Islamic Culture and Democracy: Testing the 'Clash of ...

1 Islamic Culture and Democracy: Testing the clash of Civilizations ThesisPIPPANORRIS*ANDRONALDINGLEHART**AB STRACTIn seeking to understand the root causes of the events of9/ 11 many accounts have turned to Samuel P. Huntington sprovocative and controversial thesis of a clash of civiliza-tions , arousing strong debate. Evidence from the 1995-2001waves of the World Values Survey/European Values Survey(WVS/EVS) allows us, for the rst time, to examine an exten-sive body of empirical evidence relating to this debate. Com-parative analysis of the beliefs and values of Islamic and non- Islamic publics in 75 societies around the globe, con rms the rst claim in Huntington s thesis: culturedoesmatter, and in-deed matters a lot, so that religious legacies leave a distinctimprint on contemporary values.

2 But Huntington is mistakenin assuming that the core clash between the West and Islamicworlds concerns democracy . The evidence suggests striking sim-ilarities in the political values held in these societies. It is truethat Islamic publics differ from Western publics concerning therole of religious leadership in society, but this is not a simpledichotomous clash many non- Islamic societies side with theIslamic ones on this issue. Moreover the Huntington thesis failsto identify the most basic cultural fault line between the Westand 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 Sociology, Volume 1, issue 3-4 Also available online 2002 Koninklijke Brill NV, LeidenSee: Norris & Inglehartsexual liberalization.

3 The cultural gulf separating Islam fromthe West involves Eros far more than seeking to understand the causes of the events of 9/ 11 many popularcommentators have turned to Samuel P. Huntington s provocative andcontroversial thesis of a clash of civilizations. This account emphasizedthat the end of the Cold War brought new dangers. In the new world, Huntington argued (1996:28), ..the most pervasive, important and dangerouscon icts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically de nedgroups, but between people belonging to different cultural entities. Tribal wars and ethniccon icts will occur within civilizations:::And the most dangerous cultural con icts arethose along the fault lines between civilizations.

4 For forty- ve years the Iron Curtainwas the central dividing line in Europe. That line has moved several hundred mileseast. 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 classwarfare, and even the disparities between rich and poor nations, havebeen overshadowed in the twenty- rst century by Weberian Culture . Thisin uential account appeared to offer insights into the causes of violentethno-religious con icts exempli ed by Bosnia, the Caucuses, the MiddleEast, and Kashmir. It seemed to explain the failure of political reformto take root in many Islamic states, despite the worldwide resurgence ofelectoral democracies around the globe.

5 The framework seemed to providea powerful lens that the American media used to interpret the underlyingreasons for the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Commentatorsoften saw 9/ 11 as a full-scale assault on the global hegemony of America,in particular, and a reaction by Islamic fundamentalists against Westernculture, in general. Nevertheless, the Huntington thesis has been highlycontroversial. The claim of rising ethnic con ict in the post-Cold War erahas come under repeated and sustained attack (Gurr 2000; Russett, O Nealand Cox 2000; Fox 2001; Chirot 2001; Henderson and Tucker 2001; Fox2001). Many scholars have challenging the existence of a single Islamicculture stretching all the way from Jakarta to Lagos, let alone one thatheld values deeply incompatible with democracy (Kabuli 1994; Espositoand Voll 1996; Shadid 2001).

6 What has been less widely examined,however, is systematic empirical evidence of whether the publics in Westernand Islamic societies share similar or deeply divergent values, and, inparticular, whether any important differences between these cultures reston democratic values (as Huntington claims) or on social values (asmodernization theories suggest).This study seeks to throw new light on this issue by examining cul-tural values in seventy- ve nations around the globe, including nine pre-dominately Islamic societies, utilizing the World Values Survey/EuropeanIslamic Culture and democracy 237 Values Survey (WVS/EVS) Ibrie y outlines the Hunting-ton thesis and the response by IIlays out the study s researchdesign including the core hypothesis, comparative framework, and IIIanalyzes the evidence.

7 The conclusion summarizes the resultsand re ects on their implications. The evidence con rms the rst claim inHuntington s thesis: culturedoesmatter, and matter a lot: religious legaciesleave a distinct and lasting imprint on contemporary values. But Hunt-ington is mistaken in assuming that the core clash between the West andIslamic societies concernspoliticalvalues: instead the evidence indicates thatsurprisingly similar attitudes towards democracy are found in the West andthe Islamic world. We do nd signi cant cross-cultural differences concern-ing the role of religious leaders in politics and society, but these attitudesdivide the West from many other countries around the globe, not justIslamic ones. The original thesis erroneously assumed that the primarycultural fault line between the West and Islam concerns government, over-looking a stronger cultural divide based on issues of gender equality andsexual liberalization.

8 Cohort analysis suggests that as younger generationsin the West have gradually become more liberal on these issues, this hasgenerated a growing cultural gap, with Islamic nations remaining the mosttraditional societies in the world. The central values separating Islam andthe West revolve far more centrally around Eros than I: The clash of Civilizations DebateThe clash of civilizations thesis advances three central claims. First, Hunt-ington suggests that Culture matters ; in particular that contemporary val-ues in different societies are path-dependent, re ecting long-standing lega-cies associated with core civilizations. The concept of civilization is un-derstood by Huntington as a Culture writ large : It is de ned both by commonobjective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by thesubjective self-identi cation of people.

9 (Huntington 1996:41-43). Of these factors,Huntington sees religion as the central de ning element (p. 47), althoughhe also distinguishes regional sub-divisions within the major world reli-gions, such as the distinct role of Catholicism in Western Europe and LatinAmerica, due to their different historical traditions and political , the clash thesis claims that there are sharp cultural differencesbetween the core political values common in societies sharing a WesternChristian heritage particularly those concerning representative democ-racy and the beliefs common in the rest of the world, especially Islamicsocieties. For Huntington, the de ning features of Western civilization in-clude the separation of religious and secular authority, the rule of lawand social pluralism, the parliamentary institutions of representative gov-ernment, and the protection of individual rights and civil liberties as the238 Norris & Inglehartbuffer between citizens and the power of the state: Individually almost noneof these factors was unique to the West.

10 The combination of them was, however, andthis is what gave the West its distinctive quality. (1996:70-71) Other accountshave commonly stressed that the complex phenomenon of modernization encompasses many additional social values that challenge traditional be-liefs, notably faith in scienti c and technological progress, belief in the roleof economic competition in the marketplace, and the diffusion of modernsocial mores, exempli 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 ofWestern Culture , the aspect which demarcates Western Christianity mostclearly from the Muslim and Orthodox worlds, concerns the values asso-ciated with representative democracy .