clashing civilizations? how about clashing globalizations?
So! it’s 3:45 am and a sober assesment of my current situation would indicate that I should either be sleeping or studying for the midterm I’ve got to take in less then 48 hours. As anyone who knows me would predict, I am currently doing neither and am instead killing what precious little time remains by futzing around the internet and pretending that any of the half-baked crap I’m likely to come up with at 4am in the morning will actually be of interest to someone somewhere. HA!
Seriously though, I just need a break from the organized stupidity that passes for higher education in this country. I just finished reading Huntington’s original essay on the "clash of civilizations" - written when Boris Yeltsin was still president of Russia; and Edward Said’s response to it (entitled "The clash of ignorance").
Now, for the record, I like Edward Said as a political philosopher and as a writer, but his 2 page response to Huntington’s 19 page essay barely scratches the surface of the argument he’s claiming to refute. Instead, Said spends the majority of his response in extended metaphors, his only clear argument being that it is impossible to accurately sort the worlds nation-states into group of "civilizations," and that to attempt to construct "civilizations" as a new form of social identity requires ignoring a tremendous amount of internal diversity and dramatically overemphasizing the differences between cultures. Which is true, and I agree with him; but instead of backing his claim up with hard evidence and meeting Huntington on his own turf Said abruptly ends his response with a please for intercultural understanding and leaves the majority of Huntington’s arguments intact.
And that, dear friends, is what pisses me off.
It’s not like Said wasn’t capable of refuting the argument, I know from reading his other work that he has the knowledge and the empirical evidence to shred Huntington and reveal the entire "clash of civilizations" argument for the ethnocetric and arguably racist tripe that it is, Said lets him off the hook. To be clear, Huntingtons civilizations just happen to correspond to the boundaries between the worlds major racial groups, and by asserting that the European/N. American "Western Civilization" must continue to assert its global dominance and "defend" itself from the rising threat of competing civilizations, he is essentially making the same "white culture is under attack and we must defend it!" argument that is made by american Neo-Nazis. The only difference is that the neo-nazis are too stupid too hide their intent behind supposedly race-nuetral labels like "civilization."
A more telling critique of the Clash Of Civilizations model is that it is based on the false homogenization of peoples who have nothing in common, and the false seperation of people who have everything in common. There are reasons why Aljahzeera.net features regular coverage of the ongoing stuggle for self determination in North Ireland and the Basque region of Spain, why Irish Nationalists went out of their way to oppose Apartheid in South Africa long before it was fashionable to do so, and why large numbers of South African human rights actiivists and organizations are currently supporting the boycott against Israel as a way of opposing what they see as another Apartheid state. These alliances are not merely coincidences, they are reflections of a real division and the ways that people in all three societies see themselves in relation to the real lines that divide their societies. Protastant North Irland, White South Africa, and Israel are all Settler States whose existence is - or was - predicated on the denial of sovereignity and self-determination to the indiginous populations which they supplanted. Accordingly, the indiginous populations of all three countries - regardless of race, religion, or "civilization," had and continue to have a tremendous amount in common. Their shared histories of genocide, displacement, and systematic disenfranchisement and oppression bind them together in a very real and tangible way that is recognized by intelectuals and radicals in all three societies. In the same way, however, many of the active rightist elements of the settler states also see themselves as linked. The leadership of the UDP, for example,
is resolutely pro-Israel - despite the explicitly White Anglo Protastant supremecist ideology which justifies that organizations existence (The UDP being a protastant paramilitary
group that was created and trained with funding from the British
government, and which is responsible for more then twice as many
murders and acts of terrorism as the IRA and all it’s splinter groups
combined). When White Supremecists stand up for and support a Jewish state, you know there’s something more then meets the eye at work. In this case, it’s the fact that as twin settler states the North Irish Protastants and the Israeli Zionists are on the same side of the battle for (or in their case against) the right to political and economic self-determination. So where does clash theory fit into this? To put it Bluntly, it doesn’t. By attempting to create a false "civilization" based homogenization of cultures, Huntington blinds himself and his adherants to the fact that the determining factor in predicting modern conflict is not what god (if any) you worship, but how you are going to feed your children and what the likelihood of them reaching adulthood intact is. And that is just as true in Palesteine as it is in Ireland, the issue is one of imperialism and economics, not race or religion.
Which isn’t to say that I support nationalism, because I don’t. But supporting the resistance against British Imperialism in North Ireland or Zionist imperialism in Palestein does not mean I condone the creation of a new State once that imperialism is defeated, it means that I support the right of people to stand up for themselves and organize their resistance in whatever way they see fit - even if I dissagree with it. There’s a good position paper on Anarchism and Nationalism in North Ireland which was published by the Irish Workers Solidarity Alliance (archived here: http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/ws/ws50_nation.html) which i think explains the point well.
To return to the issue of how to interpret conflicts in the modern world, A much more accurate portrayal of the current state of global affairs would be to say that nation-states are entering a crisis, and that it’s a crisis of their own making. By embracing globalization and forcing it on the rest of the world, the elites in the wealthy nations have critically undermined the sovereignity of the nation-state by undercutting one of its chief powers - the power to regulate the economy. Now for the elites who are largely transnational and no longer require a strong nation-state to prevent some other nation state from conquering them and seizing their wealth, this is a can’t-lose situation. Governments can now be played off against each other to force down tarrifs, taxes, wages, enviornmental protections, and any other "barriers to trade," while at the same time being at the beck and call of the corporate elite to practice a bit of "preventative" warfare and secure critical resources. In other words, Nation-states, which have up until now been tools of their indiginous elites are now being functionally reduced to mercenaries for hire, at the beck and call of Transnational capitalism. At the same time, the weakening of States and the breakup of the pseudo-marxist "Soviet" empire has led to the creation of hundreds of new smaller states as long-oppressed ethnic and national groups jump at the chance to seperate from Nation-States that have historically marginalized them at best and actively repressed them at worst. In other words, we are forced to return to the conflicts of seccession and independance.
The logical extreme to the doctrine of self-determination (as laid out, ironically, by the major imperialist powers at the end of world war one) is that every one of the planets 5,000 different ethnic groups would have it’s own nation, and that every one of these nations would be armed and ready to "defend itself" against its neighbors. Indeed, since the end of the most recent imperialist phase, the dominant trend worldwide has been towards the splintering of nations into smaller and smaller groups. Now, as an anarchist, I see this as both very hopefull and extreamly frightening. It is hopefull because the smaller a political body is the more likely it is to be at least somewhat democratic, and the more direct that democracy is likely to be. Since the end goal of anarchism is to create a free confederation of autonomous and self-governing communities, this trend towards smaller and smaller nations within an integrated world economy is a potentially positive thing. The problem, however, is that as long as those nations remain nation-states and retain the States obsession with warfare and reliance on systemic violence as a tool for social control; any liberatory potential is largely eliminated. Likewise, the continued dominance of capitalism ensures that the wealth of these smaller nations will continue to be controlled by a tiny elite, only now those elites wont be in Dublin or Ramallah - they will be in London and New York.
In other words, "civilizations" as Huntington describes them are irrelevant. The dominant theme in international politics for all of the forseeable future is wars of seccession as vulnerable nations are broken up into smaller and smaller peices, coupled with the steady erosion of economic autonomy and the consolidation of a new global economic elite with the power to dictate the world’s economy the same way that Stalin dictated the command economies of Bolshevik Russia.
The conflict then is not between nations, races, or civilizations, but between those of us who would create a free globalization from below based on meaningfull local autonomy, free federation, direct democracy, and a cooperative economic system run by the people, for the people; and those who would create a globalization based on fractured and atomized individuals, the proliferation of armed states, and a hegemonic global elite with the power to dictate the worlds economy, free from competition, regulation, or any semblance of checks and balances. It is therefore fundamentally a conflict between the global elites who would rule the world, local elites who will attempt to carve out their own distinct niches and end up playing into their hands, and the "pockets of resistance" (described so eloquently by Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatista’s) where ordinary people are fighting back.
at least that’s the way it looks to me at 5:20am on a wednsday morning.
