Still a Dangerous Place

By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

In 1993, Samuel Huntington published an article in Foreign Affairs titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", which quickly became the leading paradigm for post-Cold War world politics. In that article, Mr. Huntington -- one of the country's most distinguished political scientists-- set off a heated debate by asserting that the ideological struggles of the Cold War have given way to cultural clashes among the world's seven or eight great civilizations. Western, Islamic, Chinese, Hindu, Orthodox, Japanese and possibly African cultures would now constitute the major fault lines of global conflict.

With "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" (Simon & Schuster, 367 pages, $26), Mr. Huntington has now answered his many critics with a book-length amplification of the original article. The book is dazzling in its scope and grasp of the intricacies of contemporary global politics. Readers not already familiar with issues dividing Serbs and Albanians or Tamils and Hindus might feel a bit overwhelmed at the sheer volume of information conveyed here.

Mr. Huntington has underscored a basic truth that many of his critics don't want to accept: After the Cold War, we will all have to be more conscious of cultural issues in world politics. Religion has not disappeared from the world stage; in many places (not least the U.S.) it remains an important source of cohesion and identity. Nevertheless, Mr. Huntington's argument continues to suffer from two flaws that lead him to take an unduly pessimistic view of world politics.

The first concerns the way he draws cultural boundaries around very large units like "the West" or "Islam." In fact, civilizations have nowhere replaced nation-states as the primary actors in world politics: A Chinese-Iranian agreement to transfer missile technology does not constitute an alignment of Confucianism and Islam. Consciousness of belonging to a larger civilization is at least plausible in the case of the Islamic world. In Asia, by contrast, Mr. Huntington has taken far too seriously rhetoric about "Asian values" from leaders like Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad or Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew, whose policies are based on simple national interest.

Mr. Huntington's emphasis on civilizations obscures the smaller cultural identities that often divide nations within a single civilization. The world is beset not by thundering clashes of civilizations but by petty clashes of sects within weak nation-states. (One of the book's tables shows there have been more conflicts in the early '90s between subgroups within civilizations than between the civilizations themselves.)

The more serious flaw in Mr. Huntington's argument is his assertion that modernization and Westernization are distinct phenomena. The Chinese or Iranians can have technologically advanced industrial economies, he argues, and yet not share any of the West's cultural and political norms concerning pluralism, the separation of religion from political life, individualism or democracy. People in the West, then, are deluded in believing that their basic values are universal, or at least the universal result of modernization.

There is considerable reason to question this view. It is not an accident that modernity was born not in the Middle East or India but in the West, where the development of free institutions liberated men from the strictures of traditional authority and allowed them to apply reason to the mastery of politics and nature. To the extent that non-Western societies like Japan, Korea and now China have been able to modernize, it is because they either have already absorbed important elements of Western culture (like rationalism) or else have found analogs in their own cultures to Western values like the work ethic, secular politics and religious toleration. There is a strong empirical correlation between development and stable democracy. Mr. Huntington himself suggests that as China develops it will create an educated middle class that is likely to demand greater political participation. Of course the modernizing process will not result in the total homogenization of otherwise disparate cultures, but culture can survive in a variety of subpolitical or apolitical forms while adapting to a modernity that will look essentially Western.

Mr. Huntington argues that the West should stop believing that its values are universal and deal with the outside world in cultural rather than ideological terms. This view leads to some unsettling policy conclusions--e.g., that we ought to align ourselves with an authoritarian Croatia rather than a democratizing Ukraine, simply because the former is part of Western Christendom while the latter is part of the Orthodox world. Moreover, it is unclear whether it will be possible to sustain free institutions at home if we take so relativistic a view of our own values. The Declaration of Independence stated not that Westerners are created equal but that all men are created equal, and that this is a "self-evident truth" rather than a prejudice of Anglo-Saxon culture.

Mr. Huntington rightly attacks multiculturalism in the U.S. But if the Western tradition does not represent a universal value, why should it be "privileged" (as the deconstructionists say) over the non-Western traditions of the other ethnic and racial groups making up the country? If we take Mr. Huntington too seriously, the clash of civilizations may start at home.

Mr. Fukuyama is a professor of public policy at George Mason University.