Clashing Civilizations: A Toynbeean Response To Huntington

Abstract

Exactly forty years before Foreign Affairs published Samuel P. Huntington’s original ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ article, in the northern summer of 1993, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee was in the middle of a stormy debate about an equally controversial work of civilizational history and geopolitical prediction, The World and the West (Toynbee 1953). Three years away from retirement from his post at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), Toynbee was then 64 years old, and stood, as Huntington did in the early 1990s, at the pinnacle of his career, feted as modern sage for his sweeping grand historical studies and his acute analyses of international politics. His books were selling in the hundreds of thousands and his opinions on a wide range of topics avidly sought by the public (see McNeill 1989).1 The appearance of The World and the West, however, marked the start of Toynbee’s fall from grace. Thereafter, his reputation began to decline, in part because the political views he expressed in that book – best thought of as left-liberal, internationalist, anti-colonial, and empathetic (though not sympathetic) towards Soviet Communism – were growing increasingly unfashionable, as Britain tried to reassert its grip on what remained of its empire and the Cold War-polarized political debate on both sides of the Atlantic (Hall 2012). In this context, Toynbee’s argument in The World and the West and other publications that the West was ‘the arch-aggressor of modern times’ was not at all well received (Toynbee 1953, 2).2 In parallel, his standing as a scholar fell too, as the historical profession grew much less tolerant of civilizational history, as well as the kind of religiosity Toynbee increasingly professed. Ironically, just as the idea of the ‘West’ became prominent in American and Western European political discourse, the concept of civilization was in the process of being set aside by academic historians as unhelpfully vague and imprecise (see Geyl 1956). By the time Huntington revived ‘civilization’ as a unit of historical and geopolitical analysis in 1993, Toynbee’s work had long been set aside as little more than a curiosity.3 It is not surprising, therefore, that his ideas did not feature in Huntington’s original Foreign Affairs article, nor that they received relatively short shrift in the book-length version of The Clash of Civilizations (Huntington 1993; Huntington 1998). But there are good reasons, I argue in what follows, to revisit Toynbee when reading Huntington’s argument. His concept of civilization, developed in A Study of History (12 volumes, 1934–61), and especially his explorations of ‘encounters’ between civilizations and the effects he thought those encounters had, are useful instruments for destabilizing some of Huntington’s key claims.