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‘Clash of civilizations’ or crisis of civilization?

May 21, 2019

‘Clash of civilizations’ or crisis of civilization?

Talk about a graphic display of soft power: Beijing this week hosted the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations. 

Organized under the direct supervision of President Xi Jinping it took place amid an “Asian Culture Carnival.”  Sure, there were dubious, kitschy and syrupy overtones, but what really mattered was what Xi himself had to say to China and all of Asia. 

In his keynote speech, the Chinese leader essentially stressed that one civilization forcing itself upon another is “foolish” and “disastrous.” In Xi’s concept of a dialogue of civilizations, he referred to the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as programs that “have expanded the channels for communication exchanges.”

Xi’s composure and rationality present a stark, contrasting message to US President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign.

West vs East and South

Compare and contrast Xi’s comments with what happened at a security forum in Washington just over two weeks earlier. Then, a bureaucrat by the name of Kiron Skinner, the State Department’s policy planning director, characterized US-China rivalry as a “clash of civilizations,” and “a fight with a really different civilization and ideology the US hasn’t had before.”

And it got worse. This civilization was “not Caucasian” – a not so subtle 21st century resurrection of the “Yellow Peril.” (Let us recall: The “not Caucasian” Japan of World War II was the original “Yellow Peril.”) 

Divide and rule, spiced with racism, accounts for the toxic mix that has been embedded in the hegemonic US  narrative for decades now. The mix harks back to Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996. 

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ Explains Turkey-US Relations

November 12, 2016

How the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ Explains Turkey-US Relations

Turkey President Erdogan waves.Turkey’s geopolitics is increasingly at the center of attention after the failed coup of July 2016. The era of Kamalism, with the army as “guardian of secularism” has ended. The AKP and its revered chief Erdogan are free as never before to go ahead in their ideological project of pushing Turkey’s society toward its Islamic roots. In this short article we will try to explain in a comprehensive and organic way the geopolitical turmoil in Turkey using the analysis of the “clash of civilizations” from Samuel Huntington.

It appears that the framework suggested by Huntington can explain what is happening in Turkey nowadays, from the ascension of AK party, to the spread of anti-western sentiments among Turkish people, as well as the ambiguous role of Turkey in the Syrian civil war. Furthermore, exploring the remaking of the world order predicted by the eminent Harvard professor can enable us to make plausible scenarios for the future.

The main message coming from the clash of civilizations is that, in the post-Cold War era, the world will shift from bipolar (US vs USSR) to multipolar international relationships and nations will organize their relations according to their cultural ties. In this setting, the fall of the Soviet Empire announces the end of the “ideological wars “and a shift to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflicts. Huntington describes eight major civilizations and he forecasts inter civilizational conflicts along their civilizational lines, while other kind of struggles can emerge inside a civilization itself in order to gain the supremacy over it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ Explains Turkey-US Relations

October 1, 2016

How the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ Explains Turkey-US Relations

Turkey President Erdogan waves.Turkey’s geopolitics is increasingly at the center of attention after the failed coup of July 2016. The era of Kamalism, with the army as “guardian of secularism” has ended. The AKP and its revered chief Erdogan are free as never before to go ahead in their ideological project of pushing Turkey’s society toward its Islamic roots. In this short article we will try to explain in a comprehensive and organic way the geopolitical turmoil in Turkey using the analysis of the “clash of civilizations” from Samuel Huntington.

It appears that the framework suggested by Huntington can explain what is happening in Turkey nowadays, from the ascension of AK party, to the spread of anti-western sentiments among Turkish people, as well as the ambiguous role of Turkey in the Syrian civil war. Furthermore, exploring the remaking of the world order predicted by the eminent Harvard professor can enable us to make plausible scenarios for the future.

The main message coming from the clash of civilizations is that, in the post-Cold War era, the world will shift from bipolar (US vs USSR) to multipolar international relationships and nations will organize their relations according to their cultural ties. In this setting, the fall of the Soviet Empire announces the end of the “ideological wars “and a shift to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflicts. Huntington describes eight major civilizations and he forecasts inter civilizational conflicts along their civilizational lines, while other kind of struggles can emerge inside a civilization itself in order to gain the supremacy over it.

In chapter three of his book a special paragraph concerns Turkey, which, from its historical role in the region as well as its unique geographic situation is a natural bridge between two continents and two civilizations. Translated into the Huntington vocabulary, we could say the Turkey is greatest example of a civilization fault line.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Decline of the West Revisited

November 17, 2015

The Decline of the West Revisited

LONDON – The terrorist slaughter in Paris has once again brought into sharp relief the storm clouds gathering over the twenty-first century, dimming the bright promise for Europe and the West that the fall of communism opened up. Given dangers that seemingly grow by the day, it is worth pondering what we may be in for.

Though prophecy is delusive, an agreed point of departure should be falling expectations. As Ipsos MORI’s Social Research Institute reports: “The assumption of an automatically better future for the next generation is gone in much of the West.”

In 1918, Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West. Today the word “decline” is taboo. Our politicians shun it in favor of “challenges,” while our economists talk of “secular stagnation.” The language changes, but the belief that Western civilization is living on borrowed time (and money) is the same.

Why should this be? Conventional wisdom regards it simply as a reaction to stagnant living standards. But a more compelling reason, which has seeped into the public’s understanding, is the West’s failure, following the fall of the Soviet Union, to establish a secure international environment for the perpetuation of its values and way of life.

The most urgent example of this failure is the eruption of Islamist terrorism. On its own, terrorism is hardly an existential threat. What is catastrophic is the collapse of state structures in many of the countries from which the terrorists come.

The Islamic world contains 1.6 billion people, or 23% of the world’s population. A hundred years ago it was one of the world’s most peaceful regions; today it is the most violent. This is not the “peripheral” trouble that Francis Fukuyama envisioned in his 1989 manifesto “The End of History.” Through the massive influx of refugees, the disorder in the Middle East strikes at the heart of Europe.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Epsilon Theory – Salient Partners | The Clash of Civilizations

December 29, 2014

Epsilon Theory – Salient Partners | The Clash of Civilizations.

Lots of quotes this week, particularly from my two favorite war criminals – Sam Huntington and Henry Kissinger. Everyone has heard of Kissinger, fewer of Huntington, who may have been even more of a hawk and law-and-order fetishist than Kissinger but never sufficiently escaped the ivory towers of Harvard to make a difference in Washington. Like me, Kissinger bolted academia at his first real opportunity for a better gig and never looked back, which is probably why I always found him to be so personally engaging and fun to be around. Sam Huntington … not so much.

But Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” argument is not just provocative, curmudgeonly, and hawkish. It is, I think, demonstrably more useful in making sense of the world than any competing theory, which is the highest praise any academic work can receive. Supplement Huntington’s work with a healthy dose of Kissinger’s writings on “the character of nations” and you’ve got a cogent and predictive intellectual framework for understanding the Big Picture of international politics. It’s a lens for seeing the world differently – a lens constructed from history and, yes, game theory – and that’s what makes this a foundational topic for Epsilon Theory.

Huntington and Kissinger were both realists (in the Thucydides and Bismarck sense of the word), as opposed to liberals (in the John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson sense of the word), which basically just means that they saw human political history as essentially cyclical and the human experience as essentially constant. Life is fundamentally “nasty, brutish, and short”, to quote Thomas Hobbes, and people band together in tribes, societies, and nation-states to do something about that. As such, we are constantly competing with other tribes, societies, and nation-states, and the patterns of that competition – patterns with names like “balance of power” and “empire” and “hegemony” – never really change across the centuries or from one continent to another. Sure, technology might provide some “progress” in creature comforts and quality of life (thank goodness for modern dentistry!), but basically technology just provides mechanisms for these political patterns to occur faster and with more devastating effect than before.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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