Clash within civilisations

Was Huntington wrong?

When Samuel P Huntington in the year 1996 proposed the idea of ‘clash of civilisations’, it, though being controversial, became immensely popular in political and academic circles. He presented the idea that conflicts in post-Cold War world order would be on the basis of civilisational differences. Huntington defined civilisation as a cultural entity having three attributes: objective, subjective and dynamic. By objective he meant attributes like common language, religion, customs or history. Subjective attributes referred to self-identification of the group according to their choice. And the dynamic attribute is the civilisations’ tendency to rise, fall, merge, or vanish.

But present day world reflects a different scenario. One that is in contrast with Huntington’s hypothesis.

Consider the rise of ISIS in the Middle East, for example. In that case, extremist Sunni militants have captured areas of Syria and Iraq and they have actually declared it as a state. ISIS militants are targeting Shiite and Kurdish people, and advancing towards other Arab states. Their agenda is to form a Caliphate encompassing all Muslim states of the world and wage war against the western civilisation.

The ISIS conflict has intensified because the Shiite and Sunni populations within Islamic civilisation have differences that the ISIS militants are using as a tool to achieve their radical objectives. So, the conflict exists because there is a clash within Islamic civilisation i.e., Muslims killing Muslims. This has also increased the level of threat to world peace and security.

Vulnerability is the first step to a threat, and threat leads to conflict, says Barry Buzan. If the Islamic civilisation had not been vulnerable due to intra-civilisational differences, then targeting and exploiting a united and peaceful civilisation would not have been an easy task for ISIS militants. Their threats could not have materialised, and the conflict would not have gotten into the position that it is today.

Moving east, if we have a look at South Asia, it is Talibanisation that is the major threat to sovereignty of states like Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban demand a regime which is in accordance with Islamic Sharia. Though their ideas and perspectives are a radically and narrowly interpreted version of Islam, they are still striving and rising in the name of the religion.

Though less extremist than the Islamic State, Taliban also use force and coercion to achieve their goals. On one side there is this radical fundamentalist group and on other there are more liberal Islamic ideologists. So, here again there is a clash within civilisation because despite having the same religion, people have contradicting ideas. And these contradicting ideas have created a vacuum that militant groups have exploited.

In Europe, Ukraine crisis offers a new perspective for analysing world politics. In this crisis, we see that the Crimeans’ – on the basis of their Russian ethnicity – held a referendum on getting annexation with Russia, and independence from Ukraine. Though there were other factors responsible for this demand, the ethnicity issue was the major one. It is also the reason they got support from Russia.

It is also important to note that both Russia and Ukraine are part of the same civilisation i.e., Slavic-Orthodox. But instead of getting united on civilisational grounds and confronting other civilisations, they have split on ethnic grounds and are now against each other. This, again, nullifies Huntington’s hypothesis and shows a ‘clash within civilisations’.

If Huntington’s hypothesis had been correct then Russia and Ukraine would have been cooperating.

Keeping in view the contemporary examples mentioned above, we can see that the world dynamics have shifted from inter-civilisation ideological differences to intra-civilisation ethnic conflicts. These conflicts are not between civilisations as Huntington proposed, but within them. People are struggling or fighting for their distinct legacies – history, religion, ethnicity or culture – within a civilisation. Instead of uniting from within to put up a strong front against others, civilisations are disuniting from within. They are so caught up in internal clashes, that they won’t be clashing any outside forces in the near future. From a global security perspective, these differences also serve as breeding ground for threats.

It is safe to say, then, that Huntington predicted the scope of civilisational conflict wrong. He said it would be inter-civilisation, but actually it is intra-civilisation. He was right about shift from ideological to civilisational crisis, but his hypothesis does not hold true at least in near future.

That said, it is still very early to declare that Huntington’s hypothesis has failed. Clash within civilisations might be the first step to clash of civilisations and it may apply at later stage but it does not apply now. As it is, it can be proven only if intra-civilisation entities at conflict are identified as civilisations in their own right. That is, if it is held that there are civilisations within civilisations.