The "clash" thesis: war and ethnic boundaries in Europe.

• Author: Marfleet, Philip
• Position: Part II: myths: framing the problem

THE THEORY OF GLOBAL CULTURAL conflict began as an attempt to find new external Others for an American society bereft of its old enemies. Collapse of the Stalinist states removed at a stroke the focal concern of U.S. foreign policy for over four decades. It also had serious implications for domestic society, removing a key ideological reference point for American national identification. Samuel Huntington, author of the "clash" thesis, had observed frankly: "How will we know who we are if we don't know who we are against?" (1) His theory of global conflict provided a new framework for U.S. strategists and a whole series of potential enemies against which America could find self-identification.

The clash thesis was built around the idea of threats to the U.S. as a world power and to American society as a national collective. But ten years after it first appeared in the pages of Foreign Affairs the theory has had a major impact elsewhere. In Europe it has been seized by many politicians, academics and media people not only as a means of understanding relations between the European Union and its neighbors but as an approach to ethnic relations within European society. The events of 11 September 2001 and the conflicts that followed have been interpreted as confirmation of the idea of intractable cultural conflict at the global level and as a means of delineating ethnic boundaries within domestic society. The influence of the clash theory has been such that one prominent European politician has described himself as a local version of Samuel Huntington. (2)

CULTURAL DIFFERENCE

Huntington's thesis, which appeared in 1993, (3) was soon supported and embellished by co-thinkers including Charles Kranthammer, Daniel Pipes, Robert Kaplan, Martin Peretz and Morton Zuckerman. (4) By the mid-1990s a discourse of global conflict had emerged within which these and other writers borrowed extensively from the original author. The collective view was gloomy: despite defeat of the Communist threat and the proclamation in the late 1980s of a New World Order under U.S. leadership, the world was not behaving according to the Washington script. Conflict was everywhere and was now to be explained by reference to hostilities rooted in cultural difference. Even Huntington's most ardent admirers have viewed the thesis in this light: Robert Kaplan, for example, sees it as an analysis of American security needs set "in the most tragic, pessimistic terms." (5)

U.S. President George Bush senior had argued that the end of the Cold War would bring changes of "biblical proportions." (6) He announced "a new world order--where diverse nations are drawn together in a common cause, to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind." (7) Bush's Secretary of State, James Baker, welcomed "an era full of promise, one of those rare transforming moments in world history." (8) For his successor in the Clinton administration there were heroic possibilities: Warren Christopher declared, "We stand on the brink of shaping a new world of extraordinary hope and opportunity." (9) No sooner had the new order been proclaimed however than it became clear that conflict and disorder were becoming more general worldwide. In the mid-1990s the Office of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) observed that the end of the Cold War had generated a sense of optimism that local conflicts would subside:

With the rivalry of the superpowers over, it was thought, many conflicts would be resolved ... In the event, precisely the opposite has happened. Relatively successful ... peace settlements ... now appear to be the exception rather than the norm, and they have been overshadowed by a crop of new and very large humanitarian emergencies ... (10)

Between 1989 and 1994 there were 94 conflicts in 64 locations across the World. (11) The vast majority concerned civil strife--they were intra-state conflicts rather than the state-on-state battles associated with the Cold War. Many were in economically vulnerable regions such as Central America, West Asia, the Horn of Africa, Central Africa and West Africa. Here and elsewhere many states were fragile structures strongly marked by the experience of colonialism and vulnerable to even modest changes in the economic environment. Movements in commodity prices and in the value of local currencies, and changes in local and global trading regimes, could have devastating effects. They were often trigger mechanisms for economic collapse followed by destabilization of the state and factional or sectarian conflict that produced a crisis of displacement involving vast numbers of people. (12)

This state of disorder violated the principles of global development--the "Washington consensus"--according to which greater exposure to the world market would bring economic and social advance and general stability. On this view prosperity and harmony were to be achieved by adopting reform programmers devised by transnational financial institutions--the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Yet after almost two decades of the latters' structural adjustment policies many economies were in fact in a parlous state and conflicts were intensifying and generalizing, so that whole regions such as the Horn of Africa and Central West Africa were experiencing massive destabilization. The complementary theories of globalization and New World Order had anticipated increased world harmony: the reality was a more unequal and much more unstable system.

ANARCHY

Huntington's theory was primarily a means to account for disorder by identifying essential or base cultural characteristics as the root of both local and global conflicts. "The West" was a norm against which cultural blocs should be identified--read off by measuring them against the reference point of sociocultural and political formations in contemporary North America. Regions which failed to conform to the globalist development model were depicted as dysfunctional and threatening because of their exotic beliefs and practices. These views were sharpened in the work of some of Hun Huntington's admirers. Writing in 1994 Kaplan offered a warning of "The Coming Anarchy." In the dislocation of life in West Africa he saw an inability of local society to manage its affairs and a warning to the world at large:

West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental and societal stress, in which the criminal emerges as the real "strategic" danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders and the empowerment of private armies, security firms and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. (13)

For Kaplan world integration was under threat from such regions and their "Juju Warriors"[sic]. (14) Displaced rural people, he argued, would threaten the sophistication of urban life with the crudities of "culture and tribe." (15) They would seek to move northwards and westwards, breaking through borders and migratory controls, "bringing their passions with them [and] meaning that Europe and the United States will be weakened by cultural disputes." (16) Soon "our civilization" would be under the influence of the malign elements on view in West Africa and other regions of the non-Western world.

If Huntington was a pessimist, Kaplan advanced a truly dystopian vision. World stability was to be threatened by Africa's teeming masses, by its disease and systemic conflict. Meanwhile the Islamic world was "a vast and volatile realm" seeking revenge on the West. (17) Everywhere cultural blocs would be set against one another: future maps of the world were certain to be an "ever-mutating representation of chaos." (18)

EUROPE AND THE CLASH

By the mid-1990s the idea of a world moving towards systemic cultural conflict had been absorbed by many leading European politicians and academics. In Europe the notion of civilizational conflict seemed especially appropriate to those who wished to accelerate the integration of states of the European Union (EU). This complex project involved harmonization of policies among states which had long been rivals and often enemies. In each state nationalist politicians campaigned against the EU, narrowing the room for maneuver of "Europhiles" and of the senior EU functionaries (the "Eurocrats") who wished to advance the project. Within a tangle of disputes over the future of the Union member governments found few issues upon which they could agree. One area that did offer effective collaboration was that of migration policy, especially in relation to the movement of people from Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

I have argued elsewhere that Huntington's theory of cultural clash was congenial to those who wished to mobilize a consensus against immigration and to construct a series of legal obstacles to entry to the EU--the agreements which became known collectively as Fortress Europe. (19) At a moment when closure of Europe to most migrants was a pressing concern, Huntington's analysis of global events provided a context within which to set out the general rationale for EU security and integration. His cultural borderlines closely followed the territorial frontiers of an expanded Union, which were being strengthened against the entry of unwanted immigrants. In his early formulation of the "clash" thesis Huntington had argued that "The European Community rests on the shared foundation of European culture and Western Christianity." (20) The implication was clear: those not of Europe--not of a particular Christian tradition--did not possess the cultural characteristics which should give them a place in Europe and should be excluded. Huntington's focus upon Islam and its "bloody borders" and upon the Mediterranean as a cultural "fault line" seemed to complement the aims of EU strategists and soon...