Siyasat: Clash of Civilizations: US vs. Them @ Baithak

Clash of Civilizations: US vs. Them

Thursday, March 24, 2005 | 2 comments

ROHIT DE

[This article may be downloaded as an HTML file from here]

Till the 60s the world was a simple place. James Bond battled evil dictators propped by the Soviet Regime and bedded luscious Soviet spies who were usually called Olga and Natasha. But in the 90s Bond runs confused; there are evil media moguls and your occasional megalomaniacs but no KGB/ SPECTRE style classy organization.

In the 90s, with the break up of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, thriller writers had to search for new villains. Michael Crichton had the menacing monolithic Japanese corporation in 'Rising Sun', but with the economic slowdown in the 80s the Japanese don't figure so prominently any more. The Chinese, surprisingly, have had a low profile. It was the very British Lord Jeffrey Archer who seemed to have hit upon the winning combination in his Honor Among Thieves. In the book, an evil Saddam Hussein, (he who tried to kill Dubya's father) licking his wounds after the Gulf War, decided to humiliate the USA by stealing the US Declaration of Independence and burning it live on the CNN. Frederick Forsyth jumped into the fray with The Fist of God, where Saddam tried a more dangerous tactic by trying to get a nuclear weapon. Pop journalists Larry Collins and Dominic Lapierre tried a more unusual tactic with Mohammed Quadaffi bringing a nuclear bomb into New York. With Saddam and Quadaffi keeping quiet, the West began thinking about looking for a new villain. Forsyth in Icon experimented with a' la Milosevic style Russian presidential candidate, who had plans for ethnic cleansing.

Osama Bin Laden seems to have answered everyone's prayers by presenting the new spectre, and articulating the distrust against Islam that had been simmering since the Iranian Revolution and the oil blockade of the seventies. The author tries to establish that a part of the hostility against Saddam is an extension of the same. Fifty percent of Americans believe that Saddam has links with Bin Laden.

It is this idea of the evil other, assiduously promoted by the American popular culture and the media, which prompted the researcher to choose the topic. It is this idea of the Other that the project aims to analyze. The most popular expression of the 'othering' process is in the 'Clash of Civilizations' model of Samuel P. Huntington, the much touted explanation of the 11 September attacks and the new world order. Therefore, the researcher attempts to use the Huntingtonian paradigm to understand the same.

But why does one need to have paradigms? Paradigms, Huntington states, are indispensable for human thought and action. The alternative, he says, to formulating theories to expressly guide behaviour is the denial of such guides and acting in terms of objective facts and relative merits.1 However, the latter method is self-delusional as our biases and prejudices determine how we see reality.2 That is why, with explicit models, one can order and generalize about reality, understand causal relationships among phenomenon, anticipate developments and show the paths to be taken to achieve goals.3 Huntington, of course fails to explain how the model itself can be influenced by the biases and prejudices, which determine how we see reality. This is what the project seeks to establish.

It focuses on three major areas. In the contemporary context, it looks at the so-called War against Terror and Huntington's analysis of Islam's bloody borders. It then examines the so-called Sino-Islamic nexus and attempts to evaluate its possible effect on Indian foreign policy. While evaluating the use of the other it makes an effort to look at historical evolution and draw from sources of popular culture.

The idea of the Other is not limited to the US alone. There would probably be no better example than India. A recent techno-blockbuster evocatively titled '16th December', the date of the Pakistan Army surrender in the 1971 war, shows exactly that. An embittered Pakistani army officer and an Osama look-a-like terrorist leader plot to bring a nuclear weapon into the very heart of Delhi. Apart from the usual hackneyed dialogues and song and dance routines the movie keeps showing images of Islamic militants running amok in India's heartland and the word Jehad (which has been edited but can be made out by any lipreader) is mentioned in every second line.

NEW PARADIGMS

The main characteristic of relations between nations during the second half of the twentieth century was the Cold War between the Eastern and Western blocs. While some countries avoided joining either camp and maintained a neutral posture, none of them, with the exception of China after the Sino-Soviet rift, was a power capable of exercising a major influence internationally.4 Besides, even countries that tried to remain neutral in terms of the East-West confrontation were nevertheless drawn, if passively, into the magnetic field of the Cold War.

The conflicts after World War II, be it in Vietnam, Korea or Israel, were not caused by the Cold War but intrinsic to the structural framework of the East-West confrontation. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the much-heralded end of the Cold War it is but natural that scholars have tried to create a 'post-Cold War' paradigm to examine international relations.

A number of popular models offered discrete images of the post-Cold War world. These include:

* You are the superpower scenario: it states that the centre of power in the world is the United States attended by its western allies. In the next century, America will have an active role as a global superpower while avoiding the dreaded spectre of the global cop, wasting American lives and resources.5 In other words, as seen in Bosnia, America wants to have a global engagement without squandering her resources.

* End of history: Francis Fukuyama says that the ideological conflicts that dominated the world will now disappear. 6 There will be a triumph of liberalism and market capitalism. Markets have emerged as the ruling international authority, more potent than any political power, and when arrayed against a nation can cause many unthinkable changes.

* End of geography or the global village: The protagonists of this thesis do not visualize any fundamental conflict either between nations or trading blocs. They believe the world will be more integrated and will be guided by global interdependence and the evolution of a common global culture.

* One planet two worlds: As a result of global financial and communications revolution communities and nation states will have less control over their own destinies. As Paul Kennedy maintains, the gap between the rich and the poor will only further widen, leading to social unrest within the developed countries but also growing North-South tensions, mass migration and environmental damage.7

CLASHING CIVILIZATIONS

An article on the 'New World Order' was published in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993. In the article, provocatively titled 'The Clash of Civilizations?', Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington clearly articulated his perception of the world that had been taking shape since the breakdown of the Soviet Union.

The journal Foreign Affairs and its publisher are quite interesting in themselves: Foreign Affairs is a publication of the influential Council on Foreign Relations. This organization and its publications are the debating grounds for the American policy-making elite. The Council was established at the end of the World War I as a non-governmental think-tank. It represented the concerns of the various factions of the power elite in the formulation of the United States' foreign policy.8

The basic paradigm applied in the Cold War world was the ideological competition between the US and the Soviet Union. In the 1940s, US foreign policy intellectual, George F. Kennan, who served briefly in the Truman Administration, was among the first to state that the United States could not defeat communism outright but could contain it and the nations 'infected' by it, beginning with the Soviet Union. What came to be called the Cold War seems in retrospect to have been inevitable, but it was not inevitable at all. Containment was seen as the bold and politically creative alternative to that war.9 The 1947 article in Foreign Affairs in which Kennan, writing as "X," first laid out containment as a strategy remains, unsurprisingly, the most popular article ever published in that periodical.

Huntington's article and his subsequent 1996 publication of the same name is being considered as a similarly important document providing context for policies in the post-Cold War world, especially after 9/11.

The Clash of Civilizations paradigm can be summarized as a series of straightforward propositions:

* The principal political cleavages of the post-Cold War world will center along the fault lines dividing civilizations from one another. Culture, rather than ideology or national identity, will serve as the main litmus test for distinguishing friend from foe.
* Although states will remain the central actors in world politics, the alliance behaviour of states will be largely dictated by civilization politics. Unity among countries sharing the same overarching cultural values and commitments will rise while conflict across civilization boundaries will grow. Fault line wars along the borders where civilizations come into contact will threaten to expand through a phenomenon Huntington refers to as "kin country rallying". While states, therefore, will continue to serve as the active agents of international politics, civilizations can be considered the principal units of analysis.
* Although the clash of civilizations will be multifaceted, the most important dividing line will separate Western societies from the other six or seven civilizations (Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, Hindu, Islamic, Japanese, Sinic/Confucian and what he terms as possibly African) identified by Huntington. Western cultural penetration and political domination has prompted resentment and heightened attachment to non-Western cultures in other parts of the world. At the same time, the declining relative economic and demographic power of the West will bring growing political challenges to Western hegemony on the part of rising states representing rival civilizations.
* In response to these circumstances, Western societies should strive to strengthen and unify their own civilization against possible internal or external challenges to core values and interests. At the same time, the West should shed its universalistic pretensions by forswearing efforts to transform other societies into a Western mould or meddling in conflicts that do not directly threaten vital Western interests.10 Peace, should it prove possible, will rest upon the maintenance of a stable balance of power among the core states of rival civilizations.

The structure of Huntington's argument raises several issues, namely what civilizations are and how they can be identified. Can current trends in the world including modernization, globalization and democratization, lead to convergence or divergence among states? How does Huntington's new paradigm relate to traditional realist thinking about international affairs?

LOCATING CIVILIZATIONS

Huntington defines civilization as "highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species."11 Then he goes on to identify the major civilizations that exist today, "Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization." His major claim is that "the most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another."12

The problems begin with Huntington's concept of 'civilization.' He defines it as social entities that serve as the most encompassing objects of political and social identification short of the human species itself.13 The defining feature of a civilization is the unifying culture that it represents. Culture is, however, an indistinct and multifaceted concept. To determine the core elements of a culture, Huntington relies most heavily upon religion and sometimes on language, ethnicity and a common history.

So, he has on the one hand Slavic-Orthodox, Hindu and Islamic Civilizations, which are defined on the basis of their religious identity; on the other is the eponymous definition of the West based on their industrial and political development. The West is basically defined as Europe and its former settler colonies, such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.

Latin America, on the other hand conquered, settled and colonized by Europeans, is treated as a separate civilization all its own, even though most Latin Americans speak Spanish, Portuguese or English and worship a Christian God. The Slav-Orthodox world of Russia, the Ukraine and portions of the Balkans is also treated as a distinct civilization, despite its close proximity to the rest of Europe, its history of interaction with the countries to its west over many centuries and the fact that its people also embrace a branch of Christianity.14

In his original article Huntington describes China, along with a number of nearby smaller countries as Confucianist. Realizing that very few people in China now refer to themselves as 'Confucianist' and that China has consciously tried to remodel its traditional culture, Huntington resorts, in his book, to the even more ambiguous label of 'Sinic' to designate this part of the world.

He defines the Islamic world, stretching from North Africa to Indonesia, as a monolithic bloc ignoring profound differences in language, geography, ethnicity, history and tradition. India is treated as the core of a separate Hindu civilization, yet countries whose people embrace Buddhism are denied civilization status.

Finally, Huntington does not know what to do with the cultural diversity and fragmentation of sub-Saharan Africa, and thus categorizes it as a potential civilization.

But let us assume that Huntington, by identifying civilizations as key player, is attempting to move beyond mere realism and trying to draw a different paradigm, maybe even move beyond realism.

WHITHER REALISM?

Huntington for most of his career has been regarded as a realist. In international politics, realists focus on the struggle for power among autonomous and self-regarding states. Does focus on civilzations mean moving beyond realism?

After a closer examination he doesn't seem to have moved away from realism at all. World politics is still a zero sum game played among relatively unitary actors caught up in a never-ending struggle for power imposed upon them by the insecure conditions of an anarchic world.15

The major difference in his thesis is that his unit of analysis has shifted from states to civilizations. The billiard balls are larger in size and fewer in number, but they still careen around the realist billiard table in the same old fashion.16

Most civilizations have core states; the West has North America, Europe and Australia. The Hindu civilization is centered in India; the Slavic-Orthodox around Russia and the Japanese around Japan. The Latin American and African civilizations have no core states being incipient civilizations while the Islamic civilization is a unified bloc. Countries with the same civilization are kin countries and tend to rally around each other.17

The example Huntington gives is of the Bosnian conflict – an example of kin country rallying.18 Most Western nations were concerned with the Orthodox Serbs attacking Bosnian Muslims rather than the attacks by the Catholic Croats. The Vatican and the EU recognized the Catholic nations of Slovenia and Croatia. The Russian government on the other hand was attacked by public and local media for not being more supportive towards the Serbs. Islamic nations predictably castigated the West for not helping the Bosnians and aided the Bosnians in violation of the UN arms embargo with weapons and guerilla groups.

But Huntington's example is more of sound and fury than substance. The Bosnian war did not give rise to extensive civilization rallying among kindred states. Aside from occasional stalling tactics, Russia provided precious little support for its Slavic brethren in Serbia and eventually committed troops to a Western-led peacekeeping mission.19 Bosnia's Muslims welcomed the sympathies and the modest trickle of weapons offered by several Islamic countries. But the Bosnian government continued, despite repeated disappointments, to look to the West for its principal salvation.20

The seemingly mild support given to the Bosnian Muslims by the United States and EU came less from cultural aversion than from fear of getting involved in a quagmire. Indeed, media reports and public opinion surveys suggest that cultural differences did nothing to prevent most Europeans and Americans from drawing the generally correct conclusion that the Muslims were the victims of a systematic and horrifying campaign of ethnic cleansing.21

Huntington's example of the Arab world rallying behind Saddam Hussein is even more improbable.22 Though Hussein tried to portray himself as a defender of Islam against the West, the strategy failed miserably. Most Arab governments fell in with Hussein. Hussein's hopes that popular sympathy for him would lead to the collapse of those governments who supported Operation Desert Storm came to naught. Moreover, governments representing the very span of civilizations came down heavily on Iraq's policy and imposed military, economic and other sanctions upon it.

But notwithstanding his flaws, by his very basis of kin country rallying, Huntington reveals that he still considers nation states the only players of the game. All he is doing is overlaying a realist view of the world with an even more problematic cultural gloss, creating a mixed approach that is probably more problematic than either taken separately.

CIVILIZATIONAL CONFLICT IS NATURAL?

"Differences against civilizations are not only real but basic."23 Huntington's argument is that the processes of economic modernization and globalization are separating people from older identities and weakening the nation state, and other identities such as religion are filling the gap. Now civilizations are supposed to be irreconcilable and have far more fundamental differences than political ideologies; after all "a communist may become a capitalist and a democrat a republican but an Azeri cannot become an Armenian."24 Thus, with globalization as interactions between civilizations increase so do conflicts.

But Huntington's idea of meeting of civilizations means Western dominance and thus resistance to it by local traditionalists. But, meeting has historically resulted in a process of mutual borrowing, leading to a gradually progressing, though never complete, synthesis across cultures. Growing migration to the West and the rise of multicultural populations will lead to an intermingling of cultures and not necessarily conflict. In fact, the clash thesis is unable to explain the fact that all major wars fought in this century were intra-civilizational wars on the European continent.

The main problem of Huntington's thesis lies in his conceptualization of civilizations itself. Ironically, he claims in his book that there has been a tendency to divide the world into the West and the East, but this myth suffers from the defects of orientalism as described by Edward Said (he rallies his biggest critic to his cause) of promoting the difference between the familiar (us, Europe) and them (strange, East) and privileging the former over the latter.25 His argument is that though there is an entity such as the West, there is no one East, so it is more appropriate to speak of the West and the Rest, which implies the existence of many such 'Easts'. He doesn't seem to realize that by characterizing civilizations he is doing precisely that. Indeed Huntington seems to be, as Said describes him, a "clumsy writer and inelegant thinker."26

ISLAM'S BLOODY BORDERS

"The crescent shaped Islamic bloc, from the bulge of Africa to central Asia has bloody borders."27 The fault lines between civilizations are emerging as the sites for conflict. Islam is the whipping boy used by Huntington to explain a clash of civilizations. He relates the Islamic Resurgence, embodying non-acceptance of modernity, rejection of western culture and the reaffirmation of Islam.28 The reason for this he traces to demographic factors, such as increase in population and migration to Europe. To bolster his argument, in his books he refers to the growing bands of mujahideen being trained irrespective of nationality.29

The principal reason for the growth of Islamic movements is their benefit from the openings due to the democratization of the authoritarian regimes. He also mentions this as a product of "the West's declining power and prestige."30

Huntington and his school mention the theological division of the world into the dar-al-islam, the 'House of Submission/Peace,' from dar-al-harb, the 'House of Warfare.' This is illustrated by pointing out that what one considers 'local' or 'parochial' or at most 'sectarian' actually turns out to be battles between historically Muslim and historically non-Muslim populations. An incomplete list would include, moving from east to west:31

* Roman Catholics vs. Muslims on Mindanao in the Philippines
* Roman Catholics vs. Muslims on Timor in Indonesia
* Confucians and Buddhists vs. Muslims in Singapore and Malaysia
* Hindus vs. Muslims in Kashmir and, intermittently, within India itself
* Russian Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Afghanistan
* Russian Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Chechnya
* Armenian Catholics vs. Muslims in Nagorno-Karabakh
* Maronite and Melchite Catholics vs. Muslims in Lebanon
* Jews vs. Muslims in Israel/Palestine
* Animists and Christians of several denominations vs. Muslims in Sudan
* Ethiopian Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Eritrea
* Anglicans and Roman Catholics vs. Muslims in Uganda
* Greek Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Cyprus
* Serbian Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo
* Roman Catholics vs. Muslims in Algeria
* Anglicans and Roman Catholics vs. Muslims in Nigeria.
Left off this list are conflicts that, however bitter, have not risen to the level of outright civil war. On a list of this sort we might find, among others, Assyrian Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Iraq and Coptic Catholics vs. Muslims in Egypt.

To counter criticism that he characterizes Islam as a monolithic bloc in his article, Huntington changes tack in his book. As he angrily advises an interviewer to read his section on Islam called 'Consciousness Without Cohesion', in which he talks about the internal divisions in the Islamic world. Islam is less unified than any other civilization. "Muslims also fight Muslims, and much more than the people of other civilizations fight each other."32

The problem with Islam is the problem Henry Kissinger expressed with regard to Europe: 'If I want to call Europe, what number do I call?' If one wants to call the Islamic world, what number does one call?33 The problem with the Islamic world is that there is no one dominant power that one can deal with.

But a reading of the section shows that he contends that national boundaries are irrelevant in the case of Islam as Islamic loyalty is not to the nation state but to the tribe, the clan and then the extended Ummah. He explains this with the example of bodies such as the Organization of Islamic Conference and states that there are no parallels in other civilizations.34 Strangely enough, he begins his book by illustrating kin country allying through growth of regional associations such as the NATO, EU, ASEAN and NAFTA.35 In fact, the main reason why the Islamic civilization has not been able to emerge as a more powerful force is due to the lack of this dominant state.

IMAGES OF ISLAM- THE ORIENTALIST ARGUMENT

But why is Islam Huntington's favourite bogeyman? Huntington merely articulates a fear of Islam and more particularly the Arab world, which has been harboured by the West. In this belligerent kind of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in its title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage."36 What both the articles manifest is that the enormous entities of civilization and identity and culture exist in a cartoon like state "where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary."37

The use of labels like West and Islam involves making sweeping generalizations and value judgements. They perform a simple identifying function such as Pope John Paul is a Christian or Benazir Bhutto is a Muslim. Such statements tell us a bare minimum about something as opposed to another.

The American contact with Islam is considered more recent than that of Europe. The European interest in Islam arose in the period of the 'Oriental renaissance' where Europeans discovered the East anew.38 Islam was seen as a part of the East sharing its mystery, decadence and exoticism. The Orientalist discourse has been a carrier of Western notions of European self and the non-Western other that generated notions of the superiority of Europeans to non-Europeans.39

Another reason for hostility buried in the collective culture are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests, which began in the seventh century and which, as the celebrated Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark book Mohammed and Charlemagne (1939), shattered once and for all the ancient unity of the Mediterranean, destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis and gave rise to a new civilization dominated by northern powers.40

This hostility can also be traced to the problems Europeans have with Arab and Algerian migrants who are seen as taking away jobs from the Europeans.

THE ALLADIN PARADOX

"Oh I come from a land / From a faraway place / Where the caravan camels roam / Where it's black and immense / And the heat is intense / It's barbaric — but hey, it's home."41

Originally, though, these lyrics portrayed a much darker, more evil portrait of its subjects, one against, which Arab-American groups protested heavily. Since then, Disney has rewritten the lyrics to make the place, but not the people, seem barbaric; previously, the fourth and fifth lines, the offensive ones in the original theatrical release, read, "where they cut off your ear/ if they don't like your face."42

Hence, the barbaric 'nature' of Arabs in this film remains; however, it becomes disguised in the nature of the land in which these people live. This is a mere illustration of the US characterization of Arabs.

American contact with Islam has been principally because it is connected to oil. After World War II the US devised policy on certain regions based on her perceived interests; Europe for instance was rebuilt by the Marshall Plan, the USSR was designated as the chief competitor and the Third World was the arena of competition between the two powers and between the US and the newly independent assertive forces.43 For the Third World, modernization was the catchphrase to defend them from communist subversion. This policy led to the habit of seeing the Third World as the political, economic and emotional investment into the very idea of modernization.44 This process involved both government specialists as well as university experts. This confirms the Orientalism claims that dominant elements in the Occident have used specific methods to create an image of the Orient, and this knowledge is a part of a system that has been created with a definite agenda in mind.45

Among the illusions that persisted in the modernization theory is that before the advent of the US, Islam existed in a kind of timeless childhood, shielded by superstitions and the priestly class from moving out of the Middle Ages into the modern world.46

Ironically, Western media till date mediates Americans' views of the Islamic world through Israel. Israel's religious character is rarely mentioned in the press and it is viewed as Middle East's 'only democracy' and 'our staunch ally'.47 This further illustrates the we/they demarcation in relation to the Arab world; Israel with its white European roots is far more familiar than the Arabs.

Effects of modernization were supposed to be seen in the Persian Shah, who was an ideal leader following westernized modernization as opposed to nationalist forces like Nasser, Sukarno or groups like the Iranian opposition, Palestinian nationalists, etc. The Iranian Revolution was a great surprise to US theorists as it was neither pro-modernism nor pro-communist, the only recognizable alternative. The Iranian hostage crisis and the OPEC oil crisis led to the characterization of Islam as everything irrational and anti-western.48

This led to the classification of a new area where the Cold War analysis could not be applied and thus there was a need for new explanations.

THE HUNTINGTON PARADIGM POST 9/11: THE WAR AGAINST TERROR

Osama bin Laden has declared war on Western civilization, and in particular the United States. If the Muslim community to which Bin Laden is appealing rallies to him, then it will become a clash of civilizations.49

In light of recent events, Huntington's warning appears prophetic. The perpetrators of last month's attacks undoubtedly hated Western civilization.50

This is a jihad on the American people.51

The commonality of discourse between the so-called 'terrorists' and those who are apparently engaged in waging a war on them is quite striking. The 'terrorists' make no bones about their claim that they are engaged in 'a clash of civilizations,' which is what their notion of jihad captures. But their attackers too portray the conflict, implicitly if not always explicitly, as 'a clash of civilizations'.52

The attractions of this theory are twofold. The current terrorist groups are not nation states, thus it is the first time non-state actors, that too Third World non-state actors are playing such a major role on the international stage. This is something that realist theory finds hard to come to grips with and thus finds an explanation in the Huntingdonian reworking of realism on a civilizational framework.

A nation's security ideology linked to a realist framework is generally unrestrained by law and morality when dealing with enemies.53 However, popular criticism requires it to provide a window-dressing. Therefore, images of Western innocence and values are portrayed as being threatened by this new barbarism, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence against those who claim to be terrorists.54

Hence the altogether more reassuring battle orders (a crusade, good versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.) drawn out of Huntington's alleged opposition between Islam and the West, from which official discourse drew its vocabulary in the first days after the September 11 attacks.

US VS. THEM55: POLICY IMPLICATIONS

"What is taking shape is not a conflict among states, though it could become one: the US has warned, loud and clear, that the nations of the world face a 'stark choice': Join us in our crusade or "face the certain prospect of death and destruction."56

But how does the adoption of the Huntingtonian discourse influence American policy after 11 September? Huntington rejects the notion that the coming clash of civilizations should be accompanied by a Western holy war against other cultures.57 He states that one should not be tempted to assume that Western culture is, should be or can be universal. He does, however, urge unity within the West against forces from both within and without that would attempt to undermine the West's willingness or ability to defend its own values. Huntington tells us that the growing strength of some non-Western civilizations, particularly Islam, stems from their increasing sense of unity and purpose. In response to unwelcome Western pressures, groups within these societies have sponsored campaigns designed to purify their civilizations and promote a return to the roots.58 Huntington implies that the West can flourish only if it is willing to do the same.

Before 9/11 Europe and America were moving apart on a whole series of issues from genetic foods to missile defense to a European military. The events of 9/11 have for the moment changed that dramatically. After the terror attacks, the headline of Le Monde read 'We are all Americans'. Echoing Kennedy, Berliners declared, "We are all New Yorkers." As I said at the outset, in this sense Osama bin Laden has given back to the West its common identity.59

Huntington advises that the US forge its links with the civilizations similar to itself, i.e. less alien, namely the Slavic-Orthodox and Latin America. This involves the expansion of the EU and the NATO to include the Central European and the Baltic Republics. The United States also needs to encourage the 'Westernization' of Latin America.

The West must maintain its technological and military superiority over other civilizations and restrain the development of conventional and unconventional military power of the Islamic countries and China.

To avoid conflict, the West must accept Russia as the core state of Orthodoxy and a major regional power with legitimate interests in the security of its southern borders, with whom we can cooperate in dealing with Islamist terrorists. Futher strategic alliances need to be worked out with India and China who face a common problem with Islam.60

But Huntington seems to be doing a complete volte-face. All the while he has been declaring that this is a multicivilizational world, but what he seems to be doing is advocating an alliance against a common enemy, i.e. Islam. In other words, going back to the Cold War paradigm of containing the enemy. After 9/11 he seems to back off his proposed 'abstention rule' — that the West should abstain from intervening in the internal conflicts of other civilizations — as a way to avoid a clash. He qualifies his abstention rule by saying that it might have to be broken if a vital national interest was at stake. In the Gulf War, vital national interest was at stake because the US could not allow Iraq to take sole control over the bulk of the world's oil reserves. And principles were at stake as well. The US could not tolerate one country just invading and annexing another at will in violation of all international laws. So justifying it by realpotilik as well as protection of western ideals, a path which Huntington was strongly against in his work.

Like Huntington, the policy makers use the clash of civilizations thesis as good propaganda, but when it comes to hardball they turn pragmatic. They follow the old Cold War policy of backing 'good' Muslim regimes, like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc., by providing them with mechanisms to hunt down terrorist networks and build up their economies to shore themselves against fundamentalists.

THE DRAGON ALSO ROARS

"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."61

"One of Beijing's key goals: to undermine U.S influence before it becomes fait accompli."62 Images of China in the West since the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century have taken a more ominous vision. The Chinese, willing to sell tea to Great Britain, wanted no English manufactures in return. The Chinese took only silver in trade, and, as the English drank more and more tea, they experienced a severe drain on their coffers. Chinese trade restrictions also frustrated the English, who were confined, with all Westerners, to the Port of Canton. Opium, in a trade deliberately fostered by British merchants, was transported from India to Chinese smugglers. The opium was sold in China for silver, which then paid for the tea sent back to England. Opium not only stopped the silver drain, but also tipped the trade balance back in Great Britain's favour.63

American images of China in this century, as they developed in the 1920s, 30s and 40s were also complex. They were a mixture of inherited images with a pile-up of later, equally significant elements. China was viewed in part as a victim of exploitation by Europe and Japan, deserving sympathy, but it also roused old images of 'the yellow peril' (a phrase popularized by Jack London), resurrected with fears of Bolshevism.64 Other familiar images of China in American popular culture include Fu Manchu, a descendant of the heathen Chinese of the 19th century, by the 40s a stock figure in popular literature. Sinister, threatening, violent, he also has other avatars: Emperor Ming of Mongo in 'Flash Gordon', the Dragon Lady in 'Terry and the Pirates.'65

The stock characteristics attributed to the Chinese, freely expressed in the popular literature of the '30s and 40s', continue to the present. John Chinaman, for instance, is still present in endless, unfunny racial jokes containing 'Confucius say'. Even Deng Xiaoping, is not immune. A Newsweek article describes him as a "compelling and exotic little man in his charcoal Mao suit, white socks and enigmatic smile."66

In the context of China one also has to examine how the Chinese immigrants influenced US notions. Chinese immigrants were vilified not only because they were 'the other,' but also because they were successful and hard working: they 'worked like slaves' and saved all of their money, living on a diet that 'no decent American would touch.'67 Even today, the Korean immigrants in New York are accused of unfair competition, because family members work at lower wages.

China has always traditionally been viewed with suspicion being a Communist nation, especially in the context of the Korean and the Vietnam wars. The growth of the Chinese economy and its nuclear arsenal along with a significant cultural difference has led it to be especially susceptible to the othering process. Significant trade ties, however, have prevented this from emerging as big as the Islamic other had.

Huntington combines his favourite bogeymen in what he describes as the Sinic-Islamic nexus as this is where weapons proliferation has been the greatest, with China playing the central role in the transfer of both conventional and non-conventional weapons to Muslim states.68 He illustrates this burgeoning nexus as illustrated by the military relationship between China and Pakistan, with China helping Pakistan as a supplier of military hardware, research and development and transferring military-related exports. His article calls it 'a renegades mutual support pact,' which promotes acquisition of weapons and technologies to counter the military power of the West. 69

In 1996 by the time his book was published China was about to join the WTO and had greatly modified its stand towards the West. Huntington now plays on economic fears rather than military ones, conceptualizes of a Greater China Co-Prosperity Sphere, as a result of the close ties overseas Chinese have with the mainland and the fact that the Asian tigers (Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) are Chinese dominated economies. In Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines the Chinese remain the most dominant class. In Indonesia for instance, the 2 percent Chinese population controls 35 percent of the GDP.70 China thus according to him seeks a more dominant role in Asia.

Chinese Confuciastic heritage, with its emphasis on order, hierarchy and the supremacy of the collectivity creates obstacles for democratization.71 He further illustrates this by saying that the Sinic states like Taiwan and South Korea, which, moving towards democracy, have Christian leaders.

Post 9/11 Huntington's Sinic-Islamic nexus seems more shaky with China coming out in support for the US policy. He explains this by using the Chinese current internal problems with the Turko-Muslim peoples in South China.72 But China is thus a temporary ally, a fact best illustrated by the Third World War scenario he paint at the end of the book, which has China attacking Vietnam for control over the South China Sea. The US and China reach a standoff; finally the USA backs down feeling that the costs of defeating this hegemonic power are too great.73

In what is reminiscent of Cold War posturing, Huntington uses the Sinic-Islamic alliance as the fact that Russia and India, the next two major powers will form an alliance with the West to contain the Sinic-Islamic civilizations. Also if his arguments are that civilizations cannot interact peacefully, how is it that they can unite to face a common menace? All that the paradigm seems to be doing is trying to create a coherent other for the US, which has had a serious, lack of a significant other after the collapse of the USSR.

THE RISING SUN

The film 'The Rising Sun' features the corporate takeover of America by the Japanese. In this movie, the Japanese are portrayed as almost entirely immoral; the Japanese corporation is analogized as being like the Mafia; in fact in the film, the Japanese Mafia (Yakuza) and the corporation are seen to be in a continual relationship. The clear message to the Americans who saw the film or read the book is primarily this: watch out - the Japanese corporation and organized crime are morally / ideologically and organizationally / structurally one and the same.

The Japanese are coming, and by virtue of their deceitful practices which stem from their underworld gangland power structures and arcane feudal social system, they will accomplish their sinister aims; if we are not on our guard, they are likely to completely usurp American economic power and take away our freedoms, too (freedom being contiguous with free market capitalism in American cultural ideology).74

Huntington regards Japan as a unique civilization all by itself, despite the heavy influence of China in Japan's history and culture and Japan's adoption of Western-style political institutions over the past half-century. Huntington is typically vague about the particular cultural features that ostensibly distinguish Japan so uniquely from other civilizations.

Japan by itself is not a significant other; it has been after World War II the USA's staunchest ally in the Pacific. Japanese economic power, which at one point had threatened US dominance, has been greatly weakened after the 80s Bank Meltdown. It really has no military power to speak of.

But Japan to Huntington is not a trustworthy ally. In his war scenario, he sees Japan beginning to shift its position from neutrality to a pro-Chinese stance. Japan he sees as likely to accommodate China. Japan has historically sought security by allying itself with the dominant power– the British in 1905, the belligerent Axis in the 30s and the US post- World War II. The Japanese see international relations as hierarchical because their domestic policies are.75 The Japanese see the international order as influenced by its long experience with vertically organized structures in Japanese society. The Japanese are quicker to bow to force majeure and cooperate with moral superiors, and are the quickest to resent abuse from a morally flabby receding hegemon.76

The first criticism of this would be that if civilizations are about kin country alliances then why does Japan want to ally with the dominant power? But more problematic is the proposition that characterizes the Japanese people.

Japanese social institutions signify Japan to be a culture with a high level of sophistication in Western eyes, yet it also appears as highly feudal and totally anachronistic to the moral imperatives of the modern world–Japanese cultural mores are exotic, quixotic and even absurd.77

Romantic images of the country paints a picture of Japan whose sophisticated culture with its indigenous traditions are in close harmony with nature: tiny bonsai trees, exotic geisha girls in kimono, manicured rock gardens, the unfathomable mysteries of Zen Buddhism, shiatsu and macrobiotic cooking, signify for a people who are deeply intuitive and aesthetically attuned in a way different from the West.78

Rosen gives examples from a travel guide to Japan that uses metaphors to trivialize another culture in a totalistic way, so as to make it easier to capture it in the network of our understandings.

* Japanese children are encouraged to be completely dependent and keep a sense of interdependence throughout their lives.
* Everything must be placed in context in Japan.
* Japanese are constrained by their thought processes in a language very different from any other.
* They do not like meeting newcomers.
* They represent their group and cannot, therefore, pronounce on any matters without consultation–cannot initiate an exchange of views.
* Westerners are individuals, but the Japanese represent a company that represents Japan.
* As we all know, Japanese do not like to lose face.
* The Japanese go to incredible lengths to be polite.79

Thus, this characterization is used to explain Japanese behaviour. The implication is that Asian people are much more conformist than Westerners are, and less respecting of the dignity of individual rights, i.e., inferior. Thus, democracy using Huntington's argument cannot work in Asia as it is contrary to Asian ethos, an idea Asian dictators are only too happy to use to justify the lack of representative institutions and the human rights violations.

MAN CANNOT LIVE ALONE AND THE SEARCH OF THE OTHER

The researcher had begun the project with the aim to move beyond Huntington bashing, but perhaps he has not been completely successful in that goal. Most of the questions raised earlier on have been answered, so in conclusion only two aspects will be addressed.

The entire project talks about the other, how the other is created, how it is used, how the Huntingtonian paradigm bases itself on these conceptions of the other, but what is yet to be addressed is why the other is required.

Others are created through a variety of methods, but only some are used as a significant other. The reason seems patently obvious, when governments have no serious proposal as to what to do about problems such as health, education, unemployment, etc., it is necessary to divert the 'bewildered herd'.80 There is a need to whip up the fear of the enemy just as in the 1930s Hitler focused on the Jews and Gypsies. As Chomsky says, 'You frighten the population, terrorize them, intimidate them till they cower in fear. Then you have a magnificent victory over Grenada, Panama or some other defenseless Third World nation. This way you can keep them diverted and controlled.'81

Apart from this when a state requires to take action against some nation or group for real politik reasons, and the action is not morally justifiable to the public for instance bombing Iraqi civilian centres. The state needs to justify its actions through demonizing the other.

An example would be of the Kargil war where to justify violence perpetrated by the sovereign there is an attempt to manufacture consent by the edification of every man killed as a martyr. The sheer volume of patriotic material directed at the populace dwarfs every other existing national issue and overwhelms the collective consiousness.82

But this dialectic is no longer confined only to the West. The Islamic militants are a product of the West's methods to counter their then Other – Soviet Russia. The Cold War was the agency through which all progressive, nationalist and secular currents in the Third World were systematically attacked, weakened, and in some cases even destroyed. The destablization of the Indonesian Communist Party and the support given to the dictatorial Suharto government can be cited as example.

The emergence of 'terrorism' has set up a dreadful dialectic.83 Every act of imperialist depredation is utilized by the 'terrorists' to gain support among the people for their own particular brand of 'struggle'; on the other hand, every 'terrorist' strike is utilized by imperialism to garner support for its own 'crusade' on behalf of 'civilization'.84"The two others thus feed on each other, legitimize one another and grow on one another's support. There is thus once again the lining up of the world into two oppositional camps: The West and Allies vs. The Rest.

This article was earlier published in the Asian Journal of Terrorism and Internal Conflict, July 2002, Vol 6, Issue 20. Reproduced with permission of the author.

Notes and References

1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (London: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p.30.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, p.31.
4. Seizaburo Sato, "The Clash of Civilizations: A View from Japan", Special Column on Huntington's treatise "Clash of Civilizations" : First of the Series (July 1997) (visited on 3/4/2002).
5. Ash Narain Roy, The Third World in the Age of Globalization: Requiem or New Agenda (London, Zed Books, 1999), p.92.
6. Ibid, p.94.
7. Ibid, p.100.
8. Tanju Cataltepe, "Old Enemies New Paradigms", (visited on 26/3/2002)
9. Jack Miles "Theology And The Clash Of Civilizations", (visited on 26/3/2002)
10. David Skidmore, "Huntington's Clash Revisited" (visited on 29/3/2002)
11. Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations", Foreign Affairs vol. 72 no. 3, Summer 1993, p.24.
12. Ibid, p.22.
13. Skidmore, n. 10.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Huntington, n. 11, p.33.
18. Ibid, p.37.
19. Ahmed Davutoglu, "The Clash Of Interests: An Explanation Of The World (Dis)Order" in Journal Of International Affairs, December 1997-February 1998, vol II – no. 4 (visited on 6/4/2002)
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Op cit n. 18.
23. Huntington, n. 11, p. 23.
24. Ibid, p.27.
25. Huntington, n. 1, p.33.
26. Edward Said, "The Clash of Ignorance" The Nation, October 22, 2001, (visited on 26/3/2002)
27. Huntington, n. 11, p.34.
28. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World order, p.110.
29. Ibid, n. 11, p.114.
30. Huntington, n. 11, p.116.
31. Miles, n. 9.
32. Michael Steinberger, "War on Terrorism" the Observer, 21 October 2001, (visited on 6/4/2002)
33. Ibid.
34. Huntington, n. 1, p.176.
35. Huntington, n. 1, p.161.
36. Op cit, n. 26.
37. Ibid.
38. The Edward Said Reader (Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin eds., New York: Vintage Books, 2000), p.177.
39. Edmund Burke, "Orientalism and World History" Theory and Society 27, 1998, p.490.
40. Op cit, n. 26.
41. Alladin, Walt Disney Corporation.
42. Scott Schaffer, Disney and the Imagineering of Histories.
43. Op cit, n. 26.
44. Op cit, n. 38, p.191.
45. This would probably be an oversimplification of Orientalism but would, hopefully, be sufficient for the purposes of this section.
46. Op cit, n. 38, p.191.
47. Ibid, p.194.
48. Ibid, p.169.
49. Samuel Huntington, "Osama has given a common identity back to the West" , ( visited on 26/3/2002)
50. Jameson Taylor, "US vs. Them", (visited on 26/3/2002)
51. Purported statement made by Osama Bin Laden.
52. Prabhat Patnaik, "On Terrorism and Imperialism", (visited on 10/4/2002)
53. Richard Falk, "Terrorist Foundations of Recent US Foreign Policy" in Western State Terrorism Alexander George ed., Oxford Polity Press, 1991, p.116.
54. Ibid, p.108.
55. Pun intended!
56. RW Apple, NYTimes, 14 September, (visited on 26/3/2002).
57. Op cit, n. 10.
58. Op cit, n. 8.
59. Op cit, n. 49.
60. Op cit, n. 26.
61. Nayland Smith, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, (visited on 27/3/2002)
62. Dexter Roberts and Brian Benner, "How Does China play its Hand?" in Business Week, 11 February 2002, p.32.
63. John S. Major, "Asia through a Glass Darkly: Stereotypes of Asians in Western Literature cited from Focus on Asian Studies", vol. V, no. 3, pp. 4-8, (visited on 27/6/2002)
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Huntington, n. 1, p.188.
69. Skidmore, n.10, p.47.
70. Huntington, n. 1, p.170.
71. Ibid, p.238.
72. Op cit, n. 32.
73. Huntington, n.1, p.314.
74. Steven L. Rosen, "Orientalism and Cultural Conflict", (visited on 27/3/2003)
75. Huntington, n. 1, p.236.
76. Huntington, n. 1, p.237.
77. Op cit, n. 74.
78. "Rearming Japan", zmag (visited on 27/3/2002)
79. Op cit, n. 77.
80. Noam Chomsky, "Media Control", in Alternative Press Review, Fall 1993, p.24.
81. Ibid, p.25.
82. Sarah George and Singini Saha, "War, Patriotism... Propaganda?" in 1 Soc Adv (2000)
83. Op cit, n. 52.
84. Ibid.

Thursday, March 24, 2005 | permalink | 2 comments

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2 Comments:

The Clash of Civilisations will ultimately revolve around a distinct set of factors that define the 'civilisation' or 'group'.

The factor that creates the most affinity for 'birds of a feather' is Race. Next comes Religion. Only then comes Nationality.

Conflict areas where one side has these 3 factors completely different from the other, will represent the most powerful and protracted 'civilisational' clashes.

By I Rule, at March 25, 2005 4:54 AM

In the wake of author’s dark vision, every event, big or small, is interpreted as something related to the clash of civilizations. Despite its academic defeat and intellectual shallowness, the media all over the world deals with almost all the east west relations within the same context.

By Unknown, at June 03, 2007 8:38 AM