The "clash" thesis: war and ethnic boundaries in Europe.

THE THEORY OF GLOBAL CULTURAL conflict began as an attempt to find new external Others for an American society bereft of its old enemies. Collapse of the Stalinist states removed at a stroke the focal concern of U.S. foreign policy for over four decades. It also had serious implications for domestic society, removing a key ideological reference point for American national identification. Samuel Huntington, author of the "clash" thesis, had observed frankly: "How will we know who we are if we don't know who we are against?" (1) His theory of global conflict provided a new framework for U.S. strategists and a whole series of potential enemies against which America could find self-identification.

The clash thesis was built around the idea of threats to the U.S. as a world power and to American society as a national collective. But ten years after it first appeared in the pages of Foreign Affairs the theory has had a major impact elsewhere. In Europe it has been seized by many politicians, academics and media people not only as a means of understanding relations between the European Union and its neighbors but as an approach to ethnic relations within European society. The events of 11 September 2001 and the conflicts that followed have been interpreted as confirmation of the idea of intractable cultural conflict at the global level and as a means of delineating ethnic boundaries within domestic society. The influence of the clash theory has been such that one prominent European politician has described himself as a local version of Samuel Huntington. (2)

CULTURAL DIFFERENCE

Huntington's thesis, which appeared in 1993, (3) was soon supported and embellished by co-thinkers including Charles Kranthammer, Daniel Pipes, Robert Kaplan, Martin Peretz and Morton Zuckerman. (4) By the mid-1990s a discourse of global conflict had emerged within which these and other writers borrowed extensively from the original author. The collective view was gloomy: despite defeat of the Communist threat and the proclamation in the late 1980s of a New World Order under U.S. leadership, the world was not behaving according to the Washington script. Conflict was everywhere and was now to be explained by reference to hostilities rooted in cultural difference. Even Huntington's most ardent admirers have viewed the thesis in this light: Robert Kaplan, for example, sees it as an analysis of American security needs set "in the most tragic, pessimistic terms." (5)

U.S. President George Bush senior had argued that the end of the Cold War would bring changes of "biblical proportions." (6) He announced "a new world order--where diverse nations are drawn together in a common cause, to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind." (7) Bush's Secretary of State, James Baker, welcomed "an era full of promise, one of those rare transforming moments in world history." (8) For his successor in the Clinton administration there were heroic possibilities: Warren Christopher declared, "We stand on the brink of shaping a new world of extraordinary hope and opportunity." (9) No sooner had the new order been proclaimed however than it became clear that conflict and disorder were becoming more general worldwide. In the mid-1990s the Office of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) observed that the end of the Cold War had generated a sense of optimism that local conflicts would subside:

With the rivalry of the superpowers over, it was thought, many conflicts would be resolved ... In the event, precisely the opposite has happened. Relatively successful ... peace settlements ... now appear to be the exception rather than the norm, and they have been overshadowed by a crop of new and very large humanitarian emergencies ... (10)

Between 1989 and 1994 there were 94 conflicts in 64 locations across the World. (11) The vast majority concerned civil strife--they were intra-state conflicts rather than the state-on-state battles associated with the Cold War. Many were in economically vulnerable regions such as Central America, West Asia, the Horn of Africa, Central Africa and West Africa. Here and elsewhere many states were fragile structures strongly marked by the experience of colonialism and vulnerable to even modest changes in the economic environment. Movements in commodity prices and in the value of local currencies, and changes in local and global trading regimes, could have devastating effects. They were often trigger mechanisms for economic collapse followed by destabilization of the state and factional or sectarian conflict that produced a crisis of displacement involving vast numbers of people. (12)

This state of disorder violated the principles of global development--the "Washington consensus"--according to which greater exposure to the world market would bring economic and social advance and general stability. On this view prosperity and harmony were to be achieved by adopting reform programmers devised by transnational financial institutions--the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Yet after almost two decades of the latters' structural adjustment policies many economies were in fact in a parlous state and conflicts were intensifying and generalizing, so that whole regions such as the Horn of Africa and Central West Africa were experiencing massive destabilization. The complementary theories of globalization and New World Order had anticipated increased world harmony: the reality was a more unequal and much more unstable system.

ANARCHY

Huntington's theory was primarily a means to account for disorder by identifying essential or base cultural characteristics as the root of both local and global conflicts. "The West" was a norm against which cultural blocs should be identified--read off by measuring them against the reference point of sociocultural and political formations in contemporary North America. Regions which failed to conform to the globalist development model were depicted as dysfunctional and threatening because of their exotic beliefs and practices. These views were sharpened in the work of some of Hun Huntington's admirers. Writing in 1994 Kaplan offered a warning of "The Coming Anarchy." In the dislocation of life in West Africa he saw an inability of local society to manage its affairs and a warning to the world at large:

West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental and societal stress, in which the criminal emerges as the real "strategic" danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders and the empowerment of private armies, security firms and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. (13)

For Kaplan world integration was under threat from such regions and their "Juju Warriors"[sic]. (14) Displaced rural people, he argued, would threaten the sophistication of urban life with the crudities of "culture and tribe." (15) They would seek to move northwards and westwards, breaking through borders and migratory controls, "bringing their passions with them [and] meaning that Europe and the United States will be weakened by cultural disputes." (16) Soon "our civilization" would be under the influence of the malign elements on view in West Africa and other regions of the non-Western world.

If Huntington was a pessimist, Kaplan advanced a truly dystopian vision. World stability was to be threatened by Africa's teeming masses, by its disease and systemic conflict. Meanwhile the Islamic world was "a vast and volatile realm" seeking revenge on the West. (17) Everywhere cultural blocs would be set against one another: future maps of the world were certain to be an "ever-mutating representation of chaos." (18)

EUROPE AND THE CLASH

By the mid-1990s the idea of a world moving towards systemic cultural conflict had been absorbed by many leading European politicians and academics. In Europe the notion of civilizational conflict seemed especially appropriate to those who wished to accelerate the integration of states of the European Union (EU). This complex project involved harmonization of policies among states which had long been rivals and often enemies. In each state nationalist politicians campaigned against the EU, narrowing the room for maneuver of "Europhiles" and of the senior EU functionaries (the "Eurocrats") who wished to advance the project. Within a tangle of disputes over the future of the Union member governments found few issues upon which they could agree. One area that did offer effective collaboration was that of migration policy, especially in relation to the movement of people from Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

I have argued elsewhere that Huntington's theory of cultural clash was congenial to those who wished to mobilize a consensus against immigration and to construct a series of legal obstacles to entry to the EU--the agreements which became known collectively as Fortress Europe. (19) At a moment when closure of Europe to most migrants was a pressing concern, Huntington's analysis of global events provided a context within which to set out the general rationale for EU security and integration. His cultural borderlines closely followed the territorial frontiers of an expanded Union, which were being strengthened against the entry of unwanted immigrants. In his early formulation of the "clash" thesis Huntington had argued that "The European Community rests on the shared foundation of European culture and Western Christianity." (20) The implication was clear: those not of Europe--not of a particular Christian tradition--did not possess the cultural characteristics which should give them a place in Europe and should be excluded. Huntington's focus upon Islam and its "bloody borders" and upon the Mediterranean as a cultural "fault line" seemed to complement the aims of EU strategists and soon entered official discussions on migration policy.

The impact of the clash theory upon academic debate in Europe was also considerable. In 1996 a special conference was held in Toledo, Spain, which brought together European and Arab scholars to discuss changing relations between Europe and the Islamic world. An account of proceedings noted that the clash thesis had already become a key issue of debate; according to one participant, "the spirit of Samuel Huntington reigns over our proceedings." (21) Academic discussion of ethnicity, migration and regional relations has since made repeated reference to the clash theory and its implications for the EU. (22)

THREATS

This was the background to the first attempt in over 20 years at collaborative agreements between the EU and the states of the Middle East. Following the Arab oil boycott of 1973-74 the then European Economic Community (EEC) had initiated the Euro-Arab Dialogue, ostensibly an attempt to develop co-operation at all levels, in reality a desperate effort by European states to resolve their energy crisis. (23) The Dialogue had petered out, leaving most Arab participants convinced that it had been no more than an instrumental initiative. In 1995 the EU attempted a new liaison. At Barcelona foreign ministers of all the EU and Middle Eastern states met to establish a Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. Once more there was a yawning gap between the formal aims and the agenda of the European participants. The EU declared that it wished "to promote a relationship of neighborliness", especially by accelerating the development of states in the Maghreb and the Arab East. (24) It offered all manner of collaborations In trade, security, energy, water, education and cultural relations. It also offered unprecedentedly large volumes of aid--sums so large that they completely reshaped the EU's global aid strategy. (25) There was however a quid pro quo: Middle Eastern states were to close down emigration to the EU.

Harmonization of EU states' migration policies had been accompanied by increasingly strident warnings about threats to the Union from migrants originating In neighboring regions. Initially these concerned Eastern Europe but when the expected deluge of migrants from the former Stalinist states failed to materialize attention turned to an older imagined enemy--that of Islam and of people from the South. Political developments in North Africa, especially the rise of the Islamist movements, were being interpreted as signs of imminent danger to the EU, especially to countries along its southern edge. An EU document echoed the views of "clash" theorists such as Huntington and Kaplan: officials of the Union declared that conditions in North African states made for "instability leading to mass migration, fundamentalist extremism, terrorism, misuse of drugs and organized crime"; these were likely to have harmful effects In North Africa and on the Union. (26) Collinson comments on growing fears within the EU at this period about threats from the Maghreb linked to "apocalyptic images of a Europe under siege." (27)

Official briefings given to European media during the Barcelona summit explained that EU states did in fact have their own agenda. One British newspaper reported that in reality proceedings were focused upon Europe's southern border zone--the Mediterranean--"'the new fault line' that has replaced the old iron curtain." (28) Borrowing directly from Huntington, the idea of a clash of civilizations was being Invoked to explain European states' collective fears and their collaboration in migration policy.

Since the Barcelona conference EU-Mediterranean relations have been at best half-hearted, leading to strong criticism of the arrangements, especially in Arab countries. (29) When a further Euromed summit was called in 2000, several Arab foreign ministers refused to attend. It was pointed out that only 26 per cent of the promised aid for Arab states has been released by the EU, (30) which seemed less concerned with development issues than with immigration.

WHAT IS EUROPE?

In 1996 Huntington elaborated his approach in a book on the clash theory. Here he argued that Europe faced huge challenges, principally as the result of the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Communist bloc, a neighbor that for 40 years had given meaning to a succession of collective European projects. "During the Cold War Europe as a whole did not exist," he observed, "With the collapse of Communism, however, it became necessary to confront and answer the question: What is Europe?" (31) According to Huntington his own "civilizational paradigm" provided the answer. Europe was to be defined by fixing its territorial borders on the basis of cultural markers. Frontiers must correspond to the historic cultural fault lines which demarcate cultural blocs:

   The civilizational paradigm thus provides a clear-cut
   and compelling answer to the question confronting West
   Europeans: where does Europe end? Europe ends where
   Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin. (32)

In an EU which had become obsessively concerned with securing frontiers this blunt approach to external cultural boundaries seemed to provide further rationales for exclusion. Huntington also directed the EU as to its strategy for expansion. The Union was to be a Christian club, he insisted: "The identification of Europe with Western Christendom provides a clear criterion for the admission of new members to Western organizations." (33) On this basis applicant states with different cultural traditions, notably Turkey, should remain outside the Union.

According to Huntington the threat to European integrity lay principally within the Islamic cultural bloc, not only because of the long history of conflict between the two regions but also because of the problem of "Muslim demographic invasion." (34) Here the danger was not merely the breach of European borders but that of "Islamicisation"--the likelihood that immigrant communities would soon constitute an alien presence large enough to divide domestic society. As Europe had already demonstrated its inability to assimilate migrants it was likely that sustained immigration would produce separate and irreconcilable Christian and Muslim communities and that Europe might become a "cleft society." (35)

Here Huntington unwittingly touched on an issue of fundamental importance to national and supra-national formations. In Europe, where the nation-state was born, national identification has from the beginning been determined not only in relation to rival nations-in-formation but by reference to internal Others. Minorities defined on the basis of all manner of criteria--language, dialect, religion and customary practices--have provided reference points for the national idea: they have in fact been essential components of "imagined community." (36) As the old empires of Europe and the Middle East began to break up during the 19th century nationalism spread at a rapid pace. The Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman systems witnessed the birth of scores of local national movements, most raising demands for autonomy and for territorial integrity. Everywhere there were references to oppression and to local enemies--to the oppression of imperial rule and to Others against whom, on the basis of various cultural markers, national self-identification was to take place. (37) The more general that nationalism became the more general was the identification of Others-within-the-nation, notably Jews. (38)

The presence of internal enemies has been functional to all European states, from the earliest modern constructions such as Britain and France to the "late developers" of the 19th century. So too with the supra-national construction that is the New Europe. The European Union is formally internationalist: in the 1950s its architects presented it as a means of passing beyond historic rivalries and conflicts among member states. But they could not create a Union out of new socio-cultural and political materials. It was to be an amalgamation of nation-states and in effect of local nationalisms, each with its own long history of differentiation vis-a-vis each other and internal Others. This brought problems of which Europhiles and senior Eurocrats were well aware: a lack of identification with the Union which amounted to an ideological deficit.

Politicians who wished to advance European integration understood that the project required wider and deeper popular engagement with the Union. The leading French Europhile Jacques Delors expressed concern about the absence of strong feelings of "Europeanness" in member states: memorably asking, "Who falls in love with an Inner Market?" (39) By the early 1990s many senior figures in the Union were deeply concerned that integration could not continue unless such Europe-wide sentiment could be greatly strengthened. Part of the solution emerged in the successful collaboration on migration policy. This was the background against which the Barcelona conference took place, widely reported across Europe as a successful attempt to neutralize threats posed by a tide of North African migrants. (40)

The EU strategy had another less public outcome however. It focused attention upon immigrant communities within member states, heightening consciousness of an enemy "at home." The conjuring of "apocalyptic images" of Europe under siege directed attention to Europeans who were not of the cultural mainstream--above all to Muslims. Here the agenda of the EU met that of local nationalisms with their demands for exclusion and even expulsion from member states of those Europeans seen to be marked by cultural difference. (41)

'CULTURAL SPACE'

Huntington's focus upon an Islamic threat to the EU paralleled the approach of European strategists. His explicit identification of a "danger" to the Union from outside and from inside was not an approach that senior EU figures pursued publicly: it did however complement the position taken by populist politicians and by organizations of the extreme Right.

These organizations increased greatly in influence in the early 1990s. Economic recession had brought instability across Europe, with increased unemployment, general social tension and intensified local nationalism. The Right campaigned for an end to immigration and the removal of "non-Europeans" said to threaten national cultures and European identity. In France the main targets were people of North African origin: according to the leader of the Front Nationale (FN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, they undermined the "purity" of France. Evans sums up his approach:

   North African immigration he likens to a virus
   weakening the healthy body of the French nation ... Le Pen
   stigmatizes North African migrants as parasites whose presence
   is an unbearable burden, dragging France down to the level of a
   Third World country ... What multiculturalism will lead to, he
   argues, is the disintegration of French identity. To combat such
   moves Le Pen calls for the re-establishment of racial hierarchies.
   North Africans must go back to North Africa; the cultural
   superiority of Western Europe must be reaffirmed; all
   intermingling must stop: in short there must be a return to the
   colonial order of things. (42)

The FN argued that France should be reserved for French people, defined principally against Muslims, who by language, custom and "race" were said to be not of France. In the face of an "Islamic plot" French people must struggle for their survival: for Le Pen it was necessary to oppose lifts conspiracy or to surrender France to an alien force. (43)

There were similar developments in Germany where the extreme right raised the slogan "the boat is full," coined in the 1930s in Switzerland as a justification for refusing asylum to German Jews. (44) Like the FN in France the Republican Party (REP) and the German People's Union (DVU) made a connection between immigration and economic crisis, portraying Germany as overflowing with migrants who were sucking the German economy dry. As in France the main target was the Muslim community, in this case people of Turkish origin were often depicted in the propaganda of the Right as unhealthy and unhygienic and as reproducing "like rabbits." (45)

Dale notes the close connection between the racism of the extreme Right and the policies of establishment parties in Germany, notably the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which led inereasingly strident campaigns against immigrants in general and refugees in particular." (46) So too in France where Fysh and Wolfreys identify the impact on parties of the Center-Right of rising support for the FN. (47) Political parties across the spectrum were in fact affected by the real or anticipated electoral success of neo-fascist organizations. Exclusionary policies earlier viewed as unthinkable and undesirable (especially in the light of Western Europe's once insatiable need for labor) moved into the mainstream. Analyzing these developments across Western Europe MacMaster concluded that mainstream parties have tried to occupy the same terrain as the far Right by taking up a "hard" anti-immigrant position. He notes the success of the "New Racists" of the Right in France, where the leading conservative Giscard d'Estaing adopted policies on immigration little different from the FN and in Britain, where Thatcher raised the specter of a nation "swamped" by those of a different culture. (48)

The far Right did not in general argue publicly for the biological racism which underpinned classical fascism and had provided a rationale for the human catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s. Across Western Europe the Right had undertaken a "cultural turn." Organizations such as the FN used a discourse which replaced biological racism with arguments about national identity and culture. It argued that what differentiated Europeans from others were the superior attributes manifested in cultural life--in religion, language, education end high culture. Non-Europeans were said not only to be backward--because their presence weakened and in the end threatened the purity of European life but also to be dangerous.

According to the Right the natural order was one in which Europe dominated the regions which had formerly been its colonies and which now produced large numbers of immigrants. It was necessary to reassert the old regime. In the case of France, suggests Evans,

   This is why the new racism puts so much accent on
   place and space, belonging, frontiers, mixing, inclusion and
   exclusion; it also explains why the now racism reserves so much
   barfed for the hybrid and multicultural. (49)

The question of "space" had become a key element in the ideology of the New Racism. National groups were required to defend "their" space; Le Pen argued, "We must act ... by occupying our vital space, because nature has a horror of space and if we do not occupy it, others will occupy it in our place." (50) On this view the world was to be understood in terms of races and cultures struggling for survival. It was only one step to the Nazi notion of "living space"-lebensraum--a concept still mobilized by the extreme Right in Germany. In the words of Franz Schonhuber of the RP, "We're not a welfare office for the Mediterrenean ... We want to protect the German people's ecological living space against foreign infiltration." (51)

ISLAMOPHOBIA

By the late 1990s anti-Islamic sentiment had intensified across Western Europe. In the case of Britain this had become so serious that a Commission on British Muslims end Islamophobia had been established, involving figures from leading Muslim organizations and non-Muslim academics and religions leaders. In 1997 it reported on a dramatic increase in anti-lslamic feeling:

   dread and dislike [of Muslims] have existed in western
   countries and cultures for several centuries. In the last twenty
   years, however, the dislike has become more explicit, more
   extreme and more dangerous. Within Britain it means that
   Muslims are frequently excluded from the economic, social
   and public life of the nation ... and are frequently victims of
   discrimination and harassment. (52)

The report noted the prevalence of "closed views" which see Islam "as violent and aggressive, firmly committed to barbaric terrorism, and implacably hostile to the non-Muslim world. (53) It traced the development of hostile imagery in the British Press, notably the cartoons of popular newspapers which generalized stock characters--the avaricious oil sheik, the veiled woman, the turbaned cleric--and heightened a sense of difference between Muslims and the wider society. It also noted the relationship between fear or hatred of Muslims as an imagined threat from afar and as a malign presence within British society. It observed:

   Islam is depicted in Islamophobic discourse as wholly
   evil, wholly bent on--to recall an influential phrase used by
   Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University--a 'clash
   of civilizations'. The impending war will be with foreign
   states, the argument runs, and also there will be 'waves of boat
   people', all of them Muslims, descending on the shores of
   Southern Europe and there will be 'riots in the cities of Europe
   and with much bloodshed'." (54)

Huntington can hardly be held to account for intensification of racism in Europe but the regularity with which his name and his ideas now appeared in discussions about ethnic conflict was striking--as above where they were associated with the idea of Islam as both a malign influence and a source of conflict. By the late 1990s the clash theory was being widely used as a means of explaining even local communal tensions. A theory which had been developed to assert American status in an increasingly unstable and uncertain world was becoming a framework in which to place issues of "difference" rooted in specific histories of hostility to internal enemies. This development said less about the relationship of the "local" to the "global" than about the credulity and/or cynicism of those willing to mobilize for their own purposes ideas which from the beginning had had specific ideological and instrumental purposes.

The fact that this process was most advanced in Europe was not coincidental. In a prescient newspaper article written in 1996 the British journalist Richard Gott had reported on the Toledo conference on relations between Europe and Islam. He wrote:

   The United States, which has fewer Muslims within
   its borders in comparison with Europe, is chiefly affected by
   the geo-political implications of the Islamic resurgence ... But
   the European attitude towards Islam is colored both by
   proximity and by its own Muslim communities. (55)

The more that the EU and its member states focused upon the politics of exclusion the more it targeted its "own" Muslim communities, reinforcing attempts by the extreme Right to target the latter as invaders of the European "space." And the more rapidly this process advanced the more appropriate seemed the grand theories of cultural incompatibility which Huntington offered.

11 SEPTEMBER AND AFTER

The aerial attacks on the U.S. in September 2001 brought a further surge of interest in the clash thesis. Only a month after the attacks an Internet search revealed hundreds of new articles invoking Huntington as a means of understanding the events. Edward Said commented on the phenomenon: "Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European newspaper of note adding to [Huntington's] vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse." (56)

There was less coverage of the effect upon Muslim communities of responses to the 11 September events. In the U.S. there were low-key reports of harassment of Muslims and of people of "Middle Eastern appearance." A number of killings of U.S. citizens of Asian origin were in fact directly linked to the events, with Sikh men--believed to have been targeted because of their beards and turbans a particular target. (57) By January 2002, the U.S. Justice Department had prioritized the tracking of 6,000 young Middle Eastern men believed to be illegal residents, even though they accounted for only 2 per cent of the country's "absconders" and a much smaller proportion--about 0.07 per cent--of its illegal aliens. (58) Civil rights organizations alleged that the government was practicing racial profiling and encouraging stereotyping. (59)

In Europe, with Muslim communities in most major cities, threats and attacks were much more general. In Britain the Islamic Human Rights Commission reported that during the three months after 11 September the number of attacks on Muslims was 13 times higher than in an average year. (60) Its dossier revealed threats to schoolchildren and especially to women wearing headscarves and men with beards. An official of the Muslim Council of Britain commented that, "We are made to feel like outsiders, like fifth columnists." (61)

These developments were paralleled in continental Europe by a rapid rise to prominence of right-wing parties with anti-Islamic agendas. In November 2001 the Danish People's Party (DPP) scored an unprecedented electoral success. Its leader Pia Kjaersgaard had long been campaigning against admission of immigrants in general and refugees in particular. The DPP focused upon the Muslim presence in Denmark: Kjaersgaard set the tone by declaring that when she saw a Muslim she crossed the street. Denmark was under threat she said and Islam, with its "fundamentalist tendencies", must combated. (62) Following the events of 11 September, Kjaersgaard declared a "holy war" on Islam. (63) Her electoral success produced a sharp move to the right among mainstream parties and within a few months Denmark had introduced the most restrictive immigration rules in Western Europe. Critics described these as "racist" and likely to turn the country into "a fortress;" the UNHCR questioned the status of the plans under international law. (64)

There were similar developments in the Netherlands. Here Pim Fortuyn had been leading the fastest-growing right-wing party in Western Europe. His Fortuyn List campaigned aggressively against Muslims, declaring that the Netherlands was "a full country" that its borders should be closed and the number of immigrants radically reduced. Fortuyn placed his anti-Islamic sentiment in a global context. He described his book Against the Islamisation of Our Culture as a Dutch version of Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and cast himself as "the Samuel Huntington of Dutch politics." (65) He declared that the presence of Muslims put the cultural integrity of the Netherlands at risk, (66) arguing: that the country was "already bursting. I think that 16 million are quite enough." (67) Interviewed by the Australian media about his views on Islam, Fortuyn insisted, "it is a backward culture. I have written a complete book about it and you can read it also in English by Mr Huntington. You don't say to Mr Huntington that he is a racist." (68)

Meanwhile in Italy Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had also pronounced on the 11 September attacks by invoking the clash thesis. Spelling out what even U.S. leaders had hesitated to do he depicted America's "war on terrorism" as a clash of civilizations. At a widely publicized meeting with the prime minister of Germany, Berlusconi declared that Western civilization was much more advanced that that of Islam. The West, he said, demonstrated "supremacy" and "superiority". He maintained that the attacks on the U.S. were also "attacks on our civilization, of which we are proud bearers". The West had brought to the world "democratic institutions, respect for the human, civil and religious rights of our citizens, openness to diversity and tolerance of everything [sic]". He added: "This respect certainly does not exist in the Islamic countries." He made that clear Europe had a specific cultural heritage and called upon Europeans to recognize their "common Christian roots." (69) The West would conquer all enemies, he insisted, just as it had conquered communism.

As anti-Islamic sentiment intensified, the media turned to Huntington. By this point his original article had been translated into 26 languages and had been widely discussed in the print and broadcast media. (70) Edward Said comments that "uncountable" editorials in American and European publications had a common purpose: "not to edify but to inflame the reader's indignant passion as a member of 'the West'". (71) Numerous television and radio broadcasts referred to the "clash" thesis, often as if it was a stock means of understanding world and domestic events. A New York Times interview with Huntington was widely quoted in the European Press. (72) Here Huntington explained that the root of the "problem" of Islam was the high birth rate in the Muslim world, which resulted in large numbers of young males who "go out and kill other people." The conflict was indeed likely to broaden into a clash of civilizations, he maintained.

The clash thesis had now been absorbed by the extreme Right across Europe. Their main concern was the presence of "non-Europeans" and the need to evict them. Greek nationalists for example proclaimed:

From a geopolitical point of view we ascertain that the eternal conflict of civilizations, which was first examined in the post-Cold War era by Professor Huntington, has now been carried into the countries of the West.... The clash of civilizations now takes the form of a violent civil war in the interior of the Western countries. The massive influx and legalization of illegal immigrants, including fanatic Islamists, overturned the necessary condition of internal security: demographic balance and homogeneity. (73)

INTERNAL ENEMIES

To note such enthusiasm for the clash theory is not to re-inscribe Huntington's thesis. This had a precise ideological purpose: although presented as a "global" account it was focused upon the protection of U.S. interests--material and ideological--in an unstable and dangerous world. As Kaplan has pointed out in a hagiographic account of Huntington's work, concern with American interests has been the latter's "entire life's work." (74)

The clash thesis is not novel. It draws upon a tradition that emerged in Europe at the birth of the nation-state and accompanied European expansion across the world. This was the idea that, notwithstanding the intense rivalry between such states, people of Europe held in common attributes superior to those of all other human beings. Expressed in the "civilizing" missions of specific states these gave meaning to colonialism and had the effect of complementing ideologies of nation which were of immense importance in cohering unstable domestic populations. The idea of a civilizing Europe was as important "at home" as it was abroad: it was indeed a "security" measure much like Huntington's defense of U.S. interests in the 1990s. Here "civilization" has an ideological function in the classical sense: it is part of a body of ideas which endorse relations of inequality and of domination of a majority of people by a small number of others.

Among the many criticisms of Huntington one is central: that in order to construct global cultural blocs he has imposed uniformity upon a vast range of people of diverse beliefs and practices. This homogenization of cultures serves to simplify to an extreme degree the complexity of human experience. It denies the fluidity of cultural forms--the complex processes of appropriation and modification of ideas which have taken place for millennia across all manner of borders. Paradoxically it also ignores the presence of certain borderlines that have been created within the frontiers of the contemporary nation-state. The emergence of the nations of modern Europe would be unthinkable without long campaigns against internal enemies which have become functional to the emergence of ideologies of national belonging. At a time of reconstruction of Europe these internal borders have been mobilized in new ways so that a Union of European states is being defined not only against threatening external Others but against internal enemies. Huntington's theory has proved attractive because it seems to provide rationales for campaigns against both: on the one hand it has been used to define the outer borders of the New Europe; on the other hand it has been used a rationale for those who wish to penalize people viewed as invaders of the European "cultural space."

The best evaluation of the clash thesis comes from the record of those in Europe who have seized upon it as a new rationale for their own projects of exclusion. The list of enthusiasts is a roll-call of the European Right: figures such as Berlusconi, Le Pen, Kjaersgaard, Fortuyn. These men and women stand in a tradition of intolerance which many other people of Europe wish to reject. The Belgian writer Herman de Ley notes that the New Racism is constructed along similar lines to the anti-Semitism of an earlier generation. (75) It is essentially an anti-Muslimism--"a new racism, which is actually accompanying the construction of European unity." It is not however a general feature of European society. The growth of immigrant groups has sometimes been accompanied by tension and even conflict but in the main it has taken place positively and largely unnoticed. The settlement of such populations is an irreversible development and the question that arises is of advancing pluralism-a positive muticulturalism. The final goal, De Ley concludes, should be the "interculturalization" of European society. (76)

Efforts to develop further integration of EU member states are continuing. As they do so ideologues of Europeanity will face further problems of ideological deficit. In attempting to develop a sense of popular identification with the Union it is likely that they will emphasize more strongly the imagined qualities of Europeans against malign Others without and within. Theories such as the clash of civilizations--divisive, exclusionary and deeply pessimistic-will be additions to their armory.

ENDNOTES

(1). Quoted in Jacinta O'Hagan, "Civilizational conflict? Looking for cultural enemies," Third World Quarterly. Vol. 18, No. 1 (1999), pp.19-38.

(2.) Pim Fortuyn, leader in the Netherlands of the List Fortuyn, quoted in The Guardian, 10 April 2002.

(3.) Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" in Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993.

(4.) See the observations of Edward Said, Covering Islam (London: Vintage, 1997), preface.

(5.) Robert Kaplan, "Looking the World in the Eye," Atlantic Monthly, December 2001.

(6.) Quoted in Charles W. Kegley and Eugene R Wittkopf, World Politics: Trendand Transformation (New York: St. Martins Press, 1995), p.5.

(7.) Ibid.

(8.) Quoted in Noam Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1994), p.7.

(9.) Quoted in Charles W. Kegley and Eugene R Wittkopf, World Politics: Trend and Transformation, p.551.

(10.) UNHCR, The State of the World's Refugees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.34.

(11.) Jon Bennet, "Internal Displacement in Context: The Emergence of a New Politics," in Wendy Davies (ed.), Rights Have No Borders (Norwegian Refuge Council/Global IDP Survey 1998), p.16.

(12.) For an account of this syndrome in the context of a "globalizing" world system see Philip Marfleet, "Against the Globalist Paradigm," in Shereen Ismael, Globalization: Policies, Challenges and Responses (Calgary: Detselig, 1999).

(13.) Robert Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," in Patrick O'Meara, Howard D. Melinger and Matthew Krain, Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2000 [1994]), p.36.

(14.) Robert Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy", p.45.

(15.) Ibid.

(16.) Ibid: p.46.

(17.) Ibid: p.53.

(18.) Ibid: p.57.

(19.) Philip Marfleet, "Europe's Civilizing Mission," in Phil Cohen (ed.), New Ethnicities, Old Racisms (London: Zed Press, 1999); Philip Marfleet, "A New Orientalism: Europe Confronts the Middle East" in Tareq Y. Ismael (ed.), The International Relations of the Middle East in the 21st Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

(20.) Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" p.27.

(21.) Reported in The Guardian, 20 April 1996.

(22.) Lister reviews some of the debates over the "clash" theory as they affected debates in the mid-1990s. See Marjorie Lister, The European Union and the South (London: Routledge, 1997), Chapter 2.

(23.) See Lutfia Rabbani Foundation, Europeans and Arabs in Dialogue (The Hague: Lutfia Rabbani Foundation, 1995) and S. A. S. Hallaba, Euro-Arab Dialogue (Brattleboro: Amana, 1984).

(24.) Bulletin of the European Union Vol. 2, 1995, p.10.

(25.) See Philip Marfleet, "A New Orientalism: Europe Confronts the Middle East."

(26.) Bulletin of the European Union. Vol. 2, 1995, pp.10-13.

(27.) Sarah Collinson, Shore to Shore: The Politics of Migration in Euro-Maghreb Relations (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1996), p.39.

(28.) The Independent, 8 February 1995.

(29.) See Philip Marfleet, "A New Orientalism: Europe Confronts the Middle East."

(30.) The Independent, 16 November 2000.

(31.) Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon & Schuster, 1998[19996]), p.158.

(32.) Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p.158.

(33.) Ibid.

(34.) Ibid: p.204.

(35.) Ibid.

(36.) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

(37.) These developments were evidence of the cultural heterogeneity of Europe, entirely ignored by Huntington. The complexity of European cultures end their fluid character subvert the notion of Europe as a cultural bloc; so too with the heterogeneity of other geographical regions characterized by Huntington as "civilizational" coherences.

(38.) It is significant that anti-Semitism as an organized political current emerged in the early 1880s as nationalist movements proliferated across Central and Eastern Europe. The First and Second Anti-Jewish Congresses, held in 1882 and 1883, had participants from Germany, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Romania, Serbia and France. See Neil Macmaster, Racism in Europe 1870-2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p.89.

(39.) Quoted in S. Panebianco, "European Citizenship and European Identity: from the Treaty of Maastricht to public opinion attitudes," Jean Monnet Working Papers in Comparative and International Politics, December 1996, p.9.

(40.) See Philip Marfleet, "A New Orientalism: Europe Confronts the Middle East."

(41.) On the implications of EU migration strategy for domestic policies of member slates see Mike Haynes, "Setting the Limits to Europe as an 'Imagined Community' ", in Gareth Dale and Mike Cole (eds.), The European Union and Migrant Labour (Oxford: Berg, 1999).

(42.) Martin Evans, "Languages of Fascism Within Contemporary Europe," in Brian Jenkins and Spyros A. Sofos (eds.), Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe (London: Routledge, 1996), p.49.

(43.) Martin Evans, "Languages of Fascism Within Contemporary Europe" p.50.

(44.) Gareth Dale, "Germany: Nation and Immigration" in Gareth Dale and Mike Cole (eds.), The European Union and Migrant Labour (Oxford: Berg, 1999), p.137.

(45.) Martin Evans, "Languages of Fascism Within Contemporary Europe," p.48.

(46.) Gareth Dale, "Germany: Nation and Immigration," pp.136-140.

(47.) Pete Fysh and Jim Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism in France (London: 1998).

(48.) Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe, p.201.

(49.) Martin Evans, "Languages of Fascism Within Contemporary Europe," p.46.

(50.) Ibid: p.49.

(51.) Ibid: p.47.

(52.) Runnymede Trust, Islamophobia--a challenge for us all (London: Runnymede Trust, 1997).

(53.) Ibid: p.7.

(54.) Ibid: p.8.

(55.) Richard Gott, "Reason blinks in the light of faith," The Guardian, 20 April 1996.

(56.) Edward Said, "The Clash of Ignorance," The Nation, 22 October 2001, p.1.

(57.) The Independent, 17 September 2001.

(58.) The Guardian, 9 January 2002.

(59.) Ibid.

(60.) The Independent, 4 January 2002.

(61.) Ibid.

(62.) The Independent, 22 November 2001.

(63.) Ibid.

(64.) The Guardian, 10 April 2002.

(65.) Ibid.

(66.) The Guardian, 23 February 2002.

(67.) The Washington Times, 8 May 2002.

(68.) Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 7 May 2002: transcript online at http://www.anc.net/au

(69.) La Republica, 26 September 2002.

(70.) Robert Kaplan, "Looking the World in the Eye," p.19.

(71.) Edward Said, "The Clash of Ignorance," p.2.

(72.) See, for example, The Observer, 21 October 2001.

(73.) "The Islamic infiltration in Greece and Europe," at http:www.egrammes.gr

(74.) Kaplan, "Looking the World in the Eye," p.3.

(75.) Herman de Ley, "Muslims in Belgium: Enemies from Within or Fellow-Citizens?" Forum, November 1998, p.1.

(76.) Ibid.

Philip Marfleet is a Lecturer of Development Studies and Director of the Refugee Studies Program at the University of East London, United Kingdom. The author wishes to thank Adrian Budd of South Bank University for his comments on this article in draft.