Huntington’s Dangerous Paradigm

Mohsen M. Milani is professor and chair in the Department of Government and International Affairs at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Iran’s Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic (Westview, 1994). Michael Gibbons is associate professor in the Department of Government and International Affairs at the University of South Florida. He is the editor of Interpreting Politics (Basil Blackwell and NYU Press, 1987). An earlier version of this article appeared in the journal Goftman, no. 3 (winter 1999).

President Seyyed Mohammad Khatami’s brilliant initiative to begin a process of “civilisational dialogue” with different countries from different civilisations can diminish international tension, improve Iran’s relations with other nations, contribute to making the twenty-first century a century of peace and harmony, and help to rectify many prevalent misperceptions about Iran and Islam in the West. In a nutshell, civilisational dialogue, if appropriately implemented, can become a unique hallmark of Iranian foreign policy and a legacy of the Islamic Republic. The concept of “civilisational dialogue” as an instrument of Iranian foreign policy was basically developed in response, or perhaps in reaction, to a theory propounded in 1993 by the prominent American political scientist, Samuel Huntington.¹ As we will demonstrate in this essay, Huntington’s interesting and controversial paradigm is replete with factual historical errors, conceptually flawed and makes dangerously misleading policy recommendations to the US government. Remarkably, however, President Khatami has turned Huntington’s theory of the “clash of civilisations” upside down, developing from it a new and dynamic proposal founded on the concept of civilisational dialogue.

 

Huntington’s theory of the “clash of civilisations” has stirred up more discussion in recent years than any other theory about the nature and characteristics of the post–Cold War era. He claims to have developed a new paradigm that explains international politics in terms of competition, disagreements and conflict among the world’s major civilisations.

 

In what follows, we will discuss Huntington’s new paradigm, the reasons for its appeal, and its conceptual shortcomings. The new paradigm contains glaring historical inaccuracies and distortions and is based on a dangerous simplification of complex phenomena. Specifically, we argue that (1) Huntington’s rejection of neo-realism is more apparent that real. Consequently, he fails to appreciate the extent to which cultural revival will result in greater diversity in world affairs, not less; (2) his proposed paradigm cannot adequately explain the intricacies of the international system because it fails to understand the way in which culture will affect states and virtually ignores the growing role and power of transnational corporations; (3) his call for cultural renewal in the West is a form of fundamentalism that provides the justification for dangerous public policies directed at numerous sectors of the American population and would actually distance the United States from other Western countries; and (4) his analysis of Islam and China is myopic and misleading and his policy proposals unnecessarily increase the possibility of a Western confrontation with Islam and China.

Huntington’s Theory and Its Appeal

The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolised the end of the Cold War, a short and unique period in global politics that began shortly after the Second World War. During that period, the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, divided the world into spheres of influence. From that division of the world, a Manichean paradigm developed in the West that conceptualised global politics in terms of an ongoing struggle between the forces of light, the West, and those of darkness, the communist world.² With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have entered into a global order whose nature we are anxious to know. Gone is the bipolar world in which Moscow and Washington both competed for hegemony and co-managed global affairs. Today, the United States is the sole superpower in a multipolar world order. Ironically, the conspicuous absence of a powerful adversary has created a lingering confusion for the United States in the new international environment. Consequently, a number of theories purporting to explain the new world order have emerged,³ of which Huntington’s is the most controversial.

 

The essence of Huntington’s theory is that “culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilizational identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post–Cold War world”.⁴ Culture becomes the defining characteristic of civilisation, which in turn becomes the defining characteristic of the new world order. Huntington divides the world into seven major civilisations, and argues that world order is best maintained if the internal affairs of each civilisation are managed by one powerful core state of that civilisation. To avoid a global war of civilisations, he warns world leaders to accept, and co-operate to maintain, the civilisational character of global politics.

 

Clearly, not all civilisations enjoy equal power or status. For Huntington, the future of world politics revolves on three axes among the Western, Sinic (chiefly Chinese) and Islamic civilisations. In the increasingly multipolar and multi-civilisational order, the balance of power among nations is shifting away from the West and towards other civilisations, particularly the Islamic and Chinese. Moreover, the conflict between Western universalism and the ever more assertive Islamic and Sinic civilisations will intensify. In the evolving hierarchy, the West will maintain significant technical, economic and military advantages well into the next century, but it will no longer be able to assume hegemony. To maintain its position in the emerging new order, the West must reaffirm its own cultural identity and those values and principles that Huntington identifies as its very foundations. The West will continue to stand at the pinnacle of the new power pyramid, with the United States and what Huntington calls “The American Creed”—belief in “liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property” (p. 305)—at its apex.

 

Huntington maintains, however, that the power of the West has been progressively declining in the past few decades. He provides ample data to show that the West’s control of global territory, its share of world population, its contributions to manufacturing output and gross economic product, and its military manpower have all diminished relative to other countries. These changes reflect the rise of new centres of power.

 

Symptomatic of these changes, he claims, is the fact that whereas in 1919 Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau virtually controlled the world, in the future the successors to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher will be rivalled by those of Deng Xiaoping and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

 

This civilisational and cultural revival is complicated by the fact that on Huntington’s account these competing civilisations are largely incommensurable. Although they may share some values and ideas, such as prohibitions against taking innocent life, the particular interpretation of those ideas and their relation to other ideas and values peculiar or unique to each society outweigh whatever commonality they may provide.

 

In examining Huntington’s narrative about the emerging world order, the question arises whether he simply discovers the dangers he detects, or whether the heart of darkness of his collage is not actually located in the very geopolitical map he chooses, in his manner of ordering and framing the world, to make it more manageable to us by making it more alien and therefore more dangerous. To put it differently: Is Huntington’s description itself the creation of the enemy necessary to forge Western civilisational identity, as his approving citation of Michael Dibdin’s novel Dead Lagoon suggests?

 

There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century or more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.

 

Huntington then adds: “The unfortunate truth in these old truths cannot be ignored by statesman and scholars. For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations” (p. 20).

 

Hate and enemies: these are the defining words in the lexicon of Huntington’s paradigm. In the absence of a powerful nemesis for the United States, these galvanising words are most soothing to some powerful constituencies, many of them remnants of the Cold War, that continue to search for a perspective from which to manage and control an international environment they perceive as inherently dangerous.

Huntington and Neo-Realism

Huntington presents his paradigm as an alternative to the realist school of world politics. The realist school, from Thucydides to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Morgenthau and Waltz, upholds three chief principles: (1) international politics is best understood in terms of the behaviour of individual states; (2) states seek to increase their own power and national security, which are tantamount to their national interest; and (3) states are rational to the extent that their foreign policy adheres to the pursuit of increased national security.

 

The key here is the reduction of politics, either instrumentally or as an end in itself, to the pursuit of power. In Morgenthau’s words, “International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.”⁵

 

Whereas Morgenthau attributed the pursuit of power to human nature, neo-realists, such as Kenneth Waltz, attribute the pursuit of power to the nature of the international system:

 

Each state pursues its own interests, however defined, in ways it judges best. Force is a means of achieving external ends of states because there exists no consistent, reliable process of reconciling the conflicts of interests that inevitably arise among similar units in a condition of anarchy.⁶

 

Reservations about the adequacy of realism became common in the early seventies. The emerging importance of non-state actors raised doubts about whether world politics was reducible to the behaviour of nation states. Similarly, the break-up of the Soviet Union and subsequent events caused others to question the adequacy of the realist model. Scholars and commentators as different in their political and intellectual stances as Hayward Alker, David Campbell, James Der Derian, John Lewis Gaddis, Stanley Hoffman, Lewis Lapham, James Rosenau and Vaclav Havel have argued that in one way or another the realist approach to world politics is, well, unrealistic; it is ill-suited to guide foreign policy in the post–Cold War era.⁷

 

Huntington acknowledges the value of the realist approach, which he sees as consisting largely in the fact that nation states “are and will remain the dominant entities in world affairs”.⁸ Nonetheless, he claims the realist model suffers from several limitations. First, it assumes that all states define their national interest in the same way. This is arguable according to Huntington, at best capturing only part of the reality of world affairs and the conduct of foreign policy. In particular, he denies that state interests can be defined or specified without reference to culture:

 

States define their interests in terms of power but also in terms of much else besides … Values, culture and institutions pervasively influence how states define their interests. The interests of states are also shaped not only by their domestic values and institutions but by international norms and institutions. Above and beyond their primal concern with security, different types of states define their interests in different ways. States with similar cultures and institutions will see common interest. (P. 34)

 

Moreover, a range of developments has occurred that undermines the idea that world politics is reducible to the behaviour of nation states. The rise of international institutions (e.g., the European Union), the increasing importance of the international monetary system, and the growing number of political developments that challenge the sovereignty of nation states all mean that the realist paradigm is limited (p. 35).

 

Interestingly enough, Huntington rejects out of hand one alternative that, on his own account, “is close to reality” (p. 35). He characterises this view as the “sheer chaos” paradigm. It recognises the pluralisation of world politics, the breakdown of rigid state borders, the break‑up of nation states, the flow of people, money and capital across borders, and the increase in cultural diversity within states. Huntington’s response to what he calls the chaos model, what others might call the pluralisation model, is telling. These developments within world politics, he recognises, are a challenge to the territorial sovereignty of the nation state. This is not surprising when one recalls that the territorial state is that which is imposed on a chaotic world, a world not conveniently divided, be it ethnically, linguistically, racially or economically, along the pseudo-fictional lines of territoriality.

 

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have argued that the modern state in fact functions to code, inscribe, register and control precisely what Huntington interprets as the chaos of world politics. Changes in that coding, etc., then threaten to disrupt the narrative of politics imposed by the territorialisation of the nation-state system. Hence, those challenges must be met with reterritorialisation, i.e., a redrawing and rescripting of the world to domesticate that which has escaped the political discourse of previous territorialisation.

 

If it is true that the function of the modern state is the regulation of the decoded, deterritorialised flows, one of the principal aspects of this function consists in reterritorialising, so as to prevent the decoded flows from breaking loose at all edges of the social axiomatic.⁹

 

In other words the world, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is in a constant state of flux, the constant ebb and flow of populations, ideas, money, traditions, etc. When the flow of such nomadic elements of human life exceeds the power of containment that is the territorialisation of the modern state, the state system moves to reterritorialise, re-encode, reinscribe (and thereby reassert control over) that which threatens to break through or free of the normalisation and manipulability of the system of territorialisation. In contrast to Deleuze and Guattari, who welcome the deterritorialisation of world politics as providing the possibility of challenging state power, Huntington seeks to confine the nomadic impulse of the world that undermines the territorial state with a reterritorialisation along what he claims are civilisational lines. Following this reterritorialisation, the idea of core states re-encodes the pluralisation of world politics to make the pluralisation more susceptible to management and control.

 

In effect, Huntington is responding to the challenges to the nation-state system that have emerged in the last twenty years by displacing both the challenges and system to a higher level. In particular, the challenge of cultural diversity that has emerged most recently is recast along supra-national, civilisational lines, with civilisations then being represented by a select group of core nation states. Ideally, other states are expected to fall into line behind the core state that best represents the cultural centre of gravity of each civilisation. Huntington displaces the cultural revival upward, suggesting it will create supra-national civilisations that behave largely as nation states do, pursuing their own civilisational interests in an international environment that is structurally similar to that depicted by neo-realism. The inherent conflict of the international environment will force each civilisation to pursue its own cultural interests, just as, in neo-realist terms, the anarchy of the nation-state system requires that each nation state pursue its own national interest.

 

We agree that cultural revival and diversity will be an important aspect of politics in the post–Cold War era. There are, however, two problems with Huntington’s appropriation of this theme. First, as we will argue later, it underestimates the continued conflict between nation states within Huntington’s civilisational groupings. There is perhaps no better example of this than the kind of conflict that takes place within civilisations in times of religious warfare.

 

Second, it ignores the implications of cultural diversity, which in the opinion of a number of scholars are changing the relationship between cultures. Huntington’s tendency is to see cultures as largely coherent, internally consistent and intellectually separable from one another. Given this tendency, there are two alternatives available to him. The first is that one culture can represent universal values that all cultures embody or aspire to. This is the old idea of Western universalism, and Huntington thinks it has little or no future. The only option left to him, then, is the idea of cultural relativism, with each culture representing whatever its core values are. These are the dilemmas of universalism and relativism that haunted the older European approach to imperialism, from which Huntington’s account of the alternatives does not differ in principle. What it ignores, however, is the fact that cultures are and have been “overlapping, interactive and internally negotiated”.¹⁰

 

Indeed, the failure to recognise cultural diversity and the subsequent attempt to enforce a single set of cultural norms are what explain the various instances of repression and extermination that characterise recent developments in Bosnia and East Africa, to mention just two conflicts.

States and Corporations

Huntington’s application of culture to international relations is new, but his reintroduction of culture as an explanatory variable is not. Max Weber, for example, attributed England’s economic development to the Protestant work ethic, and the economic stagnation of some Asian countries to Confucianism’s emphasis on social cohesiveness and obedience. Focusing on Italian politics, Robert Putnam maintains that there is an organic link between culture and democracy.¹¹ The problem is that because the characteristics of cultures are constantly changing and transforming, it is difficult to anticipate exactly how culture will influence behaviour, particularly in the face of cultural conflicts. Moreover, given the internal complexity of, and tensions within, individual cultures, culture is not by itself a reliable explanation of economic or political behaviour.

 

The central component of Huntington’s paradigm is based on the dubious assumption that in the post–Cold War era, political, military and business alliances will increasingly be formed according to the civilisational affinities of state and other actors. History and recent international developments make this claim questionable.

 

We maintain that states and transnational corporations, whose impact Huntington virtually ignores, will continue to play decisive roles in shaping global politics. Transnational corporations are primarily interested in securing global markets for goods and services, promoting a consumerism that transcends ideology, religion, culture, civilisation and even the state itself. The state will be the focus of attempts by competing political movements to guarantee their security, augment their political power and protect and enhance parochial and pan-nationalist interests. We would argue that although the state system is under challenge from the pressures of cultural diversity and transnational corporations, it will continue to play a more critical role than Huntington suggests.

 

More specifically, we see the emergence of cultural diversity as challenging the constitutional arrangements of existing states, leading to greater political diversity rather than less. This means that the pressure for cultural diversity will lead to the formation of new states in the international arena and also loosen ties to existing states. The breakdown of the former Yugoslavia and its replacement by many sovereign states is a telling example of how cultural proclivities can lead to the formation of new states, which must then compete in the international system of states. But in addition, the growth of the constitutional recognition of internal cultural diversity will result in the state being the focal point of an increasing number of pressures from social movements and groups, including those seeking political and cultural hegemony.

 

The following example illustrates the continued role of states and transnational corporations in international affairs. It also demonstrates the limitations of Huntington’s paradigm. The bloody civil strife in Zaire, a struggle for scarce natural resources, was revealing of the phenomenal power of transnational corporations. In the past few years, those corporations have shaped the political landscape of Zaire in ways unimaginable during the Cold War. Only a week after Shaba province fell to Laurent Kabila’s forces in the early months of 1997—that is, when President Mobutu Sese Seko was still in power—mining company executives from the United States and Europe were flying into Lubumbashi to sign multi-million dollar contracts with the rebels’ finance minister, Mr Mawamanga. One corporation, America Mineral Fields, from Hope, Arkansas, signed an $885 million contract with the rebels, part of which they certainly used to finance their successful campaign against the then incumbent regime. It was noteworthy that the transnational corporations openly signed lucrative contracts not with the government of Zaire, which would have been the proper protocol, but with the rebels, who at that time were not recognised by a single state in the international community.

 

In Zaire, the transnational corporations and the rebels became strange bedfellows, forming an alliance of convenience because of the former’s pursuit of investment opportunities and the latter’s desire for state power. It is clear that in formulating their policies, neither the rebels nor the corporations paid the slightest consideration to the other’s religion, culture and civilisation. Huntington’s paradigm does not seem to be able to speak to this kind of development. It largely ignores the role of transnational corporations and their potential ability to interfere in and, it seems, legitimise some political processes. Huntington may claim that the notion that states pursue policies and form alliances that serve their perceived national interest is an old idea. But as long as threats to the security of individual states exist, whether they are contrived, real or merely imagined, states will continue to be a focal point of international politics.

Renewal of the West

Huntington sees the remaking of the world order as a decline in the hegemony of the West. No longer can the West presume that its own values, practices, ideals and institutions are a set of universals that represents the future of other nations and peoples. For Huntington, this realisation brings with it yet other, more important, concerns:

 

The central issue for the West [our italics] is whether, quite apart from any external challenges, it is capable of stopping and reversing the internal processes of decay. Can the West renew itself or will sustained internal rot simply accelerate its end and/or subordination to other economically and demographically more dynamic civilizations?¹²

 

The challenges of internal decay that Huntington identifies are the same as those that conservative critics such as Gertrude Himmelfarb, William Bennett, Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom and Daniel Bell identify as necessitating greater social control and political surveillance: family decay, rising divorce rates, a weakening of the “work ethic”, and in general a growth in the pluralisation of Western societies. This pluralisation Huntington sees as an increasingly dangerous threat. The West is home to ethnic and religious groups that reject its values, ideals and mores. Most notably, Muslims in Europe and Hispanics in the United States “reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and to propagate the values, customs, and cultures of their home societies” (pp. 304–5). This decline in the identification with Western values is exacerbated by the weakening of the central unifying theme of Western culture, i.e., Christianity.

 

The dangers cited above are particularly acute in the United States, Huntington claims. The rise of multiculturalism threatens the very core of American (and therefore Western) civilisation:

 

Historically American national identity has been defined culturally by the heritage of Western civilization and politically by the principle of the American Creed on which Americans overwhelmingly agree: liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property. In the late twentieth century both components of American identity have come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism they have attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings. (P. 305)

 

The danger of the trend toward multiculturalism is unambiguous, according to Huntington. “Rejection of the Creed and of Western civilization means the end of the United States of America as we have known it. It also means effectively the end of Western civilization” (pp. 306–7). Either we eliminate the impulse toward diversity that is emerging in the United States or all Western civilisation faces collapse. Apparently, so thin is the staying power of Western civilisation—especially Western civilisation without a monocultural American Creed—that the accommodation of diversity is unsustainable and a “small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists” can threaten it.

 

Huntington’s view of the alternatives, then, is starkly drawn: the imperatives of the international order require a political and social discipline whereby citizens identify with Huntington’s version of Western (i.e., American) civilisation. Those who disagree with Huntington, because they encourage a diversity that threatens the unity of Western culture, are not simply wrong: they are dangerous. Those with different interpretations of the relationship among competing cultures within Huntington’s civilisations; those seeking a more pluralised democracy than that defined by the liberal state; those seeking to accommodate forms of family life not prescribed by established Christianity; in short, proponents of any diversity that does not conform to the parameters of Huntington’s own unexamined, fundamentalist version of American civilisation are not simply sources of political and social dissent but a security risk.

 

Huntington simply asserts that the defining fundamentals of the American Creed are the defining characteristics of the West per se. He uncritically assumes that other Western countries necessarily mirror the United States. No thought is given as to whether the values he identifies are genuinely central to other Western societies, whether they appear in similar or different forms, whether there are other cultural values that are peculiar to other Western countries. But presumably, on Huntington’s account, the contesting of such values is as dangerous if it occurs in other Western countries as it is if it occurs in the United States. In Huntington’s schema, the unwillingness, say, of France to endorse the American Creed must be seen as a potential threat to the security of the Western world as a whole. Such a position is not the stuff of mutual recognition and co-operation.

The Sinic–Islamic Threat

The Phobia of the Other

Huntington believes that an alliance between the Islamic and Sinic civilisations poses the single greatest security threat to the United States and the West. The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the “interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness” (p. 183).

 

What seems to disturb Huntington about the Sinic and Islamic civilisations is the revivalist movement that is supposedly sweeping across them. The psychological and social traumas of modernisation, the West’s long history of subjugating the peoples of those two civilisations, and the end of the Cold War have certainly contributed to this revivalism. This revivalism, as Huntington points out, is not a rejection of modernity, but a rejection of the West, particularly its secularism, moral relativism and hedonistic/materialistic culture. The message of the Asian and Islamic societies is unambiguous: “We will be modern but we won’t be you” (p. 101). Huntington maintains that while many Asian and Islamic countries are applying Western models of development in managing their economies, they adhere to their own cultural norms and religious sentiments, which they consider to be superior to the West’s.

 

Huntington believes that these powerful revivalist movements are essentially anti-Western. We believe they are essentially non-Western. Their message, which we must hear with understanding, is: “We are tired of centuries of Western machinations to control us and we want to run our affairs on the basis of our own values and traditions.” Huntington himself admits that for centuries the West attempted to impose its values on the rest of the world. Now that the rest of the world is expressing its preferences, he considers it “anti-Western”, and not simply as “non-Western”. There are vast differences between aspiring to be non-Western and being anti-Western. For Huntington, this fine distinction does not exist, a failure of discrimination that may be attributed to his Orientalist sensibility.

 

Of all the Asian countries, it is China that Huntington fears the most. By virtue of its huge population, possession of the largest army in the world and its phenomenal economic growth, China is “gradually emerging as the society most likely to challenge the West for global influence” (pp. 82–3). Clearly, China cannot challenge the West single-handedly, hence its need to form alliances with other challenger civilisations. Islamic civilisation, Huntington claims, is a natural ally of China, for both exhibit an intense dislike of the West and have excessive ambitions to dominate the world. In fact, Huntington maintains that China has formed a de facto alliance against the West with certain Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Libya. The only evidence presented for this “alliance” is China’s sale of sensitive military hardware, such as missiles, to a few Islamic countries. But US annual military sales to Islamic countries in the Persian Gulf alone exceed all of China’s annual military exports. Does that mean that an American–Islamic alliance has been formed against some perceived enemy? Certainly not. Huntington’s claim that a nascent Chinese–Islamic alliance exists is far-fetched, but it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The very suggestion of such an alliance could encourage the United States to adopt antagonistic policies towards China and the Islamic world, in turn compelling them to form an alliance.

Neo-Orientalism

The Columbus Mentality

When Columbus arrived in the Americas, he brought with him an interpretative schema that predetermined the nature of his encounter with the new world and its peoples. That schema was underwritten by Christian dogma, the prior pronouncements of church authorities, and his knowledge of the natural world made available by his expertise in navigation and astronomy. The result was that Columbus did not approach the Americas in the hope of learning anything new. Rather, his encounter with the Americas is one in which he seeks to name the world properly, to fix it in the interpretative schema that he uncritically accepts.

 

There are two consequences of this stance toward the world. First, the uncritical acceptance of his pre-understanding shapes the way Columbus experiences the world. “He knows in advance what he will find: the concrete experience is there to illustrate a truth already possessed, not to be interrogated according to pre-established rules in order to seek the truth.”¹³ The new world can be experienced only in so far as it can be reinterpreted and fitted into his pre-understanding. Hence his experience confirms what his pre-understanding assures him of, e.g., that Cyclopes, Amazons, mermaids, dog-headed people and men with tails do exist and that paradise can be found here on this earth.

 

The second consequence of knowing what to expect in advance is that Columbus has no place for the words, testimony or language of those he encounters. His interpretation of the communications of the inhabitants of the Americas is always mediated as a confirming of what he is already told by his interpretative schema. Hence, he has little interest in what they say or in learning their language. They have no place in his schema except to reconfirm what he already believes. Above all, he does not expect to learn anything from them that would challenge his understanding of the world. So their communication is either construed as confirming what already exists (even though he doesn’t really bother to listen to or understand it), or is dismissed as meaningless (at one point Columbus even denies that the people he encounters have a language).

Islam and the West

This failure to allow the other to speak on his or her own behalf will have a long history in the clash of cultures and should serve as a warning. Unfortunately, Huntington seems to fall into the same trap as Columbus. Even the most learned historians of Islam are reluctant to make generalisations about its nature and past. This is because the diversity and complexity of Islam make sweeping generalisations risky at best and dangerous at worst. In light of this, Huntington’s treatment of Islam is particularly disappointing. For him, there exists only one Islam: It is the Islam he has studied second hand. On his account, it is monolithic, brutal and lacking in diversity. In reality, Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, is richly diverse and its history is truly complex, much more so than Huntington recognises. Just as the insistence that one group or sect within Christianity (e.g., the “Moral Majority”) or Judaism (e.g., the Kach movement of the late Meir Kahane) represented the whole of those cultures would be unjust to their complexity, so Huntington’s reduction of Islam to a single set of beliefs does violence to Islam. Failing to understand this diversity and richness, Huntington disregards as deceptive, unrepresentative or irrelevant those who deviate from his caricature of Islam.

 

He also ridicules those, including the US government, who maintain that the United States has no problem with Islam but only with so-called Islamic fundamentalists. “Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise,” he tells us.¹⁴ The problem is Islam, a religion in which “extremism is mainstream”. Judging by the sources he cites, Huntington’s reckless conclusions about a religion with over one billion followers and hundreds of sects and schools of thought are based on a few books and articles about Islam and the Islamic revivalism of recent decades.

 

Reminiscent of the writings of European Orientalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Huntington is exceptionally critical about the nature of Islam and its history. For him, Islam is the religion of the sword or jihad, holy war, with a powerful instinctual propensity for expansionism and a lack of tolerance for other religions. He is deaf to the insistence of a large number of Islamic scholars that jihad is a defensive and not an offensive posture.¹⁵ History is rich in cases of Islamic leaders showing remarkable tolerance and intolerance both of Muslims and of the peoples of other religions.

 

Huntington relies on Bernard Lewis to prove Islam’s history of aggression and hostility, quoting his claim that “for almost a thousand years, from the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna, Europe was under constant threat from Islam”.¹⁶ Huntington concludes that “Islam is the only civilization which has put the survival of West in doubt, and it has done that at least twice”. He concludes that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards” (p. 258, italics in original). Ironically, Huntington and radical modern Islamic movements have one thing in common: they exaggerate the most negative aspects of the history of the relationship between Islam and the West that have created lingering resentment in the consciousness of Muslims and Westerners.

 

Part of the problem is that Huntington relies excessively on Lewis, who is a prolific Ottomanist. But the history of the relationship between Islam and the West entails much more than the Ottoman–Western encounter. Even at the apex of its glory, the Ottoman Empire represented only one part, albeit important, of the Islamic world. A sizeable proportion of Muslims lived outside Ottoman jurisdiction in such places as Persia, Afghanistan, India and Central Asia. Huntington, much more than Lewis, equates Ottoman history with Islamic history. But they are not the same, although Ottoman history is an integral ingredient of Islamic history.

 

But even if we focus on Ottoman history, Huntington’s biases are disturbingly visible. While the Ottomans did threaten western Europe, Europeans for their part also threatened the Ottomans. From at least the seventeenth century, they began to manipulate the Ottoman Empire, eventually transforming it into the “sick man of Europe”. The occupation of Egypt, Libya and Syria by the British, Italians and French, respectively, and the total legal immunity (known as “capitulation rights”) which the citizens of some European countries enjoyed in the Ottoman Empire, are but a few examples of this manipulation. After the First World War, it was primarily the “British, and to a lesser extent the French, who partitioned the modern Middle East and established puppet governments” in what had previously been Ottoman possessions.¹⁷ The West’s treatment of other parts of the Islamic world has been equally harsh, if not harsher, than its treatment of the Ottomans.

 

Huntington is as critical of the Islamic present as he is of the Islamic past. He blames Muslim countries for excessive militarisation, ignoring the basic fact that for a long time now it has been the West, and the United States in particular, that has sold them most of their weapons. He accuses Islamic countries of acts of terrorism, which cannot be justified under any circumstances. While some Islamic countries have sponsored acts of terrorism, they are not its only source; and the overwhelming majority of Islamic countries have never been accused of terrorism.

 

Huntington’s implicit assumption is that Islamic values are anti-Western and by definition anti-modern. Neither of these assertions passes the litmus test of accuracy. In the Golden Age of Islam, coinciding not with Ottoman rule but with that of the Abbasids (750–1258 ce), important advances were made by Islamic philosophers, chemists, mathematicians, architects, astronomers, physicians, poets and many other thinkers. It was in the Islamic centres of learning that science and rational philosophy were kept alive. It was in the Abbasid period that some of Plato’s and Aristotle’s works were translated into Arabic, later being translated from Arabic into the major Indo-European languages. Islam was the critical link between classical Greece and Rome and the Renaissance, the gateway to the modern world. It was Islam that discovered algebra and popularised the Arabic numerals which eventually replaced Roman numerals. These and many other achievements were realised because the Abbasid rulers opened Baghdad to people of all religions and nationalities, including Persians, Indians, Jews and Christians.

 

Huntington also makes the sweeping generalisation that it is hard “to find statements by any Muslims, whether politicians, officials, academics, businesspersons, or journalists, praising Western values and institutions”.¹⁸ Probable reasons for Huntington’s difficulty in this regard are the unusually limited references he cites in his book and his clear unfamiliarity with the ongoing debates within the Islamic world.

 

Thousands of Muslims, from all walks of life and from all sects, have praised the West. Kemal Ataturk, Anwar al-Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, King Fahd and King Hassan are among the more recent and better-known leaders who have done so. Seyyed Jamal ad din Asadabadi, also known as Al-Afghani (1838/9–97), who was a pioneer of Islamic revivalism, admired the West for its remarkable scientific and technological advancements. He encouraged his fellow Muslims to learn from the West. Prominent Islamic thinkers have explicitly praised many aspects of the West.¹⁹ In some US eyes, the Islamic Republic of Iran is the very type of an anti-Western Muslim state. Yet its new president, Mohammad Khatami, has repeatedly declared that there is much that the Islamic world can and must learn from the West.

 

Islamic countries are stunningly diverse, rendering it problematic, if not altogether impossible, to generalise about them, or to propose a unified policy towards all of them, as Huntington does. There are more than fifty Islamic countries, covering three continents, with a total population of more than one billion people. Indonesia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Kuwait are all Islamic counties. But their cultural, linguistic and political diversity is more drastic than Huntington seems to recognise. Their levels of economic development are also very different. Some are relatively industrialised, some are highly agrarian, some are rich and many are poor.

 

Nor can we generalise about recent Islamic movements, as Huntington does. The current revivalism is not monolithic. Each Islamic movement has its own agenda and peculiarities. There are critical theological and political differences among various Islamic movements. There is no centre that directs them. There are huge differences between the Islam of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and that of Ayatollah Khomeini. Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which Huntington regards as one of the centres of the Islamic revivalist movement, has condemned the actions of Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers as unacceptable and un-Islamic.

 

Once we look at the recent Islamic movements as polycephalic, once we come to appreciate the richness of Islamic diversity, then we will probably feel less threatened by Islam. For Huntington, however, the profound differences that have divided the Islamic world for the past millennium are meaningless. With no room for them in his conceptual framework, he either ignores them altogether or explains them away.

 

Huntington’s identification of Islam and China as the most serious threats to the West may be related to the “rogue-state” doctrine, the foundation of US military strategy in the post–Cold War era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Pentagon became increasingly concerned that some small Third World countries were producing weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. These defiant states were labelled “outlaws” or “rogues”. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was a blessing in disguise for those advocating the containment of the rogue states. The Pentagon is said to have identified the most dangerous rogues as being Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Cuba, and potential rogues as being China, Egypt, India, Pakistan and Turkey.²⁰ It is notable that Islamic countries constitute a sizeable majority of both the rogues and potential rogues. Huntington’s paradigm fits in so well with the rogue-state thesis that it could serve as the intellectual justification of the Pentagon’s new doctrine, giving it credibility and cohesion.

A Dangerous Paradigm

In writing that “civilisation is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour”, Arnold Toynbee identified one of the most important characteristics of civilisations: their flexibility to interact and have a symbiotic relationship with each other. Unfortunately, Huntington’s way of framing the cultural differences between the West and other civilisations encourages policy makers to look for safe, fortified harbours. The tendency of his paradigm is to interpret the outcome of cultural differences as a zero-sum game. That is, Huntington seems to believe that one culture must win and another must lose. His theory thus encourages political actors, citizens and policy makers to interpret cultural differences as being insurmountable and to reinforce such differences rather than seek ways of negotiating them. Consequently, his policy proposals will lead to more confrontation and hostility between countries if policy makers take the view that those proposals represent the non-negotiable cultural imperatives of supra-national civilisations. Clearly, the existence of major differences and potential areas of conflict between countries with different cultural traditions cannot be denied. The solution to this old problem is to have sincere dialogue among civilisations.

Endnotes

1. Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs (summer 1993), pp. 23‑49, and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Subsequent references in our paper are to the book.

 

2. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

 

3. See, for example, Richard Falk, On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University, 1995); D. Michael Rivage-Seul and Marguerite K. Rivage-Seul, A Kinder and Gentler Tyranny: Illusions of a New World Order (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Press, 1995); James N. Rosenau, Along the Domestic Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

 

4. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 20.

 

5. See Hans J. Morgenthau and Kenneth W. Thompson, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 6th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 31.

 

6. Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 238.

 

7. Jim George, “Understanding International Relations after the World War: Probing beyond the Realist Legacy”, in Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities, ed. Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R. Alker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 33–7.

 

8. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 34.

 

9. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 258.

 

10. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 10.

 

11. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

 

12. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 303.

 

13. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 17.

 

14. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 209.

 

15. Rudolph Peters, ed., Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

 

16. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 210.

 

17. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914–1922 (New York: Henry Holt, 1989).

 

18. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 213.

 

19. For examples, see Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Denis MacEoin and Ahmed Al-Shahi, eds., Islam in the Modern World (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983).

 

20. See Michael Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America’s Search for a New Foreign Policy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).