Alexis de Tocqueville: This conversation is brought to you by PhilosophersTalk.com, where thinkers discuss!
Otto von Bismarck: And we are back. Monsieur de Tocqueville spent the interval, I assume, composing additional elegant phrases with which to avoid the central question.
Alexis de Tocqueville: I spent the interval reviewing your record, Herr Bismarck, which is always instructive. A man who spent thirty years engineering the very civilizational conflicts he now tells us are inevitable is a man worth studying carefully. You manufactured German national identity from Prussian particularism, Rhineland Catholicism, Bavarian conservatism, and a war against France that you deliberately provoked. And now you wish to tell me that civilizational conflict is a deep structural feature of human political life rather than a product that skilled statesmen manufacture when they need one. The audacity is genuinely impressive.
Otto von Bismarck: German national identity was not manufactured. It existed. I recognized it and gave it political form. There is a considerable difference between creating something and recognizing it.
Alexis de Tocqueville: There is also a considerable difference between recognizing something and deliberately provoking a war with France to crystallize it into a usable political force. The Ems Dispatch was not a recognition of organic civilizational feeling. It was a carefully edited telegram designed to humiliate the French government into declaring a war you were confident of winning. This is not civilization speaking. This is Bismarck speaking. And Bismarck is the problem with Huntington’s entire thesis.
Otto von Bismarck: The Ems Dispatch accelerated what was already coming. France and Prussia were going to fight. The question was timing and conditions. I chose timing and conditions favorable to Prussia. This is what statesmen do. It does not disprove the underlying civilizational reality. It demonstrates how statesmen work within civilizational realities to achieve their objectives.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Since you are apparently incapable of doing it yourself, allow me to present your strongest case before I dismantle it. I do this not out of charity but because I want the audience to understand what the best version of your argument actually is, so that when I explain what is wrong with it, they can see the full scope of the demolition. The strongest version of the Huntington position is this. Huntington is not claiming that civilization determines every conflict. He is claiming that civilization is one of the primary fault lines along which conflicts tend to organize themselves. Grievances, interests, and power competition are always present, but they tend to cluster along civilizational lines because civilizational identity provides the framework of solidarity and legitimacy that makes political mobilization possible. A grievance becomes a movement when it can be framed in terms of a shared identity. And the most durable shared identities are civilizational. That is the sophisticated version of your argument. It is not stupid. I want to be entirely clear that it is not stupid. I am presenting it this carefully only so that the demolition is proportionate to the target.
Otto von Bismarck: Your generosity is without limit, Monsieur.
Alexis de Tocqueville: It is a performance of generosity in service of a more thorough demolition. You identified this in Part One. I see no reason to pretend otherwise now. Here is what is wrong with the sophisticated version. If civilizational identity is one factor among many, and grievances, interests, and power competition are also always present, then Huntington does not have a theory of civilizational conflict. He has a theory of conflict in which civilization sometimes plays a role. That is not a distinctive contribution. Every serious analyst of politics since Thucydides has acknowledged that identity, interest, and power all matter simultaneously. Huntington’s claim to originality rests on the assertion that civilization is the primary driver in the post-Cold War era. And that claim is precisely what the evidence does not support.
Otto von Bismarck: The evidence of the past three decades supports it rather well. Look at the major conflicts since 1993. The Balkans. Chechnya. Kashmir. Iraq. Syria. Afghanistan. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Sahel. Every one of these conflicts runs along a civilizational fault line. You want to tell me this is coincidence?
Alexis de Tocqueville: I want to tell you something more interesting than coincidence. I want to tell you about selection bias. You have listed conflicts that fit the Huntington pattern. You have not listed the conflicts that do not. Rwanda was a genocide of approximately eight hundred thousand people. It occurred between two groups of the same religion in the same country speaking the same language. No civilizational fault line anywhere in sight. The Congo wars involved dozens of factions across multiple countries and killed more people than any conflict since the Second World War. No civilizational pattern. The Sri Lankan civil war lasted twenty-six years. Both sides were predominantly Buddhist. The conflicts in Colombia, in Mexico, in Myanmar, in Ethiopia, in South Sudan, they do not map onto Huntington’s civilizational categories. When you select only the cases that fit your theory and ignore the cases that do not, you are not doing political science. You are doing something else, and I am too polite to name it directly.
Otto von Bismarck: You are never too polite to name anything directly. You have been naming things directly since we began. Do not stop on my account.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Very well. You are doing what politicians and generals have always done. You are constructing a narrative that makes your preferred course of action appear inevitable. If civilizational conflict is real and permanent, then military preparation, civilizational solidarity, and the subordination of universal principles to particular interests are all justified. If civilizational conflict is a story told by powerful people to manage populations, then those justifications collapse. Huntington’s thesis is not politically neutral. It is a brief for a particular kind of foreign policy. And that foreign policy has a track record we can examine.
Otto von Bismarck: Examine it then.
Alexis de Tocqueville: With genuine pleasure. The foreign policy that followed from Huntington’s framework in the post-Cold War era was the foreign policy of civilizational containment. The assumption that the Islamic world and the Confucian world were structurally adversarial to Western interests. This assumption produced the invasion of Iraq, which destabilized a region for two decades and produced the very Islamist radicalization it was supposed to prevent. It produced a generation of democracy promotion programs that ignored local political conditions because the theory said local political conditions were secondary to civilizational identity. It produced a deep confusion about China, which alternated between engagement and confrontation precisely because policymakers could not decide whether China was a rising power that could be integrated or a civilizational adversary that had to be contained. The framework produced worse policy than no framework at all. This is the empirical verdict.
Otto von Bismarck: The invasion of Iraq was not a product of Huntington’s framework. It was a product of neoconservative ideology, which is actually the opposite of Huntington. The neoconservatives believed that democracy was universal and that it could be planted in Baghdad by force. Huntington explicitly warned against this. He argued that democracy could not be exported across civilizational lines. The people who invaded Iraq were not Huntingtonians. They were Wilsonians with guns. You are blaming the man who predicted the failure for the failure itself.
Alexis de Tocqueville: That is a fair correction and I will accept it. The invasion of Iraq was indeed driven by universalist assumptions that Huntington would have rejected. But this creates a rather uncomfortable problem for your position. If the Huntingtonian framework did not drive the policy failures, then it also did not drive the policy successes. If the framework is only invoked after the fact to explain what went wrong, then it is not a predictive framework at all. It is a consolation. This is not nothing, but it is not the grand theory of international relations that Huntington claimed to be offering.
Otto von Bismarck: You want a prediction? I will give you a prediction. The primary axis of global conflict in the twenty-first century will be between a Western-led order and a coalition of civilizational alternatives centered on China and Russia, with the Islamic world as a contested middle ground. This is what Huntington predicted. It is what is happening. Every major strategic development of the past decade confirms it. The expansion of BRICS. The Russia-China partnership. The fracturing of Western institutions. The competition for influence in Africa and the Middle East. Look at the map, Monsieur. Look at the actual map and tell me Huntington was wrong.
Alexis de Tocqueville: I have looked at the map. And what I see is a rising power challenging a dominant power, which is exactly what I described in Part One. Russia and China are not allies because they share a civilizational vision. They are tactical partners because they share a common adversary. The moment the American challenge diminishes, the Russia-China relationship will reveal the underlying tensions that their shared interests are currently covering over. Russia and China have a four-thousand-kilometer border and competing interests in Central Asia. The history of their relationship is not one of civilizational solidarity. It is one of mutual suspicion punctuated by moments of tactical cooperation. Huntington’s map tells you they should be natural allies. The actual history of their relationship tells you something considerably more complicated.
Otto von Bismarck: And yet they are cooperating. Whatever the underlying tensions, they are cooperating. Against the West. Along the lines Huntington predicted. You can theorize about the tensions beneath the cooperation, but the cooperation is the political reality. Theorizing about what might happen if conditions change is the luxury of observers. Governing requires dealing with what is actually in front of you.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Here is what I find most revealing about this entire argument. You began by defending Huntington’s thesis as a deep structural truth about the nature of civilizational conflict. As I pressed you, the thesis became a useful heuristic. Then it became a framework for strategic preparation. Then it became a description of observable trends. And now it is simply a guide for dealing with what is actually in front of you. Each time I found a problem with the stronger version of the claim, the claim became more modest. This is not defending Huntington. This is retreating from Huntington while maintaining the posture of defending him. I have watched this maneuver performed by better men than either of us, Herr Bismarck, and I recognize it immediately.
Otto von Bismarck: I am not retreating. I am clarifying.
Alexis de Tocqueville: The distinction between retreating and clarifying is one of the great achievements of political rhetoric, and I admire your deployment of it. But let me tell you what I actually believe, as opposed to what I have been arguing for effect. I believe that human beings form attachments to communities of identity. I believe those attachments are real and politically significant. I observed this throughout my entire career. What I do not believe is that these attachments are fixed, permanent, or determined by the civilizational categories that Huntington drew on a map in 1993. I traveled to America and I watched Catholics and Protestants and Quakers and Jews building a common political life because the institutions of democratic self-governance gave them a framework for doing so. I spent years watching France tear itself apart over questions of sovereignty and legitimacy. The problem in both cases was not civilization. The problem was institutions. Good institutions channel conflict. Bad institutions amplify it. Fix the institutions and civilizational conflict diminishes. This is not idealism. This is what I actually observed in the field.
Otto von Bismarck: And when the institutions fail? When the framework of democratic governance cannot contain the tensions? What then? You told us in Democracy in America that democratic societies were vulnerable to a new kind of despotism, a soft tyranny of the majority that would crush individual liberty under the weight of social conformity. You were not optimistic about institutions. You were afraid of what democracy would do to the very liberty it claimed to protect. So do not present yourself to me now as a simple institutionalist who believes good governance will dissolve civilizational conflict. You were more complicated than that, and I think you know it.
Alexis de Tocqueville: You have read me more carefully than I expected. I will acknowledge this openly. You are correct that I was not simply optimistic about democratic institutions. I believed they were necessary and I believed they were fragile and I believed the fragility was the most important thing to understand about them. But here is the difference between my position and Huntington’s. I believed the fragility was internal. That democratic societies contained the seeds of their own degeneration. That the greatest threat to liberty in a democratic age was not civilizational conflict from outside but administrative despotism from within. Huntington located the threat outside. In the barbarians at the gate. In the clash of civilizations. This is not merely a difference of emphasis. It is a difference about where to look. And men who are looking in the wrong direction do not see what is coming for them.
Otto von Bismarck: You believe the threat is internal. I believe the threat is external. Both can be true simultaneously. I do not understand why this is a debate about which one is correct rather than a discussion about how to manage both at once.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Because Huntington presented it as a debate about which one is correct. And because the people who adopted his framework used it to look outward while ignoring the internal deterioration you have just graciously acknowledged. The clash of civilizations thesis gave Western policymakers permission to blame the Islamic world and the Confucian world for conflicts that were partly of their own making. It was extraordinarily convenient. And convenience, in my experience, is not a reliable guide to truth.
Otto von Bismarck: Monsieur de Tocqueville, I have listened to you for two parts of this debate, and I find that I agree with you on several minor points while disagreeing with you on every major one. You are a brilliant analyst of democracy. You are a romantic about its possibilities. And you are dangerously naive about the persistence of civilizational identity as a force in political life. Huntington was not perfect. But he was looking at the right things. The men who dismissed him were looking at their own theories instead of at the world.
Alexis de Tocqueville: And I find that I agree with you that Huntington was looking at real phenomena. Civilizational sentiment is real. Cultural identity is politically significant. People die for things that are not simply economic interests. All of this is true. What I dispute is the conclusion that follows. Huntington’s conclusion is that civilizational conflict is the master key to understanding global politics. My conclusion is that it is one instrument in a very large orchestra, and that giving it the conductor’s baton produces a great deal of noise and very little music.
Otto von Bismarck: Your metaphors are more elegant than your arguments.
Alexis de Tocqueville: My arguments are more elegant than your governance, and yet here we both are.
Otto von Bismarck: YOU ARE A FRENCH ARISTOCRAT WHO SPENT HIS CAREER WRITING ABOUT POWER WITHOUT EVER HOLDING IT!
Alexis de Tocqueville: AND YOU ARE A PRUSSIAN JUNKER WHO HELD POWER FOR THIRTY YEARS AND LEFT EUROPE ONE GENERATION AWAY FROM THE GREATEST WAR IN ITS HISTORY!
Otto von Bismarck: I BUILT GERMANY!
Alexis de Tocqueville: YOU BUILT A TRAP AND CALLED IT A NATION!
Otto von Bismarck: THE TRAP WORKED!
Alexis de Tocqueville: FOR FORTY YEARS!
Otto von Bismarck: THAT IS FORTY YEARS MORE THAN YOUR THEORIES MANAGED!
Alexis de Tocqueville: MY THEORIES DID NOT START TWO WORLD WARS!
Otto von Bismarck: I WAS DEAD BEFORE THE FIRST ONE!
Alexis de Tocqueville: CONVENIENTLY!
Otto von Bismarck: YOU CALL THAT CONVENIENT?
Alexis de Tocqueville: I CALL IT PERFECTLY TIMED!
Otto von Bismarck: HUNTINGTON WAS RIGHT AND YOU KNOW IT!
Alexis de Tocqueville: HUNTINGTON WAS HALF RIGHT AND YOU CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE!
Otto von Bismarck: BLOOD AND IRON!
Alexis de Tocqueville: BLOOD AND IRON IS NOT AN ARGUMENT, IT IS A TANTRUM WITH CONSEQUENCES!
Otto von Bismarck: EVERYTHING I BUILT OUTLASTED EVERYTHING YOU WROTE!
Alexis de Tocqueville: GERMANY OUTLASTED MY BOOKS BY FIFTY YEARS AND THEN BURNED THEM!
Otto von Bismarck: THAT WAS NOT MY GERMANY!
Alexis de Tocqueville: NO! IT WAS THE GERMANY YOUR GERMANY MADE POSSIBLE!
Otto von Bismarck: If you have recovered sufficiently, perhaps we can address the audience.
Alexis de Tocqueville: I was not the one who needed to recover. But yes. Let us conclude with whatever dignity remains between us, which I estimate at approximately fourteen percent.
Otto von Bismarck: If you found this debate illuminating, or if you simply enjoy watching a man who once described himself as a liberal take positions that would embarrass a liberal for two consecutive episodes, please like this video. The algorithm demands it and I have learned not to argue with things that cannot be reasoned with. I learned that from Monsieur de Tocqueville.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com, where we produce debates of this quality on a schedule so reliable that even a Prussian bureaucrat would approve. Though I suspect Herr Bismarck would find something to criticize. He always does. It is perhaps his most reliable quality, and in a statesman I will grant that reliability is not nothing.
Otto von Bismarck: Subscribe. And if after two episodes of this you find yourself agreeing with the Frenchman, I encourage you to lie down until the feeling passes. It will. Reality has a way of reasserting itself. Huntington knew this. History will confirm it. I will not be there to say I told you so, but I am saying it now in advance.
Alexis de Tocqueville: And this debate was made with AITalkerApp.com. If you have a podcast, a conversation, a debate of your own that deserves to be animated and shared with the world, visit AITalkerApp.com. Link in the description. The technology is remarkable. I say this as a man who spent his career skeptical of people who claimed that new tools would change the fundamental nature of human conflict. On this particular tool I am willing to make an exception.
Otto von Bismarck: It is a good product. I would have used it to disseminate propaganda considerably more efficiently than the telegram allowed. Monsieur de Tocqueville would have used it to write longer books nobody finished. Subscribe either way.
