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February
28, 2002
St. Clair
/ Cockburn
Rumble
From the Jungle:
Ecuadorian Farmers Fight
DynCorp's Chem War
February
27, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Daniel
Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?
February
26, 2002
Jonathan
Steele
Kabul's
Loss
Vasily
Streltsov
The
Pentagon in
the Transcaucusas
CounterPunch
Wire
How
Corporations Use Shadowy "527" Groups to Influence
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Lt. Col.
Robert Bowman
ABM
Treaty: Alive or Dead?
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
A
Prayer for America
February
25, 2002
John Clarke
Interrogated
at US Border
Blankfort,
Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case
Alex Lynch
Naked
from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian
John Chuckman
Ashcroft
Speaks in Tongues
February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
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in an Afghan Refugee Camp
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February 28,
2002
A Critique of Samuel
Huntingon
Peddling Civilizational Wars
By M. Shahid Alam
Samuel Huntington peddles a culturalist thesis
about the sources of conflicts in The Clash of Civilizations.
He builds on the premise that the "most important distinc-tions
among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They
are cultural."
If cultural distinctions possess primacy,
it follows that they will drive the world's conflicts. The
Clash asserts that the Cold War, characterized by the clash
of ideologies, was an aberration: the most dangerous conflicts
in the new post-Cold War era will occur along the fault-lines
of civilizations. Although Huntington iden-tifies nine contemporary
civilizations, there are three that monopolize his attention:
the West, Islam and the Sinic civilization. The critical conflicts
in the coming dec-ades will occur because of challenges to the
West from Islam and China.
This is social science at its political
best-as ideology. The Clash obfuscates the realities of
unequal power: in this case, the deepest, most enduring, and
widening divisions between rich and poor countries. It is carelessly
constructed, ahistorical and contradictory; it is also contradicted
by historical evidence. Nevertheless, Huntington's thesis has
dominated public discourse since it was first launched in 1993.
Apparently, ideologies succeed by appealing to interests, not
logic or evi-dence.
Interests Don't Matter?
In the post-Cold War world, Huntington
confidently proclaims, "the most pervasive, important, and
dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich
and poor, or other economically defined groups, but between peoples
belonging to different cultural entities."
Huntington claims that conflicts between
rich and poor countries are unlikely because the latter "lack
the political unity, economic power, and military capability
to challenge the rich countries." Ironically, this contradicts
his own thesis about the most serious challenges to the West
emanating from Islam and China. Many of the Islamic countries-including
the largest-are among the world's poorest; and China too, despite
two decades of rapid growth, remains quite poor. In addition,
the Is-lamic world lacks any political unity: it is fragmented
into more than fifty countries.
It is not clear that conflicts between
rich and poor countries can only occur if the latter are united.
Two poor countries, China and India, have populations that exceed
the combined population of all Western countries. China is already
regarded as a military threat to the United States, though India
may not be far behind. Given their enormous size, with another
decade or two of rapid growth, these two countries could also
begin to offer serious economic competition to the Core countries.
Even smaller countries can become a threat.
It has been America's policy to ostracize countries in the Periphery
as rogue states if they do one or more of three things: they
resist US hegemony, they possess or are developing long-range
missiles, and they possess or are developing weapons of mass
destruction. Nearly all the "rogue states" are quite
small; the list includes Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Cuba
and Libya. It would appear that the United States takes the "rogue
states" quite seriously. It is developing the Nuclear Defense
Shield to intercept and shoot down missiles fired by the rogue
states.
Amusingly, Huntington negates his own
thesis-that most conflicts have their source in cultural differences-when
he describes the genesis of civilizational conflicts. The civilizational
wars, he concedes, originate in the usual sources: the anarchy
of states, and conflicts over people, territory and resources;
culture enters into these conflicts only later as the rival parties
mobilize support among the larger population. Isn't this a disavowal
of the primacy of cultural factors in "civilizational"
conflicts?
What Are Civilizations?
An examination of the central concept
in The Clash--civilizations-reveals several more flaws
and contradictions in Huntington's thesis.
Huntington defines civilization as "
the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level
of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes
humans from other species." In addition, each civilization
is defined by its core and enduring "values, norms, institutions,
and modes of thinking."
This is followed by a list of eight contemporary
civilizations: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Latin
American, the West, and African (possibly). This list might have
been convincing if Huntington had identified their core "values,
norms, institutions, and modes of thinking." But he refuses
to oblige. We are left wondering if indeed these 'civilizations'
can be defined by some set of unchanging core values; or how
great are the differences in the core values of these civilizations.
Curiously, there is no room in Huntington's taxonomy for Thailand,
Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, or Tibet. They are looking
for a home.
At the same time, there exists a strong
correspondence between Huntington's civilizations and Western
notion of races. All but one of them can be identified with a
'race': the West with Germanic, the Orthodox with Slavic, Latin
American with Mestizo (though their elites are almost entirely
white), the Sinic and Japanese with the 'yellow race', the Hindu
with the dark Caucasians, and the African with black. Islam alone
does not fit this description. This leads to a suspicion. Is
it possible that Huntington's scheme simply recycles the Western
division of mankind into races?
Although Huntington claims that religion
is "a central defining characteristic" of civilizations,
the correlation between his civilizations and religion is quite
weak. The West, Orthodox and Latin American civilizations are
all Christian. Latin America is set apart because it is
mostly Catholic; but so are Spain, Portugal, Belgium, France
and Italy. More importantly, if there can be three Christian
civilizations, what prevents Huntington from splitting Islam
along sectarian (Shiite and Sunni) or racial lines (Arab, Iranian,
Turkic, African and Malay). Finally, there are two civilizations
on Huntington's list-the Sinic and Japanese-which have no clear
religious affiliations-at least, as the term is understood in
the West.
The concept of civilization creates ambiguity
because of its empirical relationship with states. Of the six
major civilizations-the Western, Orthodox, Islamic, Indian, Sinic,
and Japanese-the last three are identical or nearly identical
with a state. India, China and Japan are civilizations and
states. In addition, two core states-United States and Russia-contain
a third and a half of the total populations of their civilizations.
In the event, it becomes easy to construe a straight conflict
over interests-say between United States and China, or China
and Russia-as a clash of civilizations.
Why Do Civilizations Clash?
There are at least two answers Huntington
offers to this question: these clashes have roots in the human
psyche and in the nature of cultures.
At the deepest level, the clash of civilizations
is rooted in our psyche. People define themselves by identifying
with "cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious
communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations."
But this is not enough: in order to deepen our identity we must
also hate others. In other words, the clash of civilizations
is rooted in natural human frailties.
This two-part thesis is problematic in
both its parts. The psychic need for identity is better fulfilled
by identifying with smaller groups-one's family, village, tribe,
trade union, club, or team-rather than with larger, secondary,
more distant groups, such as nations and civilizations. If we
do identity with a nation or civilization, this is socially constructed,
not rooted in our psyche. Similarly, if our self-definition
does feed on hatred, we might derive considerably greater satisfaction
in directing this hatred towards rivals at hand-in business,
politics, sports, or at the workplace-rather than to abstract
and distant entities such as 'other' civilizations.
At a different level, Huntington attributes
clashes to the nature of cultures: their differences per se
and their rivalry. In the context of the West and Islam, he asserts
that their conflicts "flow from the nature of the
two religions and the civilizations based on them." Thus,
the "ongoing pattern of conflict" between the two civilizations
results, among other things, from conflicts over the role of
religion in politics. Even their similarities become sources
of conflicts: their monotheism, which will not accommodate other
gods; their universalistic claims that contest the same territory;
and the competition of their missionaries.
These claims are rife with problems.
Ironically, an Islamic civilization barely existed during the
first phase of Arab expansion-leading to collisions with the
Byzantine Empire and the Latin West-in the seventh and early
eighth centuries. Second, let alone forcing Islam upon their
subjects, the first Islamic empire-that of the Omayyads-discouraged
conversions to Islam. They preferred the revenues from jizya,
a head tax imposed on non-Muslims.
The opposition between the West and Islam
over secularism is false. For most of its history, the West defined
itself as Christendom, which granted citizenship only to true
believers in Catholic dogma. Christians who departed from the
true faith, as well as Jews and Muslims, were persecuted, massacred,
or expelled from Europe. After a period of murderous wars, following
the rise of Protestantism, the West extended religious tolerance
to Christian denominations. However, with some exceptions, this
tolerance was not extended to non-Christians until quite recently.
On the other hand, the tolerance which Islamic empires granted
to diverse religious tendencies within Islam, and, to a lesser
degree, to other religions, would be embraced by the West only
in recent times.
The separation between the Church and
State in the West is also exaggerated. The Catholic Church was
itself a major power center, often rivaling the princes. In any
case, this separation would be hard to enforce, since the leaders
of the Church and the state were drawn from the same class of
elite landowners. This only grew worse with the rise of Protestantism.
Often, this meant that the head of state became the head of the
national church: Queen Elizabeth is still the head of the Anglican
Church. On the other hand, the Islamic societies had several
secular features, some not present in medieval or modern Europe.
At least Sunni Islam has never been organized into a Church:
it has remained a decentralized religion, in which each local
community organizes its own schools and places of worship. The
elaboration of legal systems-not just family laws-was never a
monopoly of the state. Instead, this was vested in outstanding
jurists.
Similarly, the universalist claims and,
more importantly, the means employed to achieve them, are historically
determined. In the past, Christianity viewed Islam as a false
religion, which had to be combated with force. But Christianity
hardly defines the West anymore. And though Christians may still
believe that Islam is a false religion, it is unlikely that many
of them would be too eager to enlist in crusades to extirpate
Islam. On the other hand, Islamic societies have moved in the
opposite direction over the past century, away from the tolerance
of their religion. The Islamic movements that have emerged to
resist the marginalization of Islamic societies are more rigid
in matters of practice, more defensive, and less tolerant of
other religions than almost any of the traditional schools of
Islam.
The Evidence
It will scarcely surprise anyone that
a theory so weakly constructed as Huntington's should fail the
empirical test: and its fails resoundingly.
First, consider his main thesis which
claims that conflicts between two states after 1989 are more
likely if they belong to two different civilizations. This is
not supported by the evidence. A recent study by Jonathan Fox
shows that a comparison of all ethnic conflicts during the Cold
War, and the period since, shows a modest decline in the
ratio of inter-civilization conflicts to intra-civilization conflicts.
We hear no deafening tumult of civilizational clashes after 1989.
Alternatively, we might analyze the historical
evidence to check if the probability of conflicts rises with
cultural differences. Henderson and Tucker have studied the impact
of cultural differences on the probability of international conflicts
during the post-Cold War period; their study controls for distance
between the countries, the presence of democracy, and an index
of power capabilities. Once again, there is no comfort for the
clash of civilizations. Cultural differences had no visible impact
on the probability of wars during this period.
The Huntington thesis finds no support
in the period before 1945. Of 18 major wars fought by great powers
between 1600 and 1945, only six involved states from two or more
civilizations. Once again, when Henderson and Tucker examined
international wars between 1816 and 1945, with controls for other
influences, they found that the probability of conflicts between
two states was greater if they belonged to the same civilization.
Quite the opposite of what Huntington predicts.
Now consider the accusations about Islam's
"bloody borders." Huntington asserts that "in
the 1990s they [Muslims] have been far more involved in intergroup
violence than the people of any other civilization." Again,
the data tell a different story. In his survey of ethnic conflicts,
Jonathan Fox found that Islam was involved in 23.2 percent of
all inter-civilizational conflicts between 1945 and 1989, and
24.7 percent of these conflicts between 1990 and 1998. These
shares are not too far above Islam's share in world population;
nor do we observe any dramatic rise in this share since the end
of the Cold War.
In any case, we have to be careful when
we talk about "bloody borders." A hard look at geography
reveals that civilizational borders vary strikingly, and that
Islam's share of such borders is disproportionately large. On
the one hand, Islam stretches from Senegal, Morocco and Bosnia
in the West to Sinjiang, Indonesia and Mindanao in the East.
This geographic sweep across the Afro-Eurasian landmass brings
Islam into contact-often close and extensive-with the African,
Western, Orthodox, Hindu and Sinic civilizations. We must account
not only for the borders between countries, but also the borders
between often large pockets of majority Islam within non-Islamic
countries and vice versa. It is my impression that if we were
to add up all of these borders, Islam's share might well exceed
the combined share of all others. Recognition of these facts
might help to place observations about Islam's "bloody borders"
in a less prejudicial perspective.
The Clash as Ideology
Why has The Clash dominated public
discourse in the West despite its flawed theory, lack of empirical
support, and its espousal of hatred as the necessary foundation
of cultural identity?
Our capacity to believe narratives, even
quite ridiculous ones, depends on how well they serve our individual
and collective interests. Many of the stories social scientists
weave about race, culture, economic development, free markets
and free trade are implausible, even farcical, once they are
seen in their true colors. But they endure so long as they serve
powerful interests. They endure because these powerful interests
can employ a legion of scholars who willingly-though often unknowingly-trade
the prestige of their scholarship for good jobs, good pay, and
the accolades of bosses.
The post-Cold War period marked a new
intensification in the reach of global capitalism. The communist
challenge had forced the Core countries to unite, to forge multilateral
institutions to manage their global interests: when the Cold
War ended, the Core countries moved decisively, with the multilateral
institutions in the lead, to create a global economic regime
which allowed Core capital to freely penetrate every segment
of the Periphery. The bywords of this new regime are: free trade,
liberal exchange markets, privatization, national treatment of
foreign capital, and globalization of intellectual property rights.
This has produced rapid immiseration
of large parts of the Periphery, the erosion of indigenous capital
in much of the Periphery, and widening disparities between the
Core and Periphery. Not surprisingly, this more transparent,
overbearing and invasive imperialism deepened the demand for
ideologies that would obfuscate the growing divisions between,
as well as inside, the rich and poor countries. The Clash
answers to this demand by giving primacy to religious, racial
and civilizational conflicts-thus deflecting attention from the
looming battles over the world's economic divide.
M. Shahid Alam
is Professor of Economics at Northeastern University, Boston.
His recent book, Poverty from the Wealth of Nations, was
published by Palgrave (2000). He may be reached at m.alam@neu.edu.
Copyright M. Shahid Alam.
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