Clash of Civilizations or Clash of Perceptions?

2002 Report (Continued) Background Paper


1. The Nature of Civilizational Clash

The Triumph of the West
The collapse of the Soviet Union was heralded with great euphoria and celebration in the West. With the defeat of Communism, the values of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy had seemingly triumphed. Commentators including Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that Western "liberalism" had become the unrivaled global model providing the ultimate form of political and social development. Liberal democracy, they maintained, constituted the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" and the "final form of human government." 1 The victory of Western liberal democracy constituted not only an end to the Cold War, but the "end of history" itself.

According to this view, Western liberalism had provided the most successful system for the fulfillment of humanity's desire for material betterment and equality. Western liberalism was the only system that could manage the technological development and innovative scientific research required by the postindustrial economy. To the minds of these pundits, the West was therefore the one true universal civilization to which others had to aspire.

Many believed that the West had little to learn from other civilizations and that, certainly, there was nothing that Islam could offer. In fact, the Muslim faith itself was blamed for impeding the progress of liberalism and modernity, which Islam had supposedly sought to conquer rather than accommodate. On the other hand, Fukuyama and his colleagues did believe that Muslim countries had the intellectual and organizational potential that would ultimately lead them, as well, to adopt Western liberalism. In other words, Muslims, along with everyone else, had no choice but to submit to liberalism, which carried the force of history.

The United States, the ultimate representative of Western civilization, was now in a unique historical position. The world had entered a new period in which one superpower towered above the rest of the international community, enjoying an unprecedented degree of global predominance. This was, in the words of political columnist Charles Krauthammer, America's "unipolar moment." 2

Despite the West's apparent victory, however, the 1990s produced a number of international conflicts, and along with them, increasing pessimism about the fate of the post­Cold War world. As opposed to Fukuyama's claim of the final triumph of liberal democracy, some went so far as to speak of an inevitable "Clash of Civilizations." 3

Proponents of a Clash of Civilizations The most vocal advocate of this view, Samuel Huntington, asserted that we had not reached the end of history, but rather the beginning of a series of conflicts that would stem from the fundamental antagonism between cultures. In his view, it was a mistake to regard the spread of Western liberalism as anything more than an extension of Western power and influence. International politics had commenced a new phase in which political ideology had been replaced by cultural antipathy as the organizing principle of foreign policy and the primary source of global conflict.

Huntington argued that globalization had reinforced this shift and had fostered greater identification on a civilizational basis than on political, economic, or ideological grounds. Nation-states sharing a cultural or civilizational bond were less likely to fight one another than nation-states with different civilizational identities. Future conflicts would thus occur between nations divided by civilizational fault lines. Islamic and Chinese civilizations, which were becoming more culturally assertive, now posed the most significant threat to Western liberalism. And in the case of Islam, this threat was perceived to come not only from certain fundamentalist groups, but from the faith itself.

Other commentators, such as Benjamin Barber, amplified this sentiment by singling out jihad, along with globalization, as one of two dominant antidemocratic tendencies in the modern world. 4 In Barber's view, jihad was something much larger and more culturally insidious than even a campaign of terror directed at the West. The United States was therefore obligated to forge alliances with nations with similar cultures in order to spread Western values as far and wide as possible. Barber asserted that the West could accommodate other civilizations when possible but must be confrontational when necessary.

In addition to this preoccupation with terrorism and intercultural hostility, the end of the Cold War also gave rise to Western concerns over arms proliferation, population growth, migration, and other geopolitical security issues. Interest and belief in the Clash of Civilizations thesis were fueled by these fears and by events on the international scene, including the Gulf War and the ethnic strife in Bosnia. 5 A growing number of conflicts in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Far East seemed to support the notion that engrained cultural clashes would indeed besiege the world. 6

Responses to these challenging situations were often formulated in familiar Cold War terms. Following the September 11 attacks, Daniel Pipes even followed the phrasing of George Kennan's famous 1947 article on the Soviet threat, in declaring: "the 'main element of any United States policy toward [militant Islam] must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of [its] expansive tendencies.' " 7

Certainly, the tragic events of September 11 have magnified the ongoing interest in, and subscription to, the Clash of Cultures argument. Indeed, many leading journalists now express a firm conviction in the link between global conflicts and the confrontation of "Western" and "Islamic" civilizations. Among the many upholders of this position are Steven David, Charles Krauthammer, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, Judith Miller, and Peter Rodman. Although Islam may not always have been perceived as a monolith, today it is credited with a universal hostility toward the West and Western values.

September 11 has also colored the debate over, as well as treatment of, Muslims living in the West. Although the executive branch of the United States government has made an effort to distinguish between terrorism and the Islamic faith, the popular press and many political commentators have failed to make such distinctions. 8 Some conservative journalists have gone so far as to accuse Muslims directly of presenting a clear and present danger to American society. William Lind, for example, has publicly questioned the ability of Muslims to live in the West and has stated that "they should be encouraged to leave. They are a fifth column in this country." 9 Daniel Pipes has also argued forcefully that Muslims in America are "not like any other group" and constitute a murderous army "many times more numerous than the agents of Osama bin Laden." 10

In Europe, prejudice against Islam has deep historic roots. Despite an Islamic presence in Europe that is centuries old, the cultural memory of a threat has not been erased. Following the Second World War, Europe experienced a steady rise in its Muslim population. Waves of immigrants arrived in the 1960s and 1970s from North Africa and the Middle East, transforming European demographics. Combined with higher birthrates among Muslim families, this broad-scale immigration has resulted in a dramatic rise in the Islamic presence in Europe. According to the U.N., the Muslim population in Europe grew by more than 100 percent from 1989 to 1998, eventually reaching approximately 14 million, or about 2 percent of the population. Over the same period, the Muslim population in the United States grew by 25 percent to 4.9 million.

While advocates of pluralism welcomed the new diversity, a more negative view was simultaneously spreading across the continent. According to its proponents, foreigners are competitors for jobs, for social services, and, perhaps most dangerously, for cultural ascendancy. Europe has thus witnessed a rise in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim feeling, even in countries like the Netherlands that are traditionally known for their tolerance. The Dutch Anti-Racial Discrimination Organization recently reported that not only is the anti-Muslim mood in the Netherlands a growing phenomenon among members of right-wing political parties, but it has spread across Dutch society as well. 11

The media have played a significant role in this process. Their contribution to popular perceptions of the Other, whether in the West or the Muslim world, must not be underestimated. The media shape cultural and social attitudes; they influence how people's views are formed. The DIAimages of Islam presented by Western media have often reflected a general lack of understanding of the Muslim faith, thus sowing the seeds of fear and hostility toward Islam in Western society. Despite its objectively superior military and political strength, the West persists in its fear of Muslims. Whereas Western popular opinion readily differentiates Loyalist/Republican militia from the vast majority of Protestant and Catholics in Northern Ireland, Westerners often do not make such distinctions in the case of terrorist groups and ordinary Muslims.

The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Amr Mousa, noted with alarm the extent to which the events of September 11 unleashed a wave of discrimination against Muslim and Arab people and their culture:

Arabs and Muslims were held guilty until proven innocent, rather than the reverse. Indeed, the condemnation extended to those whose Arab identity was only a distant origin, and who had long been assimilated into their new societies. Even they became victims, or potential victims, of discrimination. There is a danger in resorting to universalistic strategies that define the Other according to religious or cultural criteria.12

Influential Western commentators issued statements that were responsible, in part, for causing this misapprehension, fear, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims. Implying that the Muslim community at large was culpable for the attacks on the United States, former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger declared, "There is only one way to begin to deal with people like this, and that is you have to kill some of them even if they are not immediately directly involved in this thing." 13 In a similar vein, syndicated columnist Ann Coulter wrote, "This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." 14

Counterarguments
Theories like Fukuyama's End of History and Huntington's Clash of Civilizations attempted to provide answers to the central political questions of the post­Cold War world. However, both theses faced criticism for their particular assumptions. Fukuyama's analysis was disparaged for not sufficiently weighing the national and religious revival that had taken place in the former Soviet Union and the wider world as societies emerging from the Cold War sought to reclaim their pasts and their cultures. These "spiritual" movements reflected the continuing appeal of alternatives to liberalism, and many were openly hostile to the West, rejecting Western liberalism as arrogant, exploitative, morally bankrupt, and obsessed with the satisfaction of individual material needs. The End of History idea thus represented an unjustified assumption of liberalism's superiority and destiny as the universal civilization to which all would ultimately subscribe.

Similarly, Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis was criticized by the likes of William Pfaff and Jeane Kirkpatrick for its unsophisticated and monolithic worldview, which ignored empirical complexities and the motivations of national interest in the creation of inter- and intracivilizational conflict. 15 Civilizations are not coherent actors. Furthermore, they can engage in cooperative enterprise with one another. 16 As the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe noted, "To suggest that the universal civilization is in place already is to be willfully blind to the present reality and, even worse, to trivialize the goal and hinder the materialization of a genuine universality in the future." 17

There are two basic problems with the Clash of Civilizations theory. First, the methodological foundations of the thesis involve a program of categorizing the peoples of the world according to one, supposedly objective system. To classify individuals unhesitatingly as members of civilizations (for example as members of "the Western world," or "the Islamic world," or "the Buddhist world") is overly reductionist and ignores numerous other affiliations, such as by profession, industry, politics, and education.

Second, civilizational categories are far from clear-cut; the misreading of history attached to this categorization overlooks each culture's complexities and neglects historical interactions between them. Around the world, there are nearly one and a half billion Muslims, most of whom are not Arabs, and whose priorities and cultures are very diverse. Moreover, the Islamic world, just like other civilizations, is divided into states, each with its own interests and cultural traits, and often engaged in conflict with each other rather than with the West. 18

In the view of Fouad Ajami, it is not civilizations that control states but, rather, states that control civilizations. 19 During the past several decades, the governments of two states in the Middle East that have most frequently invoked religion to legitimize their rule have been Saudi Arabia and Iran. Yet Saudi Arabia has remained a staunch American ally, while Iran has been labeled an active opponent of U.S. foreign policy. Moreover, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, many major Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt, acted against Huntington's formula by joining the United States in a war against their fellow Muslim state of Iraq.20

Indian intellectual Amartya Sen recently noted that the champions of the Clash of Civilizations separate "Western civilization" from the rest of the world in line with their belief in the uniqueness of the West as inherently and historically tolerant.21 Huntington, for example, asserts that the West has "a tradition of individual rights and liberties unique among civilized societies." 22 Tolerance and liberty are certainly among the important achievements of modern Europe (despite obvious exceptions like Nazi Germany). However, the drawing of a millennia-long division between the tolerant West and the intolerant rest is both inaccurate and self-serving.

Implications for Policy
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a paradigm vacuum, which the End of History and Clash of Civilizations have each tried to fill. But the tendency to explain current international problems in the context of a single overarching concept is a dangerous one in any event. As with prior constructions like the Cold War, the reality is more complex and resists simple either-or policy choices that broad strategies like "containment" suggest. 23 Parallel to the uncertainty over whether Communism or the Soviet Union was the object to be contained, or whether the Soviet bloc was monolithic, or whether military means was the only avenue by which containment could be accomplished, the assumption of an engrained antipathy between Islam and the West grossly misleads policy makers. The Clash of Civilizations idea exaggerates differences and "threats" and underestimates the diversity of movements and trends in the Muslim world, thereby depriving policy makers of the kind of nuance that is central to informed decisions. Indeed, even when "Islamism" rather than all of Islam is named as the target, the spectrum of ideological positions and activities represented by this category may be lost on officials whose job it is to differentiate between those with whom they can and cannot work, in order to calibrate means with feasible ends. Many would regard it as a terrible mistake if Western pundits, and above all policy makers, were to substitute a "Green Menace" for the now defunct "Red Menace," as some are tempted to do.

A further problem is that unnuanced visions of the Islamic-Western encounter overstate religion to the detriment of their understanding of other factors. Muslims do not always act first as Muslims, and their conduct may be, at most, only partially defined by doctrine. As journalist Graham Fuller noted, "A civilizational clash is not so much over Jesus Christ, Confucius, or the Prophet Muhammad as it is over the unequal distribution of world power, wealth, and influence." 24 Increasingly, global conflicts are between the "haves" and the "have nots"--between those who have power and those who do not, those who control the world's destiny and those who are subjected to that control. In short, the determining factor of the threat to Western interests has not been the secular or religious dimension of political movements in Arab and Muslim countries, but rather their propensity to challenge the existing regional and international order, dictated by Western supremacy.

Moreover, when policy makers see religion as a driving force, they invariably assume that it will lead to conflict. But there are, of course, multiple reasons for conflict, and religion-related issues contribute to cooperation as well as to tension. Furthermore, while respect for different civilizations' texts is surely a helpful step toward mutual understanding, cultures can also help maintain peace by taking note of the many-sided involvements and achievements of the Other in our globally interactive era. An appreciation of Arab or Muslim heritage, for example, may concentrate on that society's great historical contributions to the fields of science and mathematics, rather than focusing on the Islamic religion per se.

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© 2006, The Center for Dialogues: Islamic World - U.S. - The West

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