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The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. HuntingtonReview by: Robert Marks

Journal of World History, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 101-104Published by: University of Hawai'i PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20078821 .

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8/3/2019 Book Review - Clash of Civilizations

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(governed by power maximization calculations, viewing the nationstate as the primary actor in world affairs).Huntington begins by defining civilizations primarily in terms of

culture, in particular "values, beliefs, institutions, and social structures"(p. 42), mostly as revealed through religion (p. 47). Using this broad

definition, Huntington identifies "seven or eight" contemporary civilizations: the Sinic (Chinese, which includes China, Taiwan, Korea,and Vietnam), Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox (Russia, Serbia,Greece), Western, Latin American, and possibly African (pp. 45-47).He then provides a thumbnail (and quite standard) historical sketchof the relations among civilizations, which boils down to the story of"the rise of theWest" from 1500 on (pp. 49-50). This "rise" generatedresentment from other civilizations, in particular the Chinese and

Islamic, and also?because "history tells us" that civilizations gothrough inevitable cycles of rise and fall?challenges to theWest nowthat it is entering a phase of decline (chap. 4) while the Sinic andIslamic civilizations are on the "rise" (chap. 5).

Driving the rise of east Asia (which includes Chinese and Japanese civilizations) is rapid economic growth, while the rise of Islam ispowered by a combination of religious revival and high birth rates.Huntington sees all this as "destabilizing . . . the Western-dominatedestablished international order" (p. 121). Complicating matters,Huntington believes, is the absence in Islamic civilization of a "corestate" (unlike the West, which has the United States; the Orthodox,which has Russia; or the Sinic, which has China), resulting in "asource of threat to other civilizations" because there isno single powerwith which the core states ofWestern, Orthodox, Hindu, or Sinic civilizations can deal (p. 177)? Huntington thus points to "Islam's bloodyborders" (pp. 254-58) as a particular kind of "fault line" war betweencivilizations, emphasizing Islam's fundamental and continuing conflictwith the West.

How has Huntington gone wrong in giving this picture of the worldand its history? Let me count the ways.Huntington's book is bad history in at least five ways. First, goodhistorians recognize the place of their material and approach in thecontext of other interpretations. Certainly a civilizationist approachto world history, the one Huntington adopts, is a legitimate one. Butit's not the only one, as the work of world-systems theorists attests.

Huntington is oblivious to this other way of viewing world history:"Human history is the history of civilizations. It is impossible to thinkof the development of humanity in any other terms" (p. 40). Despitequoting from Braudel and listing Wallerstein, Huntington reveals his

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ignorance of the field of world history, and of the debate over the unitsof analysis used for understanding world history. He thus paints with avery broad brush, distinguishing neither Protestant and Catholic intheWest (and not discussing "the troubles" inNorthern Ireland), norSunni and Shi'ite in Islam, let alone finer but still important differences among and between peoples in virtually every part of the world.A civilization is his sole unit of analysis for understanding the world.

Furthermore, Huntington is most impressed by the differencesamong civilizations, most of which are attributed to the supposed"fact" of the "intermittent or nonexistent" contacts between civilizations. His fundamental assumption, of course, is that "civilizations" areidentifiable historical entities. Huntington thus appears to have readWilliam McNeill's Rise of theWest, but not his critique of that workafter twenty-five years, published in this journal in 1990, in whichMcNeill raised questions about the utility of the concept of "civilization," and especially about the idea that civilizations are more or lessautonomous, not existing in a broader "ecumenical" world of interaction. Thus Huntington is doomed to imagine today a world of discretecivilizations. Ladled on top of this curious view is his own outdatedmodernization theory, whereby the process of modernization in theWest forces other civilizations to modernize (although some people instates in other civilizations mistakenly believed that what was neededwas Westernization).

Second, sources: Since comparative historians rely on the work ofother historians, Iwill not take Huntington to task for not having usedprimary sources. His selection, use, and understanding of the secondarysources, though, is fair game. And his selection of sources on, andhence understanding of, Asia in general and China in particular, thepart of the world I am most familiar with, is poor. At times he seemsto equate "Asia" with "East Asia," thereby lumping India and Pakistanwith China and Japan (e.g., pp. 93 or 107), while at other times hetalks about "East Asia" as if he had forgotten his initial distinctionbetween Sinic and Japanese civilizations. Not only is he confusedabout how to apply his own civilizational model to "Asia," but in thesection on China he appears to rely on secondary sources from the1950s and 1960s (he does not cite enough sources for me to tell)?

particularly Harvard professors who created a "Western impact/Asianresponse" model for understanding Chinese and Japanese history, amodel that has not been used for well over a decade. He even resurrects the thoroughly disreputable thesis about "Oriental despotism,"lumping the political histories of Russia, the Ottomans, China, andothers into the same undifferentiated stew (p. 140). Had he looked for

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it, Huntington might have learned much from recent scholarship onChina and Japan, and probably on other parts of the world too.Third, method: Huntington pulls together historical anecdotesfrom numerous times and places as evidence for his claims. He ismoreinterested in social science model building than in understanding the

history of any particular civilization, leading to grand generalizationslike "throughout history the distribution of languages in the world hasreflected the distribution of power in the world" (p. 62), or statementsabout "the sources of conflict between humans throughout history"(p. 208). In this last instance, Huntington commits the anachronistichistorical fallacy, projecting contemporary conditions (what he calls"the classic [conflicts] of international politics") into the past, obscuring fundamental differences between past and present.

Fourth, argument: Huntington claims that peoples and countries,asking the existential questions of "Who am I?" and "Where do Ibelong?" (p. 96), naturally gravitate to others of like cultures, leadingto the natural civilizational clumping of their interests and actions onthe world stage. And yet when he comes right down to analyzing anyparticular issue, the primary actors are not civilizations, but states, justas the "realist school" predicts. To be sure, Huntington does say thatstates will remain primary actors even in the clash of civilizations(p. 21), but he asserts that the cleavages between states will be determined by civilizational differences. His favorite case study is Bosnia, acivilizational "fault-line" bringing Western, Orthodox, and Islamiccivilizations into close contact and conflict (chap. 11). The problemwith this analysis, of course, is that the United States intervened onbehalf of the Bosnian Muslims, which Huntington does acknowledgeas "a noncivilizational anomaly in the otherwise universal pattern ofkin backing kin" (p. 281); Huntington then spends some time explaining away this "anomaly" (pp. 288-91).

Lastly, morality: this book is politics masquerading as scholarship,and to that extent it is obscene. The hidden question behind this book,and to which it is the answer, is simply this: "With the end of theSoviet Union, who or what is now the enemy of the United States?"

Huntington is not interested in understanding the past and the way itshapes the present; rather, he has a domestic and international political agenda that he is pushing. Historians everywhere should beoffended by Huntington's use of their discipline in conjuring up Chi

nese and Islamic enemies to "Western civilization" and the state Huntington sees as its primary defender, the United States. A little knowledge (in Huntington's case, of history) certainly can be dangerous.

ROBERT MARKSWhittier College