Clash Of Civilizations: A Flawed Theory?

The fundamental clash, according to Huntington, will be between the West on one side and the Sinic and the Islamic civilizations on the other. The conflict along the fault lines between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. There are various factors that have contributed to intensifying the Islam-West conflict in the late 20th century.

As the Cold War was drawing to an end, various intellectuals had undertaken the task of explaining and predicting post- Cold War global politics. Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington were such eminent scholars. Fukuyama wrote his thesis, End of History, declaring the triumph of the ideology of Liberal democracy forever. According to him, now the war of ideologies is over and there is no rival ideology of Liberal democracy forever. His argument becomes susceptible to criticism today when the whole Western world is at war with the ideology of 'terrorism'.

Four years later in 1993, Samuel P Huntington wrote his article, The clash of civilizations? In the magazine Foreign Affairs. It was the most reputed and thought-provoking piece of writing published in that distinguished magazine since George Kennans article, The sources of Soviet conduct, published in July 1947. Huntington later on elaborated those very arguments in his book titled, The clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

Huntington observes that for a century and a half following the nailing down of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, conflicts used to occur largely among princes and these conflicts led to the creation of nation states. After the French Revolution, the principal lines of conflict shifted between nations rather than princes. The end of this 19th century pattern coincides with the end of the First World War. Then in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the conflict of nation states yielded to the conflict of ideologies. Since the demise of the communist ideology, the configuration of global politics along cultural lines is underway. Huntington says, "In the 20th century, the relations among civilizations have thus moved from a phase dominated by the unidirectional impact of one civilization on all others to one of intense, sustained and multi-directional interactions among all civilizations." Huntington argues that his reconfiguration of politics at the global level would end up in a clash among civilizations. He contends that local politics is the politics of ethnicity, global politics is the politics of civilization and the rivalry of superpower is replaced by the clash of civilizations.

According to Huntington, a civilization is a cultural entity. Civilization and culture both refer to the overall way of life of a people and a civilization is a culture writ large. Huntington designates religion to be the most important of all the objective elements that define a civilization. To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the worlds greatest religions and people who share ethnicity and language but differ in religion may slaughter each other, as happened in Lebanon and the Subcontinent. Huntington divides civilizations into seven major categories. These are the Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Western, Latin American and African (possibly). Some analysts do not recognize the Japanese and African civilizations as distinct civilizations. He puts forward the following reasons for the inter-civilizational conflict.

The increasing interactions among people of different civilizations are intensifying civilizational consciousness and awareness of differences and commonalities amongst civilizations. According to Huntington the enhancement of civilizational consciousness of people due to interactions among peoples of different civilizations, in turn, invigorates differences and animosities stretching back deep into history.

During the Cold War a country could be non-aligned or it could change its alignment from one side to the other. The leaders of countries could make these choices in terms of their perceptions of their security interests, their calculation of the balance of power, and their ideological preferences. In the new world that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, cultural identity is the central factor in shaping a country's associations and antagonisms. The question asked during the Cold War, Which side are you on? has been replaced by a more fundamental question now, Who are you? Every state has to have an answer. While a country could avoid Cold War alignment, it cannot lack an identity. The 1990s have witnessed the eruption of the global identity crisis. In coping with the identity crisis what similar ancestry religion, language, values and institutions and distance themselves from those with different ones.

Modernization taking place in non-Western societies is leading towards cultural resurgence in those societies. Modernization brings changes at the individual level, as well as societal level. At the societal level, it increases the economic, military and potential power while at the individual level it leads to alienation and identity crisis. Both of these changes contribute in bringing religious, as well as cultural resurgence. Huntington observes that spurred by modernization, global politics is reconfigured along cultural lines. Peoples and countries with similar cultures are coming together and those with different cultures are coming apart. Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations are giving way to alignments defined by culture and civilizations.

The fundamental clash, according to Huntington, will be between the West on one side and the Sinic and Islamic civilization on the other. The conflict along fault lines between Wester and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. There are various factors that have contributed in intensifying the Islam-Western conflict in the late 20th century.

• A surge in population growth in the Muslim countries led to unemployment in these societies and the youth became recruits to Islamist cause.
• Islamic resurgence - an offshoot of back to the roots phenomenon created culture consciousness among the Muslims more vigorously than at any other time in history.
• The West is trying to universalize its values and impose them on other countries, including Muslims, while relaxing its economic and military muscles, but at the same time the West is not realizing the decline in its capability to do so or increase in the power of other societies to resist any such attempt
• The demise of the Soviet Union has removed the common enemy of both Islam and the West.

But if we take a down-to-earth analysis of this history, we will find various flaws that render its validity and application in the present era in doubt. First, Huntington said that the Islamic and the Sinic civilizations would coalesce together to counter the Western power as the allies and Stalin did against Hitler. But while comparing these two situations, he over looked the basic point that the period of the Allies- Soviet pact was the period of 'ideologies' that today is over. Besides this, his contention of Islamic-Chinese cooperation negates his very thesis that now there is grouping in the world along cultural lines.

Second, M K Palat observes that the weakest point of 'clashing civilizations' theory is the confusion of civilization as power bloc. The Islamic world as a civilization may be discerned but not an Islamic power conglomerate in the manner of the West or China. Akbar S Ahmed said, The Muslim world seems to be torn between those who would shake heaven and earth to get a green card and become Americans and those who shake heaven and earth to damage and destroy Americans. "So how can we envisage a world in which the whole Islamic world is pitched against the West?" 

Third, Huntington's argument is that the modernization process is leading to Islamic revivalism and ultimately contributes to the process of civilization consciousness. Thus why were the relations between Islam and the West stormy in the 11th century when there was no modernization process and thus culture consciousness (following Huntington's logic)?

Fourth, Huntington himself concedes the fact that there is no core state in the 'Islamic world'. Thus the absence of leadership will be followed by the absence of organization to act in concert against the Western civilization.

Fifth, many Muslim countries have slid into chaos and internal disturbance and a virtual civil war is going on in these countries between and among various factions, all of whom claim to be Muslims. These clashes within a civilization undermine Huntington's thesis that people sharing same culture are coming together.

Sixth, according to Samuel, religion is the most significant of all the objective elements defining civilization. But Bangladesh's secession from Pakistan was connected with language and politics and not religion.

Seventh, Amartya Sen in his essay titled, A world not neatly divided attacks Huntington's theory by giving the example of movements that involve people without any distinction of culture, language or politics. He cites an example of anti-globalization protestors whose movement include all the poor people across borders, regardless of territorial boundaries or any other barrier. Thus shared poverty can also be a motive for people struggling together.

In a nutshell, Huntington's theory in which he has envisioned the clash among civilizations to be the climatic point of development of cultural fault lines is riddled with snags and loopholes and we cannot apply this theory in the emerging economically interdependent world. According to Sen, the division of humanity into impenetrable civilizational camps impoverishes the world.