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Edward Said attacks this "clash of civilizations"
argument as an explanatory device despite its superficial intellectual
appeals.
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Samuel Huntington's article "The
Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign
Affairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention
and reaction. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with
an original thesis about "a new phase" in world politics after the end
of the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument seemed compellingly large,
bold, even visionary. |
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Said interrogates the way that Huntington's "original"
paradigm reformulates tropes of the Cold War.
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The basic paradigm of West versus
the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and
this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion
since the terrible events of September 11. |
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In "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," Slavoj
Zizek similarly identifies rhetoric explicitly recycled from Cold War diatribes.
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We already see the first bad omens,
like the sudden resurrection, in the public discourse, of the old Cold
War term "free world": The struggle is now the one between the "free world"
and the forces of darkness and terror. |
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