Sage foresaw cultural clashes

ON Christmas Eve, leading political scientist and Harvard professor Samuel Huntington died, aged 81. In 1993, at the ripe age of 66, he wrote a seminal article, "The clash of civilisations?", for Foreign Affairs, turning it into a book three years later.

It is unusual for a scholar to make a name for themselves with a work so late in their career. Jared Diamond did so with Guns, Germs and Steel, but most scholars produce their important work early in their careers.

Huntington had written several controversial articles and books when he was younger, including a repudiation of the theory that economic and social progress produces stable democracies. But none of his previous writings catapulted him into every bookshop across the world the way The Clash of Civilisations did.

I remember coming across Huntington's writings during my honours year at university. At the time they caught my eye because I was studying for a subject titled "ethnicity and nation-state". As an Australian politics major, the subject matter was not naturally familiar to me.

Huntington's thesis was that in the post-Cold War environment, conflict would be dictated primarily by people's cultural and religious identities rather than by nationalistic or ideological tendencies.

In other words, the traditional levers of conflict (capitalismvcommunism) were going to be replaced by a new world order.

Huntington divided the global community into eight cultural groupings: Western, Islamic, Sinic (China), Orthodox (Russia), Latin American, Hindu, Japanese and, if they could get their act together, African.

He argued that Western nations were too consumed by their ideological attachment to democracy. The consequence was that we were losing our cultural identity and that would count against us in the new world order.

Critics of Huntington's work claimed he was trying to provide a theoretical justification for US-led Western aggression. It was what you might call an attack from the Left.

However, Huntington was also under assault from the Right. In 1992, just before the publication of his essay, another American, Francis Fukuyama, published The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argued that with the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy was the winner. Conflict was at an end.

In other words, no clash of civilisations was likely.

It is not hard to see which of the two authors has been vindicated by recent history, particularly with the rise of Islamic militancy and continuing cultural conflicts globally.

The present tensions in Gaza fit Huntington's model. Even the rise of Pauline Hanson was attributed to a clash of cultures.

Of course, Huntington took no account of intra-cultural conflict or civil war, another criticism more properly levelled at his work.

The intellectual difficulty most critics of Huntington's thesis have struggled with is the inconsistency of their attacks. If he was implying support for US-led aggression, as was often charged, how does that correlate with Huntington's stated position that the US needed to pull back from its interventionist democratic endeavours to strengthen its homeland cultural identity?

It should come as no surprise to observers of international relations debates that the primary source of attacks on Huntington's work was French political scientists, led by articles contained in Le Monde diplomatique.

Huntington could never be accused of having been a neo-con when it came to the US-led invasions of Iraq or even Afghanistan. While he was a realist in the language of international relations scholarship, Huntington was not an American imperialist.

His thesis was, however, rightly labelled simplistic, by scholarly standards anyway. But of course much scholarly writing, especially on international relations, is almost incomprehensible. When academics attempt to cover all intellectual bases in their writing, the result is often an English professor's worst nightmare, a garbled collection of sentences that stretch for entire paragraphs. Huntington avoided that temptation, one of the reasons his writings in recent years have been accessible and well debated outside the closed shop of academe.

There is a fine line between the roles of scholar and public intellectual. It shouldn't be binary. The Americans do it far better than us. Huntington began his career as a devout member of the former, moving over time into the latter category, doing media interviews and engaging with the public.

But he always believed in the importance of crossover between academe and the public service, again something Americans do better. Huntington himself moved between the two, especially in the late 1970s.

The question is, what thesis today has the potential to stir debate the way Huntington's thesis did? It could include an extension of his argument, looking particularly at rising powers within cultural spheres such as Islamic radicalism. Or it could require a new thesis altogether.

China has been allowed to rise on the back of Western capitalism, joining the World Trade Organisation and entering into free trade agreements with a plethora of nations, all without democratising.

With the onset of the global financial crisis, Western democratic capitalism is under threat; pump-priming is again in vogue. But China continues to grow, albeit at more modest levels.

A bold and inventive thesis might be that rather than turning to China as the saviour of Western capitalism, Western nations need to make a clean break from China and the unsustainable dependence that our growth is based on.

The developed world has been living on credit. In the case of the US, the Government is as much to blame as individuals. Such unsustainable living has accommodated the growth of China to a point we seem no longer able to live without.

However, while Western nations, especially the US, have grown increasingly dependent on China, the latter has adopted almost none of the West's democratic ideals.

The consequence seems obvious: either China will be forced to turn to a more democratic ideal, or the democratic ideal the West has long believed is a cornerstone of capitalism will be shown to be inconsequential to the thriving of new capitalist states.

In the latter event, the future for Western democracies looks bleak.

I wonder if Huntington would agree.

Peter van Onselen is an associate professor of politics and government at Edith Cowan University.