Clash Of Civilizations
A provocative idea on the 21st century global order
Hello reader,
If you missed it, check out last week’s book recommendations. People particularly loved the 7th item on the list.
In the last few years, we’ve all become damn interested in international relations, geopolitics, and warfare.
We all want to understand how power works, the nature and causes of war, and the future relationship between the major world powers.
I’ve also taken a keen interest in going down these rabbit holes, what with one major war breaking out after another.
In this quest, I came across a major piece of work titled ‘Clash Of Civilizations’ by Samuel P Huntington, written in the 1990s. An American political scientist, he offered a provocative thesis on what the post-Cold War world order would look like.
So what’s this concept all about?
Let’s unpack it in 6 simple points before you fall asleep:
Civilizations: Here’s the core idea: nations in a post-Cold War world would align not along economic or ideological lines but along cultural lines, which would lead to a clash of civilizations. What is a civilization, though? It is not just the common set of values, norms, and institutions that bind people together, but the highest cultural grouping humans fall into and the broadest level of cultural identity they identify with. The world’s major civilizations are the West, Chinese, Hindu, Islamic, Japanese, Orthodox, Latin American, and African. The idea, therefore, is that the world order would be built as nations latch onto others within their own civilizational groups. But why would nations want to group themselves along these lines? It’s because we work well with people who are similar to us- those whom we can understand, relate to, and share common interests (and enemies) with.
Cultural resurgence: Why will civilizational identity (of which religion often turns out to be a big part) be so important in the 21st century, especially when people were predicting the death of religion? These predictions were being made due to increasing modernization which, paradoxically, led to the rise of religious identities. Most nations in the non-Western world modernized within a few decades, a process that took over 200 years in the West. This rapid displacement and migration to urban settings tore apart the traditional ways of life (family, religious affiliations, etc), and created a deep sense of alienation as people coped with an alien way of life. When people face such conditions, they naturally revert back to the familiar for stability, comfort, and a sense of purpose- and that’s the role religion plays.
Modernization and assertiveness: As nations modernized, many took care not to Westernize. As modernization led to increasing wealth and modernity (as in the case of East Asian economies like Singapore, Hong Kong, and S Korea), it created a sense of confidence- which directly leads to cultural assertiveness. Soft power follows hard power, and people are attracted to an ideology when they see that it can produce success, just as people were attracted to communism when they saw Russia’s impressive rise in the 60s and 70s. As economies across Asia rise, they’re growing increasingly assertive and making it clear that they’re not just different from the West, but also have a superior culture that is the secret sauce behind their swashbuckling rise. We can see a similar process playing out in Bharat today.
West vs Rest: Similarly, Islamic nations in the Middle East started becoming more confident thanks to their oil wealth and demographic bulge. As Huntington puts it succinctly, “The dangerous clashes of the future will arise from the interaction between Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness”. This will stem from the distorted Western view that their ideas, values, and institutions are something that the entire world should adopt, while the Rest oppose this vehemently and are sticking to their own way of doing things. What the West sees as Universalism, the Rest see as Imperialism.
Fault-line wars: The next set of wars, per Huntington, will therefore occur across civilizational fault lines- either among actors of different civilizations or within countries that host people belonging to different ones who eye each other with hostility. Ukraine, for instance, was divided between Uniate Christians who aligned with the West, and Orthodox Christians in the East who aligned with Russia. Even the Bosnian war saw the West supporting Catholic Croats, Russia supporting Orthodox Serbs, and the Islamic World supporting Muslim Bosnians. But such fault line wars pose the risk of getting bigger as other civilizational actors get drawn in and trigger conflicts of greater magnitudes. He calls this the kin-country syndrome, and it’s a worrying idea, especially in the current conflagration in the Middle East.
Preventing doom: So what is Huntington’s call to action for the preservation of the West? (Of course, he wrote this book to advise American policymakers) One, do not intervene in the issues of other civilizations (like American intervention in issues concerning the South China Sea) as these can quickly cascade into global conflicts. Two, attempt joint mediation whenever civilizational clashes break out to prevent a cascade. And three, all civilizations must look for what’s common among them and focus on learning each others’ ideas, customs, art, etc. This must be done in order to develop a better appreciation for other people so human civilization can flourish, instead of turning this overcrowded planet into a warzone and destroying everything we’ve built in the last few millennia.
Was Huntington right in his diagnosis?
People continue to debate this thesis 30 years after it was published, and you could hear opposing views by Edward Said or other writers. I don’t know who’s right or what the future holds, but I’ve done what I promise to: sharing thought-provoking ideas that’ll help you see the world differently.
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