"CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS"

Last week a comment by Carole on the post "Tea Party Enters Export Market" referred to a "clash of civilizations" as the underlying dynamic for anti-Islamic attitudes in Britain and the United States. This was followed almost immediately by German's Chancellor Angela Merkel calling multiculturalism in her country a "total failure". I was struck by the seamless connection between the two comments.

There's an old story that goes something like this. A group of blind persons were asked to feel and describe an elephant. To keep the story short, one felt the leg and described the elephant as being like a pillar. The second one grabbed the tail and said the elephant was like a rope, etc. for the rest of the group. How they described the elephant depended on where they felt it. In this sense, both Carole's "clash" and Merkel's "multiculturalism" were describing the same thing at two different levels, both of which are inextricably parts of a core problem in the world today.

The "clash of civilization" term was, according to Wikipedia, first used in l990 by historian Bernard Lewis in a magazine article entitled, "The Roots of Muslim Rage", in which he wrote about the growing struggle between East and West. The term eventually became the central thesis of a book by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington who said that cultural and religious identities would replace the ideological and economic differences of the Cold War as the root cause of world conflict. Huntington asserted that there were seven civilizations in the world that could be the source of such a clash. Western civilization was one, Islam another.

From what we have been experiencing the Western and Islamic cultural and religious identities have become the basis of the current world conflict and are likely to remain so well into the future. The most manifest form of this conflict has been the multitude of attacks by Muslim terrorists in countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Spain, Britain, and the United States. In Indonesia, a Muslim country, the attack was on a night club popular with western tourists. In the multiple bombings in Pakistan, another Muslim country, it appears to be an effort to destabilize the government which is seen, rightly or wrongly, as pro-American in the war in Afghanistan. There is also the war in Iraq which former President George W. Bush launched in 2003 ostensibly to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction supposedly possessed by dictator Saddam Hussein. That war, along with American policy toward Israel, is portrayed in parts of the Muslim world as evidence of American anti-Islam sentiment. All of this, however oversimplified, is cited as the most visible illustrations of Huntington's thesis about the religious roots of a clash of civilizations.

Equally significant evidence of such a clash is the statement by Merkel made in a speech asserting the "utter failure" (another phrase used by the media) of multiculturalism in Germany. In Germany's case, it involves the estimated four million Muslims who live there, primarily Turks (and their offspring) who came to Germany in the l950s because of a major shortage of German workers to help rebuild the country's economy. But her statement is only the most recent attack on multiculturalism. The issue has been very evident in a number of western European countries for some time. Unlike Germany, Muslim immigrants in several of those countries come primarily from former colonies in Africa and Asia as residents of the colonies legally migrated to the former home country. As the numbers grew and as economic opportunities dwindled, significant anti-Muslim, anti-Islamic movements emerged. (According to reports, in Germany there are still significant labor shortages but Merkel's statement indicated that the door may be closing on Muslim immigration to fill the need.) The growing numbers of Muslims, the wearing of traditional clothing, and the building of mosques--to name a few things--have come to be perceived as the emergence of an alien culture that threatens the basic Catholic/Protestant-based cultures of these countries. Thus, it has become popular politics in western Europe to seek or keep office on a platform of anti-immigration, anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies.

This same culture-based argument is found in the United States. In one form it is anti-immigration reform, backed primarily by right wing conservatives and Tea Party adherents, opposed to creating a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented residents, primarily Hispanics. Anti-immigration, "nativist" sentiment has a long history in the United States going back to the mid-19th century with opposition to the immigration of a large number of Catholics from Germany and Ireland. This evolved through various stages aimed at greatly reducing or halting new immigration from southern and eastern Europe and Asia.

Currently, primarily as a result of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) by Muslim terrorists in 2001 and the more recent issue of building a proposed Islamic cultural center near the WTC site, we now have a significant and growing anti-Muslim, anti-Islamification movement in this country fed to a considerable extent by the same groups opposing general immigration reform.

In sum, two levels of the "clash of civilizations" have emerged, both involving the West and Islamic worlds. At the most visible and feared level are the al Qaeda-type terrorist attacks that have occurred around the globe, along with two wars portrayed as a clash between western and Muslim forces, whether armies or insurgents. At the second level we have the less visible but no less destructive cultural conflict that manifests itself as anti-Muslim, anti-Islamification and is seen as a threat to nativist-based western values. The great misfortune is that as the second level becomes increasingly imbedded in political rhetoric and policy choices, the more certain it is that it will become the more fundamental "clash of civilizations" envisioned by Lewis and Huntington, a clash seemingly without end.