The Clash Of Civilisations – Discuss
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Samuel Huntington asserts in his 1996 book “The Clash of the Civilisation and the Making of a New World Order” that conflicts of the future will not be on the traditional grounds of economic power or ideology but on cultural grounds. The new fault line in world conflicts will be clashing civilisations. Further, Huntington asserts that the major division, and major conflict of the future, will be that between the west and Ðthe rest of the world. To examine this hypothesis we will address the social, economic and military/strategic worthiness of this statement.
The Cold War provided some comfort to political scientists, especially those realists who believe in the need for balance of power in international relations. This bi-polar world was comparatively easy to study, but with the fall of the Soviet block, what shape does the world take from here? We currently live in US hegemony, and for the moment it appears as though hegemonic stability holds true, despite several small wars and the threat of terrorism in the Western world (Kegley 2007). In his book, “The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order”, Samuel Huntington holds that very soon a new multi-polar post-Cold War world will be divided by confrontations between civilisations. Huntington holds that a new world system of multipolarity and multi-civilisational politics is emerging, each civilisation with its own member countries clustered around a core state or states functioning as an independent pole. The eventual result of these confrontations will be a division of the West versus Ðthe rest. The rest, as Huntington sees it, will be led by an Islamic-Cino alliance. Huntington believes that the nation states will still be the most powerful actors but the principle source of conflict will be a difference of culture. If culture is the main cause of future military action then economic and ideological differences obviously must play a less prominent role.
Huntingtons work lays three main claims. Firstly, culture matters, and will be the central aspect of future conflict. Further, religion is the defining element of culture.
“In the post -Cold War world, the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political or economic. They are cultural” (Huntington 1996) Secondly, culture binds civilisations and they are the highest forms of identity. He postures that there will be a clash of civilisations. “Ðcivilisations are the broadest cultural entities; hence conflicts between groups and from different civilisations become central to global politics” (Huntington 1996). Finally, there are sharp cultural differences between the West and Ðthe rest, for example the West believes in the separation of religious and secular authority, the rule of law and social pluralism, the parliamentary intuitions or representative government and the protection of individual rights and civil liberties as a buffer between the states (Taku 2003).
It appears that Samuel Huntington is not comfortable with this new multipolar world without a clear balance of power. His realist hypothesis about clashing civilisations creates a balance of power between the West and rest. It seems uncomfortably plausible at first, but further investigation finds significant weakness in the hypothesis.
Huntingtons theory elevates the position of social/cultural interests in international relations to the leading cause of friction between nation states. Socio-cultural issues such as “the relations of god and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, as well as the differing views of the relative importance or rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy” (Huntington, 1996), are the issues which bind and define his civilisations. It is within these issues where the differences lie, and he assumes that where differences lie, conflicts will emanate.
Culture plays two important roles in the statement The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be … the conflict between the west and the rest (Huntington 1996). The first role is that cultural similarities will be strong enough to bind civilisations, and second, these bound civilisations will see these cultural differences as reason enough to go to war.
It is hard to believe that the civilisations that Huntington has identified are monolithic. Many appear fractured, loose and far from cohesive. For example, the differences in the Muslim world are clear and obvious. Its hard enough to see the Shiite and Sunni Muslims of Iraq form coalition far less the Iranian and Turkish Muslim community. Indonesian, Arabs, Kurd and Turks all have a very different viewpoint of religion and the world. If the unification of the Islamic states is unclear, then the unification of Asia is downright puzzling. In his work, Huntington lumps China and Vietnam together in an Asian alliance civilisation, yet excludes Japan. Japan sits as a separate civilisation yet in the current world, Vietnam still keeps a massive army, mostly to guard against China. Huntington identifies religion as the pervasive variable in a civilisation yet his Western civilisation includes both Protestant and Catholic branches and the Germanic and Romance cultural differences in Western Europe are also disregarded. The distinction between the Western and Orthodox civilisations excludes non-religious factors, such as the post-Communist legacy or the level of economic development. Huntingtons postulation that civilisations are uniting enough to the point of conflict is loose (Fukuyama 1995).
In the centre of Huntingtons assumptions about uniting civilisation is the incorrect assumption that personal loyalties are centred on civilisations when in fact they are rested on nation states. Huntington espouses that civilisations are the broadest cultural entity yet ascribes intense loyalty to them. Whilst a civilisation is the highest form of individual identity, it is often the more narrow and closer forms of identity which invoke the strongest loyalty. Karl Walt noted that the “Neglect of nationalism is the Achilles heal of the civilisation paradigm”. This is evidenced by the fact that most wars in progress are between nation sates belonging to the same civilisation. It appears as those cultural differences are as large a point of conflict as differences.
The phenomenon of multiculturalism and modernisations in nation states also limits Huntingtons thesis. For example, the lead state in Huntingtons West, the USA, is very multicultural which is problematic to Huntingtons thesis. Not only is there multiculturalism within nations, but there are growing