The West: Precious, not Unique: Civilizations Make for a Poor Paradigm Just Like the Rest

Just when we thought it was safe to relax, Samuel P. Huntington has arrived with bad news: the old world of realpolitik and great power tensions may have faded, but it has been replaced by an even nastier and less predictable world of looming cultural and religious conflict ("The West: Unique, Not Universal," November/ December 1996). And unlike the passing era of power politics, Huntington claims, civilizational politics resists reason and resolution. A prudent West must accept this new dangerous reality, rally together, and prepare for the worst.

The problem with Huntington's provocative thesis is that it is wildly overstated and, if ideas by prominent thinkers have any impact in the real world, potentially dangerous. To begin, the basic features that Huntington ascribes to the West -- democracy, limited government, and the rule of law -- may have emerged first in Europe, but they are not fundamentally a cultural or civilizational phenomenon. They are institutions and practices that are manifest across diverse cultures and societies, driven as much by capitalism and the functional demands of exchange as anything else.

Furthermore, being optimistic about the spread of "Western" principles and practices does not require a simple-minded belief in convergence. As Huntington knows, sophisticated versions of modernization theory never expected convergence of other cultures and societies into a universal Western model. Modernization meant mutual adaptation to industrialism, with the anticipated emergence of increasingly complex and mixed systems that combined many elements, Western and non-Western.

There have also been striking shifts in political culture in major non-Western societies, not least of them Japan. One of the most remarkable developments in the postwar era has been the complete transformation of Japan's (and Germany's) imperialist and militarist political and social structures. It seems farfetched to appreciate the dramatic evolution in the political culture of the major fascist and revisionist states of the twentieth century yet also argue that non-Western states are prisoners of their cultures.

Contrary to Huntington, a belief in universalism and global cultural homogenization is not necessary to pursue an order that goes beyond the historical West. All that is needed are states with commitments to democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Societies and civilizations can remain very diverse yet still evolve deeply rooted commitments to these basic organizational principles. As a result, the most robust and relevant political community is not limited to the Atlantic world, but stretches well beyond -- to a larger (but certainly not global) grouping of democratic countries with market-oriented economies.

Even if Huntington were right in asserting that the West is fundamentally different from the rest, inter-civilizational conflict is by no means inevitable -- but it is probably more likely if our leaders take Huntington's thesis to heart. Declaring civilizational divides would invite counter-groupings and risk triggering precisely the types of antagonisms that Huntington anticipates. This is the civilizational equivalent of the "security dilemma" -- Huntington wants the West to defensively guard against the coming clash, but to other powers like China and Japan the circling of the Western wagons will look like a declaration of a new Cold War.

The appeal of Huntington's thesis is that it provides a ready and easily grasped ideology for shoring up American relations with Europe. With the Cold War over, what will be the glue that holds the Atlantic alliance together? Appealing to Western civilization -- which separates "us" from "the rest" -- seems like a convenient place to start. Unfortunately, such an appeal solves one problem -- how to solidify a common Atlantic identity -- by creating even more dangerous ones across other oceans and continents.

Finally, Huntington fails to appreciate the larger political community of free market democracies that the West, led by the United States, has constructed. Although undoubtedly anchored in the Atlantic world, that community now incorporates a significant portion of the globe. Robust and expanding, it has developed its own institutions and practices for conflict management and dispute resolution, lending it an unprecedented stability. That larger community may be more difficult to label, but it is far more significant than Huntington's vision of Western civilization.

Huntington sees the great alternative visions of the future as either a universal civilization based on the spread of Western consumerism and popular culture or else what he considers the more sober reality of civilizational divide. But that is not the choice. The world is moving to a divide best seen as one between the open societies with accountable governments and the rest. The United States stands at the center of this wider community of democracies, and it would be a tragic squandering of this accomplishment to settle for an inward-looking and defensive "little West."

G. John Ikenberry is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

DANGEROUS CONJECTURE

Tony Smith

The ease with which Huntington partitions the world into civilizations divided by political fault lines astonishes me. Establishing who exactly is "Western" is the first point of contention. For starters, why doesn't he count Latin America as "Western," given its remarkable odyssey over the last two decades, a journey that has brought it politically, economically, and culturally closer to North America and Western Europe than it has been in centuries?