Today’s Victorian fact of the day is this:
In 1924, long before Samuel Huntington coined his catch-phrase the “clash of civilizations,” Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol gave a lecture at the Harris Foundation in which he said that the discord and conflicts which divide east and west “arise out of a clash of different , and in many respects antagonistic, civilisations.”
Look for more information on Valentine Chirol here over the next week or two as I read his latest biography Diplomat Without Portfolio (previously mentioned here) as well as slowly update his Wikipedia entry accordingly.
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COMMENTS / 9 COMMENTS
Lexington Green added these pithy words on 27 Jul 06 at 8:47 pmTo bad you can’t post the full text of the lecture.
Or can you?
Chirol added these pithy words on 27 Jul 06 at 8:50 pmWish I could! But I don’t have the full text nor have I been able to find it. Much of his work languishes in undeserved obscurity!
IJ added these pithy words on 27 Jul 06 at 8:57 pmA couple of points:
Huntington’s clash of civilisations warned us in 1996 that “Islamic culture explains in large part the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Islamic world.”
And earlier in H’s book, “The most important groupings of states are no longer the three blocs of the Cold War [free world, communist bloc, unaligned nations] but rather the world’s seven or eight major civilizations.” The book lists nine: Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist, Japanese.
Mi-Hwa added these pithy words on 28 Jul 06 at 3:26 amDifferent civilizations do not necessarily have to clash. Instead, they can choose to complement one another. Each of the major civilizations have some good attributes and have contributed to the world.
Dan Nexon added these pithy words on 28 Jul 06 at 3:27 pmThe rise and decline of civilizations was on everyone’s lips by 1924. Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West in 1918. Ideas about civilizations, their rivalries, and so forth were an important part of European—and particularly German—social and political thought from the nineteenth century onwards. I’m pretty sure Patrick Jackson talks about this in Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West.
Elizabeth added these pithy words on 28 Jul 06 at 5:06 pmI wonder if we might say that Huntington didn’t, then, actually coin the phrase, but probably subconsciously adopted it from Chirol?
Dan Nexon added these pithy words on 28 Jul 06 at 5:14 pmHuntington didn’t actually claim to coin the phrase: I believe it comes from Bernard Lewis. Chirol’s research here, therefore, is particularly interesting.
Chirol added these pithy words on 28 Jul 06 at 8:06 pmLex: It seems this book may have it
Dan Nexon: Perhaps “popularize” is a better word.
IJ added these pithy words on 29 Jul 06 at 10:18 amAnother perspective. Resource wars are a bigger danger nowadays than ‘clashes of civilization’.
“In this tour d’horizon for prospective wars in the next few decades, Klare identifies the factors and the actors in several contested areas of Africa and Asia. Distancing himself from ruminators like Samuel Huntington, whose Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) maintained that cultural differences, such as between Muslim and Christian, will drive post-cold war international politics, Klare contends that power struggles over petroleum, water, gems, and timber will be the engines. Indeed, where oil and water are concentrated in Asia and Africa—the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea, and the South China Sea in the former; the Nile, Jordan, Tigris-Euphrates, and Indus River regions in the latter—Klare notes marked increases in military activity.”
