Islamic Culture and Democracy: Testing the 'Clash of Civilizations' Thesis

In seeking to understand the root causes of the events of 9/11 many accounts have turned to Samuel P. Huntington’s provocative and controversial thesis of a ‘clash of civilizations’, arousing strong debate. Evidence from the 1995-2001 waves of the World Values Survey/European Values Survey (WVS/EVS) allows us, for the Ž rst time, to examine an extensive body of empirical evidence relating to this debate. Comparative analysis of the beliefs and values of Islamic and nonIslamic publics in 75 societies around the globe, conŽ rms the Ž rst claim in Huntington’s thesis: culture does matter, and indeed matters a lot, so that religious legacies leave a distinct imprint on contemporary values. But Huntington is mistaken in assuming that the core clash between the West and Islamic worlds concerns democracy. The evidence suggests striking similarities in the political values held in these societies. It is true that Islamic publics differ from Western publics concerning the role of religious leadership in society, but this is not a simple dichotomous clash — many non-Islamic societies side with the Islamic ones on this issue. Moreover the Huntington thesis fails to identify the most basic cultural fault line between the West and Islam, which concerns the issues of gender equality and * John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge. ** Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Comparative Sociology, Volume 1, issue 3-4 Also available online Ó 2002 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden See: www.brill.nl 236 2 Norris & Inglehart sexual liberalization. The cultural gulf separating Islam from the West involves Eros far more than Demos. In seeking to understand the causes of the events of 9/11 many popular commentators have turned to Samuel P. Huntington’s provocative and controversial thesis of a ‘clash of civilizations.’ This account emphasized that the end of the Cold War brought new dangers. “In the new world,” Huntington argued (1996:28), “. . . the most pervasive, important and dangerous conicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically deŽned groups, but between people belonging to different cultural entities. Tribal wars and ethnic conicts will occur within civilizations: : : And the most dangerous cultural conicts are those along the fault lines between civilizations. . . For forty-Žve years the Iron Curtain was the central dividing line in Europe. That line has moved several hundred miles east. It is now the line separating peoples of Western Christianity, on the one hand, from Muslim and Orthodox peoples on the other.” For Huntington, Marxist class warfare, and even the disparities between rich and poor nations, have been overshadowed in the twenty-Ž rst century by Weberian culture. This in uential account appeared to offer insights into the causes of violent ethno-religious con icts exempliŽ ed by Bosnia, the Caucuses, the Middle East, and Kashmir. It seemed to explain the failure of political reform to take root in many Islamic states, despite the worldwide resurgence of electoral democracies around the globe. The framework seemed to provide a powerful lens that the American media used to interpret the underlying reasons for the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Commentators often saw 9/11 as a full-scale assault on the global hegemony of America, in particular, and a reaction by Islamic fundamentalists against Western culture, in general. Nevertheless, the Huntington thesis has been highly controversial. The claim of rising ethnic con ict in the post-Cold War era has come under repeated and sustained attack (Gurr 2000; Russett, O’Neal and Cox 2000; Fox 2001; Chirot 2001; Henderson and Tucker 2001; Fox 2001). Many scholars have challenging the existence of a single Islamic culture stretching all the way from Jakarta to Lagos, let alone one that held values deeply incompatible with democracy (Kabuli 1994; Esposito and Voll 1996; Shadid 2001). What has been less widely examined, however, is systematic empirical evidence of whether the publics in Western and Islamic societies share similar or deeply divergent values, and, in particular, whether any important differences between these cultures rest on democratic values (as Huntington claims) or on social values (as modernization theories suggest). This study seeks to throw new light on this issue by examining cultural values in seventy-Ž ve nations around the globe, including nine predominately Islamic societies, utilizing the World Values Survey/European Islamic Culture and Democracy 2 237 Values Survey (WVS/EVS) 1995-2001. Part I brie y outlines the Huntington thesis and the response by critics. Part II lays out the study’s research design including the core hypothesis, comparative framework, and survey data. Part III analyzes the evidence. The conclusion summarizes the results and re ects on their implications. The evidence conŽ rms the Ž rst claim in Huntington’s thesis: culture does matter, and matter a lot: religious legacies leave a distinct and lasting imprint on contemporary values. But Huntington is mistaken in assuming that the core ‘clash’ between the West and Islamic societies concerns political values: instead the evidence indicates that surprisingly similar attitudes towards democracy are found in the West and the Islamic world. We do Ž nd signiŽ cant cross-cultural differences concerning the role of religious leaders in politics and society, but these attitudes divide the West from many other countries around the globe, not just Islamic ones. The original thesis erroneously assumed that the primary cultural fault line between the West and Islam concerns government, overlooking a stronger cultural divide based on issues of gender equality and sexual liberalization. Cohort analysis suggests that as younger generations in the West have gradually become more liberal on these issues, this has generated a growing cultural gap, with Islamic nations remaining the most traditional societies in the world. The central values separating Islam and the West revolve far more centrally around Eros than Demos. Part I: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ Debate The ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis advances three central claims. First, Huntington suggests that ‘culture matters’; in particular that contemporary values in different societies are path-dependent, re ecting long-standing legacies associated with core ‘civilizations.’ The concept of ‘civilization’ is understood by Huntington as a ‘culture writ large’: “It is deŽned both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identiŽcation of people.” (Huntington 1996:41-43). Of these factors, Huntington sees religion as the central deŽ ning element (p. 47), although he also distinguishes regional sub-divisions within the major world religions, such as the distinct role of Catholicism in Western Europe and Latin America, due to their different historical traditions and political legacies. Second, the ‘clash’ thesis claims that there are sharp cultural differences between the core political values common in societies sharing a Western Christian heritage — particularly those concerning representative democracy — and the beliefs common in the rest of the world, especially Islamic societies. For Huntington, the deŽ ning features of Western civilization include the separation of religious and secular authority, the rule of law and social pluralism, the parliamentary institutions of representative government, and the protection of individual rights and civil liberties as the 238 2 Norris & Inglehart buffer between citizens and the power of the state: “Individually almost none of these factors was unique to the West. The combination of them was, however, and this is what gave the West its distinctive quality.” (1996:70-71) Other accounts have commonly stressed that the complex phenomenon of ‘modernization’ encompasses many additional social values that challenge traditional beliefs, notably faith in scientiŽ c and technological progress, belief in the role of economic competition in the marketplace, and the diffusion of modern social mores, exempliŽ ed by sexual liberalization and equality for women (Inglehart 1997; Inglehart and Baker 2000; Inglehart and Norris 2003). But Huntington’s claim is that the strongest distinguishing characteristic of Western culture, the aspect which demarcates Western Christianity most clearly from the Muslim and Orthodox worlds, concerns the values associated with representative democracy. This claim is given plausibility by the failure of electoral democracy to take root in most states in the Middle East and North Africa (see Midlarsky 1998). According to the annual assessment made by the Freedom House (2002), of the 192 countries around the world, two-thirds (121) are electoral democracies. Of the 47 countries with an Islamic majority, one quarter (11) are electoral democracies. Furthermore, none of the core Arabic-speaking societies in the Middle East and North Africa falls into this category. Given this pattern, in the absence of survey evidence concerning the actual beliefs of Islamic publics, it is commonly assumed that they have little faith in the principles or performance of democracy, preferring strong leadership and rule by traditional religious authorities to the democratic values of pluralistic competition, political participation, and political rights and civil liberties. Lastly, Huntington argues that important and long-standing differences in political values based on predominant religious cultures will lead to con ict between and within nation-states, with the most central problems of global politics arising from an ethno-religious ‘clash.’ 1 It remains unclear whether Huntington is claiming that the core cleavage concerns Western democratic values versus the developing world, or whether the main contrast lies as a fault line between the West and Islam, but the latter has been the primary popular interpretation of the thesis, and the one which has aroused the most heated debate. Middle Eastern area studies specialists, scholars of the Koran, and students of Islamic law have contested a series of issues about the ‘clash’ thesis. Critics have challenged the notion of a single Islamic 1 International relations scholars have strongly challenged the evidence for Huntington’s claim that ethnic inter-state con ict has increased during the 1990s (Gurr 2000; Russett, Oneal and Cox 2000; Fox 2001; Chirot 2001; Henderson and Tucker 2001), although this body of work is not central to the argument presented here. Islamic Culture and Democracy 2 239 culture, pointing to substantial contrasts found among one billion people living in diverse Islamic nations, such as Pakistan, Jordan, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Turkey, and the differences between Muslims who are radical or moderate, traditional or modern, conservative or liberal, hard-line or revisionist (Hunter 1998; Esposito 1997; Fuller 2002). Observers stress the manifold differences within the Islamic world due to historical traditions and colonial legacies, ethnic cleavages, levels of economic development, and the role and power of religious fundamentalists in different states, claiming that it makes little sense to lump together people living in Jakarta, Riyadh, and Istanbul. Along similar lines, the idea that we can recognize a single culture of ‘Western Christianity’ is to over-simplify major cross-national differences, even among af uent postindustrial societies as superŽ cially similar as the United States, Italy, and Sweden, for example the contrasts between Catholic Mediterranean Europe and Protestant Scandinavia, as well as among social sectors and religious denominations within each country. Moreover, setting this issue aside for the moment, even if we accept the existence of a shared ‘Islamic’ culture, scholars have also argued that the core values and teaching of the Koran are not incompatible with those of democracy (Kabuli 1994; Esposito and Voll 1996; Shadid 2001). Edward Said (2001) decried Huntington’s thesis as an attempt to revive the ‘black-white,’ ‘us-them,’ or ‘good-evil’ world dichotomy that had been so prevalent during the height of the Cold War, substituting threats from ‘Islamic terrorists’ for those from ‘Communist spies.’ Western leaders, seeking to build a global coalition against the followers of Osama Bin Laden, took pains to distance themselves from the clash of civilizations thesis, stressing deep divisions within the Islamic world between the extreme fundamentalists and moderate Muslims. Leaders emphasized that the events of September 11th arose from the extreme ideological beliefs held by particular splinter groups of Al-Qaeda and Taliban fundamentalists, not from mainstream Muslim public opinion. Just as it would be a mistake to understand the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City as a collective attack on the federal government by all Christian fundamentalists, rather than the work of a few individuals, it may inappropriate to view the attack by AlQaeda terrorists on symbols of American capitalism and Ž nancial power as a new ‘clash of civilizations’ between Islamic and Western cultures. As well as challenging the basic premises of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, alternative explanations of radical Islamic fundamentalism suggest that the underlying root causes lie in deep disparities between rich and poor within societies, buttressed by the pervasive inequalities in political power in Middle Eastern regimes (Chirot 2001). Structural or neo-Marxist theories suggest that the best predictors of radical disaffection lie in uneven patterns 240 2 Norris & Inglehart of modernization around the world and the existence of pervasive inequalities within many Muslim societies. The most important cleavage may be between middle class, more af uent, educated and professional social sectors on the one hand, — the teachers, doctors, and lawyers in Cairo, Beirut and Islamabad — and the sub-strata of poorer, uneducated, and unemployed younger men living in Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Syria who, if disaffected, may become willing recruits to Islamic fundamentalist causes. Huntington distinguishes certain demographic characteristics of Islamic societies, notably the phenomena of the ‘youth bulge,’ but does not pursue the consequences of this generational pattern, in particular whether younger men from poorer sectors of society are particularly prone to political disaffection. Yet there are plausible alternative theories about the major cultural contrasts we could expect to Ž nd between Islam and the West. In work presented elsewhere (Inglehart and Norris 2003) we document how the modernization process has transformed values by generating a rising tide of support for equality between women and men in post-industrial societies, and greater approval in these societies of a more permissive and liberal sexuality, including tolerance of divorce, abortion and homosexuality. The version of modernization theory developed by Inglehart (1997) hypothesizes that human development generates changed cultural attitudes in virtually any society, although values also re ect the imprint of each society’s religious legacies and historical experiences. Modernization brings systematic, predictable changes in gender roles. The impact of modernization operates in two key phases: i) Industrialization brings women into the paid work force and dramatically reduces fertility rates. Women attain literacy and educational opportunities. Women are enfranchised and begin to participate in representative government, but still have far less power than men. ii) The postindustrial phase brings a shift toward greater gender equality as women move into higher status economic roles in management and the professions, and gain political in uence within elected and appointed bodies. Over half of the world has not yet entered this phase; only the more advanced industrial societies are currently moving on this trajectory. These two phases correspond to two major dimensions of cross-cultural variation: (i) A transition from traditional to secular-rational values; and (ii) a transition from survival to self-expression values. The decline of the traditional family is linked with the Ž rst dimension. The rise of gender equality is linked with the second. Cultural shifts in modern societies are not sufŽ cient by themselves to guarantee women equality across all major dimensions of life; nevertheless through underpinning structural Islamic Culture and Democracy 2 241 reforms and women’s rights they greatly facilitate this process (Inglehart and Norris 2003). If this theory is applied to cultural contrasts between modern and traditional societies, it suggests that we would expect one of the key differences between the Western and Islamic worlds to focus around the issues of gender equality and sexual liberalization, rather than the democratic values that are central to Huntington’s theory. Part II: Hypotheses, Comparative Framework, and Data To summarize, many issues arising from the ‘clash’ thesis could be considered, but here we focus upon testing two alternative propositions arising from the theoretical debate. Huntington emphasizes that the political values of democracy originated in the West with the separation of church and state, the growth of representative parliamentary institutions, and the expansion of the franchise. As such, he predicts that, despite the more recent emergence and consolidation of ‘Third Wave’ democracies in many parts of the world, democratic values will be most deeply and widely entrenched in Western societies. If true, we would expect to Ž nd the strongest cultural clash in political values would be between the Western and Islamic worlds. In contrast, Inglehart’s modernization theory suggests that a rising tide of support for women’s equality and sexual liberalization has left a particularly marked imprint upon richer postindustrial nations, although traditional attitudes continue to prevail in poorer developing societies. Accordingly, given this interpretation, we also test the alternative proposition that any deep-seated cultural divisions between Islam and the West will revolve far more strongly around social rather than political values, especially concerning the issues of sexual liberalization and gender equality. The issues of cultural con ict and value change have generated considerable controversy but, as yet, almost no systematic survey data has been available to compare public opinion towards politics and society in many Middle Eastern and Western societies. Interpretations by area scholars and anthropologists have relied upon more qualitative sources, including personal interviews, observations and direct experience, and traditional textual exegesis of the literature, religious scriptures, and historical documents (see, for example, Lewis 2002). Recently commercial companies have started to conduct opinion polls that are representative of the public in a limited range of Muslim nations; 2 Gallup’s survey examined 2 The main exceptions are the Ž rst-ever Gallup survey in nine predominately Islamic societies which was carried out to monitor reactions to the events of 9/11. Gallup surveyed 10,000 people in December 2001 and January 2002, with researchers conducting hour-long, in-person interviews in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan and Morocco. For details see 242 2 Norris & Inglehart attitudes towards other countries in nine Middle Eastern societies and the United States (Moore 2002), while Roper Reports Worldwide compared social values in the United States and Saudi Arabia (Miller and Feinberg 2002). The latest waves of the World Values Survey/European Values Survey (WVS/EVS), a global investigation of socio-cultural and political change, allow comparison of democratic values across a wide range of Western and Muslim nations, as well as in many other states. * The study has carried out representative national surveys of the basic values and beliefs of publics in more than 70 nations on all six inhabited continents, containing over 80% of the world’s population. It builds on the European Values Surveys, Ž rst carried out in 22 countries in 1981. A second wave of surveys, in 43 nations, was completed in 1990-1991, a third wave was carried out in 50 nations in 1995-1996, and a fourth wave with more than 60 nations took place in 1999-2001. 3 This total sample includes almost a quartermillion respondents, facilitating analysis of minority sub-groups, such as the Muslim populations living in Russia, India, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. This study focuses on analyzing attitudes and values in the last two waves of the survey, from 1995-2001. To test the evidence for the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, this study compares values at societal-level, based on the assumption that predominant cultures exert a broad and diffuse in uence upon all people living under them 4. http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr020305.asp. In addition Roper Reports Worldwide conducted an annual worldwide survey from October 2001-January 2002 in 30 nations, including an urban sample of 1000 residents in the metropolitan areas in Saudi Arabia. For details of the Roper results see Miller and Feinberg (2002). * The following analysis draws upon a unique data base, the World Values Survey/European Values Survey (WVS/EVS). We owe a large debt of gratitude to the WVS and EVS participants for creating and sharing this invaluable dataset. Their names are listed in the WVS and EVS websites. For more information about the World Values Survey, see the WVS web sites http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/ and http://www.worldvaluessurvey.com. Most of the European surveys used here were gathered by the European Values Survey group (EVS). For detailed EVS Ž ndings, see Loek Halman, The European Values Study: A Sourcebook Based on the 1999/2000 European Values Study Surveys. Tilburg: EVS, Tilburg University Press, 2001. For more information, see the EVS website, http://evs.kub.nl. 3 Full methodological details about the World Values Survey/European Values Survey (WVS/EVS), including the questionnaires, sampling procedures, Ž eldwork procedures, principle investigators, and organization can be found at: http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/wvs-samp.html. The four waves of this survey took place from 1981 to 2001, although it should be noted that all countries were not included in each wave. 4 In addition a distinct ‘Jewish’ culture could be identiŽ ed, but Israel was not included within the current release of the WVS. Islamic Culture and Democracy 2 243 Classifying cultural regions In Huntington’s account nine major contemporary civilizations can be identiŽ ed, based largely on the predominant religious legacy in each society: 2 Western Christianity (a European culture that subsequently spread to North America, Australia and New Zealand), 2 Islamic (including the Middle East, Northern Africa, and parts of South East Asia), 2 Orthodox (Russian and Greek), 2 Latin American (predominately Catholic yet with a distinct corporatist, authoritarian culture), 2 Sinic/Confucian (China, South Korean, Vietnam and Korea), 2 Japanese, 2 Hindu, 2 Buddhist (Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia), and (possibly) 2 Sub-Saharan Africa. 5 Huntington treats states or societies as the core actors exemplifying these civilizations, although recognizing that populations with particular cultural and religious identities spread well beyond the border of the nation-state. Moreover some plural societies are deeply divided, so there is rarely a clean one-to-one mapping, apart from exceptional cases such as Japan and India. To analyze the survey evidence for these propositions, societies were classiŽ ed into these categories, (see Table 1) based on the predominant (plurality) religious identities within each nation. The survey includes nine societies with a Muslim majority (ranging from 71 to 96 percent), including Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh and Albania, Morocco, Iran and Egypt. This allows us to compare a range of states within the Islamic world, including semi-democracies with elections and some freedoms, exempliŽ ed by Albania, Turkey and Bangladesh, as well as constitutional monarchies (Jordan), and suspended semi-democracies under military rule (Pakistan). Geographically these nations are located in Central Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. In addition, the comparative framework includes 22 nations based on ‘Western Christianity’ (using Huntington’s deŽ nition to include both predominately Catholic and 5 Although it should be noted that despite the centrality of the concept, the deŽ nition, labeling and classiŽ cation of ‘civilizations’ remains inconsistent in Huntington’s work, for example it remains unclear whether Huntington believes that there is or is not a distinct African civilization, and the major discussion of types (pp. 45-47) excludes the Orthodox category altogether. 244 2 Norris & Inglehart