The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
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The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is an influential and controversial book on grand strategy and world futures, by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington. He does not rigorously define an abstraction of a [[civilization, but uses examples, although he did so in a Foreign Affairs article that called a civilization "the highest cultural grouping and the broadest level of cultural identity short of that which distinguishes humans from other species."[1]
In the book, the chief premise is
that culture and cultural identifies, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration and culture in the post-Cold War world. [2]
It takes a darker view than some alternative models, such as that of Thomas P.M. Barnett in The Pentagon's New Map,[3] suggesting that major conflict is likely; "avoidance of a global war of civilization depends on world leaders accepting and cooperating to maintain the multicivilizational character of global politics." He bases this on five corollaries to the central theme:
- Global politics is multipolar and multicivilizational; modernization is distinct from Westernization
- "The balance of power among civilizations is shifting; the West is declining in relative influence"
- "A civilization-based world order is emerging; societies sharing cultural affinities cooperate with each other; efforts to shift societies from one civilization to another are unsuccessful
- "The West's universalist pretentions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China"
- "The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal"
He rejects globalization as being either necessary and desirable. He specifically rejects the "end of history" model of his student, Francis Fukuyama:
we may be witnessing..the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.[4]
Note that Fukuyama has sometimes been strongly identified with neoconservatism, which has this ideal of liberal democracy, although his position keeps evolving.
Paradigms
He cites several paradigms that came from the Cold War, none of which he finds accurate although the latter two are closest.
- One world: euphoria and harmony: This is most often expressed in Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis
- Two worlds: Us and Them: There are, however, several binary systems. From the Islamic perspective, there is the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb. Thomas P. M. Barnett speaks of the "connected core" and everyone else. Orient versus Occident is a classic, if not terribly useful division
- 184 States, More or Less He sees this as the "realist" model, based on state interest. Perhaps not for 184 states, but there is some of this in Henry Kissinger's balance of power models.[5]
- Sheer chaos The advent of weakened and failed states supports this model, for which he cites Zbigniew Brzezinski[6] and Daniel Patrick Moynihan[7]
Instead, he proposes that a workable model groups into seven or eight civilizations takes the best of the models and builds from them. Its assumptions are:[8]
- "The forces of integration in the world are real and are precisely what are generating counterforces of cultural assertion and civilizational consciousness
- "The world is is in some sense two, but the central distinction is between the West as the hitherto dominant civilization and all the others, which, however, have little if anything in common among them. The world, in short, is divided between a Western one and a non-Western many.
- "Nation states are and will remain the most important actors in world affairs, but their interests, associations, and conflicts are increasingly shaped by cultural and civilizational factors.
- "The world is indeed anarchical, rife with tribal and nationality conflicts, but the conflicts that pose the greatest danger for stability are those between states or groups from different civilizations."
The test of a model is that it:[9]
- Generalizes, rationally, about reality
- Helps understand causality
- Anticipates, and sometimes predicts
- Separates the important from the unimportant
- Shows the roads to be taken to goals
Not all models are useful for all purposes, as he points out the differences between a road map for driving and a chart for air navigation.
Cultures and civilizations
Huntington's basic premise is that a number of great cultures are in unavoidable conflict:
- Western: Beginning in AD 700, Huntington says it still has three subcomponents: European, North American, and Latin American. It also includes European-settled countries such as Australia and New Zealand
- Latin American: While the civilization has European and North American roots, it has a distinct identity. Huntington's rationale for separating it is its political interactions more than its cultural ones
- Islamic: Clearly beginning in the seventh century, while it has an inherent concept of unity (i.e., Dar al Hab and Dar al Islam), there is still strong factionalization into Arab, Turkic, Persian, Malay and other subcivilizations
- Sinic (or Confucian): dating back at least to 1500 BC and perhaps a millenium earlier, Huntington referred to this as Confucian in earlier works but considers Sinic more accurate, to include Vietnamese and Korean civilizations — although Vietnamese and Koreans might have hearty objections
- Hindu
- Orthodox
- Japanese: an offshoot of Sinic, which was recognizable somewhere between 100 and 400 AD.
While it no longer exists, the Soviet Union clearly qualified as a civilization, in conflict with many others, especially Western, as well as exercising proxy conflict through other civilizations.
Huntington observes that a pan-African civilization does not now exist, but may form.
Some of his lists include a Buddhist civilization, but he argues that it is largely extinct in India and has been absorbed in China and Japan. The places where the strongest arguments can be made are Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka and Thailand (Therevada Buddhist subcivilization); Bhutan, Mongolia and Tibet (Lamaist Mahayana Buddhist). [10]He does not include Vietnamese culture as Buddhist.
He observes that there can be common enemies from a third civilization, exemplified, in older civilization, with the Western Allies and Soviet Union versus the mixed-model Axis. The Iran-Iraq War is a conflict within Islamic civilization. #Fault line wars within a mixed geographic area such as the former Yugoslavia are yet another model for conflict, with the variant of how radicals tend to displace moderates.
Universal civilization
Huntington mentions, somewhat dubiously, the modern idea that universal civilization is emerging, citing the novelist V. S. Naipaul. [11] Others make similar arguments, such as his student, Francis Fukuyama, and theorists of modernization, such as Thomas P. M. Barnett.
He describes the assumptions of universal civilization as:
- A "thin" minimal morality of things that are right or wrong — which, he says, if true, are not new
- The eighteenth century meaning refers to those things that distinguish "civilized" society, such as cities and literacies
- It may describe what he calls the Avos culture, or those values held by key influencers of Western society, shared, outside the west, by 0.1 to 1 percent of the world's population
- The spread of Western consumption patters, which he describes as irrelevant: "Somewhere in the Middle East, a half-doszen young men could well be dressed in jeans, listening to rap, and, between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner." This universal assumption is also challenged in Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World.
The last point is said to have more merit if applied to global communications than to consumption. While CNN argues it is a world influencer, it reaches 2-4% of the world population. Regional alternatives such as al-Jazeera may well counterbalance it.
Western civilization as modernization=
Perhaps the strongest argument for the emergence of universal civilization is the emergence, since the eighteenth century, of a modernizing Western civilization, a "third-generation" civilizations with core characteristics:
- Classical legacy
- European languages
- Catholicism and Protestantism
- Separation of spiritual and temporal authority
- Rule of law
- Social pluralism
- Representative bodies
- Individualism
Further, if there is an emerging universal civilization, it should be moving toward universal language and universal religion. Considerable arguments are made that English is the world's language, but he cites studies showing that there is little evidence that its use as a first language is increasing. He argues, however, that it can be called the worldwide Language of Wider Communication, the means of communications among cultures and civilizations. [12]
In some cases, the use of English in a multilingual country, such as India, is evidence to the desire to maintain identities of multiple civilizations within the nation. The example here is the insistence by non-Hindi speaking peoples to resist the Hinduization pushed by Nehru.
English continues to grow at the university level, but is being displaced on a daily level in a broader pattern of the growth of indigenous language, such as Arabic over French in North Africa, and Urdu over English in Pakistan.
Is there a trend to universal religion? At one extreme, celibate religions do not grow at all. Of the world's major religions, only Christianity and Islam are proselytizing, a requirement for major growth. There is a much higher birth rate among Muslims, so Islam has the edge in growth factors.
Responses to western modernization
Non-western societies have responded to the Western impact by adopting or rejecting, selectively or jointly, modernization and westernization.
- Rejectionism: accept neither Westernization nor modernization, such as Japan before the Meiji restoraion. He cites Daniel Pipes as saying that "only the very most extreme [Moslem] fundamentalists rjected modernization as well as Wesernization"[13] — yet that is a core of Salafism, clearly driving the Taliban among others. Rejectionists reject both modernization and Westernization.
- Kemalism: Embrace both in the context of local culture. Obviously, Harrington uses the model of Kemal Ataturk forcing a new society onto Turkey, but there are other analogies, such as Peter the Great of Russia. Kemalists regard both Westernization and modernization as desirable.
- Reformism: isolating the society but adapting the desirable parts, such as the Ch'ing Dynasty motto of "Chinese learning for the fundamental principles, Western learning for practical use." Reformism regards modernization as desirable but Westernization as not.
The nature of dominance
Huntington cites a list from Jeffery Barnett, writing in the U.S. Army War College journal, as explaining how the West establishes its dominance. Barnett described a policy of "exclusion" as replacing containment: when the West wants to influence, it excludes the offending actor from exclude the challenger from "sources of trade, capital, and aid". This is usually in the form of sanctions but could include armed intervention, or sanctions with armed backup. [14]
According to Harrington, the West can do this through:[15]
- Control of international economics
- World's largest buyer
- Control hard currencies
- Provide the bulk of manufactured goods
- Have massive military capability, including power projection and sea control
- Conduct advanced research and education
- Exert moral influence in certain civilizations and cultures
- Control space and international communications
Obviously, countries such as China are developing some of these capabilities; Japan is important and part of multiple civilizations.
The Challenger Civilizations
In the realignment of civilizations, there are several ways in which civilizations are challenging dominance. Economic development is the most evident. Religion, especially the Islamic resurgenc, is another.
Economic
Huntington speaks of "The Asian Affirmation", where Japan was first thought an anomaly, perhaps a case of Western economics in a non-Western society, the Four Tigers of Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore demonstrated it was not unique. A third wave of economic growth took place in China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, followed by a fourth wave in India, the Phillipines, and Vietnam. China and Vietnam produced unique mixtures of market economies under Communist governments.
Development was accelerated. While it took the US and UK 58 and 47 years, respectively, to double their per capita output, Japan did so in 33, Korea in 11, and China in 10.
Within the overall formation of broader civilization groups, economic integration is fastest when there is some cultural commonality, the European Union being most dramatic, but also Latin American groupings such as MERCOSUR and the Central American Common Market.
There are four levels of such integration:[16]
- Free trade area (e.g., NAFTA, ASEAN)
- Customs union (e.g., MERCOSUR, Andean Pact)
- Common market (e.g., early European Union)
- Economic union (e.g., European Union in part)
=Islam
While Asian resurgence was economic, he writes Islamic Resurgence in initial capitals, arguing that it is as significant as social changes suchas the Protestant Reformation or American or Russian Revolutions. It is by no means monolithic, as shown by the contrast between fundamentalist Shiism in the 1979 Iranian Revolution versus the Salafist trends under the Taliban.
Hassan al-Turabi also speaks of fundamental reconstruction of society. Cite error: Closing </ref>
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Human rights
While more than 30 countries, in the 1970s and 1980s, became more democratic and less authoritarian, the most common reason was economic development rather than democracy promotion.
Democracy was also most likely to take place where there were Western, Christian, or both influences, such as Spain and Portugal, the Phillipines and Eastern Europe. Orthodox countries, while certainly having a Christian influence, are less likely to democratize, perhaps since many are from the Soviet ex-civilization.
Anticolonialist sentiment often leads to failure of human rights resolution in the UN, some being regarded as "human rights imperialism".
Ethnicity and religion
Core state and fault line conflicts
Conflict among civilizations take place at multiple levels. Fault line conflicts are micro-level clashes between groups from different civilizations within the same state, such as the former Yugoslavia. Core state conflicts are between the major states of different civilizations, such as the Cold War.
Transition wars
As opposed to the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War (1978-1992) started as invasions, but became ethnic and fault line. Afghanistan was a very special case, the first successful resistance to a foreign power that was based neither on nationalism or socialism, but Islam.[17] At the same time, the Soviets were faced with opposition from groups or civilizations:
- American technology
- Saudi money
- Muslim demographics and zeal
While many argue the "blowback" of that conflict in Afghanistan, it certainly contributed to the establishment of jihadist groups targeting both the "far enemy" of the West, as well as what were seen as corrupt Islamic states, the "near enemy." Ironically, Saddam may well have been more liberal than the House of Saud, and there was much thinking that he might be a bloody tyrant, but he's our bloody tyrant.
The Gulf War, starting with the invasion of Kuwait, did pit Muslim against Muslim, but not in the framework of jihad.
Fault line wars
Fault line wars tend to intensify, and moderates, who perhaps would be satisfied with autonomy, are supplanted by radicals for whom nothing short of total independence is enough. In Palestine, Hamas challenged the Palestinian Authority, but in Israel, Kach challenged Likud. In Tajikistan, groups that were initially nationalist-democratic were replaced by jihadists.
It is often the more extreme factions that receive support from the worldwide diaspora. Armenian communities in the United States are politically influential, leading to prohibition of aid to Azerbaijan; Cuban-Americans have blocked any lessening of tension with Castro.
References
- ↑ Samuel P. Huntington (Summer 1993), "The Clash of Civilizations?", Foreign Affairs
- ↑ Samuel P. Huntington (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster. ,p. 20
- ↑ Barnett, Thomas P.M. (2005). The Pentagon's New Map: The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century. Berkley Trade.
- ↑ Francis Fukuyama (Summer 1989), "The End of History", The National Interest 16 (4), p. 18
- ↑ Henry Kissinger, A World Restored
- ↑ Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1993: Out of Control
- ↑ Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandemonium
- ↑ p. 36
- ↑ p. 30
- ↑ pp. 47-48
- ↑ V. S. Naipaul (30 October 1990), Wriston Lecture: Our Universal Civilization, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
- ↑ Joshua A. Fishman, "The Spread of English as a New Perspective for the Study of Language Maintenance and Language Shift," in Fishman, Cooper & Conrad: The Spread of English: The Sociology of English as an Additional Language, Newbury House, 1977, p. 108ff, quoted on p. 60
- ↑ Daniel Pipes, Path of God, pp. 197-197, quoted on p. 74
- ↑ Jeffery R. Barnett (Spring 1994), "Exclusion as National Security Policy", Parameters: 51-65
- ↑ pp. 81-82
- ↑ p. 131
- ↑ David C. Rapoport, "Comparing Militant Fundamentalist Groups, in Martin E. Marty & R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies and Militance, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 445, quoted on p. 247
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