The True Clash of Civilizations

Abstract

Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush's national security advisor, promised last September that United States is committed to the march of freedom in Muslim world. But does Muslim world march to beat of a different drummer? Despite Bush's optimistic pronouncement that there is no clash of civilizations when it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, others are not so sure. Samuel Huntington's controversial 1993 thesis-that cultural division between and Orthodox Christianity and Islam is new fault line for conflict-resonates more loudly than ever since September 11. Echoing Huntington, columnist Polly Toynbee argued in British Guardian last November, binds together a globalized force of some extremists from many continents is a united hatred of Western values that seems to them to spring from Judeo-Christianity. Meanwhile, on other side of Atlantic, Democratic Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut, after sitting through hours of testimony on U.S.-Islamic relations on Capitol Hill last October, testily blurted, Why doesn't democracy grab hold in Middle East? What is there about culture and people and so on where democracy just doesn't seem to be something they strive for and work for? Huntington's response would be that Muslim world lacks core political values that gave birth to representative democracy in Western civilization: separation of religious and secular authority, rule of law and social pluralism, parliamentary institutions of representative government, and protection of individual rights and civil liberties as buffer between citizens and power of state. This claim seems o Ronald Inglehart is program director at Center for Political Studies at University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and directs World Valu s Survey. Pippa Norris is McGuire lecturer in comparative politics at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. They are authors of Rising Tide: Gender Equali y and Cultural Change Around World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).