ANALYSIS: The Clash of Civilizations is Still Shaking Up the World
Protesters in Iran tearing up a US flag following America’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in May 2018 (Courtesy of Hossein Mersadi, Wikimedia Commons)
On a typical evening in 2005, families from Beijing to Xi’an to Guangzhou would huddle around their TVs. The 58-episode epic historical drama, Han Wu Da Di, was airing as Chinese state television’s latest primetime spectacle, reenacting the legendary reign of the Han Dynasty’s Martial Emperor. Revered for launching bold military expeditions against the northern steppes, paving the Silk Road, and propelling Imperial China to its zenith, the Martial Emperor is a household name—a larger-than-life figure immortalized as a symbol of the Middle Kingdom’s age of glory before its humiliating fall from grace in the past century.
Seven years later, on the opposite edge of Asian continent, the action-packed blockbuster Fetih 1453 took Turkey by storm. A controversial blend of fact, mythology, and nationalism, the film colorized and celebrated the watershed moment when Sultan Mehmed II knocked down the seemingly impenetrable walls of Constantinople, now Istanbul.
In many ways, these high-budget movies and shows are trying to hold onto a past that feels more alluring—and more satisfying—than the present. Countries like China and Turkey saw their vaunted hegemonic statures being toppled by Europeans brandishing bayonets and proselytizing modernity, but evidently, historical nostalgia still sells, whether through state-run media outlets or the box office.
People from Beijing to Ankara love being reminded of their civilization’s bygone badassery, and their politically-savvy leaders have clearly recognized this fact. Today, parties like Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) build their policy platform upon promises of civilizational rejuvenation. By peppering their political rhetoric with heavy allusions to the glamorous legacies of Han Dynasty prosperity or Ottoman conquests, the administrations in power are all trying to bend their populations towards nationalist fervor—and against encroachment from the so-called “Western imperialists.”
Throughout these states, which directly inherited the cultures and political trappings of powerful civilizations, political scientist Samuel Huntington’s polarizing thesis about a “clash of civilizations” seems very much alive and in play.
By partitioning the world rather crudely and insensitively into civilizational tectonic plates, Huntington might have gotten one thing wrong. It is possible that the battle lines across civilizations aren’t drawn all across the world, but rather around four specific countries: China and Turkey (as mentioned above), along with Russia and Iran.
For the sake of simplicity (and because inventing acronyms feels very original and amusing), let’s abbreviate them as CRIT.
The “Fantastic” Four
Seemingly an eclectic mix of states, CRIT is actually bound by a few striking similarities. First, the four countries constitute the complete set of sovereign political entities who both have never been formally colonized and inherited non-Western civilizations that have built flourishing, far-flung empires. These empires, moreover, have waxed and waned through hundreds of years and have only recently cracked under the pressure of competing—or warring—with the West.
The similarities binding CRIT together can brew potentially explosive repercussions. Notably, CRIT can hold lasting grievances towards the politically and culturally distinct, Western “other” that broke, bloodied, and belittled their days of empire and glory. The fact that CRIT empires only fell in recent history makes these pieces of historical memory even more bitter and traumatic.
What’s more, because CRIT has never been through the wringer of colonization, the DNA of their political and social institutions has not been forcibly remolded along Western lines (a notable contrasting example here is India, a “civilization state” that should also be very angry with and feel very different from the West, but has had much of these grievances and incompatibilities subdued because of the British Raj’s indelible mark upon its education system, its official languages, or even its elite civil service, known as the IAS).
Indeed, we see much of these repercussions playing out in dramatic fashion on the international stage today. Most notably, CRIT is a hotbed of non-democratic and backsliding regimes. According to the V-Dem index, this collection of states makes up nearly 45% of the global population living in autocracies (as of 2018). What’s more, among CRIT governments, three are antagonistic towards the West, and one, Turkey, is a NATO misfit who shares more beef with its allies than common grounds.
CRIT regimes are either stubbornly autocratic or have experienced the most dramatic democratic backsliding (Courtesy of Our World in Data)
This troublesome combination of states has also parked warships and troops around the most volatile flashpoints across the globe, ranging from Taiwan to the South China Sea, the Donbas to Crimea, the Aegean to Cyprus. On top of all this, CRIT is made up of a stunning mosaic of ethnicities, whose cries for more autonomy have often been brutally snuffed out, whether it is in Chechnya, Xinjiang, or eastern and northern Kurdistan.
If there was ever a more volatile and exasperating roadblock in the West’s quest for liberal hegemony, it is CRIT. Therefore, as we look at what the near future holds for the crisis-wracked world order, it is imperative that we get to the bottom of how the unofficial CRIT bloc remembers, narrates, or even weaponizes its past and its civilizations. It is imperative that we find out if Huntington’s ghost is indeed haunting us all.
CRIT Characteristic #1: The Politics of Nostalgia
LEFT: A poster with the words “Chinese Dream” in Shanghai, China; RIGHT: A plaque with the words “Chinese Dream, My Dream; Chinese Dream; A Dream of Prosperity and Power” in Tai’an, China (photos by author).
When I paid a visit to China the year before COVID locked the country down, I saw new propaganda posters hanging everywhere from lamp-posts to bus stations to bathroom doors. Many of them are dominated by three characters in glaring red fonts: “中国梦” (or “Chinese dream” in English). Ostensibly a parody of the coveted “American dream,” which epitomizes a young nation’s hopes for a better future, the “Chinese dream” very much represents an ancient civilization's obsession with the politics of nostalgia.
Chinese President Xi Jinping unfurled this slogan as the centerpiece of his political aspirations while organizing the “Road Towards Renewal” exhibition at the National Museum in 2012. Surrounded by artifacts from Imperial China, the paramount leader defined “the greatest dream of the Chinese nation” to be that of “rejuvenation.” Indeed, in his own version of the “Little Red Book,” Xi reiterated the fact that his country must prioritize “the Chinese dream of rejuvenation” because “China’s past made its mark on human history.”
The motifs of nostalgia and “rejuvenation” ring loudly across CRIT’s political landscapes. By positioning themselves in the direct line of succession from once-powerful empires, CRIT leaders get to capture the historical imagination of the masses and in turn boost their legitimacy.
In fact, Russian President Vladimir Putin has similarly made it his mission “to restore Russians’ pride in their country and reverse the humiliations of the 1990s,” according to journalist Owen Matthews. Building upon the nostalgia for the Soviet glory days, state-run media is frequently dominated by soap operas and patriotic manifestos commemorating Yuri Gagarin in space or Soviet combat prowess at Stalingrad. A church complex near Moscow paying homage to Russia’s V.E. day in 1945 features a lavish mural immortalizing Stalin and Putin.
But sometimes, the Russian ruling class’s nostalgia dates back even further. During his four-hour rant on the Ukraine crisis on Russian state TV, Putin invoked the term “Novorossiya,” which constitutes nearly a third of modern Ukraine that the Russian Empire once wrested from a protectorate of the Ottomans.
Turkish politics have similarly been dominated by a strain of nationalism-conservatism-Islamism, whose spirit lives on in the ruling AKP. Since the 1950s, many politicians have sought to brew public nostalgia by blending compulsory Quranic courses and nationalist historiography into primary education.
During a campaign rally in 2014, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan unabashedly proclaimed, “We are the grandchildren of Alparslan, Süleyman Shah, Osman I. We are the heirs to Mehmet the Conqueror, Selim II.”
Former Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, whose ethno-religious fervor has been labeled as “neo-Ottomanism,” spoke at a 2013 conference entitled "The Great Restoration: Our New Political Approach from the Ancient to the Age of Globalization.” In an almost Xi-like fashion, Davutoglu stated that “our very nation is striving for its own great restoration.”
Iran also used to preach a politics of nostalgia. Throughout the Pahlavi dynasty, the authoritarian regime ruled with the slogan “the Great Civilization,” as they attempted to recreate the economic and cultural greatness of Persia since the days of Cyrus the Great.
Today, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has rebranded “the Great Civilization” as “the Islamic Civilization,” yet when his theocratic indoctrination began to overshadow the rhetoric of civilizational revival, the embattled regime began to lose touch with the public. On Cyrus the Great day in 2016, thousands of Iranians paying homage to this legendary, pre-Islamic monarch clashed with security forces in Pasargadae. The confrontation was so bad that the Iranian government decided to ban visits to Cyrus’s tomb altogether in subsequent years.
Broiling grievances against Iran’s theocratic government shows us that the Persian civilization in popular imagination is a delicate mixture of a unique, home-grown culture and a religion with a universal reach. Leaning too heavily into any one of the elements could mean botching the politics of nostalgia.
In many ways, civilizational revivalism rejects a Western, liberal paradigm because it often reveres tradition and divinely-ordained monarchs over cultural syncretism and democracy. What’s more, by riling up the ethno-religious fervor of their people, leaders with an autocratic streak can find legitimacy in nostalgia, which in turn allows them to cast popular sovereignty aside. Perhaps even more troubling is how CRIT pinpoints and turns against the culprits who spoiled their imperial glory—the West.
CRIT Characteristic #2: Yankee Go Home!
Several American sailors were strolling along the beaches of old Istanbul in November 2014 when they were heckled by Turkish ultranationalist teens, who hurled bags and insults like “Yankee go home” and “killers” at their Western counterparts.
People in Turkey often pass around the adage “the only friend of a Turk is a Turk,” so not surprisingly, more than three quarters of Turkish respondents to Pew opinion polls profess that they harbor negative attitudes towards America (other Western states don’t fare much better, either).
In fact, Turkey’s fiery anti-Western sentiment comes from a place of deep-seated historical grievance. People from Ankara and Istanbul still remember how the West carved up an ailing Ottoman Empire like a delicious piece of meat at the Treaty of Sèvres, and how the heroic Mustafa Kemal rode the wave of angry nationalism to military stardom, snatching prized territories and national pride from the greedy mouths of the Europeans.
Erdogan’s government doesn’t hesitate to tap into this strain of profound grievance. Under the backdrop of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, the Turkish leader called out the West’s rampant Islamophobia. “You will not turn Istanbul into Constantinople,” he said in a speech teeming with battlefield imagery at the annual Gallipoli memorial. “Your grandparents came here...and they returned in caskets. Have no doubt we will send you back like your grandfathers.”
One might argue that Turkey’s national psyche has been overtaken by the Chosenness-Myths-Trauma (CMT) complex, coined by the Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung. In other words, the sense of civilizational exceptionalism and the reminiscence of bygone glory are mixed in with painful memories of humiliation, particularly at the hands of the West. This means that the best-selling political narrative across CRIT is one predicated upon an acute sense of victimhood—and one that makes promises of steely defiance against the perceived aggressors.
Indeed, the CCP in China has similarly harnessed anti-Western nationalism to great effect. In his book Never Forget National Humiliation, historian Wang Zheng gives an eye-opening overview of how a post-1989 “campaign for patriotic education” put stories about the “Century of Humiliation,” unequal treaties, and Western encroachment at the forefront of school curricula.
Then, whenever China locks horns in the West in a diplomatic skirmish (e.g. when Huawei was banned from selling to US government clients, or when The Wall Street Journal published a piece during the early pandemic that somehow insinuated that China was still the “Sick Man of Asia”), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would always make sweeping allusions to how China has “stood up” from its “Century of Humiliation, and how their country “will no longer be “a silent lamb awaiting slaughter.”
Russian politics is also besieged by the CMT complex. Putin has constantly cited an alleged “anti-Russian project” by the West in his speeches—a long genealogy of humiliations dating back three centuries. According to Putin and his supporters, the West continues to carry out an extended grand strategy of eroding Russia’s civilizational distinctiveness with its Enlightenment values and its ambitious military incursions towards Russia’s eastern borders..
It is therefore no surprise that historical grievance has pulled Beijing and Moscow into an “axis” of revisionism. In a 4000-word joint statement published shortly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine , the two states (evidently inspired by the CMT complex) called on NATO members “to respect the sovereignty, security and interests of other countries, the diversity of their civilizational, cultural and historical backgrounds.”
Iran’s politics, often animated by the fiery adage “Death to the West,” can similarly be explained by CMT. Indeed, according to Ambassador John Limbert, author of Negotiating With Iran: Wrestling with the Ghosts of History, Iranian politicians view diplomacy with the West through the tinted lens of “grandeur and glory,” a belief that “others owe deference for its cultural and political glories” of its past, mixed with an acute sense that “powerful outsiders” like America have “betrayed, humiliated, and brutalized a weak Iran and will do so again if given the opportunity.”
Traumatic memories of the West chipping away at CRIT sovereignty also give autocratic leaders a readymade scapegoat for domestic troubles. For instance, when large-scale protests shook Hong Kong in 2020, the CCP called out the US for being a shadowy puppet master pulling the strings of “traitors” and rioters. During the unrest that broke out in Russia following irregular parliamentary elections in 2011, Moscow similarly alleged that the protests were funded by Hillary Clinton’s deep pockets. In Turkey, Erdogan accused the West for “writing the script” and “standing by” the failed coup of 2016. Moreover, as unprecedented protests transcending sectarian divisions unfolded across Iran this year, Ayatollah Khamenei pointed the finger at the West (and Zionists). Speaking in front of a joint graduation of police cadets in Tehran, the Supreme Leader claimed that “these riots … were a design by the US and the occupying, fake Zionist regime and those who are paid by them.”
CRIT Characteristic #3: This Land is My Land
In 2012, China’s Ministry of Public Security made a seemingly trivial yet explosive decision. It decided to add nine faint dashes to the map of China encrusted within its newly-issued passports. Meant to showcase China’s sweeping territorial claims in the South China Sea, this decision angered neighbors like the Philippines to no end (Manila even temporarily halted stamping visas on Chinese passports in protest, offering documentation on a separate piece of paper instead).
However, even as its territorial disputes are eliciting geopolitical ire and have been unequivocally struck down by the Hague, China has not backed down one bit. Whereas other countries make their cases by citing international law (like UNCLOS), Beijing’s ambitious claims stem from the long train of history. “The activities of the Chinese people in the SCS date back over 2,000 years ago,” said ambassador Liu Xiaoming. “China is the first to have discovered, named, and explored and exploited [the SCS and its islands].”
China’s assertiveness in other parts of its periphery, like the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands—or more importantly, Taiwan—are similarly driven by its memories of imperial hegemony. These claims are extraordinarily sensitive and non-negotiable because Beijing’s maritime jurisdiction collapsed during the “Century of Humiliation.” As such, safeguarding its “territorial integrity” while brandishing warships and carriers is an indispensable component of the CCP’s project of civilizational rejuvenation.
Putin’s war in Ukraine is also in many respects predicated upon Russia’s historical memory. In an epic, 6800-word essay from last year, Putin tried to justify Ukraine out of existence by mentioning “history” 22 times. Ukrainians and Russians, according to Putin, have always been one people bonded by a “spiritual union” that can be traced back to the times of the Kievan Rus a millenia ago. Putin’s historiography draws legitimacy from the fact that the Kievan Rus, often hailed as the cradle of Russian civilization, was actually conceived in Kyiv. In this sense, Ukraine is part and parcel of Russia’s historical homeland, and the 2022 invasion is supposed to be a crucial episode in the arc of Russian revival.
Turkey, like its CRIT counterparts, is also a bombastic participant in territorial disputes. The Erdogan administration has in particular amplified Ankara’s claims in the Aegean Sea, Cyprus, and even the Middle East. The Turkish pro-government media even went as far as broadcasting crude maps of Turkey with revised borders, which strayed west into islands claimed by Greece and south into Iraqi cities like Mosul. In his communications with the Iraqi prime minister, Erdogan implied that these territories were still within the grip of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the 1918 armistice. Therefore, with some mental gymnastics, Turkey just might have a legitimate claim on prized territories beyond its de facto borders.
LEFT: Turkey’s maritime claims in the Aegean and Black Seas, referred to as the “Blue Homeland” (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons); RIGHT: China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea, referred to as the “Nine-Dash Line” (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).
Compared to China, Russia, and Turkey’s outstanding territorial disputes, Iranian irredentism rarely makes waves on the global geopolitical landscape. However, in recent weeks, Tehran has resurrected its dormant claim on Bahrain—allegedly Iran’s long-lost province of Mishmahig. According to state-sponsored media outlets, these islands were cruelly separated from Iran’s former empire when the Brits swooped in. Evidently, CRIT’s irredentist fervor, fueled by grandiose aspirations of civilizational restoration, have also made its way into the reclusive Islamic Republic.
CRIT Characteristic #4: Sinicization, Russification, Turkification, Persianization
Another striking parallel across CRIT is the fact that each country, owing to their rich imperial legacies, features very colorful ethnic landscapes. Modern China boasts 56 ethnicities, and 8% of its population (a whopping 150 million people) are considered minorities. Russia tops China’s diversity with 190 ethnic groups, while 20% of the population count as minorities. Iran offers perhaps the most surprising statistic, as nearly half the country is not Persian, turning the country into a mosaic of Turks, Kurds, Baluchis, Azeris, etc. Turkey’s ethnic landscape is similarly variegated and includes Kurds, Zazas, Circassians, Azerbaijanis, Greeks, and many more minorities, who together make up more than 20% of the population.
However, despite trumpeting their diversity and paying lip service to minority rights, CRIT governments often place a premium on homogeneity and order, primarily because they fear that a multicultural cacophony may be a slippery slope towards separatism and political destabilization. This obsession with socio-political uniformity in turn grows into some of the most troubling cases of forced integration in modern history. One might argue that assimilating (or subjugating) minorities and autocratic governance constitute a vicious cycle, whereby the need to quell minorities’ aspirations for more autonomy erodes democratic norms, and the lack of democratic norms create more room for autocrats to put down ethnic unrest.
China’s treatment of Uyghurs and Tibetans, for example, has shocked journalists, activists, and even bystanders worldwide. Millions of Uyghurs have been locked in so-called “re-education camps,” forced to shed their Muslim identities, receive Chinese language instruction, and endure abuse behind closed doors. What’s more, the CCP has sent waves of ethnic Han settlers to its western frontiers since the 1950s to dilute the concentration of minority population (in 1943, Xinjiang was only 6% Han Chinese, but by that number has since grown to more than 40%).
Russia’s management of ethnic minorities is equally tainted by controversy and human rights violations. For example, the government responded to Chechen uprisings from 1999 to 2010 with fire and fury, leveling the capital of Grozny in 2000 and creating catastrophic loss of human life nearing 60,000. In 2020, moreover, the State Duma notably passed an amendment to Article 68 of its Basic Law, recognizing Russian as the “language of the state-forming people.” Reading the undertones of this adjustment, minorities have become troubled and have demanded whether the Putin regime is chipping away at their formal legal protections as legitimate, distinct ethnic groups.
In both Iran and Turkey, the imposition of homogenous national identities is a decades-long tradition. The Pahlavi Dynasty in Tehran, for instance, sought to ban the use of non-Persian languages, while its Islamist successors have blocked Sunni mosques from breaking ground and stifled public displays of non-Shiite identities.
Similarly, the Kemalist regime in Turkey, hell-bent upon forcing a former multicultural empire into the mold of a culturally uniform nation-state, proclaimed that it was a priority to ensure “the domination of Turkish ethnic identity in every aspect of social life.” The Turkish language, as a result, must flourish everywhere from the streets, to the schools, to the offices of government bureaucrats. The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Greeks constitutes a bloody and chaotic manifestation of Ataturk’s relentless drive towards homogeneity.
Today, Ataturk’s more religiously-inclined successors celebrate this chapter in Turkish history. As a case in point, Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül remarked that “one of the great achievements of Atatürk ... is the population exchange between Greece and Turkey.” He followed this with an inflammatory rhetorical question, hinting at his administration's stubborn refusal to own up to the sins of the past: “Could Turkey be the same national country had the Greek community still lived in the Aegean or Armenians lived in many parts of Turkey?”
While surveying the catastrophic consequences of forced integration throughout CRIT, one might argue that ground zero for the clash of civilizations isn’t between the West and a few revisionists, but within the boundaries of these four countries themselves. As such, CRIT’s borders do not precisely overlap with civilizational fault lines. Rather, they traverse these volatile socio-political tectonics, and the question of how to govern vast arrays of identities has very likely defined the absolutism, revisionism, and paranoia of these states.
Reaching for the End of History
Evidently, grandiose promises of civilizational revival—built upon anti-Western historical grievances—have allowed CRIT governments to subdue dissent, rile up fierce nationalism, and cast aside the liberal norms prescribed by the West. By preaching bygone civilizational glory, leaders like Xi, Putin, and Erdogan have enjoyed astounding popularity at home (even accounting for biased opinion polls), and CRIT regimes at one point looked invincible.
But today, they may be unraveling. Draconian lockdowns that seem to go on forever have incited protests all across China on a scale unseen since 1989. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled the country since Putin launched his disastrous war. The demonstrations in Iran have in many ways ballooned into what resembles a full-on revolution, while Turkey’s AKP has been losing political ground since the 2019 local elections.
As we live through what might be a watershed moment in history, we could be tempted to push back against Huntington’s grim prophecy—because in many ways, an underlying yet powerful strain of admiration and fascination with the West, flowing from Istanbul to St. Petersburg, and from Isfahan to Shanghai, can sometimes overpower civilizational allegiances.
Indeed, even as the popularity of CRIT regimes waver, worldly Chinese students continue to vie for the opportunity to come to America, and the country’s vibrant consumer culture still revolves around Western brands. Across Russia and Iran, despite all the digital barbed wires erected by the governments, people are trying to smuggle in Hollywood’s latest blockbusters into countless households. Moreover, regardless of which political party comes to power in Ankara, its age-old dream of becoming a full-fledged EU member will probably stay alive.
A Chinese propaganda poster calling for viewers to “inherit virtuous traditions,” set against the backdrop of an Apple store-front in Shanghai, China (photo by author).
So despite the powerful hold that historical memories have over popular imagination, people across CRIT are not clamoring for civilizational clashes followed by geopolitical earthquakes. Rather, many people look for that sweet spot between yesterday and tomorrow, between the foreign and the indigenous, or between watching Mehmet II’s conquests in Fetih 1453 and watching Captain America kick some ass. Helping CRIT countries reconcile these clashing identities might be one of the West’s most pressing—and overlooked—challenges in the coming years.
