Saïd. Transcript. The Myth of theClashOfCivilisations. UMassAmherst.

1.      Thank you verymuch. I'm going to start, in fact, talk throughout about an essay and a book, written bySamuelHuntington entitled theClashOfCivilisations. When it first appeared in1993 in the journal ForeignAffairs, it had a questionmark after it, and it announced in its firstsentence that “worldPolitics is entering a new phase.” Threeyearslater, 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 theClashOfCivilisations AndTheEmergingWorldOrder. My premise is that the essay is better than the book. I mean, it got worse[] when 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 worldPolitics was entering a new phase was that, whereas in the recent past worldconflicts had been between ideological camps, grouping the first-, second- and third-worlds into warring entities, the new style ofPolitics which he discerned would entail conflicts between different and presumably clashing civilisations. I quote him, "The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. TheClashOfCivilisations will dominate globalPolitics." Later he explains how it is that the principal clash will be between western and nonwestern civilisation, but he spends most of his time in the twoworks, discussing the disagreements, potential or actual, between what he calls theWest on the one hand, and on the other Islamic and Confucian civilisations. In terms of detail, a great deal moreattention, hostile attention, is paid toIslam than to any other civilisation including theWest. In much of the tremendous interest subsequentlytaken inHuntington'sessay, I think derives from its timing rather than exclusively from what it says. As he himself notes, there have been several intellectual- and political-attempts since the end of theColdWar to map the emerging worldsituation, and this includes FrancisFukuyama’sthesis on the end ofHistory, which nobody talks about, so the end of Fukuyama, really. Sound of laughter. And the thesis put about during the latter days of theBushAdministration, the theory of the socalled new worldorder. But there have been moreserious attempts to deal with the coming millennium in works byPaulKennedy for example, EricHobsbawm, lessinteresting and morerabid ConorCruiseO'Brien, RobertKaplan and a book that's apparently making the rounds in campuses on JihadVersusMcWorld byBenjaminBarber. All these books have looked at the coming millennium with considerable attention to the causes of future conflict, which has given them all, I think justly, cause for alarm. The core ofHuntington'svision, which is notreallyoriginal with him, is the idea of an unceasing clash, a concept of conflict, which slides somewhat effortlessly into the politicalspace vacated by the unremitting war of ideas and values embodied in the unregrettedColdWar of which, of course, Huntington was a great theorist. I don't think therefore it's inaccurate to suggest that what Huntington'sproviding in his work, especially since it's primarilyaddressed to influential opinion and policymakers. It is in fact a recycled version of theColdWarthesis that conflicts in today's and tomorrow's world will remain not economic or social in essence, but ideological. And if that is so, oneideology, theWest, is the still point or the locus, around which, forHuntington, all other civilisations turn. In effect then, theColdWar continues, but this time on many fronts, with many moreserious and basic systems of values and ideas like-Islam and -Confucianism struggling for ascendancy and even dominance over theWest. Notsurprisingly therefore, Huntington concludes his essay with a brief survey, not only his essay but his book as well, with a survey of what it is that theWest must do to remain strong and keep its opponents weak and divided. He says, "TheWest must exploit differences and conflicts,” I’m quoting now, “among Confucian and Islamic states to support in other civilisations groups sympathetic to western values and interests. To strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate western interests and values, and to promote the involvement of nonwestern States in those institutions." And that's a veryinterventionist and quite aggressive attitude towards other civilisations to get them to be morewestern. So strong and insistent is Huntington'snotion that other civilisations necessarily clash with theWest and so relentlesslyaggressive and chauvinistic is his prescription for what theWest must do to continue winning, so that the reader is forced to conclude that he's really mostinterested in continuing and expanding theColdWar by other means, rather than advancing ideas that might help us to understand the current worldscene or ideas that would try to reconcile between cultures. Not only will conflict continue, but he says, the conflict between civilisations will be thelatestphase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world. It's as a verybrief- and rathercrudely-articulated manual in the art of maintaining a wartimestatus in the minds of americans and others, that Huntington'swork has to be now understood. I go so far as saying that it argues from the standpoint of-Pentagonplanners and -defenseindustryexecutives, who may have temporarilylost their occupations after the end of theColdWar, but have now discovered a new vocation for themselves. But perhaps because Huntington is moreinterested in policy prescriptions than he is either in History or careful analysis of cultures, Huntington, in my opinion, is quite misleading in what he says and how he puts things. A great deal of his argument, first of all, depends on second- and third-hand opinion that scants the enormous advances in our concrete understanding and theoretical understanding of how cultures work. How they change and how they can best be grasped or apprehended. A brief look at the people and opinions he quotes suggests that Journalism and popular demagoguery are his main sources rather than serious scholarship or theory. When you draw on tendentious publicists and scholars. Omitted. You alreadyprejudice the argument in favour of conflict and polemic rather than in favour of true understanding and the kind of cooperation between peoples that our planet needs. Huntington'sauthorities are not the cultures themselves, but a small handful authorities picked by him, because, in fact, they emphasise the latent bellicosity in one or another statement by one or another socalled spokesperson for or about that culture. The giveaway for me is the title of his book and his essay, theClashOfCivilisations, which is not his phrase but BernardLewis's. On thelastpage of Lewis's essay titled, theRootsOfMuslimRage, which appeared in theSeptember1990issue of theAtlanticMonthly, Lewis speaks about the current problem with the islamic world, I quote. This is incredible stuff. "It should by now be clear," Lewis says, "that we are facing a mood and movement inIslam far transcending the level of issues and policies and theGovernments that pursue them. This is no less than aClashOfCivilisations. The perhaps irrational, but surelyhistoric receptions of an ancient rival against our,” Whenever you hear the word our, you want to head for the exit. Sound of laughter. “Judeochristian heritage, our secular present and the worldwide expansion of both. It is cruciallyimportant that we on our side should not be provoked into an equallyhistoric, but also equallyirrational reaction against that rival." In other words, we shouldn't be as crazy as they are. And, of course Lewis is verymuchlistened to at theCouncilOnForeignRelations, theNewYorkerReviewOfBooks, and so and so forth. But few people today with any sense would want to volunteer such sweeping characterisations as the one's advanced byLewis about onebillionmuslims scattered through fivecontinents, dozens of differing-Languages and -traditions and -Histories. Of them all, Lewis says that they all are enraged at western modernity, as if onebillionpersons were really only one person and western civilisation was no morecomplicated a matter than a simple declarativesentence. But what I do want to stress is first of all how Huntington has picked up fromLewis in the classic kind of orientalist gesture, the notion that civilisations are monolithic and homogeneous, and second how, again from Lewis, he assumes the unchanging character of the duality between us and them. In other words, I think it's absolutelyimperative to stress that, likeLewis, Huntington doesn't write neutral, descriptive and objective prose, but is himself a polemicist whose Rhetoric not only dependsheavily on prior arguments about a war, of all against war, but in effect perpetuates them. Far from being an arbiter between civilisations, which is what he suggests he might be doing, Huntington is a partisan, advocate of onecivilisation over all the others. Like Lewis, Huntington defines islamic civilisation reductively, as if what most matters about it is it supposed antiWesternism. I mean, it doesn't matter to him that muslims have other things to do than to think about theWest with hatred, but you get the impression that that's all they are thinking about is how to destroy theWest, bomb it and destroy the whole world, really. For his part, Lewis tries to give a set of reasons for his definition that Islam has nevermodernised, that it neverseparated between Church and State, that it's incapable of understanding other civilisation, all of them complete untruths. I mean of course, the arabs, muslims have traveled well before the europeans in theEast, inAfrica, and inEurope and were great discoverers of other civilisations well before MarcoPolo and Columbus. But Huntington doesn't bother with any of this. For him Islam, Confucianism, and the other fiveorsixcivilisations, hindu, japanese, slavic, orthodox, latinamerican and african that still exist, are separate from each other and consequently potentially in a conflict, which he wants to manage, not resolve. He writes therefore as a crisismanager, not as a student of culture and civilisations, nor as a reconciler between them. At the core, and this is what has made his work strike so responsive a chord among postColdWarpolicymakers, is this sense that you saw in crisismanaging prose during theVietnamWar, this sense of cutting through a lot of unnecessary details. You go through masses of scholarship and huge amounts of experience, and you boil all of it down to a couple of catchy, (easy to quote and remember)-ideas, which are then passed off as pragmatic, hardheaded, practical, sensible, clear. Now I come to the moreserious part of what I have to say, is this thebestway to understand the world we live in? Is it wise to produce a simplified map of the world and then hand it go generals and civilian lawmakers as a prescription for first comprehending and then acting in the world? Doesn't this in effect prolong and deepen conflict? What does it do to minimise civilisational conflict? Do we want theClashOfCivilisations? Doesn't it mobilise nationalist passions, and therefore nationalist murderousness? Shouldn't we be asking the question, why is one doing this sort of thing? To understand or to act? To mitigate or to aggravate the likelihood of conflict? I'd want to begin to survey the worldsituation by commenting on how prevalent it has become for people to speak now in the name of large, and in my opinion, undesirablyvague and manipulable abstractions like theWest or japanese culture or slavic culture or Islam or Confucianism. Labels that collapse particular religions, races and ethnicities into ideologies that are considerably more-unpleasant and -provocative than Gabino and Renan did onehundredandfiftyyearsago. Let me give a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean. The language of groupidentity makes a particularlystrident appearance from the middle to the end of the nineteenthcentury as the culmination of decades of international competition between the great european and american powers for territories in-Africa and -Asia. In the battle for the empty spaces ofAfrica, the socalled dark continent, France and Britain, Germany, Belgium, Portugal resort not only to force but to a whole slew of theories and Rhetorics for justifying their plunder. Perhaps themostfamous of such devices is a french notion of the civilizing mission, laMissionCivilisatrice, a notion underlying which is the idea that some races and cultures have a higher aim in life than others. This gives the morepowerful, the moredeveloped, the morecivilised, the higher, the right to colonise others, not in the name of bruteforce or plunder, both of which are standard components of the exercise, but in the name of a noble ideal. Conrad's mostfamous story, theHeartOfDarkness, is an ironic, even terrifying enactment of this thesis that as the narrator puts it, “the conquest of theEarth which mostlymeans the taking it away from those who have a different complexion, a slightlyflatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it, is the idea. An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretense but an idea, and an unselfish belief in the idea, something you can bow down before and sacrifice to.” In response to this sort of logic, twothings occur. One is that competing imperial powers invent their own theory of cultural destiny in order to justify their actions abroad. Britain had such a theory, Germany had one, Belgium had one, and of course, in the concept ofManifestDestiny, theUnitedStates had one, too. These redeeming ideas dignify the practice of competition and clash, whose real purpose as Conrad quite accuratelysaw, was selfaggrandizement, power, conquest, treasure, and unrestrained selfpride. I'd go so far as to say that what we today call thePolitics or theRhetoric of identity, by which a member of one ethnic or religious or national or cultural group, puts that group at the center of the world, derives from that period of imperial competition at the end of thelastcentury, and this in turn, provokes the concept of worlds at war that quite obviously is at the heart of Huntington'sarticle. In the related of politicalEconomy, Geography, Anthropology, and Historiography, the theory that each world is selfenclosed, has it's own boundaries and special territory is applied to the worldmap, to the structure of civilisations, to the notion that each race has a special destiny, aPsychology and an ethos. Renan said for example, that the chinese race, its destiny is to serve, they are a docile people and they must serve. The blackrace must be the bearers, the labourers of mankind, because they are strong in physique and can work hard, that kind of. All these ideas almostwithout exception are based not on the harmony, but on the clash or conflict between worlds. Thesecondthing that happens is that the lesser people, the objects of the imperial gaze, so to speak, respond by resisting their forcible manipulation and settlement. We now know that active resistance to the whiteman began the moment he set foot in places like-Algeria, -eastAfrica, -India and -elsewhere. Later, primary resistance was succeeded by secondary resistance. The organisation of political cultural movements determined to achieve independence and liberation from imperial control. At precisely the moment in the nineteenthcentury that among the european and american powers aRhetoric of cultural selfjustification begins to be widespread, a respondingRhetoric among the colonised people develops, one that speaks in terms of african or asian or arab or muslim unity, independence, selfdetermination. InIndia for example, theCongressparty was organised in1880, and by the turn of the century, had convinced the indian elite that only by supporting indian-Languages, -industry and -commerce could politicalfreedom come. These are ours and ours alone, runs the argument, and only by supporting our world against theirs, note the us-versus-them-construction, can we finally stand on our own. One finds a similar logic at work during theMeijiperiod in modernJapan. Something like this Rhetoric of belonging is alsolodged at the heart of each independence movement, Nationalism. And it achieved the result shortlyafter theWorldWarTwo, not only of dismantling over a period of about twentyyears the classicalEmpires but of winning independence for dozes of countries thereafter. India, Indonesia, most of the arab countries, Indochina, Algeria, Kenya, etc., all these emerged onto the worldscene sometimespeacefully, sometimes as the effect of internal development as in the japanese instance, or of ugly colonial wars and wars of national liberation. In both a colonial and postcolonial contacts, therefore, Rhetorics of general, cultural or civilisational specificity went in two potential directions: one, a utopian line that insisted on an overall pattern of integration and harmony between all peoples, the other, a line that suggested as to how all cultures were so specific and jealous as to reject and war against all the others. Among instance of the utopian are the language and institutions of theUnitedNations founded in the aftermath ofWorldWarTwo, and the subsequent development out of that of various attempts of worldGovernment predicated on coexistence, voluntary limitations of sovereignty, the integration of peoples and cultures harmoniously. Among thesecond are the theory and practice of theColdWar and morerecently the idea of aClashOfCivilisations, which appears to be a necessity for a world of so many parts, and indeed even a certainty. According to this, cultures and civilisations are basicallyseparated from each other, that is to say, the core ofIslam is to be separated from everything else, the core of theWest is to be separated from all the others. I don't want to be invidious here. In the islamic world there has been a resurgence of Rhetoric and movements stressing the innate opposition between Islam and theWest, just as in Africa, Europe, Asia and elsewhere, movements have appeared that stress the need for excluding or exterminating, as inBosnia, others as undesirable. WhiteApartheid in southAfrica was such a movement as is the zionist idea that Palestain should be for the jews only and the palestinians as nonjews should have a lesser place. Afrocentricity, Islamcentricity are movements that also stress the independence and separateness of cultures. Within each civilisational camp we will notice that there are official representatives of that culture who make themselves into its mouthpiece. Who assign themselves the role of articulating our, or for that matter, their essence. This alwaysrequires compression, reduction, exaggeration. So in the first and mostimmediate level then, statements about what our culture is, civilisation is, or ought to be, necessarilyinvolves a contest over the definition. That's why I think it's moreaccurate to say that the period that we're living in is not theClashOfCivilisations but the clash of definitions. Anyone who has the slightest understanding of how cultures reallywork, knows that defining the culture, saying what it is for members of that culture, is always a major and even in undemocratic societies, an ongoing contest. There are conical authorities to be selected, regularly revised, debated, selected, dismissed. There are ideas of GoodAndEvil, belonging or notbelonging, hierarchies of values to be specified, discussed, rediscussed. Each culture moreover defines its enemies, what stands beyond it and threatens it, an other to be despised and fought against. But, cultures are not the same. There is an official culture, a culture of priests, academics, and theState. It provides definitions of Patriotism, loyalty, boundaries and what I've called belonging. It is this official culture that speaks in the name of the whole. But it's alsotrue, and this is completely missing from theClashOfCivilisationargument as we hear it inHuntington, in addition to the mainstream or official culture, there are dissenting or alternative, unorthodox, heterodox, strands that contain many antiauthoritarian themes in them that are in competition with the official culture. These can be called the counterculture, an ensemble of practices associated with various kinds of outsiders, the poor, immigrants, artisticbohemians, workers, rebels, artists. From the counterculture comes the critique of authority and attacks on what is official and orthodox. No culture is understandable without some sense of this everpresent source of creative provocation from the unofficial to the official. To disregard the sense of restlessness in theWest, inIslam, inConfucianism within each culture and to assume that there's complete homogeneity between culture and identity is to miss what is vital and fertile in culture. A couple of years ago, ArthurSchlesinger wrote a book called theDisunitingOfAmerica, which is a kind of cris de coeur about the way in which americanHistory, which for him is the History of-Bancroft and -Adams and so on, is dissolving into something quite different. And he says that new groups in american society want the writing ofHistory to reflect not only anAmerica that was conceived of and ruled by patricians and landowners, but anAmerica in which slaves, servants, labourers and poor immigrants played an important, but as yet unacknowledged role. The narratives of such people, silenced by the great discourses whose source was Washington, the investmentbanks ofNY, the universities ofNewEngland, and the great industrial fortunes of the middle- and far-West, have come to disrupt the slow progress and unruffled serenity of the official story. They ask questions, interject the experience of social unfortunates, and make the claims of lesser peoples, of women, asian- and african-americans, and various other minorities, sexual as well as ethnic. There's a similar debate inside the islamic world today which in the often hysterical outcry about the threat ofIslam, IslamicFundamentalism and Terrorism that one encounters so often in theMedia, is oftenlost sight of completely. Like any other major worldculture, Islam contains within itself an astonishing variety of currents and countercurrents. I would say that it is this extremelywidespread attitude of questioning and Skepticism towards ageold authority that characterises the postwarworld in both East and West. And it's that that Huntington cannot handle, and therefore resorts to the business of this clash of cultures or ClashOfCivilisations. To theorists of that sort, civilisationidentity is a stable and undisturbed thing, like a room full of furniture at the back of your house. This is extremelyfar from the truth, not just in the islamic world but throughout the entire surface of the globe. To emphasise the differences between cultures is completely to ignore the literallyunending debate about defining the culture or civilisation within those civilisations, including western ones. These debates completelyundermine any idea of a fixed identity, and hence the relationships between identities. What Huntington considers to be a sort of ontological fact of politicalexistence, to wit, theClashOfCivilisations. Toomuchattention paid to managing and clarifying the clash of cultures obliterates something else, the fact of a great and oftensilent exchange and dialogue between them. What culture today, whether japanese, arab, european, korean, chinese, indian, has not had long intimate and extraordinarilyrich contacts with other cultures? There is no exception to this exchange at all. Much thesame is true ofLit. where readers for example of GarciaMarquez, NaguibMahfuz, KenzaburoOe exist far beyond the national or cultural boundaries imposed by Language and nation. In my own field of comparativeLiterature. Cough ofSaeed. There's a commitment to the relationships between literatures as to their reconciliation and harmony despite the existence of powerful ideological and national barriers between them. And this sort of cooperative collective enterprise is what one misses in the proclaimers of an undying clash between cultures. The lifelong dedication that has existed in all modern and ancient societies among scholars, artists, musicians, visionaries and prophets, to try to come to terms with the other, with that other society or culture that seems so foreign and so distant. It seems to me that unless we emphasise and maximise a spirit of cooperation and humanistic exchange, and here I don't speak simply of uninformed delight or amateurish enthusiasm for the exotic, but rather a profound existential commitment and labour on behalf of the other. Unless we do that, we are going to end up superficially- and stridently-banging the drum for our culture in opposition to all the others. And we know also in another veryimportant study of the way cultures work, the book, coauthored or coedited by-TerrenceRanger and -EricHobsbawm, that even tradition can be invented. I mean the idea of a culture and a civilisation being something that's stable and fixed is completelydisproved by this notion of how traditions can be invented, manufactured for the occasion, so the traditions are really not the wonderfullystable things that we are, but ratherabstractions that can quite easily be created, destroyed, manipulated and so on. As I've argued in several of my own works, in today's Europe and theUnitedStates what is described as Islam, for instance, because this is where the burden, I think ofClashOfCivilisationsthesis goes, what is described as Islam belongs to the discourse ofOrientalism, a construction fabricated to whip up feelings of hostility and antipathy against a part of the world that happens to be of strategic importance for it's oil, it's threatening adjacence toChristianity, it's formidableHistory of competition with theWest. Yet this is a verydifferent thing, that what to Muslims who live within its domain, Islam really is. There's a world of difference between Islam inIndonesia and Islam inEgypt. By thesametoken, the volatility of today'sstruggle over the meaning and definition ofIslam is evident, inEgypt, where the secular powers of society are in conflict with various islamic protest movements and reformers over the nature ofIslam and in such circumstances theeasiest and least accurate thing is to say, That is the world of Islam, and see how it is all terrorists and fundamentalists and see also how different, how irrational they are, compared to us. But the truly weakestpart, and I conclude here, the weakest part of theClashOfCulturesAndCivilisationsthesis is the rigid separation assumed between them despite the overwhelming evidence that today'sworld is, in fact, a world of mixtures, of migrations and of crossings over, of boundaries traversed. One of the major crises affecting countries like France, Britain and theUS has been brought about by the realisation, now dawning everywhere, that no culture or society is purelyonething. Sizeable minorities, northafricans inFrance, the africancaribbean and indianpopulations inBritain, asian- and african-elements in this country, dispute the idea that civilisation, that prided themselves on being homogeneous can continue to do so. There are no insulated cultures or civilisations. Any attempt made to separate them into the watertightcompartments alleged byHuntington and his ilk does damage to their variety, their diversity, their sheer complexity of elements, their radical hybridity. The moreinsistent we are on the separation of the cultures, the moreinaccurate we are about ourselves and about others. The notion of an exclusionary civilisation is to my way of thinking an impossible one. The real question then is whether in the end we want to work for civilisations that are separate or whether we should be taking the moreintegrative but perhaps moredifficult path which is to try to see them as making one vast hole whose exact contours are impossible for any person to grasp, but whose certain existence we can intuit and feel and study. Omitted. In view of the depressing actualities around us, the presence of intercultural, interethnic conflicts, it does seem to me ostrichlike to suggest that we in-Europe and -theUS should maintain our civilisation, which Huntington calls theWest, by holding everyone and all the others at bay, increasing the rifts between peoples in order to prolong our dominance. That is in effect what he argues and one can quite easilyunderstand why it is that his essay was published inForeignAffairs and why so many policymakers have drifted toward it as allowing theUS to extend the mindset of theColdWar into a different time and for a new audience. Muchmoreproductive and useful is a new global mentality or consciousness that sees the dangers we face from the standpoint of the whole humanrace. These dangers include the pauperization of most of the globe'spopulation, the emergence of virulent local, national, ethnic and religious sentiment as in-Bosnia, -Rwanda, -Lebanon, -Chechnya and elsewhere, the decline of literacy and onset of a new illiteracy based on electronic modes of Communication, Television and the new information global superhighway, the fragmentation and threatened disappearance of the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment. Our mostprecious asset in the face of such a dire transformation ofHistory is the emergence not of a sense of clash, but a sense of community, understanding, sympathy, and hope, which is the direct opposite of what Huntington provokes. If I may quote some lines by the great martiniqueian poet, AimeCesaire that I used in my book, OnCultureAndImperialism, and I never tire of quoting these lines, and he speaks here for man, l’homme in French, but “the work of man is only just beginning and it remains to conquer all the violence entrenched in the recesses of our passion and no race possess the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there's a place for all at the rendezvous of victory” and what they imply, these sentiments prepare the way for dissolution of cultural barriers as a kind of blockage between cultures as well as of the pride that prevents the kind of benignGlobalism already to be found for instance in theEnvironmentalMovement, in scientific cooperation, in theWomen'sMovement, and the universal concern forHumanRights, in concepts of global thought that stress community and sharing over racial-, gender- or class-dominance. It would seem to me therefore, that efforts to return the community of civilisations to a primitive stage of narcissistic struggle needs to be understood, not as descriptions about how in fact civilisations behave, but rather as incitements to wasteful conflict and unedifyingChauvinism, and that seems to be exactly what we don't need. Thank you. Omitted.

2.      What are the commonalities that can unite us?

3.      Well, I think there are already all kinds of commonalities. I think thefirststep is to actuallyrecognise them as actually having taken place. I think, also for me, the idea that cultures are somehow separate entities and exist all by themselves with occasional interruptions by people with darker skin or whiter skin or whatever is simplywrong. I mean, I think thefirstthing, and I think this is where Education is terriblyimportant, and probably one of the reasons why theConservativeMovement, not just here, but in mostcountries of the world, has something veryimportant in common, and that is, the constantlyaccented cry about tradition. We should go back to our tradition, we should learn our Languages, we should concentrate on our books and our culture, that sort of thing. And I think that's bankrupt. I mean, I think all systems ofEducation alas are still deeply, sometimes unconsciously, nationalistic. So I think we have to denationaliseEducation and realise, and make it possible for people to understand that we live in a verycomplex and mixed world in which you can’t separate cultures and civilisations from each other but, in fact, History ought to be taught as the exchange and of course theClashOfCivilisations. I think that's thefirststep, and once you go from there, then I think we have a better understanding of the way certain kinds of conflict are wasteful and hopeless. I mean, ethnic cleansing, the idea of apartheid, all of these schemes for isolating people and so on and so forth. I think it's fairlyclear and straightforward. Alas, it requires a lot of work because you're bucking a veryverstrong entrenched position, which says that, We are the center of the world, whoever we are. And all of what I've said is reallyintended as a critique of that kind of monotheistic position.

4.      Is difference something we should try and avoid?

5.      What I was talking about was not, and I'm glad you brought it up because I don't want to be understood as suggesting that we're in the kind of attitude that I'm trying to describe, I'm trying to eliminate difference. I mean, there's a great deal of difference between flattening everything out into some kind of univocal, homogenised Philosophy and, so that's onepossibility and I'm obviouslyagainst that, I'm alsoagainst the idea of saying that everything is clashing and it's different and so on and so forth. That strikes me as the major flaw inHuntington'sproposal. I think it's a prescription for war. He actuallysays it. And third is the other alternative, which is what I call coexistence. But coexistence with the preservation of difference, in another words that you be able to live with those who are different from you in all kinds of way, assuming that there's a kind of, as english poet JaredManleyHopkins says, is a kind of radical inscape to each individual. There's a different kind of construction to all people in some way, which applies to allLanguages, to all cultures, if you want to use that phrase. And so it's the idea of respecting the difference, but living with it. HumanHistory is really a longHistory of compelling difference, either by assimilation or by extermination, by domination. I'm certainlynotsuggesting that what we need is a unified and simplified and reduced culture that includes everyone without distinction, everybody should wear thesameuniform and so on. That's not what I'm talking about, I'm reallytalking about the preservation of difference. Recognising that difference is all. But coexistence between them, rather than saying we'll we are different, therefore you have to stay away from us or we have to protect ourselves against you or we should destroy you. That's verydangerous. I think there are indications, as I suggested at the end of my talk, in movements of what might be called a benign global consciousness, in for example theEnvironmentalMovement, where environments differ but they are all threatened and they differ in different ways and have to be preserved and studied according to those differences, not according to some universal model.

6.      How do we combat ideas such as theClashOfCivilisations”?

7.      How to combat it? Well I mean, this is one way to combat it, to reveal it for what it is. And to debate it and through the various kinds of processes ofEducation I talked about. Plus, I think you know, one of the things that's very striking to me, as somebody who travels in and out of theUnitedStates a fair amount is the fact that most american intellectuals are really not as conscious as they perhaps ought to be of how powerful the effects ofUSintervention is throughout the world. I mean, you know, I think therefore the main duty for an american intellectual is to think about the responsibility of addressing this vast interventionary power, which is scattered all over the world where USinterests are to be found. I mean, I think that's an important Moral- and political-task that has to be defined and in this period of basically inertness where there isn't much debate on intellectual- and policy-issues outside the great thinktanks and centers like theRandCorporation, and thePentagon and so on and so forth. That seems to be terriblyimportant. What are we going to do with all these nucleardevices that are secreted all over the country and all these B2bombers, and etc.? I mean this is a vast military budget that is supposed to police the world. Omitted.

8.      How do these ideas of coexistence relate to the question ofPalestain?

9.      No, I think that the situation with the palestinians is at this moment reallyquite, well it's verging on the catastrophic, I'd say. I mean, it's not a happy moment. Not only is there reallyquite crazy in my opinion, egregious is the word I sometimes use forNetanyahu, but he's a bloody, there's something quite bloodthirsty about him. And this is the head of the, as Mr.Arafat called him, our peacepartners on the one hand, and on the other you have theUnitedStates prettymuch backingIsrael. I mean there are a few bleats here and there fromAlbright and a couple of others saying, well please time out on the settlements. I mean the suggestion being if you count to ten, and during the count of ten you, don't build any settlements you're somehow being a nice guy. And then after ten, you can build all the settlements you want, which is the theory, I think. And supplyingIsrael with billionsUSD a year, they say threebillions, there was a letter in theTimes yesterday exactlyabout that. I mean, why don't we say something to them about it—we keep on punishing the palestinians, we withhold onehundredmillionsUSD of aid and here for the palestinians because they are notfightingTerrorism enough, which means prettymuch, Lock everybody up. So why don't we withhold some of the aid toIsrael? I think it's a verygood question. It's neverasked. Sound of applaud. It's a catalogue of woes. And then we're at a moment in our History, I mean as palestinians that we are led by, I don't know, words fail me, I don't know what we're led by, but not a verybright leadership. Sound of applaud. Going from onemistake after another without a, and you know there's a kind of natural thing that occurs amongst mostpeople that in times of trouble you don't want to change horses in midstream. There's a leader and we're beset on all sides, we can't move, the refugees can't have, no passports, they are unable to work, they are unable to travel. There's sevenmillionspalestinians in the world today, more or less facing thesameproblems, some obviouslyworse than others, and the people on theWestBank and Gaza have lost fiftypercent of their income over the lastfouryears since the peaceprocess began. And unemployment is up to anywhere between thirty- and sixty-percent and houses are constantly being destroyed and property is taken from palestinians and new settlements are being built inJerusalem. Jerusalem is being judaised. In all of this, it's verydifficult to say that there's much brightness on the horizon. I think it's a particularlybad period, which I'm afraid will get worse because the leadership is very shaky, Arafat has verylittle popularity now for obvious reasons. I mean, he hasn't delivered anything except problems and he keeps rounding people up and the israelis tell him to do, and his men inWashington keep on conceding more to the israelis agreeing to morehumiliating terms, and I think the main problem and I think this will probably help a great deal in the near future, will be the clarification of what it is that we're all about. I mean for years, we used to say that we want to liberatePalestain, and then we say we want to liberate a part ofPalestain, then we want sovereignty on that, then we accept autonomy on that, we don't even get that, so our horizon keeps shrinking, and people don't know what the whole struggle is all about. And until that is made clear, unless there is some kind of consensus, which is bound to arise at some point, I think our situation will get worse. And finally you know, it's been my, it's been our view that theUnitedStates plays an extremelyimportant role and I think the view of most people, I mean I'm talking about citizens like ourselves is that the situation in theMiddleEast especiallywith regard to-Israel and -the palestinians is simplyunacceptable. This is themostextraordinary kind of flouting of the rules of international and even national behaviour. Collective punishment is the order of the day. People are killed all the time and the idea is that Israel can do this and we continue to pay for it. So, what I've been surprised by is the absence of a movement in this country, of people who are willing to take this quite important issue, and it's a movement I think that a lot of jews have to be involved in, and I don't think, I know it's RoshHashanah, so I don't think. Sound of applaud. It's not something you can turn your head away from, because this is done in the name of the jewish people. And I think it's a quite important political and historical struggle, and at the bottom is a question of fairness and Justice. Not of theUnitedStates, but of the future of these twopeoples who have to, in some way, sharePalestain. But I think the role of theUnitedStates and theUnitedStatescitizenry is absolutelycentral, raised consciousness and asking questions and not allowing these things to happen in the name of theWest and the great and the good and beautiful without demurral. And I think if I might just say onemorething to my jewish friends, that I think the crisis is a crisis of conscience, that is to say, until there's a widespread recognition and acknowledgement of what Israel cost the palestinians and that the present identity Israel today is fundamentallyintertwined with the tragedy of the palestinians, one caused by the other, there will never be peace, because you can't continue to sweep away the fact that Israel was constructed on the ruins of another society and by the mass dispossession of another people who remain unacknowledged as just sort of obscure natives in the background, back to the desert, let them go to one of the other arab countries. That's been the position. TheOsloAccords sayspecifically that Israel bears no responsibility for the costs of the occupation. This after twentyyears, twentysix years of military occupation, no responsibility. As an israeli journalist said, he said, We took over the country in1948 from the british. The british left us thePortOfHaifa, a roadsystem and an electricalsystem, a large number of municipal buildings and lots of prisons, and we could buildIsrael. Without that, there would be no State today. If we had takenPalestain in1948 the way we leftGaza for the palestinians, there would be no Israel. We destroyed theEconomy, we deported most of the capable people, we forced the people to live in hovels and refugeecamps over a period, I mean, anybody's been toGaza, it's one of themostcriminal places onEarth because of Israeli policy of occupation. And they bear no responsibility for it. I mean, that's simplyunacceptable even for the jewish people who have suffered so much. It's unacceptable. You cannot continue to victimise somebody else just because you yourself were a victim once. There has to be a limit.