Summary
The thesis, named by Bernard Lewis and taken up by Samuel Huntington, that world conflict after the Cold War would be between fixed, monolithic civilizations — answered in “The Clash of Definitions”, the final essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, by the counter-claim that every civilization is a contested, hybrid definition, not an essence that can only clash (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.523-540).
Details
- Huntington’s formulation, quoted: “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural … The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.” (PDF p.523). The phrase is Lewis’s, from the last page of “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990): “This is no less than a clash of civilizations — the perhaps irrational but surely historic reactions of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.” (quoted PDF p.525).
- In Said’s account the thesis is a recycled Cold War thesis: conflict remains ideological, the West is the still point, and its prescription — exploiting differences among Confucian and Islamic states — maintains a wartime status in Americans’ minds (PDF p.523-524).
- Its language derives from the nineteenth century’s imperial competition: the French mission civilisatrice, the competing theories of civilizational destiny (Britain’s, Germany’s, Belgium’s, and manifest destiny in the United States), and the concept of “worlds at war” applied in LeBon, Marvin and Pitt Rivers to self-enclosed worlds each with a special destiny (PDF p.527-528).
- The colonized answered with a rhetoric of belonging — African, Asian or Arab unity and self-determination — which itself could take the clash’s us-versus-them form; after World War Two such rhetorics split between a utopian line of integration (the United Nations) and a line of jealous specificity to which the clash thesis belongs (PDF p.528-529).
- Against it: defining a culture is always a contest — official culture against counter-culture, in the United States, the Islamic world, Algeria and Germany alike; traditions are in part invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger); pedigrees are retrospectively remade (Martin Bernal on Greece); identity involves fantasy, manipulation, invention and construction (White, Foucault); and today’s world is one of mixtures, migrations and crossings, in which “There are no insulated cultures or civilizations.” (PDF p.530-538).
- What the thesis overlooks is the globalization of capital, described by Brandt’s North-South (1980) and by Arif Dirlik: an integrative, uneven world system that marginalizes the four-fifths of the global population unresponsive to capital rather than civilizational blocs in collision (PDF p.538-539).
- Said’s closing judgment: efforts to return civilizations to narcissistic struggle are not descriptions of how they behave but incitements to wasteful conflict and unedifying chauvinism (PDF p.540).
Where sources disagree
No other ingested source in this wiki takes up the thesis under this name; the disagreement recorded here is Said’s with Huntington and Lewis, as he presents both.
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Orientalism, Arif Dirlik, Martin Bernal