The Clash Of Civilization Samuel Phillips Huntington

Résumé du document

Sixteen years ago Gorbatchev announced on television that he resigned as the President of the USSR, the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin and on December 26th 1991, the Supreme Soviet Court recognized the extinction of the Soviet Union: the USSR was no more. After more than fifty years of an ideological conflict between the East and the West, after a harsh struggle between communism and liberalism, the post Cold War world was searching for a new prism to view international relations. The first influential answer was given by Francis Fukuyama in his book, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992. According to him, liberal democracy is a universally acceptable concept which has finally overcome all other ideologies and that the world is now going to embrace it. He so assesses the end of history seen as a series of confrontations between ideologies. Two years later as a reaction to this thesis, the Harvard political scientist, Samuel Phillips Huntington, published in Foreign Affairs the article The Clash Of Civilizations adapted into a book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996.

Extraits

[...] Civilizations have never been a political actor or even an entity on the international scene. Even in multinational institutions, coalitions between countries are more often made of shared economical and political interests. The main purposes for countries remain their territorial security and their economical prosperity, that's why lots of theorists consider Huntington's theory as a bad simplification of real causes of conflicts. The anti occidental speeches of some South East Asia countries− that Huntington takes as examples of non Western civilization hostility against the West− clash with their warm welcoming of Occidental's investments and technologies. [...]

[...] The 1991Gulf War which was a war, more precisely a crusade, of the West against Islam; the conflict between the Muslim country Azerbaijan, supported by Turkey ,and the Christian country Armenia, supported by Russia; and the war in former Yugoslavia during which dozen of Muslim governments has sent over 4000 soldiers into Bosnia to help their Muslim bothers. As for conflicts between countries among a same civilization, they will significantly decrease. The peace between Russia and Bulgaria despite territorial tensions between them after the collapse of the USSR is a first sign of that future peace inside civilization. Huntington gives two examples to show us that this war of civilizations has already begun. [...]

[...] Huntington promotes the creation of coalition of the willing of the West −with the US at the a crusade to defend the West civilization against its menacing enemies. His thesis was also seen as self fulfilling prophesy which by asserting a clash of civilization will entail it. By underlining differences between civilizations it obviously entails the development of tensions between them. It was taken as a justification by anti occidental movements to show their fundamental disparities with the West that they need to fight against its domination over them that it will always want to keep. [...]

[...] These civilizations can include several states like the Latin American one or only a state like the Japanese civilization. The size doesn't matter in Huntington's map; these civilizations are civilizations because, throughout their national and sub-national divisions, countries that composed them are united in same beliefs and views of the future. Among these civilizations Huntington also identifies “torn countries”[8] like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia which have a large numbers of people from different civilizations and which are undoubtedly going to implode. [...]

[...] Vietnam is put together with China in the “Sinic civilization” while Japan, which largely influenced China's culture during years of colonization, forms a separate civilization. His world segmentation is all the more controversial since Huntington forgets that civilizations communicate, exchange, blend and overlap. Islam, which Huntington opposes radically to the West, was however really influential on Western civilization. A great part of the Western‘s mathematic, agriculture or medicine's principles directly come from Muslim intellectuals. Huntington forgets that cultures are built on interactions between people, that most of the times are peaceful. [...]