Clash of civilisations?
The many faces of the future
by Samuel P. Huntington

CONVENTIONAL wisdom tells us that we are witnessing the emergence of what V.S. Naipaul called a "universal civilisation," the cultural coming together of humanity and the increasing acceptance of common values, beliefs and institutions by people throughout the world. Critics of this trend point to the global domination of western-style capitalism and culture (Baywatch, many note with alarm, is the most popular television show in the world), and the gradual erosion of distinct cultures — especially in the developing world. But there’s more to universal civilisation than GATT and David Hasselhoff’s pecs.

If what we mean by universal culture are the assumptions, values and doctrines currently held by the many elites who travel in international circles, that’s not a viable "one world" scenario. Consider the "Davos culture." Each year about a thousand business executives, government officials, intellectuals and journalists from scores of countries meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland. Almost all of them hold degrees in the physical sciences, social sciences, business or law; are reasonably fluent in English; are employed by governments, corporations and academic institutions with extensive international connections; and travel frequently outside of their own countries. They also generally share beliefs in individualism, market economies and political democracy, which are also common among people in western civilisation. This core group of people controls virtually all international institutions, many of the world’s governments and the bulk of world’s economic and military organisations. As a result, the Davos culture is tremendously important, but it is far from a universal civilisation. Outside the West, these values are shared by perhaps one per cent of the world’s population.

The argument that the spread of western consumption patterns and popular culture around the world is creating a universal civilisation is also not especially profound. Innovations have been transmitted from one civilisation to another throughout history. But they are usually techniques lacking in significant cultural consequences or fads that come and go without altering the underlying culture of the recipient civilisation. The essence of western civilisation is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-westerners may bite into the latter does not necessarily mean they are more likely to accept the former. During the 1970s and 80s Americans bought millions of Japanese cars and electronic gadgets without being "Japanised", and, in fact, became considerably more antagonistic towards Japan. Only naive arrogance can lead westerners to assume that non-westerners will become "westernised" by acquiring western goods.

A slightly more sophisticated version of the universal popular culture argument focuses on the media rather than consumer goods in general. Eighty-eight of the world’s hundred most popular films in 1993 were produced in the United States, and four organisations based in the United States and Europe — the Associated Press, CNN,Reuters and the French Press Agency — dominate the dissemination of news worldwide. This situation simply reflects the universality of human interest in love, sex, violence, mystery, heroism and wealth, and the ability of profit-motivated companies, primarily American,to exploit those interests to their own advantage. Little or no evidence exists, however, to support the assumption that the emergence of pervasive global communications is producing significant convergence in attitude and beliefs around the world. Indeed, this western hegemony encourages populist politicians in non-western societies to denounce western cultural imperialism and to rally their constituents to preserve their indigenous cultures. The extent to which global communications are dominated by the West is, thus, a major source of the resentment non-western people have toward the West. In addition, rapid economic development in non-western societies is leading to the emergence of local and regional media industries catering to the distinctive tastes of those societies.

The central elements of any civilisation are language and religion. If a universal civilisation is emerging, there should be signs of a universal language and a universal religion developing. Nothing of the sort is occurring.

Despite claims fromwestern business leaders that the world’s language is English, no evidence exists to support this proposition, and the most reliable evidence that does exist shows just the opposite.English speakers dropped from 9.8 per cent of the world’s population in 1958 to 7.6 per cent in 1992. Still, one can argue that English has become the world’s lingua franca, or in linguistic terms, the principal language of wider communication. It is tool for communication, not a source of identity and community.

The linguistic scholar Joshua Fishman has observed that a language is more likely to be accepted as a lingua franca if it is not identified with a particular ethnic group, religion or ideology. In the past, English carried many of those associations. But more recently, Fishman says, it has been "de-ethnicised " (or minimally ethnicised)," much like what happened to Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek and Latin before it. As he puts it, "It is part of the relative good fortune of English as an additional language that neither its British nor its American fountainheads have been widely or deeply viewed in an ethnic or ideological context for the past quarter century or so." Resorting to English for intercultural communication helps maintain — and, indeed, reinforce — separate cultural identities. Precisely because people want to preserve their own culture, they use English to communicate with people of other cultures.

A universal religion is only slightly more likely to emerge than a universal language. The late 20th century has seen a resurgence of religions around the world, including the rise of fundamentalist movements. This trend has reinforced the differences among religions, and has not necessarily resulted in significant shifts in the distribution of religions worldwide.

The argument that some sort of universal civilisation is emerging rests on one or more of three assumptions: that the collapse of Soviet communism meant the end of history and the universal victory of liberal democracy; that increased interaction among peoples through trade, investment, tourism, media and electronic communications is creating a common world culture; and that a universal civilisation is the logical result of the process of global modernisation that has been going on since the 18th century.

The first assumption is rooted in the Cold War perspective that the only alternative to communism is liberal democracy, and the demise of the first inevitably produces the second. But there are many alternatives to liberal democracy — including authoritarianism, nationalism, corporatism and market communism (as in China) — that are alive and well in today’s world. And, more significantly, there are all the religious alternatives that lie outside the world of secular ideologies. In the modern world, religion is a central, perhaps the central, force that motivates and mobilizes people. It is sheer hubris to think that because Soviet communism has collapsed, the West has conquered the world for all time and that non-western people are going to rush to embrace western liberalism as the only alternative. The Cold War division of humanity is over. The more fundamental divisions of ethnicity, religions and civilisations remain and will spawn new conflicts.

The new global economy is a reality. Improvements in transportation and communications technology have indeed made it easier and cheaper to move money, goods, knowledge, ideas and images around the world. But will be the impact of this increased economic interaction? In social psychology, distinctiveness theory holds that people define themselves by what makes them different from others in a particular context: People define their identity by what they are not. As advanced communications, trade and travel multiply the interactions among civilisations, people will increasingly accord greater relevance to identity based on their own civilisation.

Those who argue that a universal civilisation is an inevitable product of modernisation assume that all modern societies must become westernised. As the first civilisation to modernise, the West leads in the acquisition of the culture of modernity. And as other societies acquire similar patterns of education, work, wealth and class structure — the argument runs — this modern western culture will become the universal culture of the world. That significant differences exist between modern and tradition culture is beyond dispute. It doesn’t necessary follow, however, that societies with modern cultures resemble each other more than do societies with traditional cultures. As historian Fernand Draudel writes, "Ming China... was assuredly closer to the France of the Valois than the China of Mao Tse-tung is to the France of the Fifth Republic."

Yet modern societies could resemble each other more than do traditional societies for two reasons. First, the increased interaction among modern societies may not generate a common culture, but it does facilitate the transfer of techniques, inventions and practices from one society to another with a speed and to a degree that were impossible in the traditional world. Second, traditional society was based on agriculture; modern society is based on industry.

Modern societies thus have much in common. But do they necessarily merge into homogeneity? The argument that they do rests on the assumption that modern society must approximate a single type, the western type. This is a totally false assumption. Western civilisation emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries. It did not begin to modernise until the 17th and 18th centuries. The West was the West long before it was modern. The central characteristics of the West — the classical legacy, the mix of Catholicism and protestantism, and the separation of spiritual and temporal authority — distinguish it from other civilisations and antedate the modernisation of the West.

In the post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among people are not ideological, political or economic. They are cultural. People and nations are attempting to answer a basic human question: Who are we? And they are answering that question in the traditional way, by reference to the things that mean the most to them: ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs and institutions. People identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations and at the broadest level, civilisations. They use politics not just to advance their interests, but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know who we are against.

Nation-states remain the principle actors in world affairs. Their behaviour is shaped, as in the past, by the pursuit of power and wealth, but it is also shaped by cultural preferences and differences. The most important groupings of states are no longer the three blocks of the Cold War but rather the world’s major civilisation.

As Asian and Muslim civilisations begin to assert the universal relevance of their cultures, westerns will see the connection between universalism and imperialism and appreciate the virtues of a pluralistic world. In order to preserve western civilisation, the West needs greater unity of purpose. It should incorporate into the European Union and NATO the western states of central Europe; encourage the westernisation of Latin America; slow the drift of Japan away from the West and toward accommodation with China; and accept Russia as the core state of Orthodoxy and a power with legitimate interests.

The main responsibility of western leaders is to recognise that intervention in the affairs of other civilisations is the single most dangerous source of instability in the world. The West should attempt not to reshape other civilisation in its own image, but to preserve and renew the unique qualities of its own civilisation. (Courtesy: Span)