ABSTRACT
Perspective matters. Seen from a sufficient distance-perhaps that of an orbiting spaceship-our earth appears as a smoothly rounded globe devoid of rugged edges or fissures. On closer inspection, however, this smoothness quickly gives way to a spectacle of stunning diversity: between mountains and plains, forests and deserts, oceans and dry land. Similarly, viewed from the altitude of speculative metaphysics, humankind seems to exhibit a pleasant homogeneity, anchored perhaps in a common ‘human nature’; again, however, this pleasantness is disrupted by the stark experiences of conflict and turmoil in human history. Recently, in an essay which aroused considerable controversy, Samuel Huntington alerted readers to a new phase of political conflict now occurring on a grand or global scale: that of an emerging ‘clash of civilizations’. The essay was stunning and provocative for a number of reasons, and particularly because of its timing: the aftermath of the Cold War. Just at the time when the dismantling of the Iron Curtain had engendered visions of a global ‘world order’ (chiefly under the aegis of a new pax Americana), Huntington shattered public euphoria by pointing to profound ruptures. According to Huntington, political battle lines have shifted over the centuries. While the beginning of modernity (after the Peace of Westphalia) witnessed rivalry among princely states, the French Revolution inaugurated a new phase of intensified struggle: that between nations or nation-states. Following the Russian Revolution, this phase in turn gave way to a contest between ideologies-chiefly between liberal democracy and communism-a contest which fuelled the Cold War era. What is dawning now with the demise of this era, in Huntington’s view, is a new and unprecedented pattern of conflict: one propelled no longer chiefly by ideological or economic, but by cultural or ‘civilizational ‘motive Although nation-states will still remain powerful actors in world affairs, it is the ‘clash of civilizations’ that will dominate global politics:
‘The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future’.1 The vision of conflict projected by Huntington was perhaps overdrawn in its sharp accents, and certainly remains questionable in many details. Nevertheless, several features (in my view) deserve close attention. First of all, Huntington deliberately removed the Eurocentric (or Westerncentred) blinkers from the study of world politics. Up to the close of the Cold War, he notes, international politics was overshadowed by struggles among Western states, nations, and ideologies; to this extent, international conflicts were chiefly conflicts ‘within Western civilization’ or, in a sense, ‘Western civil wars’. In the present era, by contrast, international politics for the first time moves out of its ‘Western phase’ and its central focus becomes the ‘interaction between the West and nonWestern civilizations and among non-Western civilizations’. While in previous periods, non-Western peoples and governments were reduced to the status of ‘objects of history’ (mainly by being targets of Western colonialism), they now enter the world stage and join the West as ‘movers and shapers of history’. Coupled with this feature, and perhaps still more significant, is another transgresison of the traditional paradigm of international politics: namely, the move from the level of states (or other public organizations) as chief actors in the world arena to the level of cultures seen as comprehensive meaning patterns animating the lives of ordinary people (and not only ruling elites) in a given context. Attentive in part to the post-Wittgensteinian turn to language (or to language games as life-forms), Huntington defines civilization as ‘the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have’; its fabric is constituted both by ‘common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions’, and by ‘the subjective self-identification of people’. As he realizes or concedes, civilizations of this kind are not compact or historically invariant entities; in fact, they often blend, overlap, or are transformed. Nevertheless, despite elements of flux, he holds civilizations to be ‘meaningful entities’ in the global arena, and ‘while the lines between them are seldom sharp, they are real’.2
