The Clash Of Civilizations By Samuel Huntington
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The Clash of Civilizations? Author(s): Samuel P. Huntington Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 22-49 Published by: Council on Foreign Relations Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20045621 Accessed: 26-08-2015 15:37 UTC
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The Clash of Civilizations?
Samuel P. Huntington
THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT
World politics is entering a new
phase, and intellectuals have
not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be?the end of his
tory, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the
decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and
globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the
emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect
of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years. It is my hypothesis that the fundamental
source of conflict in this
new world will not be primarily ideological or
primarily economic.
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 conflicts of global politics will
occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash
of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between
civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evo
lution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after
the emergence of the modern international system with the Peace of
Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were
largely among
Samuel P. Huntington is the Eaton Professor of the Science of
Government and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. This article is the product of the Olin
Institute’s project on “The Changing Security Environment and
American National Interests.”
[22]
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The Clash of Civilizations?
princes?emperors, absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs
attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mer
cantilist economic strength and, most important, the territory they ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with
the French Revolution the principal lines of conflict were between
nations rather than princes. In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, “The wars
of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun.” This nineteenth
century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result
of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of
nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between commu
nism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this latter conflict
became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, nei
ther of which was a nation state in the classical European sense and
each of which defined its identity in terms of its ideology. These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies
were
primarily conflicts within Western civilization, “Western civil wars,” as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth,
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its center
piece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western
civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of
civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civiliza
tions no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western
colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.
THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATIONS
During the cold war the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds. Those divisions are no longer relevant. It
is far more meaningful now to group countries not in terms of their
political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic
development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.
What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? A civilization is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, reli
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Samuel P. Huntington
gious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural
heterogeneity. The culture of a
village in southern Italy may be dif
ferent from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a
common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German vil
lages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that
distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs,
Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cul
tural entity. They constitute civilizations. A civilization is thus the
highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural
identity people have short ofthat which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by
common objective elements, such
as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the sub
jective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a
resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of inten
sity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European,
a
Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level
of identification with which he intensely identifies. People can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and
boundaries of civilizations change. Civilizations may involve a large number of people,
as with China
(“a civilization pretending to be a state,” as Lucian Pye put it),
or a
very small number of people, such as the Anglophone Caribbean. A
civilization may include several nation states, as is the case with
Western, Latin American and Arab civilizations, or only one, as is the
case with Japanese civilization. Civilizations obviously blend and
overlap, and may include subcivilizations. Western civilization has
two major variants, European and North American, and Islam has its
Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions. Civilizations are nonetheless
meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are seldom
sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they
divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows, civilizations
disappear and are buried in the sands of time.
Westerners tend to think of nation states as the principal actors in
global affairs. They have been that, however, for only a few centuries.
The broader reaches of human history have been the history of civi
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The Clash of Civilizations?
lizations. In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee identified 21 major civilizations; only six of them exist in the contemporary world.
WHY CIVILIZATIONS WILL CLASH
Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the
future, and the world will be shaped in large measure
by the interac
tions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include
Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most impor tant conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines sep
arating these civilizations from one another.
Why will this be the case?
First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are
basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, Ian
guage, culture, tradition and, most important,
religion. The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between
God and man, the individual and the group, the
citizen and the state, parents and children, hus
band and wife, as well as differing views of the
relative importance of rights and responsibili ties, liberty and authority, equality and hierar
chy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not
soon disappear. They
are far more fundamental than differences
among political ideologies and political regimes. Differences do not
necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily mean vio
lence. Over the centuries, however, differences among civilizations
have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts.
Second, the world is becoming a smaller place. The interactions
between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these
increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness and awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities
within civilizations. North African immigration to France generates
hostility among Frenchmen and at the same time increased receptiv
ity to immigration by “good” European Catholic Poles. Americans
FOREIGN AFFAIRS – Summer 1993 [25]
The conflicts of the
future will occur along the cultural fault lines
separating civilizations.
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Samuel P. Huntington
react far more negatively to Japanese investment than to larger invest ments from Canada and European countries. Similarly,
as Donald
Horowitz has pointed out, “An Ibo may be … an Owerri Ibo or an
Onitsha Ibo in what was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he
is simply an Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an
African.” The interactions among peoples of different civilizations
enhance the civilization-consciousness of people that, in turn, invig orates differences and animosities stretching
or thought to stretch
back deep into history. Third, the processes of economic modernization and social change
throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local
identities. They also weaken the nation state as a source of identity.
In much of the world religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled “fundamentalist.” Such
movements are found in Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism
and Hinduism, as well as in Islam. In most countries and most reli
gions the people active in fundamentalist movements are young, col
lege-educated, middle-class technicians, professionals and business
persons. The “unsecularization of the world,” George Weigel has
remarked, “is one of the dominant social facts of life in the late twen
tieth century.” The revival of religion, “la revanche de Dieu,” as Gilles
Kepel labeled it, provides a basis for identity and commitment that
transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations.
Fourth, the growth of civilization-consciousness is enhanced by the dual role of the West. On the one hand, the West is at a peak of
power. At the same time, however, and perhaps as a result, a return
to the roots phenomenon is occurring among non-Western civiliza
tions. Increasingly one hears references to trends toward a turning
inward and “Asianization” in Japan, the end of the Nehru legacy and
the “Hinduization” of India, the failure of Western ideas of socialism
and nationalism and hence “re-Islamization” of the Middle East, and
now a debate over Westernization versus Russianization in Boris
Yeltsin s country. A West at the peak of its power confronts non
Wests that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to
shape the world in non-Western ways. In the past, the elites of non-Western societies were usually the
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The Clash of Civilizations?
people who were most involved with the West, had been educated at
Oxford, the Sorbonne or Sandhurst, and had absorbed Western atti
tudes and values. At the same time, the populace in non-Western
countries often remained deeply imbued with the indigenous culture.
Now, however, these relationships are
being reversed. A de
Westernization and indigenization of elites is occurring in many non
Western countries at the same time that Western, usually American,
cultures, styles and habits become more
popular among the mass of
the people. Fifth, cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and
hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and eco
nomic ones. In the former Soviet Union, communists can become
democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians
cannot become Estonians and Az?ris cannot become Armenians. In
class and ideological conflicts, the key question was “Which side are
you on?” and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In
conflicts between civilizations, the question is “What are
you?” That
is a given that cannot be changed. And as we know, from Bosnia to
the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can
mean a bullet in the head. Even more than ethnicity, religion dis
criminates sharply and exclusively among people. A person can be
half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two
countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim.
Finally, economic regionalism is increasing. The proportions of
total trade that were intraregional rose between 1980 and 1989 from
51 percent to 59 percent in Europe, 33 percent to 37 percent in East
Asia, and 32 percent to 36 percent in North America. The importance of regional economic blocs is likely to continue to increase in the
future. On the one hand, successful economic regionalism will rein
force civilization-consciousness. On the other hand, economic
regionalism may succeed only when it is rooted in a common civi
lization. The European Community rests on the shared foundation
of European culture and Western Christianity. The success of the
North American Free Trade Area depends on the convergence now
underway of Mexican, Canadian and American cultures. Japan, in
contrast, faces difficulties in creating a
comparable economic entity
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Samuel P Huntington
in East Asia because Japan is a
society and civilization unique to itself. However strong the trade and investment links Japan may develop with other East Asian countries, its cultural differences with those
countries inhibit and perhaps preclude its promoting regional eco
nomic integration like that in Europe and North America.
Common culture, in contrast, is clearly facilitating the rapid
expansion of the economic relations between the People s Republic of
China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the overseas Chinese
communities in other Asian countries. With the Cold War over, cul
tural commonalities increasingly overcome
ideological differences, and mainland China and Taiwan move closer together. If cultural
commonality is a
prerequisite for economic integration, the principal East Asian economic bloc of the future is likely to be centered
on
China. This bloc is, in fact, already coming into existence. As Murray Weidenbaum has observed,
Despite the current
Japanese dominance of the region, the Chinese-based
economy of Asia is rapidly emerging as a new
epicenter for industry, com
merce and finance. This strategic area contains substantial amounts of tech
nology and manufacturing capability (Taiwan), outstanding entrepreneurial,
marketing and services acumen
(Hong Kong), a fine communications net
work (Singapore), a tremendous pool of financial capital (all three), and very
large endowments of land, resources and labor (mainland China)…. From
Guangzhou to Singapore, from Kuala Lumpur to Manila, this influential net
work?often based on extensions of the traditional clans?has been described
as the backbone of the East Asian economy.1
Culture and religion also form the basis of the Economic
Cooperation Organization, which brings together ten non-Arab
Muslim countries: Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghan istan. One impetus to the revival and expansion of this organization, founded originally in the 1960s by Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, is the realization by the leaders of several of these countries that they had
no chance of admission to the European Community. Similarly,
Caricom, the Central American Common Market and Mercosur rest
1Murray Weidenbaum, Greater China: The Next Economic Superpower?, St. Louis:
Washington University Center for the Study of American Business, Contemporary Issues, Series 57, February 1993, pp. 2-3.
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The Clash of Civilizations?
on common cultural foundations. Efforts to build a broader
Caribbean-Central American economic entity bridging the Anglo Latin divide, however, have to date failed.
As people define their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they are
likely to see an “us” versus “them” relation existing between them
selves and people of different ethnicity or
religion. The end of ideo
logically defined states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union permits traditional ethnic identities and animosities to come
to the fore. Differences in culture and religion create differences over
policy issues, ranging from human rights to immigration to trade and
commerce to the environment. Geographical propinquity gives rise
to conflicting territorial claims from Bosnia to Mindanao. Most
important, the efforts of the West to promote its values of democra
cy and liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military pre dominance and to advance its economic interests engender
countering responses from other civilizations. Decreasingly able to
mobilize support and form coalitions on the basis of ideology, gov ernments and groups will increasingly attempt to mobilize support by
appealing to common
religion and civilization identity. The clash of civilizations thus occurs at two levels. At the micro
level, adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations
struggle, often violently, over the control of territory and each other.
At the macro-level, states from different civilizations compete for rel
ative military and economic power, struggle over the control of inter
national institutions and third parties, and competitively promote their particular political and religious values.
THE FAULT LINES BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS
The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for cri sis and bloodshed. The Cold War began when the Iron Curtain divided Europe politically and ideologically. The Cold War ended
with the end of the Iron Curtain. As the ideological division of
Europe has disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between
Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity
FOREIGN AFFAIRS Summer 1993 [29]
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Western
Christianity circa icoo
Orthodox
Christianity and Islam
MILES c^SP^ Source: W. Wallace, THE TRANSFORMATION OF
WESTERN EirROPE. London: Pinter, 1990. Map by lb Ohlsson for FOREIGN AFFAIRS.
Samuel P. Huntington
and Islam, on the other, has reemerged. The most significant dividing line in
Europe, as William Wallace has suggested,
may well be the eastern boundary of
Western Christianity in the year 1500. This
line runs along what are now the boundaries
between Finland and Russia and between
the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through Belarus and Ukraine separating the
more
Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox
eastern Ukraine, swings westward separat
ing Transylvania from the rest of Romania, and then goes through Yugoslavia almost
exactly along the line now
separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of
Yugoslavia. In the Balkans this line, of
course, coincides with the historic bound
ary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman
empires. The peoples to the north and west
of this line are Protestant or Catholic; they shared the common experiences of Euro
pean history?feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the
French Revolution, the Industrial Revo
lution; they are
generally economically bet
ter off than the peoples to the east; and they may now look forward to increasing
involvement in a common European
econ
omy and to the consolidation of democrat
ic political systems. The peoples to the east
and south of this line are Orthodox or
Muslim; they historically belonged to the Ottoman or Tsarist empires and
were only
lightly touched by the shaping events in the
rest of Europe; they are
generally less
advanced economically; they seem much
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The Clash of Civilizations?
less likely to develop stable democratic political systems. The Velvet
Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ideology as the
most significant dividing line in Europe. As the events in Yugoslavia show, it is not only
a line of difference; it is also at times a line of
bloody conflict.
Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civi
lizations has been going on for 1,300 years. After the founding of
Islam, the Arab and Moorish surge west and north only ended at
Tours in 732. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the
Crusaders attempted with temporary success to bring Christianity
and Christian rule to the Holy Land. From the fourteenth to the sev
enteenth century, the Ottoman Turks reversed the balance, extended
their sway over the Middle East and the Balkans, captured
Constantinople, and twice laid siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries as Ottoman power declined Britain, France,
and Italy established Western control over most of North Africa and
the Middle East. After World War II, the West, in turn, began to retreat; the colo
nial empires disappeared; first Arab nationalism and then Islamic
fundamentalism manifested themselves; the West became heavily
dependent on the Persian Gulf countries for its energy; the oil-rich
Muslim countries became money-rich and, when they wished to,
weapons-rich. Several wars occurred between Arabs and Israel (cre
ated by the West). France fought a
bloody and ruthless war in Algeria for most of the 1950s; British and French forces invaded Egypt in
1956; American forces went into Lebanon in 1958; subsequently American forces returned to Lebanon, attacked Libya, and engaged
in various military encounters with Iran; Arab and Islamic terrorists,
supported by at least three Middle Eastern governments, employed the weapon of the weak and bombed Western planes and installations
and seized Western hostages. This warfare between Arabs and the
West culminated in 1990, when the United States sent a massive army to the Persian Gulf to defend some Arab countries against aggression
by another. In its aftermath nato
planning is increasingly directed to
potential threats and instability along its “southern tier.”
This centuries-old military interaction between the West and
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Samuel P. Huntington
Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent. The Gulf
War left some Arabs feeling proud that Saddam Hussein had
attacked Israel and stood up to the West. It also left many feeling humiliated and resentful of the West’s military presence in the
Persian Gulf, the West’s overwhelming military dominance, and
their apparent inability to
shape their own
destiny. Many Arab coun
tries, in addition to the oil exporters, are reaching levels of economic
and social development where autocratic forms of government become inappropriate and efforts to introduce democracy become
stronger. Some openings in Arab political systems have already occurred. The principal beneficiaries of these openings have been
Islamist movements. In the Arab world, in short, Western democra
cy strengthens anti-Western political forces. This may be a
passing
phenomenon, but it surely complicates relations between Islamic
countries and the West.
Those relations are also complicated by demography. The spec tacular population growth in Arab countries, particularly in North
Africa, has led to increased migration to Western Europe. The move
ment within Western Europe toward minimizing internal bound
aries has sharpened political sensitivities with respect to this
development. In Italy, France and Germany, racism is increasingly open, and political reactions and violence against Arab and Turkish
migrants have become more intense and more widespread since 1990.
On both sides the interaction between Islam and the West is seen
as a clash of civilizations. The West s “next confrontation,” observes
M. J. Akbar, an Indian Muslim author, “is definitely going to come
from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from
the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for
a new world order will
begin.” Bernard Lewis comes to a similar conclusion:
We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and
policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of
civilizations?the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient
rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage,
our secular present, and the world
wide expansion of both.2
2Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 266,
September 1990, p. 60; Time, June 15,1992, pp. 24-28.
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The Clash of Civilizations?
Historically, the other great antagonistic interaction of Arab
Islamic civilization has been with the pagan, animist, and now
increasingly Christian black peoples to the south. In the past, this
antagonism was
epitomized in the image of Arab slave dealers and
black slaves. It has been reflected in the on-going civil war in the
Sudan between Arabs and blacks, the fighting in Chad between
Libyan-supported insurgents and the government, the tensions
between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the Horn of Africa, and the political conflicts, recurring riots and communal violence
between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. The modernization of
Africa and the spread of Christianity are
likely to enhance the prob
ability of violence along this fault line. Symptomatic of the inten
sification of this conflict was the Pope John Paul IPs speech in Khartoum in February 1993 attacking the actions of the Sudans
Islamist government against the Christian minority there.
On the northern border of Islam, conflict has increasingly erupt ed between Orthodox and Muslim peoples, including the carnage of
Bosnia and Sarajevo, the simmering violence between Serb and
Albanian, the tenuous relations between Bulgarians and their
Turkish minority, the violence between Ossetians and Ingush, the
unremitting slaughter of each other by Armenians and Az?ris, the
tense relations between Russians and Muslims in Central Asia, and
the deployment of Russian troops to protect Russian interests in the
Caucasus and Central Asia. Religion reinforces the revival of ethnic
identities and restimulates Russian fears about the security of their
southern borders. This concern is well captured by Archie Roosevelt: Much of Russian history
concerns the struggle between the Slavs and the
Turkic peoples on their borders, which dates back to the foundation of the Russian state more than a thousand years ago. In the Slavs* millennium-long confrontation with their eastern neighbors lies the key
to an understanding
not only of Russian history, but Russian character. To understand Russian
realities today one has to have a concept of the great Turkic ethnic group that
has preoccupied Russians through the centuries.3
The conflict of civilizations is deeply rooted elsewhere in Asia.
The historic clash between Muslim and Hindu in the subcontinent
3Archie Roosevelt, For Lust of Knowing, Boston: Little, Brown, 1988, pp. 332-333.
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Samuel P. Huntington
manifests itself now not only in the rivalry between Pakistan and
India but also in intensifying religious strife within India between
increasingly militant Hindu groups and Indias substantial Muslim
minority. The destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in December 1992
brought to the fore the issue of whether India will remain a secular
democratic state or become a Hindu one. In East Asia, China has
_ outstanding territorial disputes with most of its
neighbors. It has pursued a ruthless policy
toward the Buddhist people of Tibet, and it is
pursuing an
increasingly ruthless policy toward
its Turkic-Muslim minority. With the Cold War over, the underlying differences between
China and th? United States have reasserted
themselves in areas such as human rights, trade
and weapons proliferation. These differences
are unlikely to moderate. A “new cold war,” Deng Xaioping report
edly asserted in 1991, is under way between China and America.
The same phrase has been applied to the increasingly difficult rela
tions between Japan and the United States. Here cultural difference
exacerbates economic conflict. People on each side allege racism
on
the other, but at least on the American side the antipathies are not
racial but cultural. The basic values, attitudes, behavioral patterns of
the two societies could hardly be more different. The economic issues
between the United States and Europe are no less serious than those
between the United States and Japan, but they do not have the same
political salience and emotional intensity because the differences
between American culture and European culture are so much less
than those between American civilization and Japanese civilization.
The interactions between civilizations vary greatly in the extent to
which they are
likely to be characterized by violence. Economic com
petition clearly predominates between the American and European subcivilizations of the West and between both of them and Japan. On
the Eurasian continent, however, the proliferation of ethnic conflict,
epitomized at the extreme in “ethnic cleansing,” has not been totally
random. It has been most frequent and most violent between groups
belonging to different civilizations. In Eurasia the great historic fault
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The crescent-shaped
Islamic bloc, from the
bulge of Africa to
central Asia, has
bloody borders.
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The Clash of Civilizations?
lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of
nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. Violence also occurs
between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the
Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and
Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.
civilization rallying: the kin-country syndrome
Groups or states belonging to one civilization that become in
volved in war with people from a different civilization naturally try to
rally support from other members of their own civilization. As the
post-Cold War world evolves, civilization commonality, what H. D.
S. Greenway has termed the “kin-country” syndrome, is replacing
political ideology and traditional balance of power considerations as
the principal basis for cooperation and coalitions. It can be seen grad
ually emerging in the post-Cold War conflicts in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia. None of these was a full-scale war between
civilizations, but each involved some elements of civilizational rally
ing, which seemed to become more important as the conflict contin
ued and which may provide a foretaste of the future.
First, in the Gulf War one Arab state invaded another and then
fought a coalition of Arab, Western and other states. While only
a
few Muslim governments overtly supported Saddam Hussein, many Arab elites privately cheered him on, and he was highly popular among large sections of the Arab publics. Islamic fundamentalist
movements universally supported Iraq rather than the Western backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Forswearing Arab
nationalism, Saddam Hussein explicitly invoked an Islamic appeal. He and his supporters attempted to define the war as a war between
civilizations. “It is not the world against Iraq,” as Safar Al-Hawali,
dean of Islamic Studies at the Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca,
put it in a widely circulated tape. “It is the West against Islam.”
Ignoring the rivalry between Iran and Iraq, the chief Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for a holy
war against the
West: “The struggle against American aggression, greed, plans and
FOREIGN AFFAIRS – Summer 1993 [35]
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Samuel P. Huntington
policies will be counted as a
jihad, and anybody who is killed on that
path is a
martyr.” “This is a war,” King Hussein of Jordan argued,
“against all Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq alone.”
The rallying of substantial sections of Arab elites and publics behind Saddam Hussein caused those Arab governments in the anti
Iraq coalition to moderate their activities and temper their public statements. Arab governments opposed
or distanced themselves from
subsequent Western efforts to apply pressure on
Iraq, including enforcement of a no-fly
zone in the summer of 1992 and the bomb
ing of Iraq in January 1993. The Western-Soviet-Turkish-Arab anti
Iraq coalition of 1990 had by 1993 become a coalition of almost only
the West and Kuwait against Iraq. Muslims contrasted Western actions against Iraq with the West’s
failure to protect Bosnians against Serbs and to impose sanctions on
Israel for violating U.N. resolutions. The West, they alleged, was
using a double standard. A world of clashing civilizations, however,
is inevitably a world of double standards: people apply
one standard
to their kin-countries and a different standard to others.


