The clash within civilisations

The important conflicts today take place inside cultural-religious blocs, not between them.

- Janan Ganesh

Before he died in 2008, Professor Samuel Huntington could have said “I told you so” without too much dissent.

The US was then several years deep into its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such violence between the Western and Islamic worlds seemed to vindicate the Harvard scholar, who had once segmented the globe into civilisations and predicted a clash among them. As our troubled millennium got going, the word “prescient” followed him around like an extra name.

It is crass to speak of such a thing as a well-timed death. Had he lived to this day, however, Prof Huntington would be taking as much flak as poor Dr Francis Fukuyama does for getting the world all wrong. The important conflicts now are within, not between, civilisations. The C-word has seldom been so popular (the US government talks about Europe’s “civilisational erasure”) and so useless.

Look at the world’s trouble spots. The war in Ukraine is a war within the “Orthodox” Christian civilisation, at least as Prof Huntington classified it. The periodic standoff between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan is another example of a tussle inside a cultural bloc - what Prof Huntington called the Sinosphere.

A candidate for the deadliest current conflict on earth, Sudan’s civil war does not pit one coherent religious or cultural group against another, as such. Even the external patrons of the combatants, which include the United Arab Emirates on one side and Egypt on the other, are mostly from within the Islamic world rather than distinct civilisations.