Civilizações

Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations Revisited - NYTimes.com:

Samuel Huntington [in] “The Clash of Civilizations?”[wrote that]human beings [...] are divided along cultural lines — Western, Islamic, Hindu and so on. There is no universal civilization. Instead, there are these cultural blocks, each within its own distinct set of values. The Islamic civilization, he wrote, is the most troublesome. People in the Arab world do not share the general suppositions of the Western world. Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to their nation-state. Their culture is inhospitable to certain liberal ideals, like pluralism, individualism and democracy. 

Huntington correctly foresaw that the Arab strongman regimes were fragile and were threatened by the masses of unemployed young men. He thought these regimes could fall, but he did not believe that the nations would modernize in a Western direction. Amid the tumult of regime change, the rebels would selectively borrow tools from the West, but their borrowing would be refracted through their own beliefs. They would follow their own trajectory and not become more Western.The Muslim world has bloody borders, he continued. There are wars and tensions where the Muslim world comes into conflict with other civilizations. Even if decrepit regimes fell, he suggested, there would still be a fundamental clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. The Western nations would do well to keep their distance from Muslim affairs. The more the two civilizations intermingle, the worse the tensions will be. 

Huntington’s thesis set off a furious debate. But with the historic changes sweeping through the Arab world, it’s illuminating to go back and read his argument today. In retrospect, I’d say that Huntington committed the Fundamental Attribution Error. That is, he ascribed to traits qualities that are actually determined by context.

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Nunca gostei da tese de Huntington, mais que não fosse, porque atribuo grande importância ao contexto (mas não conhecia o Erro Fundamental da Imputação), e o contexto no caso dos países árabes passa por coisas, como, por exemplo, a (não) resolução do problema palestiniano - livro a ler é o de Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation (foi publicado já em Portugal, e ver também aqui).



Ora, esse contexto não desapareceu. Pelo que, por isso, mas não só por isso, no entretanto, face ao que se está a passar no próximo-oriente (e não me estou a referir à Líbia), é cedo para dizer para onde a procissão se irá dirigir, depois de sair do adro - a democracia é um regime político exigente quanto às pré-condições que devem ser satisfeitas para ter hipóteses de sucesso. Uma coisa eu sei: quer os fundamentalistas (islamitas e cristãos "Bible Belt") quer Israel têm um medo pavoroso da possibilidade de democracias árabes fortes se virem a instalar na zona (ver aqui).