A Clash of Cultures

The wait for war may now be over or it may be over sometime later this week – as of Monday, President Bush had made his absolutely final, last, ultimate ending offer for Saddam Hussein to surrender and leave Iraq. It is an singular proposal, but who knows? Assuming Saddam doesn’t leave, the clash that has been coming since 1991 will be on. One unpleasant lesson likely to emerge is that the fighting could continue beyond Iraq and beyond the shadowy war on terrorism.

Samuel Huntington famously predicted almost a decade ago that the wars of the future “will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.” He wasn’t talking about the United States and France, but the conflict between countries dominated by “Western Christianity” and the “Orthodox Christianity and Islam” and their often differing views on individualism, equality, liberty, democracy, free markets and the separation of church and state.

In the latest Foreign Policy magazine, Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan and Pippa Norris of Harvard University diverge from this idea with information from the World Values Survey, a worldwide investigation of cultural and political change. They point out that the survey shows ample and equal support among Western and Muslim countries for the ideals of democratic governance but sharply different views on such issues as whether political leaders must have a belief in God and on divorce, abortion and homosexuality, where in each case the Western nations were the more tolerant.

The authors conclude that, “Although nearly the entire world pays lip service to democracy, there is still no global consensus on the self-expression of values – such as social tolerance, gender equality, freedom of speech, and interpersonal trust – that are crucial to democracy.” What that may mean, in brief, is merely insisting on elections, as the administration has talked about in Iraq’s post-Saddam era, and for encouraging elections in the Middle East generally, as the president suggested a couple of weeks ago, is not enough. What separates these nations and causes conflict between them are, at the highest levels, ideas of how other people ought to be regarded.

Battles created by cultural misunderstanding are not farfetched – the Wall Street Journal last week ran an insightful piece on the misunderstandings that have helped lead to the standoff with North Korea. And given the nearly endless opportunities for cultural conflict, the role of the State Department becomes more important than that of Defense. The skill and commitment with which the West presents and pursues its ideas on human rights to the rest of the world will be crucial. As authors Inglehart and Norris observe, “Culture has a lasting impact on how societies evolve. But culture does not have to be destiny.”