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« Back to When Cultures Collide main page   Transcript for: When Cultures CollidePBS’ “THINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG”#1005 “When Cultures Collide” Broadcast 1/24/2002 At Pfizer we’re spending nearly five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, and the Dodge Jones Foundation. Ben Wattenberg: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. In Nineteen Ninety-three, Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington rocked the realm of political theory. In an article for Foreign Affairs and a subsequent book, Huntington predicted that after the Cold War, global conflicts would no longer focus on ideologies, such as capitalism or communism. Rather, he said, the world would likely return to old battles rooted in culture. The looming possibilities of a clash of civilizations would define the future. Moreover, he named names stating that western civilization, including America, was in decline and that Islamic and East Asian civilizations were on the march. Now nearly a decade later and after Nine Eleven, Think Tank asks Sam Huntington how does his theory of The Clash hold up? The topic before the house: When Cultures Collide. This week on Think Tank. Ben Wattenberg: Sam Huntington, welcome to Think Tank, and I just wonder if we could begin with a brief biographical self-portrait. Where were you born, etcetera? Sam Huntington: Well I was born in New York City, Ben, and grew up there, went to the public schools. Ben Wattenberg: Stuyvesent. Sam Huntington: Stuyvesent, indeed. And got a scholarship and to Yale, and then served a brief while in the United States Army. Ben Wattenberg: Was that during World War II? Sam Huntington: It was right after World War II. And then went out to the University of Chicago for a year and picked up an MA and then to Harvard and picked up a Ph.D. and taught at Harvard until they refused to promote me to tenure. And went down to Columbia and was there for four years until Harvard saw the error of its ways and….. Ben Wattenberg: And came groveling back. Sam Huntington: Yes, and begged me to come back. And I’ve been there all the time since, except when I was working in the government. Ben Wattenberg: Can you give us an equally short take, just to begin our conversation, on the thesis of The Clash of Civilizations? Sam Huntington: Well I think the essence of the argument is that during the Twentieth Century and the Cold War, ideology was a key factor in international relations. The wars were between fascists, communists and liberal democratic countries. Ideology is… Ben Wattenberg: That’s ‘liberal’ in the Olde English sense. Sam Huntington: That’s right, liberal democracies. Ben Wattenberg: Right, okay. Sam Huntington: And now ideology has faded from the scene and people no longer identify with ideologies; they identify with their cultures and cultures may exist at a very local level, but there are also broader cultural entities, and the broadest cultural entities are civilizations. And the argument of the book is that the most dangerous conflicts in the future will be between states and groups from different civilizations because these have a potential to escalate. And also… Ben Wattenberg: Because they’re dragging their allies with them. Sam Huntington: Exactly, exactly. Following September eleventh, how did the world divide in terms of cultures and civilizations? The countries that are closest to us culturally--Britain, Canada, Australia--immediately came forward, sent military forces to work with ours. The reaction in Europe, part of Western civilization as we are, was again enthusiastic sympathy and expressions of support. And then you have countries in the other civilizations, in some cases being rather surprisingly cooperative, like Russia. But still… Ben Wattenberg: And now India. Sam Huntington: And China. But at a more modest level. And then we have the Muslim world which clearly is very ambivalent about what happened to us and what has happened in Afghanistan. And so they divide very much along civilizational lines. Ben Wattenberg: Well they do and they don’t. I mean, if you put, as you do in your book, you put Russia in a separate civilization; you put India in a separate civilization. And now we have the situation where they’re marching in lock-step… Sam Huntington: Well, lock step is an overstatement. Ben Wattenberg: Well. but neither is France marching in lock-step. Sam Huntington: They are cooperating with us because we have defined this situation now as a war on terrorism. The interesting question is, to what extent is this a lasting coalition against terrorism, and to what extent will it dissipate. Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Let me just say one thing about this book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. And you’ve told me that the last part is very important. It is a mind-blowing book. It is a mind-expanding book. It is a delightful book to read. It gets into nooks and crannies of the world that I never dreamed existed. However, you say in your book that the West is in decline. You say that many times. That East Asia is ascendant and Islam is ascendant. Since you wrote the article and then the book, Indonesia has come pretty close to collapsing. We had, with the fall of the Thai Baht, we had something called Asian contagion, which shook the rafters of the Asian economies and Japan has been in a dozen year slump now from which it may never emerge, if you listen to some economists. Islam has just been pulverized, part of it, and it seems to me it’s very much worried about its state in the world because of the actions of a militant minority but still a powerful force. And America and the West have sort of reestablished the law west of the Pecos. I mean they have really jumped into this thing, Just getting to that specific point. On the one hand you can say, well Nine Eleven was a civilizational conflict. But the results of it don’t seem to be in keeping with what you wrote. Sam Huntington: Well, first of all, I think one has to look at this as I tried to do it in the book in terms of a longer historical perspective. What could be considered the high point of the West was right after World War I, when Western countries ruled a huge portion of the world. And the world was colored, in large part, colored red as the result of the British Empire. And that has faded. Ben Wattenberg: Well it has faded, but you mark that as an indicator, as you just did, of the peak of Western civilization. Sam Huntington: Well of the peak of the political influence, rule of western civilization Ben Wattenberg: But, again, however, that is not a trend in motion. That is historically a one-time event. There is no more de-colonization to go through. Sam Huntington: Well that’s true. Ben Wattenberg: On the other hand, the West saw the addition of a number of Eastern European countries and possibly Russia after the Cold War so this…. Sam Huntington: Well, addition to what? Ben Wattenberg: To Western Civilization. Sam Huntington: Oh, come on. Russia isn’t part of Western civilization in any meaningful sense of that term. Ben Wattenberg: Well, but how about Hungary? Sam Huntington: Sure. Ben Wattenberg: How about the Czech Republic and Slovakia? Sam Huntington: Sure. Look, not the only criterion in defining a civilization, but probably the most important one is religion, as I point out in the book. And Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland are Catholic countries and they’ve always thought of themselves as part of the West. But once you get to the Orthodox or Muslim world, those are very different worlds. Ben Wattenberg: You have a sort of a unitary concept of the West where America and Europe, at least Christian Europe as opposed to Orthodox Christian Europe, is a unit. If you look, I’m writing about demographic stuff and Europe’s birth rate and fertility rates are just going off a cliff. And nice allies to have, yet they may just not be terribly influential in years to come. Sam Huntington That’s true. That’s part of the decline of the West. Ben Wattenberg: Yes, but America in the meanwhile, has almost three hundred million people now, we’re gonna be four hundred million people by the middle of the twenty… Sam Huntington: Maybe. Ben Wattenberg: Well, I think that’s pretty well baked in the cake. I mean, but in any event, isn’t America the sole super power? And isn’t it going to remain so for the foreseeable future? Sam Huntington: Yes, there is one super power and six or seven major powers, major regional powers. And I have argued that the two key characteristics of this structure of world power is that on any issue of global significance, almost any issue of global significance, the super power can prevent action by almost any combination of other major powers. But if the super power wants to accomplish something, it has to have the cooperation of some of those major regional powers. And those other major regional powers, with the exception of the European Union, all come from different civilizations. Ben Wattenberg: You make the case that it’s not only wrong-headed but dangerous to consider what we call ‘Western values’ as universally appealing. I don’t buy that. I seem to think that my sense of the way the world works is that when given half a chance, people really do want liberty. Sam Huntington: I think people do want liberty, whether they want Western culture or whether they want Westernization is something else. And what form of liberty they want is very important. And what key concept, particularly, in the United States, but also in Western civilization generally, is individualism. And most of the world doesn’t look at that as a prime value. They put much greater emphasis upon collectivities. People have the individual rights that are given to them by their tribe or their state or whatever. Ben Wattenberg: When you say that, it sounds to me as if you’re saying ‘things don’t change.’ Because you keep going back to these old historical fault lines, yet we have seen in recent decades, I mean you look at the Freedom House numbers and there are more and more democratic societies. You look at the Heritage numbers on economic liberty, market societies. And these are both sort of hallmarks of Western civilization. And it goes up and up and up and up in…into well, China. Sam Huntington: The Chinese really had market economy at a primitive level, of course, long before Western civilization existed. Ben Wattenberg: Well but their picking up of the market economy now is in some large measure due to the fact that they want to play in the Western game. They really have to. Sam Huntington: Well they want to play in the global game. And everybody has recognized that a state-run economy is not a very efficient way to run an economy. I have never said there isn’t change. I argue in my book that as civilizations evolve, interact with each other, change, of course there’s change. And particularly the emergence of this multi-civilizational world where people in different civilizations, who historically have been pretty much isolated from each other, are now interacting with each other in a very intense fashion, in a way which never happened before. Ben Wattenberg: But I think, and I guess this is the argument made by your former student, the apostate Francis Fukuyama in his End of History, that there is this tendency going on around the world, irregular surely and with lots of bumps in the road, but that the world is picking up the views and values of Western thought. Sam Huntington: What I think we have to get back to is a basic distinction, which I elaborate at some length in the book, which is the difference between Westernization and modernization. Ben Wattenberg: Yes. That’s important. Sam: All the world, obviously, or almost all the world certainly, wants to modernize, develop, become more prosperous and so forth. But that does not necessarily mean that they want to adopt Western culture. And in many cases, don’t want to adopt Western values. Ben Wattenberg: Well, tell me the hallmarks of Western culture. Sam Huntington: Well I mentioned one: individualism. There’s the pluralism, which has existed in the West as it has in no other civilization really. The idea of representation as existed in the West, and the distinction between the religious sphere and the political sphere. These are some of the distinctive characteristics of a Western civilization. Any one of these can be found in other civilizations, but the peculiar combination is unique to the West and this is the reason why, three or four centuries ago, the West took the lead in modernization and in economic development. Ben Wattenberg: I don’t think that has stopped. And yet it seems to me that tendency is continuing, it is expanding. Sam Huntington: What tendency? Ben Wattenberg: The tendency of people to look at those, and to adapt, those hallmarks of Western civilization. Freedom of expression, freedom of religion let’s put aside for a minute because that’s very much at issue. But democratic representative government. India, I believe, is a federal sort of a situation, not exactly like the United States, but it’s democratic, it’s been democratic. They picked up English law, the whole idea of so-called free market economics, of extensive global trade. And this is why we are called ‘the great Satan’ in Iran is because people really do like individualism. And they want individual liberty, notwithstanding the fact that their leaders……. Sam Huntington: Look, Ben, Ben, you make these statements ‘people like individualism.’ Show me some hard data that will support that. Now I look through the things, say, the World Values Survey, which has been done three times so far in the past couple of decades looking at different countries and it’s very hard to find much evidence of that sort of change. Or look at the surveys concerning individualism and the extent to which a society’s peoples endorse individualism. It’s, again, hard to find much in the way of change over time. Ben Wattenberg: Does voting count? It’s individual action to shape their own destiny. Sam Huntington: Well, there has certainly been a spread of democratic regimes around the world. I think it is fair to say democracy has taken root successfully in countries where there was a significant Western influence. And the more dubious cases… Ben Wattenberg: Mostly the British colonies. Sam Huntington: Former British colonies among them. But also the more dubious cases involve civilizations which, like Latin America, may be closely linked to the West, but democracy is, we know, is on rather shaky ground there. And then you move into the Orthodox world and democracy is on an even shakier ground. I think in the countries you mentioned earlier, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, democracy is on a very safe ground. But once you move a little bit further East to Ukraine, let’s say, a country which in many respects is rather similar to Poland, you get an entirely different picture. Ben Wattenberg: Russia’s a democracy. I mean it’s got an elected, albeit very powerful, strong president. He’s aligned himself, at least for the moment, very strongly with the West, as that’s where he sees he can make things happen. And the other thing is this - and then I want to come back to America – but just back in the days when there was a United States Information Agency, which we rather foolishly got rid of I think, they used to make the case that the majority of Muslims in the world by now had some form of democratic governance. It’s a very interesting case because I heard it and I said, “No, no, this can’t be right.” But you know the big Muslim countries are not the Arab countries. Sam Huntington: Sure, of course not. Ben Wattenberg: They’re Indonesia which has a… Sam Huntington: Now has. Ben Wattenberg: Now has democratic, something like it. Bangladesh which has something like a democratic government. Pakistan had it for a while and who knows where it’s going. So… Sam Huntington: There’s a very real distinction between electoral democracy and liberal democracy. Ben Wattenberg: I understand. Sam Huntington: And Western democracy is liberal democracy. And I don’t think anybody would say that the countries you’ve mentioned were liberal democracies. Now maybe a liberal democracy will follow the introduction of elections, but that hasn’t happened yet. And law and order and the protection of civil rights, freedom of the press, minority rights, and a rule of law that you can trust… Ben Wattenberg: And of course, you have it in the Philippines. Sam Huntington: …are missing in most of these societies. Ben Wattenberg: Okay, now let’s talk about America because that’s what I really want to talk about. You seem to indicate in the book and in some other things that you have written that in these perilous times, and I would agree these are perilous times, as you have predicted that there would be perilous times, that internally America doesn’t have the spine and the backbone to sort of weather this storm. The case is made that America is internally weak, that we’ve lost our moral compass, that we have high crime rates, that we have the other form of multi-culturalism: Balkanization, separatism, and there’s a high rate of illegitimate births, and that this weakens us. Sam Huntington: Well I think those have been real problems in our society. I don’t see how anybody could deny that. But I also have argued, and I mention this, I think I argue this in the book, but I know I’ve argued it in writing somewhere that the great characteristic of the United States, because we are such an open, pluralistic, competitive society, that when we develop problems, whether it’s crime or birth control or education or poverty or whatever, we engage in a national debate. The press, political parties, intellectual leaders come up with solutions and, as a result, several of the problems which you mentioned have certainly been reduced in their severity now because of the nature of American society. And I think that is the great strength of this country. And I think that characteristic, that is more characteristic of American society than of a society anywhere else. Ben Wattenberg: Including .our Western colleagues in Europe. Sam Huntington: Yes, yes definitely because they are also are liberal democratic regimes but they don’t have anything like the openness and the pluralism that we have. Ben Wattenberg: Do you think there’s a good chance that there will be a war—as in real war--between civilizations, or is this more likely to be an on-going contest for ideas and loyalties? Sam Huntington: Well it certainly will be the latter. It could be the former. We have all around the border of the Muslim world, you have Muslims fighting non-Muslims. We also have been on the verge of a major inter-state war between Pakistan and India. And that strikes me as a very dangerous situation as to how that might escalate in terms of involving other societies. And as I point out in the book, I think a major potential danger would be a conflict between China and the United States, because there are very real issues separating China… Ben: That’s really the big one, isn’t it? Sam: …and the United States. And while the Chinese have been cooperating with us, more or less, on the terrorist front, there is the big issue of who’s going to be the dominant power in East Asia. Japan was once. We have been for the past fifty years. China was the dominant power for many, many centuries and the Chinese, quite naturally, think they ought to resume that position. Ben Wattenberg: Will America and the West prevail? Sam Huntington: I think America will remain, by far and away, the single most powerful country. The West will remain the primary civilization. But I think there are powerful indigenous forces in many societies, not all societies, that are appealing to local traditions and values and customs and rejecting what they view as the cultural imperialism and arrogance of the West. And people have been asking now for the past several months, ‘why do they hate us so?’ And that is a question which reflects this reaction against the West and against our power. Ben Wattenberg: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Sam Huntington, thank you very much for joining us. And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via e-mail. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036. Or e-mail us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS on line at www.pbs.org, and please, let us know where you watch Think Tank. At Pfizer we’re spending nearly five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, and the Dodge Jones Foundation. This is PBS. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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