It’s the Culture, Stupid!

No. 37

Political scientist and advisor SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON outlines humanity’s geopolitical future after the Cold War in ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, an essay published in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993. At the close of the twentieth century, pundits are variously predicting such things as the decline of the nation state, obsolescence-bound because globalisation will favour political bodies of supranational scope, such as the European Union; the worldwide permeation of liberalism, after its supposed victory in the Cold War, a la FUKUYAMA;¹ the resurgence of ethnonationalism, expected by some to fill the void left by communism. There is a degree of truth in each of these propositions, Huntington concedes, but they miss the main driver of the emerging world order. The nation state has not yet exhausted its shelf life, he writes, but henceforth international conflict and cooperation will be based primarily not on the espousal of any ideology or economic theory, but on membership in a civilisation. There are approximately eight civilisations currently populating the globe, according to the author: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and (‘perhaps’) African. Civilisations are cultural entities which contain subdivisions. Members of a civilisation have historical, religious and linguistic links. They have consonant ideas, practices, rituals and behavioural patterns, in matters ranging from the quotidian to the profound. They have compatible views of the life well lived. Crucially, civilisations are the broadest entities with which individuals can identify; there is no other entity that contains them. Rome and Naples, for example, are culturally distinct but they are united by a common Italian culture; Italy and Germany are distinct nations but they are culturally situated within European civilisation, which is one of two variants of Western civilisation — the other one being the North American. There is no entity that includes, say, the Western and Islamic civilisations. The latter two are among those that differ irreconcilably on such fundamental questions as ‘the relations between God and man, individual and group, citizen and state, parents and children, husband and wife, rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy’. These differences reduce the likelihood of mutual accommodation and increase the likelihood of conflict. Indeed, Huntington expects the post-communist world to be more conflict-prone than the one it supplants. For one, people tend to be far more flexible in matters of ideology than in matters of civilisational identity. In a world of rival ideologies — communism vs. liberalism, for instance — the question is ‘Which side are you on?’, whereas in a world of rival civilisations, the question becomes ‘What are you?’; the latter allows far less wiggle room than the former. Though cultural divergence will not necessarily lead to bloodshed, Huntington predicts that the borders — ‘fault lines’ — between historically hostile civilisations will be especially combustible; an example would be the disputed region of Kashmir, on the fault line between the Islamic and Hindu civilisations. Meanwhile, global finance and the free(r) movement of people and capital make contact between individuals and groups belonging to different civilisations more frequent, thereby increasing ‘civilisation awareness’. The forces that are dissolving national borders, then, are also conflict accelerants. In addition, as the West finds itself at a historical peak in terms of power, wealth and influence, those civilisations most divergent from it are likely to form anti-West coalitions, in order to challenge Western dominance directly and forcefully. Huntington believes that the Confucian-Islamic coalition will be the most formidable one but the climate of post-Cold-War complacency in the West will create openings that others will also seek to exploit. Given these dynamics, Huntington’s prescription for the West is to pursue an aggressive foreign policy on all fronts, including the maintenance of a robust military — at least in the short run.

His thesis proved contentious. It allegedly endeared him to sections of the conservative media and to influential foreign-policy hawks in the West but Huntington’s voice has mostly been a dissonant one in the world of Western educated opinion. In the 1990s, the technocrats at the helm of national and international institutions were busy laying the foundations of a borderless future in which a dull managerialism would reign supreme; both ‘clash’ and ‘civilisations’ must have sounded like outdated and apocalyptic notions for which they had no time. Huntington must have been equally poorly received among those who, in the ebullient atmosphere of the time, were demanding their ‘peace dividend’: the rechanneling of funds and resources away from defence and intelligence, and toward social welfare. Progressive critics, keenly aware of Huntington’s track record as imperial apologist — which includes a pro-Vietnam-War stance — have accused him of giving intellectual gloss to neoconservative militarist agendas. Academic critics have taken issue with the conceptual foundation of Huntington’s case: it is predicated, they say, on a conception of civilisations as fixed entities, when in fact civilisations are much more fluid and syncretic than his classification allows. Huntington does acknowledge their fluidity and impermanence but, like any abstraction, ‘civilisation’ can still be understood pragmatically: as long as people identify as members of a particular civilisation, to the point of giving their lives in the name of it, that civilisation is as fixed as it needs to be. When one approaches ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ charitably, it becomes clear that much of the response to it is reflexive. The author is forthrightly Western in his outlook but at no point does he slide into condescension. He warns that the period when Western civilisation was history’s main mover and shaker has come to an end. It now faces rivals who will not be content as extras in a Western drama. They will exercise agency by using modernity’s tools to pursue their own ends. He urges the West to find a long-term formula of coexistence with the rest, because they are not going anywhere. A sympathetic commentator might be tempted to say that post-Cold-War upheavals vindicate the author. The ground for such claims, of course, tends to be shaky. As social scientists have shown us — often inadvertently — it is always possible to curate one’s facts so as to support one’s pet theories. In fact, most of the cogency in Huntington’s thesis lies in its simplicity and lack of assumption: people will continue to act more or less as they have always acted. Civilisation far predates modern (Western) sensibilities like humanism and globalism, and is therefore far more likely to outlive them.

1. In ‘The End of History?’, published in 1989, Francis Fukuyama announces liberalism’s decisive victory over its alternatives; it was the era’s emblematic tract in this vein. See post no. 28, ‘History’s Cat Nap’.