Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis and the search to define a global strategic paradigm
An examination of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis and the search to use religion as the cultural determinate when defining the contemporary strategic paradigm.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats, 1919
The Great War of 1914-1918 broke the world and remade it something new. Mighty empires were undone, the map was redrawn and new spawned technologies were loosed upon the human landscape. Moreover, the labours of centuries of intellectual enterprise bore unsettled fruit and gave rise to the ideological wars of the Twentieth Century[1]. To stand on the crumbling edge of the old epoch, with darkness falling and the future some fathomless chasm, thinking men could only but nod with Yeats and wonder, “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”[2].
Seven decades later, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, the world changed again. An ideological empire was undone, the map morphed anew and technology, having reshaped the human landscape, began creating landscapes of its own. Lacking Yeats’ gift we could only stammer, “What just happened?”[3] The Cold War zeitgeist was no more. That the form of the world had changed was plain, but what it had changed into was an altogether more vexing problem.
Man, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and intellectuals of all genera raced to define the new and future age. It was “the End of History”; we were on the cusp of “the Coming Anarchy”; we faced a “Clash of Civilizations”[4]. Each of these ideas, and the many other then and since, sparked debate, both fertile and furious, as thinkers and non-thinkers alike fought to examine, critique, praise or destroy each thesis and sometimes even, though rarely, offer alternative visions to refresh the debate. As Australian political scientist Allan Gyngell has noted; “Studying the…international environment is a bit like…astronomy. A photograph of the stars taken through a radio telescope or in the infrared spectrum will reveal an entirely different picture from that shown by visible light. The underlying reality is the same, but the features exposed are sharply different”[5]. While the road from the early 1990s is well travelled, some of the strategic ideas from that time have a remarkable potency, a longevity that gives them some small place in the immortal discourse around the nature and provenance of the moral, cultural and meta-physical forces that shape our world.
Since its inception in 1922, Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, has been an eminent forum for debate and the exchange of ideas on U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. The journal has published many seminal works throughout its eighty-five year history, George Kennan’s 1947 article on the doctrine of containment based on his earlier ‘long telegram’ being probably the most famous[6]. Since the end of the Cold War, few of the journal’s articles have captured popular attention like Samuel Huntington’s 1993, Clash of Civilizations? A prominent, and controversial, political scientist since the publication of his first major work Political Order in Changing Societies in 1968, Huntington sought in the 1990s to develop a new model or ‘paradigm’ as he termed it, to help students and practitioners of international relations “order and understand central developments in world politics”[7]. This search for an understanding of the ‘order’ of the world was not an idle enquiry for, like many realist theoreticians, Huntington believed the nature of world order at any point in time determined “who gets what, when, where, how and why”[8]. To understand order was to help advance the national interest.
"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future"[9].
Huntington’s thesis developed from an interest in the different aspects to societal evolution. He “came to the conclusion that central for shaping how they evolve is their culture, meaning their values and attitudes”. While he didn’t believe that culture was the only thing that counted, he felt that it was an important aspect of international relations because it often formed the basis on which different peoples related to each other. Huntington understood that while cultures evolve, they almost always include large elements of tradition at their core and that a study of the differing cultures of the world’s major ‘civilisations’ could help us understand how states deal with each other[10]. Post-1989 this cultural focus became increasingly important now that the “classes, faiths, ethnic groups and nations” the Soviets had subjugated were free to follow the mainsprings of history and wage war in their own right[11].
Huntington’s focus on the primacy of religion as the cultural determinant has come in for much criticism. For Huntington, his critics allege, all religions, and by implication their mother civilization, are monolithic wholes, Islam, for example, being Islam, devoid of the fractious richness that even casual students of that great faith clearly discern[12]. Sri Lankan Buddhists and their Tibetan co-civilizationists are an amorphous totality, with the peoples of East Asia split from their Japanese cousins and put through the Sam Huntington finger lickin’ culture blender and whisked into a super-sized Confucian smoothie ideal for the American low-fat drive-thru mind diet.
While it is true that Clash skips over the complex strata of all religions, something Huntington has admitted in subsequent years, this line of criticism reveals in itself, an interesting lack of understanding of American culture and its layers and anomalies. While European (and by extension New Zealand) academic and political elites are largely secular and, arguably, growing more so, America as a whole is still a “profoundly religious” country[13]. The great observer of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830s that “from the earliest settlement of the emigrants (in America) politics and religion contracted an alliance which never has been dissolved”[14]. His observation is as true today as it was 170 years ago, something non-American Westerners (and many non-religious Americans) struggle to grasp. For Huntington the detail withinthe major faiths matters much less than the union between faith and nation. “Religion and nationalism on a global basis tend to go together: People who are more religious also tend to be more nationalistic. Americans are generally deeply committed to both God and country, and, overall, Europeans seem to have rather weak commitments to both”[15]. In her study of religious militancy,Terror in the Name of God, Jessica Stern notes the echoing of Huntington’s thesis while interviewing Kashmiri militants who speak of their “civilisational battle” to free their land for both religious and nationalistic motivations[16]. While the strategic culture of countries like Iran or Pakistan can only be understood with Islam as a factor, so too can U.S. strategic culture be better understood if we take the particular American brand of Christian democracy into account when trying to get inside the strategic mind of that nation.
Jeannie Johnson and Jeffrey Larsen have asked, “To what extent does geography determine strategic culture?”[17] Huntington’s civilizations are as much defined by geography as by culture. His oft quoted line about Islam having “bloody borders” is an example of his cartographic perception of the earth, his culture-centric geostrategic vision so to speak. While the borders of the Islamic heartland, the old Caliphate, is certainly typified by inter-communal strife (e.g. Balkans, parts of S.E. Asia, Sudan), Islam can no longer be adequately demarcated, Islamic ‘space’ now overlaid on ourspace, both physical and psychological. London has a Muslim population of over 600,000; Moscow’s is approaching two million[18]. Since the end of WWII there has been a growing Islamic presence in ‘our’ cities, prompting figures like classics scholar and British politician Enoch Powell to propound their own clash of civilizations theorem decades before Huntington (and in Powell’s case to even more controversy). As Edward Said suggested in his critique (to put it mildly) of Huntington, Islam has long inhabited the heart of Western emotional space, Dante placing Muhammad at the centre of his Inferno[20].
Figure One: Mackinder/Spykman/Huntington Comparative Matrix[21].
| Mackinder | 1904 | | Spykman | 1944 | Huntington1993 |
| WorldIsland | Heartland/Pivot Area | Russia Central Asia | Heartland | Russia/Central Asia | Orthodox/Slavic |
| | Inner or Marginal Crescent | Europe | Rimland | European Coast-land | West |
| | | Middle East | | Arabian – Middle-East Desert | Islam |
| | | South Asia | | AsiaticMonsoon Land 1 | Hindu Buddhist |
| | | East Asia | | AsiaticMonsoon Land 2 | Chinese |
| PeripheralIslands | Outer or Insular Crescent | Africa | The Offshore Islands and Continents | Africa | African (Huntington unsure whether a civilisation) |
| | | Australia | | Australia | West |
| | | Britain | | Britain | West |
| | | Japan | | Japan | Japanese |
| | | North America | | North America | West |
| | | South America | | South America | Latin |
Huntington’s model, with some refinement, can compliment the geopolitical world models as constructed by Halford Mackinder and Nicolas Spykman. A brief comparison of the three theorists’ pictures of the world shows a similar underlying reality, even if their telescopes are showing different pictures. In their time, both Mackinder and Spykman were seen as geographic determinists. A similar charge of cultural determinism has been levelled at Huntington. Like our subject, Mackinder was at pains to stress that his geopolitical theory was not proscriptive. "The actual balance of political power at any given time is the product, on the one hand, of geographical conditions, both economic and strategic, and, on the other hand, of the relative number, virility, equipment and organization of the competing peoples"[22].
We can examine the Clash world model from a strategic culture perspective. If we accept the world as comprising discernable civilizational blocs as Huntington suggests, the implication is that, through an evaluation and cognisance of that civilization’s strategic culture, we could anticipate, and therefore counterbalance, their strategic intent. In practice however this may only be practicable if the ‘civilization’ itself was a “unified actor” – i.e. a unitary state like India or China. A civilization comprised of a plurality of states capable of exercising independent action in pursuit of sub-civilizational interests would therefore be less calculable if understood only on the higher cultural plane. Where a civilization is not a unitary actor the ability to clearly define a single strategic culture may be moot[23].
The role of national trauma in the formation of strategic culture has been examined by scholars especially with regard to the European Union. Poland’s strategic culture, particularly its emphasis on Atlanticism, is a product of its particular experience during, and after, WWII. France’s experience of that war, while nationally traumatic, was emotionally of a different magnitude and therefore has contributed differently to the shape of that strategic culture[24]. A more recent example from the Asia Pacific region to consider would be the conjoined experiences of two states, Vietnam and Cambodia, within the ‘Buddhist civilisation’ during the Indo-Chinese post-colonial period. While Vietnam’s strategic culture might be the product of defiance in the face of trauma, Cambodia’s experience, something beyond trauma, might produce a strategic culture of a very different sort. For multi-state civilizations, a “common vulnerability” to external “threats and disruptions”[25], combined with minimal internal hegemonic ambition, may be foundation criteria for the development of any pan-national strategic culture. The intra-civilizational experiences passed down to us by Thucydides don’t auger well for such a likelihood.
Some strategic culture theorists bemoan the attention Huntington has drawn to their area of enquiry. Jeffrey Lantis has suggested that Clash “may have undermined the careful, social scientific progress that had been achieved in the (strategic) cultural research programme” due to his over-simplification and sweeping generalisations of an inherently complex area of enquiry[26]. That said, a growing segment of strategic theory consumers, the U.S. military for one, have recognised a deficiency of cultural analysis and response capability within their organisations and have acted, if tentatively, to address the gap. The impact his thesis has had on the wider U.S. policy elite would suggest Huntington should take some credit for this reawakening. Max Boot has described the penetration of cultural awareness in the U.S. Marine Corps for example where foreign language and “Culture 101” classes are now seen as de rigueur for NCOs and career officers. This orientation towards “culture-centric warfare”[27], does not necessarily signal the U.S. military’s adoption of strategic culture as a “meaningful variable explaining state behaviour”, rather as a useful aggregate for predicting or interpreting strategic behaviour during war planning exercises[28].
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Huntington’s civilisational model can not, and arguably was never intended by its sponsor to be viewed in isolation. It is one layer of skin on the global body politic, like all theoretical casements, co-dependant on the other conceptual layers that contain and protect the vital organic functions of human life – emotion, thought, sustenance and propagation. While it is easy to pick holes in some of the threads of his argument, developing a counterfactual argument or ‘paradigm’ that can stand up to any sustained examination is itself difficult. This is due to the very non-reductive nature of this “multidisciplinary endeavour” we call strategic studies that straddles the line between the humanities and social science[29].
The concepts of both and culture are inherently complex things. Civilization is the more manifest of the two. This intricate compound of political, social, legal, scientific, artistic and religious institutions[30] is readily discernable from afar, and, while dim and often obscure around the edges, has a palpable core we can point to and say ‘that is such-and-such civilization’. Culture on the other hand is a much more nebulous thing to chase, like a dog and his tail, close, yet always out of reach. Culture is the mentality, the mind and character of civilized man, the philosophical and psychological garments different peoples wear over the base passions and instincts common to all humankind. Like clothing, culture is a thing of layers, the cloth and cut of the over-garments plain to see, the under-garments hidden to all but the intimate.
Culture and civilization are often confused. When we speak of ‘Russian culture’ for example, what we often mean are the fruits of it’s civilization – Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Gogol, Orthodox Ikons and liturgy, Kremlin domes or cabbage soup and oily spirits. Russian culture inhabits all these things and more, a “constitution of mind, feeling and moral character”[31] which makes the Russian a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”[32], if only to an eye of another mould. To read culture in a strategic sense is an extremely challenging exercise. To form a paradigm, a truth as such, from something so intangible, is another thing again. Despite the accepted idea that culture plays some part in shaping strategic processes and outputs, to date all the research, debate and publication have yet to result in a “coherent, productive field of study”[33]. Maybe it doesn’t really matter if it never does. Any new angle from which to examine this enigmatic thing called man is a good thing of itself and surely the possibility that a U.S. Marine learning Arabic might stumble upon the poetry of Omar Khayyam in the original is too precious a thought to sacrifice on the altar of utility.
Huntington gives us a platform to debate on. We can argue on facts or interpretation of facts. We can counteract or complement his thesis with all sorts of intellectual bludgeons and scalpels from the toy box of political, social, historical or scientific theory. We can hail his genius or mock his stupidity. We can prove him right, wrong or something in between. And that is the point. We, if we choose, can freely debate his ideas, we can freely posit ideas of our own. That, largely, is the way of Western civilization at its best. We will surely, if we hold our values dearly enough, clash with any civilization to which freedom, of expression, worship or thought, is anathema[34].
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[1] For an examination of the legacy of the Great War see Strachan, Hew, The First World War, New York, 2004.
[2] Yeats, William Butler, The Second Coming, 1920, quoted in Viereck, Peter, Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler, New Brunswick, 2004.
[3] Gleick, James, What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier, London, 2002.
[4] Three of the eras most widely debated, and controversial, concepts of the future world gestalt began life as articles in American political journals and later were expanded into bestselling books. Francis Fukuyama published “The End of History?” in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, bringing out, “The End of History and the Last Man” (Penguin Books, London, 1992) three years later. The Atlantic Monthly published “The Coming Anarchy” by journalist Robert D. Kaplan in February 1994, though it was not until 2000 that it appeared in book form as “The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War” (Vintage Books, New York, 2001).
[5] Gyngell, Allan, Parallel Worlds, Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney, September 2004. p.1.
[6] http://www.foreignaffairs.org/about/history7.
[7] Huntington, Samuel, "If Not Civilizations, What? Paradigms of the Post-Cold War World", pp.56-66 in The Clash of Civilizations: The Debate, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, 1996. p.57.
[8] Leander, Anna, "Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding World Politics", pp.370-6 inCooperation and Conflict, Vol. 41, Nordic International Studies Association, 2006. p.371.
[9] Huntington, Samuel, "The Clash of Civilizations?", pp.22-49 in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3, New York,1993. p.22.
[10] O’Keefe, Mark, Five Years After 9/11, The Clash of Civilizations Revisited, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, August 2006. [Online] http://pewforum.org/events/index.php?EventID=125. Accessed 1 July 2007.
[11] Seabury, Paul, and Angelo Codevilla, War: Ends and Means, New York, 1990. p.276.
[12] Ali, Tariq, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, London, 2002. pp.273-276.
[13] "Two Wests: A conversation between Samuel Huntington and Anthony Giddens", in New Perspectives Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 4, Fall 2003. [online]http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2003_fall/giddens_huntington.html. p.2. Accessed 18 August 2007.
[14] Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve (trans.), London, 1965. pp.229-230.
[15] Two Wests. p.2.
[16] Stern, Jessica, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, New York, 2003. pp.135-6.
[17] Johnson, Jeannie L. and Jeffrey A. Larsen, Comparative Strategic Cultures Syllabus, Defence Threat Reduction Agency, Virginia, November 2006, p.12. [online]www.dtra.mil/.../course%20materials/Syllabus%20Johnson%20Larsen%20(rev%20final%2020%20Nov).pdf.
[18] Foreign Policy, September/October 2007, Washington.
[20] Said, Edward, "The Clash of Ignorance", in The Nation, October 22, 2001.
[21] Compiled from a reading of Huntington and Cohen, Saul B., "The World Geopolitical System in Retrospect and Prospect", pp.2-12 in Journal of Geography, Vol. 1, 1989.
[22] Mackinder, Halford quoted in Sempa, Francis P., "Mackinder’s World", in American Diplomacy, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter 2000, [online] http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/14amdipl.html. Accessed 15 December 2005.
[23] Luif, Paul, "The Strategic Cultures of 'Old' and 'New' Europe", pp.109-112 in The International Spectator, Vol. 2, 2006, Istituto Affari Internazionali, Rome. p.111.
[24] Luif, p.110.
[25] Luif, p.111.
[26] Lantis, Jeffrey S., "Strategic Culture: From Clausewitz to Constructivism", in Strategic Insights, Vol. IV, Issue 10, Centre for Contemporary Conflict, October 2005. p.10.
[27] Boot, Max, Navigating the human terrain, 7 December 2005, Council On Foreign Relations, [online] http://www.cfr.org/publication/9377/navigating_the_human_terrain.html. Accessed 15 December 2005.
[28] Schmidt, Matthew, Strategic Culture as an Independent Variable in Strategic Action, Georgetown University thesis, 2005.
[29] Walton, C. Dale, "The Strategist in Context: Culture, the Development of Strategic Thought, and the Pursuit of Timeless Truth", pp.93-99 in Comparative Strategy, No. 23, 2004. p.93.
[30] Foster, Michael B., Masters of Political Thought: Volume One - Plato to Machiavelli, London, 1959. pp.22-23.
[31] Foster, p.23.
[32] Churchill, Winston, radio broadcast 1 October 1939. Despite the seemingly impenetrable nature of Russian strategic culture, Churchill believed that the key to understanding it was through identifying what Russia perceived its national interest to be at any point in time.
[33] Stone, Elizabeth L., Christopher P. Twomey and Peter R. Lavoy, "Comparative Strategic Culture Conference Report", in Strategic Insights, Vol. IV, Issue 10, Centre for Contemporary Conflict, October 2005.Ustratos focus on the economic and geo-strategic analysis, security problems of the nations, economic development, the history of the world, the geopolitical conflicts and strategic issues in Europe, America, Asia, Africa, and their strategic problems. Tags:geopolitical, strategies, economies, war, military, armed, economic development, international relations, history, geography, environment, , NGO, alliances, European Union, flags, USA, United State of America
