Clash of Civilization
MEDIA EDUCATION
FOUNDATION T R A N S C R I PT
EDWARD SAID
THE MY TH OF ‘ THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS’
Challenging media
EDWARD SAID
The Myth of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’
Executive Producer & Director: Sut Jhally Editor: Sanjay Talreja Featuring a lecture by Edward Said Professor, Columbia University and author of Orientalism Introduced by Sut Jhally University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Media Education Foundation © MEF1998
2 PART ONE – INTRODUCTION Thank you very much. I'm going to start, in fact, talk throughout about an essay and a book written by Samuel Huntington entitled The Clash of Civilizations. When it first appeared in 1993 in the journal Foreign Affairs, it had a question mark after it and it announced in it's first sentence that world politics is entering a new phase. Three years later Huntington expanded the essay, some would say bloated it, to the size of a book without a question mark. The new book which was published last year, entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Emerging World Order. My premise is that the essay is better than the book. I mean it got worse the more he added to it. So I'll concentrate most of my attention on the essay but make some comments about the book as we go along. Now, what Huntington meant when he said that world politics was entering a new phase was that whereas in the recent past world conflicts had been between ideological camps, grouping the first, second and third worlds into warring entities, the new style of politics which he discerned would entail conflicts between different and presumably clashing civilizations. I quote him, "The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics." Later he explains how it is that the principal clash will be between Western and non Western civilization, but he spends most of his time in the two works, discussing the disagreements, potential or actual, between
FOUNDATION T R A N S C R I PT
EDWARD SAID
THE MY TH OF ‘ THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS’
Challenging media
EDWARD SAID
The Myth of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’
Executive Producer & Director: Sut Jhally Editor: Sanjay Talreja Featuring a lecture by Edward Said Professor, Columbia University and author of Orientalism Introduced by Sut Jhally University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Media Education Foundation © MEF1998
2 PART ONE – INTRODUCTION Thank you very much. I'm going to start, in fact, talk throughout about an essay and a book written by Samuel Huntington entitled The Clash of Civilizations. When it first appeared in 1993 in the journal Foreign Affairs, it had a question mark after it and it announced in it's first sentence that world politics is entering a new phase. Three years later Huntington expanded the essay, some would say bloated it, to the size of a book without a question mark. The new book which was published last year, entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Emerging World Order. My premise is that the essay is better than the book. I mean it got worse the more he added to it. So I'll concentrate most of my attention on the essay but make some comments about the book as we go along. Now, what Huntington meant when he said that world politics was entering a new phase was that whereas in the recent past world conflicts had been between ideological camps, grouping the first, second and third worlds into warring entities, the new style of politics which he discerned would entail conflicts between different and presumably clashing civilizations. I quote him, "The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics." Later he explains how it is that the principal clash will be between Western and non Western civilization, but he spends most of his time in the two works, discussing the disagreements, potential or actual, between