Does The Clash of Civilizations Exist?

A google search for the definition of ‘hysteria” will tell you that it means “exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement.” The roots of the word go back to Ancient Greece when hysteria was defined as “wandering womb” in which medical practitioners, politicians, and philosophers thought the woman’s innate irrationality came from her uterus moving all around her body and wreaking havoc on her sanity and mood. This was the gynecological standard up until the, far too late, mid 1800’s. We think of hysteria when we learn about the Salem Witch Trials, McCarthyism or even in the lead up to the Holocaust. We tend to forget that hysteria is all around us and the most potent hysterics can come from even the most learned and measured people.

Samuel Huntington is something of a legend in the field of political science. He taught at Harvard, served as a key foreign policy adviser to President George H.W. Bush and he wrote The Clash of Civilizations, an article in Foreign Affairs in 1993 which he later turned to a 321- page bestselling book in 1996 after receiving fervent backlash from his own colleagues for arbitrarily lumping groups of people together on a mostly racial basis. Officially, the defined civilizations are the West, Indian, African, Asian and Islamic when reading his article, there are really two civilizations; “the West and the rest”. Essentially saying us vs. them without having to.

Huntington describes a civilization as “a cultural entity”. Reading his article and book multiple times, this quote still leaves much to be desired. Upon closer inspection, he means civilizations through a lens of Westphalian nation-states in which states as we know them only began emerging after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Civilizations are blocs of states with large commonalities in languages, mannerisms, “and most importantly”, religion. Hamid Dabashi, in his own journal article criticizing Huntington, For the Last Time: Civilizations, counters his thinking arguing “To us, it is quite evident that the very categorical constitution of ‘civilization’ in an Enlightenment invention for the very specific reasons and objectives, including its beneficiaries and excluding its victims”. This is all a very roundabout, academic way of saying that “the rest” never subscribed to this line of thinking; it was forced so the West could create a standing for themselves. Any form of state making that was not developed in Europe and resembling it elsewhere was never valid and therefore less than.

The main criticism of Huntington’s magnum opus is that he is fearful of the “Confucian” and “Islamic” civilization to the point of farce. He fears the economic growth of China and went so far as to say that “Islam has bloody borders”. That quote alone earned him years of criticism and is most likely the sole reason why he wrote an entire book defending himself for the general public to read. He doubled down on his claim that Islam cannot modernize because “Islam does not offer an alternative way to modernize”. To Huntington, the only reason Turkey, a traditionally Muslim country, modernized was because Ataturk and his associates left Islam behind and westernized regardless of whether or not the majority of the country wanted it. Despite being the only developed Muslim majority country by far, Turkey has a severe identity crisis because nobody wants it to be European nor do they want to be associated with the Middle East. To Huntington, they’re torn. Turkey did everything it could to be accepted traditionally by European powers and yet it is the belief system that serves as the biggest, most insurmountable obstacle. Now, some embrace Islam, causing a massive push back

to religiosity while some cling onto secularism. Westernization as a means to modernization clearly does not garner the results traditional experts said they would.

Huntington is indubitably smart, but he’s like your racist grandfather with a thesaurus, a PhD, and way too much influence. He did something that even the most brilliant international relations experts struggle to do, and that is to predict the actions of states going forward. He was right about regional economic blocs taking more of a foothold in today’s world. He was right about the political climate between the Middle East and South Asia when it comes to the United States in particular. He was right that civilizations clash. Surely they clash but not for the reasons he theorizes they do. Huntington is by all accounts a realist; the only thing that a realist can be sure of is that clashes happen between states in a bid for more power. It’s a key step in statemaking. Dabashi, however, impresses on us that the civilizations are constructs. Our identifiers are passed down to us and taught. This is not to say that these constructs are therefore meaningless. It is only to say that people have more power in conflicts than we think we do.

States or civilizations do not clash because of massive demographic changes; civilizations clash because, as a realist would remark, it is in civilizations’ natures to clash. Huntington and his sycophants (Fukuyama and Bloom) frame massive demographic changes as dire when it’s entirely normal. Senses of identity should not come solely from DNA, language or religion; it should, ideally, come from our interactions with other people no matter where that happens to be. Mass migration in search of economic opportunity is not a crisis in of itself. A global economy or globalizing capital is normal in its expansion. Huntington’s reactive and fearful attitude towards it makes a mountain out of a molehill, so to speak. Dabashi put it more eloquently when he concludes that “Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilization is a disturbed reaction to this phase of cultural confusion at the heart of the globalizing capital. What he and his cohorts do not understand is that they are quite late in responding, and they are responding to something already on its way to change.”

Having first decided to study political science, I was told that this book would be important whether I wanted it to be or not. Down the line, it is a continuous source of bewilderment how Samuel Huntington managed to be the way he was and still hold his influence. Likening Huntington as the moving uterus that causes chaos and abrupt foreign policy decisions would not be a stretch. Working as a foreign policy adviser tended to make most of his predictions come to fruition like a self fulfilling prophecy. The concerning part is how palatable Huntington’s writing is. The general public accepted it with no questions asked as if on impulse.

The only thing that brings any sort of comfort is how wrong one prediction is. “In 1991 and 1992 many people were alarmed by the possibility of violent conflict between Russia and Ukraine over territory, particularly Crimea […]. If civilization is what counts, however, the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each other for centuries.” There are more factors in foreign policy than a common civilization.