In the early 1990s, the state of the world was looking better than ever. The Cold War was over and the forces of liberal democracy and free market capitalism had triumphed over Communism. Political scientists and international relations theorists everywhere started making extremely optimistic projections about the future. Francis Fukuyama even went as far as to claim that we were on the verge of “The End of History,” where democracy and free markets would win the day once and for all.
Amid all this optimism came an ominous warning. In 1993, political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published an article titled “The Clash of Civilizations”. Huntington’s thesis was simple: while the Cold War had been an ideological clash between communism and liberalism, conflict in the post-Cold War order would largely occur along cultural, ethnic and religious lines. Huntington posited that the West would find itself pitted against Sinic Civilization (aka China), Orthodox Russia and the Islamic World.
The Clash of Civilizations thesis sparked an instant intellectual firestorm and became one of the most controversial political theories of its time. Critics denounced Huntington’s ideas as inaccurate, oversimplistic, and even racist. In some respects, his critics were right. Many of the details of his theory were inaccurate. For example, while dividing the world into various civilizations, Huntington lumped together groups and nations that had little to do with each other.
However, if one does not pay too close attention to the details and instead looks at the broad outlines of the Clash of Civilizations thesis, it is clear that time has proven Huntington correct.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, conflict has mainly fallen along ethnic, cultural, and religious lines. The most noteworthy example is the rise of Islamic extremism, which has been the number one security concern for the United States and the West since 2001. Recently, gunmen attacked the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo over a satirical cartoon of Mohammed, leaving 12 people dead. Anger and unrest over the cartoon has spread throughout the world; hundreds of protesters in Gaza tried to overrun a French cultural center and rioters in Niger burned numerous buildings and killed 10.
In the Middle East, ISIS has become the first Jihadist organization to effectively become an independent state. ISIS has brutally suppressed any cultural outlets that do not fit within its extremely strict interpretation of Sharia. UNESCO’s Director-General has reported that ISIS is undertaking a campaign of “cultural cleansing”, blowing up much of Iraq’s rich cultural heritage. ISIS’s culture war has taken even more extreme dimensions; last week the group executed 13 teenage boys for watching soccer.
Obviously, there is a strong religious element in ISIS’s behavior. Christians living in ISIS territory have been told to pay the Jizya (a special tax on Christians and Jews), convert to Islam, or face the sword. Yazidis are not so lucky, they are only given the choice to convert or die. ISIS’s brutal campaign of extermination has also taken an ethnic dimension. As a Sunni organization, ISIS has slaughtered Muslim Shiites, while Shiite militias have retaliated by slaughtering Sunni civilians. It seems that the ethnic conflict between Sunnis and Shiites that plagued Iraq for years has returned with a vengeance.
Center-stage in the war against ISIS is the struggle between ISIS and the Kurds. Like ISIS, the Kurds are predominantly Sunni Muslim. However, ISIS forces have targeted them simply because they are ethnically different.
ISIS might be the most eye-catching element of religious extremism but hardly the only one. In Nigeria, Boko Haram (whose name translates into “Western education is forbidden”) has killed thousands of people and kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls. Targeting schoolgirls shows that the group is largely motivated by culture and religion rather than politics. In Yemen, the government is battling Shiite Houthi rebels and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Penninsula (AQAP). In Mali, there is a serious concern that Islamists forces will bounce back after French forces withdraw.
The rise of radical Islam has in turn been accompanied a reactionary right-wing backlash in the West. In France, the far-right National Front has risen to the point that mainstream parties have been scared into taking a harder stance on immigration and radical Islam. The recent European Parliament election had 24 seats for France’s National Front, three seats for Greece’s anti-Semitic Golden Dawn Party and three seats for Hungary’s radical nationalist Jobbik Party. There is now even a German neo-Nazi on the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee. In the United States, the religion-infused Tea Party Movement has held America’s political system hostage on more than one occasion.
The reactionary right and radical Islam are hardly the only examples of the Clash of Civilizations. One year after Huntington’s first article on the subject was published, ethnic cleansing in Rwanda killed 800,000 people. The former Yugoslavia spent most of the 1990s in a constant state of war between various ethnic and religious groups. More recently, the war in eastern Ukraine has been largely ethnic in nature, pitting ethnic Ukrainians supporting the government against ethnic Russian rebels backed by Moscow. Ethnic tensions in South Sudan threaten to tear apart the world’s youngest country.
Even Buddhists, long renowned for their pacifism, have been slaughtering Muslims by the hundreds in Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
Perhaps the largest clash of civilizations is occurring between the United States and China. Although the United States and China share many interests, the cultural divide between the two nations has prevented them from becoming friends. China has modernized without westernizing, creating tensions with the western values and cultures of the United States. China’s military budget has increased by double-digits for several years straight while the United States plans to station 60 percent of its naval strength in the Pacific. Facts like these indicate that talk of China’s “peaceful rise” is nothing but air.
Statistics point to an uptick in religious conflicts. A recent study by the Pew Foundation found that the share of countries with a high or very high level of religious hostilities reached a six-year high in 2012. The number of countries with reported instances of abuse of religious minorities went from 24 percent in 2007 to nearly 47 percent in 2012. In that same time period, religious terrorism rose from being reported in just 9 percent of countries to 20 percent of countries.
Overall, the report found that 40 percent of countries have some form of religious conflict or discrimination. These countries include China, India, and Russia and account for 76 percent of the world’s population.
Why are cultural and religious groups fighting so much? The answer lies in globalization. Our world has become vastly interconnected, bringing various groups into contact through trade, immigration, and travel where previously these groups were hardly aware of each other. Rather than focus on common ground, they tend to highlight the differences between one another, especially when they have fundamentally different ideas and values.
This is not to say that the Clash of Civilizations is a good thing. A world in which people constantly fight over religious and cultural identities is a very dangerous and horrible world indeed. Humanity must work tirelessly to end the Clash of Civilizations.
However, the first step in solving a problem is admitting that there is a problem in the first place. Claiming that relationships between different cultures and religions are rosy when the evidence overwhelming points to the exact opposite conclusion does nothing to solve the problem.
It is paramount that the Clash is ended as soon as possible. There is the possibility that cultural and religious divides will make the 21st century as violent as the 20th but with far more dangerous weaponry.
Worse, when people wage wars over identity, they tend to be willing to go to more extreme lengths to achieve their goals. If people will don suicide vests over religion, imagine what those same people would do if they got their hands on nuclear bombs or weaponized smallpox. Humanity narrowly avoided a global holocaust in the Cold War, it would be foolish to assume that we will be as lucky this time around.