Huntington’s Clash Revisited

David Brooks  MARCH 3, 2011 / Nytimes.com

Samuel Huntington was one of America’s greatest political scientists. In

1993, he published a sensational essay in Foreign Affairs called “The
Clash of Civilizations?” The essay, which became a book, argued that
the post-cold war would be marked by civilizational conflict.

Human beings, Huntington wrote, are divided along cultural lines —

Western, Islamic, Hindu and so on. There is no universal civilization.
Instead, there are these cultural blocks, each within its own distinct set of
values.

The Islamic civilization, he wrote, is the most troublesome. People in the

Arab world do not share the general suppositions of the Western world.
Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to their nation-state.
Their culture is inhospitable to certain liberal ideals, like pluralism,
individualism and democracy.

Huntington correctly foresaw that the Arab strongman regimes were

fragile and were threatened by the masses of unemployed young men. He
thought these regimes could fall, but he did not believe that the nations
would modernize in a Western direction. Amid the tumult of regime
change, the rebels would selectively borrow tools from the West, but
their borrowing would be refracted through their own beliefs. They
would follow their own trajectory and not become more Western.

The Muslim world has bloody borders, he continued. There are wars and
tensions where the Muslim world comes into conflict with other
civilizations. Even if decrepit regimes fell, he suggested, there would
still be a fundamental clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.
The Western nations would do well to keep their distance from Muslim
affairs. The more the two civilizations intermingle, the worse the
tensions will be.

Huntington’s thesis set off a furious debate. But with the historic changes
sweeping through the Arab world, it’s illuminating to go back and read
his argument today.

In retrospect, I’d say that Huntington committed the Fundamental

Attribution Error. That is, he ascribed to traits qualities that are actually
determined by context.

He argued that people in Arab lands are intrinsically not nationalistic. He

argued that they do not hunger for pluralism and democracy in the way
these things are understood in the West. But it now appears as though
they were simply living in circumstances that did not allow that
patriotism or those spiritual hungers to come to the surface.

It now appears that people in these nations, like people in all nations,
have multiple authentic selves. In some circumstances, one set of
identities manifests itself, but when those circumstances change, other
equally authentic identities and desires get activated.

For most of the past few decades, people in Arab nations were living
under regimes that rule by fear. In these circumstances, most people
shared the conspiracy mongering and the political passivity that these
regimes encouraged. But when the fear lessened, and the opportunity for
change arose, different aspirations were energized. Over the past weeks,
we’ve seen Arab people ferociously attached to their national identities.
We’ve seen them willing to risk their lives for pluralism, openness and
democracy.

I’d say Huntington was also wrong in the way he defined culture.
In some ways, each of us is like every person on earth; in some ways,
each of us is like the members of our culture and group; and, in some
ways, each of us is unique. Huntington minimized the power of universal
political values and exaggerated the influence of distinct cultural values.
It’s easy to see why he did this. He was arguing against global elites who
sometimes refuse to acknowledge the power of culture at all.

But it seems clear that many people in Arab nations do share a universal
hunger for liberty. They feel the presence of universal human rights and
feel insulted when they are not accorded them.

Culture is important, but underneath cultural differences there are these

universal aspirations for dignity, for political systems that listen to,
respond to and respect the will of the people.

Finally, I’d say Huntington misunderstood the nature of historical

change. In his book, he describes transformations that move along linear,
projectable trajectories. But that’s not how things work in times of
tumult. Instead, one person moves a step. Then the next person moves a
step. Pretty soon, millions are caught up in a contagion, activating
passions they had but dimly perceived just weeks before. They get swept
up in momentums that have no central authority and that, nonetheless,
exercise a sweeping influence on those caught up in their tides.

I write all this not to denigrate the great Huntington. He may still be
proved right. The Arab world may modernize on its own separate path.
But his mistakes illuminate useful truths: that all people share certain
aspirations and that history is wide open. The tumult of events can
transform the traits and qualities that seemed, even to great experts,
etched in stone.