The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 28, 1996 by Robin Harris

PROFESSOR Samuel P. Huntington's seminal article ''The Clash of Civilizations?'' (Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993) has now lost the original modest question mark, gained length by a factor of ten, and reappeared in the form of his new book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Professor Huntington reasserts his original contention:

Spurred by modernization, global politics is being reconfigured along cultural lines. People and countries with similar cultures are coming together. Peoples and countries with different cultures are coming apart. Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations are giving way to alignments defined by culture and civilization. Political boundaries increasingly are redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious, and civilizational. Cultural communities are replacing Cold War blocs, and the fault lines between civilizations are becoming the central lines of conflict in global politics.

This is a bold and brilliant book. The author's single-minded rigor in employing the widest variety of data to make his case and his forceful sweep of assertion carry the reader along almost too easily. Perhaps the best passages -- and to the conservative mind the truest insights -- are contained in the polemical assaults on the exaggerated optimism of the immediate post - Cold War ''New World Order'' years. Contemporary predictions of a new era of global democracy and free markets flowing almost inevitably from the collapse of Communism now seem naive in the extreme. The politics of identity has ruthlessly up-ended the politics of interest. Culture (in the wider, Huntingtonian sense) turns out to matter to modern man even more than economics: global institutions and bien-pensant international consensus have been exposed as powerless when confronted by atavistic impulses and obstructive local warlords. In explaining to chastened foreign-policy advisors and practitioners the limits that cultural factors place upon them, the Huntington thesis has had a beneficial impact.

But Huntington is also convinced that the West is in steep decline. Looking only a little ahead, he predicts that ''the age of Western dominance will be over.'' And, as befits the head of security planning for the National Security Council in the Carter Administration, he does not seem to consider this a subject for regret, since ''the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.'' Nor does he draw the obvious conclusion that in this clash of civilizations, which the West has been losing, we Westerners ought to make a greater effort to win --perhaps by reinforcing our Western cultural distinctness, restoring national traditions through education, strengthening our defenses, and fighting the global battle for our ideas. Instead, he concludes that we must ''search for what is common to most civilizations . . . renounce universalism, accept diversity, and seek commonalities.'' But therein lies a problem. For if the implications of the first part of the book are correct -- that Islam is resolutely militant, that China is surging toward great-power domination, that the Orthodox Slavic world is neither willing nor able to establish a common basis of respect with the Western Christian countries -- there surely are no significant ''commonalities'' to find.

Mr. Huntington shies away from this grim conclusion, and understandably so. The world is indeed dangerous --but not as dangerous as the paradigm of a titanic clash of civilizations suggests. And this is because the thesis itself, though illuminating, is defective. The defects begin with the initial assumption. Huntington defines civilizations as ''the biggest 'we' within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other 'thems' out there.'' But though a civilization may constitute the biggest it does not necessarily constitute the strongest ''we.'' Loyalties certainly exist toward civilizations. But in much of the world, stronger loyalties exist toward nation states. The author spends much time discussing the Far East and little discussing Europe, which is regrettable. Whether or not a common European civilization exists in cultural terms, it manifestly does not for political purposes. As for a common civilization with North America, the principal advocates of European integration are rootedly hostile to this notion. If Europe is moving toward economic and political union, it is as a result of what governing elites in France, Germany, and to a lesser extent Britain want -- not because French culture has become more German, or British culture less Anglo-Saxon.

But leaving Europe aside, even in the Far East, where Huntington is scathing about bungling Western policy based on crude universalism, we should think twice before accepting the legitimacy that civilizational factors are alleged to give to current trends. China's brutish threats to stamp out political freedoms in Hong Kong, its war games against Taiwan, its defense build-up, and its support for the most anti-Western Islamic regimes are all interpreted a la Huntington as features of a ''Chinese nationalism'' which, unlike the Western democratic idea for which people died in Tiananmen Square, is a taste shared by the Chinese masses.