0.6 The end of the west  (Page 11/19)

Samuel Huntington published “The Clash of Civilizations?” in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993 and developed his thesis in a book three years later. The core proposition is that “culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilizations, are shaping the patters of cohesion and disintegration in the post-Cold War world.” He amplified this with five ancillary postulates, which are quoted here to ensure accuracy:

• “For the first time in history global politics is both multipolar and multicivilizational; modernization is distinct from Westernization and is producing neither a universal civilization… nor the Westernization of non-Western societies.”
• “The balance of power between civilizations is shifting: the West is declining in relative influence; Asian civilizations are expanding their economic, military and political strength; Islam is exploding demographically with destabilizing consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbours; and non-Western civilizations generally are reaffirming the value of their own cultures.”
• “A civilization-based world order is emerging: societies sharing cultural affinities cooperate with each other; efforts to shift societies from one civilization to another are unsuccessful; and countries group themselves around the lead or core states of their civilization.”
• “The West’s universalist pretensions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China; at the local level fault line, wars, largely between Muslims and non-Muslims, generate kin-country rallying, the threat of broader escalation, and hence efforts by core states to halt these wars.”
• “The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique, not universal, and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies. Avoidance of a global war of civilizations depends on world leaders accepting and cooperating to maintain the multicivilizational character of global politics.”

Huntington argued that the conflicts that pose the greatest risk of global instability are those between “states or groups from different civilizations.” As the West has been “the hitherto dominant civilization”, the “central distinction” is between the West “and all the others, which, however, have little if anything in common among them.”

This analysis is seem as prescient by many in an age when Islam is represented, both by some of its followers and by those who fear its ability to inspire and lend order to acts of rage and assaults on settled society, as the prime source of asymmetric threat. It also sits comfortably with the traditional realist analysis that would suggest that China’s ascendancy poses the risk of a new peer competitor emerging to challenge US dominance.

The challenge of the time

In the concluding chapter of Diplomacy, in 1994, Kissinger noted:

“Both Bush (George H W) and Clinton spoke of the new world order as if it were just around the corner. In fact, it is still in a period of gestation, and its final form will not be visible until well into the next century. Part extension of the past, part unprecedented, the new world order, like those which it succeeds, will emerge as an answer to three questions: What are the basic units of the international order? What are their means of interacting? What are the goals on behalf of which they interact?”