Clash

Meanwhile in his New York Times column Ross Douthat observes that Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” hypothesis actually explains events better than the competition. The two competitors he identifies are “left wing”:

But more often lately Huntington has been invoked either warily, on the grounds that Putin wants a clash of civilizations and we shouldn’t give it to him, or in dismissal or critique, with the idea being that his theory of world politics has actually been disproved by Putin’s attempt to restore a Greater Russia.

That’s the argument offered, for instance, by the French scholar of Islam Olivier Roy in a recent interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. Roy describes the Ukraine war as “definitive proof (because we have many others) that the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory does not work” — mostly because Huntington had predicted that countries that share Orthodox Christianity would be unlikely to go to war with one another, but instead here we have Putin’s Russia making war, and not for the first time, against a largely Orthodox Christian neighbor, even as he accommodates Muslim constituencies inside Russia.

and “right wing”:

Writing for the new outsider journal Compact, a would-be home for radicals of the left and right, Christopher Caldwell also invokes Huntington’s seemingly falsified predictions about Orthodox Christian unity. But then he also offers a different reason to reject Huntington’s application to our moment, suggesting that the civilizational model has been a useful framework for understanding events over the last 20 years, but lately we have been moving back to a world of explicitly ideological conflict — one defined by a Western elite preaching a universal gospel of “neoliberalism” and “wokeness,” and various regimes and movements that are trying to resist it.

but

Caldwell’s analysis resembles the popular liberal argument that the world is increasingly divided between liberalism and authoritarianism, democracy and autocracy, rather than being divided into multiple poles and competing civilizations.

concluding:

Yet both of those contemporary arguments offer weaker interpretive frameworks than the one Huntington provided. No theory from 25 or 30 years ago is going to be a perfect guide to world affairs. But if you want to understand the direction of global politics right now, the Huntington thesis is more relevant than ever.

IMO both of those views are a misunderstanding. The “Third Rome” theory is not “Orthodox Christian unity” in the sense they’re using it but that recoiling from that unity is a sort of blasphemy. This is the part of Mr. Douthat’s column I found most convincing:

China’s one-party meritocracy, Putin’s uncrowned czardom, the post-Arab Spring triumph of dictatorship and monarchy over religious populism in the Middle East, the Hindutva populism transforming Indian democracy — these aren’t just all indistinguishable forms of “autocracy,” but culturally distinctive developments that fit well with Huntington’s typology, his assumption that specific civilizational inheritances would manifest themselves as Western power diminishes, as American might recedes.

I would add that bundling American democracy with French, German, or British democracy is itself an enormous oversimplification and requires something of a willing suspension of disbelief. There are things that people in each of those countries consider fundamental rights that the others gape at in shocked disbelief.