Is Culture a Cause of Conflict in International Relations?
The calls for ethnic holy war coming from Muslim leaders in the Middle East since the Islamic resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s, the religious and moral rhetoric of certain Western leaders since the beginning of an international “War on Terrorism,” and the conflict of cultural identities within some modern states might lead one to conclude that culture plays a large role in international conflicts. This argument has been epitomized by Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” which argues that membership in one of several ‘civilizations’ will play an ever increasing, and indeed dominant role in the affairs between states.
This essay will survey Huntington’s argument. It will then propose that the arguments chief flaw lies in the presupposition of a monolithic Islamic culture. Next, it will suggest that while culture is intricately entwined with politics, the later is usually the source of conflicts, while the former (especially in cases of culture seeming to call for violence) is generally a reaction to the larger political and economic situation. Finally, it will argue that employing overarching stereotypes like those found in the “Clash of Civilizations” is a dangerous business, and occasionally helps to increase the role culture plays in conflict.
In Samuel Huntington’s vision of the future “the fundamental sources of conflict … will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.” (22) He clarifies that states will remain the most powerful actors in world interactions, but that they will increasingly group themselves together in terms of their “civilization.” Civilization, in this interpretation, is “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity.” (24) There are somewhere between six and nine civilizations present in the world today, but the three most important players seem to be the West (including North America and Western Europe), Orthodox Christians, including Russia and other traditionally Byzantine nations, and the Arab world, which includes the Middle East and all Islamic countries.
Huntington argues that these distinct civilizations are headed for collision. With the end of the cold war and the fall of the Soviet Union, the great ideological conflict that had been dividing the world was concluded. However the close of this conflict does not mark the beginning of a period of inevitable understanding between countries all headed for the same destination, as Francis Fukuyama proposed. Instead the emphasis in international affairs on ideological differences will be replaced by the more important set of civilization differences. “These differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are different from each other by history, language, culture, tradition, and most importantly, religion.”
As the world speeds into modernity and becomes a smaller place, interactions between states increase. National identity, Huntington argues is decreasing and religious identity fills the gap. While the western civilization enjoys its peak of power, “a return to the roots phenomenon is occurring among the non-western civilizations.” (26) Importantly, these cultural traits that determine one’s civilization membership are not mutable. One cannot choose their civilization, but is born into it. Conversion, as such, is not an option. Huntington also argues that increasing economic regionalization will serve to “reinforce civilization-consciousness” and that that regionalization will only be successful within civilizations.
Additionally Huntington sees fault lines between civilizations that have been the points of conflict for hundreds of years. These fault lines are especially pronounced at the borders of Islamic Civilization. It is here that civilizations are most likely to clash violently, while at the borders of North American and Latin American civilization, or even Orthodox Christian and Western civilizations conflicts are more likely to be borne out in non-violent ways. “The crescent shaped Islamic block of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia has bloody borders.” (34)
When clashes between civilizations do occur the states involved tend to muster support from other states in their civilization. This “nation rallying” becomes the chief mode of reaching alliances. “As the post cold war world evolves civilization commonality is replacing political ideology and traditional balance of power considerations as the principle basis for cooperation and coalitions.” (35) A telling example for Huntington is the collapsed Yugoslavia. The struggling states that formed in the wake of the collapse were adopted by their cultural big brothers. The United States and Europe supported the fledgling catholic states of Slovenia and Croatia, the Arab world backed mostly Islamic Bosnia, and Russia supported (in a limited way) Orthodox Serbia. Huntington sees this kind of alliance system evolving into global civilization conflicts, especially between “the West and the rest.” The implications for the West, then, in light of this inevitable global division is to solidify power, maintain global military and economic advantage and help to secure those states with similar cultures.
Most criticisms of Huntington’s argument stem from a single blaring characteristic: this is a vast oversimplification of complicated global interactions. Cutting the globe up into several large blocks and labeling them groups of homogenous civilizations fails to incorporate the intricate political and economic forces tugging at the foreign policies of any government within the international system of states. This simplification also blinds us to the system of conflicts working inside each of these blocks that may actually be the sources that give rise to the inter-civilization conflicts between them. I will first contend with the fiction that the Arab, or Islamic world, Huntington’s “most violent” cultural block, can be conceived as a unified whole. I will then argue that to portray the violent dealings of Arab states as a result of their Muslim culture is to place a false cultural reason in place of real political and economic ones.
“At the very core of this supposed challenge or conflict lie confusions: the mere fact of peoples being ‘islamic’ in some general religious and cultural sense has been conflated with their adhering to beliefs and policies that are strictly described as ‘Islamist or fundamentalist.” (Halliday 107) Fred Halliday argues that this false perception has several sources. First, we see a history and proliferation of conflicts in the Middle East. A convenient way to explain this phenomenon is that most of the people there are culturally Muslim. Additionally, there are collective cultural memories of great ancient struggles like the crusades that help to conjure distorted images of the Arab world in western populations. Finally, in an amazing way, the modern identity of the Islamic world seems to match the west’s perception. “The intermitten invocation of Jihad, the very real support for some terrorist groups, the bloody rhetoric about wanting to cut off the hands of America – all seemed to lend credence to the idea of the ‘Islamist Threat.’” (Halliday 111)
These in many ways superficial features of the image the Muslim world projects to the West do not capture a coherent reality. First, the Arab world does not share a unified political identity with which to wage some sort of organized military threat to the west. “In reality these Islamic countries have pursued individual, nation – state interests, and as often as not, fought each other.” (Halliday 113) This is apparent in the number of inter Arab conflicts seen in the last several decades: conflicts between Iran and Iraq, Egypt and Libya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Algeria and Morocco.
Another important consideration is that there is no static Islamic Religion. “The idea that ‘Islam’ as such provides an identity, explanation and moral code for all actions undertaken by Muslims is a clear simplification. Islam, like any other great religion, is a set of texts that are invoked to justify actions of Muslims.” These texts however, are quite vague and completely silent on a huge array of issues including nearly all those of international relations and domestic politics. The vague content of religious texts makes them readily available to manipulation by political leaders.
In these various possibilities of interpretation we can see the ability for Arab states to act according to traditional state interest and justify its actions in terms of religion and culture. The truth is that “Islam has been rationalized, producing as many Islams as there are countries with Muslin majorities.” (Piscatori 314) We should be skeptical then of interpreting conflicts of states involving populations that happen to be Muslim as religious wars as somehow religious conflicts.
“The creation of an imagined, monolithic Islam lends to a religious reductionism that views political conflicts … in primarily religious terms as ‘Islamic – Christian conflicts.’ Although the communities in these areas may be broadly identified in religious terms … it is nonetheless true … that local disputes and civil wars have more to do with political issues and socioeconomic issues than with religion.” (Esposito 217)
By examining the recent resurgence of Islam in politics since the 1960s John Piscatori exposes some political sources for the growing call to “religious conflict.” First, the end of the1967 conflict between Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and Israel left the Arab world feeling inferior in the face of a century of militarily unsuccessful encounters with outsiders, especially in the west. “The loss of Jerusalem particularly inflamed Islamist sentiment and in common outrage Muslims everywhere found strong identification with one another.” (309)
Additionally, the increased fundamentalism in some states can be seen as a response to modernization moving too fast for cultures to accept or adjust to. This was the case in the Iranian revolution of 1979. “The process of rapid modernization created disturbances in the social equilibrium” created a confusion in which “the only safe mooring seemed to be in attachment to Islamic values.” (310) This is related to the “crisis of modernity” felt in some ways by all states in the modernizing world that increasingly dissolves and redefines traditional relationships. To the Arab world Islam served as “a simplifying membership in a community with links to the past as well as the future.” (311)
Another important reason for the resurgence of political Islam lies in its value as a legitimizing tool. Presenting a community as taking collective action in an “Islamic” way is never valid. “This is either a stereotypical projection employed by those who have sought to dominate or exclude people of Islamic origins, or it is an equally spurious claim made by people within the Islamic community who seek to exercise power over a social group by advancing their particular interpretation.” (Halliday 115) It is important to remember that the states that comprise the “Islamic Civilization” are not stable liberal democratic regimes but unstable, often impoverished or grossly unequal, autocracies ravaged by histories of conflict and colonization.
“Because most of these societies are poor in institutions and dominated by unelected rulers, it is natural for them to look for a way for them to legitimize themselves easily.” (Piscatori 312) Islam is a way for them to do so. They need simply declare a religious mandate for their actions. The religion can also work as the inverse. In authoritarian regimes without freedom of speech or other liberal outlets of political expression “Islam is being discovered as a convenient tool for taking a political position.” (312) The need to appear orthodox to retain legitimacy restrains some governments from suppressing radically political speech when hidden in the terms of Islamic fundamentalism.
As we have seen, the concept of an illusory “unified Islamic world” is help as valid in the minds of the west, and reflected in the political rhetoric of leaders in the Middle East in order to serve their own security purposes. These are not unrelated occurrences. The stereotyping of diverse groups and ideas into things like “Islamic Militarism” is a dangerous business, especially when employed by political leaders not only in the Middle East, but also in the West.
“Differing cultural traditions are surely among the sources of international conflict today; by themselves however, they rarely lead to major conflicts between states.” (Gray 151) Certainly things like memories of great enmity and strong cultural mistrust can exacerbate strenuous situations and play as one factor among many in a road to conflict. However, this role of culture in conflict is greatly enlarged when stereotypes employed by leaders portray the culture of another state as a static, insurmountable, and necessarily hostile barrier. “Talk of clashing civilizations is supremely unsuited to a time when cultures are in flux. In so far as such talk shapes the thinking of policy makers it risks making cultural differences what they have been only rarely in the past – causes of war.” (Gray 159)
In 2002 the President of the United States used a childish and dangerous oversimplification in an annual State of the Union Address. The President referred to the states of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an “axis of evil” alluding to the sinister alliance of the Second World War. The President ignored the fact that no alliance between these countries existed, or that in fact two of these countries had been engaged in war with one another several times in the past. The overall impression received by the less informed viewers was that these three countries have something in common, and that it was their active role in working against the United States. Needless to say these comments did not promote mutual understanding between policy makers or populations, or help to diminish the myths mentioned above that establish an adversarial stance between “civilizations.”
John Esposito argues that the stereotypes that developed during the Crusades (which began, he argues, for the political purposes of “gaining recognition for papal authority” and to “reunite the Greek and Latin Churches.”) still exist today. “How non-Muslims think of Islam conditions the manner in which they deal with Muslims, which in turn conditions how Muslims think of and deal with non-Muslims.” (Esposito 215) The answer then, for the west, is not to continue entrenching a misleading “us” and “them” dichotomy, but to dispel in the minds of the public and policy makers that notion which has already been discredited in the minds of academics: that unified cultures primarily direct the actions of states, that unified cultures even exist in themselves, and that there is a unified Islamic threat controlling governments with violent aspirations and seek our destruction.
Esposito, John. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality (1996)
Gray, John, 'Global Utopias and Clashing Civilizations: Misunderstanding the
Present', International Affairs, 74 (1998), pp. 149-64.
Halliday, Fred, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the
Middle East (1996).
Huntington, Samuel, The Clash of Civilizations, Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993)
Piscatori, James. Islam and the International Order in Bull, Hedley and Watson, Adam (eds.), the Expansion of International Society (1984).
This essay will survey Huntington’s argument. It will then propose that the arguments chief flaw lies in the presupposition of a monolithic Islamic culture. Next, it will suggest that while culture is intricately entwined with politics, the later is usually the source of conflicts, while the former (especially in cases of culture seeming to call for violence) is generally a reaction to the larger political and economic situation. Finally, it will argue that employing overarching stereotypes like those found in the “Clash of Civilizations” is a dangerous business, and occasionally helps to increase the role culture plays in conflict.
In Samuel Huntington’s vision of the future “the fundamental sources of conflict … will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.” (22) He clarifies that states will remain the most powerful actors in world interactions, but that they will increasingly group themselves together in terms of their “civilization.” Civilization, in this interpretation, is “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity.” (24) There are somewhere between six and nine civilizations present in the world today, but the three most important players seem to be the West (including North America and Western Europe), Orthodox Christians, including Russia and other traditionally Byzantine nations, and the Arab world, which includes the Middle East and all Islamic countries.
Huntington argues that these distinct civilizations are headed for collision. With the end of the cold war and the fall of the Soviet Union, the great ideological conflict that had been dividing the world was concluded. However the close of this conflict does not mark the beginning of a period of inevitable understanding between countries all headed for the same destination, as Francis Fukuyama proposed. Instead the emphasis in international affairs on ideological differences will be replaced by the more important set of civilization differences. “These differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are different from each other by history, language, culture, tradition, and most importantly, religion.”
As the world speeds into modernity and becomes a smaller place, interactions between states increase. National identity, Huntington argues is decreasing and religious identity fills the gap. While the western civilization enjoys its peak of power, “a return to the roots phenomenon is occurring among the non-western civilizations.” (26) Importantly, these cultural traits that determine one’s civilization membership are not mutable. One cannot choose their civilization, but is born into it. Conversion, as such, is not an option. Huntington also argues that increasing economic regionalization will serve to “reinforce civilization-consciousness” and that that regionalization will only be successful within civilizations.
Additionally Huntington sees fault lines between civilizations that have been the points of conflict for hundreds of years. These fault lines are especially pronounced at the borders of Islamic Civilization. It is here that civilizations are most likely to clash violently, while at the borders of North American and Latin American civilization, or even Orthodox Christian and Western civilizations conflicts are more likely to be borne out in non-violent ways. “The crescent shaped Islamic block of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia has bloody borders.” (34)
When clashes between civilizations do occur the states involved tend to muster support from other states in their civilization. This “nation rallying” becomes the chief mode of reaching alliances. “As the post cold war world evolves civilization commonality is replacing political ideology and traditional balance of power considerations as the principle basis for cooperation and coalitions.” (35) A telling example for Huntington is the collapsed Yugoslavia. The struggling states that formed in the wake of the collapse were adopted by their cultural big brothers. The United States and Europe supported the fledgling catholic states of Slovenia and Croatia, the Arab world backed mostly Islamic Bosnia, and Russia supported (in a limited way) Orthodox Serbia. Huntington sees this kind of alliance system evolving into global civilization conflicts, especially between “the West and the rest.” The implications for the West, then, in light of this inevitable global division is to solidify power, maintain global military and economic advantage and help to secure those states with similar cultures.
Most criticisms of Huntington’s argument stem from a single blaring characteristic: this is a vast oversimplification of complicated global interactions. Cutting the globe up into several large blocks and labeling them groups of homogenous civilizations fails to incorporate the intricate political and economic forces tugging at the foreign policies of any government within the international system of states. This simplification also blinds us to the system of conflicts working inside each of these blocks that may actually be the sources that give rise to the inter-civilization conflicts between them. I will first contend with the fiction that the Arab, or Islamic world, Huntington’s “most violent” cultural block, can be conceived as a unified whole. I will then argue that to portray the violent dealings of Arab states as a result of their Muslim culture is to place a false cultural reason in place of real political and economic ones.
“At the very core of this supposed challenge or conflict lie confusions: the mere fact of peoples being ‘islamic’ in some general religious and cultural sense has been conflated with their adhering to beliefs and policies that are strictly described as ‘Islamist or fundamentalist.” (Halliday 107) Fred Halliday argues that this false perception has several sources. First, we see a history and proliferation of conflicts in the Middle East. A convenient way to explain this phenomenon is that most of the people there are culturally Muslim. Additionally, there are collective cultural memories of great ancient struggles like the crusades that help to conjure distorted images of the Arab world in western populations. Finally, in an amazing way, the modern identity of the Islamic world seems to match the west’s perception. “The intermitten invocation of Jihad, the very real support for some terrorist groups, the bloody rhetoric about wanting to cut off the hands of America – all seemed to lend credence to the idea of the ‘Islamist Threat.’” (Halliday 111)
These in many ways superficial features of the image the Muslim world projects to the West do not capture a coherent reality. First, the Arab world does not share a unified political identity with which to wage some sort of organized military threat to the west. “In reality these Islamic countries have pursued individual, nation – state interests, and as often as not, fought each other.” (Halliday 113) This is apparent in the number of inter Arab conflicts seen in the last several decades: conflicts between Iran and Iraq, Egypt and Libya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Algeria and Morocco.
Another important consideration is that there is no static Islamic Religion. “The idea that ‘Islam’ as such provides an identity, explanation and moral code for all actions undertaken by Muslims is a clear simplification. Islam, like any other great religion, is a set of texts that are invoked to justify actions of Muslims.” These texts however, are quite vague and completely silent on a huge array of issues including nearly all those of international relations and domestic politics. The vague content of religious texts makes them readily available to manipulation by political leaders.
In these various possibilities of interpretation we can see the ability for Arab states to act according to traditional state interest and justify its actions in terms of religion and culture. The truth is that “Islam has been rationalized, producing as many Islams as there are countries with Muslin majorities.” (Piscatori 314) We should be skeptical then of interpreting conflicts of states involving populations that happen to be Muslim as religious wars as somehow religious conflicts.
“The creation of an imagined, monolithic Islam lends to a religious reductionism that views political conflicts … in primarily religious terms as ‘Islamic – Christian conflicts.’ Although the communities in these areas may be broadly identified in religious terms … it is nonetheless true … that local disputes and civil wars have more to do with political issues and socioeconomic issues than with religion.” (Esposito 217)
By examining the recent resurgence of Islam in politics since the 1960s John Piscatori exposes some political sources for the growing call to “religious conflict.” First, the end of the1967 conflict between Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and Israel left the Arab world feeling inferior in the face of a century of militarily unsuccessful encounters with outsiders, especially in the west. “The loss of Jerusalem particularly inflamed Islamist sentiment and in common outrage Muslims everywhere found strong identification with one another.” (309)
Additionally, the increased fundamentalism in some states can be seen as a response to modernization moving too fast for cultures to accept or adjust to. This was the case in the Iranian revolution of 1979. “The process of rapid modernization created disturbances in the social equilibrium” created a confusion in which “the only safe mooring seemed to be in attachment to Islamic values.” (310) This is related to the “crisis of modernity” felt in some ways by all states in the modernizing world that increasingly dissolves and redefines traditional relationships. To the Arab world Islam served as “a simplifying membership in a community with links to the past as well as the future.” (311)
Another important reason for the resurgence of political Islam lies in its value as a legitimizing tool. Presenting a community as taking collective action in an “Islamic” way is never valid. “This is either a stereotypical projection employed by those who have sought to dominate or exclude people of Islamic origins, or it is an equally spurious claim made by people within the Islamic community who seek to exercise power over a social group by advancing their particular interpretation.” (Halliday 115) It is important to remember that the states that comprise the “Islamic Civilization” are not stable liberal democratic regimes but unstable, often impoverished or grossly unequal, autocracies ravaged by histories of conflict and colonization.
“Because most of these societies are poor in institutions and dominated by unelected rulers, it is natural for them to look for a way for them to legitimize themselves easily.” (Piscatori 312) Islam is a way for them to do so. They need simply declare a religious mandate for their actions. The religion can also work as the inverse. In authoritarian regimes without freedom of speech or other liberal outlets of political expression “Islam is being discovered as a convenient tool for taking a political position.” (312) The need to appear orthodox to retain legitimacy restrains some governments from suppressing radically political speech when hidden in the terms of Islamic fundamentalism.
As we have seen, the concept of an illusory “unified Islamic world” is help as valid in the minds of the west, and reflected in the political rhetoric of leaders in the Middle East in order to serve their own security purposes. These are not unrelated occurrences. The stereotyping of diverse groups and ideas into things like “Islamic Militarism” is a dangerous business, especially when employed by political leaders not only in the Middle East, but also in the West.
“Differing cultural traditions are surely among the sources of international conflict today; by themselves however, they rarely lead to major conflicts between states.” (Gray 151) Certainly things like memories of great enmity and strong cultural mistrust can exacerbate strenuous situations and play as one factor among many in a road to conflict. However, this role of culture in conflict is greatly enlarged when stereotypes employed by leaders portray the culture of another state as a static, insurmountable, and necessarily hostile barrier. “Talk of clashing civilizations is supremely unsuited to a time when cultures are in flux. In so far as such talk shapes the thinking of policy makers it risks making cultural differences what they have been only rarely in the past – causes of war.” (Gray 159)
In 2002 the President of the United States used a childish and dangerous oversimplification in an annual State of the Union Address. The President referred to the states of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an “axis of evil” alluding to the sinister alliance of the Second World War. The President ignored the fact that no alliance between these countries existed, or that in fact two of these countries had been engaged in war with one another several times in the past. The overall impression received by the less informed viewers was that these three countries have something in common, and that it was their active role in working against the United States. Needless to say these comments did not promote mutual understanding between policy makers or populations, or help to diminish the myths mentioned above that establish an adversarial stance between “civilizations.”
John Esposito argues that the stereotypes that developed during the Crusades (which began, he argues, for the political purposes of “gaining recognition for papal authority” and to “reunite the Greek and Latin Churches.”) still exist today. “How non-Muslims think of Islam conditions the manner in which they deal with Muslims, which in turn conditions how Muslims think of and deal with non-Muslims.” (Esposito 215) The answer then, for the west, is not to continue entrenching a misleading “us” and “them” dichotomy, but to dispel in the minds of the public and policy makers that notion which has already been discredited in the minds of academics: that unified cultures primarily direct the actions of states, that unified cultures even exist in themselves, and that there is a unified Islamic threat controlling governments with violent aspirations and seek our destruction.
Works Cited
Esposito, John. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality (1996)
Gray, John, 'Global Utopias and Clashing Civilizations: Misunderstanding the
Present', International Affairs, 74 (1998), pp. 149-64.
Halliday, Fred, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the
Middle East (1996).
Huntington, Samuel, The Clash of Civilizations, Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993)
Piscatori, James. Islam and the International Order in Bull, Hedley and Watson, Adam (eds.), the Expansion of International Society (1984).
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