In the late 1980s, the communist world collapsed, and the Cold War international system became history.
It is in this context that Samuel Huntington wrote, The Clash of Civilisations.
This seminal book is an expansion of his 1993 Foreign Affairs article, where he predicted a new post-Cold War world order in which the rivalry of the superpowers would be replaced by the clash of civilisations.
‘In 1917, as a result of the Russian Revolution, the conflict of nation states was supplemented by the conflict of ideologies.’
Prior to the end of the Cold War, he argued, societies were divided by ideological differences, such as the struggle between democracy and communism. But now, with the end of the Cold War, ‘…cultural communities are replacing Cold War blocs, and the fault lines between civilisations are becoming the central lines of conflict in global politics.’
Huntington believed that the West’s victory in the Cold War had produced not triumph but exhaustion. ‘The willingness of other societies to accept the West’s dictates or abide its sermons is rapidly evaporating, and so is the West’s self-confidence,’ he argued. The term the West, Huntington explained, ‘…is now universally used to refer to what used to be called Western Christendom. The West is thus the only civilisation identified by a compass direction and not by the name of a particular people, religion, or geographical area.’ The West, however, ‘is a civilisation in decline’. As Huntington pointed out:
The West is declining in relative influence; Asian civilisations are expanding their economic and political strength; Islam is exploding demographically with destabilising consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbours and non-Western civilisations generally are reaffirming the value of their own cultures.
Huntington contended that global politics was being re-configured along cultural lines. ‘In coping with identity crisis, what counts for people are blood and belief, faith and family.’ In a very fluid world, peoples and nations would be seeking identity and security. Accordingly, peoples with similar cultures would come together and peoples with different cultures would come apart. Alignments once defined by ideology would give way to alignments defined primarily by culture and civilisational identity. Political boundaries would be redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious, and civilisational.
In this post-Cold-War era, Huntington’s main thesis argues that new patterns of conflict would occur along different cultures, and that patterns of cohesion would be found within the cultural boundaries. ‘In the emerging world, the relations between states and groups from different civilisations will not be close and will often be antagonist,’ Huntington wrote. That being so:
‘The increased extent to which people throughout the world differentiate themselves along cultural lines means that conflicts between groups from different civilisations become central to global politics.’
Huntington also contended that the ‘clash of civilisations’ would be particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims. While the West’s primacy eroded and much of its power simply evaporated, Muslims in massive numbers would simultaneously turn toward Islam ‘as a source of identity, meaning, stability, legitimacy, development, power and hope’. ‘The Islamic revival’ was primarily ‘a product of the West’s declining power and prestige’ according to him. ‘In its political manifestations, the Islamic Resurgence bears some resemblance to Marxism, with scriptural texts, a vision of the perfect society, commitment to fundamental change, rejection of the powers that be and the nation state,’ he stated.
Huntington also argued that ‘the central elements of any culture or civilisation are language and religion’. Religion, he explained, ‘…is a central defining characteristic of civilisations, and … the great religions are the foundations on which the great civilisations rest.’ Hence his insightful observation that, ‘The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.’
Of course, Western leaders still like to argue that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamic extremists. These leaders ‘allege that the Muslims involved in the war are a small minority whose use of violence is rejected by the great majority of moderate Muslims. According to Huntington, ‘This may be true, but evidence to support it is lacking. Protests against anti-Western violence have been totally absent in Muslim countries.’ After all, as he correctly explained:
Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise. The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th Century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relations between Islam and Christianity.
What is more, as Huntington pointed out:
Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peacefully with their neighbours. The question naturally rises as to whether this pattern of late-20th Century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups in equally true relations between groups from other civilisations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilisation. The evidence is overwhelming.
Huntington then proceeds to explain that the conflict between Islam and the West is mostly a product of difference, ‘particularly the Muslim concept of Islam as a way of life transcending the uniting religion and politics versus the Western Christian concept of the separate realms of God and Caesar’. And yet, not even the extraordinary secularisation of the West would ameliorate the conflict, and quite to the contrary. ‘Increasingly,’ Huntington explained:
Muslims attack the West not for adhering to an imperfect, erroneous religious, which is nonetheless a ‘religion of the book’, but for not adhering to any religion at all. In Muslims eyes Western secularism, irreligiosity, and hence immorality are worse evils than the Western Christianity that produced them. In the Cold War the West labelled its opponent ‘godless communism’; in the post-Cold War conflict of civilisations Muslims see their opponent as ‘the godless West’.
Huntington then prophetically announced that the survival of the West depended primarily on Westerners re-affirming their own cultural identity. This survival would depend particularly on ‘Westerners accepting their civilisation as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies’. To protect the cultural, social, and ethnic integrity of Western societies, he believed that the number of non-Westerners admitted as immigrants or refugees, particularly those coming from the Islamic world, would have to be restricted.
This is especially important for us when it comes to understanding today’s Australia. The country had, from its origins, been a Western society. Throughout the 20th Century, Australia ‘was closely allied with first Britain and then the United States; and during the Cold War it was not only a member of the West but also of the US-UK-Canadian-Australian military and intelligence core of the West’.
In the early 1990s, however, Australia’s political leaders decided, in effect, that Australia should defect from the West and redefine itself as an Asian society. For Huntington, in a moment where historically it was fundamental to re-affirm its own Western identity, the Australian ruling classes in the 1990s deliberately delinked their nation from the West so as to make it a part of Asia ‘thereby creating a torn-country-in-reverse’. Back in those days, the then Australia’s Prime Minister Paul Keating simply decided that Australia should cease being a ‘branch office of empire’ and aim for ‘enmeshment in Asia’. Foreign Minister Gareth Evans expressed similar sentiments. According to Huntington:
The case for redefining Australia as an Asian country was grounded on the assumption that economics overrides culture in shaping the destiny of nations. The central impetus was the dynamic growth of East Asian economies, which in turn spurred the rapid expansion of Australian trade with Asia.
For a country to redefine its cultural identity, of course, the political and economic elites of the country have to be enthusiastically supportive about this radical move. Furthermore, the general public has to be willing to acquiesce in the redefinition of their cultural identity. This process of identity re-definition, Huntington predicted, ‘will be prolonged, interrupted, and painful, politically, socially, institutionally, and culturally. It also to date has failed’.
Despite the geographical connections with Asian nations, Huntington envisaged that Australia’s ‘multicultural’ ploy was unlikely to meet any of the requirements for success for a civilisation turned into a ‘torn country’. Prime Minister Keating notoriously liked to say that he was going to change Australia from ‘the odd man out to the odd man’ in Asia. This is an oxymoron: ‘Odd men don’t get in,’ Huntington stated. As he correctly pointed out:
The Keating-Evans choice could be viewed as the short-sighted result of overweighting economic factors and ignoring rather than renewing the country’s culture, and as a tactical political ploy to distract attention from Australia’s economic problems. Alternatively, it could be seen as a farsighted initiative designed to join Australia to and identify Australia with the rising centres of economic, political, and eventually military power in East Asia.
In this respect, Australia could be the first of possibly many Western countries to attempt to defect from the West and bandwagon with rising non-Western Civilisations. At the beginning of the 22nd Century, historians might look back on the Keating-Evans choice as a major marker in the decline of the West. If that choice is pursued, however, … ‘the lucky country’ will be a permanently torn country … and the ‘new white trash of Asia’, which Lee Kuan Yew contemptuously termed it. [emphasis mine]
These multiculturalists directly challenge the ‘Western’ image of Australia. They look forward to a time where the country many never again be culturally united, if united means unified in beliefs and practices. Above all, multiculturalism opposes to assimilation and it is in its essence anti-Western Civilisation. ‘It is basically an anti-Western ideology,’ argued Huntington. He sees the need to emphasise this point because multiculturalism works against the Western values of individual rights, liberal democracy, the rule of law, and the overall culture of freedom that previously formed the nation’s Western culture.
Over the last decades millions of people have migrated to Australia. Throughout its history Australia has been in part an immigrant nation, but much more importantly, it was a nation that originally assimilated immigrants and their descendants into its society and culture. In the past, most immigrants came from European societies with cultures compatible with mainstream Australian culture. Immigration involved self-selection. Australians shared a common, reasonably clear, and highly positive consent of Australian identity and institutions.
These factors are either absent or much more diluted than they were previously. Now, immigrants to Australia are different, the institutions and processes related to assimilation are different, and, most important, Australia as a ‘multicultural’ nation is different. The multiculturalists’ teaching manuals have ignored the mainstream culture. ‘The goal of the multiculturalist is to engage in transforming society by giving primary emphasis to the culture of sub-national groups.’ Achieving this goal comes at the expense of teaching the Western values and culture that Australians had in common.
In this sense, the central issue this poses for Australia is not immigration but immigration without assimilation. The artificial transformation of Australia in a ‘multicultural society’ dramatically changed the country’s national identity. ‘If a nation is a remembered as well as an imagined community, people who are losing that memory are becoming something less than a nation,’ wrote Huntington.
At a time when Australians are a less culturally identifiable group, ‘immigrants may choose among the subculture they encounter or choose to maintain their original culture’. As a consequence, a significant number of new immigrants, especially those coming from the Islamic world, do not have close ties or loyalty to Australia. ‘In some circumstances,’ writes Huntington, ‘the desire of Muslims to maintain the purity of their faith and practices of their religion may lead to conflicts with non-Muslims.’ The difficulty, he concluded, may derive from the very nature of Muslim culture and its difference from Western culture. ‘Elsewhere in the world, Muslims minorities have proved to be ‘indigestible’ by non-Muslim societies.’
Huntington boldly predicted that ‘political leaders imbued with the hubris to think that they can fundamentally reshape the culture of their societies are destined to fail’. He also believed that ‘the multicultural virus’, once it is lodged in society, is very difficult or almost impossible to expunge. ‘The virus persists and it can be fatal.’ If this is so, Australian politicians may have made history by undermining their nation’s culture and traditions, but they cannot spare the harsh judgement of history. They deliberately produced a ‘torn country’ by infecting Australia with a form of ‘cultural schizophrenia’ which remains the continuing and defining characteristic of today’s Australian society. The great Australian success history faces an uncertain future.
Prof. Augusto Zimmermann PhD, LLM, LLB, CIArb is a former member of the Law Reform Commission in Western Australia and a former associate dean (research) at Murdoch University, School of Law. He is also the President and Founder of WALTA Legal Theory Association.
This paper will be presented at ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, a seminar organised by The Civilisationists in partnership with WALTA, to be held on 24 October in Perth/WA. To book: https://www.ticketebo.com.au/civilisationists-civilisations