Highbrow Tribalism
In American foreign-policy
circles, everyone is waiting for the next X. "X" was the byline on the famous
1947 essay in Foreign Affairs , actually written by George Kennan, that
analyzed Soviet communism and laid out the post-World War II policy of
"containment." Where is a comparably compelling vision of the post-Cold War
world, a new lodestar for American foreign policy? Who is the next George
Kennan? Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington has a suggestion: How
about him?
Huntington's The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is now hitting the
bookstores. The jacket copy says that the germ of the book--Huntington's 1993
Foreign Affairs essay "The Clash of Civilizations?"--drew more
discussion than any Foreign Affairs piece since Kennan's (at least,
"according to the editors of that distinguished journal"). Blurbs from
Brzenzinski (effusive) and Kissinger (guarded) reinforce the air of
eminence.
Huntington's book is devoted to a currently ubiquitous theme: tribalism. In
politics, the tribal theme shows up in the rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and so on. In the intellectual world, the
tribal theme shows up in treatises about the importance of the sentiments
aroused by such men. Now that the bipolar order of the Cold War is gone, we're
told, the primal bonds of ethnicity, language, and religion will be a
central--if not the central--organizing principle in world affairs. Huntington
carries this idea to new heights of theoretical elaboration. Surely tribalism
has never sounded so cerebral. But it's one thing to analyze a phenomenon and
another thing to encourage it. Huntington crosses the line so easily as to make
you wonder: How different, really, are the lowbrow and highbrow expressions of
the vogue for tribalism?
Huntington's 1993 essay was, by design, a downer. The end
of the Cold War had inspired such upbeat visions as the inexorable triumph of
liberal democracy (Francis Fukuyama's The End of History ) and the "New
World Order" (global peace mediated by the United Nations). Huntington insisted
we recork the champagne. The world would remain strife-torn, he said, only now
the main actors would be not ideological blocs or nation-states or superpowers,
but distinct "civilizations"--Western, Islamic, Confucian, Japanese,
Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, Hindu, and African. (In the book, he adds a
ninth civilization, Buddhist.) "Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes,
and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale," he writes
in the book. Relations between nations from different civilizations will be
"almost never close" and "often hostile"--"trust and friendship will be rare."
Wars will tend to break out along civilizational "fault lines" and will tend to
expand along the same lines.
How should we respond to this
tribalism? Tribally. The very "survival of the West" depends on Westerners
"uniting to renew and preserve" their civilization "against challenges from
non-Western societies." Thus, Australia should abandon efforts to mesh with its
local Asian milieu and instead should join NAFTA. The United States should
de-emphasize engagement with Asia and turn back toward Europe.
How exactly Huntington's
diagnosis (perilously deep fault lines) leads to his prescription (further
deepen the fault lines) is a puzzle to which we'll return. But first, a word
about the diagnosis. Does his notion of "civilizations" as tribes writ large
make sense?
Back in
1993, most commentators said no, and this book is unlikely to change their
minds. For example, Huntington has renamed "Confucian" civilization "Sinic,"
but that doesn't tidy up the concept. South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, China,
Singapore, and Vietnam are very motley and definitely not a crew. In fact, the
thriving capitalist democracies of South Korea and Taiwan seem to blatantly
violate Huntington's logic, showing how fast cultures can switch orientations
from one "civilization" to another. Yet Huntington not only sees hidden
coherence in the Sinic bloc; he sees the bloc as part of an even larger
threat--the "Confucian-Islamic connection." This consists of China and North
Korea "cooperating" with Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Algeria to
thwart the West on such issues as arms proliferation. But the grab bag of
national policies that supposedly add up to this grand transnational
"connection" doesn't even include most Sinic or most Islamic states. If we
wanted to use one variable to predict whether a nation is involved in
Huntingon's Sinic-Islamic "connection," we'd be better off knowing whether it's
one of the four remaining Communist dictatorships than knowing whether it's one
of the five Sinic nations (50 percent predictive power vs. 40 percent).
I could , as others have, about the
civilizational paradigm's lack of analytical elegance. But that's not what
really bothers me. Though ancestral cultures aren't the mystical epoxy that
Huntington imagines, language, religion, and other aspects of cultural heritage
do matter a lot in the post-Cold War world. The "civilizations" part of
Huntington's thesis is less troubling than the "clash" part. Why is it an
inherent property of intercivilizational relations that they be "usually cool"
and "often hostile"? Why, for example, must Western relations with a Sinic bloc
be typically tense? Obviously, current Western-Chinese relations are
pretty tense. But why can't this change with, say, a new, more cosmopolitan,
regime in China, or firmer and more consistent diplomatic signals from
Washington?
It isn't enough to say, as
Huntington does, that Sinic civilization lacks the West's bent for democracy.
The cliché that democracy hobbles the conduct of a coherent foreign policy is
true. If Chinese leaders are freed from the burden of domestic pandering, they
should be able to calmly find their zones of common interest with the West and
cut the appropriate deals. So why does Huntington think we can't do business
with these people? Are only Westerners capable of perceiving their rational
self-interest and acting on it? Are only Westerners reliable negotiators?
Sometimes
Huntington seems to think so. After criticizing naive American attempts at
"constructive engagement" and "dialogue" across the Pacific, he writes, "To the
Asians, American concessions are not to be reciprocated, they are to be
exploited." Ah, yes, those wily Asians. Pat Buchanan couldn't have said it
better. (Here, again, Huntington conflates with other explanatory
variables.)
Huntington--like Buchanan--claims not to be a cultural
supremacist: He is defending the integrity of all cultures, theirs and ours.
Indeed, he sounds almost like a lefty relativist when he says we must accept
"global multiculturality" and discard the "linear" view of history, which sees
Western values as the inexorable fate of humankind. But of course, that's just
another way of saying that liberal democracy--a value Huntington surely ranks
above the alternatives morally--may never fit some peoples as naturally as it
fits us. In this light the meaning of his call to "maintain the
multicivilizational character of global politics" seems clear: separate but
equal. You let one alien nation move into your trade bloc, and pretty soon the
whole neighborhood goes downhill. (And already, Huntington worries, the West is
suffering "decline" and "decay.")
The Barbarians, in short, are
at the gate--and conspiring against us. The future, Huntington says, may boil
down to "the West against the rest." Raise the drawbridges!
And yet,
toward the end of this book, just when I was about to file Huntington in the
"Pat Buchanan" section of my brain, he underwent a miraculous transformation.
Up until this point he has been ignoring or downplaying the interdependence
among modern nations. He doesn't seem to think the Chinese reliance on Western
markets, say, or Hong Kong's thirst for Western capital, can help keep
trans-Pacific relations smooth. And God knows he doesn't waste time talking
about environmental problems soluble only by international cooperation. On the
contrary, hovering like white noise throughout his 1993 essay, and through much
of this book, is the that international relations are typically zero-sum, so
that "natural conflicts of interest" dominate world affairs.
But then, in the book's final few pages,
Huntington does his sudden turnaround and finally sees what he missed in 1993:
It is in the interests of civilizations not just to "coexist" but to actively
cooperate. We live in a world not just of "transnational corporations" but of
"transnational mafias and drug cartels," problems that nations can solve only
by acting in concert. In the book's final paragraph he repeats that, "in the
clash of civilizations, Europe and America will hang together or hang
separately," but he adds that in "the greater clash," the "global" clash
between chaos and order, "the world's great civilizations ... will also hang
together or hang separately." Huntington, who set out in 1993 to debunk the New
World Order, is suddenly talking like Boutros Boutros-Ghali!
On behalf of one-worlders
everywhere, I celebrate Huntington's Road to Damascus experience and officially
disassociate him from Pat Buchanan. But before we teach him the secret New
World Order handshake, we'd like him to resolve some paradoxes in his thinking.
In particular: the tension between his prescriptions of (a) the West turning
inward for its own salvation; and (b) the world's different tribes cooperating
for global salvation. Clearly, the first can complicate the second. If, for
example, America focuses on nourishing its European kinship and is wary of
joining Pacific regional organizations, then building a bridge to Asia will be
tricky.
One can imagine another book
that would synthesize and elaborate the of this one. For example, Huntington
suggests putting an Islamic nation on the U.N. Security Council--an interesting
idea, and proof that thinking "civilizationally," or at least culturally, has
its uses. But the growing academic fad of thinking in primarily, almost
obsessively, tribal terms is another matter. In addition to being analytically
sloppy, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Huntington notes, as evidence
of tribalism, that foreign investment in America encounters more hostility when
it's Japanese than when it's Canadian. Regrettably, this is true. But one
reason it's true is because Huntington and other tribalism aficionados spend so
much time talking about people from other "civilizations," as if they lived on
another planet. Turns out they don't.
