Vol. 19 No. 8 · 24 April 1997
pages 3-10 | 9216 words
In Search of New Enemies
Stephen Holmes
- The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel Huntington
Simon and Schuster, 370 pp, £16.99, February 1997, ISBN 0 684 81164 2
Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor and self-styled defender of Western civilisation, has been a dominant voice in American political science for thirty years. Roughly contemporary, as a Harvard graduate student in security studies, with Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Huntington failed to achieve their spectacular level of success in Washington, although he did rise to a second-tier position in the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter. His intellectual achievements, by way of compensation, have far out-stripped those of his peers. His immensely influential Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), in particular, established his reputation as a leading authority on state-building. While he passes as a conservative of sorts, he is anything but a libertarian, and has been an articulate critic of the tendency of Americans, in particular, to underestimate the contribution of political authority to individual liberty. His 1993 Foreign Affairs article, ‘The Clash of Civilisations?’, was something of a departure. It propelled him into even greater international prominence, not only because it provided a simple picture of the dangers of a post-Cold War world, but because he wrote of ethnic hatred and religious intolerance without the usual liberal discomfort, indeed without appearing to make value-judgments of any sort.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 9 · 8 May 1997
From Roger van Zwanenberg
In Stephen Holmes’s review of The Clash of Civilisations (LRB, 24 April) one word is almost entirely absent: ‘race’. In the first half of this century, readers of colonial and imperial literature would have been familiar with the kind of argument we now find in Samuel Huntington. The context has changed, but the central thesis has not. In the earlier period, race and civilisation were synonymous. Now race is dropped. Imperial writers were concerned about the future of their civilisation, about morality, miscegenation and the innate superiority of their own race. Ideas about race lurk uncomfortably in Huntington: the decadence of his own civilisation, the dangers of crossing civilisations, the soul within civilisations are just a few of the key notions where the word ‘civilisation’ could easily have been replaced by ‘race’.
‘Holmes’s criticisms won’t make any difference to the Huntingtons, and their followers. The race concept was always a slippery one, without any very precise meaning and Huntington’s concept of civilisation is not much clearer. Both are articulations of belief – most often in the inherent superiority of the believer, which is no surprise in this case.
Roger van Zwanenberg
Pluto Press, London N6
Vol. 19 No. 10 · 22 May 1997
From Yugo Kovach
Samuel Huntington’s advocacy of a monoculturalist West in The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order is rubbished by Stephen Holmes (LRB, 24 April), who claims hybridity is now the norm for which the only relevant values are universal, liberal ones. The devil as usual is in the detail, the move from the general to the particular. Both turn to the war in Bosnia as symbolic of our age. Holmes, the multi-ethnicist, accuses Huntington of treating ethnic hatred and religious intolerance dispassionately, avoiding ‘value-judgments of any sort’ and not showing the ‘usual liberal discomfort’. But how have the multi-ethnicists reacted to the largest single instance of ethnic cleansing in Europe since 1945, Croatia’s murderous clearance of the Krajina Serb nation in August 1995? Far from displaying the usual liberal discomfort, they have simply ignored it. At least Huntington is consistent in his approach.
Holmes seems blissfully unaware that multi-ethnicity/pluralism in long-established states is essentially a matter of treating dispersed minorities civilly pending their assimilation. Hyphenated Americans have no choice but to accept the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant ethos of the Founding Fathers; newcomers to London have to acknowledge that Greater England rules. Bosnia found itself devoid of any such framework once the multi-ethnic former Yugoslavia was prematurely broken up.
More important, the former Yugoslavia defined itself as multinational, a word missing from Holmes’s vocabulary. Yugoslavia was ‘strongly’ multinational like the Lebanon rather than ‘notionally’ like the UK. Bosnia itself was constitutionally multi-national (Muslim, Serb and Croat) despite being part of a greater whole. Yet when Yugoslavia was suddenly done away with, it was automatically assumed by ‘concerned’ outsiders that the people of Bosnia would in a flash do what had never been done before: make a giant leap from an explicitly multinational administrative unit to a sovereign multi-ethnic citizens’ state.
Then there is the manner of Yugoslavia’s break-up which, unlike that of the former Soviet Union, was ultimately orchestrated by outsiders. To absolve these outsiders, as Holmes appears to do, of any of the blame for Yugoslavia’s descent into hell is truly a cop-out.
Why was Germany allowed to take the lead in policy matters given its appalling record this century in the lands of the South Slavs? Bonn’s encouragement of unilateral secession violated diplomatic convention as well as the Helsinki Accords. The EU decreed in superpower fashion that federal Yugoslavia had ceased to exist and that the federal units created by winner-take-all referenda would be the successor states. The EU knew better than the Yugoslav Constitution, whose first sentence granted the right of secession to the constituent nations rather than the federal units. It was to be all give by the unionist Serbs and all take by the secessionists. Worse still, the EU was ready to lay down the law without being willing to enforce it.
Yugo Kovach
Twickenham
