Keynote Address
Colorado College's 125th Anniversary Symposium
Cultures in the 21st Century: Conflicts and Convergences
Delivered at Colorado College February 4, 1999 at 11:00 AM
by
Samuel P. Huntington
Introduction
I am greatly honored by and deeply grateful for the
opportunity to address this important assembly concerned with the role of culture in the
coming century. Let me begin by congratulating Dean Fuller, Professor Carter, and their
associates on two points. First, I congratulate them on the 125th anniversary of the
founding of Colorado College, which throughout these years has maintained its position as
the preeminent liberal arts college in this country, west of the Mississippi, and which I
am sure will maintain that distinguished position through the next century. Second, I
congratulate the organizers of this conference for their prescience and insight in
selecting culture as the theme of this meeting. The twentieth century was the century of
ideology, of the competition of socialism, communism, liberalism, authoritarianism,
fascism, democracy. Now, while we have not had the end of history, we have arrived, at
least for the moment, at the end of ideology. The twenty-first century is at least
beginning as the century of culture, with the differences, interactions, and conflicts
among cultures taking center stage. This has become manifest, among other ways, in the
extent to which scholars, politicians, economic development officials, soldiers, and
strategists are all turning to culture as a central factor in explaining human social,
political, and economic behavior. In short, culture counts, with consequences for both
good and evil.
If culture counts, what is it? In the guidelines he provided us, Professor Carter
warned against getting bogged down in debating definitions. He is right, and culture has
many meanings. Let me mention just three. First, culture may refer to the products of a
society. People speak of a societys high culturethe art, literature,
musicand its popular or folk culture. Second, anthropologists speak of culture in a
much broader sense to mean the entire way of life of a society, its institutions, social
structure, family structure, and the meanings people attribute to these. Finally, other
scholars, perhaps particularly political scientists, see culture as something subjective,
meaning the beliefs, values, attitudes, orientations, assumptions, philosophy, Weltanschauung
of a particular group of people. However it is defined, villages, clans, regions, nations,
and, at the broadest level, civilizations, have distinct cultures. Civilizations are the
broadest cultural entities with which people identify. At present, as I argued in my book,1 there are about eight major civilizations or cultural zones in the
world. Obviously, each of these has within it innumerable subcultures.
A Universal Culture?
Two central elements of culture are language and religion, and these obviously differ
greatly among societies. Scholars have also measured societies along a number of other
cultural dimensions and classified them in terms of individualism and collectivism,
egalitarianism and hierarchy, pluralism and monism, activism and fatalism, tolerance and
intolerance, trust and suspicion, shame and guilt, instrumental and consummatory, and a
variety of other ways.
In recent years, however, many people have argued that we are seeing the emergence of a
universal worldwide culture. They may have various things in mind. First, global culture
can refer to a set of economic, social and political ideas, assumptions, and values now
widely held among elites throughout the world. This is what I have called the Davos
Culture, after the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum that brings together
hundreds of government officials, bankers, businessmen, politicians, academics,
intellectuals, and journalists from all over the world. Almost all these people hold
university degrees in the physical sciences, social sciences, business, or law; work with
words and/or numbers; speak reasonably fluent English; are employed by governments,
corporations, and academic institutions with extensive international involvements; and
travel frequently outside their own country. They generally share beliefs in
individualism, market economies, and political democracy, which are also common among
people in Western civilization. Davos people control virtually all international
institutions, many of the worlds governments, and the bulk of the worlds
economic and military capabilities. The Davos Culture hence is tremendously important.
Worldwide, however, only a small portion of the worlds population shares in this
culture. It is far from a universal culture, and the leaders who share in it do not
necessarily have a secure grip on power in their own societies. It is nonetheless one
immensely significant consequence of the globalization of economic activity that has
occurred in recent decades.
A second concept of global culture focuses on the spread of Western consumption
patterns and popular culture around the world. Cultural fads have been transmitted from
civilization to civilization throughout history. Innovations in one civilization are
regularly taken up by other civilizations. These are, however, usually either techniques
lacking in significant cultural consequences or fads that come and go without altering the
underlying culture of the recipient civilization. A slightly more sophisticated version of
the global popular culture argument focuses not on consumer goods generally but on the
media, on Hollywood rather than Coca-Cola. American control of the global movie,
television, and video industries is indeed overwhelming. Little or no evidence exists,
however, to support the assumption that the emergence of pervasive global communications
is producing significant convergence in attitudes and beliefs. In due course, it is
possible that global media could generate some convergence in values and beliefs among
people, but that will happen over a very long period of time.
Third, five hundred years ago, many different cultures existed, but they were all
traditional cultures, not modern ones. Economic and social modernization then began in
Western society, and a major gap opened between modern Western society and non-modern,
non-Western societies. Now, however, modernization is a global phenomenon. All cultures
are becoming modern, and in this sense one difference between the West and the rest is
disappearing. Modernization, however, does not necessarily mean Westernization. There is
much evidence, instead, that modernization strengthens existing cultures and hence
perpetuates the differences among them. Just as five hundred years ago many different
traditional cultures and civilizations coexisted, so also the coming century will see many
different modern cultures coexisting. In the long run, these different modern cultures may
converge into one global modern culture, but that again will only occur in the very
distant future. In the shorter term, modernization generates the resurgence of non-Western
societies and cultures.
The culture of a society thus may change as a result of modernization, and also as a
result of a traumatic event (like defeat in World War II, which changed the two most
militaristic societies in the world into two highly pacifist societies), or through the
actions of political leadership. By and large, however, cultural traits persist. One
interesting, if modest, manifestation of this concerns the differences in the degree to
which people feel satisfied in different societies. Here are data over fifteen years on
the proportion of people in nine European countries who said they were "very
satisfied" with life as a whole. Despite significant changes in their economic
situation over these years, the levels of satisfaction in all these countries, except
Belgium, remained constant. Danes are satisfied. Italians are dissatisfied. More
significant for our concerns, here today are the analyses of Ronald Inglehart of values in
some sixty-one countries. He provides quantitative survey data demonstrating the reality
of the civilizations which I identified impressionistically. While again the time span is
limited, his data also show that as they get richer, societies tend to move from more
traditional to more modern and post-modern values. Yet cultures do not converge.
Modernization without convergence is once again the picture that emerges from his data.
One can, I think, go even further. As non-Western societies begin to modernize, they
also often attempt to adopt many elements of Western culture. One hundred years ago, for
instance, some people in both Japan and China were arguing that, if their countries were
going to modernize, they would have to abandon their own languages and adopt English or
German. Yet as modernization proceeds, the tendency is for people to return to their
indigenous cultures, as is witnessed today in the resurgence of Islam, the celebration of
Asian values, and the revival of religion in so many parts of the world. The world is
modernizing, but it is not Westernizing in any truly meaningful sense.
So cultures persist, and they also have consequences. Let me focus on three, concerning
the impact of culture on economic and political development, global politics, and national
identity.
Culture and Development
For decades, economists have grappled with the question, "Why have some countries
developed economically and become prosperous, while others remained mired in backwardness
and poverty?" They have not been able to find a convincing economic answer. This
question struck me with particular force some years ago when I happened to run across
economic data on Ghana and South Korea from 1960. At that time, these two countries had
almost identical economic profiles in terms of per capita GNP, relative importance of
their primary, manufacturing, and service sectors, nature of their exports, and amounts of
foreign aid. Thirty years later South Korea had become an industrial giant, with high per
capita income, multinational corporations, a major exporter of cars and electronic
equipment, while Ghana still remained Ghana. How could one account for this difference in
performance? Undoubtedly many factors were responsible, but I became convinced that
culture was a large part of the explanation. South Koreans valued thrift, savings, and
investment, hard work, discipline, and education. Ghanaians had different values.
Other scholars have come to similar conclusions. In the early 1980s, my center at
Harvard2 published a book by a former AID official, Larry
Harrison, who had worked for many years in Latin America. Entitled Underdevelopment is
a State of Mind, this book argued that Latin American culture was the principal
obstacle to Latin American development. It created a storm of protest, outrage, and
denunciation from both economists and Latin Americans. Now, however, both are coming
around to his point of view. Culture has become the current rage in economic development.
This spring, my center will hold a conference on culture and development, in which
Harrison is the major figure, and the president of the World Bank and several Bank
economists will be in attendance to learn from him how to cope with the obstacles some
cultures may pose to economic development.
The significance of culture in relation to development can be seen in the relative
progress former communist states have made in economic reform. Here, for instance, are
estimates of that progress, which as you can see vary precisely with the civilizational
differences of these countries. Now, obviously many factors may affect these differences
in economic reform, but culture certainly plays a major role. Take, for instance, two
rather similar countries, Poland and Ukraine. Ukraine was one of the most economically
developed parts of the Soviet Union, but it has now lagged far behind Poland in economic
reform and economic development, and a large part of that can be explained by the fact
that Ukraine is a culturally divided society, but predominantly Orthodox, while Poland is
a Western society.
Culture may also affect the form that economic organization takes. Levels of
interpersonal trust vary greatly among countries. Francis Fukuyama has argued that
societies where the scope of interpersonal trust is broad, such as Japan, Germany, and the
United States, are much more able to develop large-scale multinational corporations than
those where trust is limited to family and close friends as, he argues, is the case in
France, Italy, and China. If his argument is correct, it has significant implications for
the limits that may exist on Chinas development as a major actor on the world
economic scene.
In a similar vein, many studies have ranked countries in terms of their levels of
corruption. Again, they breakdown in terms of cultural groupings. The least corrupt
countries are Nordic, Scandinavian, or English-speaking; the most corrupt are Asian and
African. There is, however, one interesting exception to this pattern, which illustrates
an important point. Singapore always ranks right up there with Denmark, Finland, Sweden,
Canada, and New Zealand as one of the least corrupt countries in the world, while its
Asian neighbors, Indonesia, China, Thailand, the Philippines are among the most corrupt.
How can this be explained? The answer of course is political leadership. Lee KuanYew, who
ruled Singapore for decades, was determined to create a noncorrupt society and in large
part did. He thus exemplifies a most important insight about culture, articulated by
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "The central conservative truth is that it is
culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth
is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." And that is what
happened in Singapore.
Culture also plays a role in the development of democracy. Modern democracy is a
product of Western civilization, and well over eighty percent of the democracies in the
world today are Western or have been heavily influenced by Western culture. Yet democracy
also exists in societies with other cultures, Japan and India being two notable examples.
It would, I think, be wrong to say that any particular culture makes democracy impossible,
but it is accurate to say that some cultures are more hospitable to democracy than others.
The former communist countries also illustrate this point rather nicely. And it should
also be noted that democracy in non-Western societies often is illiberal democracy rather
than the liberal democracy we know in the West.
Culture and Global Politics
Let me turn to global politics. The central argument of my book on the clash of
civilizations is that in this post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among
peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural. Everywhere peoples
and nations are attempting to answer the most basic question humans face: "Who are
we?" And they are answering that question in the traditional way human beings have
answered it, by reference to the things that mean most to them. People define themselves
in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They
identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and,
at the broadest level, civilizations. Global politics in the twenty-first century is being
shaped along cultural and civilizational lines. This development has several implications.
One, the most important groupings of states are no longer the three blocs of the Cold
War but rather the worlds seven or eight major civilizations: Western, Orthodox,
Chinese, Japanese, Muslim, Hindu, Latin American, and African. Henry Kissinger has argued
that the "international system of the twenty-first century ... will contain at least
six major powersthe United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and probably
India." Kissingers six major powers belong to and are the leading or core
states of five very different civilizations, and, in addition, there are important Islamic
states whose strategic locations, large populations, and/or oil resources make them
influential in world affairs. The rivalry of the superpowers is being supplanted by the
clash of civilizations. For the first time in history, global politics is both multipolar
and multicivilizational.
Second, changes are occurring in the relative power of civilizations and their core
states. The West has been the overwhelmingly dominant civilization for centuries, and it
will remain so well into the next century. Nonetheless major forces are at work producing
changes in relative power. These include the demographic stagnation and economic slowdown
of the West, on the one hand, and the economic growth of East Asian societies and the
demographic dynamism of Islamic societies on the other.
Third, in this new world, the relations between states from different civilizations
will normally be distant and cool and often highly antagonistic. While ad hoc coalitions
may exist at times across civilization boundaries, intercivilizational relations are more
likely to be described by such terms as competitive coexistence, cold war, and cold peace.
(The term "cold war," la guerra fria, it is interesting to note, was
invented by thirteenth century Spaniards to describe their relations with their Muslim
neighbors, and the world is now likely to be a world of many cold wars.) The most
important axis in world politics will be the relations between the West and the rest, as
the West attempts to impose its values and culture on the other societies despite its
declining ability to do so.
In this new world, the most dangerous form of violent conflict would be core state wars
between the major states of different civilizations. The principal sources of these two
forms of conflict and hence of political instability during the next quarter century will
be the resurgence of Islam and the rise of China. The relations of the West with these
challenger civilizations -- Islam and China -- are likely to be particularly difficult and
antagonistic. The potentially most dangerous conflict is that between the United Sates and
China.
Fourth, conflict among ethnic groups is obviously pervasive. Ethnic conflict becomes
dangerous to world peace when it involves groups from different civilizations. The bloody
clashes of civilizations in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Subcontinent,
not to mention the Middle East, are dangerous precisely because they could become bigger
wars and involve other states. They are conflicts which demand, and usually get, the
attention of the U.N. Secretary General and the American Secretary of State.
These fault line wars are not randomly distributed. They are far more likely to involve
Muslims fighting non-Muslims than anyone else. One major cause involves the high birth
rates in Muslim countries which have created a "youth bulge" of people between
the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. For the foreseeable future, the relations between the
West and Islam will be at best distant and acrimonious and at worst conflictual and
violent. In the long run, however, the demographic surge will run its course. When that
happens, the way will be open to a more congenial coexistence between Islam and the West.
Fifth, while differences in culture and civilization divide people, cultural
similarities bring people together and promote trust and cooperation. Many efforts at
regional economic integration are going on in the world. The relative success of those
efforts varies directly with the extent to which the countries involved in these efforts
have a common culture. Throughout the world countries are regrouping politically along
cultural lines. Countries united by ideology but divided by culture come apart, as in the
cases of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Countries divided by ideology but united by
culture are coming together as the two Germanies have and the two Koreas and several
Chinas are beginning to. Increasingly, people and governments talk in terms of cultural
communities transcending state boundaries. Russia is grouping about itself the states that
share its Orthodox heritage. In East Asia, economic integration is underway, but it is
not, as many expected, an economic integration centered on Japan, which is all alone as a
civilization unto itself, but an economic integration rooted in China and the Chinese
business communities that dominate the economies of all East Asian countries except Japan
and Korea.
Recent Developments
My original article on the clash of civilizations was published five years ago, and the
book came out two years ago. Recent developments demonstrate, I believe, the validity and
relevance of this cultural-civilizational approach to world politics. These include: the
continuation, punctuated at times by brief truces, of violent local fault-line wars
between groups from different civilizations in many parts of the world; the restructuring
of European politics along civilizational lines; the dramatic progress toward economic
integration of single-civilization entities like the European Union and Mercosur and the
lack of progress in multicivilization efforts like APEC and NAFTA; the challenges to
secular concepts of legitimacy and identity by religious political movements in India,
Israel, Turkey, and other countries; the increasing cooperation among Muslim societies in
dealing with non-Muslim countries; the on-going conflicts over non-Western immigration
into Europe and North America; the continuing rise of China as a power in world affairs
and the intensification of the "Confucian-Muslim connection" between China,
Iran, and Pakistan; the disintegration of the 1990-91 anti-Iraq coalition; the fading
prospects that Russia will join the Western community of nations; the gradual emergence of
the core states of South Africa and Nigeria in Africa and Brazil in Latin America; and,
most dramatically, nuclear proliferation and deproliferation.
The restructuring of international politics along civilizational lines has become
particularly evident in Central and Eastern Europe. For forty-five years, the political
dividing line in Europe was the Iron Curtain. Now that line has moved several hundred
miles east and is the line separating the peoples of Western Christianity, on the one
hand, from Muslim and Orthodox peoples on the other. Austria, Sweden, and Finland,
countries culturally part of the West, had to be neutral and separated from the West in
the Cold War. Now they have joined their cultural kin in the European Union. Poland,
Hungary, and the Czech Republic are joining NATO and moving towards E.U. membership as
well. In the Baltics, the former captive republics are now able to escape the Russian
grasp and align themselves with their cultural kin to the West.
In the Balkans during the Cold War, Greece and Turkey were in NATO, Bulgaria and
Romania were in the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia was non-aligned, and Albania was an isolated
sometime friend of communist China. Now Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece are coming together
in what they term an "Orthodox entente." Slovenia and Croatia are moving toward
integration with Western Europe. Turkey is resuming its historic connections with Albanian
and Bosnian Muslims. The old antagonism between Greece and Turkey, suppressed during the
Cold War by their shared fear of the Soviet Union and communism, has revived, Greek and
Turk fighter planes challenge each other above the Aegean, an arms race is underway on
Cyprus, and Greece is becoming, in many ways, more of a partner of Russia than of its
allies in NATO. The President of Greece articulated this shift quite explicitly in October
1997 when he said, "Today we do not face any threat from the North. ... Now those
countries have the same religious beliefs as we do. Today we face a cunning threat from
the West ... from the Papists and the Protestants." The European Union, in turn, has
rejected and humiliated Turkey. Turkeys character as a torn country has become
institutionalized in the conflict between its Western-oriented military and its growing
Islamist movement, whose political expression is the Welfare Party, which has the declared
objective of taking Turkey out of NATO and whose leader when prime minister made his first
visits abroad not to Brussels and to Washington but to Teheran and Tripoli. The military
have ousted that party from office and outlawed it. Apparently, Turkey can be democratic,
or it can be Western, but it cannot be both.
Last winter, in the confrontation between the United States and Iraq, all Arab
countries, except Kuwait, opposed U.S. military action, and only Britain, Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand, the countries culturally closest to the United States, agreed
to send warships to join American forces in the Persian Gulf. Also last winter, the
simmering conflict between Kosovo Albanians and the Serbs erupted, as was quite
predictable, into a major war. India and Pakistan carried forward their
intercivilizational rivalry by conducting their nuclear tests. And then last summer, bombs
were exploded at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, with another bomb attempt
prevented in Albania. American retaliatory strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan were
universally condemned in the Muslim world and were explicitly endorsed by the governments
of only Britain, Germany, and Israel. The clash of civilizations is alive and well in
world politics.
People often criticize my argument on the grounds that it is a self-fulfilling
prophecy, that somehow because I say that clashes between civilizations exist and may
intensify that I am arguing they should occur. That, however, is clearly not the case, and
no prophecy is in itself either self-fulfilling or non-self-fulfilling. It depends on how
people react to it. In the 1950s and 1960s, many well-informed experts said that nuclear
war between the United States and the Soviet Union was virtually inevitable. That war did
not occur because people took these warnings seriously and developed arms control
programs, hot lines, mutual understandings, rules of conduct, that reduced its likelihood.
I am delighted that since I first warned of the dangers from clashes of civilizations,
many people have become concerned about the need to prevent and contain such clashes.
Political leaders, including the presidents of Germany, the Czech Republic, and Iran have
explicitly called for a dialogue of civilizations. As a result of Iranian initiative, the
United Nations has designated the year 2001 as the year for a dialogue of civilizations.
And in my own modest effort, I have organized conferences and seminars at Harvard
involving people from different civilizations to explore how to overcome their differences
and expand their commonalities.
Culture and National Identity
Let me conclude with a few words on culture and national identity, specifically
American national identity. The question of the conflict or convergence of cultures is a
central issue confronting American society. Are we a country with one culture or many? If
we are a country of many cultures, what then is the basis of national unity? Historically,
America has had a single predominant culture, the product of the original British
settlers, and successive waves of immigrants have assimilated into that culture, while
also modifying it. Its key elements have been a European heritage, the English language,
the Christian religion, and Protestant values. Ethnic, racial, regional, and other
subcultures existed within this overarching dominant culture in which virtually all groups
shared.
Now, however, the existence and the legitimacy of that core culture is under challenge
by devotees of multiculturalism, by some minority group and immigrant group leaders, and
by political figures, including the President and Vice President. President Clinton has
explicitly stated that we need a "great revolution ... to prove that we literally can
live without having a dominant European culture." Vice President Gore has, despite
his Harvard education, mistranslated our national motto, e pluribus unum, to mean
"from one, many."
America is obviously a multiethnic and multiracial society. If it also becomes a
multicultural society, lacking a common core culture, what will hold it together? The
standard answer is that Americans are united in their commitment to the political
principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other
documents, and often referred to as the American Creed: liberty, equality, individualism,
democracy, the rule of law, private enterprise. Most Americans do adhere to these values.
Those values are, however, the product of the original unifying culture, and if that
culture disappears, can a set of abstract political principles hold this society together?
The experience of other societies that were united only by political principles, such as
the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, is not reassuring.
The issue for Americans is whether we will renew and strengthen the culture which has
historically defined us as a nation or whether this country will be torn apart and
fractured by those determined to undermine and destroy the European, Christian,
Protestant, English culture that has been the source of our national wealth and power and
the great principles of liberty, equality, and democracy that have made this country the
hope for people all over the world. That is the challenge confronting us in the first
years of the twenty-first century.
1. The Clash of Civilizations
and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Schuster, 1996.
2. John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.
© 1999 by Samuel Huntington |