Samuel Huntington "The Clash of Civilizations?"

Summary

Samuel J. Huntington’s 1993 “The Clash of Civilizations?” is the most assigned article in American political science. It predicts a worldwide culture war (but not the kind you're thinking of). The book became a massive bestseller, Huntington was all over TV and his theory is still talked about all the time. It made him a darling to the press but reviled by his fellow academics. Think of "Clash" as a dark rejoinder to Fukuyama’s already-pretty-morose “End of History.” Instead of a peaceful but boring post-history, Huntington thinks that the end of the Cold War heralds a new era of worldwide civilizational conflict not only because of the Muslims (but also because of the Muslims).

Transcript

Note: this is transcribed using an online transcription service so it’s probably going to have a lot of errors. We do don’t have time to go through these all carefully but still thought that it would be more helpful than having no transcript at all.

[00:00:00] Today, a former advisor to the apartheid security forces predict something like a worldwide race war. And becomes America's intellectual darling. I'm Clif Mark. And this is good in theory.

[00:00:35] Today, I'm going to be talking about a really famous political science article that came out back in 1993, but which was such a weird hit that you still hear about it today in newspapers. And it's still the most assigned article in university political science courses. The article in question is Samuel J Huntington's clash of civilizations.

[00:00:59] He followed this up with a full length book a couple of years later of the same title, the key context of this article, because it was the early nineties is the end of the cold war. And the cold war was basically this super tense rivalry between the USA and the us Sr starting shortly after world war II.

[00:01:20] These two superpowers spent 40 years fighting proxy wars in third world countries, preparing for war with each other. And just staring each other down with itchy fingers on the nuclear trigger. During this time, the cold war was the main lens that people used to understand world politics. Everything was all about east versus west capitalism versus communism America versus Russia.

[00:01:49] If there was a war between two other countries, the key question was which ones are allied with the east, which ones are allied with the west. If there was a revolution or an election in another country, which side are the winners likely to be on? What are the implications for the cold war rivalry? This was the framework for understanding politics.

[00:02:09] Then in the late 1980s, communism basically taps out the Soviet union falls apart. The enemy is gone no more cold war. And at this point, All the academics and journalists and people who talk about politics for a living are asking what now, what new paradigm can we use to understand the world? What will the future look like?

[00:02:36] We've already looked at one answer to this question, which was Francis Fukuyama's. End of history idea was that history big H history was all about figuring out the best way to organize human life. The best political and economic system. In ancient times, we tried the Greek S we tried the Roman Republic.

[00:02:59] We tried the Roman empire feudalism, absolute monarchy, and through the course of history, the crappier systems get weeded out and new ones get invented that can do a better job of making life more rational and more free. And now that communism has crapped out democratic capitalism is the only option left.

[00:03:20] Fukiyama said, that's what everyone wants now around the world. People just want to vote for their leaders, have some basic civil rights and especially to have more of the consumer goods that capitalism delivers different countries may be on different stages of the journey. They may be taking different paths, but everyone's basically headed to the same destination, which looks something like Western style, liberal democracy.

[00:03:48] That's what the end of history is. It's a world where the only real option is some form of liberal democratic capitalism. The post cold war period, according to Fukiyama would be boring and uninspired because there's no more big dreams of building a better world, but there'd be less danger of nuclear Holocaust.

[00:04:11] There would be cheap TVs and the food should be pretty good. That's Fukuyama's idea. Then in 1993, a year after Fukuyama's book comes out, Samuel J Huntington, the guy we're talking about today publishes an article. That's kind of a response to Fukiyama and it sets out a whole other paradigm for world politics.

[00:04:34] Huntington says, oh no, no, we're not heading into a boring, peaceful end of history. We're headed for

[00:04:48] the clash of civilization.

[00:05:03] Before I get into explaining what the clash of civilizations means. Here's a little background on this guy. Sam Huntington was from an older generation. He'd been a prof at Harvard for already 30 or 40 years. And in fact, he was Fukuyama's teacher. When Fukuyama was a student, Huntington had already written a bunch of influential books and articles on international relations and politics.

[00:05:29] And on a personal level, his politics were not for everyone. In addition to being an academic, he also worked as a forum policy advisor to Lydon Johnson. And I don't know exactly what he advised Johnson to do, but I do know that one time, some anti-Vietnam war protestors hated what Huntington was saying so much that they went to his house and they painted the words, war criminal across his front door.

[00:05:57] Then later in the 1980s, Huntington worked with a government agency called the civil cooperation bureau that belonged to the apartheid regime in South Africa. What's the civil cooperation bureau. You ask some people call these guys security forces. Some people call them a death squad. And again, I don't know exactly what Huntington advised these guys to do, but they were famous for doing a lot of human rights violations.

[00:06:26] They did assassinations, they bombed a kindergarten and they poisoned the water in a refugee camp. So whilst Huntington was an Ivy league egghead. In a lifelong Democrat. He was not what you'd call a bleeding heart liberal. And in 1993, he comes up with the clash of civilizations and he's going to be known for that forever.

[00:06:50] Since there's plenty of recordings of him, I'll let him explain the basic concept to you himself. Picture a skinny 65 year old balding diabetic with oversized glasses, standing at a podium in front of a giant American enterprise Institute, display giving a speech to a bunch of reporters.

[00:07:12] The issue I wish to deal is deal with is what will be the fundamental nature, uh, and source of conflict in, uh, this new world. My hypothesis is that it will not be primarily ideological or, uh, primarily economic, uh, 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, uh, conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and gr and, and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate, uh, global, uh, politics.

[00:07:55] That's Huntington's thesis. Now that the cold war is over the future is going to be just as tense and full of conflict as ever. But instead of capitalism versus communism, it's going to be a battle of civilizations. Let's unpack that a little.

[00:08:12] First of all, what does Huntington mean by civilizations? For him, civilizations are cultures. And as you know, cultures come in all kinds of different contexts and at different scales, your workplace has a culture. Your city has a culture. French culture is different from German culture. European culture is different from American culture and so on.

[00:08:33] And if you keep going up and up in size, a civilization for Huntington is the broadest category you have before you get to the whole human race. Huntington says there's between seven and nine civilizations in the world today. There's a Western civilization and Islamic civilization. There's Confucian Orthodox Christian, Latin American, African, Japanese, Hindu, and Buddhist civilizations.

[00:08:59] The world is divided up into these giant distinct groups. And what sets them apart is culture. Huntington says that the most important features of these cultures are language and religion. But there are also fundamental differences in values in attitudes about the roles of the sexes, the family, the place of government in people's lives, the relation between society and the individual.

[00:09:22] And so on. For example, Western civilization is super into democracy and individualism and civil rights. Whereas Confucian civilization, these are the Asian countries centered around China. Is more into family, hard work and discipline. Huntington says civilizations do change. They appear and disappear over the course of history.

[00:09:49] They're not completely homogenous either. There is some diversity within each civilization, but. He does think that despite these complexities and qualifications, there are real and basic differences between these civilizations and that these differences are deep-rooted and only change very slowly. So in the time scale that we are living in, he thinks it is useful to imagine the world as being divided up between these seven to nine major civilizations.

[00:10:17] In fact, he has a world map in the front of his book that he is colored in to show which civilizations cover which territory. It's kind of like the maps at the beginning of the Lord of the rings dwarves over here, elves over there. Nevermind who the Orks are. So there are all these civilizations fine.

[00:10:36] The next thing Huntington has to explain is why they have to clash. Why can't we all just get along? And this is an important question, because if you're more on the liberal globalization end of history side of things, you might say yes, of course there are cultural differences in the world, but that doesn't mean we'll fight about it.

[00:10:58] As countries modernize and join the world economy, they're gonna become more liberal and more democratic. That's just what modernization looks like. And then cultural differences. Won't be something to fight wars about. There'll be something we can celebrate. There'll be something that we can plan shopping.

[00:11:14] All food courts around Huntington would say that's wishful thinking. What he sees happening is the opposite. Huntington says yes, countries all over the world are modernizing, but as the non-Western countries modernize, they're not trying to become more Western they're turning back to their own civilizational roots.

[00:11:35] Japan, they've stopped trying to copy the west. Now they're trying to be more Asian. India is trying to be more Hindu. The middle east is getting more Islamic, et cetera. Huntington thinks that people are identifying more and more with their cultures and they're turning inwards to their own civilizational roots.

[00:11:52] The. One sign of this process, according to Huntington is that there are new fundamentalist movements popping up all over the world. There are fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhist Jews, and Huntington says a lot of people look at these fundamentalist religious groups and they think they're backward obsolete rednecks that they're the rubs of the world and that they will disappear as modernity progresses.

[00:12:21] But the people who think this are wrong, because if you actually look at who's in these fundamentalist movements, it's not the backward peasants. It's the modernizing elites. It's the engineers, lawyers, urban people with college educations. Their parents might have been more secular, but now they're trying to get back to their cultural roots.

[00:12:41] Huntington says religious fundamentalism is not an obsolete throwback. It's part of modernization. Another point he makes, has to do with globalization people, traveling and migrating more and getting exposed to different cultures. Again, the liberal viewpoint is different. A lot of people think that if you travel around a lot and you're exposed to people from all over the world, what you'll learn is that we have a lot in common.

[00:13:09] We're basically the same. And so everyone will get along better and have more empathy for each other. Again, Huntington says, this is a bad mistake. This is wishful thinking. It might be true in isolated cases. Like if you're a rich Western student backpacking on a university gap year, but usually meeting people from different civilizations reminds you of how different you are.

[00:13:34] For example, suppose you move from Algeria to France or from Pakistan to the UK and you get to know how the French and British really. And you get to see how they keep treating you differently and don't fully accept you into their society. Then you might just start to feel more different and even more Muslim than ever.

[00:13:56] And this can be especially true for the children of immigrants who grew up in the west, but still don't feel fully included. Huntington's point here is that more exposure? Isn't really bringing people together. It's making them notice their differences. So for all these reasons and more that he talks about in the article, Huntington says civilizational identity is getting more and more important.

[00:14:20] People are starting to think in these terms and that's starting to set up a kind of us versus them dynamic. And that Huntington thinks is going to lead to conflict. He says, look around, it's already happening. Look at the Gulf war in Iraq, look at the riots between the Hindus and the Muslims in India.

[00:14:42] Look at the war between the Christian Armenians and the Muslim Azeris and Azerbaijan. And of course his big example were the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. This is kind of a marque star of the clash of civilization thesis. Yugos Lavia used to be this Federation of different nations. So you had all kinds of religious and ethnic groups living together in peace under the communist dictator, Tito, but then after Tito dies throughout the eighties, things start to get shaky, these different national and religious groups, they start not getting along so well.

[00:15:21] They're fighting for control of the state. Their ethnic and religious hatreds are simmering. And then at the beginning of the 1990s, the whole thing blows up into a giant civil war with persecution and ethnic cleansing and genocide, and things get so bad that bill Clinton and NATO have to come in and bomb the whole spot.

[00:15:43] This story of war in Europe and ethnic persecution is at the front of everyone's mind. It's on all the headlines and news shows when Huntington's writing. And he uses this example to prove his point. He says, you see. The Balkans. They've always been a hotspot for war and conflict. And the reason for that is because they are on the fault line between civilizations.

[00:16:06] This is where Western European culture and Orthodox culture and Islamic culture are all rubbing up against each other. There's bound to be trouble. And he says, this is not just a problem for the Bains. This kind of thing is going to occur. Wherever civilizations, touch. Ethnic and religious conflict are not some primitive blast from the past.

[00:16:31] They're the future. So we know that Huntington thinks that the world is divided up into different civilizations. We know why he thinks they're going to clash in general, but he also has a lot to say about these specifics about how the clash of civilizations is going to play out at that point in history.

[00:16:50] Given the political situation as he reads it in 1993, Huntington thinks that the most important axis of conflict will be the west versus the rest. His words, he says Western civilization has been dominant in the world for ages, but now things are changing. We're entering a new world of multi polarity where other civilizations are coming into their own.

[00:17:14] And in this new world, there's going to be three major factors that are gonna cause problems. I'm gonna tell you them in no particular order, first factor, according to Huntington, that's going to cause conflict. The Muslims. Huntington thinks that Islamic civilization is intolerant and prone to violence.

[00:17:33] He says they get into it with everyone, the Christians, the Jews, the Hindus, the Buddhist, whoever they can't get along. He says, quote, Islamic civilization has bloody borders and quote, what does that mean for the west versus the resting? Huntington says that the west also known as Cindo has been beefing with Islam for 1300 years.

[00:17:56] He says, remember the moreish invasion of Europe in the seven hundreds. Remember the crusades? Well, it ain't over source of conflict. Number two, according to Huntington is China. This is not because Confucian civilization is inherently aggressive or intolerant. It's just that Asian countries led by China are developing.

[00:18:20] They're getting more powerful and they don't want to be dominated by the west. They're different. They have their own Asian values and they wanna do their own thing. And if the west won't accept that there could be trouble that source of conflict, number two, but the most important source of conflict, according to Huntington is number three.

[00:18:39] Western arrogance. I find this argument interesting because Huntington is very pro Western civilization. He says Harrah for the Mona Lisa and the declaration of independence and south African apartheid. All that. But he's not saying, oh, these foreign barbarians hate us and are trying to destroy us.

[00:19:02] That's what you might expect from a Western SIV guy. But he's not saying that he's saying if I'm honest, the west has been acting like kind of an asshole. And if we're not careful, it's gonna come back to bite us. He says, since communism fell, the Western powers haven't had anything to hold them in check.

[00:19:19] So they've just been strutting around the world. Like they own the place. There is supposed to be in the world, a rules based international order with the UN and other international organizations that represent the interests of all the member states. Huntington says that's the propaganda, but that's not how it works.

[00:19:41] Actually the us and its allies are just using these organizations as a justification to assert their own interests. He says the west used the UN security council to justify invading Iraq. It used it to impose sanctions on Libya. It uses the IMF and other international economic institutions to impose policies that will help Western countries get rich and keep other countries.

[00:20:07] He even says that things that sound good, like arms control have become a tool of Western power before arms control treaties were about keeping a balance between the USA and the USSR. So we wouldn't have a world destroying war, but now he says the west is just using arms control treaties to stop any non-Western powers.

[00:20:30] They don't like from building up their military strength. Basically Huntington saying that the west is using these international institutions to maintain total dominance and the non-Western nations can see what's going on. A lot of them are responding by trying to get some of their own independence, build up their own strength and power.

[00:20:50] So they don't have to be dominated by the west. One element of the problem then is just this difference in power non-Western countries. Don't like to be dominated. But Huntington says, there's this additional element of insult and humiliation because the west, the west tends to act like its own values are universal.

[00:21:12] It goes around promoting democracy and capitalism and secularism and all that stuff. And the attitude is that they're helping these poor backward people. They're saying, don't worry, we'll save you from yourselves and make you into a real modern country. You're welcome. The Western powers, try to control other countries and they act like they're giving them a gift.

[00:21:35] Huntington says, this is just arrogance democracy, individual rights, Liberty rule of law, separation of church and state free markets. These are Western values. They aren't universal. They don't resonate in the same way in other places. So when you go into other countries to give them the gift of freedom, It feels like meddling.

[00:21:58] It feels condescending and Huntington thinks it's provoking a lot of resentment and starting feuds that don't need to be started. So what should the west do about all this? Because that after all is Huntington's audience, he's got short term advice and long term advice. In the short term hunting's advice is to keep using international organizations to promote Western interests.

[00:22:23] But to realize that you can't dominate everyone at once. So he has a strategy. He says the west should try to make friends with adjacent civilizations, Orthodox civilization, Latin American civilization, them, they should get on side, but Islamic civilization, nah, you can't sit with us. And the same with Confucian civilization.

[00:22:45] Huntington thinks the Asians are just too foreign to ever really become allies with the west. So they're on the other team except Japan, for whatever reason, Huntington thinks that Japan can hang that's the short term advice in the long term, he says the most important thing is for the west to accept that it has to share the world with other civilizations and realize that Western culture isn't universal culture, which I think is pretty good advice.

[00:23:15] That is Samuel J Huntington's clash of civilization's argument. In a nutshell,

[00:23:25] I don't wanna just leave it there though. Today with a summary of the argument. I also wanna talk a little bit about the reception and critique of the theory. On the one hand, the clash of civilization's idea was a huge hit. As soon as the article was published, everyone was talking about it. Academics were holding conferences, journalists were writing about it.

[00:23:47] Huntington was going on TV to explain it. The book based on the article made the New York times best seller list. And none of this is normal books by political science professors almost never cracked the public consciousness, but this one did big time and it stuck. 30 years later, people are still writing about the clash of civilizations in academia and in the popular press.

[00:24:14] It's still the most assigned article in political science, but on the other hand, and this is the kind of weird part experts hate it. Huntington's fellow academics, the political scientists, the theorists, the historians, they all hate his argument. And not only them, a lot of people do why. Well, the first set of arguments against the clash of civilizations are moral arguments.

[00:24:41] The whole idea of a clash of civilizations is kind of offensive to a lot of people. I mean, there are some people who are just obviously not going to like this argument. For example, there's a particular strand of academia where the whole point is to talk about colonialism and the racist legacies of Western empire and how Western ideologies construct white colonizers as superior to others and so on.

[00:25:07] And obviously people from this strand of academia hated the clash because it's all about intolerant Muslims and the west versus the rest. Edward Saed who wrote the book? Orientalism. He is the prime example of this kind of academic. And he said that the clash of civilizations is quote, the purest invidious racism is sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims end quote, if you're interested, SI's got a whole lecture about Huntington on YouTube and it's pretty good.

[00:25:48] But even if you're not Edward Sied, if you're just a person who's glad the cold war is over and hopes that the people of the world can get along. And you don't like the idea of racism. It still may sound offkey to you. When professor Huntington rolls up and says, saddle up Cowboys, the Oriental hoards are upon us.

[00:26:08] In addition to saying that the theory is racist. A lot of critiques argued that it's dangerous, that the class of civilizations could be a kind of self-fulfilling prophe. Because if everyone believes Huntington and they start thinking in terms of civilizational conflict, then they'll start to see other civilizations as a threat.

[00:26:29] And that will make them more likely to actually become enemies and get into fights. If you think someone's out to get you, you're more likely to go get them first. And at the very least the clash argument can give governments a justification for. American politicians can always say, Hey, we didn't wanna invade the middle east.

[00:26:50] It's those blood thirsty Muslims that made us do it. And Noam Tomsky. He said straight up that this theory Huntington's theory is just a justification for the us to do any atrocities. It feels like doing, of course, Huntington had a response to these kinds of critiques. He'd say something like. I'm not trying to imagine how we'd like the world to be.

[00:27:15] I'm a political scientist. I'm just doing my best to explain how the world actually works. And that's not the dangerous thing. The most dangerous thing is to cover your eyes and refuse to see the world as it really is. And that is a fine response. If all his critics had to say was that his argument was immoral, but that wasn't all they had to say.

[00:27:38] They didn't just say his argument was morally messed up. They thought it was analytically messed up. They thought it didn't make sense. It was based on silly premises. They thought that the clash of civilizations doesn't describe the world as it is. It describes it as it isn't quickly after it was published.

[00:27:57] Pretty much every element of Huntington's argument had been criticized. I don't want to go into too much detail, but here are a few of the big ones. One, this idea of civilizations of these giant cultural blocks that Huntington thinks cover the world. They don't exist. Yes. There are definitely big cultural differences around the world.

[00:28:19] There are different religions and languages, but cultures overlap and they mix together and they change constantly. Global culture is a complex ebb and flow. The very idea that you can draw a map of world culture with just eight or nine. Crayons is stupid critique. Number two, is that the examples he uses to illustrate his point are bullshit.

[00:28:45] He cherry picks situations that apparently fit his thesis and he ignores the ones that don't. and even the cherries he picks don't work very well. For example, Huntington says that the Gulf war was a clash of civilizations between the west and Islam, but how does that even make sense? The us coalition was full of Islamic countries, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, and they were all fighting in defensive Kuwait, which is also majority Islamic.

[00:29:14] So where's the clash of civilizations. People would say the same kind of thing about the Armenian Azeri conflict. Huntington calls it another case of Chris and dim versus Islam. But his critics say that war is not about that at all. The conflict is about complex political and economic and local historical factors.

[00:29:37] It's not an expression of the primordial hatred between different religions. The problem is that Huntington is just going through the newspapers, picking out these sensational headline, grabbing wars, and he's framing them all as clashes of civilizations when that's not really what's going on. That's critique number two, the last critique I wanna mention.

[00:30:02] And I think the clearest argument against the clash of civilizations is that there's no empirical evidence for it. Anyone can find a couple examples in all the conflicts in the world that seem to fit the theory. But Huntington's argument is that overall conflict will be more about civilizations. And to answer that question, you need to be more systematic and people have been looking at this question systematically for the past 30 years.

[00:30:31] Political scientists have done a ton of studies. They make lists of all de violent conflicts in the world. They code them, find out which ones are clashes between civilizations and which ones are clashes within civilizations. And they're trying to measure whether Huntington was right, whether conflict is becoming more about civilization or not.

[00:30:51] And there's no evidence that it is study after study shows that the clash of civilization's hypothesis is false. And people keep doing these studies. So it's pretty up to date. Instead. Most of the studies find that if you want to explain what's causing political violence, you're much better off looking at power dynamics or economic factors than at civilizational membership.

[00:31:19] 30 years after this article, pretty much all of academia has been saying that the clash of civilizations is racist, dangerous. Doesn't make any sense and has no empirical evidence to support it. And yet the idea will not die. Every time there's violence between a Western and a non-Western country, the columnists and the commentators are out there asking, is this, it is this the clash of civilizations?

[00:31:53] They did it after nine 11. Obviously that was a huge part of the discourse. George W. Bush even referred to the clash of civilizations in a speech, and it's still happening now. Within a couple of weeks of Russia invading Ukraine. I read at least three different articles talking about whether this was the clash of civilizations.

[00:32:14] And I promise you'll see it again. Why, why is this idea so powerful even without the support of logic, or obviously this is a complex question. I can't give you a full answer, but I can take some guesses. First of all, it's a great story. It's just more fun and easy to follow. If you think of a giant worldwide battle, Royal between seven easily distinguishable civilizations, it's easier to form opinions cuz you can just lean on cultural stereotypes and it's easier to choose teams to root for the clash of civilization's view of the world is just way more relat.

[00:32:57] Then the kind of complex calculations of power and economic interests that normally govern foreign policy. But I think the more important reason why clash made such a splash and why it still constantly talked about is because how it resonates and how it resonated with something going on in mostly American culture and political discourse.

[00:33:24] You have probably noticed that, especially in north America, people are very interested in issues of identity and culture. When it comes to politics, they're constantly fighting over whether something's racist or something's too woke or whatever. Well, this whole way of thinking about identity and politics and all of that.

[00:33:45] It hadn't been bubbling up in academic discourse in the 1970s and eighties, but it was in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when it really started blowing up in public discourse, this was the first big backlash against political correctness. It was all over the media. People were worried about multiculturalism.

[00:34:06] They were saying that the un-American way of life was under threat from immigrants, foreign people, foreign values. And in fact, Huntington's next book after the clash of civilizations was all about how multiculturalism was destroying America. This discussion was already happening. Culture and identity had already become really important ways to think about politics in society.

[00:34:29] And this anxiety about Western decay was already strong. Huntington just took this way of thinking this strand of discussion and he applied it to international relations. You've heard of the culture wars, Huntington tapped into that energy by making war cultural. This is why I think the clash was such a hit.

[00:34:51] It was zeitgeisty. It tied into all these ideas floating around and these insecurities and these incipient worldviews the idea that foreign cultures are the enemy is obviously not new nor were Western anxieties about Muslims and Asians. Huntington didn't make this stuff up, but he did put a respectable Harvard tenure name next to these ideas and he gave them a very catchy title.

[00:35:19] And that gave everyone permission to take it seriously. It gave the journalist permission to write about it because you had this Harvard guy and he was giving legitimacy to people's kind of racist, secret fears. That's why I think this argument was a hit and that's why I think other academics found it.

[00:35:37] So infuriating, the reason I think people are still talking about this argument so much is because this aspect of the zeitgeist hasn't changed. especially within the American cultural orbit, people still look at the world through the lens of culture and identity. And so civilizational clash still makes a great headline.

[00:35:59] And that's why I think we will keep hearing about Huntington for the foreseeable future.