The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington – published by Simon and Schuster, l996

A Book Review by Father John McCloskey http://www.catholicity.com/mccloskey/articles/clash.html

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The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, (Simon and Schuster, New York, l996) may be the most provocative and important book you will read this year. The book delivers what it promises, a rarity in itself. It provides a key to understanding where we are in a geopolitical sense as we approach the millennium, after the momentous collapse of the Communist system throughout the world. It has received kudos deservedly from luminaries such as Kissinger, Brzezinski, and Fukuyama.

The author, Samuel P. Huntington, holds a chair in political science at Harvard and has worked at the highest level on the National Security Council in the Carter Administration. The book may also help us to understand what may be the overreaching strategic plan of the present Holy Father and the Vatican. It also gives us some insights into the work of the Holy Spirit in history in these clearly crucial times, as we approach the year 2000 and the world becomes ever more one through communications and the media.

The article on which this book is based (Foreign Affairs, l993) caused a furor in the exalted circles of academe and statecraft. It argued that the present world conflicts and those to come are no longer purely a reflection of the ambitions of nation-states like those the first World War with its ugly massacres of millions brought on by monarchical jealousies and diplomatic stupidity, or the second World War with its competing ideologies of Nazism, Communism, and liberal democracy. These new conflicts reflect instead radically distinctive ways of looking at the ways man worships God or what gives meaning to life.

Huntington’s civilizational approach posits the following: “Spurred by modernization, global politics is being reconfigured along cultural lines. People and countries with similar cultures are coming apart forming alignments defined by culture and civilization. Political boundaries increasingly are redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious, and civilizational. Cultural communities are replacing Cold War blocs, and fault lines between civilizations are becoming the central lines of conflict in global politics…The forces of integration in the world are real and are precisely what are generating counterforces of cultural assertion and civilizational consciousness.

The world is in some sense two, but the central distinction is between the West as the hitherto dominant civilization and all the others, which, however, have little if anything in common among them. The world, in short, is divided between a Western one and a non-Western many.” I would add that as we are of the West and the West represents largely the continued existence of Greco-Roman civilization as “baptized” by Christianity down to our own time, the question is whether the moral resources of the West and hence its willingness to fight are so depleted that they will be overcome by the “non-Western many.”

The author develops his thesis in painstaking factual and historical detail that at times can be mind-numbing but is finally convincing. He clearly has had a good number of his graduate students both working out the current situations of geo-politic conflicts and constructing future scenarios. He envisions a global politics of civilizations with emerging alignments that are more or less conflictual.

In fairly rough terms he envisions eight civilizations, some of which are closely related and/or aligned with one another: The West, Latin America, African, Orthodox (Russia), Hindu, Islam, and Sinic (China). He then further proposes three main players: the West, China, and Islam. They all possess the history, population, and present day vigor that almost inevitably places their cultures in geo-political conflict. He spends considerable space analyzing their various strengths and weaknesses. With a healthy appreciation of the human condition as affected by original sin, he clearly does not envision a Fukuyaman end of history with the world full of sated liberal democracies enjoying their pleasures in peace and harmony.

What is not given its full importance in the book, however, is that culture or civilization ultimately flows from what a people worships. The book might better have been titled The Clash of Cultures or even better The Clash of Religions (there, I said it!), according to my way of thinking, because in the final analysis that conflict is its subject.

In the West, it is the worship of the one and triune God as revealed to us in Christ through the Church; in Islam it is Allah as revealed by his prophet Mohammed in the Koran; for the Chinese it is a millennial old culture of ancestor worship with other influences of the moral philosopher Confucius and the mystic Buddha. For Catholics especially the ever-increasing tension between these three civilizations is of crucial and intriguing importance.

The Church’s mission naturally is largely a supernatural one in its ends of assuring the sanctification of it’s members and the spreading of the good news throughout the world. Although it produces many positive side-effects in the natural sphere (science, art, music, literature, and even political systems) they are secondary to its primary mission.

Until the Second Coming, the Church exists in the world, and one of its most important needs is the basic freedom to exercise its mission of sanctification and evangelization ie. freedom of Catholic worship, education, and family morality as reflected in a nation’s laws. These basic rights for Catholics are largely non-existent at the present time in the sphere of Sinic (China) influence and under Islam, and they are very much under attack in what is normally constituted as the West (Europe and North America).

Hence one can trace the outlines the geo-political strategy of the Pope and Vatican: it seeks to assure the Church’s basic freedom to exist and function properly throughout the world. Pope John Paul II proclaims and promotes the “re-evangelization of the West” in order to recall Christian Europe and America back to its Christian roots. He repeatedly travels to the emerging countries of Latin America to strengthen and build a firmer foundation for their faith in the face of fundamentalist encroachment. He has as a main goal of his pontificate the reunion of Catholicism with its “Sister” Orthodox Church so the Church might “breathe with both lungs ” and draw the Slavic East into Christian alliance with the West. He spares no effort in ecumenical dialogue in the face of constant rebuffs by Orthodox Patriarchs. He patiently continues his wooing of Communist China by diplomatic means in order to enable the Church to function freely in this enormous nation/civilization of over one billion people.

What appears to be lacking is a successful papal effort with Islam. Historically, given its belief system, there has been little possibility of dialogue; at this time, there doesn’t appear to be any. (Read Bat Ye’or’s Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: from Jihad to Dhimmitude, Fairleigh-Dickinson Press, l997 for details.) Islam has on several occasions in past centuries almost conquered the Christian West through a combination of aggressive and coercive proselytism and bloody jihads. John Paul II wants to make sure that it does not happen again. He wants to make sure that the “civilization of love and truth” that he desires and foresees is allowed to develop and flourish without external threat, be it from Islam, the decadent modern West, or China.

Huntington’s basic question formulated at the end of the book is “Is Western civilization a new species, in a class by itself, incomparably different from all other civilizations that have ever existed?” From a Catholic point of view, the answer is “Yes” with the qualification that the civilization remains firmly rooted in a true supernatural Faith whence it originated.

If the West, however, has become a hedonistic de-populating civilization exporting its “values” of consumerism throughout the world, it will cave in and collapse like many civilizations before it and darkness will descend. The Faith cannot fail, but we can.

Huntington’s book is an invaluable guide to understanding the teams and the playing fields of the world on which we are the players.

Originally appeared in L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition) in the July 23, 1997, edition (No. 30).

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