Huntington's new book deals with modernization's effects

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome. If you believe the priests, nothing is moral. If you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. And if you believe the director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, we are heading for a global clash of civilizations far more intractable than the old Cold War.

Professor Samuel P. Huntington, the Harvard-based academic who heads the Olin Institute, has an extensive fan club inside the Beltway. The Washington think tanks and government departments that once grew fat off the Cold War were desperately in need of a credible new threat when Huntington came along in the early 1990s touting a forthcoming "clash of civilizations".

It was just what they needed, as pressures for disarmament mounted: a closely argued, academically respectable prediction that "the West", "Islam", and "East Asia" were heading into a long, difficult, and perhaps violent confrontation. So keep your guard up and your powder dry. Give us lots of money, in other words.

Now Huntington has done it again. His new book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published this month in the United States by Simon and Shuster, will be welcomed by military-industrial complexes everywhere. And it will have as much appeal to Iranian ayatollahs and Asian dictators as to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the "Beltway bandits". If unbridgeable differences are what you need, he's got them. Huntington's basic argument is that "modernization" -- that is industrialization, urbanization, mass education, mass media and others -- has different effects in different cultures. It has led to democracy and individualism in Western societies, but in cultures with other traditions, it will produce very different results.

This forces Huntington to argue that Iran under the ayatollahs, for example, is somehow more representative of modern Islam than Turkey, a "torn" country that made the terrible mistake of emulating Western models of modernization. "Throughout the Moslem world," Huntington writes approvingly, "people are reacting against the 'Westoxification' of their societies."

"East Asia" (which seems to include anywhere that there are significant Chinese minorities) impresses him even more. But the East Asia that wins his approval as an authentic "civilization" is the East Asia of Deng Xiao-ping's China and Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, authoritarian states where allegedly "Western" perversions like free speech and democracy are rejected, not the East Asia of Thailand and South Korea, where they are honored. There is a great deal of special pleading in Huntington's choice of "civilizations". Twenty-first century India, for example, is likely to be at least as great an economic power as 21st-century China. But India is a democratic country that produces less anti- Western rhetoric, so it gets far less of Huntington's attention.

And what kind of logic makes Iran, where the average per capita income has fallen by half in the past 20 years, a more authentic representative of the Moslem world than Turkey, a prosperous and powerful nation whose government is secular and democratic? Only the fact that Iran fits Huntington's model, and resonates strongly in the American psyche.

Huntington's great influence in Western political and military circles springs from the fact that he shares the market's basic prejudices. While making a great show of political correctness and cultural relativism, at bottom, he completely accepts the notion (an article of faith in those circles) that modernization is synonymous with Westernization.

"The West," he writes, "believes that the non-Western peoples should commit themselves to the Western values of democracy, free markets, limited governments, separation of church and state, human rights, individualism, and the rule of law ... but the dominant attitudes towards them in non-Western cultures range from skepticism to intense opposition."

Western values? Excuse me, Mr. Huntington, but just how many of those "Western values" did Henry VIII of England believe in? Or Louis XIV of France?

The West, until it began to modernize, subscribed to values much more conservative and hierarchical than those currently advocated by Lee Kuan Yew. Indeed, its social rules regarding the behavior of men and women would have met with the approval of Ayatollah Khomeini, while Henry VIII, 300 years after the Magna Carta, was the English-speaking world's closest approach to a Stalin.

What Huntington misses, with the arrogance typical of a certain caste of Westerner, is that the West was an absolutely typical preindustrial society until it began to modernize. You can find individuals in the premodern history of every civilization who advocated free speech, human rights, and even democracy. But until modernization began, they had no chance of winning.

Once modernization does get underway, however, their odds on success go up dramatically, and it makes no difference where they are. Japan, India and Turkey, which are not "Western" by any stretch of the imagination, have no more trouble running free, democratic societies than Italy, Brazil and the Philippines. Which is to say that they have lots of trouble, but succeed nevertheless.

Modernization destroys the old hierarchies everywhere, and unleashes huge social changes everywhere. Many of those changes, especially in the sphere of sex and the family, are upsetting, and some are destructive. But there's nothing particularly "Western" about the changes, except that the West was the first region of the world to go through them. Modern cultural values are not "Western", they just happen to have Western baggage tags.

Any other society that modernizes is almost certain to go through the same changes (and suffer the same angst about them). What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. But the only civilizations that will really fit Huntington's model are the ones that stall halfway. So far, no major one has.