Let's consider some of the most recent ones. The war in Georgia last year was not a cultural conflict: the Georgian and Russian histories are often intertwined, both countries are Orthodox and, according to Huntington, they belong to the same civilization. The conflict was political, determined by Russia's will to dominate the Southern Caucasus, and economic, related to the energy routes in the area.
Perhaps the greatest weakness in Huntington's theory comes from his lack of understanding of the fact that the post-Cold War world is, first of all, essentially a globalized framework in which the interdependencies between the countries is greater than at any other point in history. From an economic, but also communicational and cultural perspective, the relations have become globalized, which means that countries and people will work together even if they belong to different civilization. The explanation of the global world (which is real and palpable) cannot be based on Huntington's idea of conflicting civilizations, since these civilizations need to work together and often do.
On the other hand, Said's work and concept of Orientalism also seems entirely focused on proving a point rather than on a rigorous scientific discourse that builds on arguments to arrive to a conclusion. As Huntington does, Said knows where he wants to get to, basically to the idea that "Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient's difference with its weakness"
. The existence of several superficial European orientalists cannot transform this entire segment of research into a derisory one.
With these general considerations, it is probable that Huntington's arguments are probably stronger than Said's and that, with significant restrictions and corrections, his theory could be turned into a potentially functional thesis for the 21st...
On one hand, it is a global theory, covering all areas of the world rather than just the relationship between the Western civilization and the Oriental one, as Said's does.
On the other hand, it is debatable whether Said's argument for potential conflicts between civilizations can simply be resumed to the absence of knowledge and the superficiality of research on the part of the Western civilization. What happens if this research and knowledge flow is reversed to go both ways? How does it happen that Said does not discuss the potential significance of an Occidentalism, a study current from the East of the Western civilization? Why is it that it has to be the members of the Western civilization that have to go about learning about other civilizations in order too better understand these? Again, his approach proves a very limited perspective on understanding the interaction between civilizations, especially in the 21st century and beyond.
This is perhaps one of the main objections to the theories of Huntington and Said and to their availability in the present. The 21st century is a complex and interconnected reality, not a simplified version of the cultural interaction between civilizations. The economic and political elements can never be ignored when discussing the conflicts between civilizations or the way that the future interactions will develop. Within the global world, it is more likely that civilizations will need to work together rather than obtain an overall supremacy.
Finally, as an observation, both theories seemed to come out of a period when the conflict between the Western civilization and Islam was at its highest, which had a significant impact on how these theories developed. Huntington's theory, for example, became very actual only after the 9/11 attacks and with Bush's new foreign policies.
Bibliography
1. Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs. 1993
2. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage; 1st Vintage Books edition. October 1979
Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs. 1993
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage; 1st Vintage Books edition. October 1979
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage; 1st Vintage Books edition. October 1979
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