Perhaps it was fate that Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order fell into my reading pile when it did, the day after Christmas. It's been on my list of interests for several years now, since I first heard of it in the aftermath of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. I actually read several rebuttals of it before I read the actual article by Huntington in Foreign Affairs magazine, upon which the book is based, and the concept has intrigued me ever since. Huntington died on Christmas Eve of 2008 and I began reading shortly after the fact.
The reason it's come to the forefront of my mind is that, for years, I had heard nearly everyone I knew who had read or read about this article or book, describe it as a legitimizer of the neoconservative version of foreign policy, or at least of the theory that Western civilization was at its core mortally and naturally opposed to the civilization of Islam, and that the new 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were manifestations of this concept. Huntington himself seems not to be a neoconservative (he used to work for the Carter administration), but he certainly is a war-hawk and Westophile who believes in a pseuodo-colonial way that the West is the best and it's therefore the West's goal to preserve the essential values of our civilization at all costs, even if this means the utter destruction of other civilizations in our way. Needless to say, I immediately plunged into this book, trying to keep an open mind despite the knowledge about the author and topic I had going in. Here's part one, of what I hope to be a three part series of my analysis of the book:
The thesis of Huntington's argument is that the ideological struggle between capitalist liberal democracies and authoritarian communism was an aberration of global politics and that the end of the Cold War marked a return to the "natural" state of political struggles on the planet which takes the form of a clash of civilizations. Huntington's definition of civilizations is a bit murkier, and he borrows a bit haphazardly from the likes of Braudel, Spengler, McNiell, Durkheim, and others, but in the end he seems to draw mostly from Toynbee--that civilizations are the broadest cultural entities with which one can identify. That is, I can identify myself as a Midwesterner who has some differences from a Californian, but we both may identify ourselves as Americans with more in common with each other than, say, a German. But, Germans and Americans, drawing from the same cultural well, have more in common with each other than a Westerner does with someone from China or the Middle East. He argues that commonalities between people beyond the civilizational level are essentially biological and that the common objective elements that help to define a civilization include language, history, religion, customs, etc. Huntington argues that throughout most of history the principle fault-lines of conflict have not been ideological, as they were in both World Wars and the Cold War, but civilizational, as it has been with Western European conflicts with the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, between subcontinental Indians and Muslims during the Islamic expansion, between China and the Buddhist kingdoms to its South and West, and between European colonists and the Africans and Native Americans displaced by their settlement. With the fall of communism throughout most of the world, Huntington contends throughout the bulk of this book that the struggle between civilizations is about to ascend back to the top as the force behind foreign policy decisions the world over.
In many ways, this book reads as a rebuttal of Francis Fukayama's other neoconservative theory concerning global politics, enunciated in his book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukayama's argument was that, with the fall of the communism, the world had entered a sort of final stage in political and ideological eveolution in which liberal democracy and the free-market system had proved themselves as the penultimate form of human government and economics; and history was effectively over, insofar as history could be defined as a teleological progression from hunter-gather society through successions of monarchies, various forms of feudalism, nationalism, and all the other -isms that pervaded global political structures. As ludicrous as this sounds, it was taken seriously for a brief period by many intellectuals in the late 80s and early 90s. While Huntinton's arguments obviously have their drawbacks, among policy wonks and conservative thinkers, his concept of civilizational conflict filled in the gaps in thought that Fukayama seemed to forget about--the cultural, linguistic, and religious divisions that were, in his mind, far more important than political and economic ideologies. In that, at least, Huntington seems to be right.
Where he fails to understand or even imagine a different type fo world, is in his lack of a coherent understanding of what makes a civilization. What is a civilization? In the broadest historical and etymological sense, the word civilizations derives from the Latin word civitas which means "city" and replaced the Latin word urbs, the original word for a city. The reason for this replacement seems to have been prestige oriented, perhaps because of the notion of citizenship in the Roman Empire. Civitas came from the word civis which meant a city-dweller. In any case, the early meaning of the word "civilization" which did not appear in the English language until 1704, certainly connoted a society that reached a pinnacle in which surplus of food and an organized class structure had created a hierarchy where the building of cities, the creations of laws, the maintaining of a professional army, and so on had been achieved. This implicitly leaves out any society in which city building and complex structuring of social relations had not been achieved, and indeed, Europeans during the Age of Discovery did not regard any of the peoples with whom they came into contact, such as Native American and African tribes, as civilized. At the very least, the cultures of China, India, and the Middle East, though they were thought of as lesser peoples thatn those of Europe, were at least regarded as civilized. Henry Kissinger once said that "History is the story of states" and by this he seemed to mean, as Huntington does, that only civilizations are worthy of having their stories told. The problem with this, of course, is that it purposely leaves out the stories of all the peoples and cultures in the world, a great many of which did not encounter "civilization" until relatively recent times.
Throughout the first several sections of the book, I failed to see what was so neoconservative about Huntington's argument. In fact, I failed to see what was so political about it at all. Despite the fact that Huntington is a professor of strategic and international studies and the book is marketed as "political science," it reads much more like world history, and for the first several chapters I felt like I was reading a late twentieth century equivalent of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. Toynbee, like Huntington, was concerned with the division of the world into clear-cut and unambiguous civilizations, and he spends the majority of his magnum opus describing contemporary and historical civilizations. Western, for example, is described as beginning somewhere between the fourth and eighth centuries, as the Classical civilization of Rome and Greece came to end. Western civilization was a synthesis of this civilization with Germanic culture and Christian religion. This is mostly true and is in line with most medievalists visions of a creation of a particularly European society distinct from the Mediterranean oriented society of the previous several centuries. So, what are today's civilization that Huntington views as so black-and-white?
As this map shows, Huntington divides the world into fairly recognizable patterns of culture, language, religion, and geography. The West is made up of Western Europe, North America above the Rio Grande, Australia, and New Zealand; Islamic encompassed all regions where Islam is the dominant relgion, including places like Indonesia and parts of India and the Philippines; Orthodox civilization includes Russia and the other Orthodox Christian countries in Eastern Europe, and so on. Notice that civilizational lines do not necessarily correspond with national boundaries, and this is especially apparent in the line between Islam and African civilizations in the Southern Sahara and in the Sinic and Buddhist civilizations in Southeast Asia and the Tibetan plateau. As the book progresses, Huntington gives more and more analyses, criticisms, and predictions of the future of global conflict, and most of them revolve around intercivilizational conflicts. The book was published in 1996, well before the election of George W. Bush, 9/11, and the Iraq War, and in light of the direction of US foreign policy over the past eight years, many have hailed Huntington's prescience as nearly prophetic and many, especially those on the right, have embraced the concept of civilizational clash as the new motivating factor of politics and indeed, history in general. Bush's "with us or against us" attitude has unfortunately given credence to the more pessimistic and culturist facets of Huntington's arguments, and for some, the "War on Terror" is seen as a substitute for a more direct War on Islam. In my next post, I plan on deconstructing some of Huntington's specifc arguments, describing some fallacies, bringing light to some rebuttals, and giving Huntington's rebuttal of the rebuttals a closer look.
The thesis of Huntington's argument is that the ideological struggle between capitalist liberal democracies and authoritarian communism was an aberration of global politics and that the end of the Cold War marked a return to the "natural" state of political struggles on the planet which takes the form of a clash of civilizations. Huntington's definition of civilizations is a bit murkier, and he borrows a bit haphazardly from the likes of Braudel, Spengler, McNiell, Durkheim, and others, but in the end he seems to draw mostly from Toynbee--that civilizations are the broadest cultural entities with which one can identify. That is, I can identify myself as a Midwesterner who has some differences from a Californian, but we both may identify ourselves as Americans with more in common with each other than, say, a German. But, Germans and Americans, drawing from the same cultural well, have more in common with each other than a Westerner does with someone from China or the Middle East. He argues that commonalities between people beyond the civilizational level are essentially biological and that the common objective elements that help to define a civilization include language, history, religion, customs, etc. Huntington argues that throughout most of history the principle fault-lines of conflict have not been ideological, as they were in both World Wars and the Cold War, but civilizational, as it has been with Western European conflicts with the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, between subcontinental Indians and Muslims during the Islamic expansion, between China and the Buddhist kingdoms to its South and West, and between European colonists and the Africans and Native Americans displaced by their settlement. With the fall of communism throughout most of the world, Huntington contends throughout the bulk of this book that the struggle between civilizations is about to ascend back to the top as the force behind foreign policy decisions the world over.
In many ways, this book reads as a rebuttal of Francis Fukayama's other neoconservative theory concerning global politics, enunciated in his book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukayama's argument was that, with the fall of the communism, the world had entered a sort of final stage in political and ideological eveolution in which liberal democracy and the free-market system had proved themselves as the penultimate form of human government and economics; and history was effectively over, insofar as history could be defined as a teleological progression from hunter-gather society through successions of monarchies, various forms of feudalism, nationalism, and all the other -isms that pervaded global political structures. As ludicrous as this sounds, it was taken seriously for a brief period by many intellectuals in the late 80s and early 90s. While Huntinton's arguments obviously have their drawbacks, among policy wonks and conservative thinkers, his concept of civilizational conflict filled in the gaps in thought that Fukayama seemed to forget about--the cultural, linguistic, and religious divisions that were, in his mind, far more important than political and economic ideologies. In that, at least, Huntington seems to be right.
Where he fails to understand or even imagine a different type fo world, is in his lack of a coherent understanding of what makes a civilization. What is a civilization? In the broadest historical and etymological sense, the word civilizations derives from the Latin word civitas which means "city" and replaced the Latin word urbs, the original word for a city. The reason for this replacement seems to have been prestige oriented, perhaps because of the notion of citizenship in the Roman Empire. Civitas came from the word civis which meant a city-dweller. In any case, the early meaning of the word "civilization" which did not appear in the English language until 1704, certainly connoted a society that reached a pinnacle in which surplus of food and an organized class structure had created a hierarchy where the building of cities, the creations of laws, the maintaining of a professional army, and so on had been achieved. This implicitly leaves out any society in which city building and complex structuring of social relations had not been achieved, and indeed, Europeans during the Age of Discovery did not regard any of the peoples with whom they came into contact, such as Native American and African tribes, as civilized. At the very least, the cultures of China, India, and the Middle East, though they were thought of as lesser peoples thatn those of Europe, were at least regarded as civilized. Henry Kissinger once said that "History is the story of states" and by this he seemed to mean, as Huntington does, that only civilizations are worthy of having their stories told. The problem with this, of course, is that it purposely leaves out the stories of all the peoples and cultures in the world, a great many of which did not encounter "civilization" until relatively recent times.
Throughout the first several sections of the book, I failed to see what was so neoconservative about Huntington's argument. In fact, I failed to see what was so political about it at all. Despite the fact that Huntington is a professor of strategic and international studies and the book is marketed as "political science," it reads much more like world history, and for the first several chapters I felt like I was reading a late twentieth century equivalent of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. Toynbee, like Huntington, was concerned with the division of the world into clear-cut and unambiguous civilizations, and he spends the majority of his magnum opus describing contemporary and historical civilizations. Western, for example, is described as beginning somewhere between the fourth and eighth centuries, as the Classical civilization of Rome and Greece came to end. Western civilization was a synthesis of this civilization with Germanic culture and Christian religion. This is mostly true and is in line with most medievalists visions of a creation of a particularly European society distinct from the Mediterranean oriented society of the previous several centuries. So, what are today's civilization that Huntington views as so black-and-white?
As this map shows, Huntington divides the world into fairly recognizable patterns of culture, language, religion, and geography. The West is made up of Western Europe, North America above the Rio Grande, Australia, and New Zealand; Islamic encompassed all regions where Islam is the dominant relgion, including places like Indonesia and parts of India and the Philippines; Orthodox civilization includes Russia and the other Orthodox Christian countries in Eastern Europe, and so on. Notice that civilizational lines do not necessarily correspond with national boundaries, and this is especially apparent in the line between Islam and African civilizations in the Southern Sahara and in the Sinic and Buddhist civilizations in Southeast Asia and the Tibetan plateau. As the book progresses, Huntington gives more and more analyses, criticisms, and predictions of the future of global conflict, and most of them revolve around intercivilizational conflicts. The book was published in 1996, well before the election of George W. Bush, 9/11, and the Iraq War, and in light of the direction of US foreign policy over the past eight years, many have hailed Huntington's prescience as nearly prophetic and many, especially those on the right, have embraced the concept of civilizational clash as the new motivating factor of politics and indeed, history in general. Bush's "with us or against us" attitude has unfortunately given credence to the more pessimistic and culturist facets of Huntington's arguments, and for some, the "War on Terror" is seen as a substitute for a more direct War on Islam. In my next post, I plan on deconstructing some of Huntington's specifc arguments, describing some fallacies, bringing light to some rebuttals, and giving Huntington's rebuttal of the rebuttals a closer look.
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