Is it History's `End' or `Clash of Civilizations?"

Seeking clues to future by interpreting terrorists' attacks through two seminal views of post-Cold War world.

What do we make of the willingness of 19 young Muslim men to sacrifice their lives to kill thousands of Americans they didn't know?

Is it a tragic fluke, a final shudder of an old enmity at ``the end of history''? Or is it the first major battle in a titanic ``clash of civilizations''?

Those questions arise when the hijackers' attacks are viewed through the very different lenses of seminal essays written by two political scholars as the Cold War sputtered to a close a decade ago.

The articles, by Francis Fukuyama, then a U.S. State Department policy planner, and Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard University political scientist, were written in provocative style and made a splash in foreign-policy circles. Both were subsequently expanded into books and added to reading lists at scores of universities. Their authors were widely lionized, occasionally ridiculed.

Now, in the wake of the September terror, Fukuyama's 1989 article ``The End of History?'' and Huntington's 1993 article ``The Clash of Civilizations?'' put the news into larger patterns, as random stars form shapes when constellations are described.

Fukuyama did not claim historical events had screeched to a halt -- but that the epic contest of political systems had been fought and won.

``What we are witnessing,'' he wrote, ``is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.''

In fact, Fukuyama went so far as to anticipate a certain ``boredom'' that might set in, as ``the worldwide ideological struggle'' is replaced by ``the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.''

Fukuyama did allow in his essay in The National Interest that the Third World would remain ``mired in history'' and ``terrain of conflict.'' But even if ``a new Ayatollah proclaimed the millennium from a desolate Middle Eastern capital,'' he wrote, the underlying world order would be ``an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.''

Huntington's far-darker essay in Foreign Affairs proposed that, far from ending, history was entering a new and tumultuous period of cultural conflict among the ``seven or eight major civilizations,'' which he listed as ``Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilizations.''

Explicitly rejecting the end-of-history theory, among others, Huntington stated his thesis in words as categorical and evocative as Fukuyama's: ``The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.''

And one of the chief fault lines, Huntington wrote in the year of the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, was that separating the Western and Islamic civilizations.

``Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years,'' he wrote, tracing the Crusades and rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire.

``This centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent,'' he wrote.

If Fukuyama was right, the terror is an echo of the past more than a wave of the future, a fringe phenomenon rather than one expressing a ``civilization.'' The attacks may be merely a tragic, criminal detour in the global progress toward liberal democracy.

But if Huntington was right, the terror could be a grim prelude, the beginning of one more war in centuries of conflict between Muslims and Westerners. ``Some Westerners . . . have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen-hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise,'' he wrote.

Huntington, of Harvard, isn't commenting, and Fukuyama, now at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, is away due to a family illness. But following the carnage in New York, Washington and rural Pennsylvania, the essays' contrasting paradigms are everywhere reflected in government statements and expert analysis.

Steven R. David, a professor of international relations at John Hopkins' Homewood campus, says he believes both essays captured important truths about the contemporary world. Fukuyama is right, he says, that ``the big disputes that people fought and died for are over. Germany's not going to invade France. You don't have many people arguing that communism is superior to capitalism.'' But Fukuyama, he says, ``greatly underestimated'' the trouble that could be caused by those still ``mired in history.''

``Unfortunately,'' David says, ``I think Huntington's view is closer to the mark.''

One who portrays the terror very much as a clash of civilizations is suspected terrorist plotter and financier Osama bin Laden. Reaching back into 1,400 years of history, he is rallying Muslims against what he calls ``the new Jewish-Crusader campaign led by the biggest crusader, Bush, under the banner of the cross.''

The televised shots of crowds of Muslims in several countries celebrating the attacks, burning American flags and praising bin Laden also suggest a cultural conflict. Interviews with a wide range of Muslims around the world often elicit regret at the loss of lives, but it is usually coupled with a ``but'': But, the speakers say, American arrogance and actions, from support of Israel to sanctions against Iraq, provoked the attacks by reflecting hostility to Islam. Yet just as striking was the initial rush of Islamic leaders and officials of Muslim nations to denounce the terror and reject any Islamic justification. ``It is deplorable that in this year of dialogue between civilizations,'' said Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, a reformist Muslim cleric, echoing Huntington's words, ``the most violent and savage of attacks should have taken place.''

Other Muslim commentators, some specifically referring to Huntington, warned against unwittingly turning a horrendous crime into a conflict between civilizations. ``We should all do our best so that a war against terrorism does not turn into a `clash of civilizations,' '' wrote Azzam Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London, in the Times of London.

David, at Hopkins, says the United States and its Western allies must be careful to avoid words that imply civilizations are at war.

``If we in the West say we're at war with Islam, then we're at war with Islam. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.''

In a notable stumble early on, President Bush labeled the campaign against terror with bin Laden's favorite word, ``crusade.'' ``That reminds Muslims of an ugly history,'' says Abdulaziz Sachedina, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia.

Since then, the Bush administration has taken pains to avoid suggesting their war is against Islam. But many Muslims are still made nervous by American officials' frequent references to ``the civilized world'' or ``the free world'' in an apocalyptic showdown with ``barbarism'' or ``evil,'' Sachedina says. Americans' claim to be defending freedom rings especially hollow with Muslims in such countries as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, where the United States backs authoritarian regimes, he says.

In fact, Sachedina says, if the United States is to avoid Huntington's clash of civilizations, officials might be well-advised to back away altogether from the use of the word war.

``It's not a war; it's a criminal act,'' he says. ``The more we use war rhetoric, the more we need to find a proper target. And with an international terrorist group, there is no proper target.''

Young man have always been vulnerable to the ranting of LUNATICS. We have seen in before many times. Japanese Kamikaze, Nazi Stormtroopers, Communist revolutionaries.

It is not new, and it does not make their cause right.

The willingness of stupid, deluded, brainwashed young men to die for their leader's cause is as old as mankind.

Unfortunatly , it will not go away any time soon.

We are seeing the death throws of Islam, just as we saw the death throws of German and Japanese nationalism and Soviet communism in the last century (all finished off by the good ole US of A). A religion that espouses conversion by military conquest is doomed unless it can succeed at military conquest. They may hurt us, but they are definitely going to lose militarily, so the final outcome is a foregone conclusion.

"We are seeing the death throws of Islam, just as we saw the death throws of German and Japanese nationalism and Soviet communism in the last century (all finished off by the good ole US of A)."

Well, we didn't see their death throes until we acted. And it took years.

This is going to be a Crusade, if it is going to work at all. Long and bloody. And like the first Crusades, this is in response to jihad.

There was no Crusade before jihad.

And as long as there is Islam, there will be jihad.

I'm not sure folks get that yet.

".......it is the end of the beginning".

Oh, I don't think so. We have only seen two of the four horsemen beginning to canter (war, death), and three is just leaving the gate (pestilence). What is the fourth? Famine? That's when we'll know it is the end of the beginning.

Hang in there, film at 11. Possibly of a red moon rising.

Just thought I'd mention that you are much more bonkers than I am, and I'm pretty nutso so that's saying a lot.

If you subscribe to the religious interpretation of history then you are "mired in history" and are aligning yourself with the crazy thinking people that are part of the problem.

I would hardly call what the Taliban practices "civilization."

Agreed... But that's the point.

They do.

And so does bin Laden and Hussein.

"They do. And so does bin Laden and Hussein."

High time to show them - again - the terrible cost of their barbarity.

In the meantime, I was taking exception with the writer's use of the words "clash of civilizations."

When the same word "civilization" is used to describe both the U.S. (and by extension, "the west") and the uncivilized barbarians that perpetrated these acts of aggression, then there exists on the writer's part either a severe misunderstanding of that which constitues a "civilization," or it is a cynical attempt on his part to blur the distinctions that exist between the two and thus make us the moral equivalents of our enemies.

In either case, his repeated and inappropriate choice of language to describe what may more readily be called a "clash of cultures" or a "clash of civilization versus barbarism" tells me this writer is either terribly ignorant, or he has an axe to grind. Thus, his use of the language undermines what may otherwise be a perfectly reasonable premise.

"Oh, I don't think so. We have only seen two of the four horseman beginning to canter(war, death), and three is just leaving the gate (pestilence). What is the forth? Famine? That's when we'll know it is the end of the beginning."

Pestilence, how much more pestilence do you need? People starving all over the planet, natural disasters, and unnatural disasters, No, IMHO, the pestilence horsey has already galloped through and will continue until the end.

Now famine, the first thing people think of is literal food, however, read Amos 8:11, where God tells us the famine in the end times is not for bread and water, but hearing the words of the Lord. Look at the condition of our churches today, are they feeding the sheep? NO, they're starving the flocks.

In His Service.....

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