Ask an American with some knowledge of foreign affairs what he or she thinks of the post-Cold War world. The most likely answer will be: messy, violent and unfriendly to America.Samuel P. Huntington's thesis of clashes and conflicts between various world civilisations appeals to an American more than Francis Fukuyama's vision of a post-Cold War world in which history has `ended' and in which American values and lifestyle have at last triumphed.This is puzzling, for an American with his characteristic narcissism would, one think, go for Fukuyama's world in which American liberalism is embraced the world over than for Huntington's world in which different civilisations clash and in which the Western civilisation is arrayed against all other civilisations. Fukuyama celebrates American victory; Huntington bemoans the decline of the West in a world divided along civilisational lines. This is the strength of Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order.It's not its intellectual rigour but its simple but forcefully presented idea that the post-Cold War world forebodes ill for the West appeals to many in the West. Islam is hostile to western values and institutions and Confucian China challenges western power and influence. These propositions instinctively appeal to an American who sees and feels the weight of Chinese economic power.This book is a more elaborate, nuanced and refined statement of the one Huntington had earlier made in a Foreign Affairs article in the summer of 1993. In the way it's presented in the book, the idea of a world divided along civilisational lines somewhat corresponds to the post-Cold War world that emerged from the ruins of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Since then there have been 40 odd violent conflicts, domestic and international, and many of them have a civilisational dimension.Here is his turbulent world. Major civilisations, each with a core member, are locked in varying degrees of hate and love, friendship and enmity. One should use such words, rather than old fashioned words like conflict and cooperation, for religion is the main factor in civilisational clashes and religion always evokes the feelings of love and hate. Thus the Sinic, Japanese, Western, Eastern Orthodox (the earlier Byzantium world) and Hindu civilisations are the new protagonists on the world stage. Their respective core members are China, Japan, the United States (also France and Germany representing the European part of the western civilisation) and Russia.There is also the Islamic civilisation, spread over Asia, Africa and Europe, and in possession of much of the world's oil. It's marked by a high degree of religious and cultural consciousness, but its one glaring weakness is that it has no core member.Islam is antipathetic to western ideas and institutions and Confucian China challenges western power. There is a tacit cooperation between them, Huntington says, and cites China-Pakistan cooperation on nuclear matters as evidence of this cooperation between religious Muslims and atheist Chinese communists.Obviously, the Clinton Administration does not see the world as Huntington does; otherwise it would have looked to ``Hindu'' India as a principal counter-weight to Islam and Confucian China. Our bomb lobby has been eagerly wanting to play the role of Washington's junior ally in a strategy of Sinic-Islamic containment in return for American acquiescence in our nuclear programme. Yugoslavia was another site of the clash between the Eastern Orthodox, Islam and Western Christian religions.Huntington's analysis of this religious clash is convincing, but again he is at a loss to explain the rationale of Clinton's policy towards former Yugoslavia. Russia as the supreme representative of Byzantium Christianity backed Serbia, though later approved of NATO air strikes against Bosnia. The Islamic states, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others supported with arms and money the Bosnian Muslims. The German and French Governments, though not their people, were vaguely for a multi-ethnic Bosnia, but were decidedly against the creation of an exclusively Muslim Bosnia.What puzzles and dismays Huntington is why his government and the American people and the media were so completely for the Muslims of Bosnia. Was it the characteristic Anglo-Saxon sympathy for the underdog? Or, was it, as I think, out of a distinct American bias for multi-ethnic, plural states over states based on sectarian religious beliefs and narrow ethnic loyalties? A multi-ethnic Bosnia was normatively more desirable for the Americans than a Bosnia cruelly cut into Muslim, Serb, and Croat Bosnias.America itself is a large assorted salad bowl or a rainbow of various shades and colours. Support for ethnic and religious militancy can rebound on you, Clinton must have thought. This leads to a point of enormous importance which Huntington alludes to but does not fully discuss: the future of multi-ethnic societies at a time of fierce search for narrow religious and ethnic identities. As he rightly says, there is a global identity crisis and because there is this crisis, civilisations have acquired greater salience than states for the study of international politics. Modern state as a form of political organisation is distinctly a product of western modernity. It's constituted on an assumption, increasingly questioned everywhere, that individuals regardless of their religious beliefs and ethnic loyalties can live together as citizens in a given state. Is the state, particularly a multi-ethnic state, now nearing its end?.Yugoslavia and the USSR died because they could not withstand the fragmenting forces let loose by worldwide religious and ethnic upsurge. Modernity is dead and religion is reviving, Jacques Delors, former President of the European Union, told me last winter in Paris. Should this happen, then the multi-everything United States could also go the Yugoslav or the Soviet way. If this is what clash of civilisations entails, then everything must be done to prevent it. The state without restraints on its power is indeed oppressive but a society without the state can easily descent into barbarity. Wars between old fashioned states are less destructive than clash of civilisations.The writer is a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
