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Before he died in 2008, Samuel Huntington could have said “I told you so” without too much dissent. The US was then several years deep into its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such violence between the western and Islamic worlds seemed to vindicate the Harvard scholar, who had once segmented the globe into civilisations and predicted a clash of them. As our troubled millennium got going, the word “prescient” followed him around like an extra name.
It is crass to speak of such a thing as a well-timed death. Had he lived to this day, however, Huntington would be taking as much flak as poor Francis Fukuyama does for getting the world all wrong. The important conflicts now are within, not between, civilisations. The C-word has seldom been so popular (the US government talks about Europe’s “civilizational erasure”) and so useless.
Look at the world’s trouble spots. The war in Ukraine is a war within the “Orthodox” Christian civilisation, at least as Huntington classified it. The periodic stand-off between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan is another example of a tussle inside a cultural bloc — what Huntington called the Sinosphere. A candidate for the deadliest current conflict on Earth, Sudan’s civil war, does not pit a coherent religious or cultural group against another, as such. Even the external patrons of the combatants, which include the UAE on one side and Egypt on the other, are mostly from within the Islamic world rather than distinct civilisations.
The Israeli-Palestinian issue is more like it, but is not typical of the world’s problem zones. In fact, I wonder if the reason this localised conflict so obsesses outsiders is that it is simple to understand (or misunderstand) as being neatly inter-civilisational. It is the sort of conflict that “should” happen.
Most of the faultlines today are blurrier than that. Huntington’s most notorious claim was that Islam has “bloody borders”: that trouble starts when and where it touches other civilisations. On the evidence of the past decade, the real target of Muslim countries seems to be other Muslim countries.
Consider the proxy violence between Iran and Saudi Arabia, or the blockade that Egypt and three Gulf states put on Qatar, or the ongoing strife in Yemen, where UAE-backed rebels made gains this week against the Saudi-backed government. Add the Syrian civil war to the body of evidence, and the Arab Spring before that. The “bloodiest” encounters have been intra- not inter-civilisational ones.
If civilisation is a hopeless predictor of who fights whom, it is even worse at explaining co-operation. To a western liberal, the most disturbing bilateral compact in the world is that between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China. It crosses civilisational lines. Huntington stressed religion as the crucial part of a civilisation, but the EU often has better relations with Shinto-Buddhist Japan than with at least one of its own Christian and Kremlin-friendly member states. North and South Korea, which are ethnic and civilisational kin, could hardly have more divergent geopolitical allies. (And are legally still at war.) The peninsula shows that a state’s foreign policy can be shaped by quite recent experiences, not ancient cultural identity.
As for the current US government, its position is — to paraphrase but not to distort — “Europe isn’t western enough, so let us embrace Russia and Saudi Arabia”. Whatever the morality of the autocrat-worship here, the illogic is what stands out. The people who talk most about the west as a distinct and exclusive civilisation are the most promiscuous in practice.
How did Huntington so misread things, then? To understand conflict, it helps to have a taste for it yourself. This might be why Churchill the gun-toting jingo and Orwell the former colonial police officer could see the 1930s dictators straight, as lots of ostensibly better men could not. Well, perhaps Huntington in all his Wasp mildness was always ill-placed to predict the future of war. One truth, which plays out at all levels of politics, eluded him in particular: fanatics do not reserve their strongest hate for outright opponents.
No, it is the doubter, the apostate and the schismatic who gets it. After all, someone who is wholly alien to one’s world is easy enough to ignore. Someone who deviates from it is unbearable. Remember who it was that woke activists tried hardest to cancel: garden-variety liberals of the JK Rowling sort, not hardline rightwingers with whom their contact was anyway limited.
Apply this principle to the level of nations, and the world of 2025 starts to make sense. The conflicts are where deviations have taken place: the Orthodox but western-facing Ukraine, the culturally Chinese but democratic Taiwan, this rather than that approach to Islam. Though violence is not on the cards, the attacks on Europe from American populists are another case of the nastiness of small differences.
The terrorist strikes of September 11 2001 were seen for a long time after as the moment the 21st century began. In retrospect, the real trailer for what was to come was Putin’s invasion of Georgia seven years later, when the former Soviet republic seemed to be tilting west. That strife can occur within a civilisation, that not even religion is much of a glue: the war had these lessons for us but got lost in the banking crash of that summer. We will have all too many opportunities to relearn them.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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