If he had come out in the early 90s with it, it would have been much more impressive). (Then again, Mearsheimer came out relatively late with his analysis on China with his “China can’t rise peacefully” thesis. It’s an economic, and within time, military, juggernaut which will force the post-war Western economic/political system to be changed.īut Huntington dropped the ball on China, which Mearsheimer has not. However, China’s not an ideological opponent the way the FSU was. (India is essentially one giant Switzerland in terms of foreign relations). The main challenge to the West is not the Arab world, which is incredibly weak and getting weaker by the day. Latin America isn’t really an influencer of culture in any real shape, anyway, nor do they have a special economic model that isn’t available elsewhere(and usually working better, such as China). Which is why, if you view it from the world wide perspective, it failed.įor a world wide perspective, does anyone think China or the Latin American countries are obsessed with Islam? You can’t explain what is going on in Asia or Latin America using a fundamental cultural clash. But, of course, his thesis was a thesis which was supposed to cover the world, not the Arab world. So in that sense his thesis has been proved correct. So it is correct in viewing the Arab world but not from a Western/world point of view, where Islam is not a threat and basically irrelevant/weak. However, they are devouring themselves in large part because of religious differences(Sunni vs Shia) – and in this sense – Huntington’s thesis that the primary forces in the post-Cold War era would be religious, applies at the very least in the Arab world in this day. Islam is, after all, the Arabic people’s religion. The Arab world =/= muslim/Islamic world, of course, but it is the cultural heart of the Islamic world. It is dead because the Arab world is largely devouring itself. Nope, it isn’t dead for the reasons you cited. Maybe he is lucky he did not live long enough to see his most famous intellectual contribution so convincingly destroyed. It is hard to square the thin, gawky, bespectacled man I remember from the lecture room with the bloodthirsty, combative theory he helped come up with. Bernard Lewis was feted in the mainstream media, appeared regularly on television, and advised the Bush administration before the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq.įorty years ago, I took a course from Samuel Huntington (and two other professors). Huntington launched it in the magazine Foreign Affairs, as an article that became the single most popular piece in the publication’s history. The evident absurdity of the theory should not hide how influential it was. Where will the now 97-year-old Bernard Lewis locate the unified sinister Islamic juggernaut in the midst of Syria’s terrible civil war? Bernard Lewis, at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs In fact, the Saudis hate the Brotherhood and are propping up the pious general with billions of dollars in aid.Īnd so on across the region. The Muslim Brotherhood might have fit the bill, but it has been outlawed by a pious army general with massive popular support – including from even the more conservative Salafi Muslims.Ĭlash of civilizations theory would also have predicted that Saudi Arabia, the heart of the world of “Islam,” would rally to the Brotherhood’s side. History continues there at a rapid pace, but for now trying to identify a unified, expansionist “Islam” is simply laughable. But the events of the past three years have shown just how preposterous it was. Genuine scholars, of the Mideast and elsewhere, challenged the theory right from the start. Huntington’s most famous statement was “Islam has bloody borders.” “Islam” was also expansionist and prone to violence. Huntington, argued that something they called “Islam” was a monolithic force, which was hostile to the West due to wounded pride and deep feelings of inadequacy. The analysis, which was put forward in the early 1990s by the British-American Orientalist Bernard Lewis and by Harvard professor Samuel P. A half dozen Arab nations have been torn by massive popular uprisings, and no honest person can predict whether the eventual outcomes will be democracy, military rule, or something else again.īut one thing is certain the “clash of civilizations” theory is absolutely and completely dead. It is far too early for a conclusive historical verdict on the wave of uprisings that have swept across the Middle East since a street vendor in Tunisia named Mohamed Bouazizi protested his unfair life by burning himself to death in December 2010. Huntington, at the World Economic Forum in 2004, from Wikipedia
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