By the time The Western Question appeared, Toynbee had already sketched out a more comprehensive work, which he would publish in twelve volumes between 1934 and 1961 as A Study of History, in which he identified twenty-one major civilizations (including not only Western, Hellenic, Arabic, and Hindu, but also Egyptian, Andean, Sinic, and Yucatec), as well as four “abortive” civilizations (Far Western Christian, Far Eastern Christian, Scandinavian, and Syriac), and also five “arrested” civilizations (Polynesian, Eskimo, Nomadic, Ottoman, and Spartan).64 These civilizations were the “intelligible units” of human history and of identity, and they were much more significant than the nation-state, which was a relative newcomer to the historical scene. Toynbee described in detail the stages through which all twenty-one civilizations passed, from genesis and growth, via a “time of troubles,” to a “universal state” and eventually to breakdown and disintegration. These cycles were not inevitable, organic, and preordained, as Spengler had insisted; rather, they depended on the responses (and nonresponses) by “creative minorities” to the challenges with which their civilizations were beset during the course of their existence.65 When such people rose to these challenges, their civilizations grew and flourished, but when they failed to do so, their civilizations declined into nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and the tyranny of a once-creative elite that had degenerated into a despotic minority. At all stages, civilizations were driven by this internal dynamic, rather than by their external contacts, which meant they invariably ended the same way—not because of violent confrontations with one another, but because of the inability of their decaying elites to solve internal problems and surmount internal difficulties. “Civilizations,” Toynbee concluded, “die from suicide, not by murder.”66
Like many of his generation, Toynbee had read Gibbon early in life, but he disliked his cool, skeptical rationalism and his mockery of the Christian faith, and he did not share Gibbon’s (admittedly qualified) admiration for Rome’s imperial civilization.67 To be sure, Toynbee’s account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire seemed Gibbonian in its concepts and categories. He wrote of an “internal proletariat,” which took up and propagated the new religion of Christianity that swept across the empire, and he wrote of an “external proletariat,” which successfully pressed on Rome’s borders, and which was merely a fancy name for the barbarian invaders. But Toynbee insisted that Gibbon had misunderstood both “barbarism and religion” in arguing that they were the agents of the empire’s collapse. Pace the account offered in The Decline and Fall, Christian religion did not “destroy” Rome, since Hellenic civilization was long since dead by then; on the contrary, Christianity was the creative harbinger of the new (and better) European civilization that was gradually coming to fruition. Nor, as Gibbon alleged, were the barbarians responsible for the empire’s demise: they were merely in at the death, feasting on the corpse of Hellenic civilization like vultures, but as “heroes without a future,” they made no lasting contribution to the new Western civilization that Christianity was already bringing into being.68 Here was the full elaboration of an interpretation Toynbee had earlier sketched, namely that as new civilizations came into being, they owed more to the virtuous mother who had brought them to birth than to the barbarian who had violated her.
A Study of History was not well received by professional historians, and almost without exception they rejected Toynbee’s claim that the key understanding to the human past, present, and future lay in treating the rise and fall of civilizations as the most important and capacious of all collective human identities.69 He never adequately defined what he meant by civilization (“a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour,” he once bafflingly wrote) or by identity, and his treatment of these vague constructions was often more mystical and metaphysical than scholarly or academic.70 He arbitrarily separated out some civilizations (such as Sumerian and Babylonian, both of which were surely Mesopotamian), whereas he no less arbitrarily lumped others together (such as Greek and Roman, in the single category of Hellenic). He did not convince in his efforts to force the varied histories of all civilizations into the rigid trajectory of “rise and fall,” and in his claims that this was the result of empirical inquiry undistorted by any prior presuppositions. He placed too much stress on civilizations as autonomous, self-contained entities, and (like Spengler) he gave little attention to how they interacted, delaying his treatment of that subject until the eighth and ninth volumes, where he discussed “affiliations” and “apparentations” seemingly as an afterthought.71 And by the time he published his final volumes, Toynbee had abandoned his earlier approach, by downgrading civilizations to a subordinate place in human history, while promoting religious identities and teleologies above them, thereby fatally undermining his initial model and method.72
Despite a cascade of professional criticism, Toynbee was lionized among the reading public and in the media as the greatest historian of his day, and he was also acclaimed as someone who had important and encouraging things to say about the present prospects and future direction of Western civilization. For while according to Toynbee all other great collectivities had either disappeared or were in advanced decline (in this second category came the Far Eastern, the Hindu, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Islamic civilizations), Western civilization was very much alive, and Toynbee believed that revival and renewal were possible, provided those in authority embraced some form of higher “spiritual truth,” which would combine Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. Decline, he seemed to be saying, could be not only postponed, but perhaps averted altogether: “our future depends largely upon ourselves. We are not just at the mercy of an inexorable fate.”73 With the coming of the Cold War, this reading of Toynbee proved especially popular in the postwar United States, and in 1947 he was taken up by Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. Luce thought Toynbee was offering a powerful historical defense of Western civilization, and that he was calling for a renewal of religious faith, especially in the United States, as it faced the unprecedented challenge from the Communist barbarians for the control of the deimperializing, bipolar world. “Our civilization,” Time insisted in March 1947, in an issue that pictured Toynbee on the cover and profiled him inside, “is not inexorably doomed.”74
The idea that Toynbee had written A Study of History to proclaim the continued viability of Western civilization under transatlantic leadership found a ready response in America for well over a decade after 1945. After the nation’s decisive participation in the First World War, there had developed a growing sense that the United States was evolving into the world’s preeminent agent and exemplar of civilization, and this view would be expounded across the ensuing decades in such influential books as The Rise of American Civilization (1927) by Charles A. and Mary R. Beard and America as a Civilization (1957) by Max Lerner. And as the West faced the unprecedented challenges of the subsequent Great Depression and the Second World War, American colleges and universities offered new courses tracing the history of Western civilization, from ancient Greece and Rome, via medieval, Renaissance, and modern Europe, to contemporary America, and a plethora of textbooks were written for this burgeoning market, among them A Survey of European Civilization (1939) by Wallace K. Ferguson and Geoffrey Brunn, and A History of Western Civilization (1941) by Arthur Watts.75 In the years after 1945, these courses, in what became known as “Western civ,” reached a rapidly expanding undergraduate audience; they proclaimed and championed the uniquely liberal, tolerant, and progressive values of Europe and the United States; they reinforced the view that the leadership and defense of the West was now America’s responsibility and opportunity; and they created a reading public that was eager to read Toynbee’s volumes and to find in them reinforcement for these views.
In fact, Toynbee never believed most of the things Americans imputed to him in the decade or so after 1945. To be sure, he had initially supported the Marshall Plan, the establishment of NATO, and the sending of tro
ops to Korea, but he generally distrusted American democracy, believing the country too secular (like most of the West), and he did not share what soon became the prevailing American hostility to Russia: “western imperialism,” he wrote in 1952, “not Russian Communism is Enemy No 1 today for the majority of the human race, and the west hasn’t woken up to this.”76 Nor did he agree with Henry Luce that the United States was predestined to succeed Britain as the leader of the free, civilized world against Communist tyranny, Stalinist dictatorship, and Russian barbarism: indeed, Toynbee had long entertained an “animus against western civilization” (though not its classical predecessor), and he thought America was no more than a peripheral part of that uninspiring collectivity, believing its “alarming,” “colonial,” and “militaristic” prosecution of the war in Vietnam to be part of its mistaken pursuit of “the mythical monster ‘World Communism.’ ”77 As for the future prospects of Western civilization, Toynbee hedged his bets more than his transatlantic audience was willing to recognize. It might, he admitted, rally and recover and reassert itself. But all other civilizations had already “broken down and gone to pieces,” and “no child of this civilization who has been born in our generation can easily imagine that our own society is immune from the danger of suffering the common fate.”78
Between them, Teggart, Spengler, and Toynbee had sought to make the case that humanity should be best understood as being divided up into a plurality of civilizations and identities. But they did not agree as to how many civilizations there had been, they could not define them or describe their trajectories satisfactorily, they disagreed as to whether civilizations interacted with each other or not, and they were uncertain as to how (and how many) civilizations would evolve in the future. In short, the proposition that civilization had always been the most significant and self-conscious human aggregation, subsuming all other, lesser solidarities, could not be convincingly demonstrated or consistently verified. Yet once Toynbee’s Study of History was completed, sociologists and political scientists eagerly embraced his approach, which seemed far less parochial than most historical writing of the time, and during the 1960s they produced a succession of books, providing lists and typologies of civilizations, setting out their rise-and-fall parabolas, and offering explanations as to when, how, and why they came and went.79 Most of them were vulnerable to the same criticisms that had already been leveled at Toynbee himself, and predictably they found little favor with most professional historians. But by the third quarter of the twentieth century, when the Cold War was at its height, the notion that the world might best be understood in terms of a plurality of civilizations, which interacted antagonistically, had become one of the conventional wisdoms of the time.
THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
But when the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the idea that the world should be understood in terms of a battle of identities and ideologies, between Western civilization on the one side and Communism on the other, suddenly seemed to be part of a history that was now over; and in the “new world order” that the first President George Bush welcomed and proclaimed, where freedom, democracy, and capitalism had apparently prevailed over totalitarianism, dictatorship, and state planning, it no longer seemed appropriate to understand the world in terms of competing or conflicting civilizations based on antagonistic identities and opposed beliefs. But President Bush also put together a coalition against Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and this was for some a sign and a portent of new collective identities, which would soon be hardening, and of confrontations between them. Scarcely a decade later, during the presidency of the second George Bush, in what suddenly and ominously seemed to be a repolarized world, the view that humanity should be understood not just in terms of different civilizations but also in terms of latent confrontations—or actual “clashes”—between them again attracted widespread support among many policymakers in London and Washington. But whereas Gibbon and Toynbee had written as historians about civilizations and identities, never expecting their interpretations to make any impact on those in power, the most recent scholarship on these matters came from the disciplines of politics, sociology, and government, some of its practitioners determined to influence policy, as one of them undoubtedly did.
By coincidence, the phrase “clash of civilizations” had first been launched into the public consciousness as the subtitle to a book appearing in the same decade that Arnold J. Toynbee had produced his own work on the “contact of civilizations” (although it bears repeating that this subject never interested him much). In 1926, Basil Mathews published Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations, which may have been a deliberate play on Toynbee’s earlier choice of words. Mathews was an American missionary who disliked the militaristic urge to conquest that he regarded as the hallmark of Islam, and although he hoped Christianity might eventually prevail, he feared these two civilizations were more likely to confront each other in war than to seek together a common future.80 But Mathews’s book made little impact, and his phrase only began to attain its recent popularity and resonance in 1990, when the Middle Eastern expert Bernard Lewis published an article entitled “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” in which he argued that Muslims were increasingly threatened (and often outraged) by Western ideas of secularism and modernism, and that this made “a clash of civilizations” between these two collectivities ever more likely in the near future.81 Lewis’s words were subsequently taken up by the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, initially as the title (albeit with a question mark attached) for an article that appeared in the journal Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993. So great was the interest in and reaction to his essay that three years later Huntington restated and elaborated his thesis (now abandoning the question mark) for what would become a best seller: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.82
Huntington was clearly indebted to Bernard Lewis for his title, as well as drawing on Lewis’s work when discussing the history and politics of the Middle East. Nevertheless, his general thesis, which he hoped would be both “meaningful to scholars and useful to policymakers,” was more wide-ranging geographically (although less extended historically). For Huntington’s aim was to offer “an interpretation of the evolution of global politics after the Cold War,” and the unit of identity around which he constructed his interpretation was civilization. “Human history,” he insisted, “is the history of civilizations. It is impossible to think of the development of humanity in any other terms.… Throughout history civilizations have provided the broadest identifications for people.”83 He believed civilizations subsumed and encompassed all lesser group solidarities and collective identities, be they tribes, ethnic groups, religious confessions, or even nation-states, and that it was essential for those in government to understand “the nature, identity and dynamics of civilizations” when making future policy. In all, he discerned “seven or eight major civilizations” currently in existence around the globe. Those he named Western, Latin American, Islamic, Sinic (which he had termed “Confucian” in his original article), Hindu, Japanese, and Orthodox were relatively easy to locate and identify, and to them, with less certainty, he added African (“possibly”) and Buddhist (though he admitted it was not “a major civilization”).84
In depicting the world in these multicivilizational terms, Huntington was setting himself against those myopic triumphalists who, after the United States had vanquished Soviet Russia in the Cold War, had embraced the “widespread and parochial conceit that the European civilization of the west is now the universal civilization of the world.” But this, he insisted, was not how things were, for power was “shifting from the long-predominant west to non-western civilizations,” which meant it was essential to understand all these great global groupings of humanity. As Huntington defined them, civilizations were best understood in terms of culture, and especially in terms of their increasingly active and assertive religions, which he believed were their “central defining chara
cteristic.”85 They differed markedly from one another in their beliefs, their organizations, their relations to secular authority, and the extent of their proselytizing aims and expansionist ambitions. As a result, “the predominant patterns of political and economic development” also varied “from civilization to civilization,” which meant that “the key issues on the international agenda involve differences among civilizations.” If these differences were recognized, accepted, and managed, Huntington urged, peaceful coexistence among these civilizations was possible. But if not, the prospect was bleak, and “the fault lines between civilizations” would become “the battle lines of the future.” Hence Huntington’s conclusion that in the emerging era “an international order based on civilizations” was “the surest safeguard against world war,” while it was the growing likelihood of clashes among civilizations that constituted “the greatest threat to world peace.” And even these clashes might be no more than a stage on the way to the climactic struggle to come, namely “the greater clash, the global ‘real clash,’ between civilization and barbarism.”86
In light of these general observations, Huntington offered some specific prescriptions for survival in the multipolar post–Cold War world, where he believed “states increasingly define their interests in civilizational terms.” In the West, there were serious tasks of “renewal” ahead: it must recognize it was no longer the global hegemon it had once been, but was now merely one civilization among several, and it must also revitalize its spiritual strength by rejecting multiculturalism and by reasserting the importance of the Christian religion and the uniqueness of its traditional liberties and democratic values.87 These tasks were made all the more necessary—and all the more urgent—because of the growing power and determination of an ever more hostile Islam, and also because of the threat that China increasingly posed to the West; as a result of these widening fault lines, conflict between the West and Islam, or a war between the West and China, could not be ruled out. “The dangerous clashes of the future,” Huntington warned, “are likely to arise from the inter-action of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness.”88 Ideally, these three civilizations should try to live at peace and seek to reach mutual accommodations, by respecting each other’s differences, and by dividing the globe into well-defined spheres of influence. But this could not be guaranteed, since one form that “Western arrogance” might take was “intervention in the affairs of other civilizations,” which Huntington deplored and feared as “probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multi-civilizational world.”89
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