The Real 'Clash of Civilizations' Will Happen at Home
Samuel Huntington envisioned enduring hostility between Islam and the West. But that thesis hasn’t come to pass — and it overlooks the identity crisis that will truly define this century.
I have an end-of-year piece in the Boston Globe that takes a step back and examines the future of democracy and conflict in world politics—and what the future holds for the West, for America, for the next generation.
The piece begins with Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s controversial ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, published in 1993, goes into Western, Islamic, and Jewish history, pivots to China, and then comes back around to focus on the real clash of civilizations: the battle for the soul of the West, the soul of America. As we have seen this year, it is not merely tyrants abroad who threaten our freedoms and democracy, but gathering storms here at home.
Next year will be the test. It will be the test. Whether open, pluralistic, constitutional democracy succeeds or fails. Whether the progress built over decades collapses. Whether radical populists continue to win, and change the West as we know it. Whether reason is reclaimed, and a new project built to counter both authoritarianism and the conditions that give rise to authoritarianism in the first place. The great test is here.
Happy New Year. I’ll see you in 2024.
Boston Globe
December 31, 2023
Thirty years ago, a Harvard professor published a monumental essay that changed how America saw conflict and the future. The year was 1993; the Berlin Wall had fallen. On Christmas Day two years prior, the Soviet Union had formally collapsed.
Scholars and journalists rushed to understand what this new moment portended. It was a turning point in human affairs, and the terms from the era were as grandiose as the utopian democratic future they promised. “The unipolar moment,” said Charles Krauthammer. In another formulation, from the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, it was “the end of history.” For the better part of three centuries, international affairs had been dominated by competing empires. Now there was only one, and its military force and liberal values would be spread all over the globe.
Enter into this debate Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, whose signature thesis was bitingly simple: “World politics is entering a new phase,” he opined, and the major fault lines would no longer be ideological or economic. Rather, “the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.” Huntington had thrown up a rhetorical baseball; then he would smash it. From now on, Huntington declared, “the clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.” Civilizations, and their differences, would mark the fault lines of war and peace. Like many popular expressions, it did not originate with the scholar most associated with it. The Princeton historian of Islam Bernard Lewis had been the first to use the phrase “clash of civilizations,” but Huntington made it stick. It was an epic phrase, and it carried an ominous prediction.
Huntington posited the existence of seven or eight civilizations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavo-Orthodox, Latin American, “and possibly” African. While the professor spent considerable energies on these delineations, his real focus was Islam.
The essay (and subsequent book) sparked an intense backlash within academia, and political scientists, historians, anthropologists, and foreign policy scholars all pilloried Huntington for being alarmist, simplistic, and possibly racist. In my own academic journey, when I have mentioned the clash thesis, I have seen the faces of even moderate professors curl in disgust. Huntington was excommunicated from the liberal church of political correctness. Then 9/11 happened.
Eight years after the publication of “The Clash of Civilizations,” al Qaeda attacked the United States and declared holy war on the West. Though Osama bin Laden’s list of grievances, which briefly went viral on TikTok recently, dealt with the occupation of the Muslim Holy Lands, bin Laden also aimed to build a global Islamic empire. It was a strange culmination of events: a wiry, bespectacled Harvard professor’s controversial thesis realized in the form of the wealthy 22nd son of the bin Laden family, who became a cave-dwelling holy warrior. Huntington had apparently been vindicated.
As America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, Huntington was widely read, including in the White House. His thesis guided much of Western commentary about Islam and the Middle East for two decades. It eventually fell out of favor, but after the Hamas attacks on Israel in October, the clash of civilizations thesis received renewed interest. “This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness,” Israel’s prime minister has said.
Might it be that Samuel Huntington was correct? And if so, are we headed for a great civilizational clash that will shape the next century and beyond?
The simple answer is no. The longer answer is: Maybe — but not the one Huntington envisioned.
Civilizations Aren’t Monolithic
The first problem with Huntington’s thesis was that it segregated civilizations cleanly, when in reality these cultures and communities had learned from one another and developed together. Islam grew in tandem with Christendom, and during the Dark Ages its culture was much more advanced than Europe’s. At one point, the greatest library in the world was in Baghdad.
The second problem was that Huntington ignored the internal diversity, competition, and often chaos within civilizations. Much as the West had religious struggles, China had uprisings and Islam had upheavals. If anything, the great through line of human history is civilizations thriving for periods when they are open and declining and falling when they shut out the world.
Despite this complexity, Huntington saw Islam as a unified, monolithic civilizational threat the way crusading Christendom saw Muslim lands as heathen. As another example of how Huntington’s thesis oversimplified when and why “clashes” arise in the world, consider that Huntington did not see Jews as belonging to a different civilization from Christians, yet Jews have been subject to centuries of pogroms, persecutions, and violence. The fact is that for most of Christendom’s history, Jews were more likely to succeed and be embraced in Muslim-majority lands. Great medieval Jewish thinkers like Moses Maimonides and Hasdai ibn Shaprut lived and worked among Muslims and spoke Hebrew and Arabic. When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, soon to be followed by the Muslims, they went to mostly Islamic lands like Turkey. (Jews unlucky enough to end up in Portugal were forcibly converted.) Historically, the West grouped the Jew and the Muslim together, as in the Book of Common Prayer from 1662, when Christians prayed for “Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics.”
Today, Islam is not incompatible with mainstream politics in America or elsewhere. In fact, a younger generation of Americans is reading the Quran and learning about Islam for the first time, without the extreme Islamophobia of the post-9/11 years. They may come away with a richer and more layered understanding of Islam as a civilization, where the poetry of Hafiz and Rumi and the stories of the 1001 Nights form part of the canon. American Muslims lean left and support the Democratic Party. Abroad, almost all of the Muslim-majority states are US allies or partners, and much of the Arab League has positive relationships with Israel. Al Qaeda and ISIS are practically wiped out — and neither ever posed a civilizational threat. Moreover, no serious person can consider Hamas representative of all Palestinians, who are, let us remember, both Muslim and Christian, including members of some of the oldest Christian communities in the world.
The clash of civilization idea’s greatest flaw lay in the conflict it did not foresee. So adamant were Huntington and later neoconservatives that Islam was a threat, a fear perhaps born of cultural insecurity, that they ignored the oldest continuous civilization in the world, where all roads once led: not to Jerusalem or Athens but to China.
Unity in China, Disunity in the West
Today, there is only one country that is both empire and civilization and that directly challenges the hegemony of the United States. Only China has the power, the means, and the historical knowledge to become the dominant nation-state in the world. China’s history goes back 3,500 years. For millennia, China was the center of the world, of the Middle Kingdom, and in its own neighborhood unchallenged. The China that is reemerging today — nationalistic and militaristic, with a chip on its shoulder — is a return to the stance it adopted for centuries. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has promised to make China the leader in all forms of innovation and technology by 2050. Xi used to speak of the Chinese Dream, but now he speaks of “harmony” and uses a new phrase, ”civilization diversity.” China is an empire of a billion people, a dictatorship of one party; it has its own history to draw from, and also the political history of the Soviet Union, which Chinese political elites have studied.
If there is a clash of different civilizations, it is most likely to occur between the United States and China. Isolated terrorists, with no wider appeal and no genuine vision, may look like a civilizational threat in the West until one stands before the Great Wall of China or in the Forbidden City.
Yet it would be in no one’s interest for America and China to clash. This is not just because a war between the two would be the last war that humans ever have. It is also because, after decades of retrenchment, insecurity in the West, and the rise of radical populists, there may soon be no “West” with which China can clash. The West itself might soon become despotic and vengeful.
Across the West, the nationalist right is ascendant. Trump takes in 85 percent of the white evangelical American vote while promising to rain hellfire on his enemies. If the election were held today, Trump would probably win. From Argentina to Holland, nationalists of a particularly Christian conservative bent are gaining power. Geert Wilders, who recently won the Dutch election, is rabidly anti-immigrant and has built a platform of seeking to ban Muslims. (Wilders himself has Indonesian ancestry.)
The West is the great synthesis of all its adherents, with diverse peoples living together and free to choose their governments — practically a miracle in historical terms. In America, the struggle for such a multiracial liberal democracy has lasted two centuries and is ongoing. What has made the West, and America, great is that the principles of equality and opportunity are color-blind and that people come here, set up lives, are reborn in the West, and become its standard-bearers. As right-wing nationalists again train their lenses on immigrants, Muslims, and minorities, they’re also attacking democratic institutions that made the West great in the first place.
The regeneration of this civilization, if it is to occur, will not be found in old Crusader ideology or in narratives of how to thwart the supposed Muslim and migrant invasions but in remaining open, championing dissent, allowing for free inquiry, and being willing to learn from all cultures and civilizations.
In other words, though the possibility of a conflict with China is growing, the real clash of civilizations will take place within the West, including here at home.
Whether figures like Donald Trump and Geert Wilders continue to win power or moderate and progressive voices reclaim reason will determine what the next half century resembles. What is true is that across all civilizations, when people turn inward, begin bickering and committing violence against one another and abandoning the values that once made them great, the decline is near. When norms fade, institutions wither, and private interest is placed above public good. When slick con men are given the keys to great offices. Civilizations of the past succeeded when they were pluralistic and tolerant, unafraid to learn from others. When they made room for the minorities among them. When they chose enlightenment over corruption.
Three decades after Samuel Huntington posed his provocative thesis, a bigger struggle is underway that he did not predict. It is for the future of America as a liberal democracy, the future of the West as an open society. The Politburo men sitting in Beijing are doubtless watching with anticipation as American democracy faces its greatest test ever. This inner clash — for the soul of America, the soul of the West — may prove, in the long run, to be the decisive one.
I’m Omer Aziz, the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir, recent Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, Contributing Writer at the Boston Globe, and Publisher of Notes From The Margins. This publication is fueled by passion and supported by readers! You can subscribe below. Thanks for reading.