Comment

It became the catch-phrase of the 1990s — ‘clash of civilisations’. Samuel Huntington, the Harvard don who coined it, died at Martha’s Vineyard on Saturday. It must have been gratifying to Huntington that his thesis had gained worldwide currency and spawned more rebuttals, at least from Indian intellectuals, that any thesis since the end of the cold war.

The argument about the clash appeared for many worldly-wise people, especially in India, to be simplistic. And they spilled a lot of ink countering it, though all that they could come up with was as simplistic.

The Huntington argument was that the future clashes would not occur on ideological lines — Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed the end of history and that liberal democracy would reign happily ever after — but along older civilisational and religious lines. He identified religions and civilisations — Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Confucian — to be the units and that future friction would be along these lines. It looked too pat, too vague and when put under the magnifying glass, even false. But then he was not offering a fool-proof truth.

He has constructed a theory in a hurry of sorts, more in the manner of a policy wonk rather than as a historian. He did not manage to back up his argument with a deeper philosophical reflection which was needed to make it a lasting theory. The book, Clash of Civilisations of 1995 did not move beyond his 1993 article in the American journal, Foreign Affairs.

There was also the other thing. Huntington has succeeded in giving a certain policy orientation to Americans in the vacuum that was created as a result of the end of the cold war. Communism crumbled so suddenly that the Americans who used it as a landmark to chart a course of their foreign policy were suddenly left in the darkness. Huntington came up with a useful idea that could guide policy.

Huntington played the role that George Kennan played in formulating a framework for the cold war. Many people, especially Marxist and Muslim intellectuals, believe that the anti-Islamic slant of post-cold war American foreign policy is to be traced back to the Huntington thesis. Was Huntington anti-Muslim? He may have been in his private thoughts. But his public theory did not single out Islam. Rather it emphasised that it was the civilisation-religion complex that will play a role in future interactions and conflicts.

His detractors also seemed to be angry that Huntington had used two old ideas of religion and civilisation to construct his new thesis. The post-moderns do not like big and over-arching frameworks. They like to work with small building blocks to build small models. Here was a man who was trying to make sense of big patterns and big issues.

The Indian critics of Huntington vehemently argued that we are not merely Hindus, Muslims, Christians but also Punjabis, Tamilians, Gujaratis, with other identities like liberals, conservatives, jazz-lovers and single parents. There was more indignation rather than reasoned argument in these rebuttals.

There are some empirical clues to the Huntington idea. In the 1980s, Ayatollah Khomeini had established the rule of the clerics in Iran, conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who believed in god, nation and family were in the saddle in Britain and the United States, and Zai-ul-Haq’s Islamisation policy was underway in Pakistan. In the early 1990s, the Eastern Orthodox Church in Russia and in Siberia resurfaced. The break-up of Yugoslavia and the ethnic cleansing in Balkans were another sign of the resurgence of religion and nationalism.

If one had to draw some generalisations as to what was happening around the world, the clash of civilisations thesis was a good enough one. Like all generalisations, it was not accurate to the last decimal point. An intellectual cannot hope to do more than this. By this reckoning, Huntington has done well. People who hate him are those who are rattled by the ugly reality of religious and nationalist frenzies. Not his fault, really…