Hello,
With the recent events in the Middle East, my mind turned to books I’ve read that might share some light on the deeper issues.
It didn’t take long to think of one.
In 50 Politics Classics, I included a chapter on Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of the World Order, the explosive geopolitics bestseller from 1996.
Summary
A reminder of what this book says:
When the Cold War ended, it became obvious that the strongest differences between people were not ideological, political or economic, but cultural and religious.
Fundamentally, humans define themselves according to language, history, tradition, and religion. The more globalized the world becomes, the more conscious people become of what makes them different.
Nation states may still be the main actors in world affairs, but they are shaped by the seven or eight world civilizations: Sinic (Chinese-Confucian); Japanese; Hindu; Islamic; Orthodox; Western; Latin American; and African.
The six powers that will dominate the 21st century, America, China, Europe, Japan, Russia and India, belong to five different civilizations. There are also several Islamic states whose big populations, resource wealth and strategic importance make them influential in world affairs.
The most significant conflicts will not be between rich and poor, but between people identifying themselves as part of different civilizations. For example, in Yugoslavia, Russia assisted the Serbs, while Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran helped the Bosnians - all because of cultural kinship.
For several decades in the 20th century, the principle dividing line in the world was the Iron Curtain. A new line replaced it, separating Europe and the West from the Orthodox (Russia) and Muslim countries.
This division of the world along civilizational lines is not at all what universalist liberals (“Davos Man”) wanted – or expected.
Israel & Palestine
Before looking at criticisms of Huntington’s theory, consider a current world flashpoint: the Israel-Palestine conflict.
You could argue it too is being waged along “civilizational” lines.
The West (US, UK, Europe, Australia, Canada, etc) support Israel’s right to defend itself. Israel is an island of democracy and free-market Western values in a part of the world where these values are scarce.
Countries lining up to support Palestine are mostly Islamic ones. (I am talking about support at the national level, not among individual citizens, where there are big splits too.)
To that extent Israel-Palestine looks like a classic “proxy war”.
Criticisms
But to the criticisms of The Clash of Civilizations and its worldview. They include:
It is too simplistic to divide the world into seven or eight civilizations. The world is a lot more complex than that.
Huntington underestimates the power of states (as opposed to civilizations) to shape the world and their own destinies.
The deep splits within the Muslim world (e.g. Sunni vs. Shi’ite) preclude a single Muslim identity, so the idea of a clash between the “West and Islam” has issues. Moreover, the split between Islam and the West is exaggerated. For long stretches of history they lived peacefully alongside each other.
Huntington’s focus on ‘culture’ as the driver of politics is simply not shared by most political scientists and economists. For instance’s Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail says you can’t explain East Asian economic success by ‘Confucian values’ alone, or claim that Islamic culture is inimical to democracy.
Huntington was simply a ‘Realpolitik’, right-wing analyst who provided an intellectual basis for the War on Terror and the misguided Bush/Blair invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
His thesis borders on racism. His work as an adviser to the Botha regime in South Africa would suggest he has a personal interest in the separation of ‘races’ and cultures. Edward Said even said that Huntington’s views justified old-fashioned Muslim-bashing by the West.
Comment
These points may all be valid, and yet quite a lot of what Huntington predicted in the mid-1990s has come true, including the divisions of countries along cultural or religious lines (e.g. Sudan, Ukraine), the rise of the Chinasphere, Russia’s rejection of Europe and the West, the attempted Islamization of secular Muslim countries (Turkey, Egypt), and the impact of Islamic fundamentalism.
The liberal point of view is that globalization and modernization will naturally erode the differences between people, but for Huntington this was pure idealism. World trade did not bring about world peace, but simply provided more opportunities for clashes between competing value systems.
Indeed, you could argue that we are in the most dangerous period since the Cold War. As I wrote here, 2023 has a lot of similarities to the time just before World War One. Then as now, the world was never more integrated economically, so war seemed totally stupid. Any yet it happened.
The global financial crisis of 2008-09 and resulting deep recession in the United States and Europe deepened the perception in non-Western countries that the West was in decline. To ward off decline, Huntington believed, the West would need to become less arrogant, less missionary, and more concerned with preserving its unique values and institutions within its natural boundaries.
Huntington’s “first rule” for living in a multicivilizational world is that the core states of each civilization respect the domain of the others, and not engage in fault line wars by proxy. Only in fully admitting and respecting this will it be possible to avert conflict.
Huntington believed that an appreciation of humanity as One would only take place after first having taken account of the deep differences. Only then will would we be able to see what is shared, and use the term Civilization in the singular.
This hopeful note comes at the end of what is a rather dark, dense book.
Do you agree with the Clash of Civilizations thesis?
I’m in no way an active believer, but it certainly made me look again at my “universalist” beliefs.
The “universal civilization” idealists point to the global spread of Western culture, films, news media and products as evidence of Western ideas. But the essence of Western culture is not the Apple Mac, Huntington said. It is the Magna Carta.
Things that characterize the “the West” are the separation of church and state; the rule of law; social pluralism; representative or democratic bodies; and individualism - all of which have been rejected in various degrees by non-Western countries.
But my hopeful question is: Will they reject them forever?
I’m still a fan of that other 1990s political philosophy blockbuster, The End of History by Francis Fukuyama, which sees liberal democracy as the ultimate end point of all political systems. It simply offers the most freedom and prosperity in one package, and is inherently “antifragile” compared to authoritarian or communalist systems.
Success on Earth
What’s the link to the theme of my newsletter: “Success on Earth”?
Huntington may be right in the short-term, but I’d like to believe Fukuyama is right in the long-term.
At the end of the day we all have a desire for a good life, to get educated and to have interesting jobs, to provide for our families, to have control over our lives and some say in our political systems.
I’m for any system that errs on the side of individual freedoms, decentralized economies, and separate of religion and state. At the moment that’s liberal democracy.
Maybe we’ll wait a long time for Fukuyama’s vision to eclipse Huntington’s.
After all, the definition of a civilization is something that takes centuries to arise. And their shadow continues far into the future, even if they collapse.
But progress also happens: peaceful revolutions, cultural flowerings, long stretches of economic growth.
No one really knows the kind of age we are entering.
Read More
Three recent, short pieces I wrote about the clash-of-civilizations theory.
The chapters on Huntington and Fukuyama are in the second (2022) edition of 50 Politics Classics.
A few points on “Why War Could Easily Happen Again”, based on a reappraisal of Normal Angell’s classic book The Great Illusion.
For something less alarming, here’s three short pieces I wrote on the Kabbalah, the mystical offshoot of Judaism.
Kind regards,
Tom Butler-Bowdon
Author of the 50 Classics series
Editor of the Capstone Classics
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