Huntington states '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 Huntingtons 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 be the battle lines of the future.
With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its center-piece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of civilizations, the people 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.
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.' (ref: The Clash of Civilizations? by Samuel P. Huntington)
There have been many responses to the thesis that was provided by Huntingdon, which in itself has almost become just a convenient catch-all phrase that provided for an assumed arrogance of superiority, an 'us and them' division ready made for media savvy politicians in enabling a real and wider conflict.One does however have to understand where the idea as relayed by Huntington originated in its earliest form .
The concept of a 'clash of civilizations' was first drafted in 1990 by Bernard Lewis, a committed Zionist, to describe the conflict between political Islam and the West. 'This is no less than a clash of civilization--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. Unable to adapt to modernity and secularism, Islamic societies had rejected Western values and were now transforming Islam into a militant movement against the West.
Samuel Huntington, elevated the thesis of a clash of civilizations into a universal historical principle. Civilizations are the largest human aggregates (collectives) that command human loyalties; and conflicts between civilizations account for much of the bloodshed in recorded human history. The Cold War marked a brief departure from this principle, but now that this aberrant period was happily over, civilizations could go back to their old pastime--waging wars against each other. In this new era, Huntington predicted, the most serious challenge to the West's hegemony (leadership) would come from Islam and China.
That the Huntington thesis was an instant success is not hard to explain if one looks at this from an alternative point of view. The military establishment seized it as a suitable replacement for the loss of the Soviet (Cold War) threat. If Islam and China could be inflated into worthy enemies, they could save the military budget and NATO. The thesis would be manna to the Zionists, who had been working hard to convert their war against the Palestinians into an American war against Islam. It also gave comfort to right-wing Christian zealots (recently described in the media as christian zionists) who see Islam as the chief adversary in their war to win 'souls for Christ'.
Huntington's theory challenged the post-cold war 'end of history' scenario of an international order based on universal acceptance of the capitalist economic model, with no change on the horizon. The importance that is attached to cultural factors could be considered a highly positive development, as until now, inter-state relations and conflicts had routinely been explained according to economic analysis. Political institutions grow out of economic power structures, and culture is economics, in the sense that in the West, the market system establishes the general framework of values which should in theory be independently generated by culture
Europeans it has been suggested like the importance of cultures to be recognized, because European identities are shaped by cultural memory and awareness. Yet precisely because of the cultural experience, one cannot agree with all of Huntington's simplifications. For example, reducing the number of cultural areas to eight does not seem serious. The mention of a 'possible' African civilization is laughable. Africa is a rich mosaic of cultures; so is Europe. And Europe is not the same as North America. What he lumps together as 'Western civilization' has considerable internal fractures that cannot be attributed exclusively to migratory factors.
The basic problem with Huntington's theory, however, is the conviction that all cultures aspire to imperial power. His own culture is fascinated with power -- American culture has spread spectacularly all over the world -- but what if others are not? What if they simply aspire to respect and coexistence? Fortunately, Huntington speaks of the impending end of the Western cultural monopoly. But it is far from clear whether the idea of ranking cultures according to Western criteria is also at an end. If cultures are seen as 'superior' and 'inferior,' conflictual relations are inevitable. A large part of today's intercultural conflicts are a result of cultural humiliation. The Indians of Chiapas, for example, do not mobilize against the Western culture that characterizes Mexican political thinking, but against a long process of marginalization. Much of what is happening in the Islamic world, simplistically described as fundamentalism, is an assertion of cultural identities that have been treated as inferior and suppressed.
The great challenge is the democratic organization of cultural and community diversity. Human communities are awakening politically and aspiring to a political order founded on the recognition of the rights of all cultures and communities. Why do we still think in terms of seven or eight groups defending partial interests? It would be far better to establish the mental framework for a world organization serving the interests of the human species as a whole. Yet Huntington ignores the possibility of creating a global body of this sort by consensus; he thinks we are condemned to suffer the introverted, selfish nature of our various civilizations.
Rather than being seen as a cause for conflictual relations, differences between cultures can be sources of experiences of complementarity. Different cultures possess intellectual, symbolic and existential instruments that provide a specific view of personal, historical and cosmic reality, ie different cultures provide different ways at looking at the world , but it need not be an impermeable view. Of course, mutual enrichment is possible only if the different parties recognize their limited nature. Dialogue does not mean betrayal; it means recognizing other points of view and other experiences in their honesty and coherence. It also implies the integration of valuable elements from other traditions, without fear of a loss of identity. In the search for a more plausible human future, Westerners can learn from other cultures a feeling for community, which could offset Western individualism, or ecological practices in harmony with nature, which could offset the Western philosophy of domination.
According to Huntington, the clash of civilizations occurs at two levels. At the micro-level, 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 are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed.
However, on the other hand, there have been writings about the clash of interests in the West too. An article in the November 2002 issue of the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly, titled 'The Death of the West,' warns: 'The next clash of civilizations will be not between the West and the rest but between the US and Europe and Americans remain largely oblivious.' This stark warning was written by Charles Kupchan, a professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Updating Americans on developments in Europe, Dr. Kupchan continues:The EU's annual economic output has reached about $8 trillion, compared with America's $10 trillion, and the Euro will soon threaten the dollar's global dominance. Europe is strengthening its collective consciousness and character and forging a clearer sense of interests and values that are quite distinct from those of the US. EU will become a formidable counterweight to the US on the world stage. The transatlantic rivalry that has already begun will inevitably intensify.
Huntington tends to see the West as a single entity, part of the now powerful
Christian civilization.
The quest for human freedom and freedom of expression is a commonality between the Arab, Muslim world and the US. Unfortunately, the region (middle east) has not had a long history of that. But it cannot be assumed that because those people are not living in a society that promotes freedom, it means that they are innately or biologically against freedom. It cannot be pressumed that it is something about who they are, and that they are born to be anti-American.
Yet one is led to believe that it's something about who they are. That's not entirely true.
So part of bridging the gap and dispelling the clash of civilizations notion is to understand that every reaction is an action to something, and that if people are antagonistic towards the US, or if the US is antagonistic towards the Arab world, that all of these sentiments are instigated by something.
Osama bin Laden's call to Muslim countries to rise in a holy war (Jihad - struggle)against America, appeared to provoke a clash and provide substance to Huntingtons contention. The September 2001 atrocity providing the hawks, jingoists, pro-Israel lobbyists and media-men opportunities to start quoting like scripture his 1996 book on the subject, betraying an underlying wish for the fulfillment of his prediction. The more the Muslim states are hamstrung, it was perhaps felt, the less likely would be their support to Palestine. The US being the sole super-power, the time was perhaps considered opportune by these tendentious hawks to expand the battlefield to include Iraq and other oil-rich countries of the region. The anthrax-bearing letters of post-September 11th 2001 appear to goad the administrations attention to the units in Iraq suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons. Though the attention was without foundation .
Developments on the ground however, negated a confrontation between the Muslim and Christian civilizations. Almost all Muslim countries have condemned the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, joined the US-led coalition, and offered assistance to the campaign. The Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) and the Arab League had also endorsed the campaign against terrorism.
Osama's call for a Jihad has been ignored with contempt. It did however stir emotionally some bigots belonging to the lunatic fringe.
We should recall that the Clash of Civilisations was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about 'a new phase' in world politics after the end of the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion of something Huntington called 'civilization identity' and 'the interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations,' of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his attention. In this belligerent kind of thought, he relied heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in its title, 'The Roots of Muslim Rage.'
In both articles, the personification of enormous entities called 'the West' and 'Islam' is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy (political agitation) and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam Islam.
The challenge for Western policy-makers, is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular.
The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of September 11 2001. The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington's thesis.
Instead of seeing it for what it is--the capture of big ideas by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes--international luminaries from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles, and in the latter's case have used Huntington's ideas to rant on about the West's superiority, how 'we' have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don't. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology
for his insult to 'Islam.')
But why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in their destructiveness, for Osama bin Laden and his followers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of the Rev. Jim Jones at Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo?
It is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis.
The conceptual framework within which conflicts are defined is crucial not just to 'understanding' the conflicts, but also to finding ways of resolving them. Analyses and narratives based on the concept of separate, clearly identifiable civilizations are not adequate, if they ever were. In fact, Huntingdons 'civilizational narrative' may be an integral part of the problem rather than a part of the explanation.
Samuel Huntingtons response to his critics is 'Can any other paradigm do better? If not civilizations, what?' the issues are of importance in trying to understand the relationships between Islam and the West.
A major difficulty with the civilizational explanatory narrative is that it assumes the existence of entities that do not exist as independent units.
Marshall Hodgson used the term 'civilization' and spoke of Islam as a 'world civilization.' Yet, when he undertook the task of defining civilizations, he clearly understood them to be units which interacted within a larger historically-meaningful whole. 'If we arrange societies merely according to their stock of cultural notions, institutions, and techniques, then a great many dividing lines among pre-Modern civilized societies makes some sense, and no dividing line within the Eastern Hemisphere makes final sense,' and one needs to perceive 'the unity of the whole Afro-Eurasian citied zone
Islam cannot be called a civilization, even within these relatively standard definitions. It is a multi-civilizational unit that has significant elements and participation in more than one civilization. In both modern and premodern times, there were people who were legitimately 'Chinese Muslims,' 'Malay Muslims,' 'Fulani Muslims,' 'Bengali Muslims' and many other such combinations of societal identities with Islam. In modern times, one must also mention 'American Muslims.' All of these people show that it is possible to be both authentically Muslim and authentically local. It would take a significant redefinition of categories to state that Malcolm X was not authentically American and also, by the time of his death, authentically Muslim. If it is possible to be legitimately Western and Islamic, then at least one of those terms cannot refer to an exclusive civilizational identification.
Huntington's question of 'if not civilizations, what?' takes on a whole new meaning in the context of an analysis where the definition of civilization used in the 'civilization paradigm' does not fit either Islam or the West. The civilization paradigm, as defined by Huntington, does not, for most practical analytical purposes provide a way for talking about the interactions between two immense and complex human units which are not civilizations
A major source of conflict in the current post-cold war world is the growing conflict resulting from ever-smaller units demanding separate recognition. Mini-nationalisms provide the basis for dangerous confrontations. However, clashes between smaller and smaller groups do not represent, by themselves, conflicts between civilizations. Protestant-Catholic fighting in Ireland, Basque separatism, intrablack tensions in South Africa, and other such situations present the potential for conflict, but by themselves are not clashes between civilizations. Nationalisms produced by fragmentation of larger units are potential danger points in contemporary world affairs but none threaten global war.
Conflict on a global scale would be the product of what was called 'hyper- nationalism' . Hyper-nationalism would appear when 'nationalism,' the 'desire to create a sense of identity by marking oneself off from others -- by separating us from them -- had spread from single countries to whole regions.' Those who attempt to see civilizations in conflict where civilizations do not exist may be assisting in the process of creating hypernationalist attitudes and perceptions.
Considerations of this type provide the urgency behind the debate over 'the Islamic threat.' The perception by people in the West of Islam as a categoric threat to 'Western civilization' may create the conditions for self-fulfilling prophecies of conflict between the US and various Muslim groups and movements.
There are many conflicts in the contemporary world. There are many tensions and dangers. However, in the modern world with its high levels of interaction and dissolution of old boundaries, such conflicts are not between 'civilizations.' The civilizational narrative, in this context, increases tensions rather than explaining them.
The world in which we now live is particularist and universalist. This is a paradox and difficult to cope with but it is a reality. Insisting that the world is either particularist or universalist misses the point of the profound complexity of the contemporary human situation. Civilizational narrators like Huntington can assert that the 'one world' paradigm is an 'unreal alternative,'and they are correct if the 'one-world' approach is a Pollyanna-like presentation of a 'universal civilization' which somehow brings peace to all humans. However, if this means that somehow we must assert that Malcolm X was either not a Muslim or not a part of Western civilization, if we must see the World Beat music as not reflecting a significant reality, if we must ignore the globalization of popular culture as well as of the financial world, then it is the civilizational narrative that is 'the unreal alternative'.
The syncretistic, paradoxical, self-contradictory, sometimes human value-destroying,
conflict-ridden one-world of World Beat, McDonalds, the information superhighway and a host of other things, this one-world truly exists. Its sounds sometimes drown out the debates in scholarly journals and intellectual assemblies. In many ways in our contemporary world we really are at the end of civilization. We need to accept that and stop trying to explain our global and regional conflicts by defining and emphasizing divisions that no longer exist."
[+/-] show/hide this post
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home