Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs,
where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and
reaction. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with an
original thesis about "a new phase" in world politics after the end of
the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument seemed compellingly large,
bold, even visionary. He very clearly had his eye on rivals in the
policy-making ranks, theorists such as Francis Fukuyama and his "end of
history" ideas, as well as the legions who had celebrated the onset of
globalism, tribalism and the dissipation of the state. But they, he
allowed, had understood only some aspects of this new period. He was
about to announce the "crucial, indeed a central, aspect" of what
"global politics is likely to be in the coming years." Unhesitatingly
he pressed on:
"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."
Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague
notion of something Huntington called "civilization identity" and "the
interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations,"
of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the
lion's share of his attention. In this belligerent kind of thought, he
relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard
Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in its title, "The Roots
of Muslim Rage." In both articles, the personification of enormous
entities called "the West" and "Islam" is recklessly affirmed, as if
hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a
cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly,
with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his
adversary. Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to
spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or
for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns
the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the
unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright
ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or
civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam Islam.
The challenge for Western policy-makers, says Huntington, is to make
sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam
in particular. More troubling is Huntington's assumption that his
perspective, which is to survey the entire world from a perch outside
all ordinary attachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as
if everyone else were scurrying around looking for the answers that he
has already found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who
wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are not:
shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad
currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over
centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain
wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange,
cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible history is
ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and
constricted warfare that "the clash of civilizations" argues is the
reality. When he published his book by the same title in 1996,
Huntington tried to give his argument a little more subtlety and many,
many more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse himself and
demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he was.
The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold war opposition
reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often
insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of
September 11. The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically
motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of
deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington's thesis.
Instead of seeing it for what it is--the capture of big ideas (I use
the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal
purposes--international luminaries from former Pakistani Prime Minister
Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have
pontificated about Islam's troubles, and in the latter's case have used
Huntington's ideas to rant on about the West's superiority, how "we"
have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don't. (Berlusconi has since made
a halfhearted apology for his insult to "Islam.")
Source: http://www.thenation.com/article/clash-ignorance#
Comments