Do Conflicts between Cultures Really Exist?A Historical and Methodological Reflection

Over the recent years, political scientists and sociologists have debated about the so-called “conflict of cultures”, with reference to a well-known book by S. P. Huntington. The debate appears to have been mainly ideological: on one side, the followers of Huntington’s perspective have argued about the danger of “cultures” (Islamic, Orthodox, Asian, and so on) threatening - both economically and politically - the Western way of life (i.e. North American and European); on the other, the “cosmopolitans” or “optimistic globalists” have continued to speak of a growing integration of cultures, suggesting that, after the collapse of the communist empire, the market economy can really unify the world (see the famous essay by Francis Fukuyama). In this essay, Alessandro Dal Lago tries to overcome both points of view, assuming that they share a deterministic and holistic concept of culture, which allows to shape the behavior of social actors, being, what’s more, homogeneous and stable, i. e. independent from historical processes. The essay deconstructs the very idea of the clash of civilizations (Huntington and followers) showing how it has always blurred the contradictory relations (opposition and attraction) between, for instance, Islam and Western World even during the Crusades or Christianity and Ottoman Empire in their centuries-long wars. As to recent times, the essay’s main thesis is that the identity of migrants in Europe can be described only as the result of complex interactions between the national origins and the culture of the countries where migrants happen to live.