The rise of Islamic State and the barbaric attacks in Paris and Copenhagen over the past two months have revived the idea that we are in a global religious confrontation. After a European trip where he decried the rise of “no-go zones” for non-Muslims — ignoring that no such areas exist — Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal returned home to hold a pep rally, where he declared, “Our God wins!”
The idea of a holy war is not new: More than two decades ago, Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington wrote an immensely influential essay in Foreign Affairs on the “clash of civilizations” that would dominate global relations in the post–Cold War world. Although it’s tempting to believe Huntington’s predictions have come to pass, the opposite is true. Survey data from around the world suggest “civilizations” are increasingly converging in attitudes — including political attitudes in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the most vicious ongoing conflicts are within civilizations and major religious groupings, not between them. The world should do all it can to end those conflicts, but it’s at best misguided and at worst paranoid to think they’re mainly about “us vs. them.”
Huntington’s 1993 essay suggested that “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state often have little resonance” in other cultures. Attachment to the nation-state was weakening, and “in much of the world religion has moved in to fill this gap.” Battles among “princes, nation-states, and ideologies” were largely a thing of the past, as “the principle conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations”: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic, Latin American, and African.