The clash of civilizations: finding ways to ease cultural conflicts.

"Clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war." So concludes Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington in his much talked-about new book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of

By civilization, Huntington means something beyond culture. The religion, language, and customs of the civilization that individuals identify with most closely have more influence on their actions than do their preferences in food or popular entertainment or even their political ideals.

Huntington specifically describes seven major civilizations of the world today:

* The West, meaning that part of Europe where Catholic and Protestant Christianity have traditionally flourished, along with the United States and a few ex-colonies such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

* Orthodoxy, including Russia, modern Greece, and other countries with a tradition of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

* Sinic, including China, as well as nearby societies with strong racial and cultural links to China, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, and many overseas Chinese regardless of their nominal citizenship, who still think of China as their homeland.

* Japan, unique today despite its cultural debt to ancient China.

* Hindu, primarily India and Sri Lanka.

* Muslim, religion-focused, widespread, and growing fast, yet without a leading nation at its core.

* Latin America, with close ties to the West but many independent traits as well.

Understanding these civilizational identities helps us to forecast future trends in global affairs, Huntington believes. He argues that countries should only worry about crises involving the civilization they belong to and ignore disputes that affect only other civilizations. For example, America gains little when it tries to influence China's human-rights policies by easing or tightening access to U.S. goods and markets. But when a conflict involves countries or groups that represent two or more civilizations (as recently happened among "Muslim" Bosnia, "Orthodox" Serbia, and "Western" Croatia), uninvolved nations can often help restrain a combatant who belongs to the same civilization as themselves.

The flashpoints for serious conflict in today's world lie not along purely national borders, but where differing civilizations meet. And it is here, Huntington hopes, that the United Nations and other international agencies will act forcefully to keep civilizational border wars from spreading.

Technological Cultures Need Not Be Western

Huntington rejects the argument that modern culture must be Western because the technology essential to modern urban life first emerged in the West. Key features of Western civilization - such as Catholic and Protestant Christianity, western European languages, the rule of secular law, popular democracy, and individualism - evolved over centuries and were established before the Industrial Revolution began. They may have helped make high technology possible in the first place, but a guided missile or an air conditioner will serve democrat or despot with equal effect.

As America's economic and military power declines relative to that of countries belonging to other civilizations (notably China and the growing community of Muslim nations), the impact of American culture is likely to decline as well. Huntington warns that the West could soon find itself having to defend uniquely Western ideals such as liberal democracy, equality, and individual rights from eroding or even disappearing altogether.

Sociologists suggest that individuals and groups often gain their sense of identity through contrast with others. However much we want to belong, we also want to be different. To satisfy this longing, people instinctively look for signs of difference - even grounds for antagonism - in those they meet. It seems that to be secure we need others we can hate (or at least reject) as well as those we can love. By trying to rationalize away all grounds for having enemies, we risk being left with no friends either and no way to determine who we are or wish to be.

Huntington laments the recent trend among U.S. educators and politicians to promote multiculturalism In his view, America must maintain its Western heritage of language, faith, and cultural role models or it is doomed to disintegrate. "A multicivilizational United States," he writes, "will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations."

Facing up to the differences between civilizations may not be politically correct, but it may be politically necessary. Without accepting the right of other civilizations to exist, global repression or open war is inevitable. Yet, without continued faith in one's own civilization, its ultimate demise is equally sure. Compromise on political issues is relatively easy. But it is hard to compromise on matters involving conflicts of religion, language, or social priorities - and areas of cross-civilizational agreement are surprisingly small.

"The underlying problem for the West," Huntington concludes, "is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam . . . is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world."

In a balanced, multicivilizational world, tolerance and cooperation are the best that can be hoped for. To encourage this, Huntington proposes that the U.N. Security Council be reformed to include representatives from each of the world's major civilizations.

Samuel Huntington argues, from historical precedent, that a universal culture for the world can only be imposed by force. But others might respond, from a futures perspective, that a wholly new path toward cultural rapprochement is beginning to emerge. The Internet, though still in its infancy, already enables contact and exchange in a setting where interest counts much more than identity.

Perhaps as the Internet evolves and spreads, this filtered medium that today makes possible anonymous information searches, role-playing games, and easy, get-acquainted chatter between total strangers can create genuine communities of interest, where individuals from many civilizations blend together without subordinating one to another. Such a meta-civilization might indeed establish working ethics, develop ways of resolving conflicts, and preserve a degree of personal privacy that would deserve to be called Civilization.

Then, instead of Western nations circling wagons to defend their heritage, or Muslim prophets-in-arms forcibly converting hordes of unbelievers, individuals and whole societies might freely explore the heritage preserved by their own and other civilizations, and find both commonalities and alternatives.

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Re-making of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington (Simon & Schuster, 1996) is available from the Futurist Bookstore for $26 ($23.95 for Society members), cat. no. B-2043.