Prejudice and War

This essay compares the arguments made by Samuel P. Huntington and Paul Berman regarding the role of cultural and religious differences in future wars. It analyzes their relevance in the current scenario.

Running head: PREJUDICE AND WAR
PREJUDICE AND WAR
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In his article published in 1993, entitled ‘‘Clash of Civilizations’’, Samuel P.
Huntington argues that future wars would rather be fought over cultural and religious
differences and to attain cultural supremacy, rather than over political or economic disputes
(Huntington, 1993). His hypothesis was that future wars would be between cultures and
religions instead of between countries. However, after the 9/11 attacks on U.S soil, a ton of
academic arguments have charged the statements made by Huntington. One of them is titled
‘‘Terror and Liberism’’ by Paul Berman. In this 2003 book, Berman argues that conflicts
rather arise out of philosophical beliefs that persist differently across various groups. This
essay would be aiming at comparing the two arguments made by the two authors, and analyse
their relevance in the current scenario.
According to Huntington, the wars that will follow the cold war will be solely based
on cultural and religious differences, and not on political and ideological ones. He predicts
that America will remain the centre of power in terms of cultural dominance, while the rest of
the world could either try to match up, resort to isolation to protect their own values, or
simply attempt at making a balance with the west through modernization. This is termed as
‘west versus the rest’. He further reckons six reasons as to why civilizations would clash, all
of which are based on the assumption that cultural identity would be an integral part across
various cultures, more than ever before (Huntington, 1993).
Countering Huntington’s arguments post the 9/11 attacks however, Berman in his
book ‘‘Terror and Liberism’’ argues that cultures such as the Islamic culture and the western
culture, as identified by Huntington, do not exist distinctively. He states that this is in no way
indicative of a cultural warfare taking place in the future. To support his statements, he points
out that numerous extremists of Islam have been in the west for a fair duration of time. To

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further diminish Huntington’s claims, Berman refers to the growing relations between Saudi
Arabia and the United States (Berman, 2004).
It is clear from the arguments of Berman that cultural differences indeed do not exist
distinctively enough as of now to rage a war. Huntington’s predictions are far from
coinciding with the modern day scenarios. America’s war on terror post 9/11 is a perfect
example of how one nation has unleashed war on countries suspected with facilitating
terrorism, in an attempt to erase terrorism (Hayden, Lansford & Watson, 2017). It is a
scenario that has nothing to do with cultural or religious differences, and has more to do with
ideological, economic and political disputes, although terrorism can often not be linked to
political issues. Hence, it goes without saying that it rather aligns well with Berman’s
statements, than Huntington’s.
To conclude, although Huntington’s predictions in ‘‘Clash of Civilizations’’ may pose
a threat to humanity and global relations, they do not seem to be likely in the modern world
as of now. Cultural differences do exist (Vignoles et al., 2016) but the race and fight for
cultural identity and cultural supremacy, would take cultural differences to exist more
distinctively across the world, than they do.

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References
Berman, P. (2004). Terror and liberalism. WW Norton & Company.
Hayden, P., Lansford, T., & Watson, R. P. (2017). America's war on terror. Routledge.
Huntington, S. P. (1993). The clash of civilizations?. Foreign affairs, 22-49.
Vignoles, V. L., Owe, E., Becker, M., Smith, P. B., Easterbrook, M. J., Brown, R. & Lay, S.
(2016). Beyond the ‘east–west’dichotomy: Global variation in cultural models of
selfhood. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(8), 966.

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