Colin Cookman
IR 522 - Ideas in American Foreign Policy
04-07-05
Samuel P. Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations
The end of the Cold War and the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union drastically altered the security environment in which American intellectuals and policymakers had presumed themselves to be operating for the previous half-century. President George H. W. Bush made statements highlighting what he saw as an opportunity to establish a "new world order", but few observers — Bush included — were able to say exactly what kind of order that might be. This profound shakeup in the realm of international relations soon produced a number of competing theories that sought to explain and identify likely sources of conflict or cooperation in a newly uncertain future.
As a response to some of those early ideas, Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard political science professor and civil-military relations theorist, wrote an 1993 essay entitled "The Clash of Civilizations?" for the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs. Previous phases of world conflict — from disputes among monarchs to wars between nation-states to struggles between ideologies — were essentially, according to Huntington, conflicts within Western civilization. With the collapse of Communism and what he saw as the relative rise of non-Western powers, the stage was now set for larger conflicts between civilizations. Huntington's thesis was harshly criticized as a self-fulfilling prophecy by some observers and hailed by others as prophetic and incisive; in 1996 he expanded it to book length with the publication of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which went on to be published in some twenty-six languages and whose arguments were hotly debated throughout the world (Kaplan 81). Huntington's emphasis on the power of identity politics brought new insights to the study of international conflict, but the religious reductionism by which he defines civilizations and the degree of importance that he ascribes to them leads him to postulate overdeterministic, closed systems in which preserving cultural purity apparently trumps all other concerns.
Despite the popular influence of Huntington's Clash thesis and his numerous earlier works in the field of political science, biographical information outside of his academic life remains scant — perhaps because there is comparatively little of it. Born in New York City in 1927, Huntington attended the elite Stuyvesant High School until age 16, then entered Yale where he graduated with high distinction, earning his degree in political science in only two and a half years. After serving in the Army during World War II, he returned to academia where he has remained ever since, attaining a masters in political science from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Huntington's teaching position as a professor of political science in Harvard's Department of Government, begun in 1962 after he was recruited away from Columbia University, continues to this day. His well-situated position in the world of America's foreign policy elite is reflected in his role as a founder and editor of the influential journal Foreign Policy, and in the late 1970s he served briefly as Coordinator of Security Planning on his friend and former colleague Zbigniew Brzezinski's National Security Council.
Huntington earned notoriety early in his career with the publication of his first book, The Soldier and the State, a history of American national security policy and civil-military relations that was heavily criticized for its endorsement of the need for a traditional, realist military establishment as a means of preserving domestic political liberalism (Kaplan 68-70). Huntington emphasizes the value of order and tradition, a constant theme he developed most explicitly in his 1957 essay for The American Political Science Review, "Conservatism as an Ideology". Praising the cautious pragmatism of the philosopher Edmund Burke, Huntington says that conservatism is not an merely an ideology but rather
the intellectual rationale of the permanent institutional prerequisites of human existence. It has a high and necessary function. ... When the foundations of society are threatened, the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and the desirability of existing ones ("Conservatism" 460-61).
Describing himself in an interview with Robert Kaplan as an intellectual "‘child of [Reinhold] Neibuhr'", the Protestant theologian and Cold War philosopher, Huntington established early on in his writings a preference for this form of defensive, realpolitik conservatism (Kaplan 71). What would come to distinguish him from the more dominant realist trends, however, was his emphasis on the power of culture in determining and defining the American national identity and interests, something he first fully articulated in his 1993 Foreign Affairs essay.
The "Clash" essay was written in response to another influential theory circulating through the world of American foreign policy intellectuals in the immediate post-Cold War years — Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History?" (Clash 31). Fukuyama (a former student of Huntington's at Harvard) viewed history as a Hegelian progression of conflicts that had culminated in the ideological Cold War between the United States and the USSR. In light of the collapse of Soviet Communism, he claimed, "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government" was now effectively complete (Par. 4). Huntington, in his rebuttal, calls into question the existence of any universal culture, and instead identifies civilizational differences as a deep source of future conflict. The rapid proliferation of small-scale conflagrations that sprang up throughout the world in the immediate post-Cold War era offered Huntington a wealth of examples to work with, and many readers seized upon his explanation in an effort to understand the roots of the new multi-polar security environment.
Huntington is not the first to posit the notion of "civilizations" as distinct political units interacting with one another, and he readily acknowledges the intellectual debt he owes to British historian Arnold Toynbee, whose writings were influential in developing the civilizational model for the study of history. A civilization, as defined by Huntington, is
the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people.
These divisions are particularly important because, according to Huntington, loyalties to one's civilization ultimately trump national politics when conflict with another foreign culture arises. As evidence Huntington cites examples of Arab support for Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War (during which Hussein was lionized for standing up against the Western coalition) and the involvement of third parties in the Bosnian conflict (where, with the exception of American support for Bosnian genocide claims, the warring Croat Catholic, Serbian Orthodox, and Bosnian Muslim partisans received support exclusively from their coreligionists in Western Europe, Russia, and the Muslim world). Those seeking to understand the dynamics of world politics, Huntington believes, must understand that "kin countries" under threat will ultimately choose to flock together in light of their shared identity, constructed in opposition to the alien "other" ("Clash", par. 35).
Huntington defines his civilizations on the basis of language, ethnic, and cultural cleavages, but the most profound division of all and the one that corresponds most closely to the groups he identifies is that produced by religion. The boundaries of Western civilization are those of Western Christendom, and the values and ideals of all major civilizations ultimately derive from their religiously-inspired worldviews. "In the first half of the twentieth century intellectual elites generally assumed that economic and social modernization was leading to the withering away of religion as a significant element in human existence", Huntington says, but an upsurge of religious revival beginning in the 1970s has reconfirmed Edmund Burke's contention that "man is basically a religious animal" (Clash 97; "Conservatism" 456). "People do not live by reason alone", Huntington says; "[t]hey cannot calculate and act rationally in pursuit of their self-interest until they define their self. Interest politics presupposes identity" (Clash 97). The modernization and urbanization process, he explains, has disrupted our traditional identities, sparking a worldwide upsurge of religious revivalism. Religion offers believers a fundamental core to their identity, gives them a place in a community of fellow believers, separates them from the external "other", and offers a set of shared values that ultimately form the heart of a civilization (Clash 97).
As Daniel Drezner points out in his Washington Quarterly book review, Huntington's belief that nation-state's power as an organizing idea and source for identification was weakening was an idea widely shared by his contemporaries. The phenomenon of globalization was one frequently identified explanation for this. Many liberal internationalists (both inside the Clinton administration and out) believed that this process of rabidly increasing trade and communication was reshaping international relations in a way that would some day result in an integrated "global village", in which, as predicted by Fukuyama, the world would unite under shared values of liberal democratic capitalism. Denying the existence of any emerging global culture (save a small group of the highest economic and political elites, what he calls the "Davos people"), Huntington instead argues that the globalization process will exacerbate the clash between civilizations. As the exchange of information and number of contacts between cultures increase, he explains, individuals will actually become more aware of their differences with others, fueling grievances and igniting tensions. An increase in communication does not reduce the prospects of conflict, but in fact does the reverse; the assumption that Western values are naturally linked with modernization and economic development in the non-Western world only further antagonizes these civilizations by conflating what Huntington believes two distinct processes (Clash 67).
The provocativeness of Huntington's Clash thesis led to an immediate response within America's foreign policy establishment; in the opening of his book, Huntington claims that the publication of the article, "according to the Foreign Affairs editors, stirred up more discussion in three years than any other article they had published since the 1940s" (13). Critical reaction has frequently been harsh, particularly that coming from members of the American intellectual left, who viewed its title as a prescription for action rather than a description of an evolving system of world relations. Huntington's formulation has been derided as crudely simplistic and overly focused on culture as a determinant factor; a self-fulfilling prophecy for conflict with the rest of the world; and a tract of unremittant Western cultural chauvinism. The late Edward Said managed to hit almost all of these themes in a single October 2001 article for The Nation magazine, in which he criticized Huntington for wanting to "make ‘civilizations' and ‘identities' into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history" (Par. 4). Others have dismissed Huntington's exclusive focus on culture, maintaining the traditionally Marxist interpretation that material political and economic relationships account for the real roots of conflict between groups and that religion and other trappings constitute surface-level superstructure only (Price). Huntington has been criticized in this vein for being too credulous in accepting public statements (by figures like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew or Malaysia's Mohammad Mahatir) that critics say are more accurately perceived as fodder for domestic political rallying rather than as a genuine reflection of irreconcilable cultural cleavages (Drezner 11).
Huntington has had his defenders as well, however, and one section of his work that has earned considerable notice has been the uncompromising indictment of Islam in the pages of The Clash. Despite careful statements by the President that the United States is not at war with the Muslim ummah but rather a particular radical terrorist segment of it, many post-9/11 commentators have phrased the conflict in more broadly sweeping civilizational terms — a conclusion easy to come to given Osama bin Laden's own explicit endorsement of such a framework. (Council on Foreign Relations, par. 1). Huntington describes the conflict between Islam and the West as one with historical, enduring roots that date back to the Crusades — "Each", he says, "has been the other's Other" (Clash 209). Huntington's description of a "quasi-war" between America and the Islamic world several years prior to the dramatic events of 9/11 and the subsequent US military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have led many to consider his analysis prophetic, but his proposals on how to respond to this threat do not seem to have been embraced to the same degree as the rest of his paradigm.
In strong contrast to the President's proclamations as to the universal appeal of liberty, individualism, and the broad notion of "freedom", Huntington maintains that Western ideals cannot be imposed and will not be accepted by a civilization in which they have no historic roots. His is a far more pessimistic position than the neoconservative theory that supports "transformation" in the Middle East through the introduction of liberal democratic capitalism as the solution to conflict emanating from that region. Such an attempt at Westernizing a foreign civilization by force, Huntington believes, simply won't work in the long term. Huntington goes against a major theme of American self-conception — one that predates the Republic's founding, in texts like John Winthrop's "City on a Hill" — when he declares that Western ideals and values are not universal and, in fact, that viewing them as such is not only false but that formulating policy as if that were the case is "immoral ... and it is dangerous" (Clash 310). Failing to recognize the basic divisions between civilizations results in muddled, self-deluding policies, he warns, and the "necessary logical consequence of universalism" is unsustainable imperialism (Clash 311).
It is uniqueness, not universality, that gives Western civilization value in Huntington's eye; "The West differs from other civilizations", he says, "not in the way it has developed but in the distinctive character of its values and institutions. These include most notably its Christianity, pluralism, individualism, and rule of law, which made it possible for the West to invent modernity, expand throughout the world, and become the envy of other societies" (Clash 311). In an effort to preserve this distinctiveness, Huntington issues an apocalyptic warning towards the end of The Clash about the dangers of multiculturalism within the United States. In the spring of 2004, Huntington resurrected and expanded upon this warning with another article-book combination that has proven as explosive as The Clash was a decade before. Writing in the March/April issue of Foreign Policy, Huntington penned a 15-page cover story on "The Hispanic Challenge", which he identified as an existential threat to the "American Creed" that is intrinsically tied to the U.S.' Protestant Anglo-Saxon heritage. Huntington argues that the massive influx of immigration taking place along America's southern border risks the future bifurcation of the United States into two civilizations by introducing a group whose members do not share traditional American values and who resist integration through the strength of their numbers, their geographic concentration, and the movement towards bilingualism. "There is no Americano dream," Huntington writes starkly in his conclusion, "There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English." ("The Hispanic Challenge" 45). In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Huntington described "cleft countries" such as Czechoslovakia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and the former Yugoslavia, in which "two or more civilizations say, in effect, ‘We are different peoples and belong in different places.' The forces of repulsion drive them apart" (138). The same phenomenon is now at risk in America, he warns in his new essay, and cites as evidence the rising appeal of Hispanic identity politics and rival "white nativist" movements in the United States.
The recommendations Huntington makes in his theses are conservative in their nature, in the same Burkean tradition that he expounded upon in his 1957 "Conservatism as an Ideology" essay. Within each civilization, "core states" provide the leadership and the cultural and political center of gravity; the result, in the words of reviewer William McNeill, is an international system in which "spheres of influence must be clearly drawn among the different civilizations and meticulously observed" (McNeill par. 8). In Huntington's updated version of the classic international relations realist paradigm, it is civilizations unified by a common culture, rather than traditional nation-states, that are advised to conserve and expand their power in order to balance and respond to their rivals and advance their own interests.
Huntington's paradigm explicitly advises the United States as to its position as part of Western civilization and strongly emphasizes the importance of maintaining that identity. "The principle responsibility of Western leaders", Huntington writes in his conclusion to The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, "is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West ... but to preserve, protect, and renew the unique qualities of Western civilization." (Clash 311). On matters of diplomatic policy, this necessitates a strong alliance with Western Europe, and advises against becoming too attached to extra-civilizational allies, such as Japan, with whom long-term coinciding interests are considered to be impossible. In fact, as of the spring of 2005, indications are that Huntington's predications have actually been born out in reverse. Nor has his more cautious, defensive stances or his rejection of American universalism enjoyed great favor within the current Bush administration. Although Huntington's argument has provided much of the simplistic vocabulary currently being used in the debates of U.S. policy towards Islam, and has helped to bring a greater sense of existential urgency to the present conflict, his position of academic remove makes him far more effective as a portrayor of sociological trends than an advocate for a particular American policy.
Works Cited
Council on Foreign Relations. "Causes of 9/11: A Clash of Civilizations?" Terrorism Questions & Answers. Council on Foreign Relations, 2004.
Drezner, Daniel. "Globalizers of the World, Unite!" The Washington Quarterly. Winter 1998: 209-225.
Fukuyama, Francis. "The End of History?" The National Interest. Summer 1989.
Huntington, Samuel P. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs. Summer 1993. 5 Apr. 2005
---. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. London: The Free Press, 2002.
---. "Conservatism as an Ideology". The American Political Science Review. Jun. 1957: 454-473.
---. "The Hispanic Challenge". Foreign Policy. Mar./Apr. 2004: 30-45.
Kaplan, Robert D. "Looking the World in the Eye". The Atlantic Monthly. Dec. 2001: 68+
McNeill, William. "Decline of the West?" The New York Review of Books. Jan. 1997.
Price, Matthew. "Re-clash of Civilizations." Boston Globe 15 Feb. 2004.
Said, Edward. "The Clash of Ignorance". The Nation. Oct. 2001.