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August 19, 2010The Cliches of Civilizations
By Ben Domenech
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the well-respected author and Dutch politician, had a widely-linked column in the Wall Street Journal this week on the late Samuel Huntington’s old whacking stick, the so-called Clash of Civilizations. She writes, in part:
“The greatest advantage of Huntington's civilizational model of international relations is that it reflects the world as it is—not as we wish it to be. It allows us to distinguish friends from enemies. And it helps us to identify the internal conflicts within civilizations, particularly the historic rivalries between Arabs, Turks and Persians for leadership of the Islamic world.”
We all tend to make mistakes in examining politics in this rapid-fire era, particularly when elections fade so quickly from memory; political tides change so rapidly, and technology has so many ramifications (who had the best YouTube campaign in 2004? Answer: no one, YouTube didn’t exist yet). One of the most common errors is the adoption of overboard collectivist terms when speaking about what are more properly understood as individual actors, or conflating the behavior of factions with that of nation-states.
Rarely does one individual symbolize the entire direction of state intentions (this mistake is made most frequently today regarding Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), and rarer still does an organized faction behave according to the same restrictions and with the same calculating procedure as a nation-state.
In reality, of course, we can only make true predictions about the behavior of nation-states by looking at the longstanding factors informing state decision-making processes – alliances, financial concerns, internal weaknesses, external pressures and so on.
This brings us to Huntington, whose 50-point font phrase “the Clash of Civilizations” seems destined to be misapplied in perpetuity. Huntington’s view of the world was, of course, summarized in an article he published in 1993 where he predicted that culture, not interests or ideology, would account for the major conflicts of the future:
“Western individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures. Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction against 'human-rights imperialism' and a reaffirmation of indigenous values.”
Huntington defined these “civilizations” in the broadest possible terms – there are eight, according to his reasoning. Rejecting the idea that the nation-state is the fundamental international actor as a “western interpretation of the world,” Huntington assumed that there was a single set of dominant economic, religious and cultural values for each respective “civilization” – Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and African.
Huntington’s prediction fails the empirical test, particularly when it comes to Islam, a far-from-monolithic faith which has a lengthy history of internal war and conflict (for more on this, read Lee Smith's excellent The Strong Horse). Islam comes in many flavors, from fundamentalist to secular – and to say that there is no significant difference between the different states within the big tent of "the West" is simply ridiculous. Huntington’s Islamic civilization has been full of states constantly at each others' throats; responsible for more wars within their own "civilization," between one Islamic state and another, than for war with any other group.
The fact that America was attacked and continues to be attacked by radical Islamic terrorists - not a radical Islamic state – further serves to undercut Huntington’s predictions. The distinction is important: despite his theory, the U.S. was also immediately able to form alliances with Islamic states in order to respond. In Huntington’s world, there is no distinction between Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and heading in different policy directions is the exact opposite of his prediction of “unified civilizations” doing battle across land, sea and air on the basis of culture and religion over economic interests and security concerns.
Ali paints with an equally broad brush in her WSJ piece. To take just one of her examples, she glosses entirely over the current conflict between Najib Razak and Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, as if it does not matter to her argument which side wins. But accepting her approach requires that it does matter, particularly when Ibrahim plays anti-Semitic blame games against Israel and the United States. Of course, assuming Ibrahim’s comments are indicative of the whole of Malaysian politics would be in error – as Reinhard Meyers once explained the false lessons of World War II's inception:
“The actors in the drama appear only as personified images, no longer as real persons. Those men with the stiff collars appear as the embodiment of character–types reflected in a momentous spectacle — the man of Munich, who confronts the armed might of Germany with an umbrella, draws back in terror and gives way, because he lacks courage and determination ... The drama has a villain (Hitler) and a sinner (Chamberlain) — what more does one need to explain the outbreak of war in 1939, especially when the supporting roles are played by lesser villains such as Mussolini and Stalin, and lesser sinners like Beck and Daladier?”
We cannot understand the world without understanding that culture is just one among many motivations, and that in a global economy, factions and individuals push for the goals of commerce and liberal democracy against the short-sighted aims of the warrior-state. But individuals, nearly all of them motivated by self-preservation, have far less force and will than nation-states, and Huntington's thesis predicted a specific kind of clash occurring at a much larger level, involving unified groups of nation-states, and begetting a specific kind of conflict - one that has not occurred.
Are there cultural clashes going on in the world today? Yes, absolutely, and particularly on the individual and factional level. Perhaps this serves as a motivation for accepting Huntington's brand of false homogeneity, which promises simplicity and anecdote instead of complexity and data. Yet considering his predictions are undercut both by history and by the lessons of the present day, let's agree that we’d be better off examining the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
Benjamin Domenech, a former speechwriter for Tommy Thompson and Sen. John Cornyn, is editor of The New Ledger and a research fellow with The Heartland Institute. He writes on defense and security issues for The Compass.
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