A Quarter Century of the "Clash of Civilizations"

Jeffrey Haynes, Jeffrey Haynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000383836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The "clash of civilizations" focuses on conflict and cooperation between and within states. Dealing with the clash is essential for a peaceful and harmonious world.

The "clash of civilizations" is a topic of great interest around the world and constitutes an important dimension of religion and international relations. In the quarter century since Huntington first aired his controversial framework, inter-civilizational "clash" and "dialogue" have become mainstream issues both in international relations and in many Western countries' domestic concerns. The book examines a key question: how does Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" "paradigm" help explain current Western governments" responses to Muslim migration and related security issues? Understanding relations between the West/Westerners and Muslim-majority societies/Muslims is impossible without being aware that right-wing populist politicians in the West, as well as some policy makers and commentators, seem to view all Muslims in a malign way. This indicates a lack of willingness to make a distinction between, on the one hand, the mass of "moderate, " "ordinary, " and "peaceful" Muslims and, on the other hand, a small minority of Islamist extremists and even smaller number of Islamist terrorists. The result is a crucial topic of our times: how do different civilizations coexist in a small and increasingly congested planet without conflict?

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs.

From Huntington to Trump: Twenty-Five Years of the “Clash of Civilizations”

By Jeffrey Haynes

This article focuses on the explanatory value of the “clash of civilizations” paradigm or framework popularized by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s.¹ It examines how Huntington’s paradigm has fared in the perceptions of scholars and policy makers, the two audiences on which he focused. In the quarter century since Huntington first aired his controversial framework, inter-civilizational “clash” and “dialogue” have become mainstream issues in both international relations and in many countries’ domestic concerns.

Huntington was concerned with the impact of inter-civilizational conflicts on both national and international relations. In the article, I argue that, as a result of “glocalization,” the clash of civilizations paradigm helps explain and account for recent electoral successes of right-wing populist politicians in various Western countries, including the USA, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Slovenia.

The article focuses on the explanatory value of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” paradigm in relation to recent political outcomes in the USA and Europe. Both Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign—which consistently employed anti-Muslim rhetoric to acquire votes and which he continues to employ as president—and recent electoral successes of right-wing populists in Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Slovenia, have targeted Muslims in order to acquire voters’ support. In addition, using the same strategy, right-wing populists in several other European countries, including Austria, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Switzerland, have recently seen increased shares of the vote by, inter alia, focusing on Muslims as a key source of their countries’ social, political, and economic problems.

Abstract: What is the explanatory value of the “clash of civilizations” paradigm, popularized by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s? How has Huntington’s argument fared in the perceptions of scholars and policy makers, the two audiences on which he focused? In the three decades since Huntington first aired his controversial framework, inter-civilizational “clash” and “dialogue” have become mainstream issues in both international relations and in many countries’ domestic concerns. The article focuses on the explanatory value of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” paradigm in relation to recent political successes of right-wing populists in the USA and Europe.

The article is structured as follows: the first section looks at the main components of Huntington’s paradigm. The second section examines how well-founded and persuasive his arguments are. The third section examines the interaction of globalization and local factors to produce a glocalization effect leading to strong electoral support for right-wing populists in the USA and some European countries. Overall, the paper examines the “clash of civilizations” paradigm and how it seems to encourage some Western politicians and policy makers to view all Muslims in a malign way, without making a distinction between, on the one hand, the mass of “moderate,” “ordinary” Muslims and, on the other hand, the small minority of Islamist extremists and even smaller number of Islamist terrorists.

The Main Components of Huntington’s Paradigm

In the preface to his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Huntington (1996, 13) stated that “[t]his book is not intended to be a work of social science. It is instead meant to be an interpretation of the evolution of global politics after the Cold War. It aspires to present a framework or paradigm for viewing global politics that will be meaningful to scholars and useful to policy makers.” In his 1993 article, Huntington claimed 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. (Huntington 1993, 22)

The “new world” that Huntington was referring to was the brief, but highly eventful, period immediately after the Cold War when the Soviet Union fell apart and the United States sought to export democracy and its interpretation of human rights to much of the rest of the world. Prior to this, the four decades-long conflict of the Cold War had been both ideological and economic—with the USA and Soviet Union squaring up to each other, each seeking to make themselves global leader. But in the late 1980s, the Cold War unexpectedly ended. The implosion of the Soviet Union, a multinational state increasingly beset by ethnic divisions, soon followed. The collapse of the USSR was related to the structure of the state itself. The Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, mono-ideology state, comprising 15 different republics. Collectively, the republics were made up of dozens of ethnicities, languages, and cultures, many of which lived in uneasy harmony or disharmony with each other. In some republics, a Russian majority was parachuted in—and Russians sometimes sought to bully or dominate the locals. Unsurprisingly, this sometimes created inter-ethnic and inter-cultural tensions, for example, in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). In 1989, nationalist movements in Eastern Europe brought regime change in Poland and demands for national self-expression spread to Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, as well as communist Yugoslavia. In the resulting turmoil, several erstwhile Soviet republics began to divide along ethnic lines, encouraging separatist movements in, inter alia, Ukraine, Belarus and the three Baltic states, while Yugoslavia dissolved into a civil war involving Muslim Bosnians, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Catholic Croats. The nationalist and pro-independence turmoil proved to be too much for both states; and they soon fell apart. By December 1991 the Soviet Union was history and a month later, in January 1992, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ceased to exist (Beissinger 2009).

The near-simultaneous break-up of both the USSR and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was very recent when Huntington published his Summer 1993 article on the clash of civilizations in Foreign Affairs. For Huntington, the collapse of these two long-established multinational states,² reflected three wider developments: (1) the post-Cold War world was a new international environment without the ideological givens of the previous four decades, (2) many states around the world were under pressure from ethnic, nationalist, cultural and/or religious demands for greater autonomy or independence, and (3) future international conflicts would chiefly be along “cultural” lines,³ especially at the “fault lines” between civilizations which, Huntington (1993, 1996) believed, were “the battle lines of the future.”

Huntington identified “seven or eight” “major” civilizations:

1. Sinic: the common culture of China and Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, plus Vietnam and Korea.
2. Japanese: Japanese culture as distinctively different from the rest of Asia.
3. Hindu: identified as the core Indian civilization.
4. Islamic: Originating in the Arabian Peninsula, spread across North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and Central Asia, with several distinct sub-divisions, including: Arab, Turkic, Persian and Malay.
5. Orthodox Christian: centered on Russia and separate culturally from “Western Christendom”, seen as the foundation of current Western values.
6. Western: centered on Western Europe and North America.
7. Latin American: Countries of Central and South America, collectively with histories of corporatist, authoritarian cultures. Most have a Catholic Christian majority, albeit with growing Protestant minorities in many regional countries, and “possibly”:
8. African: Sub-Saharan Africa may lack a developed sense of “pan-African identity,” but Huntington believed that this was emerging. Core states would lead the drive to this end, either Nigeria or South Africa, the region’s most powerful and influential states (Huntington 1996, 45–46).

Huntington was not the first scholar to identify civilizations in modern international relations and make the argument that in some cases they would “clash.” Three decades earlier, the British historian, Bernard Lewis, argued that there was a “clash between civilizations” in a speech at Johns Hopkins University in 1957. Lewis returned to this theme three decades later in an article (“The Roots of Muslim Rage”) published in The Atlantic (1990). Lewis argued that Arab Muslim-majority countries and Western nations had different values which would lead them into conflict. In the late 1950s, Lewis’s contention about Muslim and Western friction did not create much of a stir. This was hardly surprising given that at the time the main foreign policy issue for the West was how to deal with an apparently vibrant and expansionist Soviet Union. Moreover, most Muslim-majority countries were then under Western colonial or quasi-colonial control, and inter-civilizational clash did not appear to be a pressing issue. In 1990, as the Soviet Union tottered, and Yugoslavia began to fall apart, Lewis’s argument seemed to many highly relevant, focusing attention in the immediate post-Cold War context on inter-civilizational conflict, posing the question: which of the two “sides” was ideationally destined to prevail?

Huntington borrowed Lewis’s phrase (“clash of civilizations”) for his influential 1993 article, crediting Lewis. Huntington (1996) was at pains to state that his was not an interpretation grounded in social science but a “paradigm” or “framework”. What did he mean? Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) original exposition of the nature of a paradigm made it plain that paradigms do not have to be “correct”—that is, stand up to social scientific scrutiny—but they do have to be widely believed. A paradigm could theoretically be built on bigotry, paranoia and a manipulation and distortion of the “facts”. That doesn’t matter—what is important is that enough people believe in the claims of a paradigm to make it significant and believable. The relationship between a paradigmatic claim and popular understanding of a phenomenon may be straightforward: If a paradigmatic argument is persuasive—however “erroneous” some may believe it is—then some at least will believe its claims. That is, when enough people want to believe in something because, for example, it fits in with their prejudices and explanatory frameworks. 9/11 is a useful example of what I am referring to. Although the egregious attacks on the USA were carried out by just 19 Muslim al Qaeda terrorists this was sufficient for some, including numerous Islamophobes in the USA and elsewhere to regard all Muslims as guilty and, as a result, henceforth be regarded with suspicion and hostility.

September 11, 2001, was instrumental in creating a climate in the USA where Islamophobia could thrive. Without 9/11 and its consequential impact, which continues to reverberate today, the Lewis/Huntington’s framework of the clash of civilizations, as it relates to the sometimes-fraught relationship between the West and Muslim countries, would likely have been debated by a few scholars only, achieving little impact on policy makers or popular views. The events of 9/11 took the “clash of civilizations” paradigm both mainstream and center stage. Earlier attacks had failed to do this. 9/11 was preceded by a jihadist bomb attack on New York’s Twin Towers in 1993, followed in 1998 by Islamist extremist assaults on two US embassies in Africa.

The US government responded to 9/11 by initiating and leading invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), which were viewed by some Muslims as exemplary punishment for the al Qaeda attack. Encouraged by Bernard Lewis, who predicted in a 2002 essay (“Time for Toppling”) in The Wall Street Journal that Iraqis would “rejoice” over an American invasion, the US sought to spread to Iraq democracy and human rights—that is, core Western civilizational values—following the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Neither President George W. Bush (2001–2009) nor his successor President Barack Obama (2009–217)—publicly identified the conflicts as a “clash of civilizations” and both were at pains to stress that the USA was not at war generally with Muslims.

Many in the West believed that 9/11 was evidence that Islam is steeped in violence and conflict (Huntington’s “bloody ...