A more harmonious clash

Over years, the concept of Southasia has evolved and expanded to advocate for regional inclusiveness and plurality, not just economically but in its politics as well. The idea of Southasia received a setback in the mid-1990s, however, around the time when the political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote his seminal piece in Foreign Affairs, followed by his book, The Clash of Civilizations. His findings seemed to militate against new forms of thinking about international relations, entrenching them deeper and more radically in the conventional notions of power politics, with Islam and China portrayed as being on one side of the fence, and the US and the rest of the world on the other. Although deeply flawed in its historical interpretation and analysis, Huntington's ideas remain an empirical statement on the state of the world as ethnic, religious and other forms of identity continue to assert themselves with renewed vigour and violent demand.

The phenomenon, in a sense, argues that despite trends in thinking amongst some, god, indeed, is not dead, and communitarian identities are not imagined. It also seems to have anticipated that history has not actually come to an end. Where the 'clash theory' went wrong, at least in part, was that it read like a policy statement for empire. Empires, to quote Eqbal Ahmad, need "ghosts and an enemy"; and once the Soviet enemy was destroyed, the erstwhile opposition needed another enemy and another ghost. For the last 15 years, clash theory has generated much debate and undergone many changes. Predictably, the theory of why there are wars between civilisations and cultures, taken to its logical conclusion, has resulted in a virulent form of radical civic nationalism, which openly denies the values of plurality.