Several years ago, while I was a student at Columbia University’s School of In- ternational and Public Affairs, one of the hottest topics of debate was an article Harvard’s Samuel Huntington wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”

The article caused such a furry that a veritable “who’s who” of scholars wrote responses. Never one to pass up an opportunity, Huntington expanded his article into a book by the same title.

After the end of the Cold War, some academics, commentators, and practitioners were optimistic about the positive changes that they vigorously maintained were just over the horizon. Huntington did not see so rosy a picture. In the world now devoid of the two balancing, stabilizing superpowers, Huntington saw a coming clash of ancient, inherently adverse cultures. These cultures, suppressed by the geopolitical realities of the Cold War, would in the post-Cold War world lead to an inevitable and largely unpreventable war between civilizations.

Many, myself included, were not convinced. I was doubtful primarily because, as a political scientist, I knew that politics—and especially international politics—is about one thing: power. Similarly, large powers don’t conquer any more because land is no longer the stuff of power. Moreover, everything I knew about war told me that a government halfway around the world really wasn’t very likely to expend its resources fighting against me because I like Big Macs, wear Nikes, and there’s a synagogue down the block from my church.

Given that, it drove me absolutely around the twist to hear people ask, after the recent terrorist attacks against the United States, “Why do they hate us?” Since the attacks, which appear to have been carried out by Islamic fundamentalists (Islam was one of Huntington’s civilizations), you might be less inclined to side with me in doubting Huntington’s theory. But even given the recent cowardly attacks, something still tells me the attacks were more about somebody’s domestic political power than about religion. Call me cynical, but I’ve worked for politicians, and I know first-hand that a politician won’t give you the time of day, much less organize a hate campaign or terrorist attack, unless there’s something in it for him.

Despite all the hand-wringing about Islam and its clash with the West, the truth is that political elites in the Middle East have adopted nationalistic rhetoric in an attempt to maintain power.

Before nationalism can succeed as a politically potent force, someone or something must convince a group that they should identify themselves first and foremost. That’s only half the story, for it is the political aspirations of the aforementioned “someone” that makes nationalism troublesome. Only then can nationalism, in whatever form, begin to be distilled into a political force. Importantly, nationalistic rhetoric is not necessarily reflective of the attitudes or policy goals of the political elite, but the elites and would-be-elites in the Mideast, having chosen, for power-optimizing reasons, to mobilize their populations with nationalistic rhetoric, find it politically difficult to moderate policies toward the West.

There are three more or less distinct eras of nationalism that can be observed in the Middle East. Each era is represented by a different manifestation of nationalism that surpasses the former because changed political circumstances of political elites make a modification of nationalist rhetoric politically expedient. The three types of nationalism are: civic nationalism (colonization through World War II), pan-Arabism (World War II to 1967) and religious nationalism (1967 to present).

Civic Nationalism. During the 1820s, changes were brought about as the direct result of Europe’s increasing involvement in the interior regions of the Ottoman Empire. While political elites in the regions were just beginning to feel the presence of European powers, it was clear to them that they were powerless to stop the encroachment completely, as they were far out-gunned. The fragmentation of interests between the individual European powers, however, allowed them some room to maneuver. At this time, domestic political leaders needed to garner as much public support as possible, so that they could present themselves to colonial powers as representatives of the population. The best way to accomplish this was to instill a sense of civic nationalism. It was of the utmost necessity, in this case, that nationalism not be couched in exclusionary terms, for local political leaders needed as much support as possible to resist complete domination by the European powers.

The 1820s also witnessed sultan Muhmud II’s successful implementation of changes in the organization of the government of the Ottoman Empire (the plan was known as Tanzimat, or “order”). These changes took on a distinctly Western flavor.

Tanzimat was guided by the principle that those who govern should live by the same laws as the governed, but most importantly, the new organization supposed that the laws should recognize no difference between Muslims, Christian and Jewish Ottomans. This adoption of civic nationalism allowed a system to exist, which was at least minimally acceptable to both the colonial powers and the local political elites.

Thus, the ruling elites retained as much power as possible. Second, at this time in the world, there was a genuine shortage of templates from which to build a state bureaucracy. The notion of the Western “state” as the exclusive legitimate organizing principle had become universal. At this time, the state was seen as both needed for economic development and ethnic integration, which, in practice, promotes the choice of civic nationalism. And should the voluntariness of the mimicry, to borrow Nazih N. Ayubi’s term, of the West wane, the colonial high commissioner and his army was always ready to remind the local populations of the benefits the Western model offered.

Though it took nearly a century for the concept to evolve, the reign of civic nationalism was to be short lived. After the first World War, the colonial powers were greatly fatigued and were prepared to grant independence to the countries of the Mideast.

Although freed from the constraint of colonial oversight and management, political elites found themselves at the head of newly independent, post-colonial states that had to be managed and built up. Using a by now familiar tool of nationalism, the ruling elites would turn to a new form. Pan-Arabism. Political elites found themselves with a framework for political action in place: nationalism. But Pan-Arabism offered four distinct advantages to the fledgling regimes. First, it allowed political elites to contrast themselves from the now disreputable (non-Arab) colonial powers. Second, it provided a ready-made network of friendly states. That is, pan-Arabism provided the opportunity to use the politically persuasive argument that the Middle East was exceptional and that regimes were obligated to protect “us from the rest.” Third, while civic nationalism had been a useful devise through which ruling elites could mobilize support for independence, it presented a small problem for political leaders after independence. The working class and peasants, had gained political awareness due to improved communications, technology, and urbanization. As these classes were becoming politically aware, they latched onto the theoretical, political currency of the day: nationalism.

They saw a way to influence the national discourse by monopolizing upon the vocabulary of the elite. The problem encountered by post-colonial leaders was that the proletariat could not or would not give up this legitimizing, power-granting vocabulary, so leaders had no choice but to couch their agendas in nationalistic terms. Finally, pan-Arabism allowed the ruling elites to help solidify their newly independent states.

At its most stringent, pan-Arabism, a form of ethnic nationalism, construed the state as an arbitrary, illegitimate political sub-division across ethnic lines, which was instituted upon the Arab population by colonizers. This understanding of pan-Arabism informed many of the independence movements in the region, and by extension, it contributed to policies adopted during the process of Middle East state building in the aftermath of independence.

This understanding is somewhat internally inconsistent. Pan-Arabism, by this definition, presupposes not only the existence of “the state,” but accepts it as a legitimate entity. This inconsistency reveals the first piece of evidence that pan-Arabism was more rhetoric than deeply held belief, at least for the political elite, serving more as a useful devise to help them to consolidate the state.

To be sure, there were legitimate attempts to actually put pan-Arabism to the test. One example of pan-Arabism applied is the formation of the League of Arab States in 1945. The league, made up of Syria; Iraq; Saudi Arabia; Egypt; and Lebanon, was established to promote inter-Arab cooperation. Another example of pan-Arabism applied is the effort of Muhammad Ali who almost succeeded in uniting a huge chunk of the Arab world. Only the intervention of the Ottoman sultan and Europe prevented him from creating a pan-Arabic entity. Another often cited example of applied pan-Arabism was the formation of the United Arab Republic. In February 1958, Syria merged with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic.

There was one other way in which pan-Arabism has reinforced the state. Adherence to the principles of pan-Arabism required that Arab states support Palestine in its dispute with Israel. As a result, large standing armies, in uniforms replete with national flags, have become a mainstay in the region. If there is a quicker way to stir up national fervor than going to war, it has yet to be discovered. Because of pan-Arabic support for Palestine, Middle-Eastern states have been required to obtain and maintain many of the trappings of the modern state; a large military apparatus, with the necessary support mechanisms, like taxation, also helped solidify the state as the legitimate actor.

In 1967, pan-Arabism would lose all legitimacy in the Arab world. On June 5 of that year, Israel would launch an attack that would rather swiftly defeat the combined forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The defeat of a “pan-Arabic” coalition effectively killed pan-Arabism as a political tool. Islamization. Just as civic nationalism was replaced by pan-Arabic ethnic nationalism lost its usefulness, pan-Arabism was replaced by religious nationalism in the form of fundamentalist Islam because of the Arab defeat in the Six Days War.

After 1967, political elites were faced with the challenge of finding a new construct through which to conduct politics. Again, there was already a functional construct available for their use: nationalism. This time, however, nationalism would be reincarnated in religious terms.

By the late 1960s, rent and the command economy structure began to catch up with the Middle East. As a result, Tunisia in 1969, Syria in 1971, and Egypt in 1974 all initiated programs to liberalize their economies and political institutions. Spurred on by an oil price collapse and a decrease in per capita income of more than 2% per year from 1975 to 1985, Jordan, Egypt and Tunisia began negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. In every case, except Morocco, these reforms (political and economic simultaneously) proved to be disastrous miscalculations for the ruling elite. They created political and social instability, opening the door for Islamists to take center stage.

Islam seemed to lend itself especially well to political adaptation. To no small degree, this was a result of the fact that most of the Muslim world had never separated church and state. Even in places as secular as Turkey, Islam, as an institution, had never experienced an event like the West’s Enlightenment, which firmly established the separation of church and state in Western philosophy. There is an Arabic word, in fact, that embodies the Islamic notion that the church and the state are rightfully one entity: din wa-dawla, literally, “church and state.”

The term “Islamic fundamentalism” has often been associated with many recent political uprisings, which call for, in the much the same way that pan-Arabists called for a pan-Arabic union, the formation of an Islamic state. Leaders of these movements argue that the West has corrupted the Muslim world and that secular regimes have not provided for their populations. They call for a return to the Islamic state of the past, despite the fact that, as Sami Zubaida observed, “Islamic empires, at least since the time of the Umayyads [(661-750 AD)], have maintained a de facto distinction between the state and society.”

Observers of Islam have recently detected an increasing integration of Islam, tied both to fundamentalist movements and to the ease of modern mass communication. This process is making Islam an objective, discrete entity that it was not in the past. Whereas in the past, local communities interpreted Islam on a local basis, increasingly a community or individual’s “Islamness” is judged against a common yardstick. The implication of this phenomenon is that it removes a certain amount of elasticity from Islam and spurs the emergence of a single standard of comparison throughout the Muslim world which is more fundamentalist and less influenced by local preferences and tolerances than was previously the case. This, in turn, encourages politicians and voters to be ultra-fundamentalist, lest they be judged, not in accord with “standard” Islam.

Many have argued that the Islamization of the Middle East has precluded the possibility that the region will ever take on democratic institutions, which are seen, according to the democratic peace theory, as stabilizing. This argument is unnecessarily hyperbolic and alarmist. Eduard Mansfield and Jack Snyder have argued “countries do not become democracies overnight. More typically, they go through a rocky transitional period, where democratic control over foreign policy is partial, where mass politics mixes in a volatile way with authoritarian elite politics, and where democratization suffers reversals. In this transitional phase of democratization, countries become more aggressive and war-prone, not less.” Given this hypothesis, it is not unreasonable to argue that the Middle East, instead of moving away from democracy and liberalization, is simply experiencing more “reversals” than have other countries and regions.

The assertion that there is an inherent “clash of civilizations” at work in international politics today does not hold up. Rather, as Mark Juergensmeyer ably put it:

“Each side [the West and Islamists] tends to stereotype the other. According to the major Islamic political strategist in Sudan, the post-Cold War West needs a new “empire of evil to mobilize against.” Similarly, he and other religious politicians need a stereotype of their own, a satanic secular foe who will help them mobilize their own forces.”

In the end, the United States does not have control over terrorists, but it does have control over its own foreign policy. If it chooses to adopt policies toward Middle Eastern states that isolate them, it will probably delay in the region’s journey toward, if not a Western democracy, at least a hybridization that provides enough stability in the region to allow it to become a productive part of the world.

How we proceed in the aftermath of September 11, requires that we ask the right kinds of questions. Asking why the people of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest of the Middle East hate us is not a good start. Asking what we can do to further our understanding of the politics of the region, what we can do to encourage reform and increasing our ability to collect good intelligence on the region may well set us on the path to removing further threats to our security.