It seems that uncertainty instead of diversity is prevailing from the eve of post-modernism, thinning the lines between world cultures and societies from day one. In search of “theory of everything,” we have almost forgotten all good and great theories and ideas about everything, leading us to skepticism and unbelief. The challenge of open skepticism tends to create more refusals than acceptance and the objective of higher education fails bitterly here, an objective that is to create a global level of understanding of the universal phenomena and to proceed with a uniform level of evolution of the intellectual mind. Instead of growing intellectual maturity and reflexivity, the symptoms of anxiety and panic and/or withdrawal are prevailing. Is this a healthy sign? Will we be able to save the sanity of the world?

In sanity lies peace and stability, and both are at stake. Now there are two choices: The first is whether the world knowledge leaders should aspire to regress back to pre-industrial revolution’s feudal monarchy based upon resignation to a single authority, where people are more entitled to powers by declaration of ownership and where there are no choices but moralized obedience to such authorities. In corporate world, Machiavellian moral has already been resounding that might is right and means may not justify the end. Such regression calls for the indoctrinated agenda of the education with priests and preachers ruling the mobs and world streets are rushing for it. The second choice or alternative is that people should embrace postindustrial Marxist-Socialist interventions, which celebrate sharing rather than ownership. The individuals sub-serve the community and in turn communities the nation; whereas, the nations must not compete in status but protect the welfare of its citizens. Whether the traditional concepts of “welfare” and “citizenship” still exist in today’s world is questionable.

Since the right of choice is still available, the nations and communities are making blind choices without thinking of the outcomes of the outcomes. What will happen to nations who will fail to attain socio-cultural and political balance in their visions? They may hear the sound of the doomsday bell ringing in their ears, thinking that they have enough time to fight till the “end.” Actually, sound travels slower than light and people are misled to believe that doomsday has yet to come, whereas, the reality has crossed that threshold much earlier and what they are witnessing is the after-math; just like a Tsunami that passes in a few minutes and only some people survive to witness its after-effects. The victims remain in shock, while those who have not experienced a Tsunami themselves hang in confusion, pondering whether their present condition is the result of the Tsunami or post-Tsunami mishandling of affairs. They may continue creating split-hair logics till doom, but their wish to reverse time remains a dream.

Similar has been the case with the “corporate” Tsunami; it came and it won – not just overpowered but overthrew everything else. We were in midst of celebrating the glory of human worth crowning individual freedom and liberalism while achieving the impossible, reaching beyond skies and galaxies through advents of natural science. We are unable to justify from where this financial meltdown came and suddenly we found ourselves struck with global recession, as if travelling on the smooth pathways of the Milky Way, we were suddenly engulfed by a black hole.

Will this mammoth spit us out alive? Is living inside a dragon “life”? Are we not inside a cave as Plato had remarked, but inside a dragon? The world outside is no more a safer place to live with nuke ideas, but living inside the dragon, the corporate culture, is wearing us out of our vitality and enthusiasm. Our weakening may weaken the dragon but do we want to die with the dragon or live with it? Those of us who believe in the afterlife, we may have the spirit to risk martyrdom or if we have the feudal courage, we may have cut the stomach line of the dragon with our bear hands, as if ploughing the fields. Kingship and martyrdom are the stories of the past. We believe in peace not war, therefore we should manage to live with the dragon. Now onwards, every tear or drop of perspiration is creating dwarfs of “relativism” and “nihilism.” The harder we work, the more we reduce in size, creating our own prototypes. Small is beautiful, but what will happen when all of us will be cut to the same size? We are shrinking together; whether or not will we grow together is questionable. I grew up listening to the stories that explained how once the earth was populated by giants and dinosaurs, and a Tsunami came and all of them became extinct.

I’ve been informed that post-modern life knows no ethical limits, understanding that values are a matter of choice, a matter of aesthetical personal taste, and suddenly I am reminded that the purpose of higher education was to develop that aesthetical taste in favor of public good. Why then should we refuse the hegemony of valued knowledge and insist on creating new knowledge of “no taste”? No wonder this “new knowledge” is impoverishing both bodies and minds rather than nurturing them. The knowledge remains stratified and complex, non-chewable and non-digestive for the common as it was engineered to fit the purpose of the “elitist corporate.” The elitism is created on the type of education one has received rather than how knowledgeable one is, where reason reigns supreme and traditional methods of acquiring knowledge are blandly rejected being accused of spreading false prophecies and hearsay.

It is not only in the field of knowledge that legitimization of factionalism and particularism has gone too far, it has also affected the social fabric of society as well. When we witness the mixing of gender and social identities, the puzzled mind asks: which gender of which race do you belong to? Elongation of the ego exposes shadows and in a consumerist world, the question is how we can cease any production. Who will dare stop them? Who has the right to exercise “choice”? Whatever come may, the post-modern world is committed to the challenge of social change and social justice, no compromise, no deal to public freedom, whether they create demons or mole hills. They are liable to create colonies and their inhabitants. Does residence and citizenship still matter?

As the Tsunami of media and information technology has been rising, social sciences have remained dumbfounded as individuals become plain victims questioning oneself in sheer pain and guilt about one’s identity: who is the citizen of which world, real or cyber? Citizenship itself is challenged employing virtual rights over social networks. With the population of cyber networks increasing at a faster rate than the population of countries and may be that of small continents, everyone is jubilant at the promise of post-modernism fulfilled – the promise of diversity. It is not setting new world order, but a new social order, defining rules of communication and relationships, where virtual existence matters more than the real one and remarkable solutions for issues related to time and space are readily available.

The citizens of a global world have never experienced such flexibility before. The gates of Eden are wide open and you do not need to carry a “good deeds license” to enter. All you need is a cyber-work-space to enter the world of ideas. Is it a dream or an “afterlife” because that too appears to be more virtual than real. Again the boundaries are thinning between the virtual and the real, between a scope of possibilities and number of its realization, all that corporate citizenship wants is huge numbers so the giants are feeding on numbers and digits. Should I worry?

While waves of uncertainty crash to a shore nearby, I embrace the warmth of diversity emanating from the Sun above. I recognize my impotence before such radiance and realize that just like the sun, there is a unity that binds humanity together.

Dr. Arif is the Head of Department Psychology, University of Central Punjab, Pakistan.

Note

[1] Heterotopia: An idealized utopia of heterogeneity, that of mixing social gender and identities by realizing the principle of diversity

Today we seem to accept that “reality is a construct” made up of meaning and values, a moment in the life of human consciousness, both at the individual and social level. The dynamic character of what we call “reality” has implications on our understanding of culture, science and man.

Culture is now understood as the set of symbols and values that constitute the virtual horizon that validates the reasonableness of human actions. By the same token, the principles of science are as valid as the arrival of other principles that revolutionize the preceding ones. Science no longer seeks necessary laws but rather the best available explanations about the universe that is today understood as open, dynamic and evolving.

Man is seen as a unity in tension, holder of a polymorphic consciousness that shapes his understanding according to a set of unconscious and preconscious processes that determine his intentions and decisions. He is known to also possess a consciousness with an unrestricted desire to know and a criterion allowing him to examine himself as he examines reality around him, simultaneously. This unrestricted desire to know leads him to an unrestricted objective: being.

This new way of viewing our own universe has two important implications: the acceptance of diversity and the forward looking mentality of man in almost every aspect of life. The forward looking character of man is associated with dramatic breakthroughs in science and the challenge of important paradigms of humanity, including the fact that this is the first time in history where human inventions and life styles can even extinguish all life on the planet.

In relation to diversity, post-modernity tends to be more colorful, heterogeneous, ecological and multi-religious than modernity. And in relation to looking into the future, the construction of things like a global civilization seem to form part of the feasible horizon to man.

Throughout human history, two things have characterized what is new: a process of simultaneous unity and conflict with what already exists, and the fact that the new state of being is not necessarily better than its predecessor. Post modernity is united with modernity in the sense that it requires the preservation of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment. However, the two eras are separated in the criticism of what can be called the “superstitions of modernity”, namely that future solutions lie only in the application of ever growing doses of science and technology, and in the repression of religious instinct and of religion in general.

There is no guarantee that this new era we are calling post-modernity will be better than the previous one. The future that opens before us can be one of a “clash of civilizations” or a time where future generations will acknowledge as an era of global splendor. The fact of the matter is that we have already left the modern “comfort zone” a long time ago. We are on a trip into the unknown and depending on how well we are equipped for this journey, we stand a better or worse chance of arriving at a safe harbor.

As with any journey, regardless of how well or how little of it we know, it is important to understand what the destination might be. We have already said that the destination of post-modernity is in the quest for meaning and being. And the reason is simple: modernism was based on progress as a paradigm and the supremacy of man over himself and nature. That is, human intelligence promised to liberate us from political oppression, provide a higher standard of living, and attain “perfection” in every field of life through the application of human mastery over knowledge, science, and technology.

Modernity appeared as a reaction to the backward looking world of the Renaissance. Post modernity in contrast, is a quest for meaning. This quest is not a return to the past and starts with achievements of human consciousness that are worth preserving, like the fight for justice, freedom and equality, and against intellectual and religious obscurantism. This quest is making a special impact on re-signifying paradigms and conquests of modernity. All over the world, thousands of people are modifying their understanding about democracy, technological progress, high standard of living and reason.

This important process of soul-searching in our times is taking place amidst spiritually-mindful people all over the world. For them, the times we live in are not the “end of history.” On the contrary, self complacency with the so-called achievements of modernity in science and communication underscores the importance of social justice, care for the planet and transcendence as pillars of a new world, since this cannot be the end of history so long as there are wars, hunger and injustice.

As the chances for economic and political systems to be radically transformed are high today, spiritually-mindful people will play a very large role in this transformation. The main reason for this is that truly spiritually-mindful people have little to no expectation in the so-called “comfort zones” because they always live to balance between what they know and the expectation of a world that has been promised to them by God. Whatever the culture he or she may have been born into, the seeker of the Truth is sensitive to the emerging probabilities where the human condition can be improved and they opt for them.

In this unconditional commitment for dynamic love lies the freedom of the spiritually-mindful person. This love is not only limited to the act of knowing but also to the act of choosing. He or she knows that unless action is undertaken, the elements that constitute a new world will never come to be. In the ethic to permanently destabilize his or her own self with already acquired ideas about the world, religion and culture, in thought and action, is implied the contribution of spiritually-mindful people to the world that is opening before us today.

A caveat however is that believers do not seem to be united across religions and cultures. Despite progress in communication, increased religious dialogue and an openness to alterity, there is little concerted interfaith action. Yet, this will only change in time if spiritually-mindful people can adequately identify and correct the many biases existing in every belief structure that in the name of God, have kept separation and strife amongst religions.

Human consciousness today is in need of an active and meaningful recognition of religious diversity. For some religions like Islam, such recognition has been established since its foundation, but has not been always followed in some regions and times in history. The same applies for Eastern philosophies and religions that have focused particularly on the discovery of God inside the heart of man. However regarding Christianity, which has only after 1965 recognized that salvation is possible outside of the Church, there is still a lot of progress to be made.

In the new world that is opening before us, it is probable that religions will not live side by side to each other in a juxtaposed manner as they do today. Instead, growing numbers of people will be able to make a clear distinction between the diverse manifestations of the names of God, and the way in which they have been interpreted and communicated. They will be more aware about the things that unite religions than the ones that separate them.

This will ultimately enrich all of them. There is a lot to be learned in the religious sense from the Arab Spring in the Middle East or from the many types of theologies that have evolved out of Vatican II all over the word or from the many teachings of Eastern beliefs. It is time for spiritually-inclined people all over the world to raise their heads and watch what their brothers from other religions are doing, inspired by the spirit of love and mercy. These people should speak to one another as this can only contribute to make the quality of their faith grow stronger.

All religions have prophets and saints that stand as a common heritage of humanity. Today, there are many people in every religion whose devotion, love of God and mankind, and heroism should be known and praised by all. They have a series of qualities important to the present quest into post modernity: they teach us that it is necessary to leave the “comfort zone” advertised by many worldly powers, they set the example in terms of the authenticity of their actions and they inspire us to transform ourselves from the inside as a precondition to make changes on the outside possible and meaningful.

In synthesis, a new world is emerging in a dialectics of many powerful forces: economic, political, military, scientific and social. A new force is required in the process: a divine spiritual guidance. This force that is depended on by millions of spiritually-mindful people is crucial, for they are in a privileged position to stand their ground on the basis of the authenticity of the process. They have not only evolved interested patterns of knowing and deciding, but by the nature of their belief, they seek a disinterested desire to know which is aimed at an unrestrictive objective, which is the finality of mankind as it unfolds into the universe of being.

Juan Fernando Lucio, a former adviser to presidential candidate Sergio Fajardo in Colombia, has advised on peace and reconciliation issues and done extensive research on the foundations of interfaith dialogue. He is currently an independent consultant and does research on the topic of liberation in contemporary religious thought.

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.