Samuel Huntington established a post-Cold War theory of international relations that is hard to ignore due to the presence and prevalence of his predictions. Huntington is a public intellectual in the most basic sense of the term: as an academic studying and instigating discourse on the relationships of various publics, he provides intellectual debate for the public. Born in my hometown of New York City in 1927, he was 24 years old when received his Ph.D. from Harvard, where he then taught and served on various boards and committees throughout his life, and co-founded Foreign Policy, one of the foremost political affairs publications in today’s scholarly community. When he passed away in 2008, the Harvard Gazette published an obituary in which Harvard’s vice provost for International Affairs Jorge Dominguez, calledHuntington “one of the giants of political science worldwide during the past half century. He had a knack for asking the crucially important but often inconvenient question. He had the talent and skill to formulate analyses that stood the test of time.”
His theory of a Clash of Civilizations predicts that inter-cultural (what Huntington calls ‘inter-civilizational’) conflict would characterize violence in post-Cold War international relations, rather than ideological conflict. The most apparent actualization of this theory is likely Arab-American hostility, which has characterized the past decade (if not the pat two decades). Huntington called this “the West vs. the Rest,” identifying growing hostility toward what many cultures feel is the exporting of American culture with globalization.
There are arguably failings in every theory, and Huntington’s is no exception. However, what is significant about Huntington’s theory is the priority it places on cultural or ‘civilizational’ differences borne from shared historical experiences and narratives. Stephen Mack identifies this concept – unintentionally – when he wrote:
“If there’s any truth to the old adage that religion and (liberal, democratic) politics don’t mix, it isn’t because they are polar opposites—an ideological oil reacting against a metaphysical water. Rather, it’s because they are, more or less, alienated kindred vying for the same space in the human imagination. It is not difficult to see why: religious experience and democratic politics make overlapping—and often competing—claims to the deepest meanings we attach to our humanity… Both, in other words, offer a vision of personal identity that is derived from beliefs about how we should relate to everything around us.”
Both Huntington and Mack acknowledge the significance and impact of socially-constructed personal identities, although Huntington focuses on the divisive constructions of various cultures while Mack considers Americans’ personal identity itself to be in conflict over how to prioritize competing religious and political values. Notably, the substance of these arguments focus on a question of not just one’s perspective of one’s identity, but of how individuals identify themselves in comparison to an “other” group. Jacques E. C. Hymans discusses this concept in depth with his theory of national identity conceptions. Hymans describes a country’s perception of its own identity as based on two dichotomies: either an oppositional (“us vs. them”) or sportsmanlike (“us and them”) self-conception, and either a nationalist (“we are as good or superior to them”) or subaltern (“we are inferior to them”) self-conception. Hence, both in domestic or international politics, we constantly compare ourselves to a key ‘other’ to qualify our own identities.
Back to Mack’s comments on competing religious and political values… this is rarely demonstrated as bluntly as it has been in France over the last decade. According to Huntington, France is a part of “the West” civilization, which one can essentially equate to NATO. [Note: it is a coincidence that Huntington’s Western civilization can be portrayed by a military alliance/ security regime; the parallel to NATO is because the alliance is based on shared principles of democratic rule, universal human and civil rights, etc., which constitute the shared cultural narrative of Huntington’s conception of ‘the West’].
To get to the heart of the French example: France has convened a legislative debate over the presence of burqas, full-face veils worn by religious Muslim females, in French public life. Their non-bonding recommendation, which came out Tuesday, suggests that the burqa should be banned from public places, a resolution that could prevent the selling of bus tickets to women wearing burqas, among countless other restrictions like picking up a child from public school (see more).
The ban would only affect about 2,000 women in France, but it has highlighted a sensitive debate in France, which generally has a very strict separation of church and state (for example, limiting religious symbols of worship in public schools). Richard Z. Chesnoff wrote in his book The Arrogance of the Frenchthat French policy is grounded in the nature of French self-identity conceptions: the French view their culture as their identity (p. 141). The current conflict in France, according to Chesnoff, stems from the fact that in the past – even if they maintained religious or ethnic traditions – many immigrants to France “were prepared to accept the monolithic French culture that France insists comes before individual ethnic and religious identities.” That is less true of recent immigrants to France from third-world countries, and Chesnoff notes that it has produced an alienation of these immigrants from different ‘civilizations’ (to apply Huntington’s theory), especially Arab immigrants.
So here’s the question: what does a “separation” of church and state really consist of, and can it mollify/pacify inter-civilizational conflict? Clearly, both within a state and between states, religion (encompassed by Huntington’s concept of “civilizations”) and politics create problems where they mix. But what needs to be asked here is what consists of mixing or separating them? Is banning peaceful public demonstration of one’s religion really a separation? Wouldn’t the separation be to universally protect each individual’s religious identity as separate from political discourse? It seems a contradiction in itself that restricting the choice of dress is prejudiced; however, France is universal in this restriction, although it affects its citizens from various ‘civilizations’ differently.
Regardless, the conflict is clearly civilizational, between the Western and Islamic cultures. So to pose the question for consideration again, in light of Huntington: where does the state’s right to jurisdiction regarding religion end? If we say it ends when it impedes on the rights of another, then an entirely new debate ensues, questioning when these rights are impeded upon. With regard to France, the question becomes this: is it really hurtful to the national interest to allow freedom of religious expression, or is it the West fighting back against the Islamic extremism associated with both burqas and Al Qaeda?
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