|
 |
|
|||
|
|
|
|
||
|
|||||
|
|||||
The Clash of Civilizations |
|
||||
|
|
||||
|
Posted: Jul 18th, 2003 by Aisha Gomez-Spiers Arguments such as that which Samuel Huntington makes in The Clash of Civilizations are increasingly important in justifying and determining the course and form of Western Civilization’s (Huntington’s words) domination of the rest of the world. As such, for those of us who wish to challenge the legitimacy of the current system of Western domination it is important to critically examine the assumptions inherent in these types of arguments. Our examination takes on further importance in our current political context because although Huntington is not writing a piece that explicitly justifies the war in Iraq nor the broader "War on Terror" that our government declared after the attacks of September 11th, the ideas that Huntington puts forth are taken for granted to such a degree in US foreign policy that they can be seen as doing so. The central idea upon which Huntington’s argument relies is a certain notion of civilization or culture that is in many ways highly simplistic and Eurocentric and glosses over some very important considerations which may provide us with a more complete understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves. Huntington sees the world, everything in its little compartments, from squarely within the West. In Huntington’s worldview, the West is the standard. This is important to keep in mind because the intellectual tradition that informs Huntington’s work is one that operates with a certain set of values and relies on a particular notion of the category culture. Huntington’s idea of culture is exclusive while creating the appearance of inclusiveness. He acknowledges the existence of other cultures and even gives non-western civilization a certain amount of agency in the logic of his argument. However, implicit in his argument, which relies very heavily on traditional ideas of modernity, scientific reasoning and instrumental rationality, is an evolutionary view of culture in which European-style modernity is the standard and European culture is on the top rungs of the evolutionary ladder. Huntington’s reliance on a type of Instrumental Rationality is important in determining those aspects of the extremely complex situation in the world that he focuses on and those which he chooses to ignore. In the last section (titled, appropriately enough, ‘implications for the West’, which indicates clearly his vantage point) these considerations, and lack thereof, take on their clearest form. Huntington advocates in this section, among other desirable ideals, "to limit the expansion of the military strength of Islamic and Confucian states… to… maintain military superiority in East and southwest Asia; to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests" (49), etc. These advantageous courses are not held up to any kind of ethical standard, but rather are concerned only with preserving the reality of Western rule, no matter what happens in the process or to whom. In the logic of Huntington’s formulation, other civilizations are presented as problems to overcome. Emmanuel Dussel says that the prominence of Modernity as a force in shaping the world is a result of the West’s "management of their centrality." in the planetary system. In other words, it was not modernity, or its inherently positive qualities, that allowed the west to become, ideologically and materially, the most powerful and influential empire the world has ever known, but rather that modernity emerged as an ideology out of the domination and exploitation of the rest of the world and a need and desire by the West to maintain this unequal relationship. Huntington does not on any level deal with how it is that the West became the standard in arguments like his; he does not deal with the relationships of power and domination in the current world order. By taking for granted the amazing degree to which the West determines the terms of most of the debates that take place about issues such as Iraq (or fill in the blank…) Huntington naturalizes Western dominance. For example, Huntington talks of "major civilizations" and says that "it is far more meaningful now to group countries in terms of their culture/civilization" (23). A pertinent question might be: who does the grouping or who decides what defines a major vs. non major civilization? Obviously this grouping has taken place in Western thought and policy for the purpose of managing the periphery more efficiently. By not questioning or examining the terms on which this formulation became the standard Huntington is normalizing a highly Eurocentric perspective, and in effect constituting this particular formulation as fact. In reality, there are many other manners in which to relate to the world within both Western and nonwestern traditions. Edward Said, a prominent Palestinian intellectual asks: "Is there such a thing as Islamic behavior?" Certainly even a critic would concede to Huntington that a common sacred text unites those that he identifies as part of Islamic Civilization. But how do these commonly held beliefs, a common sacred language, etc. manifest themselves on the ground? Do they do so in a way that can be seen as consistent or universal? Again, Said: "What connects Islam at the level of everyday life to Islam at the level of doctrine in the various Islamic societies? How really useful is "Islam" as a concept for understanding Morocco and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Indonesia? If we come to realize that, as many scholars have recently noted, Islamic doctrine can be seen as justifying capitalism as well as socialism, militancy as well as fatalism, ecumenism as well as exclusivism, we begin to sense the tremendous lag between academic descriptions of Islam (that are inevitably caricatured in the media) and the particular realities that are to be found within the Islamic world"(xv)If an individual from a society that Huntington identifies as part of Islamic civilization acts in a certain way, can that necessarily be seen as a function of his membership in Islamic Civilization? What of his position in a geopolitical region, his citizenship of a state, his residence in a city, and on down.or up, as the case may be, i.e. what of one’s role in humanity and his ethical obligations to it? All of these considerations, "local" on various levels, are subsumed when such simplistic generalized structures as 'Islamic civilization' are applied to people. For example, if the 9-11 attacks were terrorism as part of a jihad declared on the west by Islam as a civilization, why, as Thomas Friedman asked in an editorial written shortly after 9-11, did nearly all of the attackers come from Saudi Arabia and not, for example, India when the latter has a numerically significant Muslim population than the former? And what is the significance of the lack of Muslim extremism directed towards The west in India? Perhaps looking at the history of western colonial and imperial involvement in the Middle East will give us more insight into the situation than explaining it as an inherent hatred of freedom and democracy within the ideology of the civilization. It is this generalization of a diverse teaching that has made possible the fictitious connection between Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. Within Huntington’s argument is an intuitive connection between these two "enemies" of the United States and its ideals. While one is a trans-national affiliation of religious fundamentalists that has carried out an attack on a symbol of U.S. economic dominance, the other is a secular state that has not directly attacked any holdings of the United States. There is an essential difference between religious fundamentalists and secularists. In the latest video that Osama Bin-Laden released, he referred to Saddam Hussein as a "secular infidel". There has been no credible evidence that has withstood serious criticism that establishes a connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al-Qaeda. However, ideas of basic affinity between those belonging to the same civilizations (the "double standard" that Huntington identifies) are so pervasive that many Americans simply take at face value the assertion by the administration that there are indeed connections between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Thanks to Huntington’s ideas, this has become an almost logical, intuitive step for many people to make in their minds. If one accepts the logic of U.S foreign policy, it is unnecessary to further investigate this serious and important allegation. What has enabled the consent around Iraq in the United States is in part the insistence of the administration that the ideals upon which this incursion is based are those high universal concepts of democracy and human rights, two of the ideals that Huntington identifies as being inherent to the West (40). On the ground in Iraq right now we are seeing tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens protesting the American and British military presence. The question to Iraqi people seems to be: "democracy and human rights by and for whom?" Nearly every state in the Middle East has seen this dance before. The colonial legacy of the West in this region is palpable; the memory, in some cases even generations after the end of material colonialism, still fresh. The people of the region know what it is to be on the receiving end of the West’s "humanitarian missions", for this is the way that nearly all colonial incursions have been justified. Using Huntington’s logic, democracy and human rights are western qualities that are fundamentally opposed by Islamic civilization as a whole. Although Huntington and his ilk might not explicitly say that the Iraqis are not ready for democracy, so as to avoid the risk of being accused of racism and imperialism, that is the subtext of this occupation. To ensure a "democratic end" by whatever means in Iraq, requires the presence of a Western force to ensure the transition to democracy. This ideological incongruence is seen as inherent to Islamic civilization. The historical factors that have contributed to making the West’s particular brand of democracy and selective enforcement of human rights unpalatable to the rest of the world are ignored because, to Huntington, civilization is the answer to all questions. Economic and political considerations are not part of the explanation. And thus, what might otherwise be a legitimate objection to the form of western domination is explained away as cultural difference. Huntington’s argument in turn serves to further substantiate Western claims of inherent superiority, be they spoken or unspoken. The west’s self-elected role as the world’s police force is legitimized by the contention that it is the sole purveyor, of human rights in the world, and that all over the world democracy and human rights enforcement should take the form that they have assumed in the west. The west then, instead of being seen as pursuing an imperial agenda in Iraq, is acting in the interest of a higher good. Despite the mainstream American media’s reluctance to address the economic and geopolitical issues at stake in Iraq,following Huntington's example, a case can be made that gaining a foothold in this volatile and petroleum wealthy region has been an objective of the administration for generations. Huntington and the global anti-war movement seem to agree on some very important matters. In the statement quoted above, he seeks to normalize continued Western supremacy in the world by not offering any alternatives to this way of thinking, and by proposing a course of action to uphold this supremacy. Huntington and the anti-war (and anti-globalization) activists would agree that in its foreign policy the United States is pursuing a policy based primarily on self-interest and not humanitarian considerations. It looks as though in its Iraqi mission, the administration is simply following a course of action recommended by Huntington. The difference between Huntington and anti-war activists obviously lies with more ethical concerns. Huntington sees the supremacy of the west as a natural outcome of events in the world, while critics of the U.S. policy in the Middle East see it as old-fashioned imperialism in new clothes. While the U.S. claims that it is liberating Iraq from a dictatorial regime a critic would contend that the aim of the administration is to install a regime that is acquiescent to U.S. interests in the midst of the largest geographic bloc of countries belonging to Islamic civilization. In Huntington’s formulation this makes sense as a policy.   Copyright © 2003 rootsie.com |
|
||||
|
|
||||
|
|||||
