Preserving the Flame of Intolerance

The death of Huntington unfortunately does not mean an end to his legacy

Over the Christmas holidays one of the leading theorists of international relations, Samuel P. Huntington, died at age 81. Huntington is perhaps most well known for his work “The Clash of Civilizations”, both as an article (“The Clash of Civilizations?”) published in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1993 and as an expanded version of this hypothesis in his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” a few years later. Although the author of these works may have died, the thoughts behind them looks set to carry for some time to come – much to the detriment of most people on the planet.

This is because the central thesis to Huntington’s views about the post Cold War world is also the basis of present-day US foreign policy. Indeed, many see his work as the theoretical legitimization of Western aggression against non-Western cultures. In particular is his wariness of Islam, which he has on several occasions noted has “bloody borders.” Consequently, he envisioned the need for western societies to come together in solidarity in order to be able to best face such threats.

One consequence of this is the reinforcement of the notion of Judeo-Christianity. This is quite ironic considering that Judaism and Christianity are at odds with one another. This is not only apparent historically, but also on the conceptual level as well. Judaism sees Israel and its people as a chosen race, above all others; Christianity, on the other hand, rejects many of the tenets of Judaism and implicitly holds Israel responsible for the death of Christ.

The ability of Huntington’s ideas to bring together and reinforce such otherwise opposing religious views in a way also demonstrates a fundamental flaw within his thesis. The so-called Western world is not a homogenous whole, in the same way that an “Islamic civilization” isn’t. One just has to look at the civil strife in Iraq to see how homogenous Islam is. And this isn’t simply because of American intervention and the toppling of Saddam Hussein; Iran and Iraq have been at odds with one another for decades, not to mention the internal differences which were always present under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

Huntington’s misreading of the true state of international relations of the present stems from his simplistic view of the Cold War of the past, which he saw as an ideological conflict arising from a clash between the Capitalist West and the Communist East. While there is no doubt that such a view may have been valid in the early years of the Cold War, towards the latter years of this era (especially from the 1970s onward), the spheres of influence between the two camps often co-existed in symbiosis with one another. In other words, the ideological differences between the two main camps appeared to narrow as time went on. In the end, the Cold War ended up being what Norman Mailer described as a “battle of the banks” more than anything else.

As with the homogeneity of civilizations, Huntington made the mistake of not taking into account the differences which existed among the various groups of the Communist East. As history had shown, the so-called Communist East had three centers of influence: Moscow, Beijing, and Belgrade. The latter flirted with the concept of the Non-Aligned Movement (which subsequently disappeared during the political realignments of the post Cold War era) whereas the first disappeared altogether. China, meanwhile, took the approach observed by Orwell in his novel Animal Farm and learned to walk on two legs.

Full of contradictions

In effect, the main shortcoming of Huntington is his failure to appreciate the significance behind globalization, noting that “the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.” This is where Huntington makes his biggest mistake: the source of present conflicts is the influence of globalization, a process which is primarily both economic and ideological; culture, on the other hand, is one of the prime instruments by which this new form of imperialism is exported to the rest of the world.

Although Huntington didn’t believe that globalization would be the primary source of conflict in the post Cold War world, he nevertheless was one of the principal architects of this new world order, having coined the term “the Davos Man”. As far as he was concerned, it was important that a new class of global elites take control that “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations”. Sadly, this is precisely the world we live in today, and the world financial crisis is in large part driven by the ignominious activities of these new global elites.

In many ways, Huntington was full of contradictions. Thus, while many see present American foreign policy as directly attributable to his notion of a Clash of Civilizations, he nonetheless felt that the US needed to concentrate more on the home front and abandon the imposition of its ideal of democratic universalism and its incessant military interventionism. Like many conservatives in the US, he sees the main threat to American society coming from within through immigration.

A modern version of apartheid

In essence, what Huntington advocated in his analysis of the post Cold War world is nothing more than a modern version of apartheid, one that spans countries and continents and is bound together by the perception of a common “civilization”. This modern version of apartheid was perhaps driven by what ultimately happened to apartheid in South Africa.

The end of apartheid in South Africa probably led to the fear within Huntington that something similar might end up happening in the US, Canada, and the various nations of Europe – albeit on a much larger scale. As with the Rome Empire, the Pax Americana of the present is built upon the backs of modern day slaves – namely migrant workers, minorities, and immigrants. Likewise, as with the fall of Rome, Western societies are doomed to oblivion as people within these societies become increasingly self-centered and decadent. Their lives revolve around a fixation for “bread and circus”; moreover, they live beyond their means at a standard of living they not only can’t afford but in many ways don’t deserve.

For Huntington, the demise of the apartheid regime in South Africa no doubt was a precursor of what lies ahead for the Western world. Indubitably, one can discern in some of his works the respect that Huntington had for the original system of apartheid in South Africa. In the late 1960s, for instance, in a book called “Political Order in Changing Societies”, he viewed South Africa as a "satisfied society", using pseudo-mathematical arguments to reinforce his position.

His latest book entitled “Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity” (2004) appears to carry on in this tradition, warning about the threats posed by large-scale immigration. Many, who had sympathized with the apartheid system in South Africa, attribute its demise to large-scale immigration which ended up dividing the country into different peoples with different cultures and different languages.

In the end, the fears and warnings of Huntington are perhaps best turned on America and other Western countries themselves, for the shortcomings he attributes to others are more applicable closer to home. For example, if one takes what Huntington wrote a decade ago in “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order” and replace key words such as “Islam” with “America” and “the West” with “the world”, one gets a picture far more representative of the present than that of the Huntington original: “America's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the world is not American fundamentalism. It is America, a different civilisation whose people is convinced of the superiority of their culture and is obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”