Huntington’s thesis “the clash of civilizations” first appeared in the summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs. FA reports that no article sparked more responses and controversy since George Kennan wrote his famous piece in the same journal in 1947 arguing for “containment” of the Soviet Union. Subsequent to the article’s publication, there was a blizzard of pieces in response to Huntington, almost all critical.
It’s interesting to note that by the time of Huntington’s death 2008, his thesis had begun to achieve a new cachet even with former critics like Fouad Ajami, who wrote, “Nearly 15 years on, Huntington’s thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at the time.” (”The Clash,” New York Times Book Review, Jan. 6, 2008, 10).
Following are my notes on several pieces written in response to Huntington:
Citation for the article itself: Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3, Summer, 1993, pp. 22-49.
“The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations.” (p. 39)
III. Western Responses to Huntington
A. Edward Said, “Orientalism: An Afterword,” Raritan, vol. 14, no. 3,Winter, 1995, pp. 32-59.
Huntington’s thesis, “…is preposterous, since one of the great advances in modern cultural theory is the realization, almost universally acknowledged, that cultures are hybrid and heterogenous and, as I argued in Culture and Imperialism, that cultures and civilizations are so interrelated and interdependent as to beggar any unitary or simply delineated description of their individuality. How can one today speak of ‘Western Civilization’ except as in large measure an ideological fiction, implying a sort of detached superiority for a handful of values and ideas, none of them with much meaning outside the history of conquest, immigration, travel, and the mixing of peoples that gave the Western nations their present mixed identities? This is especially true of the United States, which today cannot seriously be described except as an enormous palimpsest of different races and cultures sharing a problematic history of conquests, exterminations, and of course major cultural and political achievements.” (p. 53)
B. Does the phrase “the West” refer any longer to a definable geographical and cultural entity in an age when Western technologies and culture are emanating not only from North America and Europe, but now also from Japan, Australia, Russia, and China?
C. In Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 4, Summer/Fall, 1993, pp. 2-26.
1. Fouad Ajami: Huntington underestimates the power of secularism and modernity in non-Western nations to resist religious resurgence. “…let us be clear: civilizations do not control states, states control civilizations.” (p. 9).
2. Kishore Mahbubani: “…the recent epoch of Western domination, especially under American leadership, has been remarkably benign.” (p. 10) Islam is not a monolith. The West is “bringing about its relative decline by its own hand.” (p. 14)
3. Robert L. Bartley: Powerful forces, like instant communications, are bringing cultures together not creating fault lines between them. There is a much greater potential for ruptures within civilizations (China and Hong Kong) than between them. Non-Western nations continue to move closer to full democracy. “…as Huntington himself has been known to observe, democracies almost never go to war with each other.” (p. 17)
4. Liu Binyan: Confucianism will not be a major force in China’s future. “The Chinese people are a practical sort; they have always been concerned about their material well-being.” (p. 20)
5. Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick (et al. ): “At least in the twentieth century, the most violent conflicts have occurred within civilizations: Stalin’s purges, Pol Pot’s genocide, the Nazi holocaust, and World War II.” (p. 23) Developing nations still follow the Western model. (p. 26)
IV. Response to Huntington from a prominent Arab writer:
A. Rami G. Khouri, “Slam Dunking Through History, Asia, Islamdom and Harvard Square,” December 24, 1996, reprinted in MSANEWS, December 29, 1996.
“By juxtaposing democracy as a political governance system with the largely culture-based values of Islamism and Asianism, he reflects the tendency of triumphalist Americanism to hold itself up as an inevitable model for others to follow, and even as a universal validating concept to which all societies one day will have to submit themselves for assessment, approval or rejection…
“The experience of the rest of the world is far richer and older than pan-Atlantic modernism, and should not be dismissed so quickly or axiomatically bundled in with authoritarianism if it does not hit home runs for democracy’s and America’s team…
“The facts on the ground in the Middle East, and probably other parts of the South, do not suggest predominantly that democracy and Islamism/authoritarianism are pitted against one another in a post-communist tug-of-war for universalism. They suggest, rather, that gradual transformation due to economic or political pressures is generating a new hybrid that I would call “Oriental democracy” — a synthesis of superficially adopted Western democratic norms (elections, political parties, a free and varied press, an independent judiciary, etc.) with the more credible and deeply entrenched Oriental traditions of communally-configured patriarchal and oligarchic governance (based on values that are primarily cultural, rather than religious. Many Americans remain haunted and intellectually paralyzed by the role of religion in the Iranian revolution nearly two decades ago; the rest of the world has moved on).
