Clash
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“Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs” , but because of the fact that no polarisation of ideologies is existing anymore and consequently the ideology as the basis of identification has disappeared, Huntington expects that people will search for their identity in their culture.
Therefore he suggests to exchange the paradigm of the Cold War for a paradigm of civilizations to explain international relationships.
To elucidate his thesis Huntington formulates an arrangement of civilizations, which is the basis of his following argumentation.
Civilizations are cultural unities. These unities consist of different identification levels, but members of one civilization cannot identify with another. Civilizations are the highest ranking of cultural identity.
“The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity.”
Civilizations are defined by common objective elements (language, history, religion, customs, institutions) and the “subjective self-identification of people” .
“People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner.”
Civilizations are dynamic, have no sharp borders and develop.
Huntington distinguishes between seven or eight major civilizations: Western, Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox and Latin American. Huntington is not sure whether an African civilization, excluding the Islamic countries in the north and the Near East, will come into being in the future.*
Not every country can be clearly associated with one civilization. Huntington calls these countries torn countries. He distinguishes two types of torn countries: First, there are countries with a large number of people belonging to different civilizations, which will lead to dismemberment. Second, there are countries, which have “a fair degree of cultural homogeneity” , but are divided over “whether their society belongs to one civilization or another” .
The leaders of torn countries normally wish to follow a “bandwagoning strategy” and to make their countries members of the West, but the “history, culture and traditions” of their countries are non-Western.
Huntington assumes that the civilizations will clash. He mentions six main reasons for this presumption:
First, because of their differences: The differences among civilizations are “not only real; they are basic” and the product of centuries. Civilizations are “differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition, and most important, religion” and this is the reason for why the people of different civilizations have different views on essential issues concerning society (like the relations between the individual and the group, or husband and wife), as well as differing views of the “relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy” . Huntington admits that differences “do not necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily mean violence”, but history told us that differences among civilizations are the reasons for “the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts” .
Second, because of the “world becoming a smaller place” , the increasing interactions between peoples of different civilizations “intensify civilization consciousness” and “awareness of differences between civilizations” . At the same time the increasing interactions “invigorate[s] differences and animosities” .
Third, because of the weakening of other “source(s) of identity”