In an exclusive interview with a foreign news agency recently, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad asserted again that the current international situation is characterised by a looming 'clash of civilisations' between the West and Muslim nations.

As expected, he used the wars against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regime in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively as examples to support his assertion.

Intellectually, he cited Samuel P Huntington's thesis to back his distorted view of the post-Cold War world. In 1996, Huntington published a book titled The Clash of Civilisations and The Remaking of World Order (New York, Simon & Schuster).

A shorter version of the thesis was published in the New York-based Foreign Affairs periodical in 1993.

According to Mahathir, he "would like to deny" the Huntingtonian thesis, but he is "seeing that this is happening now".

We certainly cannot deny that identity insecurity could, if not managed with a sense of public responsibility, prudence and anxious foresight, lead to violent conflicts among different ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic groups.

To this extent, Huntington, the American political scientist and veteran analyst, has done a remarkable intellectual service in alerting the world to one of the sources of political conflicts after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.

It also serves to caution us against the idealist triumphalism and Wilsonian euphoria in the immediate post-Cold War years as reflected in, among other, Francis Fukuyama's book The End of History and The Last Man (London, Peguine, 1992), or John Naisbitt's Megatrends Asia (London, Nocholas Brealey, 1995).

Intra-civilisational clashes

However, the Huntingtonian thesis is not beyond criticism. First and foremost is the argument that, in his gloomy projection of the global trend of the politics of identity, he has seriously neglected the dimension of intra-civilisational clashes.

For example, long before the war against the Saddam Hussein regime this year, thousands of Muslims were slaughtered and gassed in the1980-1988 Iraq-Iran war by their fellow Muslims. After the Iraq-Iran war, the Saddam regime continued to massacre Iraqi Kurds who are mostly Sunnis like him and the top leaders of Baath Party, as well as the Shiites.

In the 1990-1991 aggression against Kuwait, Iraqi soldiers killed, maimed and tortured Kuwaitis. The Saddam regime also fired missiles into Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The absolute majority of the peoples in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are Muslims.

It was the same in Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, different groups of Afghans who are mostly Muslims competed for political powers through armed conflicts and civil wars. The victorious Taliban, like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1975-1979, then started to violently oppress their own people, especially women.

Of course, intra-civilisational conflicts are not exclusive to Muslim societies: After 1945, there were the Chinese Civil War (1946-1949) between the Communists and Nationalists, and the North Korean aggression against the South (1950-1953).

For those who are familiar with the ups and downs of the 3,500-year Chinese history, most of the wars and armed conflicts were engaged among people who lived in the Central Plain and who shared almost the same language, belief-system and custom. Otherwise, how can we explain the proliferation of printed discourses like Sun Tzu's Art of War, The Book of The Warring States and Romance of Three Kingdoms?

The fact that Kautilya was able to compose Arthashastra in ancient India is strong evidence that there must be many wars and armed conflicts among people in ancient India for the articulation of war strategies, political tactics and other aspects of statecraft.

The so-called "European race" is also not an exception to intra-civilisational clashes. From the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta among the ancient Greek-speaking city-states in the 5th century BC, to World War One (1914-1918), the people of the European civilisation massacred each other more brutally than the violence during the crusade.

'Siege mentality'

Another equally powerful critique against the Huntingtonian thesis is that it also neglects the strong tendency of ambitious human beings, or secular megalomaniacs and nihilistic opportunists fanning ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic sentiments (which they themselves have no personal attachments) to mobilise popular support for their selfish and personal interests.

Adolf Hitler was a classic example. Exploiting the psychological insecurity of the German people in the aftermath of the First World War, his Nazi party built a 'siege mentality', through an efficient system of propaganda and psychological warfare, among the Germans.

According to that ultra ethno-nationalist script, the Germans and their nation were surrounded by external enemies like Russian Bolsheviks and Anglo-Saxon Bourgeoise, and 'internal traitors' like the Jews, Western agents and Communists.

It follows that, to liberate and purify the German nation, and to expand its 'living space', all 'external enemies' and 'internal traitors' had to be exterminated or cleansed.

It was not a new trick in Europe. The corrupt segment of the Catholic Church and its allies among the political and economic elites in the Middle Ages also constructed a 'siege mentality' by exaggerating the external threats from Muslims in the Middle East, Spain and North Africa, as well as 'internal traitors' like the Jews.

The trick was again used by Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. In Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, Muslims, like the Jews in European Middle Ages and Hitler's Germany, were the victims of ethnic and religious opportunism.

Milosevic, for example, was a secular and 'scientific socialist' politician in the Tito years but when the Serbians felt insecure after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, he jumped on the ethno-nationalist bandwagon and transformed himself into a champion of Serbian fascism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

However, there is a critical difference: while the Catholic Church and the post-war German governments have publicly admitted their grave mistakes and errors, and courageously asked for forgiveness, Milosevic is still recalcitrant.

'Self-fulfilling'

A third dimension of the critique of the Huntingtonian thesis has to do with the possibly unintended 'self-fulfilling' effect.

Although he merely analyses some patterns and trends in world politics in the academic tradition, the publication and wide circulation of his books could be exploited by political opportunists as justification for their politics of stirring up racial, religious and cultural conflicts.

To Huntington the scholar, the academic (and rational) question of 'what-it-is' could be distorted by hate-mongers, rabble rousers, terrorists, tyrants and political desperadoes into a political (and passionate) slogan of 'what-ought-to-be'.

As an English saying goes: 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'.