Peter Katzenstein: Why the Clash of Civilizations Theory Is Wrong

Interesting perspective. See below the videos for an explanation of just what exactly Peter Katzenstein is arguing against here. Interesting that Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations?" is still a topic of discussion after 17 years.

The article became a book in 1998: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

I tend to agree with him for the most part (admittedly, I only skimmed the original article). His sense that cultures (or worldviews) will be the source of international conflict has proven true in many ways. It's more a clash of values than a clash of politics. The 9/11 attack and subsequent rise of various values-based terrorist groups (al-Qaeda is the most famous, but the Maoist rebels in Nepal and India, the Christian fundamentalists in the US, and the militant messianic Zionists in Israel all engage in ideological terrorism) have seemingly made Samuel P. Huntington quite the futurist.

In his lecture at Sydney Ideas, Peter Katzenstein, one of America’s leading political scientists, offers a critique of the Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilization theory (the theory that conflict between distinct groups based on religion and cultural identities (eg Western, Islamic, Sinic) is inevitable, and will dominate in the post cold–war period). Katzenstein argues that emphasis on the unity and uniformity of different civilizations and hence on sharp differences among civilizations is misguided, and that civilizations are better thought of in pluralist terms; We should concentrate on studying encounters and engagements among civilizations.

Peter J. Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University and President of the American Political Science Association.

Presented by Sydney Ideas and the United States Studies Centre, March 2010

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Part Two:


So what is Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations Theory - Wikipedia offers a descent summary of the article and the controversy. Here is the beginning of the original article.

The Clash of Civilizations?
by Samuel P. Huntington
Foreign Affairs Summer 1993

SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. This article is the product of the Olin Institute's project on "The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests."

I. THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT
II. THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATIONS
III. WHY CIVILIZATIONS WILL CLASH
IV. THE FAULT LINES BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS
V. CIVILIZATION RALLYING
VI. THE WEST VERSUS THE REST
VII. THE TORN COUNTRIES
VIII. THE CONFUCIAN-ISLAMIC CONNECTION
IX. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE WEST

I. THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT

WORLD POLITICS IS entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be -- the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years.

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase of the evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern international system of the Peace of Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were largely among princes -- emperors, absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mercantilist economic strength and, most important, the territory they ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution the principal lines of conflict were between nations rather than princes. In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, "The wars of kings were over; the ward of peoples had begun." This nineteenth-century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, neither of which was a nation state in the classical European sense and each of which defined its identity in terms of ideology.

These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, "Western civil wars," as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its center-piece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of civilizations, the people and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.

II. THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATIONS

DURING THE COLD WAR the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds. Those divisions are no longer relevant. It is far more meaningful now to group countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.

What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? A civilization is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilizations. A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies. People can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and boundaries of civilizations change.

Civilizations may involve a large number of people, as with China ("a civilization pretending to be a state," as Lucian Pye put it), or a very small number of people, such as the Anglophone Caribbean. A civilization may include several nation states, as is the case with Western, Latin American and Arab civilizations, or only one, as is the case with Japanese civilization. Civilizations obviously blend and overlap, and may include subcivilizations. Western civilization has two major variants, European and North American, and Islam has its Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions. Civilizations are nonetheless meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are seldom sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time.

Westerners tend to think of nation states as the principal actors in global affairs. They have been that, however, for only a few centuries. The broader reaches of human history have been the history of civilizations. In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee identified 21 major civilizations; only six of them exist in the contemporary world.

III. WHY CIVILIZATIONS WILL CLASH

CIVILIZATION IDENTITY will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.

Why will this be the case?

Read the whole article.

Tags: Peter Katzenstein, Why the Clash of Civilizations is wrong, Samuel P. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations Theory, Remaking of World Order, Foreign Affairs, foreign policy, Politics, conflict, civilization, Sydney Ideas, United States Studies Centre, worldviews, religion, international conflict