Said's Possible Reading of Huntington
Adrian Johnston (rdm9298@jeeves.la.utexas.edu)
Fri, 22 Sep 1995 12:00:32 -0500
The globe is a limited space occupied by a finite and definitively
identifiable number of essential "core groups" which are bound to conflict
with each other given their partioned nature and incompatible world-views.
Compromise/understanding between "cultures," a complication-of or blurring
between the lines of identity set forth under the rubric of "civil-
izations," etc. are all ruled out by Huntington's conceptualization of
international relations. For Huntington, the world is now locked into
being a place where the West (already assumed to be a single, consolidated
identity/entity in and of itself), separated by an unbridgeable gap from
those irksome "others" (Muslims, Confucians and similar broad labels), will
find itself struggling against a wide array of dark and suspicious inter-
national conspiracies spawned by inherently hostile foreigners. Said
would definately perceive Huntington's civilization-model as the voicing
of paranoid fears resulting from the West's traditionally imperialist
stance towards what it sees as its irrational others. By continuing to
employ an opposition between "Us" (the West) and "Them" (the Orient, the
Rest, etc.), Huntington is doomed to "recontextualize" imperial/colonial
experiences. Said would probably develop several critical issues around
Huntington's position: one, boiling-down macro-level relations to a
narrow number of civilizational identities involves an operation of
essentialization (frighteningly similar to the operation that permits a
type of racism by simplifying the Other within an inflexible category) that
isn't so much "true" as reflective of a biased Western picture of alterity;
two, Huntington's position is far from objective, but instead exhibits his
direct (but perhaps unconscious) entanglement within the context of a
Western experience of the world that involves colonial/imperialist terms;
and three, that Huntington's paradigm becomes a dangerous self-fulfilling
prophecy (if "the West" treats those it marginalizes as stereotypical
character-types inherently hostile to itself, then "They" will react
accordingly; notice how Islamic fundamentalists readily embrace a con-
spiratorial group-identity created for them by authors such as Huntington,
who ironically fears these very groups). In the end, even though
Huntington's model may accurately reflect the mainstream thinking
predominating Western thinking on the global status quo (and even may make
itself true through a perverse process where it imposes its own reality on
events vis a vis its concrete effects/applications), Said would see "The
Clash of Civilizations" as an ugly hangover from nineteenth century Wsetern
imperialist attitudes towards "The Orient" that fails to struggle towards
an alternative to conflictual clashes. In fact, Huntington's stance makes
an alternate route impossible, assuming that one grants that it is capable
of generating the conflicts it claims only to describe.
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