Samuel P. Huntington and his ideas
Samuel P. Huntington authored the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order which was published in 1996 by Simon & Schuster Inc. The book is an expanded version of an article he wrote for Foreign Affairs magazine in 1993 titled The Clash of Civilizations? When the article came out during the post-Cold War era, it provoked a debate among foreign relations experts because of its contrary view that conflicts will continue to threaten world stability. The prevailing sentiment then was that the end of the Cold War signaled the end of hostilities among nations. Huntington argued that while ideological differences were behind the Cold War, cultural and religious animosities will fuel the new conflicts.
Born in New York in 1927, Huntington was a soldier, scholar, teacher and foreign relations expert. At age 18, he graduated with honors at Yale University, after which he served in the US Army. He returned to civilian life by working for a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago followed by a PhD at Harvard University, where he started teaching at age 23. From 1950 until his death in 2008 at age 81, Huntington was a member of Harvard’s Department of Government. He also served as deputy director of Columbia University’s Institute for War and Peace studies, and consultant to the US Department of State at the same time.
Huntington’s first major book was The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957), which is considered the most influential book on American civil-military relations. This was followed by the book Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), which challenged the conventional view of modernization theorists that economic and social progress would produce stable democracies in recently decolonized countries.
When Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations? for Foreign Affairs magazine, it made the same ripple effect such that he expanded it to book length and published it as The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996. In the book, Huntington maintains that while conflicts in the Cold War occurred between the communist East and capitalist West, they will now occur among the world’s major civilizations with religious and cultural underpinnings.
Fault line conflicts and core state conflicts
The clash of civilizations theory postulates that the bloodiest conflicts in this century would take place between Islamic and Western civilizations. According to this thesis of Huntington, the fall of communism signaled by the breakup of the former Soviet Union in 1991 ended the Cold War era in which the protagonists were the forces of democracy and communism. In place of these opposing forces, the clash theory holds that the post-Cold War world will be increasingly polarized between Islamic and Western civilizations and societies. The new world order seen by Huntington after the Cold War, in which the bloodiest clashes will occur between Islam and the West, was actually prefigured by events in early history that included the European forays of Islamic forces in Europe. Troops carrying the Islamic flag supposedly attacked and conquered the Ottoman Turks in Vienna and parts of Eastern Europe but they were later repulsed from Iberia.
In effect, there had always been an ideological conflict between Islam and Christianity, on which Western civilization is based, because of the universal belief that one’s religion is always better than the others. For this reason, followers of one religion seek to convert people from other religions and this becomes the source of conflicts. Huntington indicated in his book that through the years, as Western countries prospered and outpaced other regions that practice non-Christian religions, the concept of universalism acquired more than religious meaning in the West, which began to believe that all civilizations should adopt Western values. This is perceived to be the underlying reason behind the US invasion of Iraq and its continued presence in that Muslim country. This becomes a source of great resentment for Muslims, especially the Islamic fundamentalists.
According to Huntington, all these historical and modern factors combined have led and would further lead to bloody clashes between the Islamic and Western civilizations. Among the more recent expressions of such anti-Western resentment were 9/11, the Afghanistan-Iraq conflict, and the Israeli-Hizbollah-Lebanese wars in 2006.
In Huntington’s view, conflicts between different civilizations manifest themselves in two forms – fault line conflicts and core state conflicts. He describes fault line conflicts are those that occur between neighboring states belonging to different civilizations or within states that are home to populations from different civilizations, while core state conflicts are global in character and occur between major states of different civilizations.
According to Huntington, fault line conflicts can deteriorate into core state conflicts when the states engaged in a core state conflict become involved. For example, the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon used to be a fault line type of fighting that nearly deteriorated into a confrontation between the Western and Arab or Islamic worlds. The one-month war started when the Muslim fundamentalist Hezbollah established bases in south Lebanon. Israel refrained at first from attacking for fear of antagonizing the world but when Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers from across the Israel-Lebanon border, this became an excuse for the Israeli Air Force to launch 9,000 bombing missions against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.
The fighting dragged for a month because outside powers joined the fray – Israel was supplied with arms by the US, which represents the West, and the Hezbollah troops were armed and trained in war by Islamic Syria and Iran. Only when both sides realized that the civilian casualties in the war were getting too high that a ceasefire was reached.
Huntington says such conflicts may result from a number of causes, such as relative influence or power in the military or economic sense, discrimination against people from a different civilization, intervention to protect kinsmen in a different civilization, or different values and culture, particularly when one civilization attempts to impose its values on people of a different civilization. It was argued that the trends of global conflict after the end of the Cold War have increasingly appeared at these civilizational divisions, as can be witnessed in Yugoslavia after its breakup, in Chechnya, and in India-Pakistan borders.
Huntington believes the root cause of present and future clashes between Islam and the West is the dominant perception in the West that its values and political systems are superior to others and so these must be imposed on Islamic countries where democracy is unknown. This will further antagonize the Islam world and other civilizations, including the Sinic civilization represented by China. In fact, the Islamic regions have now “bloody borders” as a result of globalization, which sees many civilizations commingling with each other in all parts of the world, including the Middle East.
As in the West, the Islamic civilization also experiences a population bulge such that the increasing number of idealistic Muslim youths are forced to co-exist with Sinic, Orthodox, African and Western citizens – with sometimes disastrous results. Thus, the population explosion in Islamic civilization is fueling instability on the border of Islam and its interiors where fundamentalist movements are becoming increasingly popular, Huntington claims.
Criticism of the clash of civilizations theory
All the data supporting Huntington’s thesis may be categorized as secondary information generated through the observation method of research. He drew his conclusions from media reports of events and interpreted them without collecting primary data through the direct communication method of research. This is a rather weak basis for his arguments.
If direct communication were used, Huntington would have interviewed several Western leaders on a person-to-person basis to confirm or deny the view that Western universalism dictates such actions as the US intervention in Saudi Arabia and Iraq and its support of Israel. In the same manner, his arguments that Islamic powers also entertain thoughts of imposing their own concept of civilization on the West would have been more credible if he had talked with key Islamic figures.
In fact, critics of Huntington’s thesis contend that he relied mostly on anecdotal evidence, without going into a more rigorous empirical study to compare the inter-civilizational conflicts that have happened since the end of the Cold War period. It was noted that while regional wars with the characteristics described by Huntington increased immediately after the Cold War, these actually and steadily declined since then.
Reacting to Huntington’s thesis, Edward Said (2001) published an article in The Nation arguing that Huntington’s categorization of the world’s fixed “civilizations” omits the dynamic interdependency and interaction of culture and that his ideas are based not on harmony but on the clash or conflict between worlds.
Said dismisses the theory that each civilization is a self-enclosed world and that each race has a different psychology and destiny. This is imagined geography, he says. Said stops short of calling Huntington a warmonger but describes the clash theory as an interventionist and aggressive political stance that perpetuates the wartime mentality among Americans. Instead of promoting ideas aimed at reconciling the western and eastern cultures, this theory tries to prolong the Cold War by creating a gap between capitalist and Islamic countries.
Said disagrees that there are cultural boundaries anywhere in the world, neither is there an Islamic civilization distinct from Western civilization. An example is the friendly relationships between the US and Saudi Arabia. It is also a fact that many Islamic extremists’ study or live in the Western world, eventually adopting the culture of the host country. Westerners do the same way in Islamic countries. If there are conflicts, Said says, these may have arisen out of differences in philosophical beliefs not of cultural or religious identity.
The reason is that, contrary to what Huntington proposes, people easily adapt to values transmitted from other cultures and religions if these promote human welfare. Pope John Paul II himself once said that a clash happens only when Islam or Christianity is misunderstood or manipulated for ideological or political ends.
False appraisal of Muslim interests in Huntington’s theory
Those who find credence in the thesis of Huntington take the 9/11 terrorist attack as confirmation of this theory. It is generally accepted that 9/11 was an assault by Islamic extremists against Western values, primarily freedom and democracy. This view was abetted by Osama bin Laden who later on called for attacks on Jews and the Crusaders, which was interpreted as a cry for war with the West. The soberer scholars, however, look at this perspective as lacking a foundation in truth or consideration of the whole picture.
It has been asked: Do we know enough of Bin Laden to be able to say with certainty that he wanted to settle an old score with the West by slaughtering as many non-Muslims as possible? This is the belief that Huntington wants to perpetuate, which critics like Edward Said think neglects to consider all the facts.
In fact, even in the Islamic world itself, civilizations are fractured and show little internal unity because of ethnic divisions. Such is the case with the different world views expressed by Muslims among Arabs, Persians, Turks, Pakistanis, Kurds, Berbers, Albanians, Bosnians, Africans and Indonesians.
For this reason, Huntington’s clash of civilizations may be caused not by religion or culture but by ideas related to progress and modernity, as some backward civilizations resent the development achieved by others. Those who disagree with Huntington say even consumerism and entertainment could generate conflicts.
According to Said and other scholars that oppose Huntington’s hypothesis, what Islam is crying for is not really the annihilation of Western civilization but for national sovereignty and freedom in Iraq, Palestine and other oppressed Muslim nations.
If Islamic leaders seem suspicious of the West it is because of purely economic and political reasons, such as that the real American goal in asserting its presence in the Middle East is to take control of the oil-producing regimes in the Persian Gulf. Thus, many viewed 9/11 as the initial confirmation of Huntington’s thesis since the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US were perceived to be the handiwork of Islamic forces as a declaration of war against the West and all the values it stands for.
However, there is a section of the academic community that has opposed the clash theory from the start and continues to attack it as having proceeded on the wrong premise. After assessing the rationale of Huntington’s thesis and evaluating the logic of the arguments lined up by critics against it, finds that the clash theory may be an overreaction to terrorism instigated by Muslim extremists and a misreading of these attacks.
This was probably the reason why an initiative at the United Nations for the formation of the so-called Alliance of Civilizations in 2005 did not materialize. Under the proposal, the UN will galvanize a collective action to overcome cultural and social barriers between Islam and the Western world so that polarization between societies with different religions and cultural values would be reduced. The move did not prosper because of contrary perceptions that there is no polarization to speak of.