CAN YOU IMAGINE THIS? An American academic writes a book in the 90s to give you a paradigm so that you may better comprehend the unfolding world in the post-Cold War era, and yet the word globalisation is not part of the essential vocabulary of the book? In fact, the word makes only a sort of guest appearance in two places in this book that runs into well over 300 pages. If you do not find this provocative enough, consider this idea, which appears in the first chapter of the book and runs through the entire work as one of its central propositions and which says that the post-Soviet world is a truly multipolar world.

There have been two major Western - American, to be more precise - responses to the unprecedented upheaval which not only changed the flags and maps over large parts of Europe but also caused a climactic change in the global economic and political climate. The first response was articulated most provocatively by Francis Fukuyama in his celebrated book "The End of History and the Last Man". "We may be witnessing", went the Fukuyama formulation, "...the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

Nonsense, says Samuel P. Huntington, renowned Harvard professor and president of the American Political Science Association, arguing the other strand in American thinking in his "Clash of Civilizations" paradigm. The essence of the Huntington hypothesis runs like this: "In the modern world, religion is a central, perhaps the central, force that motivates and mobilizes people. It is sheer hubris to think that because Soviet communism has collapsed, the West has won the world for all time and that Muslims, Chinese, Indians, and others are going to rush to embrace Western liberalism as the only alternative. The Cold War division of humanity is over. The more fundamental divisions of humanity in terms of ethnicity, religions, and civilizations remain and spawn new conflicts."

Of Civilization and Civilizations
Professor Huntington first mooted this idea in an article entitled "The Clash of Civilizations?" published in the American journal on international affairs, Foreign Affairs, in the summer of 1993. The article evoked an enormous amount of interest and discussion all over the world though "the question mark in its title", Huntington tells us, was "generally ignored." Now the article has grown into a complete book entitled "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" in which the professor intends to "provide a fuller, deeper, and more thoroughly documented answer to the article's question."

Let us first note that Huntington does not discuss civilization in the singular, in the sense the term is generally used as opposed to barbarism ("The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation." - Manifesto of the Communist Party) or as opposed to imperialism and fascism in particular (for example, Tagore wrote about the "Crisis of Civilization" in the wake of the rise of fascism and Nazism). He speaks of civilizations in the plural such as the ancient Greek Civilization and nearer home, the Indus Valley Civilization in ancient history.

How does he define these civilizations? Well, these to him are the grandest possible human identities short only of humanity. A civilization is a culture writ large, a cultural area, a moral milieu encompassing a number of nations, the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity. A civilization is the "biggest "we" within which", says Huntington, "we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other "thems" out there."

This culture is however not all ethics, literature, music and films. Religion and race, according to Huntington, constitute the cultural core of a civilization. While the major civilizations in history have all been closely identified with the world's great religions, there also exists "a significant correspondence", Huntington tells us, "between the division of people by cultural characteristics into civilizations and their division by physical characteristics into races." Civilizations thus defined, Huntington's "Human history is the history of civilizations."

Wayward Ho!
Culture is also closely linked to power. The growing power of the western countries, first of Europe and then of America, has seen Western culture spread far and wide. The same is today happening to Asia, the dramatic economic growth in East Asia, Japan and China has powered a whole culture of Asian affirmation or assertiveness. The declining power of Western countries, on the other hand, has triggered a process of Western decline. But it is a slow and non-linear process, if it took the West 400 years to reach its pinnacle of power, the process of decline, Huntington tells us, may also take as long.

While civilizations display long historical continuity, they have the resilience to survive political, social, economic, even ideological upheavals, history also tells us that civilizations rise and fall, merge and divide, and also disappear and are buried in the sands of time. In an obvious dig again at Fukuyama, Huntington observes, "History ends at least once and occasionally more often in the history of every civilization. ... Societies that assume that their history has ended, however, are usually societies whose history is about to decline."

In fact, there are any number of symptoms that point to a growing rot in the Ameriacn society. Huntington lists five oft-repeated manifestations of moral decline: "1. increases in antisocial behaviour, such as crime, drug use, and violence generally; 2. family decay, including increased rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teenage pregnancy, and single-parent families; 3. at least in the United states, a decline in "social capital," that is, membership in voluntary associations and the interpersonal trust associated with such membership; 4. general weakening of the "work ethic" and rise of a cult of personal indulgence; (and) 5. decreasing commitment to learning and intellectual activity, manifested in the United States in lower levels of scholastic achievement."

Into Huntington's World
Huntington's world is divided into some eight civilizations: West, Islam, Sinic (China), Orthodox (Russian), Japan, Hindu (India), Latin American and "possibly" African. He does not count Buddhism or Judaism as distinct civilizations.

Dating back at least to 1500 B.C. and perhaps to a thousand years earlier, the Sinic civilization covers the common culture of China and the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and elsewhere outside of China as well as the related cultures of Vietnam and Korea. Originally an offspring of the Chinese civilzation, the Japanese civilization emerged as a distinct civilization during the period betwen A.D 100 and 400. The Hindu civilization is acknowledged to have existed on the Subcontinent since at least 1500 B.C. Islam originated in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century A.D., and then rapidly spread across North Africa and the Iberian peninsula and also eastward into central Asia, the Subcontinent, and Southeast Asia, giving rise, in the process, to several subcivilizations including Arab, Turkic, Persian, and Malay.

Western civilization is viewed by many scholars as having three major components, in Europe, North America, and Latin America. But Huntington prefers to count the last mentioned as a distinct civilization as it has been exclusively Catholic as against the combination of Protestant and Catholic cultures in the West and also because of the fact that it incorporates indigenous cultures which he says "did not exist in Europe, (and) were effectively wiped out in North America." Similarly, even though many scholars do not treat Africa as a separate civilization combining as it does elements of both Islamic and Western civilizations, Huntington does so in view of the developing sense of an African identity. In fact, he goes on to add, "conceivably sub-Saharan Africa could cohere into a distinct civilization, with South Africa possibly being its core state."

Each civilization in his scheme is thus identified with one major religion, and it is also generally led by one core state or a group of core states surrounded by a concentric circle of civilizational kins. In the case of West, there are two semiuniversal core states, Europe and America, while Islam suffers from the absence of any accepted core state. Japan on the other hand is "a civilization that is a state" and China is "a civilization pretending to be a state." The world also has a number of cleft states, i.e., two or more civilizations coexisting and contending within the boundary of a single state, as well as torn (schizophrenic?) states which have from time to time been trying to switch civilizational sides, for example, Russia, Turkey, Mexico and Australia.

Nation states thus do remain the main actors in Huntington's world, but their action and interaction is rooted not so much in national interests defined in economic and political terms as in cultural factors and civilizational affinities. In fact, Huntington's politics is a concentrated expression of not economics but cultural prejudices: "People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity." Viewed locally, this is politics of ethnicity; on a global level this is politics of civilizations. The clash of civilizations leads to fault-line wars at the micro level, on a macro level it may engulf the core states and lead to a major core states conflagration. In either case, it is the fault-lines between the civilizations which constitute the battle lines of the future in Huntington's world.

Global Politics: Parallel Paradigms
In advancing his civilizational paradigm, Huntington briefly examines and rejects four other contending models of international affairs. The first is of course the one-world model which exaggerates the factors and tendency of integration and overlooks the fact that the forces of integration "are precisely what are generating counters of cultural assertion and civilizational consciousness."

The second is the two-worlds model, with the two worlds being defined either in rich/poor or North/South terms or in terms of the well-known East/West dichotomy. Huntington questions the relevance of such bifurcations. An international class war between the poor South and the wealthy North, he argues, is almost as far from reality as one happy harmonious world; and while in some sense the world is really two, the division, he asserts, is not between the West and the East, but "between the West as the hitherto dominant civilization and all the others, ... between a Western one and a non-Western many."

Then there is this statist paradigm which looks at the world as a conglomeration of nearly two hundred states all of which attempt to protect their own security and advance their own interests. Huntington finds this closer to reality than the one- or two-world paradigms, but as already mentioned, he argues that while nation states "are and will remain the most important actors in world affairs, ... their interests, associations, and conflicts are increasingly shaped by cultural and civilizational factors."

Finally, he discards the "sheer chaos" paradigm which stresses "the breakdown of governmental authority; the breakup of states; the intensification of tribal, ethnic and religious conflict; the emergence of international criminal mafias; refugees multiplying into the tens of millions; the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction; the spread of terrorism; the prevalence of massacres and ethnic cleansing" as "being too close to reality." He argues that the world may be chaos but it is also not without order and since "the conflicts that pose the greatest dangers for stability are those between states or groups from different civilizations" the remaking of the world order should also be on a civilizational basis.

Unique, Not Universal
The balance of forces in this civilizational equation, Huntington points out, is tilted increasingly against the West. The sooner the West discards its arrogant ambition to universalize its civilization and instead realises and resolves to protect its uniqueness, the better for the West and the world. There is indeed a remarkable pervasiveness about the West on certain levels and in certain spheres. For example, on the level of elite culture, Huntington is perhaps quite apt in calling it Davos culture. The crowd comprising hundreds of the world's top industrialists, bankers, government officials, academics and journalists that gathers every year at this place of great scenic beauty in Switzerland to attend the annual jamboree of the World Economic Forum displays a whole world of (Western) cultural commonalities, but this is confined to not even 1% of the world's population.

There can also be no denying the fact that Western goods - cultural imports, if you will - command an unprecedentedly big world market. But such imports are basically driven by the image of Western power which is on a slow but unmistakable decline. "In previous centuries", Huntington reminds us, "the Western world was periodically swept by enthusiasms for various items of Chinese or Hindu culture." If that did not orientalise the West, "only naive arrogance can lead Westerners to assume that non-Westerners will become "Westernized" by acquiring Western goods." Moreover, "What, indeed, does it tell the world about the West when Westerners identify their civilization with fizzy liquids, faded pants, and fatty foods?" More than a million-dollar-question, indeed!

Even if we are to take Hollywood instead of Coca-Cola as the ultimate symbol of universalisation of Western culture, Huntington, citing other scholars, warns his Western readers that entertainment need not signify cultural conversion and that the same information and images transmitted through Western channels may trigger opposing perceptions.

What the West sees as universalism, the rest of the world considers imperialism, Huntington cautions the Western powers. With a condescending air of candour, he says: "Western belief in the universality of western culture suffers from three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous." A former editor of the Times of India has found this "a salutary antidote to the arrogant universalist pretensions of the West and particularly the United States in their dealings with the rest of the world." But a closer reading of Huntington clearly reveals that there is more to this than meets the liberal eyes.

Voluntary Export Restraint
At a time when the European wing of the West is trying to reassert itself against the domination of the American wing and several non-Western powers have indeed begun to make their presence felt, Huntington evidently finds it more worthwhile to promote internal cohesion by stressing a sense of elitist pride in Western culture - it's unique and cannot be copied by others. This bogey of an increasingly threatened Western uniqueness is both a diplomatic way of asserting the typical Western belief in its cultural supremacy and an attempt to trigger a unifying counterforce among Western powers against a set of perceived external enemies. It is also of a piece with the current American clamour for their so-called "intellectual property rights."

On a more practical level, this anti-universalism is meant to conveniently conceal a certain American bankruptcy even in pursuing its own cherished double standards. In the realm of political economy, the chickens of Soviet collapse are coming home to roost and the IMF and World Bank are deeply disturbed over the escalating cost of the transition economies' integration with global capitalism. From time to time the United States has been humming the "human rights" tune against China, but then the tune has been effectively drowned in the cacophony of the emerging Chinese economic reality. Huntington himself has quoted this Nixon observation made in 1994: "Today China's economic power makes U.S. lectures about human rights imprudent. Within a decade it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades it will make them laughable."

Huntington also points to a deeper dilemma which prevents the US from going the whole hog with its civilizational mission of exporting democracy all over the world. The weird game of democracy may often see an ever-so-friendly Shah of Iran get replaced by a Khomeiniesque Ayatollah. It is therefore fine to flirt with the Statue of Liberty on the Tienanmen Square, but what if in a "democratic" China the present communist regime gives way to a more openly nationalist and vigorously anti-American dispensation?

Huntington's Horrorscope
Huntington sees the growing threat to the Western civilization coming primarily from two quarters. One is obviously Islam. The Islamic challenge is prompted partly by Islam's historical rivalry with Christianity - the two religions share a lot of common features, both being monotheistic and proselytizing in character; partly by the growing economic clout of Islamic countries since the oil boom of the 70s; and also partly by its enhanced self-confidence since its victory in the Soviet-Afghan war (this is yet another victory which has, with hindsight, proved pyrrhic for the West, while the West saw in the Russian retreat in Afghanistan a vindication of the ideological superiority of the so-called "Free World", presaging the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, Muslims saw an inspiring victory for Islam!); but the most crucial factor powering the Islamic mission, according to Huntington, is demography.

He repeats this argument ad nauseum along with his other innuendoes against Islamic intolerance and militarism. "In rapidly modernizing societies, if the traditional religion is unable to adapt to the requirements of modernization, the potential exists for the spread of Western Christianity and Islam", Huntington tells us. This is how and why, we are told, both Islam and Christianity have significantly expanded their numbers in Africa and a major shift toward Christianity has occurred in South Korea.

But in case you thought both Christianity and Islam have a 50:50 or equal chance in this battle, he hastens to inform you that the battle is not in fact equal. In Huntington's words, "In the long run, however, Mohammed wins out. Christianity spreads primarily by conversion, Islam by conversion and reproduction. The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 per cent in the 1980s, levelled off, is now declining, and will probably approximate about 25 per cent of the world's population by 2025. As a result of their extremely high rates of population growth, the proportion of Muslims in the world will continue to increase dramatically, amounting to 20 per cent of the world's population about the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later, and probably accounting for about 30 per cent of the world's population by 2025."

There is of course more to demography than sheer numbers. The ongoing population explosion, Huntington tells us, has provided Islam with a demographic profile which is particularly suitable and responsible for its current spate of aggressive affirmation. Compared to other civilizations, Islam has more young people in the 15-24 age cohort which apparently provides for an unending supply of ready recruits for fundamentalism, terrorism, insurgency and migration!

Our dear professor who is so worried about Westerners reducing the essence of their civilization to "fizzy liquids, faded pants, and fatty foods", however, does not think twice before attributing Islam's growing strength to its alleged reproductive profligacy! It does not occur to him that several Islamic countries, particularly in the Persian Gulf region, are still highly under-populated, and the population density in large parts of the Islamic world is lower than the corresponding figures for many Western urban centres or for that matter compared to Japan, (Confucian) China or (Hindu) India! And pray, dear professor, if number is really what worries you, what prevents the West, the US in particular, from taking on Islam in this specific arena and carrying the numbers battle into the Islamic camp rather than dropping those depopulating devices on the innocent children of Baghdad!

Enter the Dragon
The other major civilizational quarter which is increasingly worrying the West is China. With its tremendous economic growth, this most populous country of the world has begun to exert a kind of magnetic pull not only on its separated parts - if Hong Kong has already returned can Taiwan be far behind? - and the powerful overseas Chinese communities in East and Southeast Asia and also other parts of the world, it has also begun to set a 'dangerous' example for the rest of Asia. China has begun to invest its growing economic wealth in promoting a larger and more assertive political role for itself in international affairs.

To top it all, China and Islam have begun to act in tandem setting up what Huntington calls the formidable Confucian-Islamic axis. There are also other disturbing symptoms for the West. Japan is showing signs of moving away from the American military umbrella and of re-Asianizing itself through growing economic cooperation with East and Southeast Asia and normalisation of ties with China.

Equally alarming for the US is the threat of a China-Russia axis. As Huntington observes, "In the immediate post-Cold War period, Russian-Chinese relations became significantly cooperative. Border disputes were resolved; military forces on both sides of the border were reduced; trade expanded; each stopped targeting the other with nuclear missiles ... Russia found in China an eager and substantial customer for military equipment and technology ... For both countries, a Russian-Chinese connection is, like the Confucian-Islamic connection, a means of countering Western power and universalism."

When Huntington speaks about intercivilizational clashes posing the greatest threat for stability and peace in the presentday world, he means specifically the matrix of these parallel and to an extent coordinated threats to the Western civilization, Americn hegemony to be more precise. Towards the end of the book he even spends nearly four pages to describe a possible scenario of war between the United States and China triggering off what could become the first world war in the next millennium.

The Empire's New Designs
What are his prescriptions for preventing such a scenario from coming true? The answer is: Remaking of the World Order on a Multicivilizational Basis. Core states must refrain from intervening in conflicts in other civilizations and should instead negotiate with each other to contain or to halt fault line wars between stats or groups from their civilizations. He also calls for supplanting these two ground rules - the abstention rule and the joint mediation rule - with a third rule, the commonalities rule. In this context, he refers to the Singaporean White Paper on "Shared Values" with which Singapore has been trying to stay and grow modern without lapsing into what may be called Westernisation. Other civilizations may try other mixes, but all should try and build on the "thin" morality level which is common to all civilizations. Such a three-pronged strategy, Huntington hopes, "would contribute not only to limiting the clash of civilizations but also to strengthening Civilization in the singular..."

But before advocating this grand global civilizational recipe for world peace and stability, the author suggests a very concrete strategy for the beleaguered and threatened West, the US in particular. The two wings should "achieve greater political, economic, and military integration and ... coordinate their policies so as to preclude states from other civilizations exploiting differences among them; ... incorporate into the European Union and NATO the Western states of Central Europe that is, the Visegrad countries, the Baltic republics, Slovenia, and Croatia; ... encourage the "Westernization" of Latin America and, as far as possible, the close alignment of Latin American countries with the West; ... restrain the development of the conventional and unconventional military power of Islamic and Sinic countries; ... slow the drift of Japan away from the West and toward accommodation with China; ... accept Russia as the core state of Orthodoxy and a major regional power with legitimate interests in the security of its southern borders; ... (and) maintain Western technological and military superiority over other civilizations."

Where does India figure in this scheme of intercivilizational alliances? Huntington notes that India is pitted against a China-Pakistan alliance, if not a broader Confucian-Islamic connection. Accordingly while India is likely to maintain its close relationship with Russia and remain a major purchaser of Russian military equipment, he goes on to predict closer ties between India and the United States in view of "the cooling of U.S-Pakistan relations and their common interests in containing China". He also underscores the utility of India as a key vehicle of American interests in Asia with this instructive observation: "The expansion of Indian power in Southern Asia cannot harm US interests and could serve them."

A Use-'n-Throw Paradigm!
How does the Huntington framework fare on balance? The learned professor cautions us right in the preface of his book that his treatise is not to be seen as a work of social science, it is only an interpretation of the evolution of global politics after the Cold War. And even while aspiring to present a paradigm that is "meaningful to scholars and useful to policymakers", he admits that "While a civilizational approach may be helpful to understanding global politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this does not mean that it would have been equally helpful in the mid-twentieth century or that it will be helpful in the mid-twenty-first century."

This qualification however raises more problems than it resolves. The eight civilizations listed by Huntington have all been there for more than a millennium. And being separated by time and space, if the interaction of these civilizations was limited to rather rare and low-key encounters in their early phases, it has certaily gained in intensity over the last 500 years or so. What then are those other factors which overshadowed the complex process of civilizational encounters, relegating the civilizational factor to the background, for all these years? If the disintegration of the Soviet Union and collapse of Soviet socialism suddenly rendered the civilizational paradigm the most effective in understanding the dynamic of global politics, what might again render it ineffective thirty years from now? A resurrection of socialism? But then does the author accept that factors that may contribute to such a radical shift tomorrow are active today?

Was the whole phenomenon of colonialism determined civilizationally? In the case of India, Huntington can, of course, teleologically invoke his West-versus-Islam theory for the British had wrested control of India from the hands of the Mughal rulers! Can the rise and fall of fascism be explained in terms of his theory of civilizational clashes? Latin America, according to the author's diagram of intercivilizational alignments, has a rather cordial or less conflictual relation with the West, something akin to the relation between India and Russia or between China and Islam. How would he then explain the continuing American embargo on Cuba? As an anachronistic survival from the Cold War era? And how, for that matter, would he explain the far more predominant intra-civilization clashes within Islam - the Iraq-Iran war, the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, even the beginning of the Gulf War itself?

In fact, while Huntington discards the statist paradigm which takes nation states, national identities and nationalism as its point of departure in favour of his civilizational paradigm, the latter does not really help him throw much of an extra light on international affairs. The only advantage of choosing the clash-of-civilizations model is that it enables him to recommend the best recipe for protecting American hegemony in the face of growing challenges - cement the European and domestic cracks by invoking Christian commonality and an aggressive Westernism and forge the broadest possible alliance by targetting the so-called Confucian-Islamic axis!

The Ultimate Fault-Line
There is indeed another paradigm which Huntington dismisses without even bothering (or daring?) to name it. The pathbreaking paradigm which was brilliantly articulated in a little booklet written a hundred and fifty years ago. Which categorically declared that the history of all hitherto existing society (that is, all written history) is the history of class struggles. Marx and Engels not only established their claim with thorough historical evidence, explaining the onward march of human history through centuries and across continents, through progress and reaction, reforms and revolutions, but in the process they handed down a theory that can also double as a revolutionary guide to action. It is this theory which organised a series of successful revolutions in the century that is now drawing to a close. It is this theory which not only provided the best explanation of imperialism and fascism, but also anticipated world wars and defeated fascism. And even if the Soviet Union has collapsed and the cause of socialism worldwide has suffered an apparent setback, this again is something anticipated in Marxism and it has the courage to probe this reversal and draw necessary lessons.

Now contrast this with the Huntington claim that human history is the history of civilizations. Yet he is evidently not prepared to hazard a civilizational explanation for all but a few decades of the first two millennia! And one shudders to think what would happen if the world were to seriously take his theory of civilizational clashes as a guide to action! Marxism has handed down the dynamic legacy of class struggle, social revolutions and national liberation movements. Huntington's civilizations, by contrast, look more like congealed lumps or arrested blocks of time and space, wading clumsily and cluelessly through the stagnant slush of history!

Huntington singles out religion as the defining characteristic of a civilization. For him religious resurgence is a necessary upshot of modernization both at individual and social levels. Socially, because by raising the strength and confidence of a society, modernisation apparently encourages it to rediscover its religious identity. The end result is the same in the case of individuals though here the modernisation dynamic operates the other way round. By promoting and deepening the individual's alienation in a rapidly changing social milieu, modernisation, we are told, pushes individuals to their religious roots. Huntington also has a curious argument to explain the global religious revival. The return to the sacred, he says, is a response to people's perception of the world as a single place. How would Huntington then explain the fact that for well over fifty years, religion did not at all figure prominently in the Soviet Union, be it at a collective level or at the level of individuals, even as the country sped rapidly along the modernisation route.

It is clearly not proper to talk of an undifferentiated global return to religion. It is patently strange and absurd that in the wake of globalization people should respond to their perception of the world being a single place by rallying under different and mutually conflicting religions! The religious revival in Russia and Eastern Europe makes sense in the backdrop of the disastrous social and economic reality in these countries. Such a social milieu militates in favour of a large-scale return to religion as "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions," as Marx put it way back in 1843. The collapse of socialism followed by a traumatic transition to global capitalism has reinforced human alienation and re-inverted the state and society, and religion has once again staged a major comeback as "an inverted world consciousness ... (in) an inverted world", as the "self-consciousness and self-awareness" of men who have not found (or found and yet lost) their feet in the universe. Such a religious revival cannot certainly be equated to the assertion of Islam which is additionally also a reaction to American aggression, or for that matter to the so-called Hindu revival in India which is powered in the main by an aggressive nationalism of a communal fascist kind.

Civilizationalism Unmasked
Looked at from the point of view of the exploited, oppressed and marginalised majority in, say, a feudal or capitalist society, class struggle is progressive precisely because it rallies this majority in a decisive encounter with the minority of exploiters and oppressors and fights for increasingly higher levels of social progress through successive revolutions. Nationalism can also be progressive precisely because and as long as it is pitted against imperialism. The moment nationalism loses its anti-imperialist edge and context and turns inward it could signify the beginning of fascism. The nightmares begin to come true - thousands of Sikhs are plundered and lynched to death in a single day on the streets of Delhi. And when it takes on a cultural or civilizational appearance, the Babri Masjid gets demolished in a display of medieval vandalism, the air gets thick with communal venom and thousands of Muslims are butchered in communal carnages.

What may perhaps be called civilizationalism thus can never be progressive because the very distinction between prgressive and reactionary elements is alien to it, it seeks to reject or dominate other civilizations in toto. It is one thing to rally against American imperialism or against Western domination; rejecting Western civilization in its entirety is, however, a completely different and foolish proposition. And civilizationalism is bound to become downright reactionary when an ideologue of the dominant civilization invokes it against all other civilizations of the world.

Huntington himself displays the racist and fascist attitudes (reverse racism included) that must invariably be spawned by civilizationalism. This is evident in the section in which he discusses the internal stresses being faced by Western civilization. He calls it a dangerous challenge that "immigrants from other civilizations" reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and to propagate the values, customs, and cultures of their home societies. Does not a Bal Thackeray level the same accusation against the Muslim community in India? This phenomenon, Huntington points out, is most notable among Muslims in Europe, and in lesser degree, among Hispanics in the United States.

He then goes on to raise his accusing finger at multiculturalism: "Historically American national identity has been defined culturally by the heritage of Western civilization and politically by the principles of the American Creed on which Americans overwhelmingly agree: liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property. In the late twentieth century both components of American identity have come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals publicists. In the name of multiculturalism they have attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common Ameriacn culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings." Translated to the Indian context, this again sounds like an L.K. Advani condemning composite culture and what he calls "pseudo-secularism" to preach Hindutva!

Though Huntington mentions only the Hispanics and avoids mentioning the blacks and coloured people, the African-Americans and Asian-Americans, his anti-immigrant attitude stands out quite clearly. In the context of Europe, he even acknowledges the threat of "Africanisation": "If economic development occurs and promotes social mobilization in West and Central Africa the incentives and capacities to migrate will increase, and the threat to Europe of "Islamization" will be succeeded by that of "Africanization." As a fond neo-Malthusian afterthought, he of course hastens to add in a rather chuckling vein: "The extent to which this threat materializes will also be significantly influenced by the degree to which African populations are reduced by AIDS and other plagues..."

With such an arrogant insistence on oneway assimilation, rejection of multiculturalism and deeprooted distrust of other civilizations and immigrants, it is obvious that the so-called remaking of the world order on an intrinsically hostile intercivilizational basis can only make for a shaky truce punctuated by bitter clashes and never pave the way for a real victory of humanity. And acting on a civilizational paradigm, such an outcome can never be avoided, because civilizations, as Huntington tells us, are defined by nature by their "others." Only Marxism has the moral courage and ideological-political conviction to rise against chauvinism and defend progressive elements in all cultures and civilizations and thus uphold a truly internationalist synthesis underpinned by a global anti-imperialist unity of workers and oppressed peoples.

From the Horse's Mouth
With all his arrogant Americanism and its dangerous implications, it must be granted to Huntington's credit that he has managed to deliver major blows at some of the contemporary world's most widely marketed myths. And for us in India, his Americanism may indeed be considered an additional virtue. Given the incorrigibly comprador mindset of our intellectual establishment, do not words emanating from the American academia always carry some extra weight?

Take for instance this oft-repeated myth about the growing obsolescence of nation states. It is true that international investment and capital flows have become relatively more free and unfettered. It is also true that this coupled with the growing economic might of transnational corporations has considerably eroded and circumscribed the traditional eceonomic sovereignty of nation states and reordered their priorities not only in the Third World but also in developed countries. But it is sheer economic determinism to stretch this to a full-fledged theory about the so-called global retreat of the state and then invoke this theory to condone and even glorify the worst instances of sacrifice of national interests and capitulation by the ruling classes. Huntington clearly rejects this theory of obsolescence of nation states and acknowledges the continuing centrality of nation states, if only on a civilizational basis.

Secondly, Huntington is no subscriber to the rotten dogmas and utopian dreams of a durable peace and harmony in the post-Cold War world. He makes it pretty clear that Cold War certainly has not given way to a period of Warm Peace! We may not agree to his theoretical endorsement of the fault-lines between civilizations being the battle lines of future, but in his own way he has only vindicated the Leninist formulation that imperialism means war. "The moment of euphoria at the end of the Cold War generated an illusion of harmony, which was soon revealed to be exactly that," says Huntington, reminding us that "Similar illusions of harmony flourished, briefly, at the end of each of the twentieth century's major conflicts."

He also rejects the "liberal, internationalist assumption that commerce promotes peace." "In 1913," he recalls, "international trade was at record highs and in the next few years nations slaughtered each other in unprecedented numbers." The question therefore arises quite naturally, and Huntington puts it point-blank: "If international commerce at that level could not prevent war, when can it?"

For us in India, Huntington is additionally relevant - and we are grateful to him for this - for the fact that he has laid bare quite graphically the ground where the U.S. imperialists and the forces of an aggressive Hindutva can very well meet and forge a kind of startegic partnership. Given its aggressive thrust against multiculturalism and immigrants from other civilization, the clash theory he invokes for protecting the American hegemony will come in quite handy for the saffron brigade in its domestic drive for transforming India into a Hindu Rashtra. At the same time, the recognition of India as the core state of Hindu civilization and the relevance of closer U.S.-India ties against the Confucian-Islamic common enemy will make for meaningful collaboration between the political custodians of these two core states in the global arena. Can anybody think of any greater "cultural commonality" between the world's two biggest democracies?

 

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