We see the past, as the old saying goes, with 20/20 hindsight, and there are few who can guess even somewhat accurately what the future holds. One who might have greater claim to being a prophet than most, though, is Samuel Huntington, the late American political scientist whose final works on culture and conflict both at home and abroad set off a firestorm of acrimonious debate in the years shortly after the end of the Cold War.
For those unfamiliar with Huntington’s work, he’s probably most well-known today for his contentious ideas on what he called a coming “clash of civilizations” between the globe’s various regional cultural groupings. Articulated first in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article that was later expanded into a 1996 book, Huntington’s thesis was that with the end of the Cold War ideological contest between communism and capitalism, a new form of geopolitical competition was beginning to emerge that would pit states from one civilization against one another for regional and, by implication, global supremacy.
In this contest, said Huntington, culture and religion would, along with ethnic nationalism, become the major axis of international political conflict as identity and values took the place of economic and political ideology in world affairs. The West, led by the United States, would see itself pitted against a rising “Sinic” civilization — code for China — while an Orthodox — Russia — and a generalized Islam would also pose major challenges to continued Western dominance.
As far as political theories go, Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” created an instant firestorm. A legion of critics from a variety of academic fields quickly weighed in, deconstructing Huntington’s ideas. In many respects, these criticisms were spot on — the concept was a poorly thought out idea that quite often lumped together groups, nations and states that had little to do with one another and ignored altogether important political and economic trends that were blending different societies into one another.
Importantly, it also ignored the role that liberal democracy plays in keeping the peace between nations and the way in which global capitalism brings peoples and nations together in mutual self-interest rather than conflict and competition. Combined with numerous criticisms leveled against it by scholars of war and international conflict, who pointed out that conflict more often takes place within a civilizational grouping than between them, and the force of Huntington’s thesis soon seemed far less compelling. Civilizational conflict, said Huntington’s critics, was simply not in the cards. In fact, in their view, it never had been.
Yet, as time has passed, one can say that while Huntington’s old clash idea is still a clunky, unworkable mess when it comes to the understanding of the weed-level finer details of global political life, as a broad outline for understanding contemporary geopolitics, it is not so far off the mark — as long as you don’t look too closely at the details. The U.S. and China are clearly locked in a contest for supremacy in the Pacific. Russia has begun to push back against Western encroachment. Much of the Middle East continues to reject Western ideas regarding the role of religion in public life, causing immense regional conflict as a result.
More to the point, states and regions caught along the borderlands of these vying civilizations are becoming a source of conflict and instability for the world at large. A Ukraine split between pro-Western and a pro-Russian factions has led to civil strife and, so far, a limited Russian invasion and the annexation of Ukrainian-controlled Crimea. Turkey, which has long been seen as a stable, pro-Western Muslim democracy finds itself split between secularism and religion as never before. In Africa, the borderlands between the continent’s Muslim, Arab north and the black Christians of sub-Saharan Africa have become an ungovernable killing ground. There is now even conflict between Buddhists and Muslims in Southeast Asia — an area of the world not generally known for conflict of this type.
If it seems to you that there has been an uptick in religious-based conflict around the world then you wouldn’t be wrong. According to a recent study by the Pew Foundation, the share of countries with a high or very high level of religious hostilities — a measure of hostility and violent oppression, state-sanctioned or otherwise, directed at a particular religious group — reached a six-year high in 2012.
The number of countries with reported incidents of abuse of religious minorities, for instance, rose from 24 percent in 2007 to nearly 47 percent in 2012. Meanwhile, the number of countries with reported incidents in which the use or threat of violence to enforce the religious social norms of the majority population was reported to have risen from 18 percent in 2007 to 39 percent in 2012.
Continuing this cavalcade of sectarian woe, the number of countries worldwide that have reported incidents of women being harassed over religious dress skyrocketed from 7 percent in 2007 to 32 percent in 2012. The number of countries reporting mob violence associated with religion, in turn, rose from 12 percent in 2007 to 25 percent in 2012. Religious terrorism was reported in just 9 percent of countries in 2007, but by 2012, it was reported in one-fifth of the planet.
Pew researchers report that in just over 40 percent of all countries, some form of religious conflict or discrimination is present. These countries, mostly found in Africa and Asia, account for 76 percent of humanity and include such giants as Russia, China and India. They also account for much of the Middle East, where sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni factions of the Muslim faith and between secularists and Islamists have recently reached a fever pitch.
Indeed, much as Huntington predicted, it is the countries of the Arab Islamic world and areas bordering Muslim-majority populations — the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and South Asia — where this type of religious hostility, oppression and violence is most prevalent. In fact, while nearly all regions have seen an increase in religious hostilities since 2007, these areas in particular have seen religious conflict nearly double over the last several years. Not surprisingly, such hostility is also heavily correlated with political authoritarianism.
This begs the question: what, exactly, is causing this increase in religious hostility? As an initial answer, it might be safe to say that at its heart, a major factor is the increasingly interconnected and globalized world we all live in. Rather than drawing us together by focusing on our basic similarities, globalization is bringing together widely differing groups of people through immigration, trade and travel, all of whom have very differing ideas on fundamental social and cultural values.
Familiarity, as another old saying goes, breeds contempt, and it seems that the more separate, long-distant societies are brought into bruising contact with one another through globalization, the less we all seem to like one another. Much of this, of course, is simple racism and xenophobia. Fear of the other, after all, is something that has been bred into humanity’s collective genes along with empathy and compassion, and in many cases, we highbrow cosmopolitans are right to scoff at the knee-jerk, fear-filled responses of the less enlightened.
Still, it would not be wise to discount these feelings altogether, since it’s clear that they are having an impact. The numbers reported by Pew, for instance, demonstrate that ably enough, but there are other disturbing indicators, too. In France, for instance, a resurgent National Front has scared the mainstream political parties into taking a more hardline position against immigrants and Islamic radicalism abroad. In Greece, an outright neo-Nazi party has used the country’s economic collapse to make inroads into becoming a real contender for political office, while in the U.S., a religion-infused, Tea-Party right holds the country’s political system hostage on a daily basis.
The list could go on, of course, but the point is there for everyone to see: cultural conflict very often rooted in religious differences is indeed on the rise and has become an important factor in our world today. Perhaps it was always so, but our position in the rich, democratic West blinded us to that fact. Regardless, it seems that if this second era of globalization isn’t to blow up in our faces like the first, which came to a crashing halt in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, then dealing with the social frictions being created by this great mixing and stirring-up of peoples needs to become a much higher priority than it is today.