In the Wake of September 11: The Clash of What?

Michael H. Hunt

Acute problems attend the interpretive framing of an unfolding foreign policy crisis. Just when perspective is most valuable, it is also hardest for policy makers and commentators alike to find because of the pressure to act and the value of quick and simple ways of understanding.1 Historians have something important to say at such a moment. Understanding of the past is a useful, perhaps even essential, way of providing orientation in the midst of the press of confusing events. Historical perspective will not make any easier the resolution of the difficulties now facing the United States in the Middle East. On the other hand, it would be reckless to engage ever more deeply and especially militarily in the region without first considering the possible pitfalls that a historical perspective might reveal.	1
The argument advanced here is that the nature of the conflict sparked by the horrors of September 11 and represented by the "war on terrorism" has been ill defined historically by those who have declared that war. Their justifications rest on simple binaries, usually couched in terms of defense of civilization and the march of the modern. We need instead a framework that eschews superiority and inevitability and prompts both some degree of self-consciousness among Americans with a voice in the policy debate and a modicum of awareness about those supposedly arrayed against us and ostensibly teetering on the brink of barbarism or trapped in tradition. The pairing proposed here is a bit less neat and a bit less symmetrical. On the one side is a seemingly potent and long-lived but perhaps hollow American nationalism quick to see evil, ready to combat barbarism, devoted to the advance of its way of life, and forgetful of a long record of U.S. intervention in the Middle East. On the other side is something considerably more complex—a multivalent politics in an Islamic key with decades of history behind it and with a striking range of articulations among Muslims in far-flung places. "Fundamentalism" does not begin to do justice to its diversity, and positing some blind hostility to "the West" and "the modern world" misses the genuine, specific grievances varying from country to country and inspiring both intellectual ferment and political action.	2
Let us begin by considering the two most popular ways of interpretively framing the crisis of September 11. One reading with perhaps the widest currency derives from Samuel Huntington. In 1993 he advanced the view that the United States as the leader of the West was caught in a clash of civilizations. The main challenge, as he saw it, came from Confucian Asia (primarily China) and the Islamic world (Iran seemed at the time of writing the embodiment of militant regional resistance).2 Huntington's interpretation, with its stark and value-laden delineation of regions in conflict, commanded considerable attention when it appeared and has won fresh converts in the wake of September 11.	3
This "clash" interpretation has flaws that are troubling but also familiar in American foreign policy thinking. Huntington's notion of civilization is monolithic, static, and essentialist—much like the Cold War–era view of the Communist enemy. Reacting against the revived interest in Huntington's argument after September 11, Edward Said warned of the dangers of making "'civilizations' and 'identities' into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing."3 Seen in even longer-term perspective, Huntington is heir to one of the most ethnocentric and aggressive notions in American history. Like nineteenth-century advocates of Manifest Destiny faced by the perceived barbarism of Native Americans, Latin Americans, the Spanish, and the Chinese, he posits U.S. civilizational superiority and on that basis calls for a kind of moral rearmament to promote and defend Western values. In his construction, countries determined to find their own way are not part of a culturally diverse world, but wrong-headed rebels against a preponderant and enlightened West.	. . .