The Ukrainian War; Bringing Samuel Huntington's Prophecies Back to Fore. An analysis of the geopolitical divide that charted the world's reactions to the war.

 

 

"Each civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama in human history" (Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order").

In his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the American political thinker Samuel Huntington predicted that future wars would not be between states in the traditional form but between cultures and civilizations.

Huntington divided the world into nine core cultures: Western Protestant-Catholic culture, Latin culture in South America, Orthodox culture that includes present-day Russia and its allies from the small Orthodox states of Europe and the former Yugoslavia, Islamic culture, Buddhist culture, Hindu culture, African culture, Chinese Confucian culture, and Japanese culture.

Huntington argues that the prevailing belief in the West in the universality of Western values and political systems is superficial and naïve. The continued insistence on imposing democratization will only increase hostility with other civilizations.

 

While some have drawn a utopian world in which civilizations cooperate without clash, others have drawn a dystopian world in which civilizations stand on the lines of fire and blood in an endless clash. But the truth seems to be a compromise between these two extremists. The world is in a state of interaction that sometimes takes the form of conflict and cooperation at other times, and the language of interest often prevails.

However, the concept of interest remains a variable concept that is not fixed, according to time, place, and the parties' vision of themselves, which determines their vision of the map of friendship and hostility. What some see as a threat today can be seen differently tomorrow. According to Huntington, culture and civilization's prevailing state determine the national interest. Each country looks at its own interests according to its political culture and civilizational affiliation.

Ukraine appears as an explanatory example, as its belonging to the Russian periphery, under former President Viktor Yanukovych made it view its interests and affiliation in a completely different sense from its view of its interests under the current president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Huntington's culture and cultural belonging to states determine interest, not the other way around. The parties' different worldviews determine the boundaries of conflict and cooperation.

Huntington's predictions and the Ukrainian war

The war in Ukraine is based on two opposing narratives: the Russian narrative that the West threatens the existence of Russians and their political and societal culture, so they must resist its expansion; and the Western narrative that Russia threatens democracies and wants to swallow and defeat them, and will not stand on Ukraine's borders, and therefore its expansion must be resisted. Each side sees in the other an existential cultural threat that must be confronted, even with blood, fire, and starvation.

These two narratives emerged as cultural boundaries between the intervening parties to the conflict, both directly and indirectly. While the West has merged as a bloc behind its war narrative, it has not convinced many outside the West and countries whose security is directly guaranteed, such as South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. The West has failed to convince India of it or to co-opt China to it. It has failed to publish its narrative of the war in the Middle East, which is contested by currents that are either hostile to the US-led Western vision or question Washington's seriousness in ensuring its security, as is the case with the Gulf states. The Western narrative has also found no success, even in Turkey, a "non-Western" member of NATO.

The theory of the clash of civilizations appears as a prophecy of this war as if it were drawing cultural boundaries between major civilizations, as Huntington predicted in his book. Despite gaps in his theory, the world now seems closer than ever to his perceptions.

Why did the Western narrative fail beyond its borders?

The Western narrative of war emerged as a discourse that reproduces Western history as "the central drama in human history," as Huntington himself put it. In it appeared an inflation of the civilized self and a veiled contempt for the other, through which the same myth of the superiority of the white man whose death is considered the most catastrophic event in the world compared to events less important in Africa, Middle East, or any other parts of the world.

Thus, the Western media was filled with white supremacist rhetoric and the catastrophic death of a blue-eyed and blond-haired Christian European, naturally superior to uneducated others from beyond the sea where "inferior" cultures are widespread. In more blunt terms, "These people are smart and educated... This is not the wave of refugees we are used to, people we were not sure of who we were, people with an unclear past, who could even be terrorists,"  Bulgarian Prime Minister Kirill Petkov said.

The torrent of white supremacy shocked the non-Western world and made it more skeptical of the West's war narrative. The rhetoric was reinforced by a political move that asked the countries of the Middle East and Central Asia to adopt the same Western position and condemn Russia and participate in its blockade, a position expressed by the ambassadors of the Group of Seven countries in Egypt in  the statement entitled "We must stand with Ukraine." The obligation here was directed at the host country of the ambassadors, Egypt. The opposite position of the dismissive expressed by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran "Are we your slaves?!" he said,  objecting to a similar statement from 22 ambassadors in his country.

Another crisis in the Western narrative was that it was a tale that failed to provide a security system that guarantees security for all. Some still consider it a threat to non-Western values, which brings us back to Huntington's prophecies. Although the narrative of democracy and economic welfare was attractive and was able to penetrate the imagined sphere of Orthodox civilization, as the West was able to wrest Orthodox Ukraine from the Russian sphere to its own, taking advantage of the cracks of Slavic culture, attempts to spread democracy through the color revolutions that succeeded in one country provoked nationalist strife in other countries and made the West a source of threat to some rather than an attractive factor.

Russia, which feels threatened, has forged alliances in its periphery with other dictatorships in Belarus (Europe's last dictatorship) and Central Asia and has found a foothold in the Middle East and North Africa.

Under the security threat and the desire for balance with China and Pakistan, the West has failed to convince India, which seems to be sticking to neutrality in the Ukraine crisis, for fundamental reasons: first, the historical policy of non-alignment that has shaped  India's international identity; second, that India relies on Russian armaments to more than 60 percent, which is necessary to strike a balance between itself and China on the one hand and Pakistan on the other; and third, the nationalist government that currently governs India understands the concerns of Russian nationalists more than Liberal governments.

China is emerging as a vast civilizational bloc that Huntington said would be one of the West's most important sources of challenge. Although China has economic interests with the West, its strategic interests are closer to the Russian narrative. Therefore, the West has failed to pressure it to endorse and participate in sanctions on Russia, especially since its position is that they are illegal and outrageous.

China is trying to balance its economic interests closer to the West with its strategic interests closest to Russia. Still, it seems closer to strategic primacy while not neglecting the economy.

Another bloc to which the West has failed to "sell" its narrative is the countries of the Middle East, the center of Islamic civilization according to Huntington's classification. The Gulf states are trying to maintain a neutrality that tends to be ambiguous for two reasons: first, they are willing not to respond to pressure from the United States, which is trying to pressure them to lower oil prices; and second, they are eager to explore Russian weapons that are displayed in a practical market open to followers on Ukrainian soil.

Russia has used new offensive weapons systems such as hypersonic attack missiles. It demonstrates its air and missile capabilities, discouraging the Gulf from investing in hostility with a potential arms supplier, especially given its lack of confidence in U.S. protection.

Conclusion

The Ukrainian war drew a boundary of engagement that emerged closer to the predictions of the late American political scientist Samuel Huntington. The Western-centric narrative emerged either against the other, condescending to him, or ignoring their existence, to the point that the president of Ukraine gave a speech steeped in the Western centrist vision hostile or ignoring anyone else. Zelensky addressed the Israeli Knesset: "We are in two different countries and completely different circumstances. But the threat is the same: for us and you, the destruction of the people, the state, and culture." His speech to the Knesset was not neutral, balanced, or sensitive to the Arab other's vision of the conflict. Still, it was based on Western myths surrounding establishing the State of Israel and its continuation as a Western extension in an eastern periphery.

Despite the dominance and often appeal of the Western narrative, with a great deal of ability to spread beyond its borders under cognitive control and rationalization of violence, the war has revealed a challenge facing it. The non-Western's view of their own interest stemming from their cultural affiliations made them not adopt the Western war narrative. Other cultures and civilizations seem to oscillate between neutrality, anticipation, or skepticism of the Western narrative, destabilizing the myth of the world's consensus on a unified security system centered on the West, which has a white Protestant Christian civilization and its margins.