However, fault line conflicts can also occur in the absence of ethnic fragmentation, when deep cultural differences separate populations. Blog. The Clash of Civilization’s theory has many weaknesses in perceiving the dynamic movement of identity within one civilization and between one civilization and an other. Huntington's book is a direct challenge to Fukuyama's thesis. Interestingly enough, fundamentalist forces within Islamic countries also tried to use this theory to justify their own anti-western geopolitics. Huntington’s essay, followed by a similarly titled 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, directly challenged both globalist and nationalist predictions with its claim that differences among civilizations would become the core source of future global conflict. ( Log Out /  With the help of the AsiaBarometer (Inoguchi, 2012; Inoguchi and Fujii, 2012), I argue that the clash of civilizations thesis suffers from three key weaknesses: (1) the assumption of core states in major civilizations in Asia, (2) the underestimation of the deepening permeation of globalization, and (3) the fascination combined with fixation with the specific geographical areas adjacent to Western Europe. Chinese youth today are less nationalistic than their parents and more exposed to Western political and philosophical culture than previous generations. The Balkan wars of the 1990s and early 2000s were fault line wars between and among ethno-religious groups. Fault line wars are clashes between rival ethnic groups. Further into Mitteleuropa, fault line stresses still show. Now, however, that supremacy is eroding as more and more non-Western states get their  hands on nuclear weapons. 1Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996), pp. The clash with Huntington is clear, for Huntington, his idea of civilization is quite weak and was criticized by many. With the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their land in order to give it to another group of people, in direct contravention to the very principles and laws that the West promulgated, established and either cajoled and or forced others to abide by it. The Clash of Civilizations holds that the United States is in decline, that democracy is limited to Western cultures, and that America must accept Asian authoritarianism as a good thing. Perhaps more important, the political climate has degenerated since the 1990s. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. 20. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/08/31/clash-of-civilizations-or-clash-within-civilizations/. A clash occurs when multiple factors come to the forefront either by design (with malice aforethought) or through ill-fated decisions thus creating the opportunity for a clash to take place. Angela Merkel’s decision to allow significant Islamic populations to enter Germany, and by extension Europe, grew out of this ideology. It is the cultural border of Europe, and in the post-Cold War world it is also the political and economic border of Europe and the West.2. Friction amid ethnic enclaves, combined with assertions of religious and cultural supremacy, led to genocide. Global politics at its great power weight class has returned to a state of competition; not that competition at any level entirely ceased between 1993 and today. OF WORLD ORDER. States would be forced to choose between ceding sovereignty for survival or risking destruction at the hands of more powerful transnational units. The "clash of civilizations" thesis was hollow, but powerful nevertheless. At present, China under Xi Jinping’s “Paramount Leadership” is more politically centralized and internally controlled than at any time since Mao. We have already seen evidence of situations in which they might not: insurgent success in the Second Battle of Fallujah (against Western and Western-trained forces); Hezbollah’s effectiveness against Israel in the 2006 Lebanon War; and the tenacity of ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa. The world has “shrunk” with the increase in communications and transportation technologies. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Africa remains too internally fragmented to cohere, which has allowed external powers to influence regional affairs. This is the relationship between the West and the overwhelming majority of Muslim states that Huntington does not take into consideration. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. Huntington’s predictions were divided between grand theoretical pronouncements and what he took to be their specific corollaries. The Clash of Civilizations: a Summary of Samuel Huntington's Controversial Political Analysis and Its Critics 2376 Words | 10 Pages. The Shifting Balance of Civilizations. Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order posited that one way of understanding international conflicts is that nations have a tendency — a dangerous tendency, in Huntington’s view — to align themselves in a few major cultural blocs. A formatted critique of Samuel P. Huntington's seminal work "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" The West can no longer assume its infantry forces will prevail. Huntington’s Clash thesis has significant merit, but contemporary events undermine its argument that civilizations will naturally cohere as inter-civilizational competition intensifies. A Cold War that lasted more than forty years, which also included intermittent proxy wars between East and West came to an almost sudden end. The clash of civilizations between European imperial powers and China's Qing Dynasty exploded into violence and devastation in 1841 after a series of disputes between Guangzhou's governor-general, British diplomats, ... 31. Huntington identifies religion as a critical differentiating factor. The majority of the party’s voters are found in what was formerly East Germany, and a third of that base is Russian-speaking Slavic or Volga German. Every time you rally and attack rebels it costs 10 vigor. The importance of voting essay. As Xi Jinping further consolidates power and Beijing cuts deals with significant non-state parties like the Vatican, the possibility that China will embrace Western values remains very distant. These states do not necessarily have the same strategic culture as the West, which means the logic governing Western military policy may be outdated or even obsolete. The stakes in the fracturing of non-Western civilizations are large and unknowable. Alexander Lukashenko is now in his fifth term as president of Belarus having defeated the opposition by lop-sided margins since 1994. All three states are as consistent in their embrace of kleptocratic rule as they are contemptuous of the freedom to speak, assemble, and pray. The differences within Islamic civilization are also highlighted by each state’s choice of allies. Unlike the former, Huntington denied that values were universal or likely would be universalizing. 367 pp. Hungary, Poland, and even Austria have all become more authoritarian, with their ruling right-wing parties feeding off the failure of the European Left to articulate a political vision that does not demean the Western experience and its constituent national traditions. States that lie along the “fault line” between two major civilizations are particularly vulnerable largely because geographical propinquity and resource scarcity combine with identity differences to supercharge confrontations. Others include Russia’s active intervention on Iran’s behalf in the Syrian civil war and China’s growing economic cooperation with Orthodox and Islamic Central Asian States, Pakistan, and Iran. Several potential core states exist, but out of the six that Huntington identified in 1996 (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Egypt), only three remain as possible leaders of the Islamic world.3And those three—Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—belong to their own distinct sub-civilizations that harbor deep-seated enmities toward one another. Particularly in China, the regime’s insecurity, partially manifested in an obsession with Taiwan’s democratic existence, demonstrates its leaders’ anxiety over their claim to rule. Three of the top ten and seven of the top 20 highest-grossing films of all time in China are American made. Yes, it is true that, aside from in the most reactionary sections of Islamic civilization, Western media, entertainment products and fashion remain popular throughout the world. Dissent exists in authoritarian Russia and China. This is a profoundly illiberal doctrine, an emphatic denial of universalism. It is therefore not particularly surprisingly that some Western states are turning away from the hard work of consolidating liberal democratic models of governance. The result on all sides has been a growing affinity for executive action, disregard for the legitimacy of differing opinions, the evanescence of moderate politics, and a coarsening of political discourse that encourages the manipulation of the electorate. Civilizations would still organize themselves around certain “core states” that combined hard and soft power resources to lead their cultural groupings, while torn states would be internally split between major civilizational poles. The core, comprised of the Anglosphere and Western Continental Europe (particularly Germany and France), maintained a united front throughout the Cold War, despite frequent Gallic squirming. We cannot, that is, take our role in the world for granted. Huntington sought to reshape our idea of post-Cold War politics emphasizing culture as a significant divider between friends and enemies, but not to the absolute exclusion of other traditional causes of enmity. It identifies the roots of many of today’s geopolitical issues and helps us predict what future conflicts might look like. Does the Saudi Education System Possess the Capability to be an Enabler to Saudi Vision 2030? But Iranian and North Korean missile technologies, combined with insufficient American and allied defense systems, expose the United States to a level of risk it has not faced since the end of the Cold War. The zone of friction runs almost exactly down Huntington’s identified fault line: This line dates back to the division of the Roman Empire in the fourth century and to the creation of the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth century. Hizb-al-Tahrir, for example, argued that the "clash of civilizations" was inevitable. Huntington correctly identified these differences as the inchoate drivers of non-Western opposition to the West. This international competition has highlighted fissures among Western subgroups. Once the Cold War ended what was festering beneath the surface exploded. Grand theoretical views by eminent thinkers deserve to cause stirs, whether they are right in the main or not—for being wrong grandly can start ultimately useful conversations in ways that being right trivially cannot. English-language songs are routinely at the top of Russian music charts. Clash of Civilizations readings (Said and Wistrich) Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations. Man will not return to bypassed forms of political organization. Yet, it offered an important framework, which revealed how much a unipolar universalism can stimulate cultural hatred and so civilisational clashes. Huntington was right to identify civilizations as basic units of political interaction. The connections with the West remain, but as Huntington recognized, Latin civilization as a whole remains distinct with its largely Catholic tradition and Hispano-Portuguese languages. She cannot control her own party as Brexit negotiations have all but imploded. See the book review of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Robert Marks Spring 2002 Journal of World History, Vol. His attempt to determine where we, as a species, are in terms of political and social development arguably represents the pinnacle of Huntington’s work as a political thinker. Yet for all that, one of Huntington’s broader assumptions—that political units, pressured by international competition, would work with their affiliates to create a “civilization-based world order”1—now seems mistaken. Western civilization spans the Atlantic, encompassing the United States and Canada, Western Europe, parts of Central Europe, the Baltic States, Poland, and Australia. Britain’s political leadership is inept and has been for a while. That process has caused a mixing of cultural and political institutions, starting arguably with 19thcentury Meiji Japan and continuing today in many dozens of states. But since the Soviet collapse, the Anglosphere and the Continent have drifted apart. The tilting nuclear balance is not the only indicator of the growing anti-Western challenge. Rather than entering a new period of competition for civilizational leadership, the West’s core states seem to be increasingly ambivalent about the ideals that have defined Western culture. Iran needs only to wait until the mid-2020s until the nuclear deal practically permits its nuclear weapons production; or it may break out sooner, depending on circumstances, to become the second Islamic nuclear power. A Book Review by Father John McCloskey. Saudi Arabia and Turkey, two states with starkly different political systems, have historically gravitated toward the West. Yet Huntington claims the inevitable clash is due to an inherent incompatibility between Islam and Christianity. The problem isn’t just that more non-Western states have nuclear weapons; it’s that the nuclear weapons they have are growing increasingly dangerous. Huntington also accurately identified how a changing military balance allows cultural power to spill across civilizational borders. The West’s rivals control conflict escalation in flashpoints ranging from Ukraine to Syria to the Scarborough Shoal. Potential regional leaders either refuse to exert their influence and build a clear political sphere, such as in the case of South Africa, or are plagued by internal issues, as with Nigeria. Huntington offers few assurances for declining civilizations. It’s not that they don’t like us; they just don’t like what they’re hearing. The victorious side in fault line conflicts, between governments or non-state actors, is liable to inflict harsh punishments upon its adversary. Until now, such mid-level nuclear challengers as Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan lacked the missile capabilities to threaten the U.S. mainland directly. Most dramatically, the West has refused to obey Huntington’s model. By embodying these values in foreign policy, Western states could attract allies and partners without offering concrete military incentives—or so it was thought. Absent the total air superiority and geographical propinquity featured in operations like Desert Storm, Western forces will find themselves operating in urban environments without the benefit of sustained interdiction campaigns beforehand. Value differences have certainly persisted between the West and non-West, and the military decline of Western states parallels a concerted armed challenged from states in non-Western civilizations. The sharpening antipathy that the West faces today is in part due to the high level of underlying consistency, in certain respects at least, between Russian oligarchy, Chinese state capitalism, and Islamic authoritarianism. However, Poland’s current government exhibits increasingly authoritarian tendencies, while Hungary and the Balkans are consistently more ambivalent in their allegiance to the West. The past 25 years of political development demonstrate that these systems, however fragile they become from time to time, rest on shared Western social and cultural values. Ensuring the maintenance and potential growth of the West thus requires repairing our international economic and military positions, for we are no longer a cultural hegemon, a civilization without challengers. Moreover, several of his discrete predictions, such as, for example, the shifting military balance toward non-Western civilizations and the dynamics of fault-line conflicts, have enjoyed resounding vindication over the past two decades. In the Anglosphere, the United States is reconsidering its position as the standard bearer of the liberal international order, as well as its principled attachment to free trade. Given that it was to be expected (even without the benefit of hindsight). But it is difficult to translate regime opposition into support for Western political values even in Iran, a country with a deeper proto-democratic tradition than any Near Eastern state apart from Turkey. The U.S. military could therefore extend its deterrence umbrella to allies as well as a few lucky bystander nations without truly exposing its population to a nuclear strike. $26. The West’s rivals have also begun to field progressively more advanced conventional military technologies and have innovatively adapted them to the tactical-level. Yet the Chinese Communist Party remains effective in its indoctrination efforts, and the shadow of the government’s brutality at Tiananmen Square, combined with controls over internet access, still stifles political debate. The point is that as the nuclear balance continues to shift, Western freedom of military action will narrow. Inaccurately labeled, because Muslims are a fractured group of ethnically diverse group of people. Shi‘a Iran opposes Sunni Saudi Arabia and Turkey. As a result, some in the West succumbed to a triumphalist narrative, imagining that liberal democratic capitalism was the only feasible path toward modernization. Proponents of “soft power” theory in the 1990s and early 2000s argued that the utility of military force in international politics was declining, hence the supposed primacy of attractive cultural and political values. Information technology and more efficient transport methods would “shrink” the world, according to Huntington, making interactions within civilizations more frequent and differences between them much starker. Sato, Seizaburo October 1997 ‘The Clash of Civilizations: A View from Japan’, Asia Pacific Review 4, pp. Whether from intolerance, self-doubt, or some mixture of these debilities, the West now seems to be rejecting its own heritage. He not only foresaw that civilizations would come into conflict, but specifically that the West would find itself engaged with multiple non-Western challengers. Case study of carcinoma cervix. Iran remains a curious case. In his view, other, more authoritarian models could prove every bit as potent and enduring as Western ones, and indeed recent evidence seems to vindicate Huntington on this point. Firstly, as already stated, it is the most fundamental level of identity. It is a hypothesis that has generated considerable interest, however, I find more weaknesses than strengths in Huntington's argument given it ignores a number of important aspects as they relate to the geo-political world we live in. Use the different characteristics of each troop type wisely and you will be very hard to beat. On the other hand, in his thesis, Huntington ignores the historical context during which conflict breaks out or peace takes place between nation-states. Finally, using the spike of conflict and war that broke out after the end of the Cold War as proof is an invalid use of evidence. With a few exceptions, there were states who were nominally independent, while most countries were either brutally colonized or fell under the sway of an overbearingly aggressive western hegemon. 7-23. On a casual stroll through the souk of any large Near Eastern city, the popularity of denim jeans among all age groups is undeniable. French involvement especially indicates Africa’s lack of political coherence: Despite its economic and military fragility, France still dominates many of its former colonies. THE CLASH. The Civilizational Balance and Western Decline. At the same time, however, Huntington did not believe the nation-state would continue to serve as the fundamental unit of geopolitical conflict, as it had done for much of the 20th century. Please be sure to state a position in your 2 – 3 page response. More and more exposed to Western political and philosophical culture than previous generations ’ rivals... 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