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Some estimates foresee as many as forty billion people living on the Earth
toward the end of the coming century and expect that such a number can constitute a
serious threat to the very existence of life on this planet. Various non-renewable
resources, whether it be fuel or other raw materials, are being consumed at an ever faster
pace; entire species are dying out; and, humankind is knowingly depriving itself of such a
vital substance as oxygen. At the same time, globalization is progressing at an almost
dizzying speed, which means that our planet finds itself - probably for the first time in
its history - increasingly covered by a coat of one single civilization. It is becoming a
unified and electronically interconnected information, communication, finance and business
environment, in which not only news but also billions of dollars; cultural values, or
pseudo-values; beneficial as well as harmful properties; and, sound as well as ill-advised
attitudes toward life travel at the velocity of light. An extremely dangerous phenomenon
consists in the fact that the uniformising pressure which the increasingly globalized
civilization brings to bear on the rapidly growing population generates many new social
antagonisms. The endeavour of various communities to defend their identity and uniqueness
under these conditions multiplies conflicts among cultures, ethnic groups and traditions
of civilization. The gigantic urban agglomerations, into which the progress of
civilization inevitably compresses the human race, destroy natural, easily surveyable
human communities, and thus also natural tools of moral societal self-control, which
logically leads to a further growth of the crime rate. Along with global trade, and with
an increasingly sophisticated technology, possibilities arise also for an unprecedented
advancement of organized crime and terrorism.

Much recent discussion of international affairs has been based on the misleading
assumption that the world is fraught with primordial ethnic conflict.

They all share, however, the idea that the world's current
conflicts are fueled by age-old ethnic loyalties and cultural differences.

This notion misrepresents the genesis of conflict and ignores the ability of diverse
people to coexist. The very phrase "ethnic conflict" misguides us. It has become
a shorthand way to speak about any and all violent confrontations between groups of people
living in the same country. Some of these conflicts involve ethnic or cultural identity,
but most are about getting more power, land, or other resources. They do not result from
ethnic diversity; thinking that they do sends us off in pursuit of the wrong policies,
tolerating rulers who incite riots and suppress ethnic differences.

In speaking about local group conflicts we tend to make three assumptions: first, that
ethnic identities are ancient and unchanging; second, that these identities motivate
people to persecute and kill; and third, that ethnic diversity itself inevitably leads to
violence. All three are mistaken.

Contrary to the first assumption, ethnicity is a product of modern politics.

Although
people have had identities--deriving from religion, birthplace, language, and so on--for
as long as humans have had culture, they have begun to see themselves as members of vast
ethnic groups, opposed to other such groups, only during the modern period of colonization
and state-building

The view that ethnicity is ancient and unchanging emerges these days in the potent
images of the cauldron and the tribe. Out of the violence in Eastern Europe came images of
the region as a bubbling cauldron of ethnonationalist sentiments that were sure to boil
over unless suppressed by strong states.

Nowhere does this notion seem more apt than in the former Yugoslavia.

Surely the Serbs,
Croats, and Bosnians are distinct ethnic groups destined to clash throughout history, are
they not? Yet it is often forgotten how small the differences are among the currently
warring factions in the Balkans. Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians all speak the same language
(Italy has greater linguistic diversity) and have lived side by side, most often in peace,
for centuries. Although it is common to say that they are separated by religion--Croats
being Roman Catholic, Serbs Orthodox Christian, and Bosnians Muslim--in fact each
population includes sizeable numbers of the other two religions. The three religions have
indeed become symbols of group differences, but religious differences have not, by
themselves, caused intergroup conflict. Rising rates of intermarriage (as high as 30
percent in Bosnia) would have led to the gradual blurring of contrasts across these lines.

the roots
of the current Balkan violence lie not in primordial ethnic and religious differences but
rather in modern attempts to rally people around nationalist ideas.

"Ethnicity"
becomes "nationalism" when it includes aspirations to gain a monopoly of land,
resources, and power. But nationalism, too, is a learned and frequently manipulated set of
ideas, and not a primordial sentiment.

ethnic thinking in political life is a
product of modern conflicts over power and resources, and not an ancient impediment to
political modernity.

It was the colonial powers, and the independent states succeeding them, which declared
that each and every person had an "ethnic identity" that determined his or her
place within the colony or the postcolonial system. Even such a seemingly small event as
the taking of a census created the idea of a colony-wide ethnic category to which one
belonged and had loyalties. (And this was not the case just in Africa: some historians of
India attribute the birth of Hindu nationalism to the first British census, when people
began to think of themselves as members of Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh populations.) The
colonial powers--Belgians, Germans, French, British, and Dutch--also realized that, given
their small numbers in their dominions, they could effectively govern and exploit only by
seeking out "partners" from among local people, sometimes from minority or
Christianized groups. But then the state had to separate its partners from all others,
thereby creating firmly bounded "ethnic groups."

Sri Lanka

Rwanda and Burundi

A reader might say at this point: Fine, ethnic identities are modern and created, but
today people surely do target members of other ethnic [End Page 7] groups for violence, do
they not? The answer is: Less than we usually think, and when they do, it is only after a
long period of being prepared, pushed, and threatened by leaders who control the army and
the airwaves. It is fear and hate generated from the top, and not ethnic differences, that
finally push people to commit acts of violence. People may come to fear or resent another
group for a variety of reasons, especially when social and economic change seems to favor
the other group. And yet such competition and resentment "at the ground level"
usually does not lead to intergroup violence without an intervening push from the top.

Rwanda and the Balkans

Indonesians

Rwandan

Serbs

Kosovo

Croats

This brings us to the third mistaken assumption: that ethnic diversity brings with it
political instability and the likelihood of violence. To the contrary, greater ethnic
diversity is not associated with greater interethnic conflict. Some of the world's most
ethnically diverse states, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan, though not without
internal conflict and political repression, have suffered little interethnic violence,
while countries with very slight differences in language or culture (the former [End Page
10] Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda) have had the bloodiest such conflicts. It is the number
of ethnic groups and their relationships to power, not diversity per se, that strongly
affect political stability.

Indonesia

f Indonesia, it is

Cultural diversity does, of course, present challenges to national integration and
social peace. Why do some countries succeed at meeting those challenges while others fail?
Two sets of reasons seem most important, and they swamp the mere fact of ethnic and
cultural diversity.

First there are the "raw materials" for social peace that countries possess
at the time of independence. Countries in which one group has been exploiting all others
(such as Rwanda and Burundi) start off with scores to settle, while countries with no such
clearly dominating group (such as Indonesia) have an initial advantage in building
political consensus. So-called centralized polities, with two or three large groups that
continually polarize national politics, are less stable than "dispersed"
systems, in which each of many smaller groups is forced to seek out allies to achieve its
goals. And if the major ethnic groups share a language or religion, or if they have worked
together in a revolutionary struggle, they have a bridge already in place that they can
use to build political cooperation.

Indonesia

of Indonesia.

olonial Indonesia

second
set of reasons for social peace or social conflict. States do make choices, particularly
about political processes, that ease or exacerbate intergroup tensions. As political
scientist Donald Horowitz has pointed out, if we consider only their starting conditions,
Malaysia ought to have experienced considerable interethnic violence (for the reasons
given above), whereas Sri Lanka, where Tamils and Sinhalese had mingled in the
British-trained elite, should have been spared such violence. And yet Malaysia has largely
managed to avoid it while Sri Lanka has not. The crucial difference, writes Horowitz, was
in the emerging political systems in the two countries. Malaysian politicians constructed
a multiethnic political coalition, which fostered ties between Chinese and Malay leaders
and forced political candidates to seek the large middle electoral ground. In Sri Lanka,
as we saw earlier, Sinhalese-speakers formed a chauvinist nationalist movement, and after
early cooperation Tamils and Sinhalese split apart to form ethnically based political
parties. Extreme factions appeared on the wings of each party, forcing party leaders to
drift in their directions.

Nigeria

What the myth of ethnic conflict would say are ever-present tensions are in fact the
products of political choices. Negative stereotyping, fear of another group, killing lest
one be killed--these are the doings of so-called leaders, and can be undone by them as
well. Believing otherwise, and assuming that such conflicts are the natural consequences
of human depravity in some quarters of the world, leads to perverse thinking and perverse
policy. It makes violence seem characteristic of a people or region, rather than the
consequence of specific political acts. Thinking this way excuses inaction, as when U.S.
president Bill Clinton, seeking to retreat from the hard-line Balkan policy of candidate
Clinton, began to claim that Bosnians and Serbs were killing each other because of their
ethnic and religious differences. Because it paints all sides as less rational and less
modern (more tribal, more ethnic) than "we" are, it makes it easier to tolerate
their suffering. Because it assumes that "those people" would naturally follow
their leaders' call to kill, it distracts us from the central and difficult question of
just how and why people are sometimes led to commit such horrifying deeds.

All
national economies are now vulnerable to the inroads of larger, transnational
markets within which trade is free, currencies are convertible, access to
banking is open, and contracts are enforceable under law. In Europe, Asia,
Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas such markets are eroding national
sovereignty and giving rise to entities—international banks, trade
associations, transnational lobbies like OPEC and Greenpeace, world news
services like CNN and the BBC, and multinational corporations that increasingly
lack a meaningful national identity—that neither reflect nor respect
nationhood as an organizing or regulative principle.

the world of over one billion Muslims, most of whom are not Arabs, is very diverse, with differing priorities and cultures. Moreover, the Islamic world, like other parts of the world, is dominated by states, which are driven by their own interests and priorities and often have more conflict among themselves than with the West.

In this belligerent kind of
thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran
Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in
its title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage."

This far less visible
history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously
compressed and constricted warfare that "the clash of civilizations"
argues is the reality. When he published his book by the same title
in 1996, Huntington tried to give his argument a little more subtlety
and many, many more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse
himself and demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he
was.

Huntington's assumption that his perspective, which is
to survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary
attachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if everyone
else were scurrying around looking for the answers that he has
already found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who
wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are
not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the
myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and
that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only
to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one
of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing.

It is my hypothesis
that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world 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. The clash of civilizations will be the battle lines of
the future.

ideology

Western civil wars

With the
end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase,
and its center-piece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western
civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of
civilizations, the people and governments of non-Western civilizations
no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism
but join the West as movers and shapers of history.

group countries

in terms of their culture and civilization.

The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level
of identification with which he intensely identifies.

Civilizations are nonetheless
meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are seldom sharp,
they are real.

The broader reaches of human
history have been the history of civilizations

The most important conflicts
of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these
civilizations from one another.

These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox,
Latin American and possibly African civilization.

First, differences among civilizations
are not only real; they are basic

Second, the world is becoming
a smaller place

Third, the processes of economic
modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people
from longstanding local identities

In much of the world religion has moved in to
fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled "fundamentalist."

Fourth, the growth
of civilization-consciousness is enhanced by the dual role of the West.

A West at the peak of its power confronts
non-Wests that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources
to shape the world
in non-Western ways.

A de-Westernization
and indigenization of elites is occurring in many non-Western countries
at the same time that Western, usually American, cultures, styles and
habits become more popular among the mass of the people

Finally, economic regionalism
is increasing.

The importance of regional economic blocs is likely to continue to increase
in the future. On the one hand, successful economic regionalism will reinforce
civilization-consciousness. On the other hand, economic regionalism may
succeed only when it is rooted in a common civilization.

Common culture, in
contrast, is clearly facilitating the rapid expansion of the economic
relations between the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong, Taiwan,
Singapore and the overseas Chinese communities in other Asian countries.

Culture and religion also
form the basis of the Economic Cooperation Organization, which brings
together ten non-Arab Muslim countries

As people define
their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they are likely to see an
"us" versus "them" relation existing between themselves
and people of different ethnicity or religion.

The clash of civilizations
thus occurs at two levels. At the micro-level, adjacent groups along the
fault lines between civilizations struggle, often violently, over the
control of territory and each other. At the macro-level, states from different
civilizations compete for relative military and economic power, struggle
over the control of international institutions and third parties, and
competitively promote
their particular political and religious values.

As the ideological division of Europe has
disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between Western Christianity,
on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has
reemerged.

coincides with the historic boundary between the Hapsburg
and Ottoman empires

Conflict along the fault line
between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300
years.

first Arab
nationalism and then Islamic fundamentalism manifested themselves

This
warfare between Arabs and the West culminated in 1990

This centuries-old
military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline

In the Arab world, in short, Western
democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces. This may be a passing
phenomenon, but it surely complicates relations between Islamic countries
and the West.

Those relations are also complicated
by demography. The spectacular population growth in Arab countries, particularly
in North Africa, has led to increased migration to Western Europe.

On both sides the
interaction between Islam and the West is seen as a clash of civilizations.

Historically, the
other great antagonistic interaction of Arab Islamic civilization has
been with the pagan, animist, and now increasingly Christian black peoples
to the south.

On the northern border of
Islam, conflict has increasingly erupted between Orthodox and Muslim peoples,
including the carnage of Bosnia and Sarajevo

The historic clash between Muslim
and Hindu in the subcontinent manifests itself now not only is the rivalry
between Pakistan and India but also in intensifying religious strife within
India between increasingly militant Hindu groups and India's substantial
Muslim minority.

The same phrase has been applied
to the increasingly difficult relations between Japan and the United States

The economic issues between the United States and Europe are no less serious
than those between the United States and Japan, but they do not have thesame
political salience and emotional intensity because the differences between
American culture and European culture are so much less than those between
American civilization and Japanese civilization.

With the Cold War over,
the underlying differences between China and the United States have reasserted
themselves in areas such as human rights, trade and weapons proliferation.
These differences are unlikely to moderate. A "new cold war,"
Deng Xaioping reportedly asserted in 1991, is under way between China
and America.

The interactions
between civilizations vary greatly in the extent to which they are likely
to be characterized by violence.

proliferation
of ethnic conflict, epitomized at the extreme in "ethnic cleansing,"
has not been totally random. It has been most frequent and most violent
between groups belonging to different civilizations.

THE KIN-COUNTRY SYNDROME
GROUPS OR STATES belonging to one civilization that become involved in
war with people from a different civilization naturally try to rally support
from other members of their own civilization.

First, in the Gulf War one
Arab state invaded another and then fought a coalition of Arab, Western
and other states.

The rallying of substantial
sections of Arab elites and publics behind Saddam Hussein called those
Arab governments in the anti-Iraq coalition to moderate their activities
and temper their public statements.

Muslims contrasted
Western actions against Iraq with the West's failure to protect Bosnians
against Serbs and to impose sanctions on Israel for violating U.N. resolutions.
The West, they allege, was using a double standard. A world of clashing
civilizations, however, is inevitably a world of double standards: people
apply one standard to their kin-countries and a different standard
to others.

Second, the kin-country syndrome
also appeared in conflicts in the former Soviet Union.

Russian troops fought on the Side of the Armenians, and Azerbaijan
accused the "Russian government of turning 180 degrees" toward
support for Christian Armenia.

Third, with respect
to the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, Western publics manifested sympathy
and support for the Bosnian Muslims and the horrors they suffered at the
hands of the Serbs. Relatively little concern was expressed, however,
over Croatian attacks on Muslims and participation in the dismemberment
of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Islamic governments and groups,
on the other hand, castigated the West for not coming to the defense of
the Bosnians.

The governments of Saudi Arabia and other countries felt under
increasing pressure from fundamentalist groups in their own societies
to provide more vigorous support for the Bosnians.

In the 1990s the Yugoslav conflict
is provoking intervention from countries that are Muslim, Orthodox and
Western Christian.

Conflicts and violence
will also occur between states and groups within the same civilization.
Such conflicts, however, are likely to be less intense and less likely
to expand than conflicts between civilizations.

Common membership in a
civilization reduces the probability of violence in situations where it
might otherwise occur.

In the coming years,
the local conflicts most likely to escalate into major wars will be those,
as in Bosnia and the Caucasus, along the fault lines between civilizations.
The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations.

THE WEST IS NOW at
an extraordinary peak of power in relation to other civilizations. In
superpower opponent has disappeared from the map. Military conflict among
Western states is unthinkable, and Western military power is unrivaled.
Apart from Japan, the West faces no economic challenge. It dominates international
economic institutions. Global political and security issues are effectively
settled by a directorate of the United States, Britain and France,
world economic issues
by a directorate of the United States, Germany and Japan, all of which
maintain extraordinarily close relations with each other to the exclusion
of lesser and largely non-Western countries.

The West in effect is using international institutions,
military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will
maintain Western predominance, protect Western interests and promote Western
political and economic values.

Differences in power and struggles for
military, economic and institutional power are thus one source of conflict
between the West and other civilizations. Differences in culture, that
is basic values and beliefs, are a second source of conflict.

Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in
other civilizations. Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism,
human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets,
the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic,
Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures. Western efforts
to propagate each ideas produce instead a reaction against "human
rights imperialism" and a reaffirmation of indigenous values, as
can be seen in the support for religious fundamentalism by the younger
generation in non-Western cultures. The very notion that there could be
a "universal civilization" is a Western idea, directly at odds
with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what
distinguishes one people from another.

The central axis
of world politics in the future is likely to be, in Kishore Mahbubani's
phrase, the conflict between "the West and the Rest" and the
responses of non-Western civilizations to Western power and values.

IN THE FUTURE, as
people differentiate themselves by civilization, countries with large
numbers of people of different civilizations, such as the Soviet Union
and Yugoslavia, are candidates for dismemberment. Some other countries
have a fair degree of cultural homogeneity but are divided over whether
their society belongs to one civilization or another.
These are town countries.

Mexico has stopped defining itself by its opposition to
the United States and is instead attempting to imitate the United States
and to join it in the North American Free Trade Area.

Mexico as in Turkey, significant elements in society resist the redefinition
of their country's
identity. In Turkey, European-oriented leaders have to make gestures to
Islam (Ozal's pilgrimage to Mecca); so also Mexico's North American-oriented
leaders have to make gestures to those who hold Mexico to be a Latin American
country (Salinas' Ibero-American Guadalajara summit).

Globally the most important torn country
is Russia.

President Yeltsin
is adopting Western principles and goals and seeking to make Russia a
"normal" country and a part of the West. Yet both the Russian
elite and the Russian public are divided on this issue.

To redefine its civilization
identity, a torn country must meet three requirements. First, its political
and economic elite has to be generally supportive of and enthusiastic
about the move. Second, its public has to be willing to acquiesce in the
redefinition. Third, the dominant groups in the recipient civilization
have to be willing to embrace the convert. All three requirements in large
part exist with respect to Mexico. The first two in large part exist with
respect to Turkey. It is not clear that any of them exist with respect
to Russia's joining the West.

Australia's future, they argue,
is with the dynamic economies of East Asia. But, as I have suggested,
close economic cooperation normally requires a common cultural base. In
addition, none of the three conditions necessary for a torn country to
join another civilization is likely to exist in Australia's case.

Those countries that for reason of culture and power do not wish to, or
cannot, join the West compete with the West by developing their own economic,
military and political power. They do this by promoting their internal
development and by cooperating with other non-Western countries. The most
prominent form of this cooperation is the Confucian-Islamic connection
that has emerged to challenge Western interests, values and power.

One result is the
emergence of what Charles Krauthammer has called "Weapon States,"
and the Weapon States are not Western states. Another result is the redefinition
of arms control, which is a Western concept and a Western goal