Despite this, some of these stories are both real, and as legendary as could only be imagined in an epic tale. What happened fifty years ago in Selma, Alabama, features these qualities, both as a national marker and a real story of heroism. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of what was to be remembered as “Bloody Sunday” – March 7, 1965. The achievements that came from that day – and the whole Civil Rights Movement – helped to move the US, and the world, closer to racial equality.

As remarkable as the achievements that ensued have been, it is equally heartbreaking to witness, in many countries across the globe, that discrimination – based not only on racism but also on religious convictions, social affiliations, and political positions – still exist, and often under the guise of legal justifications. In this article, I will stretch the story of Selma to relate it to a unique drama of discrimination ongoing in modern day Turkey, a strategically located country in the Middle East.

Bridge-crossing from Selma

A young John Lewis, today a Congressional Representative (since 1987), led his SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and a crowd of around 600 on a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were planning to leave the city of Selma on a march to Montgomery, the state capital 54 miles east, to demonstrate their desire for equal citizenship rights. At the other end of the bridge, however, waited a line of state troopers. The non-violent marchers were violently attacked, leaving many heavily injured.

After re-grouping, another march was held, led by Martin Luther King Jr. This march and other demonstrations resulted in the 1965 Voting Rights Act which ensured every American citizen the right to vote regardless of race. Selma is an important threshold in the history of the Civil Rights Movement and it did not happen at the cost of nothing: thousands were arrested, many killed, and many more heavily wounded. Famously, the murder of an activist and deacon, Jimmie Lee Jackson, inspired the marchers. Yet despite frustration at the violence and discrimination, non-violence was a defining character of Civil Rights’ activism, and the followers would not compromise on this.

First march, March 7: Bloody Sunday. Around 600 marchers were heavily beaten and dispersed.

Second march, March 9: Turnaround Tuesday. Around 2500 marchers joined by hundreds of people from around the country to support the demonstration. Minister James Reeb who came from Boston was beaten by Ku Klux Klan that night and he could not survive. Dr. King turned marchers back from the bridge to wait for a judicial order to proceed.

Third march, March 21-25: To Montgomery. Started with 8 thousand and culminated with 25 thousand marchers and they were able to deliver a petition to the Governor’s office.

With endurance, patience, diplomacy, and stamina, activists were finally able to cross the Pettus Bridge, making their suffering known nationwide, and were able to make themselves heard in D.C. The commemoration of this event on its 50th anniversary was led, incredibly enough, by the first African American president of the United States. President Obama said on the site of the march and massacre, “In one afternoon 50 years ago, so much of our turbulent history — the stain of slavery and anguish of civil war; the yoke of segregation and tyranny of Jim Crow; the death of four little girls in Birmingham; and the dream of a Baptist preacher — all that history met on this bridge.”

But one description Obama made that day portrayed the true character of the Civil Rights Movement:

“It was not a clash of armies, but a clash of wills; a contest to determine the true meaning of America.”

This was an accurate description; for the followers of the Civil Rights Movement were not using violence. Instead, they constantly trained to restrain themselves when challenged by violence and curses. And after they were able to sharpen their wills to the highest point of resilience, they won over their oppressors. They did not tarnish their rightful cause with the filthiness of violence, and this mustered sympathizers across the nation, both black and white. The Minister James Reeb, who was killed after the second march, was a white man. In fact, three of the four martyrs who answered SCLC’s (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) call and came to Selma, were white (Unitarian Minister James Reeb, Unitarian laywoman Viola Liuzzo, the Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels).¹

Fast forward to 2015. The United States still suffers from racism. The recent killings in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston, and a few other places² are sad evidence that racist violence is still with us and has not yet yielded, and that the march begun in Selma is not yet over. Still, however, these attacks, which have been earnestly denounced by the American nation as a whole and perpetrators are facing trials, cannot undermine the accomplishments of the non-violent civil rights movement and their white supporters.

What is happening in Turkey?

The movie Selma, which was about the marches to Montgomery, was released around the same time when the trailers of a Turkish movie called Selam: Bahara Yolculuk (Peace: Journey to Spring) was being screened across Turkey. The two movies are related not only due to the extremely similar names, but because they feature the uniqueness of two epic tales of struggle for basic human rights and peaceful coexistence. They are the stories of two communities seemingly distant in location, time, and color, but mutual in goals and methods, in many respects.

Whereas Selma conveys the heroism of African-Americans striving non-violently as a part of civil rights movement, Selam reflects an episode of the Hizmet Movement’s expansion to the world. The volunteers involved in this movement are professionals – teachers, business people, physicians, and people from all walks of life who cherish the peacebuilding ideas of Fethullah Gülen, a retired Turkish preacher, who promotes education and honors every human being with compassion and respect. Hundreds of schools, relief organizations, healthcare centers, and dialogue institutions have been established by the participants of this movement across the globe. The movie is about the successful opening of one of the schools in Central Asia and the self-sacrificial work of their teachers.

Yet, what is not featured in the movie is the discrimination the Movement is suffering in its home base, Turkey, where it also originated. There is a systematic oppression underway against the schools, media outlets and journalists, corporations, public servants, and individuals who are affiliated with the Movement. This has been ongoing since the outbreak of the enormous corruption scandal against the government in December 2013.

The government, which has been in a position of un-checked power since 2002, responded to the claims of corruption with incredible vitriol, reassigning “thousands of police and prosecutors … and the prosecutors who initiated the investigation were suspended. The government closed the investigation and destroyed evidence that was gathered.”³ Heavily injured by these probes that included “claims of bribery, irregular gold exports worth billions of dollars and stashes of cash,”⁴ the government, which was trying to win upcoming local, presidential, and parliamentary elections, needed a scapegoat to lay all the sins on, in the public’s view. The Hizmet Movement, the largest social mass movement in Turkey, with sympathizers and volunteers from all spheres of society, was a tailor-made candidate for this position. And thanks to the overwhelming majority of the media, which the government directly and indirectly controls, as well as the overhaul of the entire state structure through reassignments and undermining the separation of powers, they have succeeded, to a certain extent, in manipulating public perception. Today, there are many public servants and journalists jailed on no legal grounds, but solely because of an alleged affiliation with Hizmet. Among the constituents of the ruling party’s supporters, a considerable portion believes Fethullah Gülen is an American spy secretly serving US interests by trying to overthrow the Turkish government! Accusations of similar sorts were alleged against the civil rights movement too. Robert Welch wrote in JBS Bulletin (John Birch Society Bulletin, June 1965): “Our task must be simply to make clear that the movement known as ‘civil rights’ is Communist-plotted, Communist-controlled, and in fact…serves only Communist purposes.”

People are afraid to send their kids to Hizmet schools, and they don’t want to work with sympathetic business owners. The signs of the schools are being torn down by municipalities, their companies are being raided by police, defamations of all sorts are being circulated through a paid-off propaganda machine, and witch-hunts of all sorts are being conducted.

Discrimination and segregation based on race as experienced in the US cannot be compared to the current political controversy in Turkey. Turkey has its own extremely weak record on human rights based on ethnicity and sectarian differences with Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds. Ironically, fellow sunni Turks who did not conform to the uncompromising definition of the new citizen under the ultra-secularist Kemalist regime have been subjected to state violence and defamation arguably no less than the previous groups. Yet, it is very disappointing to see a country which was once considered in the first decade of the twenty-first century as a potential model in the Middle East to have turned into a regime with only minor differences, if any, from its authoritarian neighbors.

One thing that Hizmet shares with the Civil Rights Movement is an approach to countering oppression: using non-violence and positive action. Through this policy, Dr. King and his supporters were able to gather much support from the rest of the nation and eventually acquired their rights. Non-violence and positive action are the essence of the faith-inspired Hizmet Movement, too, and thankfully, there is a growing support for them in many of the 170 countries where they operate.

Tyranny cannot last long, and Turkey will certainly wake up soon to once again realize the importance of this mass movement of education and dialogue. Retaliation in kind is not in Hizmet’s nature, so they will not slander back, they will not curse back, and they will never hurt back – these are against who they are. Those who support the oppressors against Hizmet are doing so either because of their envy for the achievements of Hizmet, because they cannot really believe their government could be this corrupt, or because it is in their best interest to continue to work closely with the government for their personal and/or institutional survival; this is the most accurate definition of slavery, where perhaps not the physical bodies, but their wills, values, and virtues are being compromised.

Conclusion

I have been writing this article at the time when Mr. Obama was preparing himself for a eulogy to be read at the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney in Charleston, South Carolina. The reverend was allegedly killed by a white supremacist. Despite many achievements that were earned during the Civil Rights Movement and despite the many obstacles the US has surpassed, such mass violence shows the US still has a long ways to go to true equality.

The word Selma is considered to have descended from either a Germanic root – the shortening of Anselma, from Germanic “ans,” which means god, and “helm,” which means helmet – or from an Arabic root of “salam,” which means peace. Thus, Selma stands for a Godly protection in peace. Selma, as in the Turkish movie, is a journey to spring. It is a one-way road for innocent victims to leave behind all discrimination and maltreatment. Challenged by these ongoing discriminations, we hope both Turks and Americans will be victorious in this “clash of wills.”

References

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/07/selma-people-who-died_n_6810430.html
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/from-ferguson-to-charleston-and-beyond-anguish-about-race-keeps-building.html
3. http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/humanrightsreport
4. Daniel Dombey, Financial Times, October 18, 2014.

Leiden is a small picture-perfect postcard Dutch university town, full of canals, cobbled streets, windmills, high-roofed 17th century houses, cheerful blond girls whizzing by on bicycles, imposing churches, and markets full of tulips and aged cheese. If Hollywood needed a stage for a film about Holland, it would be here. Yet this is no stereotypical Dutch town: Leiden is also a city unique in Europe, for it has a longstanding relationship with the Arabic and Muslim world. If there was anywhere I could feel the potential of human endeavor among peoples, it would be here.

On a bright, sunny Saturday morning at the end of January, I visited the bustling market and crossed bridges over canals, discovering the back streets, courtyards, and narrow alleys of this romantic town. The Mayflower pilgrims set forth to America from here; Rembrandt grew up here and went on to paint the heartbreak of humanity in oils; fellow Leiden painter, Jan Steen, captured the exuberance of existence in his. I ducked into the local public library for a visit, and when I stepped out the door, I came face to face with a brick wall covered by a mural written in Arabic script. This was the “Wereldwinkel” (fair trade shop.) The mural was a poem written by Nasir Kazmi (1925-1972) in Urdu, an important South-Asian language with over 250 million speakers in India, Pakistan, and other countries, and which uses Arabic script. I soon learned that it is one of the some 100 poems written by international poets that grace walls throughout the city: Shakespeare, Neruda, Sugawara no Michizane, Verlaine, Reverdy, Sapho, and William Carlos Williams all have their words immortalized in their native languages and scripts on high for all to contemplate as they pass. As I wandered along the streets of the city, I took delight in discovering many poems surprising me in unexpected places, and I even found one in Turkish, written by Fakir Baykurt (1929-1999). Yet, I could not help but wonder why a poem in Arabic had been set in such a prominent place.

I soon learned that this was but the tip of the Oriental iceberg. For over 400 years, Leiden has been deeply involved in Arabic studies, and the Islamic world has played a significant part in the history and culture of this European city. In 1575, stadtholder William of Orange granted Leiden the first university in the Northern Netherlands. A few years later, in 1613, the gifted linguist Thomas van Erpe (1584-1624) – better known by his Latinized name, Erpenius – became the first occupant of Leiden University’s chair for Arabic. The decision to create the position was taken in 1599, when the University was just 24 years old. In our world of jet travel and instant internet globalism, it is hard for us to realize that in the days of 16th century Europe, the Oriental world was still akin to outer space: manuscripts, printed books, and savants were rare – only a few handful existed in Europe – and lexicons and grammars were unheard of, so it is impressive that the University of Leiden took this initiative. Such a daring move was all the more impressive because wars, starvation, and plague had left 1/3 of the city’s population dead. Leiden was fighting for its life, and during these difficult days they turned to a light from the east as a beacon of hope, and not as a scourge of destruction. Could our world, in January 2015, think the same way? Erpenius, after learning Arabic in Paris from an Egyptian Copt and a Spanish Muslim, dreamed of setting sail to Istanbul to study Oriental languages, but he never made it. He published an Arab grammar book, which remained in use until the 19th century and established Leiden as the center of Arabic studies in Europe: students came from all over the European continent to study here. He spent his last years translating the Qur’an into Latin, but unfortunately never completed it, as he died of the plague in 1624 at the young age of 40. More than four centuries after Erpenius was appointed, Leiden is still the center for Arabic studies in the Netherlands.

The first recorded Muslim to live in Leiden was a North African named Omar Boek, probably from Morocco, who settled here in 1596. As every good Muslim strives to be, he was charitable: it is recorded that he donated money to help the poor by rebuilding a local convent. Why he came here we do not know, but he must have cut an exotic figure as he strolled along the canals, and I often wonder if the young Rembrandt ever crossed his path.

Indeed, since the beginning of the 16th century, Leiden’s scholars, businesses, and citizens have used their knowledge of the Islamic world to make Leiden a culturally and economically richer city. The creation of the chair for Arabic was done for pragmatic reasons, motivated by the Dutch logic for commerce and trade. The teaching of Arabic would benefit the Netherland’s commercial activities, especially in Southeast Asia, where the Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602. It was not just commerce, however, that motivated this move, for the study of Arabic allowed the University to put itself on the European map of academic excellence and allowed philologists to better understand and teach others of the human achievement as witnessed by history and other cultural viewpoints. Learning Arabic allowed students to access Arab sapientia, or wisdom. The ability to read Arabic texts in the original offered a gateway to the Arab’s exceptional contributions in the fields of medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and geography, and gave insight to a civilization longer lived than that of Rome. It opened a door to a rich and extensive world; a provocative world of expanded and arresting knowledge.

In addition, printers and publishers clustered around the university scholars. The oriental collections of the University Library are some of the most impressive in Europe, but there is more in Leiden: it is the home of the international publishing house, E.J. Brill. Say the world “Brill” to an Orientalist and you will see his face light up and hear the awe of admiration in his voice. Brill is, quite simply, the most erudite publishing house in the field.

The first printer of Arabic in the Netherlands was a certain E. J. Brill of Leiden, whose business became known in the publishing world for their ability to type set and print many Oriental and uncommon languages. Brill focused on Orientalist materials in Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Malay, and Japanese. The famous Encyclopedia of Islam is one of the highlights of this house, first printed from 1913-1938 in 4 volumes and supplements. In the 1960’s Brill moved its modernized printing activity away from the original building on the Oude Rijn (Old Rhine Canal), and the type-setting presses and blocks of 5,100 characters in the famous “Brill Typeface” offering a complete coverage of the Latin script with the full range of diacritic characters needed to display any language correctly were shut down – but do not fear, the typeface is now available for downloading for free on the Brill website.

In architecture, too, you can discover traces of the Islamic culture in Leiden. Walk down Leiden’s main street, the Breestraat, and you will see at the top of the V-D emporium an impressive piece of sculpture in the tympanum, known as the Guilded Turk. The carving comprises a bust wearing a turban, reigning above the house of two merchant brothers, Jan and Adriaen Le Pla, who had made their wealth primarily through trade in the Levant. The brothers even lived in Istanbul at one point. This gilded figure expresses the longstanding commercial relationship between Leiden and the Middle East. Look closely and you will discover the story of their business: Neptune, the god of the sea, is at the left, and Mercury, the god of trade, is on the right. Mercury coddles a bundle of ‘grein’ or ‘Turkish cloth’ under his arm, a fabric produced using either silk or angora wool, as hinted by the Angora goat peeping from behind his feet. Angora wool was shipped from Ankara to Smyrna (Izmir) to Leiden, where it was combined with European wool, dyed and processed in 7 different guild halls. This cloth was exported to Europe and even back to the Levant, making rich not only the merchants of Leiden, but also those of Ankara. Peasant goat herders in Anatolia made the Burghers of Leiden the richest men of Holland, all from the hair of a Turkish goat.

You can also look up to the top of the facade of Leiden’s monumental City Hall, and notice a curious embellishment on the edge of the roof: yes, you are right; those are alems, the crescent moon finials seen on every mosque in Turkey. It is believed that the crescent moons are there in reference to the Dutch Protestant protesters who rebelled against the Spanish Crown in 1574, and who held as their motto “Rather Turkish than Papist!” Led by William of Orange, these rebels affirmed that they would rather become Muslim subjects than remain subjects of the Catholic King of Spain, for they had observed that the Ottoman Turks under Selim II were more tolerant of other religions than Catholicism was at the time, an attitude perhaps not held by all the current European Common Market leaders today.

It is not just in books and commerce and architecture that Leiden formed bonds with the Middle East, but also in botany. In 1587, Leiden University decided to create a medicinal herb garden and teach botany. A botanist named Carolus Clusius (1526-1609) accepted the University’s commission to create the garden. When the Flemish diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522-1592) returned from the Court of Suleiman the Magnificent with a tulip bulb in his saddlebags, it was to Clusius that he turned. In Vienna, he passed it on to Clusius, who was at the time the prefect of the Austrian imperial garden. When Clusius took up an appointment at the University of Leiden in 1593, he planted that bulb in the botanical garden of the University. His detailed planting lists have made it possible to recreate his garden, and a small, fenced-in area at the entry of the Horus Botanicus Garden honors the spot where it was planted, next to a statue of the legendary horticulturist. Thus bloomed the first tulips in Western Europe, and as the story goes, the rest is history. The tulip became much sought after by collectors, and ultimately the tulip market got completely out of hand, with tulip bulbs changing hands for astronomical prices. Tulipmania reached its peak in 1636-37, after which the market collapsed and many traders went bankrupt. Also in the Botanical Gardens of Leiden is an old observatory originally founded by Jacobus Golius (1596-1677), professor of Arabic, who traveled to Istanbul and Aleppo and collected many astronomy manuscripts for Leiden University, including one created by Ottoman Sultan Murad IV’s court astronomer.

I looked at the ordered, calm, and industrious Dutch of this city and realized not only how much we need to see, read, hear, and ask about the life and ways of thinking in the lands far beyond these canals, but also of the lives of those “different” ones now living among us. Is the legacy of Erpenius alive today in Leiden?

Yes, it is. Today, Leiden University has one of the largest and most extensive departments covering the Muslim world – from Morocco to Indonesia; from the rise of Islam to the present. Today, some 6,000 priceless manuscripts from the Middle East in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish can be found in Leiden University Library’s Middle East and Islam Collections, such as the “Ring of the Dove” by Tawq al-hamamafi’l-ulfa wa ‘l-ullaf, an 11th century Arabic book about love.

Today, you can see the Turkish Mimar Sinan Mosque, built in 1995 for the Turkish community in the precinct of a former Dutch Reformed Church, and which offered the first minaret on the skyline of Leiden.

Today, there are halal Islamic butcher shops and Turkish barbers scattered on the streets of the city and Moroccans selling olives in the market, driving taxis and tending municipal bicycle garages.

A former church building on Rembrandtstraat housed the Moroccan Al Hijra Mosque, present in Leiden for 30 years. Al-Hijra commemorates the migration of Mohammed and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622, a reference not lost on these immigrants. This building was replaced in 2012, when a brand new mosque opened in northern Leiden in a neighborhood more convenient to the Moroccan community.

Today, one can hope that Arabic is studied not to decipher ancient scientific texts, but to have an increased knowledge about the modern Middle East and Islamic culture. The sudden and pressing relevance of the events of January 7th bring all of this activity to imperative consciousness. Perhaps the goals of the University are not the same as in the 17th century, and most certainly the social structure of the Islamic world has changed since then – but what remains the same is that this city maintains a welcoming and appreciative place for that voice coming from afar – whether it manifests itself as medieval manuscripts, Arabic poems on walls, or Turkish butcher shops. This is a lesson for all of us to heed.

In the late January afternoon, a cold wind picked up and I wrapped my wool scarf more tightly around my neck as I strolled along the picturesque canals of the city. I was reminded that we must wrap our lives in optimism and beauty, or else we are doomed to live a perpetual polar winter of cultural, racial, and religious misunderstandings. Like those 17th century tulip dealers in Holland, we, too, will go bankrupt if we let our mania get out of control in the wrong way. I thought of the last lines of the poem of Nasir Kazmi that I saw on the wall opposite the public library:

If the cruel wind of the times continues to sway,
Earth will lie drained of water, the sun deceived of rays.

Spring is soon coming, and the beds of the Leiden Botanical Garden and all of Holland will be ablaze with dancing floral turbans, of many colors and varieties. I think of the mountains of freshly-cut blooms that fill the cargo holds of hundreds of planes departing from Schiphol Airport each day, bringing their splendor to the entire world. It all started here in Leiden, with one bulb from a foreign land planted in peace; with the will of one community to work together and live not as enemies, but friends; with Europeans willing to embrace the difference of the other and to learn from it. I take the inspiration gleaned on my walks along those cobblestone streets of Leiden in the suitcase of my mind as a souvenir more precious than any piece of Delft china: the hope for a world where we, too, can bloom in harmonious color with our neighbors, and where we can share our lives with Islam – not as enemies, but as blossoms in one garden of beauty.

In his studies, (1993, 1996) Huntington suggests alternative explanations to understanding conflicts and disputes in the post-Cold War period. To him, “culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilizational identities, are shaping patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War” (Huntington 1996, 20).

The purpose of this paper is to test Huntington’s argument (1996) by addressing the following question: “Does a civilizational difference cause militarized interstate dispute?” The significance of the answer to this question is obvious: if Huntington’s claim is empirically supported, then dominant theories of international politics, which do not base conflicts on civilizational differences, have to be revised. And, therefore, Huntington’s theory will be useful in understanding the emerging world-order and explaining militarized disputes and conflicts that have occurred in the post-Cold War era.

Literature review

There were many responses and objections to Huntington’s argument that resulted in an extensive debate. Many of them claimed that the civilization theory is unable to explain the causes of conflicts and international order. In spite of the great number of responses and studies, few of these have been supported by quantitative research.

One of the important studies that evaluated Huntington’s argument and which deserves close attention was conducted by Russett, Oneal, and Cox in 2000 (in Triangulating Peace 2001, 239-305). The main question to be answered was “Does a difference in civilization increase the likelihood that a pair of states will become involved in a militarized interstate dispute?” (Russett et al 2001, 248). To perform their study, they used the University of Michigan’s Correlates of War (COW) database that provided Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID). In their view, limiting their analysis to MID that occurred during the 1950-92 period was appropriate, because “Huntington addressed events in these years when he first presented his argument in 1993” (249). Variables of liberal and realist theories were also added to their analysis in order to observe which theory had had higher explanatory and predictive power. Results of logistic regression indicated that variables of liberal and realist theories had much more influence on the probability of conflict than on civilization theory. Belonging to different civilizations increases the risk of dispute between two states only by 12 percent with .30 level of statistical significance. (255).

Huntington (2000, 609) replied to Russett et al, suggesting that they retest their argument as it was dealing with the post-Cold War period. Russett et al (2000, 611), in turn, argued that Huntington (1993) had used many disputes and conflicts that had not occurred in the post-Cold War era to justify and support his argument. That was the reason why they used MID of the 1950-92 period.

Another study to test Huntington’s argument was conducted by Jonathan Fox in 2001. He tried to examine whether conflicts between civilizations, particularly Western and Islamic conflicts, had increased with the end of the Cold War (Fox 2001, 459). He used the Minorities at Risk (MAR) dataset for his quantitative research and came up with interesting results. From a global perspective, the ratio of non-civilizational conflicts to civilizational conflicts had not changed significantly after the end of the Cold War. From an Islamic civilization perspective, there had been little change in the amount of conflicts among Islamic and other civilizations. However, from the perspective of Western civilizations, the proportion of conflicts between Western and Islamic civilizations had significantly increased since the end of the Cold War. Fox concludes that the findings illustrate that it is important which perspective one looks at conflicts from. If one looks from the Western perspective, they will find an increased amount of conflicts between Western and Islamic civilizations, which supports Huntington’s argument. But from the global and Islamic civilization perspective, little evidence can be found for a “clash of civilizations” in the post-Cold War period (459).

Although Fox’s study deserves attention, it does not examine conflicts among the other seven civilizations, but only focuses on the Western versus Islamic civilizations. Furthermore, his units of analysis are conflicts within states, not interstate. Interstate disputes are important in analyzing Huntington’s argument, because a nation as a whole has specific civilizational characteristics. According to Huntington’s map (1996, 26-27) of civilizations, each nation belongs to one of the nine civilizations and conflicts mostly arise among these. Conflicts that occur within states are only one minor part of Huntington’s argument.

Many other scholars have qualitatively criticized Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory. Ali Mazrui (1997) finds three major problems in Huntington’s argument. First, there is a “factual fallacy.” “It may not be factually true that the main lines of conflict of the future, following the Cold War, will be lines of clash of civilizations. It could be states or economic blocs” (Mazrui in Rashid 97, 27). Second, there could also be a “conceptual fallacy” in Huntington’s argument. Mazrui suggests a “clash of races” as an alternative to the clash of civilizations (27). Thirdly, there is a “temporal fallacy,” which means that inter-civilizational conflicts are not phenomena of the emerging world, but rather that they have been the most important issue of the world for at least the past four to five hundred years; within these conflicts we can include the Crusades, the “trans-Atlantic slave-trade, and European colonization of much of the world” (29).

In response to his critics (Foreign Affairs 1996, 67), Huntington stated that none of these scholars had come up with a better alternative to explain the conflicts of the new era. To him, the clash of civilizations remains the most powerful theory to understand disputes in the post-Cold War period.

In this context, this paper is of a crucial importance because 1) it will focus on militarized disputes of the post-Cold War period; 2) the disputes are among the states and civilizations they belong to; 3) and the study will conduct a quantitative method to analyze the clash of civilizations. Thus, this paper takes into account the weaknesses of previous studies and establishes a strong critique to Huntington’s argument.

Research design

This analysis uses the Correlates of War (COW) project’s Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID). The COW provides MID starting from 1816 to 2001. As Huntington (2000, 609) claims, the clash of civilizations theory is helpful in understanding conflicts that occurred after the end of the Cold War, specifically after 1989 (Huntington 1996, 21; Huntington 2000, 609). The COW project had MID reaching up to 2001, so I chose those MID which occurred from 1989 to 2001. Although the number of disputes in this period seems to be small to test any theory, it should be quite enough to evaluate Huntington’s argument, as post-Cold War disputes were the basis of his theory. I had 620 militarized interstate disputes in total. Each dispute occurred between at least two states; one state in side A, and another on side B. The sides are coded as 0 and 1. I had information on which pair of states had disputes. Some disputes had more than two sides. I rearranged these coalitions as if they had disputes separately as dyads. For instance, if there were two states on side A and two states on side B in a dispute, than there would be four dyads involved in the same dispute.

States in these disputes belong to one of the nine civilizations, which are Western, coded as 1, Latin American (2), African (3), Islamic (4), Sinic (5), Hindu (6), Orthodox (7), Buddhist (8), and Japanese (9). Huntington (1993, 1996) does not explicitly specify the number of civilizations. In his article (1993) he mentions about “seven or eight major civilizations.” To him, Buddhism “has not been the basis of a major civilization.” (Huntington 1996, 48). Also Japan has not founded any civilization as there are no nations that share the same religion, language, or cultural values with Japanese culture. However, map 1.3 (The World of Civilizations: Post-1990) in his book (1996, 26-27) shows that there are nine civilizations in the world, including Buddhist and Japanese. I used nine civilizations as shown in the map. Russett et al (2001, 251) used eight, excluding Japanese. I wonder how they dealt with disputes that had Japan on one of the sides.

Having nine coded civilizations and many more states in the dataset, I coded all states as any of the nine civilizations they belonged to, according to map 1.3. (Huntington 1996, 26-27). I had difficulties, as did Russett et al (2001, 251), in classifying some states, because the map was not clear and Huntington did not explicitly mention them in the text. For example Nigeria, according to the map is separated into two civilizations, Islamic and African. Since religion is the most important factor that distinguishes each civilization, I have used the CIA’s World Factbook to find out the proportion of religion in Nigeria, and classified it as Islamic. India is shown as a state of both Islamic and Hindu civilizations, but I have classified it as Hindu. Sri Lanka was classified as Buddhist in relevance with Russett et al (2001). The Philippines, in my classification, go into Sinic civilization, but Russett et al (2001) classify it as Western. The most interesting problem that occurred in classification was to which civilization Israel belongs. The question is significant, as Israel has had many disputes with its neighboring states. Huntington thinks Israel is an Islamic civilization according to the map. It is ironic that Israel is considered as an Islamic civilization, first because it has nothing to do with the religion of Islam, and second because such an approach decreases empirical support for Huntington’s argument. Although it does not make sense, I classified Israel as Islamic, strictly adhering to the map.

To answer my research question I had to use civilization dyads and observe if these dyads are prone to clash or not and how frequently they have disputes. Thus, I arranged these nine civilizations in dyadic form and came up with 45 civilization dyads, extracting each one of the same dyads as 1,2 v. 2,1. A dyad is labeled 0 if the civilizations in it are the same and 1 if the civilizations are different. After arranging civilization dyads, I plugged each dispute into one of the dyads and totaled it in regard to the 45 civilization dyads. Then I arranged the number of disputes in each dyad according to the proportion to the total number of disputes.

Huntington’s main hypothesis is that civilizations have mattered and have had positive impact on disputes in the post-Cold War period. I have my doubts about his argument and hypothesize that civilizations do not matter in interstate.

Data analysis

After running my Probit model, I have found that difference in civilizations had negative impact on interstate disputes with relatively small statistical significance (10). The findings of this paper contradict what Huntington (1993, 1996) suggests as his explanation for the causes of interstate disputes in the post-Cold War era. In other words, civilization differences do not cause interstate conflicts.

There have been a total of 620 militarized interstate disputes during the 1989-2001 period, according to the COW dataset (see Table 1). Some of civilization dyads did not have any disputes, whereas other dyads conflicted several times. Huntington’s argument that different civilizations clash does not find support with the results of this study. We can see from Table 1 that 19 dyads that consist of different civilizations have not had any militarized dispute since the end the Cold War. How can Huntington explain this phenomenon on the basis of his clash of civilizations argument? Can interstate disputes be explained by civilizational differences? The answers to these questions are obviously negative. Different variables of realist and liberal theories may explain the findings, but that is not within the scope of this study.

Limitations

One of the important limitations is the absence of a clear list of civilizations and states in these civilizations. If Huntington had provided these data then there would be no dissimilarities among the scholars who tried to test his argument. Some studies used eight civilizations while others used nine. Some states, like Israel and the Philippines were placed in different civilizations in different studies. This may influence the results of these studies, as these states have had many militarized disputes.

Conclusion

This study shows that Huntington’s argument is insufficient to explain conflicts in the new world order. As he argues, “culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilizational identities, are shaping patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War” (Huntington 1996, 20). However, he did not carry out a quantitative analysis of the argument. He provided only case studies and offered qualitative analysis as support. Many studies, including this one, have been conducted in response to his clash of civilizations argument, with the conflicts of the post-Cold War period being analyzed quantitatively. None of these studies has found evidence to support Huntington’s argument. The finding of this study illustrates that a difference in civilization is not sufficient on its own to understand what causes conflicts these days nor does it have a positive impact on militarized disputes.

References

• Foreign Affairs. 1996. Samuel P. Huntington’s the Clash of Civilizations? The Debate. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
• Fox, Jonathan. 2001. Two Civilizations and Ethnic Conflict: Islam and the West. Journal of Peace Research 38(4): 459-472.
• Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs 72(3): 22-49
• If Not Civilizations, What? Foreign Affairs 72(4): 186-94, 1993.
• The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1996.
• Try Again: A Reply to Russett, Oneal & Cox. Journal of Peace Research 37(5): 609-610, 2000.
• Rashid, Salim. 1997. The Clash of Civilizations? Asian Responses. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Russett, Bruce M. and John R. Oneal. 2000. A Response to Huntington. Journal of Peace Research 37(5): 611-612.
• Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Inter dependence, and International Organizations. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.