What's New about Exceptionalism?

Fundamentalism's Future Francis Fukuyama (bio) The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State by Mark Juergensmeyer. University of California Press, 1993. 292 pp. Mark Juergensmeyer's The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State chronicles the recent rise of fundamentalist religious movements around the globe. He argues that religious nationalism has successfully defeated secular nationalism as the most dynamic and powerful "ideology of order" in the world that is emerging after the end of the Cold War. There has been a broad perception that secularism itself, whether it takes a democratic or communist/socialist form, has proven to be an empty and unsatisfying form of social organization. Those secular nationalist states established in the immediate aftermath of decolonization represented, in the eyes of the new religious nationalists, only a more subtle form of Western cultural imperialism. The author states: "What is striking is how unanimously religious politicians—be they Christians in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America; Muslims and Jews in the Middle East and Central Asia; or Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists in South and Southeast Asia—reject Western-style secular political ideologies, in part because they reject their claims of universality"(p. 144). Anticipating a theme recently developed by Samuel Huntington in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, Juergensmeyer argues that while the ideological conflicts of the Cold War were essentially internecine disputes between rival systems born from Western culture, the conflicts of the future will be intercultural, following cleavages that are primarily religious. [End Page 125] The examples of religious nationalism cited by Juergensmeyer are mostly, though not exclusively, from the Third World. He begins with the relatively familiar political challenge presented by Islamic fundamentalism to secular regimes in lran, Pakistan, Egypt, Palestine, and Algeria. He notes that Americans were taken by surprise during the Khomeini revolution in Iran because the prevailing Western social science paradigm had been one of spreading secularization; they continue to underestimate the desire of non-Western peoples to go "backward" into History and recover lost religious identities. The same phenomenon is evident in South Asia, where the secular, nationalist, and socialist Indian state founded by Nehru has been under daily assault from a variety of militant Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim religious activists, and where militant Buddhism has clashed both with Tamil nationalism and with the secular state in Sri Lanka. Religious nationalism, far from spending itself by the late 1980s, got a fresh shot in the arm with the collapse of communism. This unleashed a variety of suppressed religious movements, not only Islamic ones in Central Asia and the Transcaucasus, but Christian movements in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other parts of Eastern Europe. Juergensmeyer for the most part presents a thoughtful and balanced analysis of these religious movements and their rather ominous implications for global politics. He notes, for example, that many religious nationalist movements are more incompatible with liberalism and the defense of individual human rights than they are with democracy. When divorced from liberalism, democracy can indeed be a useful tool for the spread of intolerant fundamentalism. The alarming title of his book, suggesting that the Cold War will be replaced by an equally apocalyptic clash of religious civilizations, is posed as a question rather than a definite prediction. While Juergensmeyer does not underestimate the threat that religious nationalism poses to liberalism and world order, neither does he adopt an attitude of simple-minded hostility toward religion itself. Noting the critiques that Robert Bellah and Alasdair Maclntyre have offered of the potentially atomizing consequences of Western liberal individualism, he explains that there is a potentially healthy aspect to religious revival. As in the case of Huntington's "clash of civilizations" hypothesis, Juergensmeyer's analysis applies most accurately to the Middle East and South Asia. It is much less helpful in understanding other parts of the world, and as a general characterization of world politics it is woefully inadequate. Outside of Sri Lanka, for example, Buddhism has not taken either a militant or politicized form in recent years (with the partial exception of the Sokka Gokkai sect in Japan). Buddhism's tolerant doctrines easily coexist with Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, and Shintoism, and may...

In the decade since the conclusion of the Cold War, International Relations scholars have anxiously sought to identify and explain the actors and forces that are shaping the emerging world order. Among the debates stimulated by the conclusion of the Cold War, two of the most dramatic focus on the contrasting visions of world order presented by Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ and Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ theses. Huntington’s 1993 essay1 has become one of the most widely discussed articles of contemporary International Relations.2 His analysis of the post-Cold War world is radical and shocking, suggesting an era in which world politics is dominated by conflicts between civilizations. His thesis contains dire warnings to the West that it must consolidate to meet the threats of disintegration from within and attack from without. Conversely, Fukuyama’s image of world politics is one of a world divided between societies still evolving through the processes of history, and those which have successfully evolved to a post historical state. In this context, the West is viewed as at the forefront of a broad civilizing process, providing the model of the rational state towards which the rest of humanity is evolving.

Dominic Boyer (DB): More so than most of us, Ulf, you are truly an “anthropologist of the world.” And it so happens that these are very challenging times, but also in some ways very inspiring times, for the world. The Washington Consensus, for example, seems more fragile than ever before, and an anthropologist is set to lead the World Bank for the first time. Yet austerity reigns, and the eurozone is in turmoil. Latin America is blossoming with new social and political experiments. Yet the United States seems in the grip of a slow and possibly very ugly decline. I wanted to ask you to reflect on anthropology’s role in today’s world. Or, not to be so parochial, what the ethnographic and conceptual work of transnationally oriented human scientists (forgive the German conceit!) could contribute to the navigation of times like these. Is this a good time to resurrect the 1980s image of anthropology as cultural critique, for example?Ulf Hannerz (UH): I will certainly follow the activities of the World Bank with renewed interest (although the alternative, which would have been a Nigerian woman economist heading it, would have been appealing as well).I think “cultural critique” remains one of the uses of anthropology — and, of course, although it was revived in the 1980s, it goes way back, to Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski. But overall, I would want to see more experimentation with diverse styles and genres in anthropological writing — particularly in reaching out to audiences outside the discipline, in or outside academia. At present, anthropologists, not least in the United States, seem to be writing almost entirely for each other. It is striking that a number of historians seem to do so much better in writing for wider readerships — I am thinking of people like Timothy Garton Ash, Simon Schama, the late Tony Judt, or Niall Ferguson (whatever one may think of some of the latter’s political stances). But, then, it is also notable that these are all British immigrants, or commuters, to the American academic scene.Thank you for describing me as an “anthropologist of the world.” I really do think that anthropology as a truly worldwide discipline in its research interests has a particular public role. I just read Amin Maalouf’s Disordered World, a book on various troubles now facing humanity — Maalouf is a Lebanese writer, long in the Paris diaspora, so the book has an emphasis on the changing Arab world. Anyway, he sees coping with cultural differences as perhaps the major challenge, globally and locally, and suggests that if everyone were to become enduringly passionate about one culture other than his or her own, the result would be “a closely woven cultural web covering the whole planet” (Maalouf 2011: 161). Now that is obviously a utopian idea, but it struck me that anthropologists with their commitments to widespread fields could be seen as a kind of avant-garde here. But then they have to find ways of disseminating their understandings effectively, in an information landscape which is now very different from that of the classic anthropology of “other cultures.” On the one hand, knowledge (or misunderstandings) can now flow through so many parallel or competing channels; on the other hand, I am afraid the result of current media saturation is often more narcissism, rather than more cosmopolitanism. Will such efforts at informing the public about the world elsewhere take the form of cultural critique? Sometimes, no doubt. But I am reminded of Marshall Sahlins’s comment somewhere that we should not make it seem as if other people have constructed their lives for our purposes, in answer to the evils of Western society. This could turn into only a higher form of narcissism.DB: Ulf, let’s talk a bit more about reaching out to wider audiences through our writing. Two questions come immediately to mind given your career: the first is whether you feel there are particular experimental lessons to be learned from Scandinavian anthropology, where, perhaps especially in Norway and Sweden, anthropology has shown a remarkable capacity to participate in public debate. The second question is what, if anything, you think we can learn from news journalists today about communicating our forms of expertise to wider publics. One tends to hear lamentation that news media are not more interested in what we have to say or in how we say it. But, of course, this way of thinking amounts at some point to its own alibi.UH: I think our Norwegian colleagues have been particularly successful here, but to what extent there are “experimental lessons” I am not quite sure. In part I think they have simply tried harder. One of them had a regular newspaper column for quite some time, in the 1970s and 1980s or so, and then in the next generation there were several who took an interest in reaching a wider public and who may also have stimulated each other. This has been true not only of anthropologists; I think a number of other Norwegian social scientists have been noticeable as public commentators as well.Now, for one thing, one should note that even these anthropologists have in large part offered views on Norwegian affairs, not so much on matters relating to other countries or cultures (although immigration and minority issues have been an important theme). But I think one should also keep in mind that in terms of population size, the Scandinavian countries are all rather small. So I believe there is a kind of familiarity, accessibility, transparency that helps. Journalists have some sense of who is who in academia and vice versa. It is far from perfect, but scholars who want to cultivate media contacts have a better chance to do so.There is another factor which I think I should emphasize. These are countries with strong national languages, which are weak internationally. My friend Abram de Swaan, a Dutch sociologist, has described the “world language system” as one of three tiers: English, now far above anything else; then languages like French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Chinese, and a few others; then the third tier of languages which have few people using them as a second language. That obviously is where Scandinavian languages (as well as Dutch and a great many others) belong. This means that Scandinavian academics who want to participate in international academic life must write in a foreign language, most likely English, and some get very good at this. The other side of the coin may be that they can then become fairly invisible at home, among audiences who do not habitually read English and do not see those publications, in foreign journals or from foreign publishing houses, anyway. That may not worry these scholars — but if they care to reach home audiences, writing in the national language may become more of a conscious choice where one knows that one is very likely writing for another audience, outside the discipline, perhaps outside academic life altogether. I think there is a kind of informal division of labor here. Some people are more focused on their more or less global community of colleagues; others are more intent on contributing to public knowledge at home.But then I see a current complication. Academic institutions, and politicians of higher education, in Europe and various other regions, now seem much more obsessed with streamlined research assessment exercises, publication rankings — what is sometimes referred to as the academic “audit culture” — than I believe is yet the case in the more pluralistic American academic world. I think it is in large part a matter of these institutions being state institutions, so you can impose rules on them very effectively from the top. And the way these measurements work, you climb in the rankings with articles in what are considered the leading international journals, which will be mostly in English (and published or at least distributed by a handful of commercial publishing houses, but that is to a degree another matter). The ranking procedure obviously in large part has its origins in the natural sciences and medicine, so not much thought is given to the built-in logics of different disciplines, especially those in the humanities and social sciences. This means that books are undervalued, and so are writings in other languages, for other audiences. There is, for one thing, a contradiction here. At least our Scandinavian national academic systems tend officially to celebrate the “three tasks” of universities: research, teaching, but also reaching out with [their] knowledge to the public. Now the first of these may at least seem rather easily measurable — that is, at least, the assumption behind those auditing procedures. There is some preoccupation, too, with ways of evaluating teaching quality. In contrast, there seems to be very little systematic attention to that third task: contributing to public knowledge. Unless the agents of audit culture get serious about this, the reasonable response, from university presidents all the way down to young faculty struggling to get tenure, will be not to bother much with that scholarly public service. So that could actually decline, and public culture would be further impoverished. I know of universities in countries with severe societal problems — no names mentioned — where some more input into public debate from the human sciences would seem desirable, but when you point this out to a university’s leadership with its eyes on global ranking lists, you may not find good listeners.Forgive me for dwelling on this, but I think it is a tendency we must really be concerned with. Your second question: What, if anything, can we learn from journalists? Now there is certainly a lot of variety in journalism. Some of it is dreadful, some very good. Academics and journalists may have a kind of habitual aversion to one another; for anthropologists that aversion easily comes to focus on foreign correspondents. Forgive me again, but when I engaged in a research project on the work of foreign correspondents some years ago (mostly those writing for print media of higher quality), I quite often found that they were doing very good work, considering the practical circumstances. And they could know much more than they had a chance to show. Especially in their feature stories, I think they were sometimes quite impressive in getting mini-ethnographies into one thousand words or so, in ways that could attract readers. So if we want to reach wider audiences ourselves with some of our work, I think we may do well to read at least some foreign correspondents, and some other investigative reporters, with some care. Not least would I think we should try to develop a sense of the “big picture,” if we can credibly find one. Ethnographers still tend to handle miniatures well, but techniques of zooming may be a bit neglected.DB: I’d like to come back to the issue of audit culture in a moment. But while we’re on the subject of publics and publicity (again in the German sense of Öffentlichkeit), do you see conditions changing, or new opportunities opening, with new media and social media? For example, there are now probably hundreds of anthropologists engaged in blogging of some form, and this format could be one way of offering the thousand-word mini-ethnographies that you just mentioned. On the other hand, blogs, like other new and social media, tend to operate through networks rather than address broad (anonymous) publics in the traditional sense. Another example: I enjoy Keith Hart’s Facebook posts, and he seems to take this work very seriously. But again, he may be posting only to an immediate audience of a few hundred people, many of whom already belong to his professional networks. But that’s rather symptomatic of our media environment today, no? The broadcast publicity that you and I grew up with is being hollowed out by these new meshes of lateral connectivity. Do we need to rethink our modes of public outreach accordingly? Or should the objective still be to write more oped pieces for newspapers or to find ways to get ourselves on TV?UH: Perhaps we should be doing all these things — perhaps the one format I am really doubtful about is the kind of TV talk show where the entire idea seems to be to get people to shout at each other. But I do not think I am really technologically up-to-date on all new possibilities.Keith is an old friend of mine — we first ran into each other in the Cayman Islands over forty years ago and have been in touch ever since. I think he has continued to be one of the original minds, the gadflies, of our field. But I believe it is true that his ongoing electronic networking effort is another instance of anthropologists talking mostly to each other. And I am afraid much blogging, in and out of anthropology, is more a matter of self-expression than of communication.Now I am not sure why the Mumbai Theatre Guide and the Circassian World Newsletter appear regularly in my e-mail in-box. I never asked for them, and I certainly do not always, or even often, open these messages, but at least they are there, without my having to make the effort to seek them out. I think if we are really interested in contributing to public knowledge, we cannot sit and wait for audiences to come to us. I would see more potential in collaborative enterprises, regularly feeding knowledge and opinion about particular themes, rather than some undifferentiated “public anthropology,” to audiences who really define their interests in other ways than a curiosity about our discipline as such.I see a need for a greater organizing effort here. In my most recent English-language book, Anthropology’s World (2010), I devote a chapter to pointing to some “usable past” that we could still do well to think about again — contemporary anthropology seems to me too much inclined to amnesia. And there I devote some passages to the efforts of the “modernologist” Kon Wajiro in Japan and the Mass-Observation movement in Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Both of these basically recruited teams of amateur observers to do ethnographic observations in varied contexts, on current issues. I would not suggest we would want to return precisely to this, but the fact that there are now professional anthropologists everywhere might make a kind of collaborative “world on knowledge, continued and which news could In the Arab I found in my e-mail a flow of by the media anthropology of the of Some of them were from people who had been there, on and other Especially if we could develop a of probably on anthropologists rather than we might find new interested I like this world idea very much and with you that there is an important for anthropology parallel to the work of but also to networks of to the of as well, but just we do that that we cannot also do These are different modes of writing for different But to on the of a collaborative world would and I this be a project for our professional like and In I’d be interested to know how as a of and in feel that professional can contribute to the of the field. they be doing more than they as with so many this is not an but a if we to do slow and I am sure and as major can a part in this of world But I think it is very important to get and Latin American colleagues as My friend a me of a new that has a part in an without at with a in Perhaps that could a part in and public ethnographic as in Anthropology’s World that of in the world not seem to be as long as opportunities for and very and Perhaps this back to the less than conditions which academic and anthropology is in many of the world. can one for the kind of global you have in mind in a world still by That is a perhaps that new of the World Bank can do to capacity in more in those social sciences which are most to the of his I do hear of scholars in the more of the world research which would also the with colleagues in their fields in countries where there is little or no Yet there is the in such that the research is set by the more and so it could to it another variety of And in the current I that much of this kind is might also that in some of those countries that are now in the some of the new can to a broad for research institutions and institutions public knowledge. That could at least scholarly interests and It is for one thing, that several of the countries already have strong anthropological it would be good if these could also to be a little less with at to contribute more to the woven cultural about which I Amin Maalouf — that global of of certainly there is also a question of what we can do perhaps on a more on this side of more utopian This things like our — which journals do we where do our books come — and using for example, to scholars and to in such a way that they do not Do you also the worry that the of anthropology are being by the of what and others have “audit culture” in universities the In your how have public the way anthropology is I would not to have a good of how all that actually out. culture has but the forms may I that in the when my own was the first assessment and I was in that at the it all with a of of with the of the national universities and I her that I had thought it had all out rather better than I had to the of British academic about their And and first we was not to do it the British So there have been differences and over time. I would not be sure about how actually work their way through in different national and other I that in some the auditing is are and — and then that the has public into old public that to get to the on anthropology, I do not believe it is a good first its for the of time for the of a of discipline, which is often part of the audit culture not well with a kind of professional which to in another among those a new language, and what have I think this is one factor — there are certainly others — which now in the of more at Some years when I was to a at a British I found that young (and found that was than I had been when I my — I have not been so to It was a very good and had it well the but had her much the I before, I still think audit culture has struck more and in some other than it has in the United But then, some of the in higher do not seem very well about the of American academic although they find that American universities tend to on those ranking which they take very and must be as for one thing, they often believe that those times for come from on the other hand, I ask my American in major if their actually do their and their in they all seem to their also one American when we were at the in colleagues there that if their universities out with only a few these young scholars would be to for academic in their own these would to in with better what about It is sometimes that at least you have tenure, or is its you can to do the research you your research interests — perhaps to other for research than where you have been But things like research assessment may impose on academic work at such as I hear of to get things by or even when they might have from being a little more time. I that such as up on a new on another language, and other such would be by the of auditing certainly have no with the that we must be for the work we whether in teaching, research, or to public knowledge. It is too, if people at academic get better about who what, how and how well, on the am I in of But assessment need to be better to the of and its there is now a fairly widespread of that at least in the human although it is not so how will be to this has been a conceptual or interest of for some time as well as a of and At the of this too is there a to be as to how Hannerz the anthropological and are the and practical issues of to you My with really rather In the when I a talk at on my interest in who was in the audience, asked if I had thought about cosmopolitanism. I had to that I had not out that he But that and I that I So a little for a rather academic the on the and and in the World in in I my in a which was really a of that its way into one and the first of revived interest in in several disciplines, it one of my most I want to that of the to show that it was for a engaged with cultural but especially it was in what was still the was a among the in the and he was by with in the that of interest in and with more of an emphasis on the and of it in a of about what the world could do I am afraid in the and that Anyway, so when I back to a question to be how the more of the that I had been with to the more political I a talk on this to a cultural in my colleagues there there was no in that really So is this just a of of Western languages, to the I think they at times, quite and there can even be a them, but I would also think they are often that to be quite am I to do I have a interest in another the of global that with people like and on the academic and and on the and which has continued to ever since. This is an interest not just in these as to be as but also in their in a global public — mostly American in but into many languages, in book through those and of of world is for the German of book of and the of World its rather as — I think that suggests about why an anthropologist might be by the kind of you find in many of these as another current which I have been particularly in a with in I am the anthropology of the Scandinavian and had a in a which is to my home but also to the so colleagues could in from like and the United Arab to participate — we do not want this to become too are certainly not to some of but there are At I think one may find a of in networks what I about Norway and some in But, there may be some less as that may be mostly over on a But I think you can see that too, into my with the way the world comes in academia and elsewhere — and the part anthropology can have in It would be if the world was a more but we are not there the of and of those global and the debate over them, It seems to me as there is an these On the one hand, you are at the work of and, on the other hand, the of in the world this of large and perhaps say about the state of anthropology’s own and one of anthropology’s first of the of would you comment on the of as an for anthropology is it still where less I that in an I for a book on and in the late I that the time was when as such might not be a research interest it may for would be as a part of the of a variety of of But it was never really a of I have global some number of times, to a more on a that has But from I have often the to to that national — which certainly still not that they are truly then, has been a way of out of the of which I think is still quite strong in many disciplines, although perhaps less so in I think anthropology out of its own to its ethnographic it follow they took is true that I have had a interest in things and in I took an interest in in more or less classic for into cultural and I tend to follow writings on issues in social But our are not really in that sense. with is still to or the United States or are concerned with in a but then we also want to what for and many other may have been to a national anthropology has little at this and with that of global and the too many have to be Perhaps the effort to do an anthropology of is still that of the national of the But that was in large part a World with using ethnographic (and to or more or less So then become and in large fairly this was about and to an extent should we do about I am not sure it was ever that much of an in sense. It may too many things — and at the time it is that in some it is so only to But I think we should the of having some number of words which in a and way to of issues. The global will probably among And so will culture and and no a great many of them will in public and if we want to be in with wider publics and their as commentators or for that matter as to some for one their may not be a I think that back to where we this

The Paper examines Huntington's model for understanding conflicts in contemporary international relations, according to which the cultural and religious identities of peoples are the primary causes of their mutual clashes. Starting from the basic elements of his paradigm on the "clash of civilizations", like the concept of civilizations and their typology, the concept of conflict, their types and causes, to which the first part of the Paper is dedicated, the central part of the Paper presents a cross-section of critical reviews of Huntington's "clash of civilizations" model from the principle criticism to particular ones. After that - and bearing in mind contemporary international events and processes in the times of the "new cold war" - an attempt is made to determine whether to what extent Huntington was right, i.e. how accurate his model for understanding the conflict was, and how much it was not. Final part of the Paper is devoted to the understanding of contemporary inter-civilizational relations precisely in relation to Huntington's predictions. The conclusions that arise are clear: in Huntington's model of the "clash of civilizations", the conflicts are obviously more contentious than the civilizations themselves. The three-decade development of international relations, from the time of the end of the Cold War until today, has significantly pointed to the importance of large-scale civilizational, cultural and value groupings, although not to the degree of monolithicity and determinism as claimed by Huntington. He also quite correctly observed two tendencies: that non-Western civilizations will reject with a leaf almost all universalistic aspirations that are imposed on them against their own value frameworks, and that this will increase mutual antagonisms, but not between all civilizations and their "core states", religious groups and ethnicities, but between "the West and the rest." Moreover, the process of multipolarization that has begun leads the way to greater and more continuous inter-civilizational cooperation between non-Western large, medium and small powers. The success of these reconciliations and partnership projects is evidently larger if the increasingly problematic influence of the modern West, as a disruptive factor in the intercivilizational and multipolar world equation, is excluded from them.

A series of attempts have been made since the end of the Cold War to make sense of the much changed international system. Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’,1 Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’,2 Aron Wildavsky’s zones of conflict and zones of peace and Michael Doyle’s observations on liberal states’3 propensity not to engage in conflict with each other, are prime examples. Many of the ideas were driven by key articles, greeted as seminal, but like a young child with a new toy, they were soon discarded. Not unnaturally, theorising about the shape of the international system focused on the US role in the post-Cold War world. Two works in particular fuelled much of what became known as the declinist debate. First, Paul Kennedy’s book ‘The Rise and The Fall of The Great Powers’, speculated about whether the US would fall prey to modern variants of imperial overstretch, whereby ‘Great Powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending more on “security” and thereby divert potential resources from “investment” and compound their long-term dilemma’.4 In the same year that Kennedy’s book appeared, David Calleo’s equally provocative Beyond American Hegemony: The Future of the Western Alliance5 was published. Calleo argued that post-Cold War NATO was ‘essentially an American protectorate for Europe. As such, it is increasingly unviable’. Calleo further contended that it was global shifts that introduced fundamentally changed distributions of resources and power and that ‘even if the fundamental common interests of the United States and Western Europe dictate a continuation of the Atlantic Alliance… the old hegemonic arrangements cannot continue without becoming self-destructive’.6

After descending an escalator of his hotel at Central Park West on a June day in 2015, Donald Trump ascended a podium and proceeded to accuse Mexico of “sending people that have lots of problems, a...

This study quantitatively examines Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' theory using data from the State Failure dataset which focuses on intense and violent internal conflicts between 1950 and 1996. The proportion of state failures which are civilisational has remained mostly constant since 1965. The absolute amount of civilisational conflict has dropped considerably since the end of the Cold War. There is no clear evidence that the overall intensity of civilisational state failures is increasing in proportion to non-civilisational state failures. Also, the predictions of Islam's 'bloody borders' and the Confucian/Sinic-Islamic alliance against the West have not yet occurred. In fact, Islamic groups 'clash' mostly with other Islamic groups. However, the majority of the West's civilisational conflicts, during the Cold War and to a lesser extent after it, are with the Islamic civilisation. Thus it is arguable that Huntington's prediction that the Islamic civilisation is a potential threat to the West is probably more due to the end of the relevance of the Cold War paradigm than any post-Cold War changes in the nature of conflict. This highlights the potential influence of paradigms on policy and should serve as a caution to academics and policy makers to be more aware of the assumptions they make based on any paradigm.

Reviewed by: The New World Order: Contrasting Theories Peter Grosvenor Birthe Hansen & Bertel Heurlin, The New World Order: Contrasting Theories (Basingstoke: Macmillan. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) The end of the Cold War, and the emergence of a so-called New World Order (NWO), have presented the contending paradigms of international relations theory with serious theoretical challenges, all of which relate to polarity — a central concept in international systems analysis. Contributor Ronald Deibert writes that, “the study of world order is... above all the study of the organization of political space — the architecture of political authority — at a world level” (p18). A polar actor is an actor so significant in this architecture that its removal would fundamentally alter the global distribution of power. The Cold War was widely interpreted as a bi-polar system in which two dominant actors imposed stability and peace through a balance of power of both a nuclear and conventional kind. This was, of course, a northern hemispherical perspective because, as Fred Halliday has demonstrated in his Cold War, Third World (Hutchinson Radius, London 1989), the superpowers clashed by proxy in the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Yet the implosion of the Soviet Union as a polar actor spectacularly reconfigured world politics and ushered in an era of comparative uncertainty. This volume of nine essays, edited by two Danish political scientists from the University of Copenhagen, details the responses of contending schools of international relations theory to the post-Cold War world. The term “New World Order” is of political, not academic, coinage. It was used by the Bush administration in the early 1990s to denote a new global situation in which the United States would head multi-lateral efforts to resolve long-standing intra-regional conflicts, to spread liberal democracy, and to liberalize the world economy. The American leadership of a Gulf War coalition comprising such disparate powers as Bangladesh, Denmark, Morocco, Syria, Egypt and France was presented by Bush as an example of the NWO in practice. To the neo-realist school, which treats power asymmetries as the necessary determinants of order and disorder in an anarchical international system, the NWO is simply a uni-polarity in which the power of the United States cannot be effectively challenged by another actor, or group of actors. But uni-polar systems are inherently unstable: in the absence of restraint, the dominant power over-reaches itself, and other powers gradually coalesce to form a countervailing power bloc. In his contribution to this volume K.N. Waltz argues that American uni-polarity is already giving way to a multi-polarity as Russia and China move closer together, and smaller states, stripped of the protection of their Cold War superpower sponsors, seek to build up their own autonomous defense capacities, including in some cases the quest for nuclear credibility. Liberal theoreticians, on the other hand, find encouragement in the NWO for their essentially rationalist project to improve the relations between states through diplomacy, international law, the spread of democracy, and the strengthening of international institutions. The essays collected here are arbitrarily dismissive of the “liberal-convergence” theory elucidated in Francis Fukuyama’s neo-Hegelian The End of History and the Last Man (Penguin, London 1992), but the burgeoning “democratic peace” literature is subjected to rigorous logical and empirical analysis. In contrast to both neo-realist and liberals, Marxists identify important continuities between the Cold War system and the NWO, as Michael Cox shows in his lucid survey of radical international relations theory. Wallerstein’s world systems theory always dealt in an alternative bi-polarity of North-South and substantially ignored the Cold War. Similarly, in his World Orders Old and New (Pluto Press, London 1994), Chomsky sees the end of the Cold War as nothing more than the completion of a world capitalist system under American hegemony. Cox credits Marxism with having tracked the development of international capitalism since The Communist Manifesto and suggests that it will continue to have a role in exposing the contradictions and iniquities of contemporary globalization. At the same time, he concedes that Marxism’s principal theoretical weakness is its inability to formulate practical systemic alternatives to...

Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis considers interstate and intrastate conflicts between groups of different civilizations to be more frequent, longer, and more violent than conflicts within civilizations. The clash of civilizations should be the principal issue in world politics after the end of the Cold War, and it should especially shape the relationship between the West and Islam. This article examines Huntington’s hypotheses on the basis of a dataset derived from the Uppsala Conflict Data Project. A new research design uses conflict-years in order to deal with conflicts both between and within states. It also tries to find the ‘core’ intercivilizational conflicts. The analyses distinguish three periods after World War II, and each of them is characterized by a higher number of intercivilizational conflict-years than the previous one. There are two points of transition, in the 1960s and 1980s, but the trends in the clash of civilizations seem to be unaffected by the end of the Cold War. The relationship between civilizational difference and duration of conflict is not statistically significant. Conflicts within civilizations are less likely to escalate into war during the post-Cold War period than during the Cold War period, while the intensity of conflicts between civilizations remains as high as in the Cold War. The majority of intercivilizational conflict-years during the post-Cold War period have involved Islamic groups. Nevertheless, the frequency of conflict between the Islamic and Sinic (Confucian) civilizations and the West remains marginal.

Three themes emerge in the literature on post-Cold War Asia-Pacific. The first concerns the impact that the end of the Cold War has had or will have on the evolution of the Asia-Pacific international system. The second theme focuses on the challenges posed to the Asia-Pacific states by the new security agenda. And the third theme addresses the problem of institutionalizing security in the Asia-Pacific. In this article, I address these three themes and assess the relevance of Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' hypothesis for the future evolution of the Asia-Pacific international system.

DAVID SUCHOFF New Historicism and Containment: Toward a Post-Cold War Cultural Theory s part of cold war cultural theory, New Historicism opposed .the idea of a subversive modernism with "containment," reading literary works as suffused by power, controlled by mass culture, or subject to the state. This New Historical reaction against the notion of a subvetsive literary text was framed against textual approaches, but also against the claims of the "liberal imagination," whose foremost exponent in America was Lionel Trilling. The return to history, like feminism , situated novels once again in excluded areas of history, and defined cultural criticism itself as subject to the control of social context. But the development ofAmerican criticism, as Frank Lentricchia noted in After the New Criticism, had already left to one side the Frankfurt School analysis of literature's domination by the marketplace, as well as its quest for a redemptive cultural critique (Lentricchia 12).1 New Historicism, however, carried Cold War limits into its evaluation of mass society. New Historical writing rethought the claimed freedom of the "liberal imagination," considered the ideological uses of modernist "subversion, " and examined mass culture almost exclusively as a source of social control. This development from liberal cultural theory, and away from its socialist predecessors, took place in the political culture of McCarthyism, liberal pluralism, and the foreign policy doctrine of "containment," formulated by George Kennan in 1947.2 Such limited views of mass culture, as well as oppositional criticism, all emerged from this specific American situation, and their attitudes toArizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 1, Spring 1992 Copyright © 1992 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004-1610 138David Suchoff ward modernism and socialism—the historical antecedents of a devalued "subversion"—continue to shape our own. This essay will historicize these terms of contemporary cultural debate, and demonstrate the origins of "containment" as the horizon ofNew Historicism's American cultural history and its limited view of mass culture; finally, I will examine Frankfurt School approaches to the commodification of literature , and their potential for shaping a post-Cold War cultural critique. COLD WAR CULTURAL THEORY: MODERNISM, SOCIALISM AND SUBVERSION When Criticism and Social Change appeared in 1983, Frank Lentricchia urged the political criticism of literature to avoid the blind alley of deconstruction and return to history. "Kantian, symbolist, and aestheticist patterns of thought ... all of which father modern political refusals," Lentricchia argued, had left their traces in poststructuralism's concern with signs, and were to be avoided in favor of attention to the matetial functions of literature in society. But Lentricchia's brief against modernism had its own American cultural history: the Cold War. As liberal cultural theory separated itself from the radicalism of the Thirties and the realist aesthetic favored by the Popular Front, a notion of modern narrative as subversive had been formed. Dickens, Melville, and Kafka were used to construct a cultural criticism that was liberal and modernist, but set socialism aside. That version of modernism, Lionel Trilling argued, was anticipated by Freud, who articulated a modern self "submitting to culture and yet . . . in opposition" to culture's conformist forces. The scope of its narrative canon was established significantly by Dickens and Kafka, whose novels were said to show "the perfect continuity of the nineteenth century with the twentieth" (Beyond Culture 102).' J. Hillis Miller's influential Charhs Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958) would reinforce the connection between Dickens and Kafka as novelists of "metaphysical alienation" and social criticism (233-34). But a somewhat obscure book by C.L.R. James—Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953)—had already placed Melville in the same line of alienated cultural rebellion. An important Caribbean historian and a leader of the Workers Party, James defined Melville as a cultural rather than political opponent of New Historicism and Containment139 American society.4 H. Bruce Franklin's New Left revival of James revised his earlier mythic interpretation of Melville, Tfie Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology (1963), but saw Melville's class-conscious radicalism without the textual acuity that the contemporary work of Fredric Jameson on the novel would supply. 5 Together with later works, such...

Confucianism and Modernity—Insights from an Interview with Tu Wei-ming Bingyi Yu and Zhaolu Lu On November 6 and December 5, 1997, we visited Tu Wei-ming, professor of Chinese history and philosophy and Director of the Yenching Institute at Harvard University. The questions we brought to Professor Tu were manifold, but we had one concern that was central. It seemed to us that although we are entering a new millennium, the basic human dilemma remains fundamentally the same as it has been through the ages: we must all live together on this planet, but we fight among ourselves for the limited available resources. How can we make this turn into a new century—this turn of the millennium—a genuinely human turn in the best sense? What mode of thinking will enable us to create a new world civilization—and not just a new "world order"? How will our past, particularly our many cultural traditions, affect our future? As members of the scholarly community who are Chinese, we are especially concerned with the question of what role Chinese culture, in particular the Confucian tradition, can play in the remaking of our world. During our two interview sessions, we made known our concerns, and Professor Tu shared some of his most recent thoughts on the relationship between traditional Confucianism and modern civilization. He also elaborated his earlier views on the history of civilization, on the construction of planetary culture, and on the modern relevance of traditional Confucianism. For this article, we have organized some of the results of our interview under three headings: (1) the clash of civilizations and the dialogue of civilizations, (2) Confucian humanism and the "New Humanism," and (3) tradition and modernity. The Clash of Civilizations and the Dialogue of Civilizations In 1993, one of Tu's colleagues, Professor Samuel P. Huntington (at Harvard's Olin Institute of Strategical Studies), published an essay titled "The Clash of Civilizations" (Huntington 1993). In this essay, Huntington claims that international political conflicts and the future of human development can both be explained in terms of a clash of civilizations, and he further elaborates this theory in his 1996 work The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington maintains that historically the sharpest and cruelest conflicts are all deeply rooted in the divergences of civilizations from each other. He claims that in the future a divergence between Western and non-Western civilizations, rather than political and economic differences, will define the battleground where international conflicts arise, and that the clash between traditional Confucianism on the one hand and both Islam and the non-Islamic West on the other will be the focal point of international conflicts. These conflicts will determine the future structure and orientation [End Page 377] of international politics. So far, this "clash of civilizations" theory continues to receive a strong response worldwide that is both favorable and critical.1 Professor Tu criticized the Huntingtonian understanding of civilization as a rather one-sided point of view that represents a fashionable but unhealthy current that has persisted in American society since the end of the Cold War and is typical of the narrow-minded political model that has come out of that era. Although the "clash of civilizations" theory continues to be widely popular, Tu predicted that its influence will decline, because its very foundation is problematic. First of all, it does not correctly represent the mainstream currents in modern civilizations. Tu emphasized that it is a dialogue of civilizations, not a clash, that appropriately characterizes this mainstream. Moreover, conflict exists not just between civilizations; it arises internally, within each civilization system as well. Countries and regions around the world are confronted with the conflict between improving material life and maintaining moral and spiritual values, between fostering economic growth and preserving the environment, between protecting individual rights and safeguarding the community, between change and stability, and so on. Problems like these are not unique to any one civilization system. The fact that these problems are common to different civilization systems indicates that a wide-ranging dialogue between different civilizational and cultural streams is both possible and necessary. In the 1940s the German philosopher Karl Jaspers proposed...

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.”To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post‐Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.” To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post-Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.”To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post‐Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.