The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (84 page)

The raw materials of tradition can be used to create an extremely wide range of alternative “civilizations.” What chiefly conditions the creative process is not tradition so much as the local and global environments in which culture develops. But Huntington would have us believe that the range of civilizational choices is strictly bounded by given traditional “values.”

The effect of that cultural determinism is to revive that peculiar strain of Western thinking which saw the Cold War itself as a
kulturkampf
: a clash of civilizations. In American anticommunism there was always a split, cross-cutting the division separating conservatives from liberals, between rational/voluntarist and irrational/determinist interpretations of communist behavior. While the former pictured communism as a chosen belief system subject to change or abandonment under certain conditions, the latter emphasized the force of cultural determinism—that ineffable and immutable “something” in Russian, Chinese, or Vietnamese culture that inclined those peoples toward aggressive totalitarianism.

The logical implication, then and now, was not merely that the Other was different, but that he was inferior. If each civilization is the product (and prisoner) of its unique traditions, no basis for supracultural judgment or action exists. Near the end of his essay, Huntington pictures “a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with others.” But his own extreme relativism undermines that pious hope. If “the West against the Rest” truly describes the future of international conflict, what choice is there but to defend “Our” inherited values against “Theirs”?

Old or new, a paradigm stands or falls according to its ability to describe, predict, and make sense of events. How well does Huntington’s theory account for the causes of conflict in the emerging international system? According to “The Clash of Civilizations?”, the history of militarized disputes in the modern international system began with wars between princes during the century and a half following the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The nation-states that emerged out of that period molded the nature of conflict in the next phase—the era of interstate warfare. The 1917 Russian Revolution heralded the third era, a period of ideological conflict, which has now come to a close. It is to be succeeded, according to Huntington, by a period of civilizational conflict, as individuals and nations confronted by the obsolescence of earlier structures are compelled to construct their identities around larger and more encompassing politico-cultural entities.

A neat progression, but does it describe what is happening in the post-Cold War world? Does it predict the likely course of future international conflict? Many of Huntington’s critics upbraid him for relegating the state to a secondary (if still important) status in the system of the future. However, he is correct to perceive a long-term trend away from states as the primary actors in international politics. He is also correct to note attempts to form new pannational blocs on the basis of alleged cultural commonalities. But two mistakes lead the theorist to overschematize, overstate, and otherwise misconceive those developments. First, he fails to recognize that ethnic nations may be as resistant to incorporation in multinational civilizational blocs as they were to absorption by colonialist empires. Second, in order to reassert the importance of cultural factors in international politics, he turns liberal and Marxist reductionism on its head, arguing that cultural differences have become the primary facilitator of international conflict rather than one basis (among others) for conflict mobilization.

Huntington has little to say about the remarkable proliferation and increase of ethnic or national conflicts that predated the collapse of the Soviet empire by at least two decades. For purposes of proving his thesis, he selects, out of the various ethno-national conflicts now raging, those that seem to pit one “civilization” against another. But that selectivity will not wash. Huntington wants to talk about Islamic-Western conflict in Iraq, for example, but not about the struggles between Iraq’s Muslim peoples: Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. (Indeed, the last thing he wants to discuss is the insistence by Arabs, Persians, and Kurds that they each constitute separate historical civilizations!) Similarly, while citing the fighting in Africa between Muslims and Christians or animists, he is silent about the type of inter-ethnic struggles now rending Rwanda, Liberia, and other African countries. In fact, out of the dozens of current ethnic conflicts, at least as many are conflicts within civilizations as conflicts between them. Further, even where they are nationally inter-civilizational, most of those conflicts remain localized and do not involve what Huntington calls “civilization rallying.”

That should not surprise us. For reasons unexplored by Huntington, the ethnic nation, not the multiethnic civilization, has become the primary matrix for the construction of political identity and a fertile source of global conflict. Violent struggles today are just as likely to pit ethnic nation against ethnic nation, religious group against religious group, or ethnic nation against multinational state, as they are civilization against civilization. Of the roughly 180 states that compose the current world system, 15 at most can be called nations in the sense that a vast majority of people believe that they share a common ancestry and cultural identity. The norm for states is multinationality, with 40 per cent containing people from five or more distinct nations. In slightly less than one-third of the cases overall, the largest national group does not even compose a majority of the state. And if such diversity is characteristic of mere states, how much more characteristic is it of multinational or civilizational empires!

As a result, many conflicts continue to be intra- as well as inter-civilizational. Even where nations at war do belong to different civilizations, it generally makes more sense to consider their conflicts national rather than civilizational. For example, Huntington presents the warfare between Muslims, Serbs, and Croats in former Yugoslavia as a prototypical clash of civilizations. But in no relevant way do those struggles differ from those between interpenetrated ethnic “families” within alleged civilizational boundaries: Pushtuns and Baluchis vs. Punjabis in Pakistan; Catholics vs. Protestants in Northern Ireland; Hutus vs. Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi; and so forth. The key to inter-civilizational struggle, according to Huntington, is “civilizational rallying” by “kin-countries.” But the evidence suggests, first, that ethnic rallying is at least as common as rallying of the civilizational variety; and, second, that “kin countries” cannot be counted on to provide their civilizational brethren with more than verbal support, if that.

Huntington cannot have it both ways. If “rallying” proves the trend toward a clash of civilizations, does not the failure to rally disprove his thesis? His answer, no doubt, would be, “Wait and see.” For the present, however, the primary cultural unit in international politics remains the nation—be it ethnic, tribal, religious, or political—not the civilization.

Of course, this is not to say that ethnic nations are eternal or that they may not at some point be superseded by civilizations. Anything “constructed” can be reconstructed, and civilization-consciousness can be conceived of (and sometimes “sold”) as an expanded ethnic consciousness. Suppose, then, that Huntington were to abandon the jejune notion that modern civilizations are homogenous nations sharing primordial cultural values. Suppose that he were to recognize them as ideological constructs designed to permit mobilization of diverse ethnic groups. Imagine, finally, that he were to face frankly the problem of the relativity of ethnicity, admitting that “Islamic civilization,” for example, might well turn out to be a hopeless project, given the existence of separate Turkish, Persian, Arab, Kurdish, and Malay cultures, and that civilizations he has not named (Buddhist, Polynesian, Latin American Indian, etc.) could become the foci for new movements of unification. The theorist might still insist that the destiny of the nation is to be subsumed by larger civilizational units capable of offering their various ethnic components the satisfactions of membership in a greatly extended, more powerful “family.” And he might still predict that the fate of those larger units, once organized, is to struggle for global power.

But what should one make of such predictions? Will new pan-national empires based on ideologized “tribal” identities arise to challenge the West and reorganize the international system? History tells us that it is possible. The rise of the reactionary European “pan movements” of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seems quite similar to the development Huntington prophesies. But what conditions favor the development of new pan movements? What would make the merely possible probable?

Those questions reveal the existence of a theoretical hole in Huntington’s model. Since he provides little evidence of the direct causes of civilizational conflicts, Huntington is unable to specifically predict when or where they will occur. In fact, no primordialist theory can tell us when cultural similarities will become the raw material for ideological mobilization. The factors generating the current Islamic and Hindu revivals, like those that enabled Hitler to mobilize pan-Germanic sentiment in the interests of National Socialism, lie almost entirely off Huntington’s theoretical map. Having declared that difference between nations, classes, and ideologies will not be the primary source of conflict, he is unable to connect the rise of radical Islamism, for example, with the collapse of world oil prices, Western support for corrupt local regimes, the failure of secular elites to extend the benefits of modernization to local workers and peasants, massive unemployment among Arab youth, the persistence of internal ethnic and class divisions, the collapse of socialist alternatives, and so forth. Nor can he explain why so many middle-class Indians now see Hindu revivalism as a solution to their problems, or what drives many contemporary Russians to endorse through popular vote the neo-fascist policies of Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

That same gap in causal explanation leads the theorist to make dubious predictions about the future of Western civilization. On the one hand, Huntington wishes us to believe that since Germany and the United States are both members of the Western “family,” serious conflict between the two powers (or between any other Western states) is no longer conceivable. On the other hand, since Japan is, by definition, non-Western, economic conflict between that nation and the United States has been cast in civilizational terms. But a moment’s reflection will reveal that Westernism is as much an ideological construct as was communism or the “Free World.” Under the pressure of a serious economic crisis, intensified global competition, or radical political change in one country or the other, Germans and Americans could easily rediscover their “essential” differences. Conversely, socioeconomic and political developments could accelerate (or decelerate) the convergence between the Japanese and Western civilizations.

Huntington’s cultural determinism leads him not only to obscure the conditions that sometimes produce pan-national movements, but also to view differences between civilizations as largely fundamental. That is, at least, logical. For if each civilization is the product and advocate of its own unique, primordial values, no common value-base exists that will permit conflict resolution. Among civilizational strangers, the best that one can expect is a truce. But the relativist trap is not inescapable. Huntington himself refers obliquely to unspecified cultural “commonalities.” As soon as one recognizes destructive social conflict as the result of unsatisfied basic needs—needs common to all humans, whatever their cultural heritage—the questions of causation and of conflict resolution can be demystified and answered.

By specifying the commonalities hinted at by Huntington, the paradigm of basic human needs challenges realist assumptions at their source. Conflict specialists John Burton, Paul Sites, and others argue that serious social conflict is not generated by individual aggressiveness or international lawlessness as much as by the failure of existing systems to satisfy people’s basic needs.
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Certain needs (e.g., identity, bonding, security, meaning, and development) are shared by all human beings. Unlike interests, they are not bargainable; people will not trade their identities or belief-systems for money or surrender them even at gunpoint. And unlike values, they are not specific to particular cultures or civilizations. Local cultures, or the state of a society’s development, define the satisfiers of basic needs, but the needs themselves are universal. Moreover, they are irrepressible, demanding satisfaction no matter how a society’s leaders may seek to suppress or manipulate them. If adherence to a street gang, a nation, or a civilization is a way of attempting to satisfy unfulfilled needs for identity, bonding, and security, neither coercion nor persuasion will alter that behavior. On the other hand, the conflicts generated by unsatisfied needs can be resolved (not just managed) by altering existing social and political arrangements to the extent necessary to satisfy them. The problem, ordinarily, is not a shortage of satisfiers; it is the unwillingness of elites to make the necessary system changes.

In that light, what are the circumstances that could generate pan-national or civilizational conflicts in the post-Cold War era? In modern times, at least, culture is unlikely to function as a political rallying-point unless at least three conditions are met:

First, the participants must feel that their identities, liberties, and livelihoods are seriously and immediately threatened by powerful, culturally distinguishable outsiders, often supported by local allies—an “enemy within.” The degree of perceived threat is far more salient, in that regard, than the degree of perceived cultural difference.

Second, participants’ other methods of satisfying their basic needs for identity, development, meaning, and security must be discredited or currently unavailable. The merger of one’s class or nation with others in some pannational entity is unlikely to occur unless class- and ethnic-based organizations have already proven ineffectual.