In 1996, the political scientist Samuel Huntington he made a number of forceful claims about the post-Cold War world.
world politics was becoming not only “multipolar” but also “multicivilizational”, he argued, with rival powers modernizing along different cultural lines, not simply converging with the liberal West. “The balance of power among civilizations was changing, and the West was entering a period of relative decline.
A “world order based on civilization” was emerging, in which societies “sharing cultural affinities” were more likely to group into alliances or blocs. And the pretended universalism of the West created the framework for sustained conflict with rival civilizations, above all with China and the Islamic world.
These assertions formed the backbone of Huntington’s book. the clash of civilizations and the reconfiguration of the world order, which was considered a wide-ranging interpretive alternative to the “end of history” thesis of Francis Fukuyamawith its vision of liberal democracy as the horizon towards which post-Cold War societies would probably converge.
Huntington’s thesis would seem to deserve new attention in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the surprisingly unified response from the West, and the more uncertain reactions of China and India.
But Huntington has been invoked more frequently lately, either cautiously, claiming that Putin wants a clash of civilizations and that we should not give him the chanceeither in the form of rejection or criticism, with the idea that his theory of world politics has been refuted by Putin’s attempt to restore a Great Russia.
Dead Russian soldiers on the outskirts of kyiv. Reuters Photo
the russian war
That is the argument made, for example, by Olivier Roy, a French scholar of Islam, in a recent interview with The new observer.
Roy says the Ukraine war is “the ultimate proof (because we have plenty of other proof) that the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory doesn’t work,” not least because Huntington had predicted that countries sharing orthodox Christianity were unlikely to will go to war with each other but instead here we have Putin’s Russia making war, and not for the first time, against a largely Orthodox Christian neighbor, even as it harbors Muslim groups within Russia.
Writing for the new Compact magazine, which aspires to be an outlet for radicals on the left and right, Christopher Caldwell also makes reference to Huntington’s apparently false predictions about the unity of Orthodox Christians.
But it also offers a different reason for rejecting Huntington’s application to our time, and suggests that the model of civilization was a useful framework for understanding the events of the past 20 years. but that lately we have returned to a world of explicitly ideological conflictsdefined by a Western elite that preaches a universal gospel of “neoliberalism” and “wokeness”, and various regimes and movements that try to reject it.
It is a right-wing reading of the world scene, hostile to the Western missionary fervor it describes. But Caldwell’s analysis resembles the popular liberal argument that the world is increasingly divided between liberalism and authoritarianismdemocracy and autocracy, instead of being divided into multiple competing poles and civilizations.
However, both contemporary arguments offer weaker interpretive frameworks than the one Huntington provided. No theory of 25 or 30 years ago will be a perfect guide to world affairs. But if you want to understand the direction of world politics right now, Huntington’s thesis is more pertinent than ever.
To see why, you have to go back to the years immediately after his book was published: the turn of the millennium, the Bush years, and the early Obama years. Huntington’s analysis was often invoked in those days to explain the rise of jihadist terrorism, the Islamist resistance to Western power.
A Ukrainian soldier on the outskirts of kyiv. Reuters Photo
But in all other world settings, his thesis seemed relatively dubious. American power did not seem to be in obvious decline. China was integrating into the Western world and liberalizing to a certain extent and was not charting its own civilizational course.
the beginning of the century
The Russia of Putin’s first term seemed to aspire to alliances with the United States and Europe and a certain type of democratic normality. In India, the forces of Hindu nationalism were not yet on the rise. And even in the Muslim world there were recurring moments, from the Green Movement in Iran to the Arab Spring, that seemed to promise 1989-style democratic revolutions, followed by convergence with the West.
In other words, the early years of the 21st century provided a good deal of evidence of the universal appeal of Western capitalism, liberalism and democracy, with open opposition to those values confined to the margins: Islamists, far-left critics of globalization , the North Korean government.
The last decade, on the other hand, has made Huntington’s predictions about the divergence of civilizations seem much more prescient. It is not just that American might has clearly declined relative to its rivals and competitors, or that post-9/11 efforts to spread Western values by force of arms have so often failed.
The specific divergences between the world’s major powers have also generally followed the civilizational patterns that Huntington outlined.
A tank in the vicinity of kyiv. Reuters Photo
China’s one-party meritocracyPutin’s uncrowned tsarism, the triumph of dictatorships and monarchies over religious populism in the Middle East after the Arab Spring, the populism that is transforming Indian democracy… are not indistinguishable forms of “autocracy”, but culturally characteristic developments that fit well into Huntington’s typology, his assumption that specific civilizational legacies would manifest as Western power waned, as American power receded.
And then, just as tellingly, the region where this recent divergence has been weakest, and the post-Cold War wave of democratization most resilient, is Latin America, about which Huntington acknowledged some uncertainty as to whether it deserved its own civilizational category or belonged essentially to the United States and Western Europe. (He opted for the former; the latter seems more plausible today.)
And what about Huntington’s specific predictions about the Ukraine, raised by Roy and Caldwell in the critique? Well, there he was wrong: while he accurately foresaw the internal Ukrainian divisions, the divide between the Orthodox, Russian-speaking East and the more Catholic, Western-leaning West, his assumption that civilizational alignments would trump national ones has not been borne out. confirmed in Putin’s war, in which eastern Ukraine has fiercely resisted Russia.
That example fits into a larger pattern: none of the emerging non-Western great powers have yet built grand alliances based on civilizational affinities, which means that the third of Huntington’s four great predictions stands today as the weakest.
liberalism
For example, he imagined that a rising China could peacefully integrate Taiwan and perhaps even draw Japan into its sphere of influence; that scenario seems highly unlikely at this point. Instead, where the smaller countries are somehow “torn,” as he put it, between some other civilization and the liberal West, tend to prefer an American alliance to a US alignment with Moscow or Beijing.
This speaks to the enduring appeal of the West, to America’s enduring advantages even in a multipolar world. But it does not mean that liberalism is in a position to return to the position it occupied when American strength was at its height.
None of the ambiguous and ambivalent reactions to Putin’s war outside the Euro-American alliance allow one to think of a sudden springtime for the liberal-international world order. And while some aspects of Fukuyama’s end-of-history have clearly spread outside the liberal West, it is so often the dark side of viewing it – consumerism and childless anomie – as well as the idealism of democracy and human rights.
Even less does the Ukraine conflict mean that the export of American-style “woke” culture, as much as Putin worries, is about to become the focal point of a new global ideological conflict. Quite the opposite: most “woke” culture seems to be insular and inward-looking, a specifically Western and especially Anglo-American response to the disappointments of the neoliberal period.
Instead of offering a universal message, its slogans and key ideas only make sense within the United States and Europe: What could “interrogate whiteness” mean for the middle class of Mumbai or Jakarta, or for the young elites of Bahrain or Beijing? And it is clearly adapted to a time in which the United States is perceived as a country in decline, insofar as it offers, on the one hand, a program of moral and spiritual renewal, but also a way to justify a certain mediocrity and torpor, because, after all, too much focus on excellence or competition smacks of white supremacy.
Interestingly, the wars of “wokeness” reveal another key thing Huntington may have been wrong about. His main fear for the Western world in an age of competition between civilizations was that he would abandon his own cultural identity and that multiculturalism would be his undoing: that the United States would fragment into English- and Spanish-speaking enclaves under the pressure of mass immigration.
And some of the recent convergences between North American and Latin American politics – the growing appeal of right-wing populism and socialism in the United States, the rise of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism in South America – cagree with those predictions.
But the battles over “woke” culture are not necessarily an example of ethnic balkanization or multiculturalism gone too far. To the contrary, the current culture war may be reducing ethnic polarization in our political parties – drawing some racial minorities to the right, for example – while resurfacing some of the oldest divisions in Anglo-American politics.
The “woke” often seem heirs to the Puritans of New England and the utopian fervor of Yankeeism; their enemies are often southern evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and the libertarian descendants of the Scots-Irish; and what is at stake in the debates they are opposing interpretations of the American founding, the Constitution, the Civil War, and frontier settlement.
The current American culture war therefore vindicates Huntington in a broader sense, while refuting one of his specific fears. Our various battles over race and gender, liberalism, education, and religion, are really a response to a world that no longer takes American hegemony or liberal universalism for granted.
But they are not – or at least they are not yet – a surrender to dissolving forces, a post-American descent. Rather, if there is to be a clash of civilizations, the clash within the United States is about what kind of civilization should ours be?
The New York Times