The Undivided Past (40 page)

This deficiency is well illustrated in the case of the Republic of
India, which Huntington claimed formed a distinct and separate
“Hindu civilization.” In fact, India has been a secular
democracy since its
independence from Britain in 1947, which means there has never been a “Hindu” component to its constitution—much to the dismay and disappointment of the more intransigent elements in the Hindutva movement.
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To be sure, Hindus have always been a numerical majority, but there are also more Muslims in India (in excess of 140 million) than in any other country in the world, with the exception of Indonesia and, marginally,
Pakistan; and nearly every country that forms part of Huntington’s “
Islamic civilization” contains fewer Muslims than those millions living in India. (Elsewhere, in an admission by turns contradictory and
inaccurate, Huntington argued that India was not a unitary civilization at all, but a “cleft country” divided by the “civilizational fault-line” between Muslims and Hindus.)
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Moreover, across the centuries, Christians, Parsees, Jains, Sikhs, Jews, and Buddhists, as well as atheists and agnostics, have all lived (and often thrived) in India; one indication of this long tradition of religious pluralism was that in 2005 the nation’s president was a Muslim, its prime minister was a Sikh, and the head of the ruling party was a Christian. Under these circumstances, to categorize India and its civilization as “just a Hindu country” is, as
Amartya Sen notes, “a fairly bizarre idea.”
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Similar criticisms have been made of Huntington’s signature concepts of “
Western” and “Islamic” civilizations. For many nations in the
allegedly monolithic “West,” ranging from
Canada and the United States to
France and
Germany, are ethnically very diverse: should
African Americans be included by virtue of their American
citizenship, or are they a transatlantic offshoot of “African” civilization? The constitutional arrangements and political cultures of these countries are similarly varied: the United States is a transcontinental federation, the United Kingdom an unusual mixture of monarchy, union, and devolution, France a powerfully centralized state, and so on. The claim that the West has always been the unique repository of reason, freedom, and liberty betrays a deep historical ignorance, not only of the West itself, but also of anywhere (or, indeed, everywhere) else.
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And the range of religious faiths that can be subsumed beneath the Western, Christian umbrella is also astonishingly wide, while what many Americans most deplore about Europe is that it is too secular. The same objections apply to the depiction of “Islam” as a mirror-image unitary civilization, for it, too, is a very varied religion in terms of its tenets and practices, and like
Christianity again, it has its own share of conservatives, moderates, radicals—and extremists. Moreover, it is impossible to treat the
Middle East as a distinct or as a monolithic or as a unified region, because there is “no one ‘Islam’”: Jordan and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Iraq and the Sudan, Morocco and Turkey are very different countries, with correspondingly different histories, political cultures, constitutional arrangements, and international profiles.
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Underlying these specific criticisms is a more general objection that should scarcely need belaboring by this stage. In defining his
civilizations exclusively in religious terms, Huntington assumed that faith and belief were the preeminent and overwhelming criteria of human
identity and solidarity. But at no stage did he successfully demonstrate this, and it is difficult to see how he could have done so, for it bears repeating that while a particular religious faith may be shared by many individuals, it is only one identity among others that any person may claim. And while for some people it may be the most important, for many others it is not. In any case, how any individual may self-identify—in what order he or she may rank his or her group affiliations—surely varies to such an extent that no single affiliation will in the long run be more commanding than any other.
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This applies with particular force to the claim that civilization is the largest and most all-encompassing category of collective human identity, for the notion that these vast transcontinental aggregations, often taking in hundreds of millions of people, can be defined in terms of one single and shared affiliation, which overrides all others, is to carry oversimplification to the point of absurdity. Yet the more complex and varied these so-called civilizations are rightly recognized to be, the more difficult it becomes to define and distinguish and weigh them, let alone to claim they are the most important identity of all. Here is a fundamental paradox about collective identities that Huntington neither addressed nor resolved.

Not surprisingly, then, he also misunderstood—indeed, disregarded—the many overlaps, interactions, and interconnections between civilizations that his maps represented as being sealed off, protected, and clearly and impermeably bounded. To be sure, Huntington admitted that in practice, land
borders were rarely this precisely or clearly demarcated, but he did not draw the obvious conclusion, namely that such places, where one formal jurisdiction melds and merges imperceptibly into another, may be transnational or transcultural zones of engagement and interaction as much as they may be potential areas of confrontation and conflict.
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And like many maps, Huntington’s division of the world into separate terrestrial authorities misled in another way, for it failed to represent the massive cross-land flows and
transoceanic movements in people, in goods, in money, in services, in information, and in ideas—flows and movements that connect all but the most isolated regions on earth, and that are doing so to a greater degree than ever before in human history. To the extent that Huntington conceded the ever-increasing interconnectedness of the globe, he thought it reinforced particular civilizational identities and fueled intercivilizational conflict; but the evidence suggests it is at least as likely that such varied, increasing, and multifarious encounters draw peoples and nations and civilizations closer together in a revived and intensified sense of shared experiences, common identities, and global
cosmopolitanism.
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Detailed research, undertaken since the appearance of Huntington’s article and book, confirms these early doubts.
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In political terms, most nations still act primarily in their own self-interest, rather than as a constituent or subordinate part of any greater collectivity: states’ individual concerns and priorities continue to be more important to their leaders and citizenry than any higher sense or call of civilizational unity. Since they have always been difficult to describe or define, it is scarcely surprising that civilizations are incapable of acting with unified, coherent, and directed purpose, which undermines Huntington’s claim that it is the “differences among civilizations” that “have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts.”
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More particularly, the notion that a clash between the West and Islam (or between the West and
China) is
bound
to occur because their histories are so antagonistic, and their values are so different, will scarcely bear careful scrutiny. A great deal of evidence has already been adduced in an earlier chapter suggesting that in the long term, relations between Christianity and Islam have been characterized as much by accommodation and conversation as by antagonism and confrontation, and recent surveys make plain that there are shared values, including the idea and ideal of
democracy, which is as attractive to many Muslims as to Christians.
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In any case, since 1945, both during and after the
Cold War, conflicts have broken out between states belonging to the
same
civilization (as defined by Huntington) on many more occasions than they have between states belonging to
different
civilizations, which scarcely
supports his prediction that it is between
civilizations that future conflicts are most likely to occur.
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Despite, or perhaps because of, these major errors and limitations, Huntington’s book appealed powerfully to those
neoconservative politicians, intellectuals, and evangelical Christians who, by the late 1990s, were hoping that the scandal-beset presidency of
Bill Clinton would be followed by a more assertive Republican administration. They found its “simplified paradigms or maps” to be appealing and convincing, and they happily regarded them as “indispensable to human thought and action.”
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They shared Huntington’s insistence on the importance of
religion in determining the largest collective identities; they agreed that the West needed to rediscover its sense of identity and purpose; and (up to a point) they appreciated the guidance he gave, and the warnings he furnished, concerning the future relations between the West and the rest of the world. But just as
Gibbon and
Toynbee had been misunderstood or oversimplified by pundits and politicians who invoked their names to justify their own views and policies, so Huntington would also (at least in part) be misinterpreted or misrepresented by those on the American right. For he repeatedly insisted that the post–
Cold War world was multipolar, and that the most pressing task facing the West, whose global influence was diminishing by the day, was not to provoke confrontation but to reach some form of accommodation with those other civilizations that were becoming increasingly important. By such means, Huntington hoped, the “clash of civilizations,” which he thought “improbable but not impossible,” might be averted. So while to the neoconservatives Huntington’s work was a manifesto justifying confrontation and unilateralism, in reality it was a much less bellicose admonition.

On their initial publication, Huntington’s arguments were well received by such foreign policy luminaries from the “realist” school as Henry A.
Kissinger, but with limited popular notice. It was not until years later, with the events of 9/11, that his “clash of civilizations” thesis would become, seemingly overnight, the most influential explanation of what had just occurred, and of what must happen in the future. Three groups in particular embraced what they believed to be the Huntington interpretation of events
with great vehemence and enthusiasm. The first were the American media, which “automatically, implicitly and unanimously,” and with little serious reflection or analysis, decided Huntington’s analysis of two
civilizations locked in a mortal global clash was correct.
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The second was President
George W. Bush and his supporters, ranging from such neoconservative intellectuals as
William Kristol,
Richard Perle, and
Robert Kagan, to the British prime minister,
Tony Blair, along with most of his cabinet and the House of Commons, who responded by urging a new “
Crusade” to “save civilization itself.” Hence the invasions of
Iraq and
Afghanistan, and the Manichean rhetoric about the “war on terror” as the great struggle between the forces of light and the “axis of evil,” between Judeo-Christian freedom and
democracy on the one hand and Islamic despotism and tyranny on the other.
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And the third group to embrace the Huntington thesis, although from the opposite side, was the followers of
Osama bin Laden himself, who gleefully agreed that
Al Qaeda was leading the Islamic world in a clash with the West, a holy war against the great, wicked, monstrous, and degenerate Satan, the head of the serpent being the United States.
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For a time, it did seem possible to contend that the world was threatened and sundered by an apocalyptic “clash” in the way Huntington had analyzed and predicted: “our civilization,” the late
Christopher Hitchens observed, “must be fought for and barbarism must be defeated.”
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But almost from the outset, it was clear that neither side was as united or as homogeneous as these formulated polarities suggested. It soon emerged that several hundred of those who died when the twin towers collapsed were Muslims, while
Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, however brutal, was by the norms of the
Arab world a notably secular regime, with little sympathy for the militant Islamism of Osama bin Laden, let alone his ambition to establish a Muslim caliphate.
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These were inconvenient facts for those who wished to depict a deep, divisive conflict between the Christian West and the Islamic world, and they were but a foretaste of what was to come. The “war on terror” would soon become highly unpopular on both sides of the Atlantic, and the impatient denunciations by
Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. secretary of defense, of “old Europe” suggested that
“Christian civilization” was less monolithic or enthusiastic than the overwrought rhetoric of Bush or Blair repeatedly claimed. And on what was supposed to be the “other side,” many
Arab governments denounced the attack on the World Trade Center, urging that it was no proper, much less consensual, expression of Islam, which they were at pains to
identify as a religion of peace. Meanwhile, many divisions within that faith, chiefly between
Sunni and
Shiite, once little remarked by outsiders, would come to prominence following the invasion of
Iraq.
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Yet both Bush and Blair continued to insist they were engaged in a Manichean conflict, defining and defending civilization against the forces of barbarism, terror, darkness, and evil. As a bornagain Christian,
George W. Bush appropriated the formulation in the Gospel of
Matthew that you were either with America or you were against it, and
Tony Blair expressed equally fervent certainty: “I don’t believe,” he observed, “that what is happening in Iraq today is anything other than an absolutely visceral, profound struggle between what is right and what is wrong.” Neither leader had any time for nuance, compromise, dialogue, or
accommodation, and
Roy Jenkins’s words on Blair applied equally well to Bush: “the Prime Minister, far from lacking conviction, has almost too much, particularly when dealing with the world beyond Britain. He is a little Manichean for my perhaps now jaded taste, seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white, contending with each other, and with a consequent belief that if evil is cast down, good will inevitably follow.”
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Yet neither Bush nor Blair succeeded in convincing the majority of people in “the West” that the attack on the World Trade Center was the first blow in a global struggle resembling the hot war against Fascism or the
Cold War against
Communism. At the very least, they should have read Huntington more carefully, for despite the shortcomings of his analysis of civilizations as the ultimate unit of collective human identity, he had consistently urged accommodation rather than confrontation, and he had explicitly counseled against preemptive military action. Indeed, in the aftermath of 9/11, he refused to support the idea of a “war on terror” or the American-led invasion of Iraq.
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