Morally Objectionable, Politically Dangerous

Morally Objectionable, Politically Dangerous

Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

There is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Samuel Huntington. He is perhaps the most brilliant, articulate, versatile, and creative living political scientist. He has written the most authoritative work on the consequences of social change on political order. Besides his own analyses, he has often usefully denounced the simplifications and contradictions of the theorists of "endism" and "declinism"; or, in earlier times, of the "state-centered" and "transnational" schools in the debate over multinational corporations; or of the theorists of modernization and political development who were compelled to take refuge from their own miasma of confusion in the innocuous term "change."

Yet Huntington's taste for generalization, his gift for striking formulations, his knack for provocation and, one must say, his lack of political common sense and responsibility, lead him time and again to commit the very sins of excessive simplification that he has so well castigated in others. He has by such excesses generated serious intellectual misunderstandings and, ultimately, moral and political misdirections.

Faithful followers of Huntington's work will remember the storms created by his formulations about the urbanizing, and hence modernizing, effects of the U.S. bombing and strategic hamlets policies in the Vietnam War; or about the dangers of excessive democracy in post-industrial society. Readers of his great work on Political Order in Changing Societies will remember how his penetrating insights into the dialectics of mobilization and institutionalization led him to predict a bright future for Leninist parties-as opposed to individual dictatorships-in the Middle East. Others will recall how his recommendations in the 1970s of a NATO strategy made up of nuclear defense (through anti-ballistic missile deployments) and conventional retaliatory offense, while conceptually brilliant, could never be taken seriously due to their lack of economic and psychological realism.

The danger with The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is, on the contrary, that it could be taken too seriously. Huntington's verbal fireworks have never been so dazzling. They often convey illuminating insights, but more often are incredibly one-sided and inflammatory: "The West's problem is not Islamism but Islam"; "People in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia and the subcontinent slaughter each other because they believe in different gods"; "Islam's bloody borders", and so forth. The most striking formulations-including the central one characterizing the nineteenth century as defined by the clash of nations, the twentieth by that of ideologies, the twenty-first by that of civilizations-were present in his original Foreign Affairs article (Summer 1993), and have already sent shock waves around the world. But contrary to the case of Francis Fukuyama, whose sensational article in The National Interest (Summer 1989) was succeeded by a more moderate and balanced volume, Huntington's book is, if anything, more extreme than his article. It adds or expands a prescriptive and a predictive dimension that are the most disputable and dangerous parts of his argument. This is all the more regrettable because the analysis starts from very real and striking observations.

The book rests on two very solid pillars. The first-hardly a revelation but well worth the emphasis it is given-is that the balance of power is shifting from the West to Asia, and that China's economic power and the demographic growth of Muslim peoples together create a formidable challenge to the existing international system.

The second is that, today, identity and community are on the rise as mobilizing themes in comparison to political and economic ideologies; that ascriptive, particularly ethnic, affiliations are on the rise compared to functional ones; and that religion and nostalgia for the past seem to prevail over belief in science, progress, or utopian revolution.

Huntington is also right, and deeply original, in seeing a link between these two phenomena. In one of his most striking remarks, he points out that "no other civilization has generated a significant political ideology, and the West has never generated a major religion." The spiritual shift that he detects-moving from rationality and universalism to mysticism and tradition-coincides to some extent with the shift in economic and military power from West to East.
Where he seems to me to go deeply wrong is in fixing these phenomena on the primacy of one permanent factor, namely civilizations, interpreted essentially in terms of religion. Worse perhaps, Huntington assumes the closed and conflictual character of these entities as he tries to fit every conflict in the world into his scheme. And last but not least, he bases his prescriptions for Western policies on what amounts to a global segregationist scheme that negates the West's basic concepts and aspirations, and that ignores several of the imposing realities of modern society.

Huntington's search for a substitute for the two blocs or superpowers of the Cold War leads him to focus on what he calls civilizations, which are, by his definition, the broadest cultural grouping short of the world as a whole. But what is most characteristic of the search for identity and community is the multiplicity of its levels: the family, the tribe, the nation, and the sect are at least as lively and conflictual as the great religions, let alone the great civilizations that they have spawned. By Huntington's own count, heavily biased as it is in favor of the macro level, less than half of today's ethnic conflicts can be described as inter-civilizational. Rather than conflicts along the fault lines of his seven or eight civilizations, the really bloody wars of our time oppose Tutsi and Hutu, Pashtun and Tadjik, Shi'a and Sunni, Turk and Kurd, Iranian and Iraqi. Like nations and alliances, civilizations and religions are constantly torn between globalization and fragmentation, between the homogenizing forces of modernization (manifest in the evolution of consumption and demographic patterns or in the rise of feminist protest, even in a country like Iran) and the divisive forces of local traditions and new prophets or saviors (whose declared aims of overcoming division usually produce the reverse effect).

Civilizations are not substantive and permanent entities, nor are they necessarily closed and conflicting ones. Mutual influence and syncretism are the most frequent phenomena historically, particularly in our time of migrations and fluid communications. At the religious as well as at the ethnic and national level, the violent insistence on distinctiveness is more often than not a reaction against the perceived danger of losing it. Fundamentalism is an essentially modern and reactive phenomenon directed against the West, one adopting not only the latest tools but also much of the structure of Western ideologies, just as the latter usually bore the character of "secular religions." The new religiosity is a reaction to secularization and, in its own way, more often than not contributes to the phenomenon it fights, in the sense that the tradition to which it looks back invariably gets reinterpreted, if not reinvented, in the process. Hence, Huntington's formulation that the world is becoming more modern and less Western, while true at a certain level, fails to distinguish between the declaratory (or subjective) and the substantive (or objective) dimensions of that process.

It also glosses too quickly over the differences between power and ideas and the complexity of the dynamics between the two. The world is certainly becoming more anti-Western but that does not prevent the non-Western world's form of modernity from being profoundly Westernized. When Singapore, founded by the British, raises the banner of Asian originality, it does so both to compensate for its origins and to resist an evolution toward an amalgam of individualism and anomie, corruption and consumerism, which threatens, in turn, the other successful Asian tigers as well as the West. It would be absurd to deny that the evolution of the non-Western world will trigger new demands for roots and for diversity, as well as new antagonisms arising from the "narcissism of small differences." It would be equally absurd not to expect that future combinations of the old and the new, in the West as well as in the East, will be increasingly influenced by the emerging centers of non-Western power. But it is indefensible to be as hasty as Huntington is in the first part of his book in dismissing the influence of, on the one hand, the Weberian "disenchantment of the world" and, on the other, the effect of computer technology and pop culture-as well as their Western, and particularly American-dominated, character, at least in the present period.

The reason why Huntington tends to forget or deny the obvious is that his new enthusiasm for the cultural dimension leads him to underestimate and underplay its continuing interaction with the economic and the political aspects. The war in Chechnya and the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan have, of course, an ethnic and a religious dimension, but they have been activated by concerns having more to do with oil routes and realpolitik than with a clash of civilizations. Both the classical game of the balance of power between states (with its resulting alliances between the United States and Pakistan, or between Iran and Russia, or the double game being played by the latter amid Georgians and Abkhazians, Armenians and Azeris), and "Fukuyama type" processes (with their linkages, imperfect but real, between prosperity, democracy, and peace) continue to affect ethnic and religious developments and be affected by them.

Inter-state politics, capitalist markets, and democratic institutions may be Western in origin, and they may be increasingly under attack in the twenty-first century, but to accord them only a marginal role in any description of the present world disorder, or in any prescription for a future world order, can only be a delusionary exercise in caricature. Huntington's eagerness to use the religious label prevents him from distinguishing between real clashes of opposing faiths and cases in which religion is just a marker for the identity of historic groups, as between Irish Catholics and Protestants, or an instrument of opportunistic communist-era elites, as in Serbia.

In consequence, Huntington's descriptions and predictions are a collection of unilateral statements that have, at best, half a chance of being proven true. Thus, when China sells weapons to Libya, it confirms the alliance between Confucianism and Islam-but when the United States sells weapons to Saudi Arabia, what does that illustrate? Trade conflicts between the United States and Japan are signs of a clash of civilizations-but what are those between the United States and the European Community? The Europeans are said to follow the United States in its policies against Libya, Iran, and Iraq, while during the Cold War they are said to have refused to toe the Atlantic line; but, of course, just the opposite is true, as shown by European refusal to grant overflight rights for the U.S. bombing of Libya, or to boycott Iran, or to identify with Israel-all of which contrast with the success of NATO in maintaining a reasonably united front against the Soviet threat. Germans are said to welcome Polish immigrants but not Muslims, although the statistics quoted on page 200 show just the opposite. It is maintained that China and Japan will align against the West, a prediction hardly made convincing by the current rise of opposing nationalisms over the Senkaku Islands, or by the preference of most Asian states for bilateral links with the United States over an Asian security system.

It is with respect to Islam that Huntington's cultural case is strongest, and that is because Islam is the religion that is more static, more directly political, and more hostile to the West than others. Nevertheless, it is also the case where his specific analyses are the most distorted and dangerous. His eagerness to show Muslim bellicosity as the source of fault line wars leads him, for example, to underplay the importance of Russia's role in fueling conflict in the Caucasus and in Moldova in order to divide and rule.

More tragic and inexcusable, he gives a totally biased account of the conflicts in Kosovo and Bosnia. Huntington writes as if the initiative for war had come from the Muslims, who then "wrapped themselves in the victim's guise." He totally neglects the fact that the Bosnians, to begin with, did not even have an army; that the former communist leaders in Serbia (and, to a lesser extent, Croatia) developed a clear nationalist design involving the partition of Bosnia; and that this led, on the Serbian side, to clearly genocidal and systematic atrocities, qualitatively different from the crimes that undoubtedly were committed by the other sides.

The readers of The National Interest do not need to be reminded of the real story, so well analyzed in its pages by, among others, Noel Malcolm. But they will be surprised by the degree to which Huntington's culturalist lenses distort his historical account and his moral judgment. They will be no less baffled by his descriptions of Western powers supporting Croatia (which will come as news to the French and British governments, as well as to their critics), of Russia's faithfulness to the Orthodox axis (a propagandistic myth challenged by historians and by the experience of Balkan rivalries and Russian betrayals of their smaller Slavic or Orthodox brethren), and of other Muslim states rising in defense of Bosnia. Of course, the sympathies of the Catholic Church and of Bavarians and Austrians did lay more with Croatia, and it is true that Iran and Saudi Arabia (in conjunction with the United States) have helped Bosnia, and have thereby contributed to making it more Islamic. It is also true that Muslims everywhere interpreted some four years of relative Western passivity as a sign of hostility to Islam. But the fact remains that the Yugoslav War-a fault line conflict-did not fulfill the potential claimed for it by Huntington of escalating into a global clash of civilizations.

Instead, what is striking is how careful outside powers were not to get too involved or risk their mutual relations, how little the masses on all the non-Yugoslav sides were mobilized, how readily all sides accepted an unjust peace based on de facto partition, and how strongly the ex-Yugoslav Republics expressed their desire to join the European Union. Fragmentation and consensus, gang rivalries and economic interdependence, conflicting reactions and converging behavior of outside powers-these are all much more characteristic of the situation in the Balkans than is anything having to do with an overarching clash of civilizations.

Errors of this sort also suggest why Huntington's prescriptions for world order are both morally objectionable and politically dangerous. They tend in the direction of solidifying existing fault lines and encouraging a world based on a kind of religious or civilizational Yalta. Huntington has imagined a revised "billiard ball" model of international relations based on civilizations instead of nations, with civilizations regrouped around one or two "core-states", and having, evidently, as little as possible to do with each other.

The theoretical implications and the practical consequences of Huntington's doctrine of "non-intervention in other civilizations' affairs" are equally appalling. According to Huntington, at the most general level "Western intervention in affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential conflict in a multicivilizational world." Conversely, "an international order based on civilizations is the surest protection against world war." These extraordinarily broad statements are, so to speak, operationalized in formulations such as this: "Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; internationalism abroad threatens the West and the world." As for Europe, he asserts that the European Union and NATO "should include the Western Christian states of Central and Eastern Europe", while the West "should recognize Russia as primarily responsible for the maintenance of security among Orthodox countries and in areas where Orthodoxy predominates"-hence leaving it in control of the Balkans (including Greece, which Huntington excludes from the West). Western powers would not even act as balancers there, as they did in the nineteenth century, according to his scheme of things.

All of this is quite surprising-even odd. Politically, Huntington has been one of the most articulate advocates over the years of an assertive American foreign policy and of its benefits for the world. Here he ends up as a civilizational neo-isolationist. Philosophically, he adopts the point of view of the most extreme radical critics of the West, as he interprets the West's advocacy of universalism and a global human rights regime, and its use of international organizations, as entirely guided by its own parochial interests. He characterizes the notion of Western universalism as practically unsustainable and philosophically hollow.

By so doing, Huntington falls into two major traps, both caused by his newly-found cultural determinism. In one sense, his useful plea for diversity and modesty does not go far enough. His search for a unifying formula ("If not civilizations, what?") is inconsistent with the fact, which he recognizes, that all conflicts are not ethnic and all ethnic conflicts are not civilizational-just as all twentieth-century conflicts were not ideological and all nineteenth-century conflicts were not national. Earlier searches for a single key to multiple conflicts led to disastrous misjudgments; indeed, such a search is simply absurd in today's increasingly complex, changing, and multidimensional world. One may argue in each case whether the cultural, the economic, or the political dimension is more important; one may also accept that the first is on the rise; yet one may still be profoundly suspicious of a division of the world that would legitimize, enhance, and freeze the current cultural status quo by condemning civilizational shifts. This is all the more so since, as Huntington's useful analyses of divided states and swing cultures confirm, cultural or religious and territorial divisions do not necessarily coincide, and do so less and less with modern means of communication.

It is certainly true that dogmatic multiculturalism threatens the unity and sense of common loyalty of the United States and of the West, but this is just as true at the global level. Similarly, while reckless interventionism in other civilizations is dangerous, so is reckless interventionism by self-appointed (or Huntington-designated) core-states in the affairs of their own civilizational domain. Religions and civilizations being intertwined within nations and continents, the search for perfect unity within and perfect separation from the outside can only lead to tyranny. For better or worse, Europe, including Western Europe, is also to some extent a Muslim continent; the United States is also to some extent an Asian country. The attempt to overcome this reality by fiat can only proceed through inhumane and unrealistic ethnic cleansing. Nobody would accuse Huntington of being a friend of, or an apologist for, Slobodan Milosùevi«c or Jean-Marie Le Pen, but one cannot help being reminded of the latter taking Saddam Hussein's side at the time of the Gulf War, proclaiming as he did so that he was not against Arabs or Africans but merely wanted each culture to stay at home.

This illustrates the second of Huntington's basic errors, one which in a sense pulls in the opposite direction. Short of complete physical isolation, which is contrary to history in general and to modern society in particular, diversity can be peaceful only if it is leavened both by multiple allegiances and commonalities, by inner pluralism and external ties. Neither Mazzini nor Wilson had anything in common with Hitler, yet the myth of an "international of nationalisms", of a spontaneous harmony between nations, did lead to disaster, as did the line adopted in 1914 by respectable German thinkers from Max Weber to Thomas Mann, of a civilizational conflict based on the clash of German culture with both Anglo-American materialism and Slavic mysticism. If today Huntington can safely count Germany as Western, it is not because its inhabitants are Catholics and Protestants (two religions that have had their share of mutual slaughtering), but because the clash between civilization and barbarity has finally taken precedence over the clash between cultures, and because, with the help of American power, other ties and commonalities such as economic interdependence, democracy, and individualism bind Germany to the West.

In the last three pages of his book, Huntington seems to recognize the existence and importance of civilization as such (complete with its discontents), as well as the many commonalities between major cultures. Universality and pluralism seem all of a sudden to be more than mere tools of Western power. But this part of the volume is even more underdeveloped than the first. One is tempted to suggest some further, more nuanced reading to the author of The Clash of Civilizations: for instance, The Democratic Distemper, and The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century.

For this is, indeed, the ultimate paradox: Nobody has refuted cultural determinism in the name of social evolution and political institutions more effectively than did Samuel Huntington in his earlier works. It is as if he had launched, in the skies of theory and prophecy, three rockets: call them SAM i, SAM ii, and SAM iii.

The first, SAM i, which seems to correspond to his most permanent inspiration, concerns the dangers that social evolution-from the condition of the Third World to that of post-industrial society-entails for democracy. Here Huntington stresses the necessity for a certain restoration of political authority, which he saw as threatened by the excesses of mobilization and anarchy, touched off by rapid changes.

The second, SAM ii, contrasts with the first by virtue of its more optimistic message. This is The Third Wave, which extols the progress of democracy, from the fall of right-wing or military dictatorships in the 1970s to that of communist regimes in the early 1990s. In this book, Huntington does not neglect the likelihood of other periods of regression, nor the difficulty encountered by democracy in taking root everywhere. But his conclusions are nevertheless universalist and militantly pro-democracy.

That makes SAM iii-the theoretical rocket launched in this book-all the more explosive: This rocket hits its target most spectacularly, but its fall-out is likely to be the least controllable. Between the three, there is a great danger of what nuclear strategists call the "fratricide effect", that is, mutual destruction in flight or upon successive impacts.
If, instead, they were organized in some kind of hierarchy, they could usefully complement each other and provide the best in-depth interpretation of the political sociology of our time. But to do so, one would have to return to the two familiar Huntingtonian dynamics: that of technological, economic, and social change; and that of political and legal institutionalization (modernization and democracy). These seem strangely absent from the present book, yet the return to tradition and religion cannot be understood except as a reaction to modernization and its discontents, and its consequences cannot but be profoundly related to the viability of democratic beliefs and institutions.

Nobody would be better able to provide this synthesis than Sam Huntington himself, if only the subtle Dr. Jekyll could wrestle control back from the dark and distortive Mr. Hyde. So please: Play it again, Sam!

Essay Types: Book Review