging elsewhere in the world, no country can balance American power, thus an unbalanced multipolar world is impossible. On the first point, Germany has not yet developed the requisite strategic autonomy to become a military superpower, which is well within Berlin’s arsenal should it pursue a more muscular foreign policy if latent tensions with the US continue to develop. For example, schisms between President George W. Bush and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and their contemporaries Trump and Merkel suggest that this division is possible. Mearsheimer cannot claim credit yet because the world remains devoid of great power conflict. Interdependence and cooperation still prevail and have disrupted the challenges that Mearsheimer predicted with rising multipolarity in the state system.

Mearsheimer also argues (2006) that given the Thucydidean trap of international relations – that one power cannot rise without coming into conflict with the falling power – China and the US will engage in some form of confrontation in the future. He ultimately argues that the US will treat China much the same as it did the Soviet Union during the Cold War with a policy of containment, and defeat China if Washington pursues smart policies. Multipolarity takes time to emerge, but with the rise of the Chinese economy coupled with technological improvements to their military, Beijing has emerged as a superpower for some academics, pundits, and policymakers. Russia’s military actions in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Syria in 2015 suggest that Moscow may be a resurgent actor in world affairs, worthy of great power status. There is some evidence of emerging multipolarity, then, with China, Russia, and other major actors like India. Questions, however, remain on the actions of Germany and Japan – both of which should emerge as ‘great powers’ under Mearsheimer’s model. Thus, Mearsheimer’s theory is still largely untested because the correct conditions of unbalanced multipolarity have not yet emerged.

Huntington Debates Mearsheimer and Fukuyama  

Interestingly, as noted in the introduction, Huntington specifically criticizes the theories of Fukuyama and Mearsheimer in Chapter one of his book because they both provide contrasting visions of the post-Cold War world. In a sense, Fukuyama’s thesis is one of harmony in the post-Cold War world – a point that Huntington vigorously views as overly optimistic and unlikely – because, in Fukuyama’s view, there would be no major struggles over ideology in the future such as those that preceded World War I, World War II, and the Cold War (Huntington, 1997, 31). Fukuyama concedes that conflicts would still take place in the “Third World” (now usually called the developing world), but that the end of history marks ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (Huntington, 1997, 31).

Assessed from the vantage point of 2018, 25 years after his initial prediction, Huntington is certainly right in his pessimism of Fukuyama’s thesis, at least to some degree. Fukuyama’s thesis has not delivered the universalization of Western liberal democracy, and has eroded since its high point in 2010. However, unlike World War I with monarchism, World War II with fascism and the Cold War with communism (see Mazower 1999), the post-Cold War world does not have one, distinct ideology with which capitalism and liberal democracy are competing. Fukuyama therefore cannot be easily dismissed, especially if the backsliding of democracy in the 2010s is merely a blip on a wider trend towards democratization, and if there is no major competitor for liberal democracy. Perhaps the rise of authoritarian state-centric capitalism in China and Russia provides an alternate ideological model for post-Cold War conflict, but democratic variants in Japan and South Korea still show that democratization is highly prized in tangent with a state-driven form of capitalism.

Huntington also criticizes Mearsheimer, specifically over his predictions on Russia and Ukraine, although he makes two contradictory claims. First, Mearsheimer predicts that ‘the situation between Ukraine and Russia is ripe for the outbreak of security competition between them. For a great power like Russia that shares a long and unprotected common border, like the one between Russia and Ukraine, often lapse into competition driven by security fears. Russia and Ukraine might overcome this dynamic and learn to live in harmony, but it would be unusual if they do’ (Mearsheimer 1993, 54 cited in Huntington 1996, 37). Huntington refutes this argument and instead argues that a civilizational approach is a better explanation of the peace between the two countries because they share the same civilizational culture – thus, peace is the more likely outcome. However, in a later section of Huntington’s book, the second point he makes on Ukraine/Russia, is that he describes Ukraine as a ‘cleft country’, which is torn, in a sense, between two civilizations (Huntington 1997, 166). ‘A civilizational approach’, Huntington argues that it, ‘highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than Yugoslavia’ (Huntington 1997, 37).

When viewing the world in 2018, 25 years after the publication of The Clash of Civilizations , Mearsheimer’s thesis certainly looks better than Huntington’s given Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the interjection of covert Russian forces in the Eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Huntington is still correct in his assessment that a split of Ukraine would be bloodier than Czechoslovakia, but less so then Yugoslavia, but incorrectly diagnosed Mearsheimer’s state-centric argument that Russia and Ukraine would likely engage in some form of violent war over security concerns, rather than civilizational kinship. Against Mearsheimer, Huntington’s thesis is certainly less accurate in some places. Mearsheimer correctly predicts the likelihood of violence between Russia and Ukraine, something that Huntington dismisses because he assumed that civilizational identity would become paramount, rather than the security-based rivalry that Mearsheimer asserts. Huntington’s discussion of Ukraine as a ‘cleft country’ revitalizes his argument because it implicitly notes the possibility that Ukraine would splinter – a bold prediction to make when assessing any country. Moreover, Huntington’s assessment that Ukraine would split in a manner more violent than Czechoslovakia, but less violent than Yugoslavia, is currently correct. Mearsheimer thus holds some leverage over Huntington on this issue, but the depth and specificity of Huntington’s predictions purport his sophisticated foresight.

9/11, the Afghan and Iraq wars, the Failure of the Arab Spring, and the Rise of ISIS  

Turning specifically to Huntington for the remainder of the chapter, what are the successes of his argument? Huntington’s thesis presents some explanation of 9/11, the failure of the Arab Spring, the rise of ISIS, and the threat of terrorism especially in the West. Yet, at the same time, inter-civilizational fault lines have not produced mass conflict. Civil wars are relatively rare even in places where civilizations meet (see Goldstein, 2011). Parts of Huntington’s thesis hold in the measures noted above, but his explanation should have generated more conflict, and less cross-civilizational cooperation such as the rise of BRICS, and the inter-civilizational coalition to defeat ISIS.

Where has Huntington been successful? In his book, Huntington provides 19 bullet points (Huntington, 1997, 38-39) that show how the post-Cold War world is moving towards a civilizational approach. Since the publication of his book, there are certainly many more bullet points that could be added. However, four major events fall categorically successful for Huntington’s prediction. As noted in the above section, Huntington’s theory showed significant accuracy in 2001 with 9/11 – if Huntington’s clashing civilizations thesis had been taken more seriously, some argue, the US could have better prepared for a 9/11-type event. In the aftermath of 9/11, the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq also provide some justification for Huntington. The war on Afghanistan received widespread support and NATO’s triggering of Article V – Huntington predicted the concept of civilizational kin rallying, especially in times of war or major attack. The Iraq War was much more contentious, and, in some senses, caused inter-civilizational disagreements since France, Germany, and Canada, among others in the West opposed the invasion of Iraq, all trying to offset the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis by not aligning with the wider Western civilization. This cuts against Huntington’s thesis to some degree, but the waging of war by a country from one civilization (the West) against another (Islamic) bolsters the original ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis.

At the outset of the Arab Spring when Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated in Tunisia in December 2010, it kick-started a chain of protests across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). When President Ben Ali of Tunisia was ousted followed in quick succession by President Mubarak of Egypt in January 2011 and then President Gadhafi of Libya in the midst of a bloody civil war, it seemed like the MENA region – the last vestige of widespread autocracy – might begin the process of democratization. The President of Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh also resigned, and liberal reforms took hold in Morocco, Kuwait, and Jordan among other cases. Fukuyama’s thesis recovered somewhat in 2011 and 2012 despite the downturn of democracy elsewhere in the world.

However, as protests in Syria beginning in March of 2011 segued into a fissiparous civil war, the early optimism of the Arab Spring began to wane, before finally petering out. Democratic successes are still evident in some MENA societies, and further reforms may still be enacted, but at least for now, the Arab Spring movement has subsided. Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ theory did not predict the short-term failure of the Arab Spring. However, he did predict that Islam would be the prominent defining feature of the MENA region as an Islamic civilization controversially implying that some of the values would be anathema to values in other civilizations such as democracy in the West.

The rise of ISIS as a significant player in the conflicts in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iraq, but also in Yemen and Libya, does not necessarily uphold Huntington’s thesis, but provides some suggestion of Huntington’s prediction. Since Huntington (1997) divided the world into nine different civilizations including an Islamic civilization, the goal of ISIS is to unify this civilization under a radical Islamist banner. Huntington is incorrect in the sense that a majority of people in the Middle East and North Africa still reject the ISIS-vision of a radical form of sharia law, but Huntington argues that Islam will be the key defining feature of the civilization. At this point, Huntington’s thesis still holds since a group like ISIS rose to prominence.

A global war involving core states of the world’s major civilizations is highly improbable but not impossible. Such a war, we have suggested, could come about from the escalation of a fault line was between groups from different civilizations, most likely involving Muslims on one side and non-Muslims on the other (Huntington 1997, 312).

On one of Huntington’s most controversial points, ‘Islam has bloody borders’ the rise of ISIS suggests some accuracy on the part of Huntington given the deadliness of this group. Missed in the wider narrative, however, is the prevailing peace in the world. The political scientist, Joshua Goldstein, shows that interstate war has declined dramatically such that in some years, there were no interstate wars at any place in the world (Goldstein 2011). Although conflict has increased since 2011, interstate violence remains relatively rare. Thus, Huntington’s assertion that ‘Islam has bloody borders’ is on one level true, it ignores the decline of violence everywhere. Based on Huntington’s prediction, one would actually expect a lot more violence in places where the Islamic civilization meets other civilizations, and yet political violence, and both interstate and intrastate wars remain relatively low compared to other points in human history.

Overall, on all four points, and despite some shortcomings, Huntington remains relevant to the post-Cold War debate. At the end of his book, Samuel Huntington openly wrestled with the idea of a clear civilizational identity. He argues, for example, that the United States should reject multiculturalism in order to preserve its place in the Western civilization,

The futures of the United States and of the West depend upon Americans reaffirming their commitment to Western civilization. Domestically this means rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism. Internationally it means rejecting the elusive and illusory calls to identify the United States with Asia (Huntington 1997, 307).

There is a portion of the above quote that suggests Huntington predicted the rise of an American presidential candidate like President Donald Trump – someone with an America First type disposition that is generally viewed as more nationalistic than previous presidents. Trump’s success, in some ways, is due to a Huntingtonian admonition to rally around one’s civilization (see Huntington 2004), one that President Trump has thus far fulfilled given his disdain for globalization, and his desire to reduce illegal immigration especially from civilizations outside of the West. Although there are some clear distinctions, President Trump’s rhetoric and actions mirror some of the three sentences listed above as important by Huntington to maintain the United States’ role as leader of the West. Huntington’s work was very controversial when first published in 1993 leading to a vociferous debate in the pages of Foreign Affairs and elsewhere. When viewing the world in 2018, Huntington is no less controversial, but also still seems to speak to the present. As a means of testing whether his thesis still holds intellectual ground 25 years later, the mere fact that Huntingtonian assessments are still relevant in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential Election debates, shows an answer in the affirmative. The same critiques of Huntington being too broad, not specific enough in some areas, and conceding some ground to his intellectual rivals exemplified by Fukuyama and Mearsheimer, all remain. Nevertheless, scholars cannot discount Huntington because core parts of his arguments still remain relevant to the narratives of today even if Huntington is clearly incorrect in some places.

* The author would like to thank Jacob Mach for his help with researching content for this chapter. The original idea for this chapter comes from Dr. Andrew Barnes and Dr. Steven Hook of Kent State University.

[1] Mearsheimer made this statement at the 2013 International Studies Association conference in San Francisco, California, on a panel discussion.

References  

Doyle, Michael W. 1986. “Liberalism and world politics.” American Political Science Review 80(4): 1151–1169.

Doyle, Michael W. 2005. “Three pillars of the liberal peace.” American Political Science Review 99(3): 463–466.

Freedom House. 2017. “Populists and Autocrats: The Dual Threat to Global Democracy.” https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017 Accessed 15 February 2017.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?.” The National Interest 16: 3–18.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man . New York: Simon and Schuster.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2008. “They can only go so far.” Washington Post , 24 August. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/08/22/AR2008082202395.html Accessed 22 June 2017.

Goldstein, Joshua S. 2011. Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide . New York: Penguin.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72(3): 22–49.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1997. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order . New York: Simon & Schuster.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1999. “The lonely superpower.” Foreign Affairs 78(2): 35–49.

Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who are we?: The challenges to America’s national identity . New York:  Simon and Schuster.

Mazower, Mark 2000. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century . New York: Vintage Books.

Mearsheimer, John. 1993. “The case for a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent.” Foreign Affairs 72(3): 50–66.

Mearsheimer, John. 1990. “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War.” International Security 15(1): 5–56.

Mearsheimer, John. 2001. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics . New York: WW Norton & Company.

Mearsheimer, John. 2006. “China’s Unpeaceful Rise.” Current History 105(690): 160–162.

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Advance Preview: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ 25 Years On
• Civilizations, Political Systems and Power Politics: A Critique of Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’
• Samuel Huntington and the American Way of War
• The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and Realism in International Political Thought
• The Kin-Country Thesis Revisited
• Clashing Civilizations: A Toynbeean Response to Huntington

Glen M.E. Duerr is Associate Professor of International Studies at Cedarville University. A citizen of three countries, he has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Kent State University and is the author of Secessionism and the European Union , which was published by Lexington Books in 2015.

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Samuel Huntington’s Great Idea Was Totally Wrong

His “clash of civilizations” essay in foreign affairs turned 30 this year. it was provocative, influential, manna for the modern right—and completely and utterly not true..

The “Kennan Sweepstakes,” they called it in the early 1990s. Decades earlier, the diplomat George Kennan had won lasting renown (and lifelong self-torture) with his writings at the Cold War’s outset that outlined the nature of the Soviet threat to the United States and prescribed a vague strategy to counter it. Now, as the Soviet Union relaxed its grip on Central Europe and then imploded, leading thinkers, government officials, and policy wonks scrambled to define the nature of this new age in foreign affairs (ideally via a catchy term like Kennan’s “containment”).

Francis Fukuyama’s essay on “The End of History?” in The National Interest is only the best-remembered of the ideas that were tossed around. The journalist Charles Krauthammer identified a “unipolar moment” where peace could only be assured by the United States having “the strength and will to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.” With less literary felicity, the political scientist John Mearsheimer foresaw a Europe dissolving into chaos and war as “Germany, France, Britain, and perhaps Italy will assume major-power status” and battle for power. Leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev, George H.W. Bush, and Joe Biden called for a renewed emphasis on cooperation through the United Nations and anticipated reduced military conflict, while, in 1993, President Bill Clinton floated “democratic enlargement” as his guidepost.

This was the context when Samuel Huntington injected his famous ideas into public consciousness 30 years ago. A 1993 Foreign Affairs essay he expanded into a bestselling book with a slightly different title three years later, “The Clash of Civilizations?” argued that the source of conflict in the world in the coming decades would not be primarily economic or ideological, as it had been. Rather, cultural issues would rise to the forefront of the international arena in unprecedented ways. “The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics,” he wrote, making a bold prediction despite the question mark in the essay’s title. Countries should be grouped together not by their political systems or levels of economic development but by civilizational belonging and be “differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion.” Nation-states would still be the predominant actors in the world, but they would battle less over geopolitics as it had been traditionally understood since the seventeenth century than over resurging cultural and religious identities. “The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations.”

Huntington clarified that he wasn’t eager to see a clash of civilizations—he advised Western policymakers to be cognizant of the tremendous sensitivities around cultural issues so they would avoid imposing their values on non-Western peoples and refrain from interfering in their affairs. “The reason he wanted to put the question mark is that he didn’t want the world to go down this direction; he wanted there to be cooperation among civilizations—reconciliation and dialogue,” recalled his one-time doctoral student Fareed Zakaria, who commissioned Huntington’s article as managing editor of Foreign Affairs . That call for peaceful collaboration between civilizations was largely lost in the subsequent furor over the article, although calls for cooperation were admittedly not the bulk of the essay or the book but merely a small component.

Huntington died in 2008, but the argument he ignited has long outlasted him. The debate over the clash has not abated, 30 years on. It is still common each month to read in the media about a civilizational clash or hear elected officials and intellectuals reference the catchphrase, as a random sample indicates. “The Theory Is Alive,” the Indian version of The Telegraph declared in April. In June, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI said that the world was witnessing not a clash of civilizations but a “clash of ignorances.” Chinese leaders recently proposed an “equality of civilizations” in place of the West’s clash, according to The Economist , which reported a diplomat lamenting that “the antiquated thesis of a ‘clash of civilisations’ is resurfacing.”

Indeed, Huntington’s argument is so antiquated that it has already gone through several afterlives and been resurrected, like a horror movie villain. As the twentieth century ended and liberal capitalist democracy seemed unrivaled, it appeared as though The Clash of Civilizations was unduly pessimistic and perhaps irrelevant to the international arena. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Huntington’s book became a bestseller for a second time, as conservatives across the United States and Europe cited its arguments for why Islam was fundamentally incompatible with Western society. When refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East attempted to find stability in white-majority countries, Huntington’s ideas were invoked as a reason for opposing such ventures. Right-wingers like Steve Bannon have utilized the Clash of Civilizations thesis to reject immigration to the United States. Perhaps most surprisingly, thinkers around Russian leader Vladimir Putin have argued that their country is the leading defender of a Christian civilization that the rest of Europe has largely abandoned, providing yet another lifeline to a 30-year-old essay.

Huntington would almost certainly abhor many of the uses of his arguments, given his interpersonal decency, frequent travel to universities and legislatures around the world, mentorship of and friendship with people of color, and lifelong support for U.S. interests. “I think he would have absolute contempt for this type of stuff,” said Gideon Rose, another of Huntington’s students and the Foreign Affairs managing editor following Zakaria. “He would have been appalled at the disorder, he would have been appalled at the prejudice, he would have been appalled at the anti-intellectualism. He was no fan of elites, but he was also in no way a populist.”

And yet, by simplifying the world into categories defined largely by culture and religion and declaring them inevitably hostile to one another, Huntington established an intellectual template for what has followed in his wake. By portraying the West as a unique civilization under siege from mass immigration and Islam, he drastically underestimated America’s assimilative power and most Muslims’ rejection of fundamentalist Islam. Even worse, Huntington’s ideas were so powerful and popular that they deepened currents hostile to peaceful coexistence between Western countries and others. One of the most prescient comments on Huntington’s ideas came from the Indonesian Australian writer Wang Gungwu, who observed in 1996, “This is what is so stunning about The Clash of Civilizations : it is not just about the future, but may actually help to shape it.” Wang was right about that, and we are largely worse off for it.

Huntington was a shy political scientist who began teaching at Harvard in 1949. A quintessential WASP, he’d registered as a Democrat the year earlier at the age of 21, met his wife while writing speeches for Adlai Stevenson, advised presidential nominees Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Michael Dukakis in 1988, and served on Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council. A visit to his archive at Harvard reveals that he offered some thoughts on foreign policy to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992, around the time he was putting the finishing touches on the “Clash” essay.

Despite his long relationship with the Democratic Party, Huntington was anything but a partisan hack. Before he gained international fame, he already stood at the top of his profession for his contributions to subfields of political science. His first book, The Soldier and the State , had an enormous impact on the theory of civilian-military relations. His next major work, Political Order in Changing Societies , was a landmark in comparative politics. And his book immediately preceding Clash , The Third Wave , introduced that phrase to encompass the series of transitions to democracy that numerous countries undertook in the late 1970s and 1980s. (It also displayed Huntington’s knack for fashioning memorable neologisms to describe political phenomena.) Mixed in with these achievements were other books and many journal articles he wrote, alongside co-founding Foreign Policy and serving as president of the American Political Science Association. In a 1999 cover story for this magazine on the decline of political science, Jonathan Cohn called Huntington “arguably his generation’s most influential student of international relations.”

With his skeptical worldview, Huntington was slow to see that the Cold War was ending as the 1980s wound down. But when it did, he anticipated not Fukuyama’s pacific ideal but a “jungle-like world of multiple dangerous, hidden traps, [and] unpleasant surprises,” he said in a 1990 lecture. He added, “We need a good word to describe the international relations of this new world … the right phrase to replace [Walter] Lippmann’s Cold War as a label for this much more complicated situation of ambiguous relationships and multiple conflicts.” Over the next two years, he set himself to that task.

Some of The Third Wave had examined the relationships between cultures and democratization. The book argued that changes within the Roman Catholic Church and economic development had led countries with Catholic majorities toward democracy, whereas before the 1970s, democratic countries had mostly contained Protestant majorities. Huntington attached a great deal of importance to culture’s role in political affairs, and “The Clash” was an extension of this. But his thinking evolved in spurts, and it was comfortable with nuances to the point of being contradictory.

In October 1992, Huntington wrote a memo to Bill Clinton’s campaign suggesting the Arkansas governor prioritize the expansion of democracy. “A world in which Russia and China were democracies like all the other great powers would truly be a democratic and a highly secure world,” he wrote. But that same month, Huntington debuted a far more pessimistic thesis about a clash of civilizations in a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank.

He adopted the term after reading the historian Bernard Lewis’s 1990 essay in The Atlantic on “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” Lewis argued that the separation of church and state arose from Christian principles, not universal ones. Conversely, many Muslims were reverting to what he called the “classical Islamic view” that deemed secularism, modernity, and the equality of nonbelievers with godly people as heretical. “This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both,” Lewis wrote.

Lewis was a conservative-leaning scholar, charged as a quintessential contemporary Orientalist scholar by the left-leaning literary critic and Palestinian activist Edward Said. But Huntington was an admirer of Lewis, being a conservative Democrat, as devoted to order, security, and American traditions as any Republican. And so his appearance at AEI was unsurprising. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural,” he announced. “The major conflicts will [be] between peoples of different civilizations.” He said he was not offering a prediction but a hypothesis, although that uncertainty decreased in the following years.

Huntington circulated a version of the speech as a working paper for Harvard’s now defunct John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, which he directed (the Olin Foundation was a longtime funder of conservative causes). His students included Zakaria and Rose. Senator Bill Bradley and historian Paul Kennedy also discussed the essay, and Huntington’s archives contain a handwritten note from former President Richard Nixon congratulating the professor for writing the best post–Cold War essay and having “raised issues [in the AEI lecture] that no one else, in or out of government, has adequately addressed.” Even before it was published, then, the essay was generating buzz.

When Zakaria became managing editor, he asked Huntington to adapt the paper as the cover story for the summer 1993 issue of a redesigned Foreign Affairs . “I definitely knew it was going to be big because it was so provocative,” Zakaria recalled. “And he wasn’t famous, but he was famous enough that he had authority.” Zakaria admired Huntington’s prescient understanding of the power of culture in the post–Cold War era and his willingness to dispel liberal illusions around the triumph of globalization, free markets, and democracy.

But nobody, not Zakaria nor Huntington, could possibly anticipate how big Huntington’s essay would be. With some changes made to the Olin paper at Zakaria’s suggestion, “The Clash of Civilizations?” attracted more attention than anything Foreign Affairs had published since Kennan’s Cold War essays, and more than anything it has published since. Editors were deluged with requests to reprint the article and responses from other intellectuals, some of which they printed. Huntington was flooded with interview and lecture requests from around the world, where readers seemed as fascinated by, supportive of, or angry about the “Clash” thesis as were Americans. As much as any article in a popular foreign policy journal can, “The Clash” penetrated into the public consciousness and began influencing world events immediately. The U.S. ambassador to Indonesia cabled the State Department in August 1993 complaining that the article had “caught on like wildfire in Asia,” to the point that “dealing with the issue is as great a challenge for policy and public diplomacy as any in the post–Cold War era.”

What made “The Clash” radioactive was not just its unfashionable pessimism or its author’s establishment pedigree. Rather, it seemed to explain complex global realities in a novel, simple way. The Gulf war could, if one squinted hard enough, impersonate a conflict between different countries from different civilizations. The same was true of the Yugoslav Wars then raging , the Israeli-Arab conflict, and China’s opposition to U.S. policies. Any friction between states with different cultures could appear as evidence of a clash between civilizations, as could any friendship between countries with similar cultures, which Huntington called “kin countries.” Even an inchoate sense that other people around the world were just somehow different from Westerners could be justified in civilizational terms.

Huntington also had something going for him that most political scientists do not: He could really write. His sentences were clear, bold, and blunt, perhaps at times to a fault. “Differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic,” he wrote. Huntington was notable for his confidence in writing declarative sentences that simplistically categorized billions of people. The world would be shaped, he said, by “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African civilization.” Billions of humans were assigned to these eight groups. Each group possessed their own “philosophical assumptions, underlying values, social relations, customs, and overall outlooks on life.” This cultural determinism was nearly inescapable and explained the world’s complicated political and economic circumstances. “Islamic culture explains in large part the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Muslim world,” he wrote, minimizing such weighty factors as geography, history, imperialism, economics, and leadership quality. Comprehending Huntington’s paradigm didn’t require knowing any history or global politics; anyone could just look at a globe, see the divisions, and chalk them up to inevitable cultural differences.

Huntington’s blithe generalizations about millions of people recalled discredited modes of thinking. In the book, he wrote that “civilization and race are not identical” but conceded that “a significant correspondence exists between the division of people by cultural characteristics into civilizations and their division by physical characteristics into races.” Civilizations as entities defined by stubborn cultural elements differed from civilizations defined by immutable racial characteristics—but the two were close enough to be kin themselves.

Relatedly, Huntington portrayed the West as unique and fretted that its very survival was threatened by mass immigration and Islam. Mexican immigrants particularly were not assimilating into the United States, inciting a “demographic invasion.” He saw civilizational conflict in such minor developments as Mexican immigrants demonstrating in Los Angeles against a referendum meant to deny state benefits to undocumented people. These sections of his book have largely been forgotten, but swaths of The Clash of Civilization s read like a Trump campaign brochure with footnotes.

Huntington responded to little of the barrage of criticisms the book inspired. He argued that his paradigm was more accurate than any other, and that simplifications of international relations were always necessary. Otherwise, he addressed only what he saw as misrepresentations of his argument, and even then he did so only occasionally. “His modus operandi would be to do his work on a subject, answer a question to his own satisfaction, and then to move on to another topic that he found interesting,” recalled Gideon Rose. However, Huntington, unafraid of being unpopular, did grant many interviews and traveled internationally to address his argument to local audiences.

But while Huntington was largely content to let the furor over his argument rage, he grew increasingly vocal with his alarm about Latino immigration to the United States. When he cast his vote for Bob Dole in 1996, he was voting for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time. “Recent Mexican and Muslim immigrants identify more with their country of origin than with the United States,” he said in 1998. He said multiculturalism had replaced a national feeling among elites, alienating them from ordinary Americans. “If multiculturalism continues to spread, it is likely at some point to generate an ethnic and possibly racist populist reaction from white Americans,” he predicted. “If this occurs, the United States would become isolationist and hostile toward much of the outside world.”

Huntington was correctly, brilliantly anticipating the direction in which the United States was headed, but he absolved white Americans of their xenophobic, authoritarian turn, perhaps because he shared some of their anxieties and prejudices about Latin Americans. His concern about Mexican immigration became a panic, one he said could jeopardize the country’s future, not just its allegedly fragile national identity. His last book, 2004’s Who Are We?, was borderline hysterical about the failures of the United States to remain unified in the face of the “illegal demographic invasion” and cosmopolitan elites. In this final work, Huntington did not just foresee the Trump movement that would emerge more than a decade later; he supported some of its primary grievances. “Cultural America is under siege,” he wrote. “Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s,” he wrote. Huntington suggested that Mexican culture and values were different from American ones, citing observers who believed “Hispanic traits” included mistrust of people outside the family, laziness, low regard for education, and an acceptance of poverty as a precondition to entering heaven. If the United States did nothing to reaffirm its “historic Anglo-Protestant culture,” it would devolve into two countries, he believed: one that retained its traditional values, the other a Hispanicized bloc that undermined what had established American greatness.

After Who Are We? , Huntington commenced a new work about the relationship between religion and nationalism called Chosen Peoples . Sadly, he never finished it, suffering health failures for years before dying in 2008. Even his many critics admitted that few other academics had shifted the world outside the academy as he had.

After 9/11, when The Clash of Civilizations hit the bestseller list for the second time, Simon & Schuster rushed 20,000 new copies of it into print. With extremists claiming to attack major American capitalist and governmental symbols in the name of Islam, it was easy to mistake Huntington for a prophet. Within hours of the attacks, fretful voices worried about making a civilizational clash a self-fulfilling reality. On September 11 itself, Pakistan’s ambassador to Russia said, “This must not be seen as a clash of civilizations between the Islamic and the Christian world. You must pay attention to the fact that every Islamic nation worth its name has condemned this.”

To some degree, his caution was heeded. French, German, Canadian, and Arab leaders swiftly cautioned against perceiving the attacks as part of a clash of civilizations, demonstrating how deeply and widely Huntington’s phrase had penetrated. President George W. Bush repeated that Islam was a great world religion not represented by terrorists and invoked Huntington’s phrase to repudiate it. “This struggle has been called the clash of civilizations,” Bush said . “In truth, it is a struggle for civilization.” Even Henry Kissinger warned against feeding into the narrative of a clash, as did analysts at the Heritage Foundation. Rudy Giuliani, at his zenith disguising himself as a big-hearted statesman, told the United Nations, “Surrounded by our friends of every faith, we know this is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a conflict between murderers and humanity.”

Others were less circumspect, in the United States and elsewhere. “It’s a clash of civilizations,” former Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick said on The O’Reilly Factor on September 13. The Economist praised Huntington’s views on Islam as “cruel and sweeping, but nevertheless acute.” The Atlantic featured a glowing, nearly 9,500-word profile of Huntington, written by the journalist Robert Kaplan. A few years earlier, Kaplan had written Huntington a letter, found in his archives, praising the political scientist for being a bomb-thrower. “The real purpose of the intellectual is to constructively disturb ,” Kaplan wrote. “That is exactly what you have done.”

Indeed, Huntington seemed to enjoy the role of provocateur, and it gradually overtook his vocation as a detached political scientist. The Boston Globe profiled his revived fame in a front-page article, and Huntington believed a real clash was forthcoming as the West responded to the attacks, telling the paper, “I fear that while Sept. 11 united the West, the response to Sept. 11 will unite the Muslim world.” He believed that, as Osama bin Laden reportedly hoped, Muslims everywhere would revolt against the West and foment a world war. Soon after, Huntington wrote a Newsweek essay that was more narrow-minded than anything he had written. “Contemporary global politics is the age of Muslim wars,” he argued. “Muslim wars have replaced the Cold War as the principal form of international conflict.” Few other academics were writing anything like this for popular periodicals at the time. Huntington also strengthened the panic around terrorists using deadlier weapons than airplanes to attack the United States, estimating that bin Laden ran a network “with cells in perhaps 40 countries,” and 9/11 had “highlight[ed] the likelihood of chemical and biological attacks.”

Huntington’s caricatured generalizations about Islam legitimized other voices espousing religious and cultural essentialism. Talk about Islam as a dangerous, monolithic entity represented by its most violent elements became mainstreamed. The military historian John Keegan complimented Huntington’s prescience and declared , “A harsh, instantaneous attack may be most likely to impress the Islamic mind.” The syndicated columnist Richard Cohen wrote that “a rereading of [Huntington’s] article shows that much of it has held up” because “whatever happens to bin Laden or, for that matter, the Taliban, the cultural roots of this conflict will persist.” Another columnist, Rod Dreher, wrote in National Review , “it is unarguable that very many Muslims and their leaders despise non-Muslims, attack us rhetorically in religious terms, and wish to see us die for our infidelity to Allah.” He added menacingly, “if there is an Islamic fifth column in this country, the American public needs to know about it.” Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi got in on the action, declaring that “our civilization is superior to Islam.” But his views were widely criticized, and he took the rare step of half-heartedly apologizing .

In the ensuing years of Bush’s tenure, however, fewer apologies would be made for such denigrations of Islam as a religion and a civilization. As jihadists occasionally attacked Western countries, Muslim immigration continued, and Western armies occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamophobia became more politically acceptable, first on the religious right, then among think tankers such as Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes, and, finally, among more moderate intellectuals such as Martin Amis and Sam Harris. Amis said , “I don’t think that we can accommodate cultures and ideologies that make life very difficult for half the human race: women.” By the time Barack Obama ran for president, anti-Islamic sentiment was widespread enough to facilitate frantic rumors about his religion. A language was needed to sanitize the anxieties of what was often sheer bigotry, and Huntington provided the lexicon and establishment imprimatur.

But even as Huntington’s thesis hardened into conventional wisdom in segments of the foreign policy and journalism worlds, matters took quite a different direction in the academy. In the book version of Clash , Huntington laid down a simple marker to help determine the value of his argument. “A crucial test of a paradigm’s validity and usefulness is the extent to which the predictions derived from it turn out to be more accurate than those from alternative paradigms,” he wrote. Soon after he published those words, scholars took up the challenge and began testing his theory. Among the first was a 2000 paper in Journal of Peace Research , in which three political scientists examined conflicts between 1950 and 1992 to determine if states from different civilizations were likelier to be in conflict, and to assess whether other theories better accounted for these conflicts. “There is little evidence that civilizations clash,” they found. Traditional international relations theories like realism better accounted for world events. Huntington responded that his thesis was meant to apply to the post–Cold War world, not the bulk of the years his critics had studied, although his essay made numerous present-tense statements about anti-Western civilization alignments, such as, “A Confucian-Islamic military connection has thus come into being, designed to promote acquisition by its members of the weapons and weapons technologies needed to counter the military power of the West.”

The following year, two different political scientists looked in International Studies Quarterly at the relationship between civilizations and wars over nearly two centuries, between 1816 and 1992. They, too, found little support for Huntington’s theory. “Most importantly, our analysis reveals that during the post–Cold War era (1989–1992), the period in which Huntington contends that the clash of civilizations should be most apparent, civilization membership was not significantly associated with the probability of interstate war,” they wrote.

In 2002, still another scholar looked at conflicts between 1946 and 1997, also in Journal of Peace Research . This analysis, too, found that “state interactions across civilizational lines are not more conflict prone.” The same was true for the eight years since the Cold War ended, pace Huntington. Again in 2002, when Huntington’s retrograde ideas about Islam were coursing through American life, a paper in the British Journal of Political Science looked at data to assess whether ethnic conflicts since the Cold War that could be defined as civilizational had increased in quantity or intensity, let alone defined the period. Alas, “civilizational conflicts make up only a minority of ethnic conflict in the post–Cold War era.” Nor were those conflicts more intense than those wars waged by states in common civilizations.

The research empirically finding Huntington’s theory to be wrongheaded continued to mount. A 2006 European Journal of International Relations paper found that “violence is more likely among states with similar ties, even when controlling for other determinants of conflict.” Other scholars took aim at particular aspects of Huntington’s thesis. In a 2009 article in the British Journal of Political Science , two political scientists looked at data to assess civilizational clashes not in terms of war but in terms of terrorism. The Clash had gained renewed attention following 9/11 after all, and Huntington had cited jihadist terrorism against the West as evidence of his thesis. “Significantly more terrorism is targeted against nationals of the same country than against those of other countries,” they found. Examining Huntington’s most controversial claim, they concluded that there was “no significant effect with respect to terrorism from the Islamic civilization against nationals of all other civilizations in general.” As for migrants, a 2003 report in Comparative Political Studies crunched the numbers and determined that “diasporas and immigrants did not increase intercivilizational conflicts.” Later studies have confirmed these shortcomings and added more.

Not all academic research pointed away from Huntington. A 2010 article in the journal Cooperation and Conflict buttressed several components of Huntington’s theory, looking at wars between states from 1989 to 2004. “The findings illustrate that Western countries paired with a country from any other civilization, in particular the Islamic bloc, increases the likelihood of violent international conflict,” it read.

But the analysis was an outlier: Most studies empirically testing Huntington’s argument found the data lacking. Peer-reviewed studies aside, the world’s conflicts demonstrate the failures of Huntington’s thesis. Huntington’s wrongheaded belief that the Muslim world would unite in response to what was then called the war on terrorism revealed his limited understanding of the divisions among, and motivations of, the hundreds of millions of people in Muslim-majority countries, who are as divided along nationalist, ethnic, and intra-religious lines as any other civilization. Similarly, by far the deadliest war of the twenty-first century so far has been the Second Congo War, which lasted from 1998 to 2003. Most of the three million people killed in the war were civilians. The ongoing Syrian Civil War has claimed the lives of more than 300,000 civilians. That number is similar to the number of people killed in Sudan in the war that began in 2003. These three wars top the list of the worst conflicts of the twenty-first century, and they have something in common: they were largely fought within civilizations.

And then there is the Russo-Ukrainian War, the conflict with the most potential to escalate into a nuclear exchange. In The Clash , Huntington argued specifically that the future relationship between Russia and Ukraine would serve as a test of his theory. He rebutted John Mearsheimer’s claim that the two countries were headed for conflict because of a long, undefended border, a history of mutual enmity, and Russian nationalism. “A civilizational approach, on the other hand, emphasizes the close cultural, personal, and historical links between Russia and Ukraine and the intermingling of Russians and Ukrainians in both countries, and focuses instead on the civilizational fault line that divided Orthodox eastern Ukraine from Uniate western Ukraine, a central historical fact of long standing,” Huntington wrote. “While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian-Ukrainian War, a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia.” Here as elsewhere, the civilizational approach proved demonstrably, even catastrophically wrong, highlighting the limits of a perspective that overemphasizes the role of culture in world affairs. Putin might eventually conquer some of eastern Ukraine, but that occurrence wouldn’t result from some civilizational kinship. “By May 2022, only 4 percent in Ukraine’s east and 1 percent in the south still had a positive view of Russia,” according to an analysis by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Amazingly, people who had called themselves Russians living in Ukraine are now patriotic Ukrainians. “Cultural and historical preferences have also changed dramatically. Sixty-eight percent of respondents from the south and 53 percent from the east now describe Ukrainian as their native language,” the Carnegie analysis found, consistent with other studies. These evolutions illustrate how cultural identities are far more malleable than Huntington suggested.

But even as research and events have discredited Huntington’s argument, it has found important adopters among the far right worldwide. Steve Bannon, the influential adviser to the Trump administration, has adopted variations of the ideas, saying, “If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers … kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours, or other places.” No wonder that Trump’s White House extensively limited immigration, singled out Muslim refugees as primed for violence, overstated the threat posed by jihadist terrorists, and made defending an apparently embattled American civilization fundamental to its worldview.

Beyond the United States, right-wing figures globally increasingly used the language of clashing civilizations. Pim Fortuyn, a pioneer in the far-right populist crusade against Islam, represented himself as “the Samuel Huntington of Dutch politics.” Russian leader Putin styles himself as the defender of Christendom, saying “Euro-Atlantic countries” were “rejecting their roots,” which included the “Christian values” that were the “basis of Western civilization.” Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister who has become the de facto leader of Christian conservatives, told an American conference of right-wingers that “Western civilization” was under attack by people who hated Christians and globalists who “want to give up on Western values and create a new world, a post-Western world.”

Huntington likely would have despised some of his new fans. He was a nationalist who was skeptical of immigration, but he was simultaneously a small- d democrat who devoted his life to defending America’s interests and its democratic system. Most importantly, he wanted to avoid the clash of civilizations he foresaw, not provoke one, as people like Bannon are eager to do. Praise for a violent, anti-Western dictator like Putin is unimaginable coming from him. But however inadvertently, Huntington furthered the cause of far-right populists everywhere by giving them a language and academic cover for their apocalyptic, xenophobic sentiments. These reactionaries have targeted Muslims and migrants with brutal rhetoric and actions, fueling the global, cultural, and religious tensions that Huntington wanted to reduce. But that is the thing about theories: Sometimes they clash with the real world, to disastrous effect.

Jordan Michael Smith is a contributing editor at The New Republic.

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Scott Zeitlin, PhD, Advances Understanding and Treatment of Huntington’s Disease

September 4, 2024 by [email protected]

Scott Zeitlin, PhD

Since UVA neuroscientists discovered the link between the brain and the immune system in 2015, researchers across UVA Health and worldwide have been investigating ways of leveraging this connection to treat neurologic diseases and disorders from autism to Alzheimer’s. At UVA, private donors and foundations have fueled groundbreaking discoveries in this area. The research team of Scott Zeitlin, PhD, an associate professor of neuroscience at UVA School of Medicine, recently benefited from this generosity.

With visionary support from the Pelican Fund, Zeitlin and his team are uncovering the secrets of Huntington’s disease (HD) and identifying new targets for combating this debilitating, fatal brain disorder. His experiments are illuminating (literally with fluorescent dye in some cases) how the body’s innate immune responses are implicated in HD and can be harnessed to delay and mitigate HD symptoms. Beyond giving new hope to families affected by HD, Zeitlin’s findings may open the floodgates for new treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and more.

Read complete article by Katherine Ludwig in Pulse magazine. To support Scott Zeitlin’s groundbreaking research, please contact Kelly Reinhardt, Director of Development, Neurosciences, at [email protected] .

Filed Under: Philanthropy , Research

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