It occurs to me that there are people — bloggers, particularly — who have put a good bit of thought into the matter of terrorism, yet have never read Samuel Huntington’s seminal work, “The Clash of Civilizations.” Not the book by that title, but the original article, as published in Foreign Affairs in 1993. In it, Huntington famously (and contentiously) declared “the end of history” (which is to say, the end of post-Westphalian liberal democracy) and that, with the Cold War over, a new “clash of civilizations” will inevitably come about:
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.
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.
[…]
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.
I can’t overstate the importance of being familiar with “The Clash of Civilizations,” at least for anybody with a passing interest in geopolitics. While some see Huntington as discredited, in light of recent global events, others see him as highly prescient. I count myself, cautiously, as among the latter.
Waldo, don’t fall into the civilizations trap. Huntington’s thesis is a convenient excuse for xenophobes and religious bigots to justify a modern-day crusade against Muslims and to maintain some of the racist undertones that marked U.S. imperial policy at the turn of the last century. I don’t think Huntington intended fo that, but those are the types who are drawn to his thesis.
I recommend Charles Kupchan’s book “The End of the American Era.” Kupchan looks at foreign trends and U.S. tendencies with a much more discerning eye than Huntington, and Kupchan also keeps a longer perspective. His predictions about Europe, however, appear dated due to the French and Dutch reluctance to ratify the EU Constitution.
The Bible is used by xenophobes and bigots to justify crusades, too, but it’s still a touchstone with which people should be familiar. :)
I have re-read Huntington’s article over the years and, to this day, I still take issue with him putting the lid on Communism. I think Capitalism is enjoying a resurgence but I find it hard to believe that society will never make a good faith effort again to care for one another.
Waldo, that comment was nowhere near what I was talking about. Sure, bigots have used the Bible for their own ends, but they have a hard time getting around the example Jesus set with the Samaritan woman (John 4), the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), the opportunity for the Ethiopian official to be saved (Acts 8) and the words of St. Paul in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
In other words, those who use the Bible to divide and oppress must use justifications that are out-of-context and do not follow the life and example of Jesus of Nazareth. With Huntington, however, those who preach cross-cultural conflict and bloody wars (get them before they get us) need not take one jot or tittle out of context.
I don’t mind you recommending a book that is often cited by the cultural warriors as a causus belli in order to increase understanding about their twisted minds. What I do mind is when you call him “highly prescient,” or hint he might be so.