There was a massive intellectual uproar in 1990s when Professor Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard University Professor, in a lecture at The American Enterprise Institute first propounded a theory that the post-Cold War conflicts were going to be characterised by a clash of civilisations where people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflicts. The lecture was in 1992. In 1993, he expanded the lecture in an article in FOREIGN AFFAIRS titled “THE CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS?” as if he was no longer sure of the applicability of the concept. Finally in 1996, he further gave the concept a book-length treatment when he published a book titled: THE CLASH OF CIVILISATION AND THE REMAKING OF WORLD ORDER.
Two preliminary points should be made at this point. The first is that academics don’t just wake up to start propounding theories out of idleness. Usually, it is in response to a stimulus, whether external or internal. In this particular case, Huntington was reacting to the end of the cold war, a war marked by ideological conflicts between capitalism and communism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of Russian nationalism and other nationalism in Eastern Europe, scholars were divided into two camps. There were those like Francis Fukuyama who saw this as the end of conflicts and others like Huntington who thought conflicts would simply find other sources.
It was in an attempt to find an intellectual basis to explain future conflicts that Huntington came up with the concept. As mentioned earlier, there were other scholars who were also involved in seeking to provide an explanation for what to expect. Francis Fukuyama’s concept was embodied in his own book titled, THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN. His own point of view was that with the decisive defeat of communism by Western capitalism, the whole world was bound to embrace the tenets of Western capitalism and we would all sleep facing the same direction.
In a 20-minute lecture, I cannot do justice to an analysis of Fukuyama’s thesis. That would have to be for another day and another audience.
Huntington would not be the first person or scholar to use the phraseology. In 1990, Bernard Lewis had applied the phrase in his own article titled “THE ROOTS OF MOSLEM RAGE.” Even as far back as 1926, Basil Mathews had written a book titled “YOUNG ISLAM ON TREK: A STUDY IN THE CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS”. Therefore as you can see, the phrase has an ancient pedigree. But that does not mean that it was and still is an accurate rendition of world history, then and now.
I decided to share my own views about the concept with you because I am fascinated by his classification of the world along civilisational lines and also because I believe it is a useful tool in understanding present-day conflicts in the world and in Nigeria.
What is a civilisation? A people with their belief system. It is that simple. Even though Huntington defines a civilisation as a cultural identity, I want to avoid the narrow connotation of the use of the term, culture, by preferring the elastic meaning implied in a belief system.
As its ancient pedigree implies, there has always been a clash or clashes of civilisations from when homo erectus transmitted into homo sapiens. As I have argued in a previous lecture, the first case of genocide resulted in homo sapiens wiping out homo erectus even though we know so little about the belief systems of both, whether they were compatible, the same or antagonistic. If you read the Bible as a historical document, you cannot but come to the conclusion that the wars between ancient Israel and the Philistines, Amorites, Assyrians etc were as a result of clashes of civilisations. The wars between the British and the Benin kingdom, between the British and the Fulani Emirates, between the Oyo and Fulani empires were all manifestations of clashes of civilisations.
This is not to imply that all wars are civilisational wars. Civil wars by definition cannot and are not civilisational. This also does not mean that every war between two different civilisations deserves to be categorised as a clash of civilisation. The wars of Alexander the Great did not seek to impose Greek value system on conquered territories, neither did Ghenkis Khan seek to impose Mongolian value system on the territories he conquered.
What then is a war of civilisations? It is a war driven by the desire to impose a different system of cultural and religious values on others who hold on to a different system.
Therefore as a concept, it is sound.
According to Huntingdon, there are five major civilisations:
1.Western civilisation comprising the United States, Canada, Western and Central Europe, Australia and Oceania.
2.The Orthodox civilisation of the former Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece and Romania.
3The Eastern civilisation made up of Buddhist, Chinese, Hindu and Japonic civilizations.
4.The Muslim Civilisation of the Greater Middle East extending to Northern West Africa, Albania, Bangladesh, Brunei, Comoros, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Maldives.
5.The civilisation of Sub-Saharan Africa located in Southern Africa, Middle Africa (excluding Chad), East Africa (excluding Ethiopia, Comoros, Kenya, Mauritius and Tanzania), Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Then there are other groupings which are contentious:
1.Latin America which includes Central America, South America, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Mexico. They regard themselves as part of the Western civilisation although there are slight variations in social and political structures from Europe.
2.The Anglo-Caribbean is regarded as an emerging quasi-civilisation.
3.Ethiopia and Haiti are regarded as cellular civilisations in the sense that they are lone countries.
4.Israel is another cellular civilisation even though embedded in western civilisation because of the attachment of the diaspora Jews.
There is another group of countries regarded as “cleft” because large portions of the population identify with different civilisations. Examples are India (Hindu-Muslim), Ukraine (Eastern-rite Catholic-dominate western section versus Orthodox-dominated east), Benin, Chad, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Togo (Islam/Sub-Saharan Africa), Guyana and Surinanme (Hindu and sub-Saharan Africa), China (cleft between Sinic, Bhuddist, and the West in the case of Hong Kong and Macau) etc.
These are Huntingdon’s classifications which I endorse by and large because like any attempt to make order out of chaos, there are bound to be rough edges and imprecise classifications. I should add that I regard the Roman Catholic Church as a special specie of civilisation. It is only Roman Catholic countries like Ireland, like countries in Eastern Europe and in Latin America where the Church has clashed with governments, and where it is the governments who have been battered and bruised who will easily understand why I classify the Roman Catholic Church as a civilisation.
But much more important is the fact that mutations and fluctuations are the hallmark of human history. Right now, Huntingdon has identified five major civilisations. But Arnold Toynbee, that master historian of the world who wrote history in broad strokes as master painters like Dale, Van Gogh or Gaugin paint on broad canvasses, in his A Study of History, identified 21 major civilisations at that time. A Study of History is the 12-volume magnum opus of British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, which he started in 1934 and finished in 1961.The author traces the development and decay of all of the major world civilisations in the historical record. Toynbee applies his model to each of these civilisations, detailing the stages through which they all pass: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.
The major civilisations, as Toynbee sees them, are: Egyptian, Andean, Sinic, Minoan, Sumerian, Mayan, Indic, Hittite, Hellenic, Western, Orthodox Christian (Russia), Far Eastern, Orthodox Christian (main body), Persian, Arabic, Hindu, Mexican, Yucatec and Babylonic. There are four ‘abortive civilisations’ (Abortive Far Western Christian, Abortive Far Eastern Christian, Abortive Scandinavian, Abortive Syriac) and five ‘arrested civilisations’ (Polynesian, Eskimo, Nomadic, Ottoman, Spartan).
You will immediately notice that Tonybee’s work is deficient in his total ignorance of, and hence non-inclusion of African civilisations. In any case, his work shows that civilisations are not frozen in concrete but are in a state of flux. Some will die out, some will be absorbed by more vibrant ones and some will absorb others.
On reflection, one obvious fact jumps out and that is that there is nothing actually new about the events crystallised under the rubric Clash of Civilisation. Those were precisely the clash called the Crusades at that time. That also confirms another Arnold Toynbee eternal truth that human history is marked by a cyclical pattern. What goes round, comes round.
Does that imply that there is an inevitability of conflicts or wars because of the existence of different civilisations? The answer has to be in the negative. For different civilisations to breed conflict, at least one of the civilisations must be driven by a global mission to achieve superiority over others, to deny others the legitimacy of existence and must possess a belief system that is not subject to change or mutation.
There are two ways to change a course of action. It is either through superior force or through superior argument. Neither works against suicide bombing.
Boko Haram did not introduce the Clash of Civilisation into the Nigerian politics. This was done by the Dan Fodio incursion into Nigeria and the attendant Jihad. Nigerian politics since then has been coloured by this Clash of Civilisation. This clash cannot be resolved by western type elections. It can only be resolved by a GRAND CONSENSUS WORKED OUT BY THE POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, RELIGIOUS, CULTURAL, AND INTELLECTUAL ELITE ON THE PLATFORM OF A NATIONAL CONFERENCE
It is this frightening possibility of a world crisis that cannot be subjected to the usual diplomatic processes of carrot-and-stick that underlay the intellectual criticism of Huntington’s work.
A more problematic issue is to what extent can we ascribe to the whole the belief system of the fundamentalist fringes? Does Al-Qaeda reflect the moslem faith? Do the Christian fundamentalist sects reflect the Christian faith? Or have these fundamentalist sects occupied the available space that the mainstream has become captives of the fringes.?
The answers have public policy implications. We should not be complacent or panic. Somehow the world manages to survive it all.
(As an aside, in 2011, Mr. Jim O’Neili an out-going Chairman of Goldman Sachs coined the term BRIC as the new global economic power. It was later amended to read BRICS —Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of the teeth all over Nigeria as to the omission of Nigeria from the list. We were all determined to get into that group or go burst in the process.
Now we are told that we did not need to go through that flagellation. Mr. Michael Andrew, the global chairman of KPMG International says there is a new economic kid on the block that is making waves called MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey).
