“This Is Not Huntington’s World”

Rousbeh Legatis interviews HARALD MÜLLER of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 1 2013 (IPS) - While a fine wine might get better with age, the same is not true for flawed political theories.

Celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, the much-debated theory of the “Clash of Civilisations” (CoC) prescribes a good-versus-evil logic to explain international relations and violent conflicts around the globe.
“It is wrong, but it serves basic needs,” says Harald Müller, executive director of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF).
In 1993, Samuel Huntington, then a professor at Harvard University, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs which later became a book. He divided the world into eight civilisations “defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people.”
Huntington predicted that in the post Cold War era, cultural differences would be the key driving factor behind war and conflict.
In an interview with U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis, Müller explains why Huntington’s theory gained so much traction despite its implausibility.
Excerpts from the interview follow.
Q: “A good way to measure the power of a theory is to look at the scale and intensity and quality of the debate it provokes. On those grounds, ‘Clash’ is one of the most powerful theoretical contributions in recent generations,” reads the introduction of the Foreign Affairs special 20^th anniversary issue to Huntington’s theory. In your opinion, what determines a good political theory? And how do you assess Huntington’s success accordingly?
A: There is obviously a difference between “powerful theory” and [academically] “good theory”. A theory is “powerful” when it hits a public nerve on an issue of great saliency at the time of publication. If it is easy to grasp and simple enough to be grasped by a great number of people, and when a good selling job is done, it can gain considerable traction.
But it is not necessarily a good theory. Social Darwinism was very powerful at the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th theory, but it was a scientifically fairly bad theory.

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