The Clash of Civilizations. Or, is that all?

Let us begin with a simple question: Have you ever wonder what makes up the world we are living in today? Of course, apart from the obvious air, water, earth and all that is in between, a questioning psyche like the ancient Greeks to the philosophical cosmos certainly opens up to infinity of ponderings and never-getting-arounds.

Much like the issue of what constitute to the post-Cold War and intellectuals have not hesitated to propagate visions of what could be the end of history.

Alright, back to business for now.

The end of the Cold War era has contributed to a large extent to the social political make-up of modern society modern society today in terms of the social political make-up as well as the formation of contemporary communal paradigms. 

“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… 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.”

                                 Samuel P. Huntington, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993 – The Clash of Civilizations?

And so begins one of the most prominent, debated, and commented upon essay written in the twentieth century which has since acted as a theoretical framework with which to construe almost all of the conflicts that have broken out since the end of the century while forecasting the manifestation of future conflicts. Samuel Huntington, among the greatest American political scientist, in his phenomenal ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ argued that the post-cold war would be marked by civilizational conflict in the coming decade, the world could be divided not along political lines but cultural lines. Culture, especially its religious, has become the main cause of conflicts, far more than political objectives such as territorial conquests. 

 

Inevitably, there seemed to be an obsession about this debate after laying out his theory about the clash in Foreign Affairs’ article back in 1993. Subsequently, an renewed obsession found its way onto this matter after Huntington refined his theory in 1996 with a book entitled The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order, primarily pinpointing the supposed ‘conflicts’ between the Islam nations and the non-Islamic West. In terms of communications, there is without a doubt, a strong gravitation towards such news coverage involving religion and all its related elements. This then constitutes to the way the world is being covered through a molded perspective. 

According to Cooper and Yue (2008), the post-Cold War era has presented to us many facets of uncertainty as to how the new world order is being shaped. Be it policymakers or the media, the geopolitical scheme after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall or the disintegration of Soviet Union remained rather ambiguous at that point of time. More so, the journalistic field had been pushed to new heights, in search of new ways in approaching international news coverage. However, it was not until Huntington’s essay which so happened to be produced during the milieu, which conveniently served as a tipping point for media makers to blow political matters out of proportions at many times. Especially when Islam comes into the picture, it is inevitable that Huntington’s claims of an imagined singularity and civilizational clash harnessed even more attention and to a certain extent, validation after the tragic September 11^th incident which took place almost twelve years ago. The Muslims and the radical Islam were then portrayed by the mainstream American media as a dangerous foe to the world and certainly, to the West (Hickey, 2002). Newspaper headlines like “This is A Religious War” and “Muslim Rage” (Abrahamian, 2002) were most definitely a common sight at that moment and Islam was unfortunately being put into a bad light, just like how Huntington may very well be reducing the cause of this incident to the clash of Islam’s tectonic plate of the religion with “bloody borders”.

 

Nevertheless, such reductionist view is typically combined with a rather ambiguous insight into world history that seems to overlook, first, that the notion of ‘clash’ are between civilizational categories when the main clashes actually happened within the civilizations. Secondly, Huntington failed to realize that there are much more to the dynamics of such conflicts and it does not just stop at cultural difference. In fact, Senghaas (2001) considers that many cultural clashes contain economic roots.

 

Also, Huntington blatantly accused Islam as having “bloody borders” when he emphasized “in the 1990s they [Muslims] have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization.” Conversely, empirical data indicated Islam was only involved in 23.2 percent of all inter-civilizational conflicts between 1945 and 1989, and 24.7 percent between 1990 and 1998. These shares are not too far-off above Islam’s share in world population and the rise of this form of involvement since the end of the Cold War is not that significant after all (Fox, 2001). Once again, a flaw surfaced as Huntington generalized the association of Muslims in ‘contributing’ to violence aggression when the coverage of the Islamic borders comprise not just the neighboring countries in which M. Shahid Alam , Professor of Economics at Northeastern University responded “In any case, we have to be careful when we talk about “bloody borders.”

Here is an excellent article on the elaborated version of what we are talking about now.

http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/04winter/seib.pdf

Perhaps, with such a technological determinist society that we are in today, the effects of a widespread debate like this is hard to contain when accessing information is just a click away. Perhaps, there could never be an end point to this debate on what could be the main instigation of future social or civilizational fault lines but here lies an inherent hope of mine: that with this analysis, policymakers and the ruling authorities should consider a set of policies that are more sound, sensible, objective and plausible as well as coverage for the citizens to have a better idea of what the world is coming to. 

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References

Abrahamian, E. (2002). The U.S. Media, Samuel Huntington, and September 11. Middle East Report, 223, 62

Alam, M. S. (2002, February 28). Huntington. Petrolia, California, United States of America.

Cooper, W. W., & Yue, P. (2008). Challenges Of The Muslim World: Present, Future and Past. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Fox, J. (2001). Two Civilizations and Ethnic Conflict: Islam and the West. Journal of Peace Research, 38(4) , 459-472.

Hickey, N. (2002). Perspectives on War. Columbia Journalism Review, 40(6), 40

Huntington, S. P. (1993a). The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3) , 22-49.        

Seib, P. (2004). Strategic Studies Institute. Retrieved August 4, 2013, from The News Media and the “Clash of Civilizations”:  http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/04winter/seib.pdf

Senghaas, D. (2001). The Clash within Civilisations: Coming to Terms with Cultural Conflicts. London/New York: Routledge.