Before he died in 2008, Samuel Huntington could rightly say, “I told you so.” The United States was already several years into its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such conflicts between the Western and Islamic worlds seemed to confirm the claims of this Harvard academic, who once divided the world into civilizations and predicted their clash. As our troubled millennium wore on, the word “prophet” followed him almost like a nickname.
It is inappropriate to speak of something like a “well-timed death.” Yet, if he were alive today, Huntington would be criticized almost as much as poor Francis Fukuyama—for misinterpreting the world. The important conflicts today are taking place within, not between, civilizations. The word “civilization” has never been more popular (the U.S. government speaks of the “civilizational erasure” of Europe)—and never more useless.
Look at the world’s conflict zones. The war in Ukraine is a war within an “Orthodox” Christian civilization, at least as Huntington classified it. The occasional tension between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan is another example of competition within the same cultural bloc, what Huntington called the “Sinosphere.” A candidate for the most destructive current conflict on Earth, the civil war in Sudan, is not, strictly speaking, pitting two coherent religious or cultural groups against each other. Even the external sponsors of the warring parties, including the UAE on one side and Egypt on the other, are largely from the Islamic world, not from different civilizations.
The Israeli-Palestinian issue is similar to this, but it is not typical of most of the world’s crisis zones. In fact, I wonder if the reason this local conflict has captured the attention of outside observers so much is precisely that it is easy to understand (or misunderstand) as neatly “intercivilizational.” It is the kind of conflict that, by that logic, “should” happen.
Most of today's dividing lines are much more blurred than that. Huntington's most infamous claim was that Islam has "bloody borders": that problems arise where it touches other civilizations. Based on events over the past decade, however, the real targets of Muslim countries are mostly other Muslim countries.
Fanatics do not reserve their fiercest hatred for their open opponents. No, their greatest rage is directed at the skeptic, the outlaw, or the schismatic figure. After all, it is easy to ignore someone who is a complete stranger to your world. The one who deviates from it is unbearable.
Take, for example, the proxy conflicts between Iran and Saudi Arabia, or the blockade imposed on Qatar by Egypt and three Gulf states, or the ongoing conflict in Yemen, where UAE-backed rebels made progress against the Saudi-backed government this week. Add to that the Syrian civil war, and before that the Arab Spring. The bloodiest conflicts have been within, not between, civilizations.
If civilization is a hopeless indicator of who will clash with whom, it is even weaker in explaining cooperation. One Western liberal is most concerned about the bilateral alliance between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China. It crosses “civilizational lines.” Huntington emphasized religion as a key part of civilization, but the EU often has better relations with Shinto-Buddhist Japan than with even one of its own Kremlin-friendly Christian members. North and South Korea, which are ethnically and civilizationally related, could hardly have more different geopolitical allies. (And they are still formally at war.) The Korean peninsula shows that a country’s foreign policy direction can be shaped by recent experiences, not by some ancient cultural identity.
As for the current American government, its position is, paraphrased but without distortion, as follows: “Europe is not Western enough, so let’s embrace Russia and Saudi Arabia.” Whatever one may think about the morality of such autocrat worship, its illogicality is most striking. Those who talk most about the West as a special and exclusive civilization are, in practice, the most prone to political “promiscuity.”
How, then, did Huntington get it so wrong? To understand conflict, it sometimes helps to have “experienced” it. Perhaps that is why the intolerant Churchill, and Orwell, a former colonial policeman, could see clearly the dictators of the 1930s, while many seemingly “better” people could not. Perhaps Huntington, with all his typical American Protestant establishment blandness, was never the best choice to predict the future of war. One truth, which is evident at all levels of politics, particularly eluded him: fanatics do not reserve their fiercest hatred for their outspoken opponents.
No, the greatest anger is directed at the skeptic, the outlaw, or the schismatic figure. After all, it is easy to ignore someone who is a complete stranger to your world. It is the one who deviates from it who is unbearable. Just remember who the “wok” activists tried most fervently to “cancel”: ordinary liberals in the style of J. K. Rowling, not the hard rightists with whom they had little contact anyway.
Apply this principle to the level of states, and the world of 2025 begins to make sense. Conflicts erupt where there is divergence: Orthodox but Western-leaning Ukraine; culturally Chinese but democratic Taiwan; this approach to Islam, not that. While violence is not on the agenda, the attacks on Europe by American populists are another example of the “ugly side” of small differences.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have long been seen as the moment when the 21st century began. From today’s perspective, the real “trailer” for what was to come was Putin’s invasion of Georgia seven years later, as the former Soviet republic began to turn to the West. That conflict can erupt within a civilization, that even religion is not a particularly strong bond — these are the lessons that the war offered us, but they were overshadowed by the banking collapse of that summer. We will have too many opportunities to learn them again.
The text is taken from "Financial Times"
Translation: NB
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