LOL. We ARE at war; been in it for 1300+ years.
Read this if you have time (from "THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATIONS" below.
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The Clash of Civilizations? - Samuel P. Huntington
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The Clash of Civilizations:
The Debate
Second Edition
Copyright © 2010 by the Council on Foreign Relations
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: THE DEBATE
This publication may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without
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Contents
Foreword by James F. Hoge, Jr. iv
The Clash of Civilizations? 1
Samuel P. Huntington (Summer 1993)
The Summoning 33
Fouad Ajami (September/October 1993)
The Dangers of Decadence 45
Kishore Mahbubani (September/October 1993)
The Case for Optimism 52
Robert L. Bartley (September/October 1993)
Civilization Grafting 58
Liu Binyan (September/October 1993)
The Modernizing Imperative 62
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (September/October 1993)
Do Civilizations Hold? 67
Albert L. Weeks (September/October 1993)
The West Is the Best 70
Gerard Piel (September/October 1993)
If Not Civilizations, What? 72
Samuel P. Huntington (November/December 1993)
Clash of Globalizations 86
Stanley Hoffmann (July/August 2002)
Us and Them: The Enduring Power
of Ethnic Nationalism 100
Jerry Z. Muller (March/April 2008)
The Clash of Emotions 120
Dominique Moïsi (January/February 2007)
[iv]
Foreword by
James F. Hoge, Jr.
When the Cold War suddenly ended at the beginning of the
1990s, two critical questions preoccupied international affairs
experts: What would be the nature of world politics and the
source of conflict in this new world? The most notable analysis
was conceived by renowned Harvard professor Samuel P.
Huntington.
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In “The Clash of Civilizations?” published by Foreign Affairs
in 1993, Huntington argued that ideological and economic
factors would no longer be the fundamental source of conflict.
Instead, the great divisions among peoples and nations
would be cultural. Thus the principal conflicts of global politics
would occur between nations and groups of civilizations
that are “differentiated from each other by history, language,
culture, tradition and, most important, religion.” Since “civilization
identity” will be increasingly important, Huntington
predicted that “the world will be shaped in large measure by
the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These
include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-
Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African.”
Huntington’s striking thesis that the clash of civilizations
would dominate global politics was showcased in media
around the world and prompted voluminous favorable and critical
commentary. To this day, his essay is the most requested
reprint from Foreign Affairs. Because of the sustained high
interest, Foreign Affairs published a reader consisting of “The
Clash of Civilizations?,” commentary from seven well-known
experts, and a response from Huntington. Among the commentators’
observations were these: conflicts are most likely to
break out between nations and groups within a civilization;
the enduring nature of citizenship is national; civilizations are
Foreword
the clash of civilizations: the debate [v]
absorptive sponges rather than clashing billiard balls; fears of
fundamentalist movements are exaggerated and the tenacity of
modernity and secularism within civilizations are underestimated;
and contrary to realist predictions, most states are not
perpetually at war with each other. In response, Huntington
documented contemporary examples of the forces that make
for clashes between civilizations and argued that they “can be
contained only if they are recognized.” Whether one subscribes
to Huntington’s overall thesis, there has been ample evidence in
the seventeen years since his landmark essay to support many
of his insights.
Foreign Affairs is pleased to present this second edition, in
both print and digital format, which features those aforementioned
essays as well as three more recent ones.
the clash of civilizations: the debate [1]
The Clash of Civilizations?
Samuel P. Huntington
SUMMER 1993
--------------------------------
THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT
World politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have
not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be—the end
of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation
states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting
pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of
these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all
miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is
likely to be in the coming years.
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict
in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily
economic. The great divisions among humankind and the
dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states
will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the
principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations
and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations
will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations
will be the battle lines of the future.
Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the
SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government
and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at
Harvard University. This article is the product of the Olin Institute’s project
on “The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests.”
The Clash of Civilizations?
[2] foreign affairs
evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and
a half after the emergence of the modern international system
with the Peace of Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world
were largely among princes—emperors, absolute monarchs and
constitutional monarchs attempting to expand their bureaucracies,
their armies, their mercantilist economic strength and,
most important, the territory they ruled. In the process they
created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution
the principal lines of conflict were between nations rather
than princes. In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, “The wars of kings
were over; the wars of peoples had begun.” This nineteenthcentury
pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as
a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it,
the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first
among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy,
and then between communism and liberal democracy. During
the Cold War, this latter conflict became embodied in the
struggle between the two superpowers, neither of which was a
nation state in the classical European sense and each of which
defined its identity in terms of its ideology.
These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies
were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, “Western
civil wars,” as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true
of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars
of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With
the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of
its Western phase, and its centerpiece becomes the interaction
between the West and non-Western civilizations and among
non-Western civilizations. In the politics of civilizations, the
peoples and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer
remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism
but join the West as movers and shapers of history.
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [3]
THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATIONS
During the Cold War the world was divided into the First, Second
and Third Worlds. Those divisions are no longer relevant.
It is far more meaningful now to group countries not in terms
of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level
of economic development but rather in terms of their culture
and civilization.
What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? A civilization
is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups,
nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at
different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village
in southern Italy may be different from that of a village
in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian
culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European
communities, in turn, will share cultural features that
distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs,
Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader
cultural entity. They constitute civilizations. A civilization is
thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest
level of cultural identity people have short of that which
distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both
by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion,
customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification
of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of
Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as
a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a
Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest
level of identification with which he intensely identifies.
People can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the
composition and boundaries of civilizations change.
Civilizations may involve a large number of people, as with
China (“a civilization pretending to be a state,” as Lucian Pye
The Clash of Civilizations?
[4] foreign affairs
put it), or a very small number of people, such as the Anglophone
Caribbean. A civilization may include several nation
states, as is the case with Western, Latin American and Arab
civilizations, or only one, as is the case with Japanese civilization.
Civilizations obviously blend and overlap, and may
include subcivilizations. Western civilization has two major
variants, European and North American, and Islam has its
Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions. Civilizations are nonetheless
meaningful entities, and while the lines between them
are seldom sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dynamic; they
rise and fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of history
knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands
of time.
Westerners tend to think of nation states as the principal
actors in global affairs. They have been that, however, for only
a few centuries. The broader reaches of human history have
been the history of civilizations. In A Study of History, Arnold
Toynbee identified 21 major civilizations; only six of them exist
in the contemporary world.
WHY CIVILIZATIONS WILL CLASH
Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the
future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the
interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These
include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-
Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization.
The most important conflicts of the future will occur along
the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one
another.
Why will this be the case?
First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they
are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history,
language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion.
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [5]
The people of different civilizations have different views on the
relations between God and man, the individual and the group,
the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and
wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of
rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and
hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They
will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than
differences among political ideologies and political regimes.
Differences do not necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does
not necessarily mean violence. Over the centuries, however,
differences among civilizations have generated the most prolonged
and the most violent conflicts.
Second, the world is becoming a smaller place. The interactions
between peoples of different civilizations are increasing;
these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness
and awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities
within civilizations. North African immigration to
France generates hostility among Frenchmen and at the same
time increased receptivity to immigration by “good” European
Catholic Poles. Americans react far more negatively to Japanese
investment than to larger investments from Canada and European
countries. Similarly, as Donald Horowitz has pointed out,
“An Ibo may be . . . an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in what
was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he is simply an
Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an African.”
The interactions among peoples of different civilizations
enhance the civilization-consciousness of people that, in turn,
invigorates differences and animosities stretching or thought to
stretch back deep into history.
Third, the processes of economic modernization and social
change throughout the world are separating people from longstanding
local identities. They also weaken the nation state as
a source of identity. In much of the world religion has moved
in to fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are
The Clash of Civilizations?
[6] foreign affairs
labeled “fundamentalist.” Such movements are found in Western
Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well
as in Islam. In most countries and most religions the people
active in fundamentalist movements are young, college-educated,
middle-class technicians, professionals and business persons.
The “unsecularization of the world,” George Weigel has
remarked, “is one of the dominant social facts of life in the
late twentieth century.” The revival of religion, “la revanche
de Dieu,” as Gilles Kepel labeled it, provides a basis for identity
and commitment that transcends national boundaries and
unites civilizations.
Fourth, the growth of civilization-consciousness is enhanced
by the dual role of the West. On the one hand, the West is at
a peak of power. At the same time, however, and perhaps as a
result, a return to the roots phenomenon is occurring among
non-Western civilizations. Increasingly one hears references to
trends toward a turning inward and “Asianization” in Japan,
the end of the Nehru legacy and the “Hinduization” of India,
the failure of Western ideas of socialism and nationalism and
hence “re-Islamization” of the Middle East, and now a debate
over Westernization versus Russianization in Boris Yeltsin’s
country. A West at the peak of its power confronts non-Wests
that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to
shape the world in non-Western ways.
In the past, the elites of non-Western societies were usually the
people who were most involved with the West, had been educated
at Oxford, the Sorbonne or Sandhurst, and had absorbed
Western attitudes and values. At the same time, the populace
in non-Western countries often remained deeply imbued with
the indigenous culture. Now, however, these relationships are
being reversed. A de-Westernization and indigenization of
elites is occurring in many non-Western countries at the same
time that Western, usually American, cultures, styles, and habits
become more popular among the mass of the people.
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [7]
Fifth, cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable
and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political
and economic ones. In the former Soviet Union, communists
can become democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor
rich, but Russians cannot become Estonians and Azeris cannot
become Armenians. In class and ideological conflicts, the
key question was “Which side are you on?” and people could
and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between
civilizations, the question is “What are you?” That is a given
that cannot be changed. And as we know, from Bosnia to the
Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can
mean a bullet in the head. Even more than ethnicity, religion
discriminates sharply and exclusively among people. A person
can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a
citizen of two countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic
and half-Muslim.
Finally, economic regionalism is increasing. The proportions
of total trade that were intraregional rose between 1980 and
1989 from 51 percent to 59 percent in Europe, 33 percent to 37
percent in East Asia, and 32 percent to 36 percent in North
America. The importance of regional economic blocs is likely
to continue to increase in the future. On the one hand, successful
economic regionalism will reinforce civilization-consciousness.
On the other hand, economic regionalism may succeed
only when it is rooted in a common civilization. The European
Community rests on the shared foundation of European culture
and Western Christianity. The success of the North American
Free Trade Area depends on the convergence now underway of
Mexican, Canadian and American cultures. Japan, in contrast,
faces difficulties in creating a comparable economic entity in
East Asia because Japan is a society and civilization unique to
itself. However strong the trade and investment links Japan
may develop with other East Asian countries, its cultural differences
with those countries inhibit and perhaps preclude its
The Clash of Civilizations?
[8] foreign affairs
promoting regional economic integration like that in Europe
and North America.
Common culture, in contrast, is clearly facilitating the rapid
expansion of the economic relations between the People’s
Republic of China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the
overseas Chinese communities in other Asian countries. With
the Cold War over, cultural commonalities increasingly overcome
ideological differences, and mainland China and Taiwan
move closer together. If cultural commonality is a prerequisite
for economic integration, the principal East Asian economic
bloc of the future is likely to be centered on China. This bloc is,
in fact, already coming into existence. As Murray Weidenbaum
has observed,
Despite the current Japanese dominance of the region, the Chinese-based economy
of Asia is rapidly emerging as a new epicenter for industry, commerce and
finance. This strategic area contains substantial amounts of technology and
manufacturing capability (Taiwan), outstanding entrepreneurial, marketing and
services acumen (Hong Kong), a fine communications network (Singapore), a
tremendous pool of financial capital (all three), and very large endowments of
land, resources and labor (mainland China). . . . From Guangzhou to Singapore,
from Kuala Lumpur to Manila, this influential network—often based on extensions
of the traditional clans—has been described as the backbone of the East
Asian economy.1
Culture and religion also form the basis of the Economic
Cooperation Organization, which brings together ten non-
Arab Muslim countries: Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan
and Afghanistan. One impetus to the revival and expansion
of this organization, founded originally in the 1960s by
Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, is the realization by the leaders of
several of these countries that they had no chance of admission
to the European Community. Similarly, Caricom, the Central
1Murray Weidenbaum, Greater China: The Next Economic Superpower?, St.
Louis: Washington University Center for the Study of American Business,
Contemporary Issues, Series 57, February 1993, pp. 2–3.
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [9]
American Common Market and Mercosur rest on common
cultural foundations. Efforts to build a broader Caribbean-
Central American economic entity bridging the Anglo-Latin
divide, however, have to date failed.
As people define their identity in ethnic and religious terms,
they are likely to see an “us” versus “them” relation existing
between themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion.
The end of ideologically defined states in Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union permits traditional ethnic identities
and animosities to come to the fore. Differences in culture
and religion create differences over policy issues, ranging from
human rights to immigration to trade and commerce to the
environment. Geographical propinquity gives rise to conflicting
territorial claims from Bosnia to Mindanao. Most important,
the efforts of the West to promote its values of democracy and
liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military predominance
and to advance its economic interests engender countering
responses from other civilizations. Decreasingly able to mobilize
support and form coalitions on the basis of ideology, governments
and groups will increasingly attempt to mobilize support
by appealing to common religion and civilization identity.
The clash of civilizations thus occurs at two levels. At the
microlevel, adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations
struggle, often violently, over the control of territory
and each other. At the macro-level, states from different civilizations
compete for relative military and economic power,
struggle over the control of international institutions and third
parties, and competitively promote their particular political
and religious values.
THE FAULT LINES BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS
The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political
and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash
The Clash of Civilizations?
[10] foreign affairs
points for crisis and bloodshed. The Cold War began when
the Iron Curtain divided Europe politically and ideologically.
The Cold War ended with the end of the Iron Curtain. As
the ideological division of Europe has disappeared, the cultural
division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the
one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other,
has reemerged. The most significant dividing line in Europe,
as William Wallace has suggested, may well be the eastern
boundary of Western Christianity in the year 1500. This line
runs along what are now the boundaries between Finland and
Russia and between the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through
Belarus and Ukraine separating the more Catholic western
Ukraine from Orthodox eastern Ukraine, swings westward
separating Transylvania from the rest of Romania, and then
goes through Yugoslavia almost exactly along the line now
separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia.
In the Balkans this line, of course, coincides with the historic
boundary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The
peoples to the north and west of this line are Protestant or
Catholic; they shared the common experiences of European
history—feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the
Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution;
they are generally economically better off than the
peoples to the east; and they may now look forward to increasing
involvement in a common European economy and to the
consolidation of democratic political systems. The peoples to
the east and south of this line are Orthodox or Muslim; they
historically belonged to the Ottoman or Tsarist empires and
were only lightly touched by the shaping events in the rest of
Europe; they are generally less advanced economically; they
seem much less likely to develop stable democratic political
systems. The Velvet Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron
Curtain of ideology as the most significant dividing line in
Europe. As the events in Yugoslavia show, it is not only a line
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [11]
of difference; it is also at times a line of bloody conflict.
Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic
civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. After the founding
of Islam, the Arab and Moorish surge west and north only
ended at Tours in 732. From the eleventh to the thirteenth
century the Crusaders attempted with temporary success to
bring Christianity and Christian rule to the Holy Land. From
the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Turks
reversed the balance, extended their sway over the Middle East
and the Balkans, captured Constantinople, and twice laid
siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
as Ottoman power declined Britain, France, and Italy
established Western control over most of North Africa and the
Middle East.
After World War II, the West, in turn, began to retreat;
the colonial empires disappeared; first Arab nationalism and
then Islamic fundamentalism manifested themselves; the West
became heavily dependent on the Persian Gulf countries for
its energy; the oil-rich Muslim countries became money-rich
and, when they wished to, weapons-rich. Several wars occurred
between Arabs and Israel (created by the West). France fought a
bloody and ruthless war in Algeria for most of the 1950s; British
and French forces invaded Egypt in 1956; American forces went
into Lebanon in 1958; subsequently American forces returned
to Lebanon, attacked Libya, and engaged in various military
encounters with Iran; Arab and Islamic terrorists, supported
by at least three Middle Eastern governments, employed the
weapon of the weak and bombed Western planes and installations
and seized Western hostages. This warfare between Arabs
and the West culminated in 1990, when the United States sent
a massive army to the Persian Gulf to defend some Arab countries
against aggression by another. In its aftermath NATO
planning is increasingly directed to potential threats and instability
along its “southern tier.”
The Clash of Civilizations?
[12] foreign affairs
This centuries-old military interaction between the West and
Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent.
The Gulf War left some Arabs feeling proud that Saddam Hussein
had attacked Israel and stood up to the West. It also left
many feeling humiliated and resentful of the West’s military
presence in the Persian Gulf, the West’s overwhelming military
dominance, and their apparent inability to shape their own
destiny. Many Arab countries, in addition to the oil exporters,
are reaching levels of economic and social development
where autocratic forms of government become inappropriate
and efforts to introduce democracy become stronger. Some
openings in Arab political systems have already occurred. The
principal beneficiaries of these openings have been Islamist
movements. In the Arab world, in short, Western democracy
strengthens anti-Western political forces. This may be a passing
phenomenon, but it surely complicates relations between
Islamic countries and the West.
Those relations are also complicated by demography. The
spectacular population growth in Arab countries, particularly
in North Africa, has led to increased migration to Western
Europe. The movement within Western Europe toward minimizing
internal boundaries has sharpened political sensitivities
with respect to this development. In Italy, France and Germany,
racism is increasingly open, and political reactions and
violence against Arab and Turkish migrants have become more
intense and more widespread since 1990.
On both sides the interaction between Islam and the West is
seen as a clash of civilizations. The West’s “next confrontation,”
observes M. J. Akbar, an Indian Muslim author, “is definitely
going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the
Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle
for a new world order will begin.” Bernard Lewis comes to a
similar conclusion:
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [13]
We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and
policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of
civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient
rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide
expansion of both.2
Historically, the other great antagonistic interaction of Arab
Islamic civilization has been with the pagan, animist, and now
increasingly Christian black peoples to the south. In the past,
this antagonism was epitomized in the image of Arab slave
dealers and black slaves. It has been reflected in the on-going
civil war in the Sudan between Arabs and blacks, the fighting
in Chad between Libyan-supported insurgents and the government,
the tensions between Orthodox Christians and Muslims
in the Horn of Africa, and the political conflicts, recurring riots
and communal violence between Muslims and Christians in
Nigeria. The modernization of Africa and the spread of Christianity
are likely to enhance the probability of violence along this
fault line. Symptomatic of the intensification of this conflict
was the Pope John Paul II’s speech in Khartoum in February
1993 attacking the actions of the Sudan’s Islamist government
against the Christian minority there.
On the northern border of Islam, conflict has increasingly
erupted between Orthodox and Muslim peoples, including
the carnage of Bosnia and Sarajevo, the simmering violence
between Serb and Albanian, the tenuous relations between
Bulgarians and their Turkish minority, the violence between
Ossetians and Ingush, the unremitting slaughter of each other
by Armenians and Azeris, the tense relations between Russians
and Muslims in Central Asia, and the deployment of Russian
troops to protect Russian interests in the Caucasus and Central
Asia. Religion reinforces the revival of ethnic identities and
2Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic Monthly, vol.
266, September 1990, p. 60; Time, June 15, 1992, pp. 24–28.
The Clash of Civilizations?
[14] foreign affairs
restimulates Russian fears about the security of their southern
borders. This concern is well captured by Archie Roosevelt:
Much of Russian history concerns the struggle between the Slavs and the Turkic
peoples on their borders, which dates back to the foundation of the Russian state
more than a thousand years ago. In the Slavs’ millennium-long confrontation
with their eastern neighbors lies the key to an understanding not only of Russian
history, but Russian character. To understand Russian realities today one has to
have a concept of the great Turkic ethnic group that has preoccupied Russians
through the centuries.3
The conflict of civilizations is deeply rooted elsewhere in Asia.
The historic clash between Muslim and Hindu in the subcontinent
manifests itself now not only in the rivalry between Pakistan
and India but also in intensifying religious strife within
India between increasingly militant Hindu groups and India’s
substantial Muslim minority. The destruction of the Ayodhya
mosque in December 1992 brought to the fore the issue of
whether India will remain a secular democratic state or become
a Hindu one. In East Asia, China has outstanding territorial
disputes with most of its neighbors. It has pursued a ruthless
policy toward the Buddhist people of Tibet, and it is pursuing
an increasingly ruthless policy toward its Turkic-Muslim
minority. With the Cold War over, the underlying differences
between China and the United States have reasserted themselves
in areas such as human rights, trade and weapons proliferation.
These differences are unlikely to moderate. A “new
cold war,” Deng Xaioping reportedly asserted in 1991, is under
way between China and America.
The same phrase has been applied to the increasingly difficult
relations between Japan and the United States. Here cultural
difference exacerbates economic conflict. People on each
side allege racism on the other, but at least on the American
side the antipathies are not racial but cultural. The basic values,
3Archie Roosevelt, For Lust of Knowing, Boston: Little, Brown, 1988, pp.
332–333.
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [15]
attitudes, behavioral patterns of the two societies could hardly
be more different. The economic issues between the United
States and Europe are no less serious than those between the
United States and Japan, but they do not have the same political
salience and emotional intensity because the differences
between American culture and European culture are so much
less than those between American civilization and Japanese
civilization.
The interactions between civilizations vary greatly in the
extent to which they are likely to be characterized by violence.
Economic competition clearly predominates between
the American and European subcivilizations of the West and
between both of them and Japan. On the Eurasian continent,
however, the proliferation of ethnic conflict, epitomized at the
extreme in “ethnic cleansing,” has not been totally random.
It has been most frequent and most violent between groups
belonging to different civilizations. In Eurasia the great historic
fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is
particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped
Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia.
Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and
Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India,
Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam
has bloody borders.
CIVILIZATION RALLYING:
THE KIN-COUNTRY SYNDROME
Groups or states belonging to one civilization that become
involved in war with people from a different civilization naturally
try to rally support from other members of their own
civilization. As the post–Cold War world evolves, civilization
commonality, what H. D. S. Greenway has termed the
“kin-country” syndrome, is replacing political ideology and
The Clash of Civilizations?
[16] foreign affairs
traditional balance of power considerations as the principal
basis for cooperation and coalitions. It can be seen gradually
emerging in the post–Cold War conflicts in the Persian Gulf,
the Caucasus and Bosnia. None of these was a full-scale war
between civilizations, but each involved some elements of civilizational
rallying, which seemed to become more important
as the conflict continued and which may provide a foretaste of
the future.
First, in the Gulf War one Arab state invaded another and
then fought a coalition of Arab, Western and other states.
While only a few Muslim governments overtly supported Saddam
Hussein, many Arab elites privately cheered him on, and
he was highly popular among large sections of the Arab publics.
Islamic fundamentalist movements universally supported Iraq
rather than the Western-backed governments of Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia. Forswearing Arab nationalism, Saddam Hussein
explicitly invoked an Islamic appeal. He and his supporters
attempted to define the war as a war between civilizations. “It is
not the world against Iraq,” as Safar Al-Hawali, dean of Islamic
Studies at the Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, put it in a
widely circulated tape. “It is the West against Islam.” Ignoring
the rivalry between Iran and Iraq, the chief Iranian religious
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for a holy war against
the West: “The struggle against American aggression, greed,
plans and policies will be counted as a jihad, and anybody who
is killed on that path is a martyr.” “This is a war,” King Hussein
of Jordan argued, “against all Arabs and all Muslims and not
against Iraq alone.”
The rallying of substantial sections of Arab elites and publics
behind Saddam Hussein caused those Arab governments
in the anti-Iraq coalition to moderate their activities and temper
their public statements. Arab governments opposed or distanced
themselves from subsequent Western efforts to apply
pressure on Iraq, including enforcement of a no-fly zone in the
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [17]
summer of 1992 and the bombing of Iraq in January 1993. The
Western-Soviet-Turkish-Arab anti-Iraq coalition of 1990 had by
1993 become a coalition of almost only the West and Kuwait
against Iraq.
Muslims contrasted Western actions against Iraq with the
West’s failure to protect Bosnians against Serbs and to impose
sanctions on Israel for violating UN resolutions. The West,
they alleged, was using a double standard. A world of clashing
civilizations, however, is inevitably a world of double standards:
people apply one standard to their kin-countries and a different
standard to others.
Second, the kin-country syndrome also appeared in conflicts
in the former Soviet Union. Armenian military successes in
1992 and 1993 stimulated Turkey to become increasingly supportive
of its religious, ethnic and linguistic brethren in Azerbaijan.
“We have a Turkish nation feeling the same sentiments
as the Azerbaijanis,” said one Turkish official in 1992. “We are
under pressure. Our newspapers are full of the photos of atrocities
and are asking us if we are still serious about pursuing our
neutral policy. Maybe we should show Armenia that there’s
a big Turkey in the region.” President Turgut Özal agreed,
remarking that Turkey should at least “scare the Armenians a
little bit.” Turkey, Özal threatened again in 1993, would “show
its fangs.” Turkish Air Force jets flew reconnaissance flights
along the Armenian border; Turkey suspended food shipments
and air flights to Armenia; and Turkey and Iran announced
they would not accept dismemberment of Azerbaijan. In the
last years of its existence, the Soviet government supported
Azerbaijan because its government was dominated by former
communists. With the end of the Soviet Union, however, political
considerations gave way to religious ones. Russian troops
fought on the side of the Armenians, and Azerbaijan accused
the “Russian government of turning 180 degrees” toward support
for Christian Armenia.
The Clash of Civilizations?
[18] foreign affairs
Third, with respect to the fighting in the former Yugoslavia,
Western publics manifested sympathy and support for the
Bosnian Muslims and the horrors they suffered at the hands
of the Serbs. Relatively little concern was expressed, however,
over Croatian attacks on Muslims and participation in the
dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the early stages of
the Yugoslav breakup, Germany, in an unusual display of diplomatic
initiative and muscle, induced the other 11 members
of the European Community to follow its lead in recognizing
Slovenia and Croatia. As a result of the pope’s determination
to provide strong backing to the two Catholic countries,
the Vatican extended recognition even before the Community
did. The United States followed the European lead. Thus
the leading actors in Western civilization rallied behind their
coreligionists. Subsequently Croatia was reported to be receiving
substantial quantities of arms from Central European and
other Western countries. Boris Yeltsin’s government, on the
other hand, attempted to pursue a middle course that would
be sympathetic to the Orthodox Serbs but not alienate Russia
from the West. Russian conservative and nationalist groups,
however, including many legislators, attacked the government
for not being more forthcoming in its support for the Serbs.
By early 1993 several hundred Russians apparently were serving
with the Serbian forces, and reports circulated of Russian arms
being supplied to Serbia.
Islamic governments and groups, on the other hand, castigated
the West for not coming to the defense of the Bosnians.
Iranian leaders urged Muslims from all countries to provide help
to Bosnia; in violation of the UN arms embargo, Iran supplied
weapons and men for the Bosnians; Iranian-supported Lebanese
groups sent guerrillas to train and organize the Bosnian forces.
In 1993 up to 4,000 Muslims from over two dozen Islamic
countries were reported to be fighting in Bosnia. The governments
of Saudi Arabia and other countries felt under increasing
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [19]
pressure from fundamentalist groups in their own societies to
provide more vigorous support for the Bosnians. By the end of
1992, Saudi Arabia had reportedly supplied substantial funding
for weapons and supplies for the Bosnians, which significantly
increased their military capabilities vis-à-vis the Serbs.
In the 1930s the Spanish Civil War provoked intervention
from countries that politically were fascist, communist and
democratic. In the 1990s the Yugoslav conflict is provoking
intervention from countries that are Muslim, Orthodox and
Western Christian. The parallel has not gone unnoticed. “The
war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has become the emotional equivalent
of the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War,” one
Saudi editor observed. “Those who died there are regarded as
martyrs who tried to save their fellow Muslims.”
Conflicts and violence will also occur between states and
groups within the same civilization. Such conflicts, however,
are likely to be less intense and less likely to expand than conflicts
between civilizations. Common membership in a civilization
reduces the probability of violence in situations where
it might otherwise occur. In 1991 and 1992 many people were
alarmed by the possibility of violent conflict between Russia
and Ukraine over territory, particularly Crimea, the Black
Sea fleet, nuclear weapons and economic issues. If civilization
is what counts, however, the likelihood of violence between
Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic,
primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships
with each other for centuries. As of early 1993, despite all the
reasons for conflict, the leaders of the two countries were effectively
negotiating and defusing the issues between the two
countries. While there has been serious fighting between Muslims
and Christians elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and
much tension and some fighting between Western and Orthodox
Christians in the Baltic states, there has been virtually no
violence between Russians and Ukrainians.
The Clash of Civilizations?
[20] foreign affairs
Civilization rallying to date has been limited, but it has
been growing, and it clearly has the potential to spread much
further. As the conflicts in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus
and Bosnia continued, the positions of nations and the
cleavages between them increasingly were along civilizational
lines. Populist politicians, religious leaders and the media have
found it a potent means of arousing mass support and of pressuring
hesitant governments. In the coming years, the local
conflicts most likely to escalate into major wars will be those,
as in Bosnia and the Caucasus, along the fault lines between
civilizations. The next world war, if there is one, will be a war
between civilizations.
THE WEST VERSUS THE REST
The west is now at an extraordinary peak of power in relation
to other civilizations. Its superpower opponent has disappeared
from the map. Military conflict among Western states
is unthinkable, and Western military power is unrivaled. Apart
from Japan, the West faces no economic challenge. It dominates
international political and security institutions and with Japan
international economic institutions. Global political and security
issues are effectively settled by a directorate of the United
States, Britain and France, world economic issues by a directorate
of the United States, Germany and Japan, all of which
maintain extraordinarily close relations with each other to the
exclusion of lesser and largely non-Western countries. Decisions
made at the UN Security Council or in the International
Monetary Fund that reflect the interests of the West are presented
to the world as reflecting the desires of the world community.
The very phrase “the world community” has become
the euphemistic collective noun (replacing “the Free World”)
to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [21]
the United States and other Western powers.4 Through the
IMF and other international economic institutions, the West
promotes its economic interests and imposes on other nations
the economic policies it thinks appropriate. In any poll of non-
Western peoples, the IMF undoubtedly would win the support
of finance ministers and a few others, but get an overwhelmingly
unfavorable rating from just about everyone else, who
would agree with Georgy Arbatov’s characterization of IMF
officials as “neo-Bolsheviks who love expropriating other people’s
money, imposing undemocratic and alien rules of economic
and political conduct and stifling economic freedom.”
Western domination of the UN Security Council and its
decisions, tempered only by occasional abstention by China,
produced UN legitimation of the West’s use of force to drive
Iraq out of Kuwait and its elimination of Iraq’s sophisticated
weapons and capacity to produce such weapons. It also produced
the quite unprecedented action by the United States,
Britain and France in getting the Security Council to demand
that Libya hand over the Pan Am 103 bombing suspects and
then to impose sanctions when Libya refused. After defeating
the largest Arab army, the West did not hesitate to throw
its weight around in the Arab world. The West in effect is
using international institutions, military power and economic
resources to run the world in ways that will maintain Western
predominance, protect Western interests and promote Western
political and economic values.
That at least is the way in which non-Westerners see the new
4Almost invariably Western leaders claim they are acting on behalf of
“the world community.” One minor lapse occurred during the run-up to the
Gulf War. In an interview on “Good Morning America,” Dec. 21, 1990, British
Prime Minister John Major referred to the actions “the West” was taking
against Saddam Hussein. He quickly corrected himself and subsequently
referred to “the world community.” He was, however, right when he erred.
The Clash of Civilizations?
[22] foreign affairs
world, and there is a significant element of truth in their view.
Differences in power and struggles for military, economic and
institutional power are thus one source of conflict between
the West and other civilizations. Differences in culture, that
is basic values and beliefs, are a second source of conflict. V. S.
Naipaul has argued that Western civilization is the “universal
civilization” that “fits all men.” At a superficial level much of
Western culture has indeed permeated the rest of the world. At
a more basic level, however, Western concepts differ fundamentally
from those prevalent in other civilizations. Western ideas
of 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, as can be seen in the support
for religious fundamentalism by the younger generation
in non-Western cultures. The very notion that there could be a
“universal civilization” is a Western idea, directly at odds with
the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on
what distinguishes one people from another. Indeed, the author
of a review of 100 comparative studies of values in different societies
concluded that “the values that are most important in the
West are least important worldwide.”5 In the political realm, of
course, these differences are most manifest in the efforts of the
United States and other Western powers to induce other peoples
to adopt Western ideas concerning democracy and human
rights. Modern democratic government originated in the West.
When it has developed in non-Western societies it has usually
5Harry C. Triandis, The New York Times, Dec. 25, 1990, p. 41, and “Cross-
Cultural Studies of Individualism and Collectivism,” Nebraska Symposium
on Motivation, vol. 37, 1989, pp. 41–133.
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [23]
been the product of Western colonialism or imposition.
The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to
be, in Kishore Mahbubani’s phrase, the conflict between “the
West and the Rest” and the responses of non-Western civilizations
to Western power and values.6 Those responses generally
take one or a combination of three forms. At one extreme,
non-Western states can, like Burma and North Korea, attempt
to pursue a course of isolation, to insulate their societies from
penetration or “corruption” by the West, and, in effect, to opt
out of participation in the Western-dominated global community.
The costs of this course, however, are high, and few states
have pursued it exclusively. A second alternative, the equivalent
of “band-wagoning” in international relations theory, is to
attempt to join the West and accept its values and institutions.
The third alternative is to attempt to “balance” the West by
developing economic and military power and cooperating with
other non-Western societies against the West, while preserving
indigenous values and institutions; in short, to modernize but
not to Westernize.
THE TORN COUNTRIES
In the future, as people differentiate themselves by civilization,
countries with large numbers of peoples of different civilizations,
such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, are candidates
for dismemberment. Some other countries have a fair degree of
cultural homogeneity but are divided over whether their society
belongs to one civilization or another. These are torn countries.
Their leaders typically wish to pursue a bandwagoning strategy
and to make their countries members of the West, but the history,
culture and traditions of their countries are non-Western.
6Kishore Mahbubani, “The West and the Rest,” The National Interest,
Summer 1992, pp. 3–13.
The Clash of Civilizations?
[24] foreign affairs
The most obvious and prototypical torn country is Turkey.
The late twentieth-century leaders of Turkey have followed in
the Attatürk tradition and defined Turkey as a modern, secular,
Western nation state. They allied Turkey with the West
in NATO and in the Gulf War; they applied for membership
in the European Community. At the same time, however, elements
in Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and
have argued that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern Muslim
society. In addition, while the elite of Turkey has defined Turkey
as a Western society, the elite of the West refuses to accept
Turkey as such. Turkey will not become a member of the European
Community, and the real reason, as President Özal said,
“is that we are Muslim and they are Christian and they don’t
say that.” Having rejected Mecca, and then being rejected by
Brussels, where does Turkey look? Tashkent may be the answer.
The end of the Soviet Union gives Turkey the opportunity to
become the leader of a revived Turkic civilization involving
seven countries from the borders of Greece to those of China.
Encouraged by the West, Turkey is making strenuous efforts to
carve out this new identity for itself.
During the past decade Mexico has assumed a position
somewhat similar to that of Turkey. Just as Turkey abandoned
its historic opposition to Europe and attempted to join Europe,
Mexico has stopped defining itself by its opposition to the United
States and is instead attempting to imitate the United States
and to join it in the North American Free Trade Area. Mexican
leaders are engaged in the great task of redefining Mexican identity
and have introduced fundamental economic reforms that
eventually will lead to fundamental political change. In 1991 a
top adviser to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari described at
length to me all the changes the Salinas government was making.
When he finished, I remarked: “That’s most impressive. It
seems to me that basically you want to change Mexico from a
Latin American country into a North American country.” He
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [25]
looked at me with surprise and exclaimed: “Exactly! That’s precisely
what we are trying to do, but of course we could never say
so publicly.” As his remark indicates, in Mexico as in Turkey,
significant elements in society resist the redefinition of their
country’s identity. In Turkey, European-oriented leaders have
to make gestures to Islam (Özal’s pilgrimage to Mecca); so also
Mexico’s North American-oriented leaders have to make gestures
to those who hold Mexico to be a Latin American country
(Salinas’ Ibero-American Guadalajara summit).
Historically Turkey has been the most profoundly torn country.
For the United States, Mexico is the most immediate torn
country. Globally the most important torn country is Russia.
The question of whether Russia is part of the West or the leader
of a distinct Slavic-Orthodox civilization has been a recurring
one in Russian history. That issue was obscured by the communist
victory in Russia, which imported a Western ideology,
adapted it to Russian conditions and then challenged the West
in the name of that ideology. The dominance of communism
shut off the historic debate over Westernization versus Russification.
With communism discredited Russians once again face
that question.
President Yeltsin is adopting Western principles and goals
and seeking to make Russia a “normal” country and a part of
the West. Yet both the Russian elite and the Russian public are
divided on this issue. Among the more moderate dissenters,
Sergei Stankevich argues that Russia should reject the “Atlanticist”
course, which would lead it “to become European, to
become a part of the world economy in rapid and organized
fashion, to become the eighth member of the Seven, and to put
particular emphasis on Germany and the United States as the
two dominant members of the Atlantic alliance.” While also
rejecting an exclusively Eurasian policy, Stankevich nonetheless
argues that Russia should give priority to the protection of
Russians in other countries, emphasize its Turkic and Muslim
The Clash of Civilizations?
[26] foreign affairs
connections, and promote “an appreciable redistribution of our
resources, our options, our ties, and our interests in favor of
Asia, of the eastern direction.” People of this persuasion criticize
Yeltsin for subordinating Russia’s interests to those of the
West, for reducing Russian military strength, for failing to support
traditional friends such as Serbia, and for pushing economic
and political reform in ways injurious to the Russian
people. Indicative of this trend is the new popularity of the
ideas of Petr Savitsky, who in the 1920s argued that Russia was
a unique Eurasian civilization.7 More extreme dissidents voice
much more blatantly nationalist, anti-Western and anti-Semitic
views, and urge Russia to redevelop its military strength and
to establish closer ties with China and Muslim countries. The
people of Russia are as divided as the elite. An opinion survey
in European Russia in the spring of 1992 revealed that 40 percent
of the public had positive attitudes toward the West and
36 percent had negative attitudes. As it has been for much of its
history, Russia in the early 1990s is truly a torn country.
To redefine its civilization identity, a torn country must meet
three requirements. First, its political and economic elite has
to be generally supportive of and enthusiastic about this move.
Second, its public has to be willing to acquiesce in the redefinition.
Third, the dominant groups in the recipient civilization
have to be willing to embrace the convert. All three requirements
in large part exist with respect to Mexico. The first two
in large part exist with respect to Turkey. It is not clear that
any of them exist with respect to Russia’s joining the West.
The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism
was between ideologies which, despite their major differences,
ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality
7Sergei Stankevich, “Russia in Search of Itself,” The National Interest, Summer
1992, pp. 47–51; Daniel Schneider, “A Russian Movement Rejects Western
Tilt,” Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 5, 1993, pp. 5–7.
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [27]
and prosperity. A traditional, authoritarian, nationalist Russia
could have quite different goals. A Western democrat could
carry on an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would
be virtually impossible for him to do that with a Russian traditionalist.
If, as the Russians stop behaving like Marxists, they
reject liberal democracy and begin behaving like Russians but
not like Westerners, the relations between Russia and the West
could again become distant and conflictual.8
THE CONFUCIAN-ISLAMIC CONNECTION
The obstacles to non-Western countries joining the West vary
considerably. They are least for Latin American and East European
countries. They are greater for the Orthodox countries
of the former Soviet Union. They are still greater for Muslim,
Confucian, Hindu and Buddhist societies. Japan has established
a unique position for itself as an associate member of
the West: it is in the West in some respects but clearly not of
the West in important dimensions. Those countries that for
reason of culture and power do not wish to, or cannot, join
the West compete with the West by developing their own economic,
military and political power. They do this by promoting
their internal development and by cooperating with other non-
Western countries. The most prominent form of this cooperation
is the Confucian-Islamic connection that has emerged to
challenge Western interests, values and power.
8Owen Harries has pointed out that Australia is trying (unwisely in his
view) to become a torn country in reverse. Although it has been a full member
not only of the West but also of the ABCA military and intelligence core
of the West, its current leaders are in effect proposing that it defect from the
West, redefine itself as an Asian country and cultivate close ties with its neighbors.
Australia’s future, they argue, is with the dynamic economies of East
Asia. But, as I have suggested, close economic cooperation normally requires a
common cultural base. In addition, none of the three conditions necessary for
a torn country to join another civilization is likely to exist in Australia’s case.
The Clash of Civilizations?
[28] foreign affairs
Almost without exception, Western countries are reducing
their military power; under Yeltsins leadership so also is Russia.
China, North Korea and several Middle Eastern states,
however, are significantly expanding their military capabilities.
They are doing this by the import of arms from Western and
non-Western sources and by the development of indigenous
arms industries. One result is the emergence of what Charles
Krauthammer has called “Weapon States,” and the Weapon
States are not Western states. Another result is the redefinition
of arms control, which is a Western concept and a Western
goal. During the Cold War the primary purpose of arms
control was to establish a stable military balance between the
United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies.
In the post–Cold War world the primary objective of arms control
is to prevent the development by non-Western societies of
military capabilities that could threaten Western interests. The
West attempts to do this through international agreements,
economic pressure and controls on the transfer of arms and
weapons technologies.
The conflict between the West and the Confucian-Islamic
states focuses largely, although not exclusively, on nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missiles and other
sophisticated means for delivering them, and the guidance,
intelligence and other electronic capabilities for achieving that
goal. The West promotes nonproliferation as a universal norm
and nonproliferation treaties and inspections as means of realizing
that norm. It also threatens a variety of sanctions against
those who promote the spread of sophisticated weapons and
proposes some benefits for those who do not. The attention
of the West focuses, naturally, on nations that are actually or
potentially hostile to the West.
The non-Western nations, on the other hand, assert their
right to acquire and to deploy whatever weapons they think
necessary for their security. They also have absorbed, to the full,
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [29]
the truth of the response of the Indian defense minister when
asked what lesson he learned from the Gulf War: “Don’t fight
the United States unless you have nuclear weapons.” Nuclear
weapons, chemical weapons and missiles are viewed, probably
erroneously, as the potential equalizer of superior Western
conventional power. China, of course, already has nuclear
weapons; Pakistan and India have the capability to deploy
them. North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Algeria appear to be
attempting to acquire them. A top Iranian official has declared
that all Muslim states should acquire nuclear weapons, and in
1988 the president of Iran reportedly issued a directive calling
for development of “offensive and defensive chemical, biological
and radiological weapons.”
Centrally important to the development of counter-West
military capabilities is the sustained expansion of Chinas military
power and its means to create military power. Buoyed by
spectacular economic development, China is rapidly increasing
its military spending and vigorously moving forward with
the modernization of its armed forces. It is purchasing weapons
from the former Soviet states; it is developing long-range
missiles; in 1992 it tested a one-megaton nuclear device. It is
developing power-projection capabilities, acquiring aerial refueling
technology, and trying to purchase an aircraft carrier. Its
military buildup and assertion of sovereignty over the South
China Sea are provoking a multilateral regional arms race in
East Asia. China is also a major exporter of arms and weapons
technology. It has exported materials to Libya and Iraq that
could be used to manufacture nuclear weapons and nerve gas.
It has helped Algeria build a reactor suitable for nuclear weapons
research and production. China has sold to Iran nuclear
technology that American officials believe could only be used
to create weapons and apparently has shipped components of
300-mile-range missiles to Pakistan. North Korea has had a
nuclear weapons program under way for some while and has
The Clash of Civilizations?
[30] foreign affairs
sold advanced missiles and missile technology to Syria and
Iran. The flow of weapons and weapons technology is generally
from East Asia to the Middle East. There is, however, some
movement in the reverse direction; China has received Stinger
missiles from Pakistan.
A Confucian-Islamic military connection has thus come
into being, designed to promote acquisition by its members of
the weapons and weapons technologies needed to counter the
military power of the West. It may or may not last. At present,
however, it is, as Dave McCurdy has said, “a renegades’ mutual
support pact, run by the proliferators and their backers.” A new
form of arms competition is thus occurring between Islamic-
Confucian states and the West. In an old-fashioned arms race,
each side developed its own arms to balance or to achieve superiority
against the other side. In this new form of arms competition,
one side is developing its arms and the other side is
attempting not to balance but to limit and prevent that arms
build-up while at the same time reducing its own military
capabilities.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE WEST
This article does not argue that civilization identities will replace
all other identities, that nation states will disappear, that each
civilization will become a single coherent political entity, that
groups within a civilization will not conflict with and even fight
each other. This paper does set forth the hypotheses that differences
between civilizations are real and important; civilizationconsciousness
is increasing; conflict between civilizations will
supplant ideological and other forms of conflict as the dominant
global form of conflict; international relations, historically
a game played out within Western civilization, will increasingly
be de-Westernized and become a game in which non-Western
civilizations are actors and not simply objects; successful
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [31]
political, security and economic international institutions are
more likely to develop within civilizations than across civilizations;
conflicts between groups in different civilizations will
be more frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts
between groups in the same civilization; violent conflicts
between groups in different civilizations are the most likely and
most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global
wars; the paramount axis of world politics will be the relations
between “the West and the Rest”; the elites in some torn non-
Western countries will try to make their countries part of the
West, but in most cases face major obstacles to accomplishing
this; a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be
between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states.
This is not to advocate the desirability of conflicts between
civilizations. It is to set forth descriptive hypotheses as to what
the future May be like. If these are plausible hypotheses, however,
it is necessary to consider their implications for Western
policy. These implications should be divided between shortterm
advantage and long-term accommodation. In the short
term it is clearly in the interest of the West to promote greater
cooperation and unity within its own civilization, particularly
between its European and North American components;
to incorporate into the West societies in Eastern Europe and
Latin America whose cultures are close to those of the West;
to promote and maintain cooperative relations with Russia
and Japan; to prevent escalation of local inter-civilization conflicts
into major inter-civilization wars; to limit the expansion
of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to
moderate the reduction of Western military capabilities and
maintain military superiority in East and Southwest Asia; to
exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic
states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to
Western values and interests; to strengthen international institutions
that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values
The Clash of Civilizations?
[32] foreign affairs
and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those
institutions.
In the longer term other measures would be called for. Western
civilization is both Western and modern. Non-Western civilizations
have attempted to become modern without becoming
Western. To date only Japan has fully succeeded in this quest.
Non-Western civilizations will continue to attempt to acquire
the wealth, technology, skills, machines and weapons that are
part of being modern. They will also attempt to reconcile this
modernity with their traditional culture and values. Their economic
and military strength relative to the West will increase.
Hence the West will increasingly have to accommodate these
non-Western modern civilizations whose power approaches
that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly
from those of the West. This will require the West to
maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect
its interests in relation to these civilizations. It will also,
however, require the West to develop a more profound understanding
of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions
underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in
those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to
identify elements of commonality between Western and other
civilizations. For the relevant future, there will be no universal
civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each
of which will have to learn to coexist with the others.
the clash of civilizations: the debate [33]
The Summoning
“But They Said, We Will Not Hearken.”
Jeremiah 6: 17
Fouad Ajami
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1993
In Joseph Conrad’s Youth, a novella published at the turn of
the century, Marlowe, the narrator, remembers when he first
encountered “the East”:
And then, before I could open my lips, the East spoke to me, but it was in a
Western voice. A torrent of words was poured into the enigmatical, the fateful
silence; outlandish, angry words mixed with words and even whole sentences of
good English, less strange but even more surprising. The voice swore and cursed
violently; it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by
calling me Pig, and from that went crescendo into unmentionable adjectives—in
English.
The young Marlowe knew that even the most remote civilization
had been made and remade by the West, and taught new
ways.
Not so Samuel P. Huntington. In a curious essay, “The Clash of
Civilizations,” Huntington has found his civilizations whole and
intact, watertight under an eternal sky. Buried alive, as it were,
during the years of the Cold War, these civilizations (Islamic,
Slavic-Orthodox, Western, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, etc.)
rose as soon as the stone was rolled off, dusted themselves off,
FOUAD AJAMI is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at
the School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University
The Summoning
[34] foreign affairs
and proceeded to claim the loyalty of their adherents. For this
student of history and culture, civilizations have always seemed
messy creatures. Furrows run across whole civilizations, across
individuals themselves—that was modernity’s verdict. But
Huntington looks past all that. The crooked and meandering
alleyways of the world are straightened out. With a sharp pencil
and a steady hand Huntington marks out where one civilization
ends and the wilderness of “the other” begins.
More surprising still is Huntington’s attitude toward states,
and their place in his scheme of things. From one of the most
influential and brilliant students of the state and its national
interest there now comes an essay that misses the slyness of
states, the unsentimental and cold-blooded nature of so much
of what they do as they pick their way through chaos. Despite
the obligatory passage that states will remain “the most powerful
actors in world affairs,” states are written off, their place
given over to clashing civilizations. In Huntington’s words,
“The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between
civilizations.”
THE POWER OF MODERNITY
Huntington’s meditation is occasioned by his concern about
the state of the West, its power and the terms of its engagement
with “the rest.”1 “He who gives, dominates,” the great historian
Fernand Braudel observed of the traffic of civilizations. In
making itself over the centuries, the West helped make the others
as well. We have come to the end of this trail, Huntington
is sure. He is impressed by the “de-Westernization” of societies,
1The West itself is unexamined in Huntington’s essay. No fissures run
through it. No multiculturalists are heard from. It is orderly within its ramparts.
What doubts Huntington has about the will within the walls, he has
kept within himself. He has assumed that his call to unity will be answered,
for outside flutter the banners of the Saracens and the Confucians.
Fouad Ajami
the clash of civilizations: the debate [35]
their “indigenization” and apparent willingness to go their own
way. In his view of things such phenomena as the “Hinduization”
of India and Islamic fundamentalism are ascendant. To
these detours into “tradition” Huntington has assigned great
force and power.
But Huntington is wrong. He has underestimated the tenacity
of modernity and secularism in places that acquired these
ways against great odds, always perilously close to the abyss,
the darkness never far. India will not become a Hindu state.
The inheritance of Indian secularism will hold. The vast middle
class will defend it, keep the order intact to maintain India’s—
and its own—place in the modern world of nations. There exists
in that anarchic polity an instinctive dread of playing with fires
that might consume it. Hindu chauvinism may coarsen the
public life of the country, but the state and the middle class that
sustains it know that a detour into religious fanaticism is a fling
with ruin. A resourceful middle class partakes of global culture
and norms. A century has passed since the Indian bourgeoisie,
through its political vehicle the Indian National Congress, set
out to claim for itself and India a place among nations. Out
of that long struggle to overturn British rule and the parallel
struggle against “communalism,” the advocates of the national
idea built a large and durable state. They will not cede all this
for a political kingdom of Hindu purity.
We have been hearing from the traditionalists, but we should
not exaggerate their power, for traditions are often most insistent
and loud when they rupture, when people no longer really
believe and when age-old customs lose their ability to keep
men and women at home. The phenomenon we have dubbed
as Islamic fundamentalism is less a sign of resurgence than of
panic and bewilderment and guilt that the border with “the
other” has been crossed. Those young urban poor, half-educated
in the cities of the Arab world, and their Sorbonne-educated
lay preachers, can they be evidence of a genuine return to
The Summoning
[36] foreign affairs
tradition? They crash Europe’s and America’s gates in search of
liberty and work, and they rail against the sins of the West. It is
easy to understand Huntington’s frustration with this kind of
complexity, with the strange mixture of attraction and repulsion
that the West breeds, and his need to simplify matters, to
mark out the borders of civilizations.
Tradition-mongering is no proof, though, that these civilizations
outside the West are intact, or that their thrashing about
is an indication of their vitality, or that they present a conventional
threat of arms. Even so thorough and far-reaching an
attack against Western hegemony as Iran’s theocratic revolution
could yet fail to wean that society from the culture of the
West. That country’s cruel revolution was born of the realization
of the “armed Imam” that his people were being seduced
by America’s ways. The gates had been thrown wide open in
the 1970s, and the high walls Ayatollah Khomeini built around
his polity were a response to that cultural seduction. Swamped,
Iran was “rescued” by men claiming authenticity as their banner.
One extreme led to another.
“We prayed for the rain of mercy and received floods,” was
the way Mehdi Bazargan, the decent modernist who was Khomeini’s
first prime minister, put it. But the millennium has
been brought down to earth, and the dream of a pan-Islamic
revolt in Iran’s image has vanished into the wind. The terror
and the shabbiness have caught up with the utopia. Sudan
could emulate the Iranian “revolutionary example.” But this
will only mean the further pauperization and ruin of a desperate
land. There is no rehabilitation of the Iranian example.
A battle rages in Algeria, a society of the Mediterranean, close
to Europe—a wine-producing country for that matter—and
in Egypt between the secular powers that be and an Islamic
alternative. But we should not rush to print with obituaries
of these states. In Algeria the nomenklatura of the National
Liberation Front failed and triggered a revolt of the young,
Fouad Ajami
the clash of civilizations: the debate [37]
the underclass and the excluded. The revolt raised an Islamic
banner. Caught between a regime they despised and a reign of
virtue they feared, the professionals and the women and the
modernists of the middle class threw their support to the forces
of “order.” They hailed the army’s crackdown on the Islamicists;
they allowed the interruption of a democratic process sure
to bring the Islamicists to power; they accepted the “liberties”
protected by the repression, the devil you know rather than the
one you don’t.
The Algerian themes repeat in the Egyptian case, although
Egypt’s dilemma over its Islamicist opposition is not as acute.
The Islamicists continue to hound the state, but they cannot
bring it down. There is no likelihood that the Egyptian state—
now riddled with enough complacency and corruption to try
the celebrated patience and good humor of the Egyptians—
will go under. This is an old and skeptical country. It knows
better than to trust its fate to enforcers of radical religious
dogma. These are not deep and secure structures of order that
the national middle classes have put in place. But they will not
be blown away overnight.
Nor will Turkey lose its way, turn its back on Europe and
chase after some imperial temptation in the scorched domains
of Central Asia. Huntington sells that country’s modernity
and secularism short when he writes that the Turks—rejecting
Mecca and rejected by Brussels—are likely to head to Tashkent
in search of a Pan-Turkic role. There is no journey to that
imperial past. Ataturk severed that link with fury, pointed his
country westward, embraced the civilization of Europe and did
it without qualms or second thoughts. It is on Frankfurt and
Bonn—and Washington—not on Baku and Tashkent that the
attention of the Turks is fixed. The inheritors of Ataturk’s legacy
are too shrewd to go chasing after imperial glory, gathering
about them the scattered domains of the Turkish peoples. After
their European possessions were lost, the Turks clung to Thrace
The Summoning
[38] foreign affairs
and to all that this link to Europe represents.
Huntington would have nations battle for civilizational ties
and fidelities when they would rather scramble for their market
shares, learn how to compete in a merciless world economy,
provide jobs, move out of poverty. For their part, the “management
gurus” and those who believe that the interests have
vanquished the passions in today’s world tell us that men want
Sony, not soil.2 There is a good deal of truth in what they say,
a terrible exhaustion with utopias, a reluctance to set out on
expeditions of principle or belief. It is hard to think of Russia,
ravaged as it is by inflation, taking up the grand cause of a “second
Byzantium,” the bearer of the orthodox-Slavic torch.
And where is the Confucian world Huntington speaks of?
In the busy and booming lands of the Pacific Rim, so much
of politics and ideology has been sublimated into finance that
the nations of East Asia have turned into veritable workshops.
The civilization of Cathay is dead; the Indonesian archipelago
is deaf to the call of the religious radicals in Tehran as it tries to
catch up with Malaysia and Singapore. A different wind blows
in the lands of the Pacific. In that world economics, not politics,
is in command. The world is far less antiseptic than Lee
Kuan Yew, the sage of Singapore, would want it to be. A nemesis
could lie in wait for all the prosperity that the 1980s brought
to the Pacific. But the lands of the Pacific Rim—protected, to
be sure, by an American security umbrella—are not ready for a
great falling out among the nations. And were troubles to visit
that world they would erupt within its boundaries, not across
civilizational lines.
The things and ways that the West took to “the rest”—those
whole sentences of good English that Marlowe heard a century
ago—have become the ways of the world. The secular idea, the
2Kenichi Ohmae, “Global Consumers Want Sony, Not Soil,” New Perspectives
Quarterly, Fall 1991.
Fouad Ajami
the clash of civilizations: the debate [39]
state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping
tariff walls and barriers, the state as an instrument of welfare,
all these have been internalized in the remotest places. We have
stirred up the very storms into which we now ride.
THE WEAKNESS OF TRADITION
Nations “cheat”: they juggle identities and interests. Their ways
meander. One would think that the traffic of arms from North
Korea and China to Libya and Iran and Syria shows this—that
states will consort with any civilization, however alien, as long
as the price is right and the goods are ready. Huntington turns
this routine act of selfishness into a sinister “Confucian-Islamic
connection.” There are better explanations: the commerce of
renegades, plain piracy, an “underground economy” that picks
up the slack left by the great arms suppliers (the United States,
Russia, Britain and France).
Contrast the way Huntington sees things with Braudel’s
depiction of the traffic between Christendom and Islam across
the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century—and this was in
a religious age, after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks
and of Granada to the Spanish: “Men passed to and fro, indifferent
to frontiers, states and creeds. They were more aware of
the necessities for shipping and trade, the hazards of war and
piracy, the opportunities for complicity or betrayal provided by
circumstances.”3
Those kinds of “complicities” and ambiguities are missing
in Huntington’s analysis. Civilizations are crammed into the
nooks and crannies—and checkpoints—of the Balkans. Huntington
goes where only the brave would venture, into that belt
of mixed populations stretching from the Adriatic to the Baltic.
3Ferdinand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the
Age of Philip II, Vol. II, New York: Harper & Row, 1976, p. 759.
The Summoning
[40] foreign affairs
Countless nationalisms make their home there, all aggrieved,
all possessed of memories of a fabled past and equally ready
for the demagogues vowing to straighten a messy map. In the
thicket of these pan-movements he finds the line that marked
“the eastern boundary of Western Christianity in the year
1500.” The scramble for turf between Croatian nationalism
and its Serbian counterpart, their “joint venture” in carving up
Bosnia, are made into a fight of the inheritors of Rome, Byzantium
and Islam.
But why should we fall for this kind of determinism? “An
outsider who travels the highway between Zagreb and Belgrade
is struck not by the decisive historical fault line which
falls across the lush Slavonian plain but by the opposite. Serbs
and Croats speak the same language, give or take a few hundred
words, have shared the same village way of life for centuries.”
4 The cruel genius of Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo
Tudjman, men on horseback familiar in lands and situations
of distress, was to make their bids for power into grand civilizational
undertakings—the ramparts of the Enlightenment
defended against Islam or, in Tudjman’s case, against the heirs
of the Slavic-Orthodox faith. Differences had to be magnified.
Once Tito, an equal opportunity oppressor, had passed from
the scene, the balancing act among the nationalities was bound
to come apart. Serbia had had a measure of hegemony in the
old system. But of the world that loomed over the horizon—
privatization and economic reform—the Serbs were less confident.
The citizens of Sarajevo and the Croats and the Slovenes
had a head start on the rural Serbs. And so the Serbs hacked at
the new order of things with desperate abandon.
Some Muslim volunteers came to Bosnia, driven by faith
and zeal. Huntington sees in these few stragglers the sweeping
4Michael Ignatieff, “The Balkan Tragedy,” New York Review of Books, May
13, 1993.
Fouad Ajami
the clash of civilizations: the debate [41]
power of “civilizational rallying,” proof of the hold of what he
calls the “kin-country syndrome.” This is delusion. No Muslim
cavalry was ever going to ride to the rescue. The Iranians may
have railed about holy warfare, but the Chetniks went on with
their work. The work of order and mercy would have had to be
done by the United States if the cruel utopia of the Serbs was to
be contested.
It should have taken no powers of prophecy to foretell where
the fight in the Balkans would end. The abandonment of Bosnia
was of a piece with the ways of the world. No one wanted
to die for Srebrenica. The Europeans averted their gaze, as has
been their habit. The Americans hesitated for a moment as the
urge to stay out of the Balkans did battle with the scenes of
horror. Then “prudence” won out. Milosevic and Tudjman may
need civilizational legends, but there is no need to invest their
projects of conquest with this kind of meaning.
In his urge to find that relentless war across Islam’s “bloody
borders,” Huntington buys Saddam Hussein’s interpretation of
the Gulf War. It was, for Saddam and Huntington, a civilizational
battle. But the Gulf War’s verdict was entirely different.
For if there was a campaign that laid bare the interests of states,
the lengths to which they will go to restore a tolerable balance
of power in a place that matters, this was it. A local despot had
risen close to the wealth of the Persian Gulf, and a Great Power
from afar had come to the rescue. The posse assembled by the
Americans had Saudi, Turkish, Egyptian, Syrian, French, British
and other riders.
True enough, when Saddam Hussein’s dream of hegemony
was shattered, the avowed secularist who had devastated the
ulama, the men of religion in his country, fell back on Ayatollah
Khomeini’s language of fire and brimstone and borrowed
the symbolism and battle cry of his old Iranian nemesis. But
few, if any, were fooled by this sudden conversion to the faith.
They knew the predator for what he was: he had a Christian
The Summoning
[42] foreign affairs
foreign minister (Tariq Aziz); he had warred against the Iranian
revolution for nearly a decade and had prided himself on
the secularism of his regime. Prudent men of the social and
political order, the ulama got out of the way and gave their state
the room it needed to check the predator at the Saudi/Kuwaiti
border.5 They knew this was one of those moments when purity
bows to necessity. Ten days after Saddam swept into Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia’s most authoritative religious body, the Council of
Higher Ulama, issued a fatwa, or a ruling opinion, supporting
the presence of Arab and Islamic and “other friendly forces.”
All means of defense, the ulama ruled, were legitimate to guarantee
the people “the safety of their religion, their wealth, and
their honor and their blood, to protect what they enjoy of safety
and stability.” At some remove, in Egypt, that country’s leading
religious figure, the Shaykh of Al Ashar, Shaykh Jadd al Haqq,
denounced Saddam as a tyrant and brushed aside his Islamic
pretensions as a cover for tyranny.
Nor can the chief Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei’s rhetoric against the Americans during the Gulf
War be taken as evidence of Iran’s disposition toward that campaign.
Crafty men, Iran’s rulers sat out that war. They stood to
emerge as the principal beneficiaries of Iraq’s defeat. The American-
led campaign against Iraq held out the promise of tilting
the regional balance in their favor. No tears were shed in Iran
for what befell Saddam Hussein’s regime.
It is the mixed gift of living in hard places that men and
women know how to distinguish between what they hear
and what there is: no illusions were thus entertained in vast
stretches of the Arab Muslim world about Saddam, or about
5Huntington quotes one Safar al Hawali, a religious radical at Umm al
Qura University in Mecca, to the effect that the campaign against Iraq was
another Western campaign against Islam. But this can’t do as evidence. Safar
al Hawali was a crank. Among the ulama class and the religious scholars in
Saudi Arabia he was, for all practical purposes, a loner.
Fouad Ajami
the clash of civilizations: the debate [43]
the campaign to thwart him for that matter. The fight in the
gulf was seen for what it was: a bid for primacy met by an imperial
expedition that laid it to waste. A circle was closed in the
gulf: where once the order in the region “east of Suez” had been
the work of the British, it was now provided by Pax Americana.
The new power standing sentry in the gulf belonged to the
civilization of the West, as did the prior one. But the American
presence had the anxious consent of the Arab lands of the Persian
Gulf. The stranger coming in to check the kinsmen.
The world of Islam divides and subdivides. The battle lines in
the Caucasus, too, are not coextensive with civilizational fault
lines. The lines follow the interests of states. Where Huntington
sees a civilizational duel between Armenia and Azerbaijan,
the Iranian state has cast religious zeal and fidelity to the wind.
Indeed, in that battle the Iranians have tilted toward Christian
Armenia.
THE WRIT OF STATES
We have been delivered into a new world, to be sure. But it is
not a world where the writ of civilizations runs. Civilizations
and civilizational fidelities remain. There is to them an astonishing
measure of permanence. But let us be clear: civilizations
do not control states, states control civilizations. States avert
their gaze from blood ties when they need to; they see brotherhood
and faith and kin when it is in their interest to do so.
We remain in a world of self-help. The solitude of states continues;
the disorder in the contemporary world has rendered
that solitude more pronounced. No way has yet been found to
reconcile France to Pax Americana’s hegemony, or to convince
it to trust its security or cede its judgment to the preeminent
Western power. And no Azeri has come up with a way the
lands of Islam could be rallied to the fight over Nagorno Karabakh.
The sky has not fallen in Kuala Lumpur or in Tunis over
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[44] foreign affairs
the setbacks of Azerbaijan in its fight with Armenia.
The lesson bequeathed us by Thucydides in his celebrated
dialogue between the Melians and the Athenians remains. The
Melians, it will be recalled, were a colony of the Lacedaemonians.
Besieged by Athens, they held out and were sure that the
Lacedaemonians were “bound, if only for very shame, to come
to the aid of their kindred.” The Melians never wavered in their
confidence in their “civilizational” allies: “Our common blood
insures our fidelity.”6 We know what became of the Melians.
Their allies did not turn up, their island was sacked, their world
laid to waste.
6Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, New York: The Modern American
Library, 1951, pp. 334–335.
the clash of civilizations: the debate [45]
The Dangers of Decadence
What the Rest Can Teach the West
Kishore Mahbubani
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1993
In key Western capitals there is a deep sense of unease about
the future. The confidence that the West would remain a dominant
force in the 21st century, as it has for the past four or five
centuries, is giving way to a sense of foreboding that forces like
the emergence of fundamentalist Islam, the rise of East Asia
and the collapse of Russia and Eastern Europe could pose real
threats to the West. A siege mentality is developing. Within
these troubled walls, Samuel P. Huntington’s essay “The Clash
of Civilizations?” is bound to resonate. It will therefore come
as a great surprise to many Westerners to learn that the rest
of the world fears the West even more than the West fears it,
especially the threat posed by a wounded West.
Huntington is right: power is shifting among civilizations.
But when the tectonic plates of world history move in a dramatic
fashion, as they do now, perceptions of these changes
depend on where one stands. The key purpose of this essay is to
sensitize Western audiences to the perceptions of the rest of the
world.
KISHORE MAHBUBANI, Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Dean
of the Civil Service College, Singapore, last served overseas as Singapore’s
Permanent Representative to the United Nations (1984–89). These are his personal
views.
The Dangers of Decadence
[46] foreign affairs
The retreat of the West is not universally welcomed. There
is still no substitute for Western leadership, especially American
leadership. Sudden withdrawals of American support from
Middle Eastern or Pacific allies, albeit unlikely, could trigger
massive changes that no one would relish. Western retreat
could be as damaging as Western domination.
By any historical standard, the recent epoch of Western
domination, especially under American leadership, has been
remarkably benign. One dreads to think what the world would
have looked like if either Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia had
triumphed in what have been called the “Western civil wars”
of the twentieth century. Paradoxically, the benign nature of
Western domination may be the source of many problems.
Today most Western policymakers, who are children of this
era, cannot conceive of the possibility that their own words and
deeds could lead to evil, not good. The Western media aggravate
this genuine blindness. Most Western journalists travel
overseas with Western assumptions. They cannot understand
how the West could be seen as anything but benevolent. CNN
is not the solution. The same visual images transmitted simultaneously
into living rooms across the globe can trigger opposing
perceptions. Western living rooms applaud when cruise
missiles strike Baghdad. Most living outside see that the West
will deliver swift retribution to nonwhite Iraqis or Somalis but
not to white Serbians, a dangerous signal by any standard.
THE ASIAN HORDES
Huntington discusses the challenge posed by Islamic and Confucian
civilizations. Since the bombing of the World Trade
Center, Americans have begun to absorb European paranoia
about Islam, perceived as a force of darkness hovering over a
virtuous Christian civilization. It is ironic that the West should
increasingly fear Islam when daily the Muslims are reminded
Kishore Mahbubani
the clash of civilizations: the debate [47]
of their own weakness. “Islam has bloody borders,” Huntington
says. But in all conflicts between Muslims and pro-Western
forces, the Muslims are losing, and losing badly, whether
they be Azeris, Palestinians, Iraqis, Iranians or Bosnian Muslims.
With so much disunity, the Islamic world is not about to
coalesce into a single force;
Oddly, for all this paranoia, the West seems to be almost
deliberately pursuing a course designed to aggravate the Islamic
world. The West protests the reversal of democracy in Myanmar,
Peru or Nigeria, but not in Algeria. These double standards
hurt. Bosnia has wreaked incalculable damage. The
dramatic passivity of powerful European nations as genocide
is committed on their doorstep has torn away the thin veil
of moral authority that the West had spun around itself as a
legacy of its recent benign era. Few can believe that the West
would have remained equally passive if Muslim artillery shells
had been raining down on Christian populations in Sarajevo or
Srebrenica.
Western behavior toward China has been equally puzzling.
In the 1970s, the West developed a love affair with a China
ruled by a regime that had committed gross atrocities during
the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But
when Mao Zedong’s disastrous rule was followed by a far more
benign Deng Xiaoping era, the West punished China for what
by its historical standards was a minor crackdown: the Tiananmen
incident.
Unfortunately, Tiananmen has become a contemporary
Western legend, created by live telecasts of the crackdown. Beijing
erred badly in its excessive use of firearms but it did not
err in its decision to crack down. Failure to quash the student
rebellion could have led to political disintegration and chaos, a
perennial Chinese nightmare. Western policymakers concede
this in private. They are also aware of the dishonesty of some
Western journalists: dining with student dissidents and even
The Dangers of Decadence
[48] foreign affairs
egging them on before reporting on their purported “hunger
strike.” No major Western journal has exposed such dishonesty
or developed the political courage to say that China had virtually
no choice in Tiananmen. Instead sanctions were imposed,
threatening China’s modernization. Asians see that Western
public opinion—deified in Western democracy—can produce
irrational consequences. They watch with trepidation as Western
policies on China lurch to and fro, threatening the otherwise
smooth progress of East Asia.
Few in the West are aware that the West is responsible for
aggravating turbulence among the more than two billion people
living in Islamic and Chinese civilizations. Instead, conjuring
up images of the two Asian hordes that Western minds fear
most—two forces that invaded Europe, the Muslims and the
Mongols—Huntington posits a Confucian-Islamic connection
against the West. American arms sales to Saudi Arabia do not
suggest a natural Christian-Islamic connection. Neither should
Chinese arms sales to Iran. Both are opportunistic moves,
based not on natural empathy or civilizational alliances. The
real tragedy of suggesting a Confucian-Islamic connection is
that it obscures the fundamentally different nature of the challenge
posed by these forces. The Islamic world will have great
difficulty modernizing. Until then its turbulence will spill over
into the West. East Asia, including China, is poised to achieve
parity with the West. The simple truth is that East and Southeast
Asia feel more comfortable with the West.
This failure to develop a viable strategy to deal with Islam or
China reveals a fatal flaw in the West: an inability to come to
terms with the shifts in the relative weights of civilizations that
Huntington well documents. Two key sentences in Huntington’s
essay, when put side by side, illustrate the nature of the
problem: first, “In the politics of civilizations, the peoples and
governments of non-Western civilization no longer remain the
objects of history as targets of Western colonization but join the
Kishore Mahbubani
the clash of civilizations: the debate [49]
West as movers and shapers of history,” and second, “The West
in effect is using international institutions, military power and
economic resources to run the world in ways that will maintain
Western predominance, protect Western interests and promote
Western political and economic values.” This combination is a
prescription for disaster.
Simple arithmetic demonstrates Western folly. The West has
800 million people; the rest make up almost 4.7 billion. In the
national arena, no Western society would accept a situation
where 15 percent of its population legislated for the remaining
85 percent. But this is what the West is trying to do globally.
Tragically, the West is turning its back on the Third World
just when it can finally help the West out of its economic doldrums.
The developing world’s dollar output increased in 1992
more than that of North America, the European Community
and Japan put together. Two-thirds of the increase in U.S.
exports has gone to the developing world. Instead of encouraging
this global momentum by completing the Uruguay Round,
the West is doing the opposite. It is trying to create barriers,
not remove them. French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur
tried to justify this move by saying bluntly in Washington that
the “question now is how to organize to protect ourselves from
countries whose different values enable them to undercut us.”
THE WEST’S OWN UNDOING
Huntington fails to ask one obvious question: If other civilizations
have been around for centuries, why are they posing a
challenge only now? A sincere attempt to answer this question
reveals a fatal flaw that has recently developed in the Western
mind: an inability to conceive that the West may have developed
structural weaknesses in its core value systems and institutions.
This flaw explains, in part, the recent rush to embrace
the assumption that history has ended with the triumph of
The Dangers of Decadence
[50] foreign affairs
the Western ideal: individual freedom and democracy would
always guarantee that Western civilization would stay ahead of
the pack.
Only hubris can explain why so many Western societies are
trying to defy the economic laws of gravity. Budgetary discipline
is disappearing. Expensive social programs and porkbarrel
projects multiply with little heed to costs. The West’s
low savings and investment rates lead to declining competitiveness
vis-à-vis East Asia. The work ethic is eroding, while
politicians delude workers into believing that they can retain
high wages despite becoming internationally uncompetitive.
Leadership is lacking. Any politician who states hard truths is
immediately voted out. Americans freely admit that many of
their economic problems arise from the inherent gridlock of
American democracy. While the rest of the world is puzzled by
these fiscal follies, American politicians and journalists travel
around the world preaching the virtues of democracy. It makes
for a curious sight.
The same hero-worship is given to the idea of individual
freedom. Much good has come from this idea. Slavery ended.
Universal franchise followed. But freedom does not only solve
problems; it can also cause them. The United States has undertaken
a massive social experiment, tearing down social institution
after social institution that restrained the individual. The
results have been disastrous. Since 1960 the U.S. population
has increased 41 percent while violent crime has risen by 560
percent, single-mother births by 419 percent, divorce rates by
300 percent and the percentage of children living in single-parent
homes by 300 percent. This is massive social decay. Many
a society shudders at the prospects of this happening on its
shores. But instead of traveling overseas with humility, Americans
confidently preach the virtues of unfettered individual
freedom, blithely ignoring the visible social consequences.
The West is still the repository of the greatest assets and
Kishore Mahbubani
the clash of civilizations: the debate [51]
achievements of human civilization. Many Western values
explain the spectacular advance of mankind: the belief in scientific
inquiry, the search for rational solutions and the willingness
to challenge assumptions. But a belief that a society
is practicing these values can lead to a unique blindness: the
inability to realize that some of the values that come with this
package may be harmful. Western values do not form a seamless
web. Some are good. Some are bad. But one has to stand
outside the West to see this clearly, and to see how the West is
bringing about its relative decline by its own hand. Huntington,
too, is blind to this.
[52] foreign affairs
The Case for Optimism
The West Should Believe in Itself
Robert L. Bartley
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1993
On November 9, 1989, our era ended. The breaching of the
Berlin Wall sounded the end of not merely the Cold War, but
an epoch of global conflict that started with the assassination
of Archduke Francis Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. Now, with
the twentieth century truncated, we are straining to discern the
shape of the 21st.
We should remember that while there is of course always
conflict and strife, not all centuries are as bloody as ours has
been. The assassination in Sarajevo shattered an extraordinary
period of economic, artistic and moral advance. It was a period
when serious thinkers could imagine world economic unity
bringing an end to wars. The conventional wisdom, as Keynes
would later write, considered peace and prosperity “as normal,
certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further
improvement, and any deviation from [this course] as aberrant,
scandalous, and avoidable.”
If with benefit of hindsight this optimism seems wildly naïve,
what will future generations make of the crabbed pessimism
of today’s conventional wisdom? Exhausted and jaded by our
labors and trials, we now probe the dawning era for evidence
ROBERT L. BARTLEY is Editor of The Wall Street Journal.
Robert L. Bartley
the clash of civilizations: the debate [53]
not of relief but of new and even more ghastly horrors ahead.
In particular, we have lost confidence in our own ability to
shape the new era, and instead keep conjuring up inexorable
historical and moral forces. Our public discourse is filled with
guilt-ridden talk of global warming, the extinction of various
species and Western decline.
Even so hardheaded a thinker as Samuel P. Huntington has
concluded, “A West at the peak of its power confronts non-Wests
that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to
shape the world in non-Western ways.” The conflicts of the
future will be between “the West and the rest,” the West and
the Muslims, the West and an Islamic-Confucian alliance,
or the West and a collection of other civilizations, including
Hindu, Japanese, Latin American and Slavic-Orthodox.
This “clash of civilizations” does not sound like a pleasant
21st century. The conflicts will not be over resources, where it
is always possible to split the difference, but over fundamental
and often irreconcilable values. And in this competition the
United States and the West will inevitably be on the defensive,
since “the values that are most important in the West are the
least important worldwide.”
Well, perhaps. But is it really clear that the greatest potential
for conflict lies between civilizations instead of within them?
Despite the economic miracle of China’s Guangdong province,
are we really confident that the Confucians have mastered the
trick of governing a billion people in one political entity? Do
the women of Iran really long for the chador, or is it just possible
the people of “the rest” will ultimately be attracted to the
values of the West?
Undeniably there is an upsurge of interest in cultural, ethnic
and religious values, notably but not solely in Islamic fundamentalism.
But at the same time there are powerful forces
toward world integration. Instant communications now span
the globe. We watch in real time the drama of Tiananmen
The Case for Optimism
[54] foreign affairs
Square and Sarajevo (if not yet Lhasa or Dushanbe). Financial
markets on a 24-hour schedule link the world’s economies.
Western, which is to say American, popular culture for better
or worse spans the globe as well. The new Japanese crown princess
was educated at Harvard, and the latest sumo sensation
is known as Akebone, but played basketball as Chad Rowen.
The world’s language is English. Even the standard-bearers of
“the rest”were largely educated in the West. Boatloads of immigrants,
perhaps the true hallmark of the 21st century, land on
the beaches of New York’s Long Island.
This environment is not a happy one for governments of traditional
nation states. In 1982 François Mitterrand found how
markets limit national economic policy. A national currency—
which is to say an independent monetary policy—is possible
at sustainable cost only for the United States, and even then
within limits, as the Carter administration found in 1979. In
Western Europe and the Western hemisphere, the demands of
national security have ebbed with the Cold War. Transnational
companies and regional development leave the nation-state
searching for a mission, as Kenichi Ohmae has detailed. Robert
Reich asks what makes an “American” corporation. Walter
Wriston writes of “The Twilight of Sovereignty.”
These difficulties confront all governments, but they are doubly
acute for authoritarians, who depend on isolation to dominate
their people. Democracy, the quintessentially Western
form of government, spread with amazing speed throughout
Latin America and the former communist bloc and into Africa
and Asia. In 1993 Freedom House reports 75 free nations, up
from 55 a decade earlier, with only 31 percent of the world’s
population, and most of that in China, living under repressive
regimes, down from 44 percent ten years ago. The combination
of instant information, economic interdependence and the
appeal of individual freedom is not a force to be taken lightly.
Robert L. Bartley
the clash of civilizations: the debate [55]
After all, it has just toppled the most powerful totalitarian
empire history has known.
It is precisely the onslaught of this world civilization, of
course, that provokes such reactions as Islamic fundamentalism.
The mullahs profess to reject the decadent West, but
their underlying quarrel is with modernity. Perhaps they have
the “will and resources” to construct an alternative, and perhaps
so does the geriatric regime in Beijing. But they face a
deep dilemma indeed, for Western civilization and its political
appendages of democracy and personal freedom are profoundly
linked with the capitalist formula that is the formula for economic
development.
THE POWER OF PROSPERITY
If you list the Freedom House rankings by per-capita annual
income, you find that above figures equivalent to about $5,500,
nearly all nations are democratic. The exceptions are the medieval
oil sheikhdoms and a few Asian tigers such as Singapore.
Even among the latter, development is leading to pressures for
more freedom. Under Roh Tae Woo South Korea has deserted
to full democracy. Nor should the implosion of the Liberal
Democratic Party in Japan be comforting to advocates of some
“consensual”model of democracy. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew
may be right to consider himself a philosopher king, but since
Plato the species has been endangered and unreliable.
Perhaps Western values are an artifact of an exogenous civilization,
but there is a powerful argument that they are an
artifact of economic development itself. Development creates a
middle class that wants a say in its own future, that cares about
the progress and freedom of its sons and daughters. Since economic
progress depends principally on this same group, with
its drive for education and creative abilities, this desire can be
The Case for Optimism
[56] foreign affairs
suppressed only at the expense of development.
In the early stages of development, as for example in Guangdong,
the ruling elites may be able to forge an accommodation
with the middle class, particularly if local military authorities
are dealt into the action. But if the Chinese accommodation
survives, it will be the first one. The attempt to incorporate
the six million Hong Kong Chinese, with their increasingly
evident expectation of self-rule, will be particularly disruptive.
The lesson of other successfully developing nations is that continued
progress depends on a gradual accommodation with
democracy. And history teaches another profoundly optimistic
lesson: as Huntington himself has been known to observe,
democracies almost never go to war with each other.
The dominant flow of historical forces in the 21st century
could well be this: economic development leads to demands
for democracy and individual (or familial) autonomy; instant
worldwide communications reduces the power of oppressive
governments; the spread of democratic states diminishes the
potential for conflict. The optimists of 1910, in other words,
may turn out to have been merely premature.
STAYING THE COURSE
This future is of course no sure thing. Perhaps Huntington’s
forces of disintegration will in the end prevail, but that is no
sure thing either. The West, above all the United States, and
above even that the elites who read this journal, have the capacity
to influence which of these futures is more likely. If the fears
prevail, it will be in no small part because they lacked the will
and wit to bring the hopes to reality.
The American foreign policy elite is in a sense the victim
of its own success. Much to its own surprise, it won the Cold
War. The classic containment policy outlined in George Kennan’s
“X” article and Paul Nitze’s NSC-68 worked precisely as
Robert L. Bartley
the clash of civilizations: the debate [57]
advertised, albeit after 40 years rather than the 10 to 15 Kennan
predicted. But after its success, this compass is no longer
relevant; as we enter the 21st century, our policy debate is adrift
without a vision.
Some observations above hint at one such vision: if democracies
do not fight each other, their spread not only fulfills our
ideals but also promotes our security interests. The era of peace
before 1914 was forged by the Royal Navy, the pound sterling
and free trade. The essence of the task for the new era is to
strike a balance between realpolitik and moralism.
Traditional diplomacy centers on relations among sovereign
nation states, the internal character of which is irrelevant. In
an information age, dominated by people-to-people contacts,
policy should and will edge cautiously toward the moralistic,
Wilsonian pole. Cautiously because as always this carries a risk
of mindlessness. We cannot ignore military power; nothing
could do more to give us freedom of action in the 21st century
than a ballistic missile defense, whether or not you call it Star
Wars. And while we need a human rights policy, applying it
merely because we have access and leverage risks undermining,
say, Egypt and Turkey, the bulwarks against an Islamic fundamentalism
more detrimental to freedom and less susceptible to
Western influence.
It will be a difficult balance to strike The case for optimism
is admittedly not easy to sustain. Plumbing the temper of our
elites and the state of debate, it is easier to give credence to
Huntington’s fears. But then, during the Hungarian revolution
or Vietnam or the Pershing missile crisis, who would have
thought that the West would stay the course it set out in NSC-
68? It did, and to do so again it needs only to believe in itself.
[58] foreign affairs
Civilization Grafting
No Culture Is an Island
Liu Binyan
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1993
The end of the Cold War has indeed brought about a new phase
in world politics, yet its impact is not unidirectional. The tense
confrontation between the two armed camps has disappeared
and in this sense ideological conflict seems to have come to
an end, for the moment. But conflicts of economic and political
interests are becoming more and more common among the
major nations of the world, and more and more tense. Neither
civilization nor culture has become the “fundamental source of
conflict in this new world.”
The new world is beginning to resemble the one in which I
grew up in the 1930s. Of course, tremendous changes have taken
place; nonetheless there are increasing similarities. Western
capitalism has changed greatly, but the current global recession
is in many ways similar to the Great Depression. The Soviet
Union and Nazi Germany may no longer exist, but the economic,
social and political factors that led to their emergence
still do—economic dislocation, xenophobia and populism.
The Cold War has ended, but hot wars rage in more than
thirty countries and regions. The wave of immigrants from
LIU BINYAN, one of China’s leading dissidents, is Director of the Princeton
China Initiative, Princeton, New Jersey. His most recent book is A Higher
Kind of Loyalty: A Memoir.
Liu Binyan
the clash of civilizations: the debate [59]
poor territories to rich countries and the influx of people from
rural areas to cities have reached an unprecedented scale, forming
what the UN Population Fund has called the “current crisis
of mankind.” We can hardly say these phenomena result from
conflict between different civilizations.
CHINA’S ERRANT EXPERIMENT
For most countries the task is not to demarcate civilizations but
to mix and meld them. In the former colonial countries, the
problems of poverty and starvation have never been solved by
their own civilizations or by the interaction of their indigenous
civilization with Western civilization. But this search for a successful
formula for economic well-being and political freedom
continues.
Look at China. The Chinese people eagerly embraced Communism
in the pursuit of economic development and political
dignity. The bankruptcy of Maoism and socialism occurred a
dozen years before the collapse of the former Soviet Union. It
was not the result of the end of the Cold War, but the disaster
brought about by Maoist ideology. The reason for this shift
again comes from the strong desire of the people to get rid of
poverty and to gain freedom. For China this is the third time
people have tried to graft Western civilization onto traditional
civilization—in the first half of the twentieth century and in
the 1980s, with capitalism; from the late 1940s to the 1970s,
with Marxism-Leninism.
Now, though Confucianism is gradually coming back to
China, it cannot be compared to the increasingly forceful
influence of Western culture on the Chinese people in the last
twenty years. The Chinese people are a practical sort; they
have always been concerned about their material well-being.
In addition, the last forty years have left them wary of intangible
philosophies, gods and ideals. Nowhere in China is there
Civilization Grafting
[60] foreign affairs
a group or political faction that could be likened to the extreme
nationalists of Russia or Europe.
Nor can we expect any civilizational unity that will bring
the Confucian world together. In the past forty years, the split
of mainland China with Taiwan was of course due to political
and ideological differences. After the end of the Cold War the
Confucianist culture common to the Chinese from both sides
of the Taiwan Strait will not overcome the differences in political
systems, ideology and economic development.
Deng Xiaoping’s experiment is to try to weld Western capitalism
with Marxism-Leninism and even aspects of Confucianism.
Thus while liberalizing the economy, the Chinese
communist regime also points to the consumerism and hedonism
of Western civilization in an effort to resist the influences
of democracy and freedom. At the same time, it borrows from
Confucianist thought—obedience to superiors, etc.—which is
useful in stabilizing communist rule. It also attempts to use
Chinese nationalist sentiments in place of a bankrupt ideology,
seeking to postpone its inevitable collapse.
There are many historical and current examples of rulers who
have a greater interest in maintaining or developing some kind
of traditional order rather than in accommodating the struggles
and changing interests of ordinary people. In the mid-1930s,
Chang Kai-shek launched a national campaign advocating
Confucianism—called “The Movement of New Life”—when
China’s population was victimized by famine, civil war and
Japanese aggression. The movement aimed to distract people
from their real interests and ended in complete failure. Since
the 1980s China’s new rulers began a campaign similar to the
KMT’s—“The Movement for Higher Spiritual Civilization”—
which advocated love for the country and the party, and behaving
civilly toward others. But the actual aim of the campaign
was to replace the bankrupt ideology and to distract the public
from its interest in democracy and freedom, and to blunt
Liu Binyan
the clash of civilizations: the debate [61]
the cultural and moral impact of the West. Understandably, it
failed. Even the terminology of a “spiritual civilization” became
the target of irony and ridicule among the Chinese.
What will emerge in China is a mixture of these many forces,
but it will not be the kind of mixture that this regime wants.
It will not mix economic freedom with political unfreedom.
Communism and capitalism are so completely different that
no one will be fooled for long that they can be joined. In the
end there will be a Chinese path, but it will be a different path
to freedom, a different path to democracy. The Chinese people
do not speak in Western phrases and political philosophies, but
they know what kind of political and economic system best
serves their own welfare.
TAKING THE BEST FROM EACH
It is ironic that Samuel P. Huntington sees a resurgent Confucianism
at the very time when spiritual deterioration and moral
degradation are eroding China’s cultural foundation. Fortyseven
years of communist rule have destroyed religion, education,
the rule of law, and morality. Today this dehumanization
caused by the despotism, absolute poverty and asceticism of the
Mao era is evidenced in the rampant lust for power, money and
carnal pleasures among many Chinese.
Coping with this moral and spiritual vacuum is a problem
not just for China but for all civilizations. Will the 21st century
be an era when, through interaction and consensus, civilizations
can merge, thus helping peoples to break old cycles of dehumanization?
Getting rid of poverty and slavery is the least of China’s
problems. The more difficult task is the process of men’s self-salvation,
that is, transforming underlings and cowed peoples into
human beings. Enriching the human spirit is indeed the longer
and harder task. It will require using the best of all civilizations,
not emphasizing the differences between them.
[62] foreign affairs
The Modernizing
Imperative
Tradition and Change
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1993
I approach the work of Samuel P. Huntington with keen interest
and high expectations. Like most political scientists, I have
learned much from his writings. Now in his article “The Clash
of Civilizations?” he once again raises new questions.
In his essay, Huntington asserts that civilizations are real
and important and predicts that “conflict between civilizations
will supplant ideological and other forms of conflict as
the dominant global form of conflict.” He further argues that
institutions for cooperation will be more likely to develop
within civilizations, and conflicts will most often arise between
groups in different civilizations. These strike me as interesting
but dubious propositions.
Huntington’s classification of contemporary civilizations is
questionable. He identifies “seven or eight major civilizations”in
the contemporary world: Western (which includes both European
and North American variants), Confucian, Japanese,
Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American “and
JEANE J. KIRKPATRICK is Leavey Professor of Government at Georgetown
University and Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
the clash of civilizations: the debate [63]
possibly African.”
This is a strange list.
If civilization is defined by common objective elements such
as language, history, religion, customs and institutions and, subjectively,
by identification, and if it is the broadest collectivity
with which persons intensely identify, why distinguish “Latin
American” from “Western”civilization? Like North America,
Latin America is a continent settled by Europeans who brought
with them European languages and a European version of
Judeo-Christian religion, law, literature and gender roles. The
Indian component in Latin American culture is more important
in some countries (Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and Peru) than
in North America. But the African influence is more important
in the United States than in all but a few Latin American countries
(Brazil, Belize and Cuba). Both North and South America
are “Western” European with an admixture of other elements.
And what is Russia if not “Western”? The East/West designations
of the Cold War made sense in a European context,
but in a global context Slavic/Orthodox people are Europeans
who share in Western culture. Orthodox theology and liturgy,
Leninism and Tolstoy are expressions of Western culture.
It is also not clear that over the centuries differences between
civilizations have led to the longest and most violent conflicts.
At least in the twentieth century, the most violent conflicts have
occurred within civilizations: Stalin’s purges, Pol Pot’s genocide,
the Nazi holocaust and World War II. It could be argued
that the war between the United States and Japan involved a
clash of civilizations, but those differences had little role in that
war. The Allied and Axis sides included both Asian and European
members.
The liberation of Kuwait was no more a clash between civilizations
than World War II or the Korean or Vietnamese wars.
Like Korea and Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War pitted one non-
Western Muslim government against another. Once aggression
The Modernizing Imperative
[64] foreign affairs
had occurred, the United States and other Western governments
became involved for geopolitical reasons that transcended cultural
differences. Saddam Hussein would like the world to
believe otherwise.
After the United States mobilized an international coalition
against Iraq, Saddam Hussein, until then the leader of a revolutionary
secular regime, took to public prayers and appeals for
solidarity to the Muslim world. Certain militant, anti-Western
Islamic fundamentalists, Huntington reminds us, responded
with assertions that it was a war of “the West against Islam.”
But few believed it. More governments of predominantly Muslim
societies rallied to support Kuwait than to “save” Iraq.
In Bosnia, the efforts of Radovan Karadzic and other Serbian
extremists to paint themselves as bulwarks against Islam
are no more persuasive, although the passivity of the European
Community, the United States, NATO and the United
Nations in the face of Serbia’s brutal aggression against Bosnia
has finally stimulated some tangible Islamic solidarity. But
most governments of predominantly Muslim states have been
reluctant to treat the Bosnian conflict as a religious war. The
Bosnian government itself has resisted any temptation to present
its problem as Islam versus the Judeo-Christian world. The
fact that Serbian forces began their offensive against Croatia
and Slovenia should settle the question of Serbian motives and
goals, which are territorial aggrandizement, not holy war.
Indubitably, important social, cultural and political differences
exist between Muslim and Judeo-Christian civilizations.
But the most important and explosive differences involving
Muslims are found within the Muslim world—between
persons, parties and governments who are reasonably moderate,
nonexpansionist and nonviolent and those who are antimodern
and anti-Western, extremely intolerant, expansionist
and violent. The first target of Islamic fundamentalists is not
another civilization, but their own governments. “Please do not
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
the clash of civilizations: the debate [65]
call them Muslim fundamentalists,”a deeply religious Muslim
friend said to me. “They do not represent a more fundamental
version of the Muslim religion. They are simply Muslims who
are also violent political extremists.”
Elsewhere as well, the conflict between fanaticism and constitutionalism,
between totalitarian ambition and the rule of
law, exists within civilizations in a clearer, purer form than
between them. In Asia the most intense conflict may turn out
to be between different versions of being Chinese or Indian.
Without a doubt, civilizations are important. By eroding
the strength of local and national cultures and identifications,
modernization enhances the importance of larger units of identification
such as civilizations. Huntington is also surely right
that global communication and stepped-up migration exacerbate
conflict by bringing diametrically opposed values and
life-styles into direct contact with one another. Immigration
brings exotic practices into schools, neighborhoods and other
institutions of daily life and challenges the cosmopolitanism
of Western societies. Religious tolerance in the abstract is one
thing; veiled girls in French schoolrooms are quite another.
Such challenges are not welcome anywhere.
But Huntington, who has contributed so much to our understanding
of modernization and political change, also knows the
ways that modernization changes people, societies and politics.
He knows the many ways that modernization equals Westernization—
broadly conceived—and that it can produce backlash
and bitter hostility. But he also knows how powerful is the
momentum of modern, Western ways of science, technology,
democracy and free markets. He knows that the great question
for non-Western societies is whether they can be modern without
being Western. He believes Japan has succeeded. Maybe.
He is probably right that most societies will simultaneously
seek the benefits of modernization and of traditional relations.
To the extent that they and we are successful in preserving our
The Modernizing Imperative
[66] foreign affairs
traditions while accepting the endless changes of modernization,
our differences from one another will be preserved, and
the need for not just a pluralistic society but a pluralistic world
will grow ever more acute.
the clash of civilizations: the debate [67]
Do Civilizations Hold?
Albert L. Weeks
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1993
Samuel P. Huntington has resurrected an old controversy in
the study of international affairs: the relationship between
“microcosmic” and “macrocosmic” processes. Partisans of the
former single out the nation state as the basic unit, or determining
factor, in the yin and yang of world politics. The “macros,”
on the other hand, view world affairs on the lofty level of
the civilizations to which nation states belong and by which
their behavior is allegedly largely determined.
To one degree or another, much of the latter school’s thinking,
although they may be loath to admit it, derives from Oswald
Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Quincy Wright, F. N. Parkinson
and others. In contrast, scholars such as Hans J. Morgenthau,
John H. Herz and Raymond Aron have tended to hew to the
“micro” school.
Both schools began debating the issue vigorously back in the
1950s. That Huntington is resurrecting the controversy 40 years
later is symptomatic of the failure of globalism—specifically
the idea of establishing a “new world order”—to take root and
of the failure to make sense of contradictory trends and events.
His aim is to find new, easily classified determinants of contemporary
quasi-chaotic international behavior and thus to get
a handle on the international kaleidoscope.
ALBERT L. WEEKS is Professor Emeritus of International Relations at New
York University.
Do Civilizations Hold?
[68] foreign affairs
His methodology is not new. In arguing the macro case in
the 1940s, Toynbee distinguished what he called primary, secondary
and tertiary civilizations by the time of their appearance
in history, contending that their attributes continued to
influence contemporary events. Wright, likewise applying a
historical method, classified civilizations as “bellicose” (including
Syrian, Japanese and Mexican), “moderately bellicose”
(Germanic, Western, Russian, Scandinavian, etc.) and “most
peaceful” (such as Irish, Indian and Chinese). Like Toynbee
and now Huntington, he attributed contemporary significance
to these factors. Huntington’s classification, while different in
several respects from those of his illustrious predecessors, also
identifies determinants on a grand scale by “civilizations.”
His endeavor, however, has its own fault lines. The lines are
the borders encompassing each distinct nation state and mercilessly
chopping the alleged civilizations into pieces. With the
cultural and religious glue of these “civilizations” thin and
cracked, with the nation state’s political regime providing the
principal bonds, crisscross fracturing and cancellation of Huntington’s
own macro-scale, somewhat anachronistic fault lines
are inevitable.
The world remains fractured along political and possibly geopolitical
lines; cultural and historical determinants are a great
deal less vital and virulent. Politics, regimes and ideologies are
culturally, historically and “civilizationally” determined to an
extent. But it is willful, day-to-day, crisis-to-crisis, war-to-war
political decision-making by nation-state units that remains
the single most identifiable determinant of events in the international
arena. How else can we explain repeated nation-state
“defections” from their collective “civilizations”? As Huntington
himself points out, in the Persian Gulf War “one Arab state
invaded another and then fought a coalition of Arab, Western
and other states.”
Raymond Aron described at length the primacy of a nation
Albert L. Weeks
the clash of civilizations: the debate [69]
state’s political integrity and independence, its inviolable territoriality
and sovereign impermeability. He observed that “men
have believed that the fate of cultures was at stake on the battlefields
at the same time as the fate of provinces.” But, he added,
the fact remains that sovereign states “are engaged in a competition
for power [and] conquests . . . . In our times the major
phenomenon [on the international scene] is the heterogeneity
of state units [not] supranational aggregations.”
[70] foreign affairs
The West Is Best
Gerard Piel
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1993
We must be in terror of the civilizations conjured by Samuel P.
Huntington for the same reason that Nils Bohr admonished us
to fear ghosts: We see them, and we know they are not there!
We have another reason to be in terror of them. Without
boundaries, interiors or exteriors, continuity or coherent entity,
any of the Huntington civilizations can be summoned in a
moment to ratify whatever action the West and its remaining
superpower deem rightful. Now they fit the Eric Ericsson definition
of the pseudo-species, outside the law.
In the end, “the West and the Rest” offers a more useful analysis.
We can recognize these ghostly civilizations as the developing
countries and the countries in transition.
They all aspire to the Western model. They are still engaged
in conquest of the material world. As they proceed with their
industrialization, they progressively embrace the “Western
ideas,” in Huntington’s litany, “of individualism, liberalism,
constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of
law, democracy, free markets . . . .”
At the primary level it is a function of lengthening life expectancy;
people in those countries are beginning to live long
enough to discover they have rights and to assert them. Mass
education, which comes with Westernizing industrialization,
GERARD PIEL is Chairman Emeritus of Scientific American, Inc.
Gerard Piel
the clash of civilizations: the debate [71]
makes its contribution as well. Tiananmen Square in Beijing
and the massing of the people at the parliament building in
Moscow stand as rites in a passage.
How long the process will take depends on how the West
responds to the needs and the disorder that beset the emerging
and developing nations—in fear or in rational quest of the
common future. The question is: Do Western ideas have more
substance than those pseudo-civilizations?
[72] foreign affairs
Response
If Not Civilizations,
What?
Paradigms of the Post-Cold War World
Samuel P. Huntington
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1993
When people think seriously, they think abstractly; they conjure
up simplified pictures of reality called concepts, theories,
models, paradigms. Without such intellectual constructs, there
is, William James said, only “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.”
Intellectual and scientific advance, as Thomas Kuhn showed
in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, consists of
the displacement of one paradigm, which has become increasingly
incapable of explaining new or newly discovered facts, by
a new paradigm that accounts for those facts in a more satisfactory
fashion. “To be accepted as a paradigm,” Kuhn wrote, “a
theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not,
SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government
and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at
Harvard University. His article “The Clash of Civilizations?” appeared in the
Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, and several responses to it were published
in the September/October 1993 issue.
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [73]
and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can
be confronted.”
For 40 years students and practitioners of international relations
thought and acted in terms of a highly simplified but very
useful picture of world affairs, the Cold War paradigm. The
world was divided between one group of relatively wealthy and
mostly democratic societies, led by the United States, engaged
in a pervasive ideological, political, economic, and, at times,
military conflict with another group of somewhat poorer, communist
societies led by the Soviet Union. Much of this conflict
occurred in the Third World outside of these two camps, composed
of countries which often were poor, lacked political stability,
were recently independent and claimed to be nonaligned.
The Cold War paradigm could not account for everything that
went on in world politics. There were many anomalies, to use
Kuhn’s term, and at times the paradigm blinded scholars and
statesmen to major developments, such as the Sino-Soviet split.
Yet as a simple model of global politics, it accounted for more
important phenomena than any of its rivals; it was an indispensable
starting point for thinking about international affairs;
it came to be almost universally accepted; and it shaped thinking
about world politics for two generations.
The dramatic events of the past five years have made that
paradigm intellectual history. There is clearly a need for a new
model that will help us to order and to understand central
developments in world politics. What is the best simple map of
the post-Cold War world?
A MAP OF THE NEW WORLD
“The Clash of Civilizations?” is an effort to lay out elements
of a post-Cold War paradigm. As with any paradigm, there is
much the civilization paradigm does not account for, and critics
will have no trouble citing events—even important events
If Not Civilizations, What?
[74] foreign affairs
like Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait—that it does not explain and
would not have predicted (although it would have predicted
the evaporation of the anti-Iraq coalition after March 1991).
Yet, as Kuhn demonstrates, anomalous events do not falsify
a paradigm. A paradigm is disproved only by the creation of
an alternative paradigm that accounts for more crucial facts in
equally simple or simpler terms (that is, at a comparable level
of intellectual abstraction; a more complex theory can always
account for more things than a more parsimonious theory).
The debates the civilizational paradigm has generated around
the world show that, in some measure, it strikes home; it either
accords with reality as people see it or it comes close enough so
that people who do not accept it have to attack it.
What groupings of countries will be most important in
world affairs and most relevant to understanding and making
sense of global politics? Countries no longer belong to the Free
World, the communist bloc, or the Third World. Simple twoway
divisions of countries into rich and poor or democratic and
nondemocratic may help some but not all that much. Global
politics are now too complex to be stuffed into two pigeonholes.
For reasons outlined in the original article, civilizations are the
natural successors to the three worlds of the Cold War. At the
macro level world politics are likely to involve conflicts and
shifting power balances of states from different civilizations,
and at the micro level the most violent, prolonged and dangerous
(because of the possibility of escalation) conflicts are likely
to be between states and groups from different civilizations.
As the article pointed out, this civilization paradigm accounts
for many important developments in international affairs in
recent years, including the breakup of the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia, the wars going on in their former territories, the
rise of religious fundamentalism throughout the world, the
struggles within Russia, Turkey and Mexico over their identity,
the intensity of the trade conflicts between the United States
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [75]
and Japan, the resistance of Islamic states to Western pressure
on Iraq and Libya, the efforts of Islamic and Confucian states
to acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them,
China’s continuing role as an “outsider” great power, the consolidation
of new democratic regimes in some countries and
not in others, and the escalating arms race in East Asia.
In the few months since the article was written, the following
events have occurred that also fit the civilizational paradigm
and might have been predicted from it:
—the continuation and intensification of the fighting among
Croats, Muslims and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia;
—the failure of the West to provide meaningful support to
the Bosnian Muslims or to denounce Croat atrocities in the
same way Serb atrocities were denounced;
—Russia’s unwillingness to join other UN Security Council
members in getting the Serbs in Croatia to make peace with the
Croatian government, and the offer of Iran and other Muslim
nations to provide 18,000 troops to protect Bosnian Muslims;
—the intensification of the war between Armenians and
Azeris, Turkish and Iranian demands that the Armenians
surrender their conquests, the deployment of Turkish troops
to and Iranian troops across the Azerbaijan border, and Russia’s
warning that the Iranian action contributes to “escalation
of the conflict” and “pushes it to dangerous limits of
internationalization”;
—the continued fighting in central Asia between Russian
troops and Mujaheddin guerrillas;
—the confrontation at the Vienna Human Rights Conference
between the West, led by U.S. Secretary of State Warren
Christopher, denouncing “cultural relativism,” and a
coalition of Islamic and Confucian states rejecting “Western
universalism”;
—the refocusing in parallel fashion of Russian and NATO
military planners on “the threat from the South”;
If Not Civilizations, What?
[76] foreign affairs
—the voting, apparently almost entirely along civilizational
lines, that gave the 2000 Olympics to Sydney rather than
Beijing;
—the sale of missile components from China to Pakistan,
the resulting imposition of U.S. sanctions against China, and
the confrontation between China and the United States over
the alleged shipment of nuclear technology to Iran;
—China’s breaking the moratorium and testing a nuclear
weapon, despite vigorous U.S. protests, and North Korea’s
refusal to participate further in talks on its own nuclear weapons
program;
—the revelation that the U.S. State Department was following
a “dual containment” policy directed at both Iran and Iraq;
—the announcement by the U.S. Defense Department of a
new strategy of preparing for two “major regional conflicts,”
one against North Korea, the other against Iran or Iraq;
—the call by Iran’s president for alliances with China and
India so that “we can have the last word on international
events”;
—new German legislation drastically curtailing the admission
of refugees;
—the agreement between Russian President Boris Yeltsin
and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk on the disposition
of the Black Sea fleet and other issues;
—U.S. bombing of Baghdad, its virtually unanimous support
by Western governments, and its condemnation by almost
all Muslim governments as another example of the West’s
“double standard”;
—the United States listing Sudan as a terrorist state and the
indictment of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and his followers for
conspiring “to levy a war of urban terrorism against the United
States”;
—the improved prospects for the eventual admission of
Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia into NATO.
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [77]
Does a “clash of civilizations” perspective account for everything
of significance in world affairs during these past few
months? Of course not. It could be argued, for instance, that
the agreement between the Palestine Liberation Organization
and the Israeli government on the Gaza Strip and Jericho is a
dramatic anomaly to the civilizational paradigm, and in some
sense it is. Such an event, however, does not invalidate a civilizational
approach: it is historically significant precisely because
it is between groups from two different civilizations who have
been fighting each other for over four decades. Truces and
limited agreements are as much a part of the clashes between
civilizations as Soviet- American arms control agreements were
part of the Cold War; and while the conflict between Jew and
Arab may be circumscribed, it still continues.
Inter-civilizational issues are increasingly replacing intersuperpower
issues as the top items on the international agenda.
These issues include arms proliferation (particularly of weapons
of mass destruction and the means of delivering them), human
rights, and immigration. On these three issues, the West is on
one side and most of the other major civilizations are on the
other. President Clinton at the United Nations urges intensified
efforts to curb nuclear and other unconventional weapons;
Islamic and Confucian states plunge ahead in their efforts
to acquire them; Russia practices ambivalence. The extent
to which countries observe human rights corresponds overwhelmingly
with divisions among civilizations: the West and
Japan are highly protective of human rights; Latin America,
India, Russia, and parts of Africa protect some human rights;
China, many other Asian countries, and most Muslim societies
are least protective of human rights. Rising immigration
from non- Western sources is provoking rising concern in both
Europe and America. Other European countries in addition
to Germany are tightening their restrictions at the same time
that the barriers to movement of people within the European
If Not Civilizations, What?
[78] foreign affairs
Community are rapidly disappearing. In the United States,
massive waves of new immigrants are generating support for
new controls, despite the fact that most studies show immigrants
to be making a net positive contribution to the American
economy.
AMERICA UNDONE?
One function of a paradigm is to highlight what is important
(e.g., the potential for escalation in clashes between groups
from different civilizations); another is to place familiar phenomena
in a new perspective. In this respect, the civilizational
paradigm may have implications for the United States.1 Countries
like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia that bestride civilizational
fault lines tend to come apart. The unity of the United
States has historically rested on the twin bedrocks of European
culture and political democracy. These have been essentials of
America to which generations of immigrants have assimilated.
The essence of the American creed has been equal rights for
the individual, and historically immigrant and outcast groups
have invoked and thereby reinvigorated the principles of the
creed in their struggles for equal treatment in American society.
The most notable and successful effort was the civil rights
movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1950s and
1960s. Subsequently, however, the demand shifted from equal
rights for individuals to special rights (affirmative action and
similar measures) for blacks and other groups. Such claims run
directly counter to the underlying principles that have been
the basis of American political unity; they reject the idea of a
“color-blind” society of equal individuals and instead promote
a “color-conscious” society with government-sanctioned privileges
for some groups. In a parallel movement, intellectuals and
1See, for instance, the map in Die Welt, June 16, 1993, p. 3.
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [79]
politicians began to push the ideology of “multiculturalism,”
and to insist on the rewriting of American political, social, and
literary history from the viewpoint of non-European groups.
At the extreme, this movement tends to elevate obscure leaders
of minority groups to a level of importance equal to that
of the Founding Fathers. Both the demands for special group
rights and for multiculturalism encourage a clash of civilizations
within the United States and encourage what Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr., terms “the disuniting of America.”
The United States is becoming increasingly diverse ethnically
and racially. The Census Bureau estimates that by 2050
the American population will be 23 percent Hispanic, 16 percent
black and 10 percent Asian-American. In the past the
United States has successfully absorbed millions of immigrants
from scores of countries because they adapted to the prevailing
European culture and enthusiastically embraced the American
Creed of liberty, equality, individualism, democracy. Will
this pattern continue to prevail as 50 percent of the population
becomes Hispanic or nonwhite? Will the new immigrants be
assimilated into the hitherto dominant European culture of the
United States? If they are not, if the United States becomes truly
multicultural and pervaded with an internal clash of civilizations,
will it survive as a liberal democracy? The political identity
of the United States is rooted in the principles articulated
in its founding documents. Will the de-Westernization of the
United States, if it occurs, also mean its de-Americanization? If
it does and Americans cease to adhere to their liberal democratic
and European-rooted political ideology, the United States as we
have known it will cease to exist and will follow the other ideologically
defined superpower onto the ash heap of history.2
2For a brilliant and eloquent statement of why the future of the United
States could be problematic, see Bruce D. Porter, “Can American Democracy
Survive?,” Commentary, November 1993, pp. 37-40.
If Not Civilizations, What?
[80] foreign affairs
GOT A BETTER IDEA?
A civilizational approach explains much and orders much of
the “bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion” of the post-Cold War world,
which is why it has attracted so much attention and generated
so much debate around the world. Can any other paradigm
do better? If not civilizations, what? The responses in Foreign
Affairs to my article did not provide any compelling alternative
picture of the world. At best they suggested one pseudo-alternative
and one unreal alternative.
The pseudo-alternative is a statist paradigm that constructs
a totally irrelevant and artificial opposition between states and
civilizations: “Civilizations do not control states,” says Fouad
Ajami, “states control civilizations.” But it is meaningless to
talk about states and civilizations in terms of “control.” States,
of course, try to balance power, but if that is all they did, West
European countries would have coalesced with the Soviet
Union against the United States in the late 1940s. States respond
primarily to perceived threats, and the West European states
then saw a political and ideological threat from the East. As
my original article argued, civilizations are composed of one or
more states, and “Nation states will remain the most powerful
actors in world affairs.” Just as nation states generally belonged
to one of three worlds in the Cold War, they also belong to
civilizations. With the demise of the three worlds, nation states
increasingly define their identity and their interests in civilizational
terms, and West European peoples and states now see a
cultural threat from the South replacing the ideological threat
from the East.
We do not live in a world of countries characterized by the
“solitude of states” (to use Ajami’s phrase) with no connections
between them. Our world is one of overlapping groupings of
states brought together in varying degrees by history, culture,
religion, language, location and institutions. At the broadest
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [81]
level these groupings are civilizations. To deny their existence
is to deny the basic realities of human existence.
The unreal alternative is the one-world paradigm that a universal
civilization now exists or is likely to exist in the coming
years. Obviously people now have and for millennia have had
common characteristics that distinguish humans from other
species. These characteristics have always been compatible with
the existence of very different cultures. The argument that a
universal culture or civilization is now emerging takes various
forms, none of which withstands even passing scrutiny.
First, there is the argument that the collapse of Soviet communism
means the end of history and the universal victory of
liberal democracy throughout the world. This argument suffers
from the Single Alternative Fallacy. It is rooted in the Cold
War assumption that the only alternative to communism is liberal
democracy and that the demise of the first produces the
universality of the second. Obviously, however, there are many
forms of authoritarianism, nationalism, corporatism and market
communism (as in China) that are alive and well in today’s
world. More significantly, there are all the religious alternatives
that lie outside the world that is perceived in terms of secular
ideologies. In the modern world, religion is a central, perhaps
the central, force that motivates and mobilizes people. It is sheer
hubris to think that because Soviet communism has collapsed
the West has won the world for all time.
Second, there is the assumption that increased interaction—
greater communication and transportation—produces a common
culture. In some circumstances this may be the case. But
wars occur most frequently between societies with high levels
of interaction, and interaction frequently reinforces existing
identities and produces resistance, reaction and confrontation.
Third, there is the assumption that modernization and economic
development have a homogenizing effect and produce
a common modern culture closely resembling that which has
If Not Civilizations, What?
[82] foreign affairs
existed in the West in this century. Clearly, modern urban, literate,
wealthy, industrialized societies do share cultural traits
that distinguish them from backward, rural, poor, undeveloped
societies. In the contemporary world most modern societies
have been Western societies. But modernization does not
equal Westernization. Japan, Singapore and Saudi Arabia are
modern, prosperous societies but they clearly are non-Western.
The presumption of Westerners that other peoples who modernize
must become “like us” is a bit of Western arrogance that
in itself illustrates the clash of civilizations. To argue that Slovenes
and Serbs, Arabs and Jews, Hindus and Muslims, Russians
and Tajiks, Tamils and Sinhalese, Tibetans and Chinese,
Japanese and Americans all belong to a single Western-defined
universal civilization is to fly in the face of reality.
A universal civilization can only be the product of universal
power. Roman power created a near-universal civilization
within the limited confines of the ancient world. Western power
in the form of European colonialism in the nineteenth century
and American hegemony in the twentieth century extended
Western culture throughout much of the contemporary world.
European colonialism is over; American hegemony is receding.
The erosion of Western culture follows, as indigenous, historically
rooted mores, languages, beliefs and institutions reassert
themselves.
Amazingly, Ajami cites India as evidence of the sweeping
power of Western modernity. “India,” he says, “will not become
a Hindu state. The inheritance of Indian secularism will hold.”
Maybe it will, but certainly the overwhelming trend is away
from Nehru’s vision of a secular, socialist, Western, parliamentary
democracy to a society shaped by Hindu fundamentalism.
In India, Ajami goes on to say, “The vast middle class
will defend it [secularism], keep the order intact to maintain
India’s—and its own—place in the modern world of nations.”
Really? A long New York Times (September 23, 1993) story on this
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [83]
subject begins: “Slowly, gradually, but with the relentlessness
of floodwaters, a growing Hindu rage toward India’s Muslim
minority has been spreading among India’s solid middle class
Hindus—its merchants and accountants, its lawyers and engineers—
creating uncertainty about the future ability of adherents
of the two religions to get along.” An op-ed piece in the
Times (August 3, 1993) by an Indian journalist also highlights
the role of the middle class: “The most disturbing development
is the increasing number of senior civil servants, intellectuals,
and journalists who have begun to talk the language of Hindu
fundamentalism, protesting that religious minorities, particularly
the Muslims, have pushed them beyond the limits of
patience.” This author, Khushwant Singh, concludes sadly that
while India may retain a secular facade, India “will no longer
be the India we have known over the past 47 years” and “the
spirit within will be that of militant Hinduism.” In India, as in
other societies, fundamentalism is on the rise and is largely a
middle class phenomenon.
The decline of Western power will be followed, and is beginning
to be followed, by the retreat of Western culture. The rapidly
increasing economic power of East Asian states will, as
Kishore Mahbubani asserted, lead to increasing military power,
political influence and cultural assertiveness. A colleague of his
has elaborated this warning with respect to human rights:
[E]fforts to promote human rights in Asia must also reckon with the altered
distribution of power in the post-Cold War world. . . . Western leverage over
East and Southeast Asia has been greatly reduced. . . . There is far less scope for
conditionality and sanctions to force compliance with human rights. . . .
For the first time since the Universal Declaration [on Human Rights] was
adopted in 1948, countries not thoroughly steeped in the Judeo-Christian and
natural law traditions are in the first rank: That unprecedented situation will
define the new international politics of human rights. It will also multiply the
occasions for conflict. . . .
Economic success has engendered a greater cultural self-confidence. Whatever
their differences, East and Southeast Asian countries are increasingly conscious
of their own civilizations and tend to locate the sources of their economic success
If Not Civilizations, What?
[84] foreign affairs
in their own distinctive traditions and institutions. The self-congratulatory, simplistic,
and sanctimonious tone of much Western commentary at the end of the
Cold War and the current triumphalism of Western values grate on East and
Southeast Asians.3
Language is, of course, central to culture, and Ajami and
Robert Bartley both cite the widespread use of English as evidence
for the universality of Western culture (although Ajami’s
fictional example dates from 1900). Is, however, use of English
increasing or decreasing in relation to other languages? In
India, Africa and elsewhere, indigenous languages have been
replacing those of the colonial rulers. Even as Ajami and Bartley
were penning their comments, Newsweek ran an article
entitled “English Not Spoken Here Much Anymore” on Chinese
replacing English as the lingua franca of Hong Kong.4 In
a parallel development, Serbs now call their language Serbian,
not Serbo-Croatian, and write it in the Cyrillic script of their
Russian kinsmen, not in the Western script of their Catholic
enemies. At the same time, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and
Uzbekistan have shifted from the Cyrillic script of their former
Russian masters to the Western script of their Turkish kinsmen.
On the language front, Babelization prevails over universalization
and further evidences the rise of civilization identity.
CULTURE IS TO DIE FOR
Wherever one turns, the world is at odds with itself. If differences
in civilization are not responsible for these conflicts,
3Bilahari Kausikan, “Asia’s Different Standard,” Foreign Policy, Fall 1993,
pp. 28-34. In an accompanying article Aryeh Neier excoriates “Asia’s Unacceptable
Standard,” ibid., pp. 42-51.
4In the words of one British resident: “When I arrived in Hong Kong 10
years ago, nine times out of 10, a taxi driver would understand where you
were going. Now, nine times out of 10, he doesn’t.” Occidentals rather than
natives increasingly have to be hired to fill jobs requiring knowledge of English.
Newsweek, July 19, 1993, p. 24.
Samuel P. Huntington
the clash of civilizations: the debate [85]
what is? The critics of the civilization paradigm have not produced
a better explanation for what is going on in the world.
The civilizational paradigm, in contrast, strikes a responsive
chord throughout the world. In Asia, as one U.S. ambassador
reported, it is “spreading like wildfire.” In Europe, European
Community President Jacques Delors explicitly endorsed its
argument that “future conflicts will be sparked by cultural
factors rather than economics or ideology” and warned, “The
West needs to develop a deeper understanding of the religious
and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations,
and the way other nations see their interests, to identify what
we have in common.” Muslims, in turn, have seen “the clash”
as providing recognition and, in some degree, legitimation for
the distinctiveness of their own civilization and its independence
from the West. That civilizations are meaningful entities
accords with the way in which people see and experience
reality.
History has not ended. The world is not one. Civilizations
unite and divide humankind. The forces making for clashes
between civilizations can be contained only if they are recognized.
In a “world of different civilizations,” as my article
concluded, each “will have to learn to coexist with the others.”
What ultimately counts for people is not political ideology
or economic interest. Faith and family, blood and belief, are
what people identify with and what they will fight and die for.
And that is why the clash of civilizations is replacing the Cold
War as the central phenomenon of global politics, and why a
civilizational paradigm provides, better than any alternative,
a useful starting point for understanding and coping with the
changes going on in the world.
[86] foreign affairs
Clash of Globalizations
Stanley Hoffmann
JULY/AUGUST 2002
A NEW PARADIGM?
What is the state of international relations today? In the 1990s,
specialists concentrated on the partial disintegration of the
global order’s traditional foundations: states. During that
decade, many countries, often those born of decolonization,
revealed themselves to be no more than pseudostates, without
solid institutions, internal cohesion, or national consciousness.
The end of communist coercion in the former Soviet Union and
in the former Yugoslavia also revealed long-hidden ethnic tensions.
Minorities that were or considered themselves oppressed
demanded independence. In Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and
Haiti, rulers waged open warfare against their subjects. These
wars increased the importance of humanitarian interventions,
which came at the expense of the hallowed principles of national
sovereignty and nonintervention. Thus the dominant tension
of the decade was the clash between the fragmentation of states
(and the state system) and the progress of economic, cultural,
and political integration—in other words, globalization.
Everybody has understood the events of September 11 as the
beginning of a new era. But what does this break mean? In
the conventional approach to international relations, war took
STANLEY HOFFMANN is Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard
University and a regular book reviewer for Foreign Affairs.
Stanley Hoffmann
the clash of civilizations: the debate [87]
place among states. But in September, poorly armed individuals
suddenly challenged, surprised, and wounded the world’s
dominant superpower. The attacks also showed that, for all
its accomplishments, globalization makes an awful form of
violence easily accessible to hopeless fanatics. Terrorism is the
bloody link between interstate relations and global society. As
countless individuals and groups are becoming global actors
along with states, insecurity and vulnerability are rising. To
assess today’s bleak state of affairs, therefore, several questions
are necessary. What concepts help explain the new global order?
What is the condition of the interstate part of international
relations? And what does the emerging global civil society contribute
to world order?
SOUND AND FURY
Two models made a great deal of noise in the 1990s. The first
one—Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis—was not
vindicated by events. To be sure, his argument predicted the
end of ideological conflicts, not history itself, and the triumph
of political and economic liberalism. That point is correct in a
narrow sense: the “secular religions” that fought each other so
bloodily in the last century are now dead. But Fukuyama failed
to note that nationalism remains very much alive. Moreover,
he ignored the explosive potential of religious wars that has
extended to a large part of the Islamic world.
Fukuyama’s academic mentor, the political scientist Samuel
Huntington, provided a few years later a gloomier account that
saw a very different world. Huntington predicted that violence
resulting from international anarchy and the absence of common
values and institutions would erupt among civilizations rather
than among states or ideologies. But Huntington’s conception
of what constitutes a civilization was hazy. He failed to take into
account sufficiently conflicts within each so-called civilization,
Clash of Globalizations
[88] foreign affairs
and he overestimated the importance of religion in the behavior
of non-Western elites, who are often secularized and Westernized.
Hence he could not clearly define the link between a civilization
and the foreign policies of its member states.
Other, less sensational models still have adherents. The “realist”
orthodoxy insists that nothing has changed in international
relations since Thucydides and Machiavelli: a state’s military
and economic power determines its fate; interdependence and
international institutions are secondary and fragile phenomena;
and states’ objectives are imposed by the threats to their
survival or security. Such is the world described by Henry Kissinger.
Unfortunately, this venerable model has trouble integrating
change, especially globalization and the rise of nonstate
actors. Moreover, it overlooks the need for international cooperation
that results from such new threats as the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). And it ignores what
the scholar Raymond Aron called the “germ of a universal consciousness”:
the liberal, promarket norms that developed states
have come to hold in common.
Taking Aron’s point, many scholars today interpret the world
in terms of a triumphant globalization that submerges borders
through new means of information and communication. In
this universe, a state choosing to stay closed invariably faces
decline and growing discontent among its subjects, who are
eager for material progress. But if it opens up, it must accept a
reduced role that is mainly limited to social protection, physical
protection against aggression or civil war, and maintaining
national identity. The champion of this epic without heroes is
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. He contrasts
barriers with open vistas, obsolescence with modernity, state
control with free markets. He sees in globalization the light
of dawn, the “golden straitjacket” that will force contentious
publics to understand that the logic of globalization is that of
peace (since war would interrupt globalization and therefore
Stanley Hoffmann
the clash of civilizations: the debate [89]
progress) and democracy (because new technologies increase
individual autonomy and encourage initiative).
BACK TO REALITY
These models come up hard against three realities. First, rivalries
among great powers (and the capacity of smaller states to
exploit such tensions) have most certainly not disappeared. For
a while now, however, the existence of nuclear weapons has
produced a certain degree of prudence among the powers that
have them. The risk of destruction that these weapons hold
has moderated the game and turned nuclear arms into instruments
of last resort. But the game could heat up as more states
seek other WMD as a way of narrowing the gap between the
nuclear club and the other powers. The sale of such weapons
thus becomes a hugely contentious issue, and efforts to slow
down the spread of all WMD, especially to dangerous “rogue”
states, can paradoxically become new causes of violence.
Second, if wars between states are becoming less common,
wars within them are on the rise—as seen in the former Yugoslavia,
Iraq, much of Africa, and Sri Lanka. Uninvolved states
first tend to hesitate to get engaged in these complex conflicts,
but they then (sometimes) intervene to prevent these conflicts
from turning into regional catastrophes. The interveners, in
turn, seek the help of the United Nations or regional organizations
to rebuild these states, promote stability, and prevent
future fragmentation and misery.
Third, states’ foreign policies are shaped not only by realist
geopolitical factors such as economics and military power
but by domestic politics. Even in undemocratic regimes, forces
such as xenophobic passions, economic grievances, and transnational
ethnic solidarity can make policymaking far more
complex and less predictable. Many states—especially the
United States—have to grapple with the frequent interplay of
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competing government branches. And the importance of individual
leaders and their personalities is often underestimated in
the study of international affairs.
For realists, then, transnational terrorism creates a formidable
dilemma. If a state is the victim of private actors such
as terrorists, it will try to eliminate these groups by depriving
them of sanctuaries and punishing the states that harbor them.
The national interest of the attacked state will therefore require
either armed interventions against governments supporting terrorists
or a course of prudence and discreet pressure on other
governments to bring these terrorists to justice. Either option
requires a questioning of sovereignty—the holy concept of realist
theories. The classical realist universe of Hans Morgenthau
and Aron may therefore still be very much alive in a world of
states, but it has increasingly hazy contours and offers only difficult
choices when it faces the threat of terrorism.
At the same time, the real universe of globalization does not
resemble the one that Friedman celebrates. In fact, globalization
has three forms, each with its own problems. First is economic
globalization, which results from recent revolutions in
technology, information, trade, foreign investment, and international
business. The main actors are companies, investors,
banks, and private services industries, as well as states and
international organizations. This present form of capitalism,
ironically foreseen by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, poses a
central dilemma between efficiency and fairness. The specialization
and integration of firms make it possible to increase
aggregate wealth, but the logic of pure capitalism does not
favor social justice. Economic globalization has thus become
a formidable cause of inequality among and within states, and
the concern for global competitiveness limits the aptitude of
states and other actors to address this problem.
Next comes cultural globalization. It stems from the technological
revolution and economic globalization, which together
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foster the flow of cultural goods. Here the key choice is between
uniformization (often termed “Americanization”) and diversity.
The result is both a “disenchantment of the world” (in Max
Weber’s words) and a reaction against uniformity. The latter
takes form in a renaissance of local cultures and languages as
well as assaults against Western culture, which is denounced
as an arrogant bearer of a secular, revolutionary ideology and a
mask for U.S. hegemony.
Finally there is political globalization, a product of the other
two. It is characterized by the preponderance of the United
States and its political institutions and by a vast array of international
and regional organizations and transgovernmental
networks (specializing in areas such as policing or migration
or justice). It is also marked by private institutions that are neither
governmental nor purely national—say, Doctors Without
Borders or Amnesty International. But many of these agencies
lack democratic accountability and are weak in scope, power,
and authority. Furthermore, much uncertainty hangs over the
fate of American hegemony, which faces significant resistance
abroad and is affected by America’s own oscillation between
the temptations of domination and isolation.
The benefits of globalization are undeniable. But Friedmanlike
optimism rests on very fragile foundations. For one
thing, globalization is neither inevitable nor irresistible. Rather,
it is largely an American creation, rooted in the period after
World War II and based on U.S. economic might. By extension,
then, a deep and protracted economic crisis in the United
States could have as devastating an effect on globalization as
did the Great Depression.
Second, globalization’s reach remains limited because it
excludes many poor countries, and the states that it does transform
react in different ways. This fact stems from the diversity
of economic and social conditions at home as well as from partisan
politics. The world is far away from a perfect integration
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of markets, services, and factors of production. Sometimes the
simple existence of borders slows down and can even paralyze
this integration; at other times it gives integration the flavors
and colors of the dominant state (as in the case of the Internet).
Third, international civil society remains embryonic. Many
nongovernmental organizations reflect only a tiny segment of
the populations of their members’ states. They largely represent
only modernized countries, or those in which the weight of the
state is not too heavy. Often, NGOs have little independence
from governments.
Fourth, the individual emancipation so dear to Friedman
does not quickly succeed in democratizing regimes, as one
can see today in China. Nor does emancipation prevent public
institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank, or the World Trade Organization from remaining
opaque in their activities and often arbitrary and unfair in
their rulings.
Fifth, the attractive idea of improving the human condition
through the abolition of barriers is dubious. Globalization is
in fact only a sum of techniques (audio and videocassettes,
the Internet, instantaneous communications) that are at the
disposal of states or private actors. Self-interest and ideology,
not humanitarian reasons, are what drive these actors. Their
behavior is quite different from the vision of globalization as an
Enlightenment-based utopia that is simultaneously scientific,
rational, and universal. For many reasons—misery, injustice,
humiliation, attachment to traditions, aspiration to more than
just a better standard of living—this “Enlightenment” stereotype
of globalization thus provokes revolt and dissatisfaction.
Another contradiction is also at work. On the one hand, international
and transnational cooperation is necessary to ensure
that globalization will not be undermined by the inequalities
resulting from market fluctuations, weak state-sponsored protections,
and the incapacity of many states to improve their
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fates by themselves. On the other hand, cooperation presupposes
that many states and rich private players operate altruistically—
which is certainly not the essence of international
relations—or practice a remarkably generous conception of
their long-term interests. But the fact remains that most rich
states still refuse to provide sufficient development aid or to
intervene in crisis situations such as the genocide in Rwanda.
That reluctance compares poorly with the American enthusiasm
to pursue the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
What is wrong here is not patriotic enthusiasm as such, but the
weakness of the humanitarian impulse when the national interest
in saving non-American victims is not self-evident.
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Among the many effects of globalization on international
politics, three hold particular importance. The first concerns
institutions. Contrary to realist predictions, most states are not
perpetually at war with each other. Many regions and countries
live in peace; in other cases, violence is internal rather than stateto-
state. And since no government can do everything by itself,
interstate organisms have emerged. The result, which can be
termed “global society,” seeks to reduce the potentially destructive
effects of national regulations on the forces of integration.
But it also seeks to ensure fairness in the world market and
create international regulatory regimes in such areas as trade,
communications, human rights, migration, and refugees. The
main obstacle to this effort is the reluctance of states to accept
global directives that might constrain the market or further
reduce their sovereignty. Thus the UN’s powers remain limited
and sometimes only purely theoretical. International criminal
justice is still only a spotty and contested last resort. In the
world economy—where the market, not global governance, has
been the main beneficiary of the state’s retreat—the network
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of global institutions is fragmented and incomplete. Foreign
investment remains ruled by bilateral agreements. Environmental
protection is badly ensured, and issues such as migration
and population growth are largely ignored. Institutional
networks are not powerful enough to address unfettered shortterm
capital movements, the lack of international regulation
on bankruptcy and competition, and primitive coordination
among rich countries. In turn, the global “governance” that
does exist is partial and weak at a time when economic globalization
deprives many states of independent monetary and
fiscal policies, or it obliges them to make cruel choices between
economic competitiveness and the preservation of social safety
nets. All the while, the United States displays an increasing
impatience toward institutions that weigh on American freedom
of action. Movement toward a world state looks increasingly
unlikely. The more state sovereignty crumbles under the
blows of globalization or such recent developments as humanitarian
intervention and the fight against terrorism, the more
states cling to what is left to them.
Second, globalization has not profoundly challenged the
enduring national nature of citizenship. Economic life takes
place on a global scale, but human identity remains national—
hence the strong resistance to cultural homogenization. Over
the centuries, increasingly centralized states have expanded
their functions and tried to forge a sense of common identity
for their subjects. But no central power in the world can do
the same thing today, even in the European Union. There, a
single currency and advanced economic coordination have not
yet produced a unified economy or strong central institutions
endowed with legal autonomy, nor have they resulted in a sense
of postnational citizenship. The march from national identity
to one that would be both national and European has only just
begun. A world very partially unified by technology still has
no collective consciousness or collective solidarity. What states
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are unwilling to do the world market cannot do all by itself,
especially in engendering a sense of world citizenship.
Third, there is the relationship between globalization and violence.
The traditional state of war, even if it is limited in scope,
still persists. There are high risks of regional explosions in the
Middle East and in East Asia, and these could seriously affect
relations between the major powers. Because of this threat, and
because modern arms are increasingly costly, the “anarchical
society” of states lacks the resources to correct some of globalization’s
most flagrant flaws. These very costs, combined with
the classic distrust among international actors who prefer to try
to preserve their security alone or through traditional alliances,
prevent a more satisfactory institutionalization of world politics—
for example, an increase of the UN’s powers. This step
could happen if global society were provided with sufficient
forces to prevent a conflict or restore peace—but it is not.
Globalization, far from spreading peace, thus seems to foster
conflicts and resentments. The lowering of various barriers
celebrated by Friedman, especially the spread of global media,
makes it possible for the most deprived or oppressed to compare
their fate with that of the free and well-off. These dispossessed
then ask for help from others with common resentments, ethnic
origin, or religious faith. Insofar as globalization enriches
some and uproots many, those who are both poor and uprooted
may seek revenge and self-esteem in terrorism.
GLOBALIZATION AND TERROR
Terrorism is the poisoned fruit of several forces. It can be the
weapon of the weak in a classic conflict among states or within
a state, as in Kashmir or the Palestinian territories. But it can
also be seen as a product of globalization. Transnational terrorism
is made possible by the vast array of communication tools.
Islamic terrorism, for example, is not only based on support for
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the Palestinian struggle and opposition to an invasive American
presence. It is also fueled by a resistance to “unjust” economic
globalization and to a Western culture deemed threatening to
local religions and cultures.
If globalization often facilitates terrorist violence, the fight
against this war without borders is potentially disastrous for
both economic development and globalization. Antiterrorist
measures restrict mobility and financial flows, while new terrorist
attacks could lead the way for an antiglobalist reaction
comparable to the chauvinistic paroxysms of the 1930s. Global
terrorism is not the simple extension of war among states to
nonstates. It is the subversion of traditional ways of war because
it does not care about the sovereignty of either its enemies or
the allies who shelter them. It provokes its victims to take measures
that, in the name of legitimate defense, violate knowingly
the sovereignty of those states accused of encouraging terror.
(After all, it was not the Taliban’s infamous domestic violations
of human rights that led the United States into Afghanistan; it
was the Taliban’s support of Osama bin Laden.)
But all those trespasses against the sacred principles of sovereignty
do not constitute progress toward global society, which
has yet to agree on a common definition of terrorism or on a
common policy against it. Indeed, the beneficiaries of the antiterrorist
“war” have been the illiberal, poorer states that have
lost so much of their sovereignty of late. Now the crackdown
on terror allows them to tighten their controls on their own
people, products, and money. They can give themselves new
reasons to violate individual rights in the name of common
defense against insecurity—and thus stop the slow, hesitant
march toward international criminal justice.
Another main beneficiary will be the United States, the only
actor capable of carrying the war against terrorism into all corners
of the world. Despite its power, however, America cannot
fully protect itself against future terrorist acts, nor can it fully
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overcome its ambivalence toward forms of interstate cooperation
that might restrict U.S. freedom of action. Thus terrorism
is a global phenomenon that ultimately reinforces the enemy—
the state—at the same time as it tries to destroy it. The states
that are its targets have no interest in applying the laws of
war to their fight against terrorists; they have every interest in
treating terrorists as outlaws and pariahs. The champions of
globalization have sometimes glimpsed the “jungle” aspects
of economic globalization, but few observers foresaw similar
aspects in global terrorist and antiterrorist violence.
Finally, the unique position of the United States raises a serious
question over the future of world affairs. In the realm of
interstate problems, American behavior will determine whether
the nonsuperpowers and weak states will continue to look at the
United States as a friendly power (or at least a tolerable hegemon),
or whether they are provoked by Washington’s hubris
into coalescing against American preponderance. America may
be a hegemon, but combining rhetorical overkill and ill-defined
designs is full of risks. Washington has yet to understand that
nothing is more dangerous for a “hyperpower” than the temptation
of unilateralism. It may well believe that the constraints
of international agreements and organizations are not necessary,
since U.S. values and power are all that is needed for
world order. But in reality, those same international constraints
provide far better opportunities for leadership than arrogant
demonstrations of contempt for others’ views, and they offer
useful ways of restraining unilateralist behavior in other states.
A hegemon concerned with prolonging its rule should be especially
interested in using internationalist methods and institutions,
for the gain in influence far exceeds the loss in freedom
of action.
In the realm of global society, much will depend on whether
the United States will overcome its frequent indifference to
the costs that globalization imposes on poorer countries. For
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now, Washington is too reluctant to make resources available
for economic development, and it remains hostile to agencies
that monitor and regulate the global market. All too often,
the right-leaning tendencies of the American political system
push U.S. diplomacy toward an excessive reliance on America’s
greatest asset—military strength—as well as an excessive reliance
on market capitalism and a “sovereigntism” that offends
and alienates. That the mighty United States is so afraid of the
world’s imposing its “inferior” values on Americans is often a
source of ridicule and indignation abroad.
ODD MAN OUT
For all these tensions, it is still possible that the American war
on terrorism will be contained by prudence, and that other
governments will give priority to the many internal problems
created by interstate rivalries and the flaws of globalization.
But the world risks being squeezed between a new Scylla and
Charybdis. The Charybdis is universal intervention, unilaterally
decided by American leaders who are convinced that they
have found a global mission provided by a colossal threat. Presentable
as an epic contest between good and evil, this struggle
offers the best way of rallying the population and overcoming
domestic divisions. The Scylla is resignation to universal chaos
in the form of new attacks by future bin Ladens, fresh humanitarian
disasters, or regional wars that risk escalation. Only
through wise judgment can the path between them be charted.
We can analyze the present, but we cannot predict the future.
We live in a world where a society of uneven and often virtual
states overlaps with a global society burdened by weak public
institutions and underdeveloped civil society. A single power
dominates, but its economy could become unmanageable or
distrusted by future terrorist attacks. Thus to predict the future
confidently would be highly incautious or naive. To be sure,
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the world has survived many crises, but it has done so at a very
high price, even in times when WMD were not available.
Precisely because the future is neither decipherable nor determined,
students of international relations face two missions.
They must try to understand what goes on by taking an inventory
of current goods and disentangling the threads of present
networks. But the fear of confusing the empirical with the
normative should not prevent them from writing as political
philosophers at a time when many philosophers are extending
their conceptions of just society to international relations. How
can one make the global house more livable? The answer presupposes
a political philosophy that would be both just and
acceptable even to those whose values have other foundations.
As the late philosopher Judith Shklar did, we can take as a point
of departure and as a guiding thread the fate of the victims
of violence, oppression, and misery; as a goal, we should seek
material and moral emancipation. While taking into account
the formidable constraints of the world as it is, it is possible to
loosen them.
[100] foreign affairs
Us and Them
The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism
Jerry Z. Muller
MARCH/APRIL 2008
Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world,
Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in
politics. After all, in the United States people of varying ethnic
origins live cheek by jowl in relative peace. Within two or three
generations of immigration, their ethnic identities are attenuated
by cultural assimilation and intermarriage. Surely, things
cannot be so different elsewhere.
Americans also find ethnonationalism discomfiting both
intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths
to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture,
often deliberately constructed. And ethicists scorn value systems
based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.
But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away. Immigrants
to the united states usually arrive with a willingness to fit
into their new country and reshape their identities accordingly.
But for those who remain behind in lands where their ancestors
have lived for generations, if not centuries, political identities
often take ethnic form, producing competing communal
claims to political power. The creation of a peaceful regional
JERRY Z. MULLER is Professor of History at the Catholic University of
America. His most recent book is The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in
Modern European Thought.
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the clash of civilizations: the debate [101]
order of nation-states has usually been the product of a violent
process of ethnic separation. In areas where that separation has
not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.
A familiar and influential narrative of twentieth-century
European history argues that nationalism twice led to war, in
1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, Europeans
concluded that nationalism was a danger and gradually
abandoned it. In the postwar decades, western Europeans
enmeshed themselves in a web of transnational institutions,
culminating in the European Union (EU). After the fall of the
Soviet empire, that transnational framework spread eastward
to encompass most of the continent. Europeans entered a postnational
era, which was not only a good thing in itself but also
a model for other regions. Nationalism, in this view, had been a
tragic detour on the road to a peaceful liberal democratic order.
This story is widely believed by educated Europeans and
even more so, perhaps, by educated Americans. Recently, for
example, in the course of arguing that Israel ought to give up
its claim to be a Jewish state and dissolve itself into some sort
of binational entity with the Palestinians, the prominent historian
Tony Judt informed the readers of The New York Review of
Books that “the problem with Israel . . . [is that] it has imported
a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project
into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights,
open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish
state’ . . . is an anachronism.”
Yet the experience of the hundreds of Africans and Asians
who perish each year trying to get into Europe by landing on
the coast of Spain or Italy reveals that Europe’s frontiers are not
so open. And a survey would show that whereas in 1900 there
were many states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly
dominant nationality, by 2007 there were only two, and one
of those, Belgium, was close to breaking up. Aside from Switzerland,
in other words—where the domestic ethnic balance
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of power is protected by strict citizenship laws—in Europe the
“separatist project” has not so much vanished as triumphed.
Far from having been superannuated in 1945, in many respects
ethnonationalism was at its apogee in the years immediately
after World War II. European stability during the Cold War
era was in fact due partly to the widespread fulfillment of the
ethnonationalist project. And since the end of the Cold War,
ethnonationalism has continued to reshape European borders.
In short, ethnonationalism has played a more profound and
lasting role in modern history than is commonly understood,
and the processes that led to the dominance of the ethnonational
state and the separation of ethnic groups in Europe are
likely to reoccur elsewhere. Increased urbanization, literacy,
and political mobilization; differences in the fertility rates and
economic performance of various ethnic groups; and immigration
will challenge the internal structure of states as well as their
borders. Whether politically correct or not, ethnonationalism
will continue to shape the world in the twenty-first century.
THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY
There are two major ways of thinking about national identity.
One is that all people who live within a country’s borders are
part of the nation, regardless of their ethnic, racial, or religious
origins. This liberal or civic nationalism is the conception with
which contemporary Americans are most likely to identify. But
the liberal view has competed with and often lost out to a different
view, that of ethnonationalism. The core of the ethnonationalist
idea is that nations are defined by a shared heritage,
which usually includes a common language, a common faith,
and a common ethnic ancestry.
The ethnonationalist view has traditionally dominated
through much of Europe and has held its own even in the
United States until recently. For substantial stretches of U.S.
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the clash of civilizations: the debate [103]
history, it was believed that only the people of English origin,
or those who were Protestant, or white, or hailed from northern
Europe were real Americans. It was only in 1965 that the reform
of U.S. immigration law abolished the system of national-origin
quotas that had been in place for several decades. This system
had excluded Asians entirely and radically restricted immigration
from southern and eastern Europe.
Ethnonationalism draws much of its emotive power from the
notion that the members of a nation are part of an extended
family, ultimately united by ties of blood. It is the subjective
belief in the reality of a common “we” that counts. The markers
that distinguish the in-group vary from case to case and time
to time, and the subjective nature of the communal boundaries
has led some to discount their practical significance. But as
Walker Connor, an astute student of nationalism, has noted,
“It is not what is, but what people believe is that has behavioral
consequences.” And the central tenets of ethnonationalist
belief are that nations exist, that each nation ought to have its
own state, and that each state should be made up of the members
of a single nation.
The conventional narrative of European history asserts
that nationalism was primarily liberal in the western part of
the continent and that it became more ethnically oriented as
one moved east. There is some truth to this, but it disguises a
good deal as well. It is more accurate to say that when modern
states began to form, political boundaries and ethnolinguistic
boundaries largely coincided in the areas along Europe’s Atlantic
coast. Liberal nationalism, that is, was most apt to emerge
in states that already possessed a high degree of ethnic homogeneity.
Long before the nineteenth century, countries such
as England, France, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden emerged as
nation-states in polities where ethnic divisions had been softened
by a long history of cultural and social homogenization.
In the center of the continent, populated by speakers of
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German and Italian, political structures were fragmented into
hundreds of small units. But in the 1860s and 1870s, this fragmentation
was resolved by the creation of Italy and Germany,
so that almost all Italians lived in the former and a majority of
Germans lived in the latter. Moving further east, the situation
changed again. As late as 1914, most of central, eastern, and
southeastern Europe was made up not of nation-states but of
empires. The Hapsburg empire comprised what are now Austria,
the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia and parts
of what are now Bosnia, Croatia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine,
and more. The Romanov empire stretched into Asia, including
what is now Russia and what are now parts of Poland,
Ukraine, and more. And the Ottoman Empire covered modern
Turkey and parts of today’s Bulgaria, Greece, Romania,
and Serbia and extended through much of the Middle East
and North Africa as well.
Each of these empires was composed of numerous ethnic
groups, but they were not multinational in the sense of granting
equal status to the many peoples that made up their populaces.
The governing monarchy and landed nobility often differed in
language and ethnic origin from the urbanized trading class,
whose members in turn usually differed in language, ethnicity,
and often religion from the peasantry. In the Hapsburg
and Romanov empires, for example, merchants were usually
Germans or Jews. In the Ottoman Empire, they were often
Armenians, Greeks, or Jews. And in each empire, the peasantry
was itself ethnically diverse.
Up through the nineteenth century, these societies were still
largely agrarian: most people lived as peasants in the countryside,
and few were literate. Political, social, and economic stratifications
usually correlated with ethnicity, and people did not
expect to change their positions in the system. Until the rise
of modern nationalism, all of this seemed quite unproblematic.
In this world, moreover, people of one religion, language,
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the clash of civilizations: the debate [105]
or culture were often dispersed across various countries and
empires. There were ethnic Germans, for example, not only
in the areas that became Germany but also scattered throughout
the Hapsburg and Romanov empires. There were Greeks
in Greece but also millions of them in the Ottoman Empire
(not to mention hundreds of thousands of Muslim Turks in
Greece). And there were Jews everywhere—but with no independent
state of their own.
THE RISE OF ETHNONATIONALISM
Today, people tend to take the nation-state for granted as the
natural form of political association and regard empires as
anomalies. But over the broad sweep of recorded history, the
opposite is closer to the truth. Most people at most times have
lived in empires, with the nation-state the exception rather
than the rule. So what triggered the change?
The rise of ethnonationalism, as the sociologist Ernest Gellner
has explained, was not some strange historical mistake; rather,
it was propelled by some of the deepest currents of modernity.
Military competition between states created a demand
for expanded state resources and hence continual economic
growth. Economic growth, in turn, depended on mass literacy
and easy communication, spurring policies to promote education
and a common language—which led directly to conflicts
over language and communal opportunities.
Modern societies are premised on the egalitarian notion that
in theory, at least, anyone can aspire to any economic position.
But in practice, everyone does not have an equal likelihood of
upward economic mobility, and not simply because individuals
have different innate capabilities. For such advances depend
in part on what economists call “cultural capital, “ the skills
and behavioral patterns that help individuals and groups succeed.
Groups with traditions of literacy and engagement in
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commerce tend to excel, for example, whereas those without
such traditions tend to lag behind.
As they moved into cities and got more education during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ethnic groups with
largely peasant backgrounds, such as the Czechs, the Poles, the
Slovaks, and the Ukrainians found that key positions in the
government and the economy were already occupied—often
by ethnic Armenians, Germans, Greeks, or Jews. Speakers of
the same language came to share a sense that they belonged
together and to define themselves in contrast to other communities.
And eventually they came to demand a nationstate
of their own, in which they would be the masters, dominating
politics, staffing the civil service, and controlling commerce.
Ethnonationalism had a psychological basis as well as an economic
one. By creating a new and direct relationship between
individuals and the government, the rise of the modern state
weakened individuals’ traditional bonds to intermediate social
units, such as the family, the clan, the guild, and the church.
And by spurring social and geographic mobility and a self-help
mentality, the rise of market-based economies did the same.
The result was an emotional vacuum that was often filled by
new forms of identification, often along ethnic lines.
Ethnonationalist ideology called for a congruence between
the state and the ethnically defined nation, with explosive
results. As Lord Acton recognized in 1862, “By making the
state and the nation commensurate with each other in theory,
[nationalism] reduces practically to a subject condition all other
nationalities that may be within the boundary. . . . According,
therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilization in that
dominant body which claims all the rights of the community,
the inferior races are exterminated, or reduced to servitude, or
outlawed, or put in a condition of dependence.” And that is just
what happened.
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the clash of civilizations: the debate [107]
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
Nineteenth-century liberals, like many proponents of globalization
today, believed that the spread of international commerce
would lead people to recognize the mutual benefits
that could come from peace and trade, both within polities
and between them. Socialists agreed, although they believed
that harmony would come only after the arrival of socialism.
Yet that was not the course that twentieth-century history was
destined to follow. The process of “making the state and the
nation commensurate” took a variety of forms, from voluntary
emigration (often motivated by governmental discrimination
against minority ethnicities) to forced deportation (also known
as “population transfer”) to genocide. Although the term “ethnic
cleansing” has come into English usage only recently, its
verbal correlates in Czech, French, German, and Polish go
back much further. Much of the history of twentieth-century
Europe, in fact, has been a painful, drawn-out process of ethnic
disaggregation.
Massive ethnic disaggregation began on Europe’s frontiers.
In the ethnically mixed Balkans, wars to expand the nationstates
of Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia at the expense of the
ailing Ottoman Empire were accompanied by ferocious interethnic
violence. During the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, almost
half a million people left their traditional homelands, either
voluntarily or by force. Muslims left regions under the control
of Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs; Bulgarians abandoned
Greek-controlled areas of Macedonia; Greeks fled from regions
of Macedonia ceded to Bulgaria and Serbia.
World War I led to the demise of the three great turn-of-thecentury
empires, unleashing an explosion of ethnonationalism
in the process. In the Ottoman Empire, mass deportations
and murder during the war took the lives of a million members
of the local Armenian minority in an early attempt at
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ethnic cleansing, if not genocide. In 1919, the Greek government
invaded the area that would become Turkey, seeking to
carve out a “greater Greece” stretching all the way to Constantinople.
Meeting with initial success, the Greek forces looted
and burned villages in an effort to drive out the region’s ethnic
Turks. But Turkish forces eventually regrouped and pushed
the Greek army back, engaging in their own ethnic cleansing
against local Greeks along the way. Then the process of population
transfers was formalized in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne:
all ethnic Greeks were to go to Greece, all Greek Muslims to
Turkey. In the end, Turkey expelled almost 1.5 million people,
and Greece expelled almost 400, 000.
Out of the breakup of the Hapsburg and Romanov empires
emerged a multitude of new countries. Many conceived of
themselves as ethnonational polities, in which the state existed
to protect and promote the dominant ethnic group. Yet of central
and eastern Europe’s roughly 60 million people, 25 million
continued to be part of ethnic minorities in the countries in
which they lived. In most cases, the ethnic majority did not
believe in trying to help minorities assimilate, nor were the
minorities always eager to do so themselves. Nationalist governments
openly discriminated in favor of the dominant community.
Government activities were conducted solely in the
language of the majority, and the civil service was reserved for
those who spoke it.
In much of central and eastern Europe, Jews had long played
an important role in trade and commerce. When they were
given civil rights in the late nineteenth century, they tended to
excel in professions requiring higher education, such as medicine
and law, and soon Jews or people of Jewish descent made up
almost half the doctors and lawyers in cities such as Budapest,
Vienna, and Warsaw. By the 1930s, many governments adopted
policies to try to check and reverse these advances, denying Jews
credit and limiting their access to higher education. In other
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words, the National Socialists who came to power in Germany
in 1933 and based their movement around a “Germanness” they
defined in contrast to “Jewishness” were an extreme version of
a more common ethnonationalist trend.
The politics of ethnonationalism took an even deadlier turn
during World War II. The Nazi regime tried to reorder the ethnic
map of the continent by force. Its most radical act was an
attempt to rid Europe of Jews by killing them all—an attempt
that largely succeeded. The Nazis also used ethnic German
minorities in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere to enforce
Nazi domination, and many of the regimes allied with Germany
engaged in their own campaigns against internal ethnic
enemies. The Romanian regime, for example, murdered hundreds
of thousands of Jews on its own, without orders from Germany,
and the government of Croatia murdered not only its
Jews but hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Romany as well.
POSTWAR BUT NOT POSTNATIONAL
One might have expected that the Nazi regime’s deadly policies
and crushing defeat would mark the end of the ethnonationalist
era. But in fact they set the stage for another massive round
of ethnonational transformation. The political settlement in
central Europe after World War I had been achieved primarily
by moving borders to align them with populations. After
World War II, it was the populations that moved instead. Millions
of people were expelled from their homes and countries,
with at least the tacit support of the victorious Allies.
Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin
all concluded that the expulsion of ethnic Germans from
non-German countries was a prerequisite to a stable postwar
order. As Churchill put it in a speech to the British parliament
in December 1944, “Expulsion is the method which, so far
as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and
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lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless
trouble. . . . A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed
at the prospect of the disentanglement of population, nor am
I alarmed by these large transferences.”He cited the Treaty of
Lausanne as a precedent, showing how even the leaders of liberal
democracies had concluded that only radically illiberal
measures would eliminate the causes of ethnonational aspirations
and aggression.
Between 1944 and 1945, five million ethnic Germans from
the eastern parts of the German Reich fled westward to escape
the conquering Red Army, which was energetically raping
and massacring its way to Berlin. Then, between 1945 and
1947, the new postliberation regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Poland, and Yugoslavia expelled another seven million
Germans in response to their collaboration with the Nazis.
Together, these measures constituted the largest forced population
movement in European history, with hundreds of thousands
of people dying along the way.
The handful of Jews who survived the war and returned to
their homes in eastern Europe met with so much anti-Semitism
that most chose to leave for good. About 220, 000 of them
made their way into the American-occupied zone of Germany,
from which most eventually went to Israel or the United States.
Jews thus essentially vanished from central and eastern Europe,
which had been the center of Jewish life since the sixteenth
century.
Millions of refugees from other ethnic groups were also
evicted from their homes and resettled after the war. This was
due partly to the fact that the borders of the Soviet Union had
moved westward, into what had once been Poland, while the
borders of Poland also moved westward, into what had once
been Germany. To make populations correspond to the new
borders, 1.5 million Poles living in areas that were now part
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of the Soviet Union were deported to Poland, and 500, 000
ethnic Ukrainians who had been living in Poland were sent to
the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Yet another exchange
of populations took place between Czechoslovakia and Hungary,
with Slovaks transferred out of Hungary and Magyars
sent away from Czechoslovakia. A smaller number of Magyars
also moved to Hungary from Yugoslavia, with Serbs and Croats
moving in the opposite direction.
As a result of this massive process of ethnic unmixing, the
ethnonationalist ideal was largely realized: for the most part,
each nation in Europe had its own state, and each state was
made up almost exclusively of a single ethnic nationality. During
the Cold War, the few exceptions to this rule included
Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. But these
countries’ subsequent fate only demonstrated the ongoing vitality
of ethnonationalism. After the fall of communism, East and
West Germany were unified with remarkable rapidity, Czechoslovakia
split peacefully into Czech and Slovak republics, and
the Soviet Union broke apart into a variety of different national
units. Since then, ethnic Russian minorities in many of the
post-Soviet states have gradually immigrated to Russia, Magyars
in Romania have moved to Hungary, and the few remaining
ethnic Germans in Russia have largely gone to Germany. A
million people of Jewish origin from the former Soviet Union
have made their way to Israel. Yugoslavia saw the secession of
Croatia and Slovenia and then descended into ethnonational
wars over Bosnia and Kosovo.
The breakup of Yugoslavia was simply the last act of a long
play. But the plot of that play—the disaggregation of peoples
and the triumph of ethnonationalism in modern Europe—is
rarely recognized, and so a story whose significance is comparable
to the spread of democracy or capitalism remains largely
unknown and unappreciated.
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DECOLONIZATION AND AFTER
The effects of ethnonationalism, of course, have hardly been
confined to Europe. For much of the developing world, decolonization
has meant ethnic disaggregation through the exchange
or expulsion of local minorities.
The end of the British Raj in 1947 brought about the partition
of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, along with
an orgy of violence that took hundreds of thousands of lives.
Fifteen million people became refugees, including Muslims
who went to Pakistan and Hindus who went to India. Then, in
1971, Pakistan itself, originally unified on the basis of religion,
dissolved into Urdu-speaking Pakistan and Bengali-speaking
Bangladesh.
In the former British mandate of Palestine, a Jewish state
was established in 1948 and was promptly greeted by the revolt
of the indigenous Arab community and an invasion from the
surrounding Arab states. In the war that resulted, regions that
fell under Arab control were cleansed of their Jewish populations,
and Arabs fled or were forced out of areas that came
under Jewish control. Some 750, 000 Arabs left, primarily for
the surrounding Arab countries, and the remaining 150, 000
constituted only about a sixth of the population of the new
Jewish state. In the years afterward, nationalist-inspired violence
against Jews in Arab countries propelled almost all of the
more than 500, 000 Jews there to leave their lands of origin
and immigrate to Israel. Likewise, in 1962 the end of French
control in Algeria led to the forced emigration of Algerians
of European origin (the so-called pieds-noirs), most of whom
immigrated to France. Shortly thereafter, ethnic minorities
of Asian origin were forced out of postcolonial Uganda. The
legacy of the colonial era, moreover, is hardly finished. When
the European overseas empires dissolved, they left behind a
patchwork of states whose boundaries often cut across ethnic
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patterns of settlement and whose internal populations were
ethnically mixed. It is wishful thinking to suppose that these
boundaries will be permanent. As societies in the former colonial
world modernize, becoming more urban, literate, and
politically mobilized, the forces that gave rise to ethnonationalism
and ethnic disaggregation in Europe are apt to drive
events there, too.
THE BALANCE SHEET
Analysts of ethnic disaggregation typically focus on its destructive
effects, which is understandable given the direct human
suffering it has often entailed. But such attitudes can yield a
distorted perspective by overlooking the less obvious costs and
also the important benefits that ethnic separation has brought.
Economists from Adam Smith onward, for example, have
argued that the efficiencies of competitive markets tend to
increase with the markets’ size. The dissolution of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire into smaller nation-states, each with its own
barriers to trade, was thus economically irrational and contributed
to the region’s travails in the interwar period. Much of
subsequent European history has involved attempts to overcome
this and other economic fragmentation, culminating in
the EU.
Ethnic disaggregation also seems to have deleterious effects
on cultural vitality. Precisely because most of their citizens
share a common cultural and linguistic heritage, the homogenized
states of postwar Europe have tended to be more culturally
insular than their demographically diverse predecessors.
With few Jews in Europe and few Germans in Prague, that is,
there are fewer Franz Kafkas.
Forced migrations generally penalize the expelling countries
and reward the receiving ones. Expulsion is often driven by
a majority group’s resentment of a minority group’s success,
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on the mistaken assumption that achievement is a zero-sum
game. But countries that got rid of their Armenians, Germans,
Greeks, Jews, and other successful minorities deprived themselves
of some of their most talented citizens, who simply took
their skills and knowledge elsewhere. And in many places, the
triumph of ethnonational politics has meant the victory of traditionally
rural groups over more urbanized ones, which possess
just those skills desirable in an advanced industrial economy.
But if ethnonationalism has frequently led to tension and
conflict, it has also proved to be a source of cohesion and stability.
When French textbooks began with “Our ancestors the
Gauls” or when Churchill spoke to wartime audiences of “this
island race,” they appealed to ethnonationalist sensibilities
as a source of mutual trust and sacrifice. Liberal democracy
and ethnic homogeneity are not only compatible; they can be
complementary.
One could argue that Europe has been so harmonious since
World War II not because of the failure of ethnic nationalism
but because of its success, which removed some of the greatest
sources of conflict both within and between countries. The
fact that ethnic and state boundaries now largely coincide has
meant that there are fewer disputes over borders or expatriate
communities, leading to the most stable territorial configuration
in European history.
These ethnically homogeneous polities have displayed a great
deal of internal solidarity, moreover, facilitating government
programs, including domestic transfer payments, of various
kinds. When the Swedish Social Democrats were developing
plans for Europe’s most extensive welfare state during the interwar
period, the political scientist Sheri Berman has noted, they
conceived of and sold them as the construction of a folkhemmet,
or “people’s home.”
Several decades of life in consolidated, ethnically homogeneous
states may even have worked to sap ethnonationalism’s
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own emotional power. Many Europeans are now prepared, and
even eager, to participate in transnational frameworks such as
the EU, in part because their perceived need for collective selfdetermination
has largely been satisfied.
NEW ETHNIC MIXING
Along with the process of forced ethnic disaggregation over
the last two centuries, there has also been a process of ethnic
mixing brought about by voluntary emigration. The general
pattern has been one of emigration from poor, stagnant areas
to richer and more dynamic ones.
In Europe, this has meant primarily movement west and
north, leading above all to France and the United Kingdom.
This pattern has continued into the present: as a result of recent
migration, for example, there are now half a million Poles in
Great Britain and 200, 000 in Ireland. Immigrants from one
part of Europe who have moved to another and ended up staying
there have tended to assimilate and, despite some grumbling
about a supposed invasion of “Polish plumbers, “ have
created few significant problems.
The most dramatic transformation of European ethnic
balances in recent decades has come from the immigration
of people of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern origin, and
here the results have been mixed. Some of these groups have
achieved remarkable success, such as the Indian Hindus who
have come to the United Kingdom. But in Belgium, France,
Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom,
and elsewhere, on balance the educational and economic progress
of Muslim immigrants has been more limited and their
cultural alienation greater.
How much of the problem can be traced to discrimination,
how much to the cultural patterns of the immigrants themselves,
and how much to the policies of European governments
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is difficult to determine. But a number of factors, from official
multiculturalism to generous welfare states to the ease of contact
with ethnic homelands, seem to have made it possible to
create ethnic islands where assimilation into the larger culture
and economy is limited.
As a result, some of the traditional contours of European
politics have been upended. The left, for example, has tended
to embrace immigration in the name of egalitarianism and
multiculturalism. But if there is indeed a link between ethnic
homogeneity and a population’s willingness to support generous
income-redistribution programs, the encouragement of a
more heterogeneous society may end up undermining the left’s
broader political agenda. And some of Europe’s libertarian cultural
propensities have already clashed with the cultural illiberalism
of some of the new immigrant communities.
Should Muslim immigrants not assimilate and instead
develop a strong communal identification along religious
lines, one consequence might be a resurgence of traditional
ethnonational identities in some states—or the development
of a new European identity defined partly in contradistinction
to Islam (with the widespread resistance to the extension of
full EU membership to Turkey being a possible harbinger of
such a shift).
FUTURE IMPLICATIONS
Since ethnonationalism is a direct consequence of key elements
of modernization, it is likely to gain ground in societies undergoing
such a process. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it
remains among the most vital—and most disruptive—forces
in many parts of the contemporary world.
More or less subtle forms of ethnonationalism, for example,
are ubiquitous in immigration policy around the globe. Many
countries—including Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland,
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the clash of civilizations: the debate [117]
Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Serbia, and Turkey—provide
automatic or rapid citizenship to the members of diasporas
of their own dominant ethnic group, if desired. Chinese immigration
law gives priority and benefits to overseas Chinese. Portugal
and Spain have immigration policies that favor applicants
from their former colonies in the New World. Still other states,
such as Japan and Slovakia, provide official forms of identification
to members of the dominant national ethnic group who
are noncitizens that permit them to live and work in the country.
Americans, accustomed by the U.S. government’s official
practices to regard differential treatment on the basis of ethnicity
to be a violation of universalist norms, often consider such
policies exceptional, if not abhorrent. Yet in a global context, it
is the insistence on universalist criteria that seems provincial.
Increasing communal consciousness and shifting ethnic balances
are bound to have a variety of consequences, both within
and between states, in the years to come. As economic globalization
brings more states into the global economy, for example,
the first fruits of that process will often fall to those ethnic
groups best positioned by history or culture to take advantage
of the new opportunities for enrichment, deepening social
cleavages rather than filling them in. Wealthier and higherachieving
regions might try to separate themselves from poorer
and lower-achieving ones, and distinctive homogeneous areas
might try to acquire sovereignty—courses of action that might
provoke violent responses from defenders of the status quo.
Of course, there are multiethnic societies in which ethnic
consciousness remains weak, and even a more strongly developed
sense of ethnicity may lead to political claims short of
sovereignty. Sometimes, demands for ethnic autonomy or selfdetermination
can be met within an existing state. The claims
of the Catalans in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium, and the
Scots in the United Kingdom have been met in this manner,
at least for now. But such arrangements remain precarious and
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are subject to recurrent renegotiation. In the developing world,
accordingly, where states are more recent creations and where
the borders often cut across ethnic boundaries, there is likely to
be further ethnic disaggregation and communal conflict. And
as scholars such as Chaim Kaufmann have noted, once ethnic
antagonism has crossed a certain threshold of violence, maintaining
the rival groups within a single polity becomes far more
difficult.
This unfortunate reality creates dilemmas for advocates of
humanitarian intervention in such conflicts, because making
and keeping peace between groups that have come to hate and
fear one another is likely to require costly ongoing military
missions rather than relatively cheap temporary ones. When
communal violence escalates to ethnic cleansing, moreover,
the return of large numbers of refugees to their place of origin
after a cease-fire has been reached is often impractical and even
undesirable, for it merely sets the stage for a further round of
conflict down the road.
Partition may thus be the most humane lasting solution to
such intense communal conflicts. It inevitably creates new
flows of refugees, but at least it deals with the problem at issue.
The challenge for the international community in such cases is
to separate communities in the most humane manner possible:
by aiding in transport, assuring citizenship rights in the new
homeland, and providing financial aid for resettlement and
economic absorption. The bill for all of this will be huge, but it
will rarely be greater than the material costs of interjecting and
maintaining a foreign military presence large enough to pacify
the rival ethnic combatants or the moral cost of doing nothing.
Contemporary social scientists who write about nationalism
tend to stress the contingent elements of group identity—
the extent to which national consciousness is culturally and
politically manufactured by ideologists and politicians. They
regularly invoke Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined
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communities, “ as if demonstrating that nationalism is constructed
will rob the concept of its power. It is true, of course,
that ethnonational identity is never as natural or ineluctable
as nationalists claim. Yet it would be a mistake to think that
because nationalism is partly constructed it is therefore fragile
or infinitely malleable. Ethnonationalism was not a chance
detour in European history: it corresponds to some enduring
propensities of the human spirit that are heightened by the process
of modern state creation, it is a crucial source of both solidarity
and enmity, and in one form or another, it will remain
for many generations to come. One can only profit from facing
it directly.
[120] foreign affairs
The Clash of Emotions
Fear, Humiliation, Hope,
and the New World Order
Dominique Moïsi
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
Thirteen years ago, Samuel Huntington argued that a “clash of
civilizations” was about to dominate world politics, with culture,
along with national interests and political ideology, becoming
a geopolitical fault line (“The Clash of Civilizations?” Summer
1993). Events since then have proved Huntington’s vision more
right than wrong. Yet what has not been recognized sufficiently
is that today the world faces what might be called a “clash of
emotions” as well. The Western world displays a culture of fear,
the Arab and Muslim worlds are trapped in a culture of humiliation,
and much of Asia displays a culture of hope.
Instead of being united by their fears, the twin pillars of the
West, the United States and Europe, are more often divided by
them—or rather, divided by how best to confront or transcend
them. The culture of humiliation, in contrast, helps unite the
Muslim world around its most radical forces and has led to a
culture of hatred. The chief beneficiaries of the deadly encounter
between the forces of fear and the forces of humiliation are
the bystanders in the culture of hope, who have been able to
DOMINIQUE MOÏSI is a Senior Adviser at the Institut Français des Relations
Internationales (IFRI) in Paris.
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the clash of civilizations: the debate [121]
concentrate on creating a better future for themselves.
These moods, of course, are not universal within each region,
and there are some areas, such as Russia and parts of Latin
America, that seem to display all of them simultaneously. But
their dynamics and interactions will help shape the world for
years to come.
THE CULTURE OF FEAR
The United States and Europe are divided by a common culture
of fear. On both sides, one encounters, in varying degrees,
a fear of the other, a fear of the future, and a fundamental anxiety
about the loss of identity in an increasingly complex world.
In the case of Europe, there are layers of fear. There is the
fear of being invaded by the poor, primarily from the South—a
fear driven by demography and geography. Images of Africans
being killed recently as they tried to scale barbed wire to enter
a Spanish enclave in Morocco evoked images of another time
not so long ago, when East Germans were shot at as they tried
to reach freedom in the West. Back then, Germans were killed
because they wanted to escape oppression. Today, Africans are
being killed because they want to escape absolute poverty.
Europeans also fear being blown up by radical Islamists or
being demographically conquered by them as their continent
becomes a “Eurabia.” After the bombings in Madrid in 2004
and London in 2005 and the scares this past summer, Europeans
have started to face the hard reality that their homelands
are not only targets for terrorists but also bases for them.
Then there is the fear of being left behind economically. For
many Europeans, globalization has come to be equated with
destabilization and job cuts. They are haunted by the fear that
Europe will become a museum—a larger and more modern
version of Venice, a place for tourists and retirees, no longer a
center of creativity and influence.
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Finally, there is the fear of being ruled by an outside power,
even a friendly one (such as the United States) or a faceless one
(such as the European Commission).
What unites all these fears is a sense of loss of control over
one’s territory, security, and identity—in short, one’s destiny.
Such concerns contributed to the no votes of the French and
the Dutch last year on the referendum on the proposed EU
constitution. They also explain the return of strong nationalist
sentiments in many European countries—on display during
the recent World Cup tournament.
Some of the same sense of loss of control is present in the
United States. Although demographic fears are mitigated by the
largely successful integration of Hispanics (compared with the
difficulties surrounding the integration of Muslims in Europe),
they are clearly present. The quarrel over the Spanish version
of the American national anthem echoes the debate over the
wearing of headscarves and veils in Europe.
Used to rates of growth significantly higher than those in
most European countries, Americans do not fear economic
decay the way Europeans do (although they worry about outsourcing).
Yet they, too, are thinking of decline—in their bodies,
with the plague of obesity; in their budgets, with the huge
deficits; and in their spirit, with the loss of appetite for foreign
adventures and a growing questioning of national purpose.
The United States’ obsession with security after September 11
is understandable and legitimate. But what has it cost in terms
of U.S. influence and image in the world? From the difficulties
foreign travelers have entering U.S. territory to the human
rights scandals of Guantánamo Bay, terrorists have at least
in part succeeded in undermining the United States’ claims
of moral superiority and exceptionalism by prompting such
reactions.
Whereas Europeans try to protect themselves from the
world through a combination of escapism and appeasement,
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the clash of civilizations: the debate [123]
Americans try to do so by dealing with the problem at its
source abroad. But behind the Bush administration’s forceful
and optimistic rhetoric lies a somber reality, which is that
the U.S. response to the September 11 attacks has made the
United States more unpopular than ever. The U.S. intervention
in Iraq, for example, has generated more problems than it has
solved. Iraq is descending into civil war, and U.S. actions there
have tipped the balance of power within the Muslim world to
its most radical Shiite elements.
THE CULTURE OF HUMILIATION
Europeans started to reflect on their own decay after World
War I: “We civilizations now know ourselves mortal,” the
French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry wrote in 1919. The
Muslim world, meanwhile, has been obsessed with decay for
centuries. When Europe was in its Middle Ages, Islam was at
the peak of its Renaissance, but when the Western Renaissance
started, Islam began its inexorable fall. From its defeat by a
Christian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto, in 1571, to its failure to
capture Vienna in 1683, to its final disappearance after World
War I, the Ottoman Empire slowly shrank into oblivion.
The creation of the state of Israel in the midst of Arab land
could only be seen by Muslims as the ultimate proof of their
decay. For Jews, the legitimacy of Israel was manifold; it combined
the accomplishment of a religious promise, the realization
of a national destiny, and compensation by the international
community for a unique crime, the Holocaust. For Arabs, by
contrast, it was the anachronistic imposition of a Western colonial
logic at the very moment decolonization was getting under
way. In their view, crimes of the Christian West, fallen into
barbarism against the Jews, were being unfairly paid for by the
Muslim East.
The unresolved conflict between Israel and its neighbors has
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helped turn the culture of humiliation into a culture of hatred.
Over time, the conflict’s national character has shifted to its
original religious basis—a conflict between Muslims and Jews,
if not a clash between Islam and the West at large.
The combination of the deepening civil war in Iraq and the
fighting in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel has reinforced
a sense of outrage in many Muslims that has been fully
exploited by Iran and its allies. In a war of images and symbols,
Shiite extremists can appear to embody the spirit of resistance
to humiliation, getting stronger with each blow they endure.
Globalization, meanwhile, has contributed to the problem.
Every day, the Middle East is confronted with the contrast
between globalization’s winners, essentially the Western world
and East Asia, and those who have been left behind.
The culture of humiliation is not limited to the Middle East
but extends to the Muslim diaspora in the West as well. The
riots that took place in France during the fall of 2005, for example,
had an essentially socioeconomic origin, but they were also
a lashing out by the disaffected against a society that claims to
give them equal rights in principle but fails to do so in practice.
The gap is also, in part, the product of incompatible worldviews,
stemming from different historical eras. As societies in
Europe are becoming increasingly secular, the importance of
religion in the daily life of the Muslim world is increasing.
When Europeans look at Islam today, they are reminded of
their own zealotry and wars of religion in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. This gap in mindset exists between the
United States and the Muslim world as well, but it is less profound
because the United States remains deeply religious and
has even experienced a religious revival lately. Yet fundamentalism
within Islam is unique in the sense that it is animated
by a dual sense of revenge: by the Shiite minority against the
Sunni majority and by the fundamentalists against the West
at large.
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THE CULTURE OF HOPE
As the West and the Middle East lock horns, confidence in
progress has been moving eastward. An art exhibit displayed
in 2005–6 at the Royal Academy of Arts, in London, entitled
“China: The Three Emperors, 1662–1795,” summarized new
China’s psychology. The explicit message of the exhibit, sponsored
by Beijing, was clear: China is back. The central piece
of the exhibit was a huge eighteenth-century painting, in the
Jesuit-European style, showing the envoys of the West paying
tribute to the Chinese emperor. After two centuries of relative
decline, China is progressively recovering its legitimate international
status. Its policy of concentrating on economic development
while avoiding conflict seems to be working, earning
Beijing both material benefits and international respect.
As for India, for the first time in its modern history it has
stepped onto the world stage as both an independent and an
important power. Cooperating diplomatically with the United
States and making economic deals in Europe, the emerging
Indian elites are displaying even more pride and optimism than
their Chinese counterparts. The world’s largest democracy will
soon emerge as the most populous country, and it seems to
know no limits.
Of course, Cassandras may rightly point out that strategic,
economic, social, and political difficulties abound and that the
culture of hope could easily collapse on itself like a house of
cards. Asia has yet to witness the reconciliation between former
enemies that constitutes the most remarkable achievement of
postwar western Europe. The level of animosity in China and
South Korea over Japan’s treatment of the past evokes the situation
of Europe in the 1950s. (China seems to have set double
standards in this respect, never forgetting Japan’s crimes while
never remembering its own.) North Korea is a particularly
dangerous rogue state. And arms races and nuclear proliferation
in East Asia could set the region up for a terrible conflict
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down the road.
The gap that exists in China between the dynamism of the
economy and the near incapacity or total reluctance of the present
leadership to implement the most elementary and necessary
political reforms does not bode well for the peaceful evolution
of the country. Yet despite these concerns, there is hope among
both leaders and publics across the region, and it seems likely
to last as long as growth continues.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
In confronting this clash of emotions, the first priority for the
West must be to recognize the nature of the threat that the
Muslim world’s culture of humiliation poses to Europe and
the United States. Denying the threat’s existence or responding
to it in the wrong way are equally dangerous choices. Neither
appeasement nor military solutions alone will suffice. The war
that is unfolding is one that the culture of humiliation cannot
win, but it is a war nonetheless and one that the West can lose
by continuing to be divided or by betraying its liberal values
and its respect for law and the individual. The challenge is not
figuring out how to play moderate Islam against the forces of
radicalism. It is figuring out how to instill a sufficient sense
of hope and progress in Muslim societies so that despair and
anger do not send the masses into the radicals’ arms.
In that regard, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears more
than ever as a microcosm of and possibly a precedent for what
the world is becoming. Israel is the West, surrounded by the
culture of humiliation and dreaming of escape from a dangerous
region and of reentry into a culture of hope. But it must
find a solution to the Palestinian problem first, or else the escape
will not be possible. So, too, Europe and the United States seek
to permanently banish their fears but will be able to do so only
by finding a way to help the Muslim world solve its problems.
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