By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page W17
Not so many years ago, the world made a lot more sense. At the very least you could pretend to understand it. This illusion of comprehensibility was a fringe benefit of the Cold War. Every international skirmish could be explained as part of the epic struggle between democracy (or "the free world," as we put it) and the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat ("the godless Commies"). The prospect of thermonuclear war had a way of clarifying the mind; anyone seeking a framework for thinking about the destiny of humankind could start with, at one extreme, Armageddon. The United States and the Soviet Union enforced their national security with a wonderfully acronymed strategy called Mutual Assured Destruction. The academics described this world as "bipolar." There was a method to the madness. Then the unthinkable happened: One side gave up without anyone firing a shot.The theorists had to scramble in a suddenly unipolar (multipolar?) environment. Things were flying apart, breaking up, disintegrating. Two theories-dramatic, bombastic and immediately controversial-emerged from the convoluted mass of academic jabber. The first idea was triumphalist. It came from an obscure young Washington think tank dweller named Francis Fukuyama. He called his thesis "The End of History," and although that sounded apocalyptic, he was attempting to deliver good news. Fukuyama argued that the historical process that had seen the rise of feudalism, monarchism, communism, fascism and various other isms had come to its conclusion. Democracy and free markets - the core values of Western civilization - had proved victorious over all competing systems. There was no better way to organize human affairs. Game over.But there was this other idea. It was darker. Indeed it sounded like a medieval nightmare. The theorist was a Harvard professor named Samuel P. Huntington-Fukuyama's former teacher, as it happens. Huntington summed up his theory in a dramatic phrase: "The Clash of Civilizations." The Huntington thesis mocked the feel-good notions of the Fukuyama camp. Huntington saw a world of tribes. Tribalism was increasing. Ancient hatreds were rising to the surface. In Huntington's world there was little danger that everyone would join hands around a campfire and sing "Kumbaya." The reason is culture. Culture, said Huntington, is the preeminent force of conflict in the modern world. Politics, economics, ideology and national interests remain important, but culture trumps everything. Culture is bone deep, essential to a person's identity, and transcends national boundaries. Cultural conflict, Huntington said, was erupting along civilizational fault lines. The two theories may suffer from nearly lethal cases of overstatement and oversimplification. For political scientists, however, these are the two touchstones of any debate about the direction of the world. Many people who reject both theories still cite them dutifully-they're the theoretical elephants in the room. The old debate about capitalism vs. communism has been replaced by Fukuyama vs. Huntington. We're deep in the land of theory here, of abstractions and esoterica. Even so, these ideas seem more relevant and potentially more useful since the calamity of September 11. For many Americans, the events of that morning were simultaneously horrifying and perplexing. Who were these people who'd attacked us? Why did they hate us so much? What did they want? As the nation girded itself for a war against terror and sent troops and warplanes to Afghanistan, many of us wondered, too, where this conflict would lead. Was this a three-month war, a three-year war, or would it possibly drag on for the rest of our lives? In such a context, it's not a trivial matter which of the two big ideas is closer to the truth. If Fukuyama is right, the current crisis is a momentary detour in humanity's inexorable march toward global brotherhood. If Huntington is right, you might want to start digging that bunker in the back yard. It was early November, and on the bulletin boards in Coolidge Hall, on the campus of Harvard University, fliers announced a bewildering array of upcoming seminars. Some seemed narrow in their focus ("Unwanted Cesarean Sections in Brazil") and some sounded rather exotic ("Footbinding as Artifact"). Some might have been inspired by current events ("Religion and Misplaced Secularity in South Asia") and some were simply indecipherable ("The Transnational Villagers: Rethinking Determinants of Inequality"). Obviously there were some big ideas here, and some medium-size ideas, and some ideas too fuzzy to have any distinct dimension. In this peculiar universe I found Sam Huntington, in a book-cluttered office on the fourth floor, tending an idea so huge it was heard around the world. Seventy-four years old, tenured, Huntington is a mild-mannered, balding man who, on this day, was wearing a regulation herringbone tweed jacket. I had imagined him as an Old Testament figure, maybe with a bushy white beard, definitely a severe countenance, but in fact he's strikingly bland and bookwormish, a bit reticent, someone who'd rather be reading and writing than giving an interview. (His friend Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the scholarly former senator, says, "I don't use a word like this often, but he's gentle.") On the morning of September 11, Huntington told me, he didn't go to Harvard, but rather went to Logan International Airport and got on a plane. Had it been the wrong plane, this interview obviously would not have been happening, and conspiracy theorists would have had a field day. He landed safely in Washington, and headed off to a board meeting downtown, and soon heard that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers. Did he feel vindicated? No, he said. He felt outrage and horror. The terrorists did not represent Islam-this wasn't an authentic civilizational clash. It just might lead to one. "Osama bin Laden clearly thinks of it as a clash of civilizations. He's declared jihad on the United States, and encouraged Muslims to go kill Americans whenever they get a chance. I think President Bush and the administration have so far been reasonably successful in trying to define it as a war on terrorism," he said. This is properly defined as a war for civilization, he said. "But it certainly could become a clash of civilizations." He thinks the reaction to September 11 was divided along civilizational lines. "Countries with similar cultures immediately identified with us," he said. "Le Monde ran this famous headline: 'We are all Americans now.' Berliners issued this declaration, echoing Kennedy: 'We are New Yorkers.'" As we spoke that afternoon, the news from Central Asia was hardly encouraging. The Northern Alliance had made little progress against the Taliban. There had been a number of anti-American protests in Pakistan and Indonesia. Violence had flared anew in the West Bank and Gaza. And yet in the days and weeks that followed, despite all these tensions, a full-blown cultural conflagration never quite materialized. The unlikely and fragile alliance between the United States and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf managed to survive. Joseph Nye, Huntington's Harvard colleague and friend, says recent events indicate that Huntington's theory is an overstatement: "What we've seen in the last few months, and before that, is a civil war within Islam, rather than a war between Islam and the West." Give Huntington credit: He sounded a warning, a useful one. You can hear an echo of the professor's theory every time President Bush declares that the West is not at war with Islam. The war on terror remains fraught with uncertainty, but as I write, in late November, the Afghanistan operation has turned sharply in favor of the United States and its allies. The Taliban has been routed, and Osama bin Laden is on the run, a poor candidate at this point for a new life insurance policy. There is speculation that the United States will go after Saddam Hussein next. What's certain is that, if and when bin Laden is erased from the picture, gone will be the one man who has openly advocated a clash of civilizations. "These events have divided the whole world into two sides," bin Laden said in a videotape aired in October, "the side of believers and the side of infidels." Benjamin Barber, a University of Maryland political scientist and author of Jihad vs. McWorld, says, "Bin Laden is the primary publicist for Huntington's theory." For Huntington, a clash of civilizations was a worst-case scenario. For bin Laden it was a game plan. Perhaps the most damning assessment of Huntington's thesis comes from Francis Fukuyama. "It had a mischievous impact on the way people around the world thought about these things," Fukuyama says. "I think it's not just wrong, it's also not helpful to world politics. It gives aid and comfort to people who want to reject Western values." Fukuyama operates out of a tidy office on the seventh floor of a Johns Hopkins think tank on Massachusetts Avenue NW. For a big thinker with bold ideas, he's a soft-spoken man who largely avoids the media spotlight. He says he and Huntington remain on friendly terms, even if there have been some tense moments over the years. Huntington and Fukuyama are continuing a controversial tradition of writing universal histories of the human species. Making "sweeping generalizations" is not a character flaw in their case, it's what they do professionally. In the 19th century, a favorite generalization about human affairs was that they reflected "Progress." Almost everyone believed that the world got better over time. Karl Marx, for example, saw civilization marching through a capitalist phase toward an eventual arrival at communism. Technological progress was astonishing: Man could communicate at a distance through wires, he could conquer ancient diseases, he could banish the darkness. As the 20th century arrived, he suddenly could fly. Like Icarus, he got burned. In the second decade of the century the world was plunged into a tragic and largely pointless war. Technology now meant machine guns and mustard gas. Starting with Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West" (1918), universal histories became tales of inevitable decay. Another world war, the Holocaust and Stalin's gulag gave abundant evidence that the human animal remained a brute. In George Orwell's novel "1984," a chilling character named O'Brien tells the captured protagonist, Winston Smith, "Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain . . . If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever." When Robert Nisbet published History of the Idea of Progress in 1980, he could accurately report that the intellectuals of the West didn't believe in Progress and certainly didn't believe in the superiority of their own civilization. Hardly anyone in academia (or the CIA, for that matter) had a clue that the communist world was about to collapse. Fukuyama, however, believed in Progress. In the summer of 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he published in the journal the National Interest an article with the dramatic title "The End of History." "What we may in fact be witnessing," he wrote, "is not just the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the emergence of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. Borrowing the vocabulary of Hegel and Marx, it may be the end of history." He went so far as to suggest that life in the future might be rather dull. "The end of history will be a very sad time . . . In the post-historical period, there will be neither politics nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history." The academics howled with indignation. The man was practically declaring that political scientists would soon need another line of work! But Fukuyama's timing was perfect: The Berlin Wall soon was in rubble, and two years later the Soviet Union imploded. Globalization took off. Suddenly American hamburger chains were selling fries where proles had only recently lined up for stale bread. On the most remote island on the planet you might plausibly find a Madonna fan. Now it was Huntington's turn to roil the academy. He'd been going against the grain his entire professional life. In the 1950s, contradicting conventional wisdom, he argued that arms races don't always lead to wars. In the 1960s, with the antiwar movement surging on campus, he remained hawkish on Vietnam and briefly worked as a Pentagon consultant. He outraged social scientists by declaring that modernization in the Third World would likely lead to instability, coups and corruption. "I try to take a realist point of view," he told me that day in his office. "People have a natural tendency to put a gloss on things." (His conservatism may have been a factor when the National Academy of Sciences twice rejected his nomination for membership-though the biggest factor may have been the academy's generally skeptical view of political science, which isn't a "hard" science like physics or chemistry.) In the summer of 1993, Huntington published in the journal Foreign Affairs his new and alarming thesis. "It is my hypothesis," he wrote, "that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." This was a stunning article. Culture barely registered on anyone's radar in political science departments. Most people were focused on nation states, the "Great Powers," the quest for a 'balance of power,' and so on. The typical professor didn't talk about religion or culture, he just spent a lot of time using the word "hegemony." It was a shock to hear Huntington de-emphasize the nation state and elevate the tribe. Huntington saw cultural conflicts intensifying after the Cold War-it was as though the Cold War had suppressed all those historical tribal passions. In the Balkans, along the fault lines between what Huntington identified as the Western, Orthodox and Muslim civilizations, people were killing one another in wars of ethnic rage. Huntington believed that "Islam" and "the West" (I put the terms in quotations because so many of Huntington's readers have objected to these simplistic labels) had been mired in a condition of "quasi-war" since the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran in the late 1970s. As he wrote in his subsequent book, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," published in 1996 and eventually translated into 29 languages, "If Muslims allege that the West wars on Islam and if Westerners allege that Islamic groups war on the West, it seems reasonable to conclude that something very much like a war is underway." The article and the book were blunt and unsentimental. Some readers caught a strong whiff of cultural supremacy. Barber criticizes Huntington for implying that African Americans and Mexican Americans are not part of Western civilization. Graham Allison, one of Huntington's longtime colleagues at Harvard, says, "He has a history of being intellectually provocative and fearless. His critics might say insensitive." It appears that Huntington is often misinterpreted - his ideas take on a different cast by the time they've sailed halfway around the world. Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University, said that when he went to Morocco and Pakistan about eight years ago, he kept hearing people talk about a certain professor and his new idea. "They were saying the West wants a war with Islam. I would say, how do you come to this conclusion? And they would say, the leading Harvard professor wants a war with Islam," Ahmed recalls. "It was becoming dangerously self-fulfilling." Huntington, for the record, doesn't want a war between civilizations. His book goes to great length to discuss ways that civilizations can peacefully coexist. He says that Western leaders shouldn't meddle in the affairs of other civilizations - that it's dangerous to tell China, for example, what it can and can't do in the South China Sea. Huntington argues that a Muslim nation should have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Still, Muslims felt stereotyped and homogenized by Huntington. There are more than a billion Muslims on the planet and they don't think and act alike. "For Huntington to say that there is an Islamic civilization, he has to impose an unbelievable uniformity on the world of Islam, all the way from Morocco in the west to Indonesia," says Johns Hopkins political scientist Fouad Ajami. Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, points out that millions of Muslims live in the West. If Huntington's thesis is true, he says, "what are we doing here, then?" When I mentioned to Huntington that Roy Mottahedeh, a Harvard colleague, wrote a piece saying that "Clash of Civilizations" seemed to treat Islam like a monolithic entity, Huntington erupted. "He is totally wrong!" he said. Maybe I'm misparaphrasing the article, I started to say, but Huntington was now agitated, and began railing about a recent magazine article. "They are totally wrong!' (Earlier he'd told me, "I can't deal with irrational people.") And yet even some of his friends don't agree with his basic theory. Graham Allison points out, "Most of the conflicts I find in the world today are within civilizations, rather than between civilizations." Huntington is not blind to such events as the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. He wrote that Islam is fractured: "The absence of an Islamic core state is a major contributor to the pervasive internal and external conflicts which characterize Islam." And yet his theory still seems to require that civilizations behave like organisms. He also includes, in his book, maps that he admits are "highly simplified." Islam, for example, covers a big swath of the globe from Africa to Central Asia, with a tiny piece in the Balkans and another section in Indonesia. Civilizations in Huntington's world don't overlap. Huntington, like Fukuyama, has taken everything that happens in the world, every cultural phenomenon, every border war, every technological innovation, every election, every religious edict, every backroom power grab, every economic and political trend - everything under the sun - and condensed it into a tidy little package that folds up and fits in your pocket. It's a significant skill, but it will always generate criticism. The professor sees patterns. He makes simplified models of the world. Complications ensue. After wading into this quagmire of theory, it's fair to call the question. Who's right, Huntington or Fukuyama? Probably both, to a degree. Fukuyama's forces of globalization are inciting Huntington's cultural rage. Barber, a fan of neither theorist, says, "There's a relationship between the globalizing tendencies and the jihadic, tribalistic reaction. They are part of a single phenomenon. It's not that one person's right and one person's wrong." Harvard's Theda Skocpol says, "In an era of global capitalism, cultural distinctiveness can become more important, not less important. Because it's sort of what people have left." There's no doubt that Huntington has been in ascendancy since September 11. His book, five years after publication, has rocketed onto the bestseller lists. Fukuyama has been on the defensive. He says he remains as optimistic as ever, but concedes that there are exceptions to this process that he labeled the End of History: "If you get these Islamic terrorists who claim to hate Western civilization and they attack New York City, clearly you have a clash of cultures," Fukuyama says. But he quickly adds that the September 11 attack is merely a "rearguard action," and won't stop "this great freight train of globalization." And what about Progress? Is that real, or just a 19th-century delusion? There is a powerful argument in favor of Progress from those who study "game theory," a field in which one tries to figure out how rational beings will behave in hypothetical scenarios. Hazel Henderson, a prominent futurist, and journalist Robert Wright have both argued that the logic of game theory explains why human beings increasingly form networks of cooperation and interdependence. Look at Western Europe, historically home to countless vicious wars and ethnic hatreds, now unified to the point of using a common currency. "Globalization is part of the evolution of the human species. That's been our history for over a million years," says Henderson. Huntington, for his part, concedes that Progress exists in the technological and material world, but says it doesn't exist in the moral sphere. "Human nature hasn't changed," Huntington told me by phone one day. "All these physical improvements in material well-being won't change human nature. The same amount of hate will exist in human society." When we spoke in his office, I asked him, "If you had your druthers, would Fukuyama be right?" Meaning, Western civilization would spread around the world and this nasty thing called History would effectively be over. "Oh sure," he answered. "But that's not going to happen." Political prophecy is always chancy. The hot theory today may seem hopelessly naive in two years. No one, not even Huntington, imagined September 11 and its aftermath. "September 11 bloodied us all," says Fouad Ajami. The future always holds surprises. There might even come a day-hard as it is to imagine now-when the world suddenly makes sense again.
Joel Achenbach is a Washington Post staff writer.
Francis Fukuyama holds that -- despite terrorist attacks -- the world may be witnessing "the emergence of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." (Chris Hartlove)
