Clash Of Civilizations Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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“The Clash of Civilizations” (1993) is the well-known work of Samuel P. Huntington, the late Harvard professor of political science, who argued that the primary cause of violent and nonviolent conflicts in the post–cold war period will be civilizational differences.

Huntington defined civilization as the “highest cultural grouping of people.” While civilizations are dynamic entities and redefined with changes in the self-identification of people, they also involve objective attributes, such as language, history, customs, institutions, and especially religion, which make their differences “real.” Based on this premise, Huntington identified eight civilizations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and “possibly” African. He predicted that the conflicts in the post–cold war era would erupt “along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.”

According to Huntington, the underlying reasons behind civilizational conflicts are manifold. First, cultural and religious differences are more fundamental than ideological or political ones. An individual can switch ideologies in a day, as happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but “Azeris cannot become Armenians.” He also underlined that ethnic attachments lead to the kin-country syndrome, which is influential in determining states’ sides especially in the post–cold war conflicts: Russia behind Serbia against Bosnia, Turkey behind Azerbaijan against Armenia, and the United States behind Israel against Syria and Iran. Furthermore, ethnic differences are likely to have implications on immigration and human rights policies.

Second, globalization brings nations closer, which does not necessarily lead to greater cooperation but potentially to a reaction against the Western economic and military dominance. Accordingly, Huntington has argued, religious fundamentalism is spreading especially among the young, educated, middle-class people beyond national boundaries but within civilizations. In this regard, the tension between the West and Islam is likely to be the most conflictive one due to the American influence in the Middle East.

Finally, Huntington envisaged the rise of regional, rather than global, economic cooperation, which would reinforce civilizational consciousness. Consequently, he predicted that the European Union (EU) would be consolidated not only around economic interests but also around the common culture, which will inevitably leave Turkey outside. Another implication of his thesis is a growing economic cooperation in East Asia that would center on China rather than on Japan.

Since its suggestion, the clash of civilizations has become a thesis that many academics and political figures have disagreed with but not ignored. Amartya Sen criticized it for disregarding diversity within civilizations. Bruce Russett and coauthors examined militarized interstate disputes in the period from 1952 to 1992 and found that relative power and regime type have greater explanatory power than civilizational differences on the incidence of interstate conflict. A more recent study by Andrej Tusicisny examined the same relationship in the period from 1946 to 2001 and found that civilizational fault lines are not more prone to conflict than any other place. The United Nations has put forward initiatives like the Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations (2001) and the Alliance of Civilizations (2005), which aim to investigate and address the causes of contemporary polarization between cultures.

Despite strong criticisms, theories embedded in the clash of civilizations are still alive today, and not for bad reasons. First, the empirical studies that have refuted the thesis suffer from multiple deficiencies. They either cover a short period of time in the post–cold war era; do not include post-9/11 conflicts, such as the U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and against al-Qaida; or disregard nonviolent cultural conflicts, such as the cartoon crisis in Denmark or the increasing resistance in Europe to Turkey’s membership in the European Union. Second, recent studies by Alan Krueger and Marc Sageman have found that the popular explanations for international terrorism, such as poverty and lack of education, have no empirical basis as terrorists tend to come from well-educated, middle-class or high-income families; target people of a different religion in suicide attacks; and are motivated by the sufferings of Muslims in Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq, and other places. Overall, the jihad of al-Qaida; discourses like President George W. Bush’s “crusade”; and the rise of right-wing, ant immigrant political parties in Western Europe, among other developments, seem to have kept Huntington’s thesis at least partly valid in the post–cold war period.

Bibliography:

Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49.
Krueger, Alan B. What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Russett, Bruce M., John R. Oneal, and Michaelene Cox. “Clash of Civilizations, or Realism and Liberalism Déjà Vu?” Journal of Peace Research 37, no. 5 (2000): 583–608.
Sageman, Marc. Leaderless Jihad:Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Sen, Amartya. “Civilizational Imprisonments: How to Misunderstand Everybody in the World.” The New Republic, June 10, 2002, 28–33.
Tusicisny, Andrej. “Civilizational Conflicts: More Frequent, Longer, and Bloodier?” Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 4 (2004): 485–498.