The Undivided Past (39 page)

In fact, Toynbee never believed most of the things Americans imputed to him in the decade or so after 1945. To be sure, he had initially supported the Marshall Plan, the establishment of
NATO, and the sending of troops to Korea, but he generally distrusted American
democracy, believing the country too
secular (like most of the West), and he did not share what soon became the prevailing American hostility to Russia: “western
imperialism,” he wrote in 1952, “not Russian
Communism is Enemy No 1 today for the majority of the human race, and the west hasn’t woken up to this.”
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Nor did he agree with
Henry Luce that the United States was predestined to succeed
Britain as the leader of the free, civilized world against Communist tyranny, Stalinist dictatorship, and Russian barbarism: indeed, Toynbee had long entertained an “animus against western civilization” (though not its classical predecessor), and he thought America was no more than a peripheral part of that uninspiring collectivity, believing its “alarming,” “colonial,” and “militaristic” prosecution of the war in
Vietnam to be part of its mistaken pursuit of “the mythical monster ‘World Communism.’ ”
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As for the future prospects of Western civilization, Toynbee hedged his bets more than his transatlantic audience was willing to recognize. It might, he admitted, rally and recover and reassert itself. But all other civilizations had already “broken down and gone to pieces,” and “no child of this civilization who has been born in our generation can
easily imagine that our own society is immune from the danger of suffering the common fate.”
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Between them,
Teggart,
Spengler, and Toynbee had sought to make the case that humanity should be best understood as being divided up into a
plurality of civilizations and
identities. But they did not agree as to how many civilizations there had been, they could not define them or describe their trajectories satisfactorily, they disagreed as to whether civilizations interacted with each other or not, and they were uncertain as to how (and how many) civilizations would evolve in the future. In short, the proposition that civilization had always been the most significant and self-conscious human aggregation, subsuming all other, lesser solidarities, could not be convincingly demonstrated or consistently verified. Yet once Toynbee’s
Study of History
was completed, sociologists and political scientists eagerly embraced his approach, which seemed far less parochial than most historical writing of the time, and during the 1960s they produced a succession of books, providing lists and typologies of civilizations, setting out their rise-and-fall parabolas, and offering explanations as to when, how, and why they came and went.
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Most of them were vulnerable to the same criticisms that had already been leveled at Toynbee himself, and predictably they found little favor with most professional historians. But by the third quarter of the twentieth century, when the
Cold War was at its height, the notion that the world might best be understood in terms of a plurality of civilizations, which interacted antagonistically, had become one of the conventional wisdoms of the time.

But when the
Berlin Wall fell, and the
Soviet Union
collapsed in 1991, the idea that the world should be understood in terms of a battle of identities and ideologies, between Western civilization on the one side and
Communism on the other, suddenly seemed to be part of a history that was now over; and in the “new world order” that the first President
George Bush welcomed and proclaimed, where freedom,
democracy, and
capitalism had apparently prevailed over
totalitarianism, dictatorship, and state
planning, it no longer seemed appropriate to understand the world in terms of competing or conflicting civilizations based on antagonistic
identities and opposed beliefs. But President Bush also put together a coalition against
Saddam Hussein of
Iraq, and this was for some a sign and a portent of new collective identities, which would soon be hardening, and of confrontations between them. Scarcely a decade later, during the presidency of the second
George Bush, in what suddenly and ominously seemed to be a
re
polarized world, the view that humanity should be understood not just in terms of different civilizations but also in terms of latent confrontations—or actual “clashes”—between them again attracted widespread support among many policymakers in London and Washington. But whereas
Gibbon and Toynbee had written as historians about civilizations and identities, never expecting their interpretations to make any impact on those in power, the most recent scholarship on these matters came from the disciplines of politics, sociology, and government, some of its practitioners determined to influence policy, as one of them undoubtedly did.

By coincidence, the phrase “clash of civilizations” had first been launched into the public consciousness as the subtitle to a book appearing in the same decade that
Arnold J. Toynbee had produced his own work on the “contact of civilizations” (although it bears repeating that this subject never interested him much). In 1926,
Basil Mathews published
Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations
, which may have been a deliberate play on Toynbee’s earlier choice of words. Mathews was an American missionary who disliked the militaristic urge to conquest that he regarded as the hallmark of Islam, and although he hoped
Christianity might eventually prevail, he feared these two civilizations were more likely to confront each other in war than to seek together a common future.
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But Mathews’s book made little impact, and his phrase only began to attain its recent popularity and resonance in 1990, when the Middle Eastern expert
Bernard Lewis published an article entitled
“The Roots of Muslim Rage,” in which he argued that Muslims were increasingly threatened (and often outraged) by Western ideas of
secularism and modernism, and that this made “a clash of civilizations” between these
two collectivities ever more likely in the near future.
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Lewis’s words were subsequently taken up by the Harvard political scientist
Samuel P. Huntington, initially as the title (albeit with a question mark attached) for an article that appeared in the journal
Foreign Affairs
in the summer of 1993. So great was the interest in and reaction to his essay that three years later Huntington restated and elaborated his thesis (now abandoning the question mark) for what would become a best seller:
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.
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Huntington was clearly indebted to Bernard Lewis for his title, as well as drawing on Lewis’s work when discussing the history and politics of the
Middle East. Nevertheless, his general thesis, which he hoped would be both “meaningful to scholars and useful to policymakers,” was more wide-ranging geographically (although less extended historically). For Huntington’s aim was to offer “an interpretation of the evolution of global politics after the
Cold War,” and the unit of
identity around which he constructed his interpretation was civilization. “Human history,” he insisted, “is the history of civilizations. It is impossible to think of the development of humanity in any other terms.… Throughout history civilizations have provided the broadest identifications for people.”
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He believed civilizations subsumed and encompassed all lesser group solidarities and collective identities, be they tribes, ethnic groups,
religious confessions, or even nation-states, and that it was essential for those in government to understand “the nature, identity and dynamics of civilizations” when making future policy. In all, he discerned “seven or eight major civilizations” currently in existence around the globe. Those he named
Western, Latin American, Islamic, Sinic (which he had termed “Confucian” in his original article), Hindu, Japanese, and Orthodox were relatively easy to locate and identify, and to them, with less certainty, he added African (“possibly”) and Buddhist (though he admitted it was not “a major civilization”).
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In depicting the world in these multicivilizational terms, Huntington was setting himself against those myopic triumphalists who, after the United States had vanquished
Soviet Russia in the Cold War, had embraced the “widespread and parochial conceit that the European civilization of the west is now the universal
civilization of the world.” But this, he insisted, was not how things were, for power was “shifting from the long-predominant west to non-western civilizations,” which meant it was essential to understand
all
these great global groupings of humanity. As Huntington defined them, civilizations were best understood in terms of culture, and especially in terms of their increasingly active and assertive religions, which he believed were their “central defining characteristic.”
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They differed markedly from one another in their beliefs, their organizations, their relations to
secular authority, and the extent of their proselytizing aims and expansionist ambitions. As a result, “the predominant patterns of political and economic development” also varied “from civilization to civilization,” which meant that “the key issues on the international agenda involve differences among civilizations.” If these differences were recognized, accepted, and managed, Huntington urged, peaceful coexistence among these civilizations was possible. But if not, the prospect was bleak, and “the fault lines between civilizations” would become “the battle lines of the future.” Hence Huntington’s conclusion that in the emerging era “an international order based on civilizations” was “the surest safeguard against world war,” while it was the growing likelihood of clashes among civilizations that constituted “the greatest threat to world peace.” And even these clashes might be no more than a stage on the way to the climactic struggle to come, namely “the greater clash, the global ‘real clash,’ between civilization and barbarism.”
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In light of these general observations, Huntington offered some specific prescriptions for survival in the multipolar post–
Cold War world, where he believed “states increasingly define their interests in civilizational terms.” In the West, there were serious tasks of “renewal” ahead: it must recognize it was no longer the global
hegemon it had once been, but was now merely one civilization among several, and it must also revitalize its spiritual strength by rejecting multiculturalism and by reasserting the importance of the Christian religion and the uniqueness of its traditional liberties and
democratic values.
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These tasks were made all the more necessary—and all the more urgent—because of the growing power and determination of an ever more hostile Islam, and also because of the threat that
China increasingly posed to the
West; as a result of these widening fault lines, conflict between the West and Islam, or a war between the West and China, could not be ruled out. “The dangerous clashes of the future,” Huntington warned, “are likely to arise from the inter-action of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness.”
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Ideally, these three civilizations should try to live at peace and seek to reach mutual accommodations, by respecting each other’s differences, and by dividing the globe into well-defined spheres of influence. But this could not be guaranteed, since one form that “Western arrogance” might take was “intervention in the affairs of other civilizations,” which Huntington deplored and feared as “probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multi-civilizational world.”
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Huntington’s article and book provoked a great deal of journalistic and academic comment, but although some of it was favorable, much of it was critical. While writing in a
Toynbee-like manner about civilizations rising and falling, Huntington provided no convincing, long-term historical account as to how or when or why his seven (or eight) “major civilizations” had come into being or had so recently become so prominent. In 1920, he claimed, the world had been divided between the Western
imperial powers and the rest, and in the 1960s between the “free world” and the “
Communist bloc,” albeit with many “unaligned nations” in South Asia, Africa, and South America. But somehow, suddenly, the world of the 1990s had become defined and dominated by “civilizations,” which had clearly been around a long time, even though they had not seemed significant in the preceding decades. This was scarcely an historically plausible version of global history during the twentieth century. Moreover, Huntington’s civilizations, and the collective
identities that they purportedly embodied and articulated, turned out on closer inspection to be based on little more than overaggregated statistics (which concealed at least as much as they revealed), on the mistaken assumption that one hegemonic variable determined both individual and collective identity (to the neglect of all the others), and on a map of the world that made them seem
monolithic and hermetically sealed off from one another (when even the author conceded the boundaries between them were often vague and ill-defined).
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By Huntington’s own admission,
The Clash of Civilizations
was written to provide a “simplified map of reality,” but on many occasions he had oversimplified the cartography (both literally and metaphorically) to the point where reality scarcely seemed to matter or intrude at all.
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Like
Spengler and
Toynbee before him, many of Huntington’s civilizations seem on closer inspection to be little more than arbitrary groupings and idiosyncratic personal constructs. Sweden and
Spain were part of the West, whereas
Greece was not; Sinic civilization included Korea but excluded
Japan, and encompassed Vietnam but left out Laos; Latin America “could be considered either a sub-civilization within western civilization or a separate civilization closely affiliated to the west and divided as to whether it belongs to the west”; African civilization extended across all the sub-Saharan continent, but tribal identities were still “pervasive,” and it had not yet “cohered” into “a distinct civilization”; and
Buddhism, “although a major religion, has not been the basis of a major civilization,” since it had adapted, assimilated, or been suppressed in
China, Korea, and Japan, and had survived only in Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia, and parts of Indochina. Such vague collective groupings and “cultural entities” carry little conviction, and the global historian
Felipe Fernández-Armesto was surely right in observing that Huntington “could not fully satisfy the demand for a definition or classification of civilizations to match the importance he gave them.”
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