Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations offers a seductive but fundamentally flawed lens through which to view global conflict.
While his thesis resonates emotionally—inviting people to externalize blame by identifying threats in cultural or religious “Others”—it does so at the expense of historical accuracy and analytical depth. In truth, the most violent and transformative conflicts in human history have occurred not between civilizations, but within them.
Take Europe, for instance—the cradle of modernity and a continent Huntington classifies as a single civilization. From the British massacres of the Irish, the Napoleonic Wars to the two World Wars, Europe tore itself apart through internecine conflict. World War I and World War II—commonly labeled as global conflicts—were in essence European civil wars that spilled across borders. A more accurate naming convention might be European War I and European War II. These wars were fought not against alien civilizations but among nations that shared language families, religions, and philosophical traditions.
The Holocaust further underscores this internal descent into brutality. Nazi Germany, a supposed pinnacle of Western advancement, built industrial mechanisms to annihilate millions of fellow Europeans. This genocidal project was born not from a clash with an external civilization, but from a political agenda within the West itself.
Terrorism, too, has often originated internally. The United Kingdom’s most persistent security threat until the late 20th century came not from foreign jihadists, but from the Irish Republican Army. In 1984, the IRA nearly assassinated Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Their campaign was rooted in historical, political, and religious disputes within the British Isles—not in a civilizational divide.
The Cold War, long seen as a binary confrontation between East and West, also fails Huntington’s test. Both the United States and the Soviet Union drew from the same intellectual lineage of Enlightenment rationalism and industrial modernity. Marx, the father of communism, was German and did most of his work in London. Lenin was steeped in European political theory. The Cold War was a geopolitical sibling rivalry—not a civilizational standoff.
Religious schisms within civilizations have also fueled centuries of violence. The Catholic–Protestant conflicts in Europe, including the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War, were devastating and long-lasting. These were not clashes of civilizations but internecine wars waged over authority, theology, and political control.
A similar pattern is visible in the Middle East. The Sunni–Shia divide has been the root of many of the region’s bloodiest conflicts, from the Iran-Iraq War to the contemporary civil wars in Syria and Yemen. These are fratricidal struggles within Islam, not confrontations with external civilizations.
Even the United States, often framed as a monolithic representative of Western civilization, was nearly torn apart by its own Civil War—a domestic conflict between Americans of European descent. More than 600,000 lives were lost, not to foreign armies, but to an internal reckoning over slavery, state sovereignty, and national identity.
The ongoing tensions between the United States, Israel, and Iran are also mischaracterized when framed as a civilizational clash. If this were truly a confrontation between Western and Islamic civilizations, the 57 Muslim-majority nations would rally behind Iran. Yet, many key Muslim nations—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and others—have chosen either neutrality or quiet alignment with the West. This fracture underscores the reality that geopolitical rivalries, regional interests, and ideological divisions within civilizations are far more significant than simplistic civilizational binaries.
The deeper historical lesson is clear: the gravest threats to any society often come from within. Conflict is most likely where identities intersect and power is contested among close cultural or political relatives. Civilizations are not monoliths, and their greatest ruptures tend to emerge internally—from ideological, theological, and political fault lines.
Huntington’s framework, though rhetorically powerful, is historically unconvincing. By casting global conflict as a clash of civilizations, it obscures the internal dynamics that truly drive human violence. Understanding the past requires more than fear of the “Other”; it requires confronting the mirror.
No comments:
Post a Comment