Clash of Civilizations
= Book and concept
Book
* Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. Simon and Schuster, 1996
(Essay version: Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs 72 (3): 22–49.)
Concept
Discussion
1. From Encyclopedia.com:
"The “clash of civilizations” is a thesis that guides contemporary social science research in a comparative and global perspective. It is also a concept frequently used in political and public discourse, especially regarding the relationship between the “West” and Islam. This entry is intended to provide readers with an understanding of the origins and meaning of the clash of civilizations, selected research pertinent to this thesis, and a critical examination of this thesis and research.
Although historian Bernard Lewis had used the term earlier, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington popularized the “clash of civilizations” in a highly influential 1993 article in the journal Foreign Affairs and in a bestselling book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). In these works, Huntington puts forth the clash of civilizations thesis in an attempt to explain the causes, character, and consequences of divisions among people and between states after the collapse of Eastern European Communism in the late twentieth century. The thesis combines historical insights with contemporary developments, such as the increasing importance of religion and the rise of religious fundamentalism. Huntington writes, “the most important distinctions among people [today] are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural” (1996, p. 21). “The most important groupings of states are no longer the three blocs of the Cold War,” Huntington further asserts, “but rather the world’s seven or eight civilizations” (1996, p. 21). These civilizations contain all of the elements of culture, such as language, history, identity, customs, institutions, and religion, but the clash of civilizations thesis holds that religion is the major fault line. Accordingly, the world’s people and states are classified into the following civilizations, largely on the basis of their religious traditions: Sinic (Chinese), Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Western (Christian), Latin American, and “possibly,” African. As evidence in support of this thesis, Huntington points in his 1993 article to fighting among (Western Christian) Croats, (Muslim) Bosnians, and (Orthodox) Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, U.S. bombing of Baghdad, and the subsequent negative Muslim reaction. Furthermore, Huntington predicts, “the next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations” (1993, p. 39). The most dangerous civilizational conflicts, from Huntington’s perspective, will arise from Western arrogance, Muslim intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness."
2, By Krishan Kumar:
"By general consent, Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1997) marks the inauguration of a renewed interest in civilization. “Human history,” announced Huntington firmly, “is the history of civilizations” (ibid.: 40). Civilizations, for Huntington (as for Toynbee), derive from the major world religions.4 Renouncing the idea of a “universal civilization” toward which the whole world was converging, Huntington wished to stress the separate “fault lines” that divided, and continue to divide, the major civilizations. He was particularly concerned, in the contemporary period, with those separating Western civilization from those of Asia—especially the Sinic and Japanese varieties—and from Islamic civilization. The West sees Asian and Islamic civilizations as “challenger civilizations” to its historic dominance. But it is evident that, for Huntington, Islam is regarded as the greatest threat at the present time (ibid.: 217–18).
The 9/11 attacks, and the subsequent conflicts with Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups, were bound to add to this feeling of a cosmic clash between Islam and the West. In the years since, the sense of Islam as the West's principal antagonist has for most Westerners abated somewhat, but not the feeling that the West is embattled, surrounded by threats and challenges on all sides. That has if anything increased. The rise of China to economic predominance is the obvious challenge (e.g., Jacques 2012), but India, too, finally but unmistakably demonstrating its potential, represents another important contender. And Japan, while still apparently unable to pull itself out of the doldrums brought about by the massive economic downturn of the 1990s, remains a formidable competitor; it could always return to the position it had reached in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was widely forecast that it would become “number one,” at least economically.
Asia, in its many varieties, seems poised to present the greatest civilizational challenge to the West. Hence the popularity of terms such as “re-orient”—the return of or to the East—(e.g., Frank 1998; see Hobson 2004), and the revival of a thriving literature concerned with what we might call the “Weber problem”: how and why, and when, did the West rise to dominate the world, and how secure is that dominance today? The return of civilization as a form of analysis is at least partly bound up with the return of the old questions: “What is the West?” and “What is the relation of the West to ‘the rest’?”5
That is the evident concern of what we might take as the most recent expression of the trend that Huntington started, Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011). Ferguson's book, based on a series made for British television, clearly continues the Huntingtonian theme, and its very subtitle is taken from the title of one of Huntington's chapters (ch. 8: “The West and the Rest: Intercivilizational Issues”). The very lively, sometimes vitriolic controversy Ferguson's book has engendered itself shows that he has touched a very living nerve. In a similar vein, and also controversial, is historian Anthony Pagden's combative Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West (2008). Pagden makes no bones about “the clash of civilizations,” which he clearly regards as the master theme of the past two millennia, nor does he attempt to conceal his partiality for the civilization of the West. Equally warm, in all senses, was the reception for Ian Morris's Why the West Rules—For Now (2011). Morris is a classicist and a historian and much praised by Ferguson, though he writes in a less combative style. He, too, tries to explain how it was that the West rose to prominence, and what the prospects might be for the future.6
The question of the present condition and future of the West is not the only thing driving the revival of civilizational analysis. There is what many regard as a much more deep-seated challenge, to not just Western civilization but also to what we might think of as civilization itself, civilization as the accomplishment of the whole of humanity. Here what is at issue is not so much the rivalry and competition between civilizations, but between civilization and nature, or perhaps more accurately the way in which human action impacts on the relation between human civilization and the natural world. "
More information
See also:
- Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011)
- Anthony Pagden's Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West
Bibliography
From Encyclopedia.com:
Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. 2003. Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World. Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Moaddel, Mansoor. 2002. The Study of Islamic Culture and Politics: An Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology 28: 359–386.
Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. 2004. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.