The Undivided Past

by David Cannadine

  Huntington’s article and book provoked a great deal of journalistic and academic comment, but although some of it was favorable, much of it was critical. While writing in a Toynbee-like manner about civilizations rising and falling, Huntington provided no convincing, long-term historical account as to how or when or why his seven (or eight) “major civilizations” had come into being or had so recently become so prominent. In 1920, he claimed, the world had been divided between the Western imperial powers and the rest, and in the 1960s between the “free world” and the “Communist bloc,” albeit with many “unaligned nations” in South Asia, Africa, and South America. But somehow, suddenly, the world of the 1990s had become defined and dominated by “civilizations,” which had clearly been around a long time, even though they had not seemed significant in the preceding decades. This was scarcely an historically plausible version of global history during the twentieth century. Moreover, Huntington’s civilizations, and the collective identities that they purportedly embodied and articulated, turned out on closer inspection to be based on little more than overaggregated statistics (which concealed at least as much as they revealed), on the mistaken assumption that one hegemonic variable determined both individual and collective identity (to the neglect of all the others), and on a map of the world that made them seem monolithic and hermetically sealed off from one another (when even the author conceded the boundaries between them were often vague and ill-defined).90

  By Huntington’s own admission, The Clash of Civilizations was written to provide a “simplified map of reality,” but on many occasions he had oversimplified the cartography (both literally and metaphorically) to the point where reality scarcely seemed to matter or intrude at all.91 Like Spengler and Toynbee before him, many of Huntington’s civilizations seem on closer inspection to be little more than arbitrary groupings and idiosyncratic personal constructs. Sweden and Spain were part of the West, whereas Greece was not; Sinic civilization included Korea but excluded Japan, and encompassed Vietnam but left out Laos; Latin America “could be considered either a sub-civilization within western civilization or a separate civilization closely affiliated to the west and divided as to whether it belongs to the west”; African civilization extended across all the sub-Saharan continent, but tribal identities were still “pervasive,” and it had not yet “cohered” into “a distinct civilization”; and Buddhism, “although a major religion, has not been the basis of a major civilization,” since it had adapted, assimilated, or been suppressed in China, Korea, and Japan, and had survived only in Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia, and parts of Indochina. Such vague collective groupings and “cultural entities” carry little conviction, and the global historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto was surely right in observing that Huntington “could not fully satisfy the demand for a definition or classification of civilizations to match the importance he gave them.”92

  This deficiency is well illustrated in the case of the Republic of India, which Huntington claimed formed a distinct and separate “Hindu civilization.” In fact, India has been a secular democracy since its independence from Britain in 1947, which means there has never been a “Hindu” component to its constitution—much to the dismay and disappointment of the more intransigent elements in the Hindutva movement.93 To be sure, Hindus have always been a numerical majority, but there are also more Muslims in India (in excess of 140 million) than in any other country in the world, with the exception of Indonesia and, marginally, Pakistan; and nearly every country that forms part of Huntington’s “Islamic civilization” contains fewer Muslims than those millions living in India. (Elsewhere, in an admission by turns contradictory and inaccurate, Huntington argued that India was not a unitary civilization at all, but a “cleft country” divided by the “civilizational fault-line” between Muslims and Hindus.)94 Moreover, across the centuries, Christians, Parsees, Jains, Sikhs, Jews, and Buddhists, as well as atheists and agnostics, have all lived (and often thrived) in India; one indication of this long tradition of religious pluralism was that in 2005 the nation’s president was a Muslim, its prime minister was a Sikh, and the head of the ruling party was a Christian. Under these circumstances, to categorize India and its civilization as “just a Hindu country” is, as Amartya Sen notes, “a fairly bizarre idea.”95

  Similar criticisms have been made of Huntington’s signature concepts of “Western” and “Islamic” civilizations. For many nations in the allegedly monolithic “West,” ranging from Canada and the United States to France and Germany, are ethnically very diverse: should African Americans be included by virtue of their American citizenship, or are they a transatlantic offshoot of “African” civilization? The constitutional arrangements and political cultures of these countries are similarly varied: the United States is a transcontinental federation, the United Kingdom an unusual mixture of monarchy, union, and devolution, France a powerfully centralized state, and so on. The claim that the West has always been the unique repository of reason, freedom, and liberty betrays a deep historical ignorance, not only of the West itself, but also of anywhere (or, indeed, everywhere) else.96 And the range of religious faiths that can be subsumed beneath the Western, Christian umbrella is also astonishingly wide, while what many Americans most deplore about Europe is that it is too secular. The same objections apply to the depiction of “Islam” as a mirror-image unitary civilization, for it, too, is a very varied religion in terms of its tenets and practices, and like Christianity again, it has its own share of conservatives, moderates, radicals—and extremists. Moreover, it is impossible to treat the Middle East as a distinct or as a monolithic or as a unified region, because there is “no one ‘Islam’”: Jordan and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Iraq and the Sudan, Morocco and Turkey are very different countries, with correspondingly different histories, political cultures, constitutional arrangements, and international profiles.97

  Underlying these specific criticisms is a more general objection that should scarcely need belaboring by this stage. In defining his civilizations exclusively in religious terms, Huntington assumed that faith and belief were the preeminent and overwhelming criteria of human identity and solidarity. But at no stage did he successfully demonstrate this, and it is difficult to see how he could have done so, for it bears repeating that while a particular religious faith may be shared by many individuals, it is only one identity among others that any person may claim. And while for some people it may be the most important, for many others it is not. In any case, how any individual may self-identify—in what order he or she may rank his or her group affiliations—surely varies to such an extent that no single affiliation will in the long run be more commanding than any other.98 This applies with particular force to the claim that civilization is the largest and most all-encompassing category of collective human identity, for the notion that these vast transcontinental aggregations, often taking in hundreds of millions of people, can be defined in terms of one single and shared affiliation, which overrides all others, is to carry oversimplification to the point of absurdity. Yet the more complex and varied these so-called civilizations are rightly recognized to be, the more difficult it becomes to define and distinguish and weigh them, let alone to claim they are the most important identity of all. Here is a fundamental paradox about collective identities that Huntington neither addressed nor resolved.

  Not surprisingly, then, he also misunderstood—indeed, disregarded—the many overlaps, interactions, and interconnections between civilizations that his maps represented as being sealed off, protected, and clearly and impermeably bounded. To be sure, Huntington admitted that in practice, land borders were rarely this precisely or clearly demarcated, but he did not draw the obvious conclusion, namely that such places, where one formal jurisdiction melds and merges imperceptibly into another, may be transnational or transcultural zones of engagement and interaction as much as they may be potential areas of confrontation and conflict.99 And like many maps, Huntington’s division of the world into separate terrestria
l authorities misled in another way, for it failed to represent the massive cross-land flows and transoceanic movements in people, in goods, in money, in services, in information, and in ideas—flows and movements that connect all but the most isolated regions on earth, and that are doing so to a greater degree than ever before in human history. To the extent that Huntington conceded the ever-increasing interconnectedness of the globe, he thought it reinforced particular civilizational identities and fueled intercivilizational conflict; but the evidence suggests it is at least as likely that such varied, increasing, and multifarious encounters draw peoples and nations and civilizations closer together in a revived and intensified sense of shared experiences, common identities, and global cosmopolitanism.100

  Detailed research, undertaken since the appearance of Huntington’s article and book, confirms these early doubts.101 In political terms, most nations still act primarily in their own self-interest, rather than as a constituent or subordinate part of any greater collectivity: states’ individual concerns and priorities continue to be more important to their leaders and citizenry than any higher sense or call of civilizational unity. Since they have always been difficult to describe or define, it is scarcely surprising that civilizations are incapable of acting with unified, coherent, and directed purpose, which undermines Huntington’s claim that it is the “differences among civilizations” that “have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts.”102 More particularly, the notion that a clash between the West and Islam (or between the West and China) is bound to occur because their histories are so antagonistic, and their values are so different, will scarcely bear careful scrutiny. A great deal of evidence has already been adduced in an earlier chapter suggesting that in the long term, relations between Christianity and Islam have been characterized as much by accommodation and conversation as by antagonism and confrontation, and recent surveys make plain that there are shared values, including the idea and ideal of democracy, which is as attractive to many Muslims as to Christians.103 In any case, since 1945, both during and after the Cold War, conflicts have broken out between states belonging to the same civilization (as defined by Huntington) on many more occasions than they have between states belonging to different civilizations, which scarcely supports his prediction that it is between civilizations that future conflicts are most likely to occur.104

  Despite, or perhaps because of, these major errors and limitations, Huntington’s book appealed powerfully to those neoconservative politicians, intellectuals, and evangelical Christians who, by the late 1990s, were hoping that the scandal-beset presidency of Bill Clinton would be followed by a more assertive Republican administration. They found its “simplified paradigms or maps” to be appealing and convincing, and they happily regarded them as “indispensable to human thought and action.”105 They shared Huntington’s insistence on the importance of religion in determining the largest collective identities; they agreed that the West needed to rediscover its sense of identity and purpose; and (up to a point) they appreciated the guidance he gave, and the warnings he furnished, concerning the future relations between the West and the rest of the world. But just as Gibbon and Toynbee had been misunderstood or oversimplified by pundits and politicians who invoked their names to justify their own views and policies, so Huntington would also (at least in part) be misinterpreted or misrepresented by those on the American right. For he repeatedly insisted that the post–Cold War world was multipolar, and that the most pressing task facing the West, whose global influence was diminishing by the day, was not to provoke confrontation but to reach some form of accommodation with those other civilizations that were becoming increasingly important. By such means, Huntington hoped, the “clash of civilizations,” which he thought “improbable but not impossible,” might be averted. So while to the neoconservatives Huntington’s work was a manifesto justifying confrontation and unilateralism, in reality it was a much less bellicose admonition.

  On their initial publication, Huntington’s arguments were well received by such foreign policy luminaries from the “realist” school as Henry A. Kissinger, but with limited popular notice. It was not until years later, with the events of 9/11, that his “clash of civilizations” thesis would become, seemingly overnight, the most influential explanation of what had just occurred, and of what must happen in the future. Three groups in particular embraced what they believed to be the Huntington interpretation of events with great vehemence and enthusiasm. The first were the American media, which “automatically, implicitly and unanimously,” and with little serious reflection or analysis, decided Huntington’s analysis of two civilizations locked in a mortal global clash was correct.106 The second was President George W. Bush and his supporters, ranging from such neoconservative intellectuals as William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Robert Kagan, to the British prime minister, Tony Blair, along with most of his cabinet and the House of Commons, who responded by urging a new “Crusade” to “save civilization itself.” Hence the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Manichean rhetoric about the “war on terror” as the great struggle between the forces of light and the “axis of evil,” between Judeo-Christian freedom and democracy on the one hand and Islamic despotism and tyranny on the other.107 And the third group to embrace the Huntington thesis, although from the opposite side, was the followers of Osama bin Laden himself, who gleefully agreed that Al Qaeda was leading the Islamic world in a clash with the West, a holy war against the great, wicked, monstrous, and degenerate Satan, the head of the serpent being the United States.108

  For a time, it did seem possible to contend that the world was threatened and sundered by an apocalyptic “clash” in the way Huntington had analyzed and predicted: “our civilization,” the late Christopher Hitchens observed, “must be fought for and barbarism must be defeated.”109 But almost from the outset, it was clear that neither side was as united or as homogeneous as these formulated polarities suggested. It soon emerged that several hundred of those who died when the twin towers collapsed were Muslims, while Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, however brutal, was by the norms of the Arab world a notably secular regime, with little sympathy for the militant Islamism of Osama bin Laden, let alone his ambition to establish a Muslim caliphate.110 These were inconvenient facts for those who wished to depict a deep, divisive conflict between the Christian West and the Islamic world, and they were but a foretaste of what was to come. The “war on terror” would soon become highly unpopular on both sides of the Atlantic, and the impatient denunciations by Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. secretary of defense, of “old Europe” suggested that “Christian civilization” was less monolithic or enthusiastic than the overwrought rhetoric of Bush or Blair repeatedly claimed. And on what was supposed to be the “other side,” many Arab governments denounced the attack on the World Trade Center, urging that it was no proper, much less consensual, expression of Islam, which they were at pains to identify as a religion of peace. Meanwhile, many divisions within that faith, chiefly between Sunni and Shiite, once little remarked by outsiders, would come to prominence following the invasion of Iraq.111

  Yet both Bush and Blair continued to insist they were engaged in a Manichean conflict, defining and defending civilization against the forces of barbarism, terror, darkness, and evil. As a bornagain Christian, George W. Bush appropriated the formulation in the Gospel of Matthew that you were either with America or you were against it, and Tony Blair expressed equally fervent certainty: “I don’t believe,” he observed, “that what is happening in Iraq today is anything other than an absolutely visceral, profound struggle between what is right and what is wrong.” Neither leader had any time for nuance, compromise, dialogue, or accommodation, and Roy Jenkins’s words on Blair applied equally well to Bush: “the Prime Minister, far from lacking conviction, has almost too much, particularly when dealing with the world beyond Britain. He is a little Manichean for my perhaps now jaded taste, seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white, contending wi
th each other, and with a consequent belief that if evil is cast down, good will inevitably follow.”112 Yet neither Bush nor Blair succeeded in convincing the majority of people in “the West” that the attack on the World Trade Center was the first blow in a global struggle resembling the hot war against Fascism or the Cold War against Communism. At the very least, they should have read Huntington more carefully, for despite the shortcomings of his analysis of civilizations as the ultimate unit of collective human identity, he had consistently urged accommodation rather than confrontation, and he had explicitly counseled against preemptive military action. Indeed, in the aftermath of 9/11, he refused to support the idea of a “war on terror” or the American-led invasion of Iraq.113

  Not surprisingly, then, the Bush-Blair view of the world, in which “the battle lines are drawn” in a “simple binary struggle” between “good and evil,” has been very publicly rejected by their successors.114 Determined to “seek a new beginning” in the relations between the West and Islam, President Barack Obama discarded the “clash of civilizations” as an explanation of the woes of the world, and urged the merits—and the precedents—of conversation and conciliation. He made this plain in Turkey in 2009, when he told his audience that their country “is not where East and West divide: this is where they come together,” and he developed his argument in a later speech at Cairo University.115 He noted that “the relationship between Islam and the West” had sometimes been characterized by “conflict and religious wars,” but that there had also been “centuries of coexistence and cooperation.” On balance, he was convinced that “the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart,” and he called for a dialogue between Christianity and Islam based on “a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground.” He spoke of Islam’s great achievements in mathematics, medicine, architecture, poetry, and music, to which the West was indebted. He urged Americans and Muslims to abandon their crude stereotypes of each other, to focus on “finding the things we share” rather than on “seeing what is different,” and to “recognize our common humanity.”116