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A Look Back At A Predicted 'Clash Of Civilizations'

It was 20 years ago that Samuel Huntington's essay on what he termed "the clash of civilizations" was first published in the journal Foreign Affairs. The essay predicted the next frontier of global conflict would occur along cultural cleavages — most prominently between the Islamic world and the West. Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose and Robert Siegel discuss how perceptions of the essay have changed over time.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Twenty years ago this summer, the journal Foreign Affairs published what proved to be a very controversial article. The political scientist Samuel Huntington declared a new phase to world politics. The fundamental source of conflict in this new world, he wrote, will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The Cold War was over and the Soviet Union was finished. As Huntington put it to Charlie Rose...

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON: The big question is what will be the patterns of association and of conflict among nations in the post-Cold War world. And if one looked at the evidence, it seems to me that it is overwhelming that nations are going to be aligning themselves along cultural lines.

SIEGEL: There would be a "Clash of Civilizations." That was the title of the Foreign Affairs article, which grew into a book.

Samuel Huntington died five years ago, but the often furious arguments that his thesis inspired can still be heard now and again. And this summer, Foreign Affairs, which is published by the Council on Foreign Relations, marked the 20th anniversary with an issue that collected many of the writings - pro and con - that have clashed over the "Clash of Civilization."

And joining us today is the editor of the Foreign Affairs, Gideon Rose. Welcome to the program once again.

GIDEON ROSE: Good to be here.

SIEGEL: On Huntington's map of the world's civilizations, there was: Western, Latin American, African, Eastern Orthodox, Islamic, Confucian, Hindu and Japanese. Is it fair to say that elite opinion scoffed at this schematic of the world civilizations?

ROSE: They did. On the other hand, it's also fair to say that many of the individual arguments about the specifics didn't get at the larger point, which is really about how much culture matters as opposed to broad, impersonal structural forces like geopolitics or economics or ideology.

SIEGEL: For some context here, in the early 1990s, European communism had imploded. But in Yugoslavia, there was a war that had Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims at one another's throats. That, I think, influenced Huntington a great deal, didn't it?

ROSE: Yeah, I think what also influenced Sam was the fact that there was a feeling out there, after the end of the Cold War, either that the world would go peacefully towards democracy and international harmony - which he didn't believe - or that the kinds of patterns that we see the past of conflict, conflict over ideologies, like the Cold War; conflicts over geopolitics, like the modern European history with nations jockeying for power like billiard balls, that those would replay themselves.

And what he felt was that cultural differences among nations and among peoples would reassert themselves over some of these other factors. And that the largest variable you can think of, culturally, was civilization and that that would therefore be a kind of dividing line that people hadn't paid enough attention to.

SIEGEL: An interesting commentator on the Huntington article was the writer Fouad Ajami, who both criticized it severely in his first review and then, years later, rethought his criticism of Huntington. Tell us about Ajami's writings.

ROSE: Well, one of the points that Ajami made in his additional attack on, or response to the "Clash" article, which we've included in the collection, was that states are pretty wily and they can sort of maneuver themselves and be trickier than the civilizations they're supposedly part of. And that Huntington had sort of under estimated the extent to which states make their own destinies, rather than being trapped in a civilizational mode.

But after 9/11 and the war on terror, when it seemed like there were these broad drivers in world politics in which radical Islam had come to play such a role and the West had come into conflict with Islam in various ways, Fouad argued that Huntington had a point about the extent to which some other factors managed to override normal geopolitics in many respects, or could do so. And that maybe the thesis had more staying power and validity than he had given it credit for.

SIEGEL: In his original review though, Ajami made another point. It was that while nationalist leaders in Yugoslavia managed to emphasize the civilizational differences between being Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim, these groups in most times were remarkably similar in terms of language and custom. And the lines between civilizations are a lot more fluid and porous than they might be made out to be.

ROSE: I think that's absolutely true. And the best arguments, it seems to me, against Huntington's thesis are that it's very hard to pin down exactly what the civilizations are, that the borders are fuzzy, and that people can be many things simultaneously, and that the specifics of the argument - when it tries to become predictive - quickly get very either fuzzy or inaccurate.

SIEGEL: As you said, Huntington fared better after 9/11, or his ideas did. Twenty years after he wrote, having failed to mediate a Mid-East peace or normalize relations with Iran, after a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, a civil war in Syria, the very fitful revolution in Egypt, does the Mid-East start to look like it's vindicating Samuel Huntington, that their problems are cultural, civilizational?

ROSE: Well, you know, there's fascinating things going on here. The problems that the Arab Spring has run into suggests that it's actually difficult to get things off the ground, that it's going to be a long time before what you might consider normal patterns of development assert themselves.

And I think the way to think about this is we know that modernization makes countries somewhat similar. But we also know that it doesn't make them exactly alike and that it can in many respects bring out their differences. And that modernization is not the same thing as Westernization. When you've come into the modern world, when you've gotten liberalism, when you've gotten democracy, when you've gotten an advanced level economic development, will you still end up having dramatic cultural differences that will keep people thinking and perhaps acting differently from each other?

SIEGEL: Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs, thanks for talking with us today.

ROSE: Thank you.

SIEGEL: We were discussing the 20th anniversary of the publication of the article "Clash of Civilizations" by political scientist Samuel Huntington.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ Today: Responses and Developments

This is an excerpt from The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ 25 Years On: A Multidisciplinary Appraisal. Download your free copy here

It is now a quarter of a century since Samuel Huntington first published his treatise about what he understood as an epochal event in international relations: the post-Cold War ‘clash of civilizations’. Since the late 1970s, the talk has been of the impossibility of different sets of values, norms and beliefs living side-by-side in an increasingly globalized world. In 1993, the late Samuel Huntington published one of the most cited articles in international relations literature: ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ ( Foreign Affairs , Summer 1993, pp. 22–48), followed three years later by a book-length treatment of the same issue. Why are the article and book so important for our understanding of the post-Cold War world? Why are they collectively a touchstone for nearly all contemporary debates about the capacity of different groups to live together in relative amity not enmity?

Origins and Development of the Clash of ‘Clash of Civilizations’

Bernard Lewis (1990), the British orientalist, was the first to claim there was a ‘clash between civilizations’ in a speech at Johns Hopkins University in 1957. Lewis argued that Islam and the West had differing values which would only be resolved following conflict. Initially, however, Lewis’s contention did not create much of a stir. This was hardly surprising given that the main foreign policy issue confronting the West in the late 1950s was dealing with what was widely perceived as an expansionist Soviet Union. Four decades later, Lewis’s clash between civilizations had become a clash of civilizations. This was the claim of Samuel Huntington, who contended that a clash between the West and the ‘Muslim world’ would be the key foreign policy issue for the US (and the West more generally) after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. Like Lewis, 40 years earlier, Huntington argued that one of the two ‘sides’ was ideationally destined to prevail over the over. Because of their differing values, it would not be possible for them to unite to defeat humanity’s myriad common problems (such as climate change, poverty, and gender inequality).

The relationship between a scholarly argument relating to, and popular understanding of, a phenomenon is not always clear. Had things turned out differently, Huntington’s arguments on the ‘clash of civilizations’ would probably have been debated only by a few scholars, without much impact on policy-makers or popular understanding of how the world works. But the events of 9/11 made Huntington’s arguments mainstream and centre stage. The 9/11 attacks had been preceded by others which, with hindsight, could be seen as initial signs of a ‘civilizational war’ between the West and the Muslim world. A first jihadi assault on the Twin Towers in 1993 was followed in 1998 by attacks on two US embassies in Africa. The 1993 and 1998 attacks, coupled with 9/11, seemed to some to be clear signs that Islamist extremists were willing to take the ‘clash of civilizations’ to the stage of open conflict with the US.

Neither President George W. Bush nor President Barack Obama responded to terrorism carried out by actors motivated by Islamist ideologies by declaring war on ‘Islam’. President Bush stated a week after 9/11 that ‘[t]hese acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith’. The US response, Bush decreed, was to go to war with al-Qaeda terrorists, whose words and deeds perverted ‘the peaceful teaching of Islam’ (Bush 2001). A few years later, Obama also denied that there was a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the US and the Muslim world. In a major speech in Cairo in 2009, not long after assuming the presidency, Obama sought to reach out to Muslim-majority societies, aiming to set relations on an improved footing (Obama 2009). However, neither Bush nor Obama was successful in preventing a ‘clash of civilizations’ mentality from spreading and gaining strength at the popular level in America, especially among those who identify with the political and religious right. Right-wing political media such as Fox News and certain politically conservative evangelical leaders became more and more bluntly critical of Islam with each passing year.

By the time of the presidential campaign in 2016, the issue of the relationship between the US and the Muslim-majority world was very much in the spotlight. During the electoral process, the republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, stated (among many other things) that ‘I think Islam hates us’ (2017). There was no attempt to clarify that he was referring only to ‘radical Islamic terrorists’ (Trump 2017). Few on the hard-right thought he needed to offer any clarification or qualification.

My argument in this brief piece is not that Huntington’s article and book were so important because his argument was ‘correct’ or ‘right’. My claim is twofold: First, Huntington’s article was and is important because it captured perfectly the end-of-the-Cold War zeitgeist , a way of seeing the world which has endured in the uncertain years which have followed, as exemplified by the hostility shown to ‘Islam’ by candidate (now President) Trump. Second, Huntington’s argument has proved to be an abiding statement about globalisation and the hopes and fears that it conveys. It is almost irrelevant that his focal point: the impossibility of the West – read; the US – and ‘Islam’ – read; ‘Islamic radicalism/fundamentalism’ – living together in harmony was laughingly over-simplified, redolent of the paranoia of someone experiencing the shattering of a stable, safe and unchanging world suddenly and demonstrably confronted with the scenario of the post-World War II paradigm smashed to smithereens. What was a card-carrying Realist, such as Huntington, to do under these circumstances? The response was to find a new enemy and dress it up in the same preposterous ‘baddy’ clothes that had marked the treatment by US Realists of the Soviet Union from the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s and transfer the characteristics of conflict to a new ‘actor’: ‘Islamic fundamentalism.’

It may be worth recalling that a quarter century ago in the early 1990s, the world was just emerging from a 50-year period of secular ideological polarization, focused on the US and the Soviet Union, the poster children of very different worldviews: ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘global communism’. Contrary to today’s triumphalist claims of some in the US, the US did not ‘win’ the Cold War; rather, the Soviet Union ‘lost’ it. Unable to compete with America in a competition for global dominance, its shaky, dysfunctional and misanthropic political/social/economic system spectacularly imploded within a seemingly impossibly short period of time: apparently as strong as ever in the mid-1980s, by 1991, the Soviet Union and its system as well as its parasitic coterie of attendant nations were no more. This left a gulf, a hole, a vacuum. How, and with what, to fill it?

Globalization, redolent of democracy, capitalism and freedom, was the heady force which defeated the USSR. In addition, globalization was also the factor which reinjected religion back into international relations, having been forced in the centuries following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 into marginalization. The sudden demise of the Cold War, as well as the Soviet Union and its attendant secular ideology, opened the way for a new focus on ‘culture’ and ‘civilizations’, of which religion is very often an integral aspect. The 9/11 attacks on the United States were a key event in the debate about the role of cultural and religious difference – especially, ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ – in international conflict, especially in the way that they focused attention on al-Qaeda’s then dominant brand of globalized cultural terrorism. For some scholars, analysts and policy makers – especially but not exclusively in the United States – 9/11 marked the practical onset of Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ between two cultural entities: the ‘Christian West’ and the ‘Islamic world’, with special concern directed at Islamic ‘fundamentalists’ or ‘radical terrorists’. This is not to suggest that Huntington’s arguments have had it all their own way. For some, 9/11 was not the start of a ‘clash of civilizations’ but rather the last gasp of transnational Islamist radicalism. (It remains to be seen if still unfolding events in Mali, Niger, Nigeria and elsewhere are the start of a new phase of Islamist radicalism.) On the other hand, it is hard to disagree with the claim that the events of September 11 thrust culture to the forefront of the international agenda, providing Huntington’s thesis with a new lease of life. Henceforward, many commentators were no longer inhibited in attributing essentialist characteristics to the ‘Christian West’ and ‘Islam’. After 9/11, there was a pronounced penchant to see the world in a Huntington-inspired simplistic division, with straight lines on maps – ‘Islam has bloody borders’, Huntington averred (1993, 35) – apparently the key to understanding what were increasingly portrayed as definitively ethically and racially defined lines across the globe.

September 11, 2001, as well as many subsequent terrorist outrages, were perpetrated by al-Qaeda or its followers; all involved extremist Muslims that wanted to cause destruction and loss of life against ‘Western’ targets that nevertheless often led to considerable loss of life, for example in Istanbul and Casablanca, among Muslims. The US response – the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ – targeted Muslims, some believe rather indiscriminately, in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Some have claimed that these events ‘prove’ the correctness of Huntington’s thesis. In such views, the 9/11 attacks and the US response suggested that Huntington’s prophecy about clashing civilizations was now less abstract and more plausible than when first articulated in the early 1990s. Others contend, however, that 9/11 was not the start of the ‘clash of civilizations’ – but, as already noted, the last gasp of radical Islamists’ attempts to foment revolutionary change which had begun with Iran’s revolution in 1979 and carried on into the 1980s with determined attempts by Islamist radicals to gain state power in Algeria and Egypt. We can also note, however, that 9/11 not only had major effects on both the US and international relations but also contributed to a surge of Islamic radicalism in Saudi Arabia. This was a result not only of the presence of US troops in the kingdom, as highlighted by al-Qaeda’s then leader, the late Osama bin Laden, but also due to a growing realization that the function of Saudi Arabia’s ulema was and is overwhelmingly to underpin and explain away the unearned and unrepresentative dominance of the ruling king, his extended family and parasitic entourage.

The United Nations’ and ‘Moderate’ Muslims’ Response to the ‘Clash of Civilizations’

Huntington’s argument about the ‘clash of civilizations’ coincided with what some have called the ‘return’ of religion to international relations. Higher profile for religion in international relations was manifested in various ways, including an increasing presence at the world’s only global intergovernmental organization, the United Nations (UN). The role of religion at the UN expanded greatly after 9/11. The UN itself instituted a new entity in 2005: the Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), whose name was a direct riposte to Huntington’s argument about the inevitability of civilizations clashing in the post-Cold War world. The UNAOC was created by the UN General Assembly and headed by the UN Secretary-General, following a request from the governments of Spain and Turkey. This is not to imply that the UN suddenly ‘got’ religion after decades of secular focus or that the UN is now the focus of a single, coordinated faith voice. Indeed, UNAOC’s concern with civilizational disharmony is itself a manifestation of difference in this regard. A major analytical controversy in this regard is what is meant by the term ‘civilization’ and how do such entities act in international relations, including at the UN. For example, while today inter-civilizational tensions and conflicts are typically linked to the perceived polarizing effects of globalization, half a century ago the focus was on different values between the West and secular Arab nationalists. When Bernard Lewis coined the phrase ‘clash between civilizations’ six decades ago, he was referring to a then extant ideological issue, that is, the baleful relationship of contemporary Arab nationalists, such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led the country between 1956 until his death in 1970, and who frequently expressed hostility towards the West. By the early 1990s, the focus had changed from secular nationalist hostility to Western security concerns with ‘Islamic fundamentalism’.

Petito (2007; 2009) notes that, partly in response to Huntington’s claims of civilizational conflict, a counter narrative emerged stressing how vitally important it is for harmonious international relations that there is improved dialogue to deter a ‘clash of civilizations’. A key milestone in this regard came in 1998, when the then-president of Iran, Seyed Muhammad Khatami, called for improved ‘dialogue among civilizations’ during an address to the UN General Assembly. Following Khatami’s call, the General Assembly designated 2001 as the Year of Dialogue among Civilizations, an initiative strongly supported by the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Yet, before Khatami’s initiative could firmly take root and develop, his efforts were derailed by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. They were quickly followed by the US-led invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) which de facto killed Khatami’s ‘dialogue among civilizations’ idea. Yet, international concern was too pronounced to give up on the idea of improved dialogue between civilizations and before long the Alliance of Civilizations initiative was announced under the auspices of the UN. [1] The UNAOC was initially suggested in 2004 at the 59th Session of the UN General Assembly by the then Prime Minister of Spain, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, supported by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s prime minister at the time. The UNAOC was formally launched a year later by the UN Secretary General at the time, Kofi Annan. In 2007, Annan’s successor, Ban Ki-moon, appointed a former president of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio, as head of UNAOC. Sampaio held the position until September 2012, when he was replaced by Qatar’s Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, a former leader of the UN General Assembly, who took up the role in March 2013.

UNAOC prioritizes building ‘a global network of partners including States, International and regional organizations, civil society groups, foundations, and the private sector to improve cross-cultural relations between diverse nations and communities’ (2017c). To this end, a ‘Group of Friends’ supports UNAOC, comprising, at the time of writing (October 2017), 120 governments and 26 international organizations (IOs) (2017a). In addition, UNAOC has ‘memorandums of understanding’ with 16 ‘Partner Organizations’, including some IOs also listed in the Group of Friends [2] , such as the Council of Europe and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and some entities which are not, including the Anna Lindh Foundation, the Global Dialogue Foundation and La Francophonie (2017b). The aim of UNAOC reaching out to both state and non-state actors is to highlight its focus: not appearing to be solely a UN-focused, top-down body, remote from the concerns of governments, NGOs and ‘ordinary’ people. The overall aim is to roll back a putative or real ‘clash of civilizations’ and instead develop enhanced dialogue between cultural and religious groups for mutual, long-term benefit.

While the UN has sought fit to establish an entity with the express purpose of repudiating Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’, ‘moderate’ Muslims have also responded to his contention by stressing the common ‘moderate’ ground which Christians and Muslims occupy. Kamali (2015, 9) argues that there are strong injunctions to moderation within the Islamic tradition:

Wasatịyyah (‘moderation’) is an important but somewhat neglected aspect of Islamic teachings that has wide-ranging ramifications in almost all areas of concern to Islam. ‘Moderation’ is primarily a moral virtue of relevance not only to personal conduct of individuals but also to the integrity and self-image of communities and nations. Moderation is an aspect, in its Qur’anic projections, of the self-identity and worldview of the Muslim community, or ummah .

There have been several attempts since the early 2000s to pursue initiatives both within the Muslim world and in interfaith contexts, with the aim of highlighting and pursuing the path of ‘moderation’, to improve interfaith relations between Muslims and Christians. Several initiatives highlighting wasaṭiyyah followed 9/11: six institutional developments and four non-institutionalized initiatives. The institutional developments were: (1) International Assembly for Moderate Islamic Thought and Culture (based in Jordan, 2003); (2) International Centre for Moderation (Kuwait, 2004); (3) Centre for Islamic Moderation and Renewal (Doha, 2008); (4) Global Movement of Moderates Foundation (Malaysia, 2012); (5) Institute Wasatiyyah Malaysia (Malaysia, 2013); and (6) International Institute of Wasatiyyah (Malaysia, 2013). The four non-institutionalized initiatives were: (1) The Islamic Scholars and Religious Teachers Association Charter of Moderation in Religious Practice (Singapore, 2003); (2) The Mecca Declaration (Saudi Arabia, 2005); (3) The Amman Message (Jordan, 2005); and (4) ‘A Common Word between Us and You’ (Jordan, 2007). These and other interfaith and inter-civilizational initiatives and reform measures are significant not only because of their ideas and orientations stressing moderation – in contrast to the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis which stresses the lack of moderation and common ground between civilizations – but also because they explicitly expose incorrect, entrenched perceptions, such as: Islam is incapable of change; Islam is a violent religion; Muslims do not speak out against religious extremism and terrorism; and all Muslims reject religious pluralism and interfaith dialogue (Kamali 2015, 80).

The overall impact of assertions of Islamic ‘moderation’ is difficult or impossible to gauge accurately. However, one of the initiatives, ‘A Common Word between Us and You’, an open letter dated 13 October 2007, turned out to be controversial. The letter was organized and sent out by Jordan’s Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought. It was signed by 138 influential Muslim leaders and scholars from around the world, ‘from a wide variety of denominations and schools of thought within Islam, and addressed to the contemporary leadership of Christian Churches, federations and organizations’ (Marciewicz 2016, 23). It was clearly an attempt to stress the importance of common ground between the faiths and to try to undermine the ‘clash of civilizations’ argument.

The open letter called for peace between Muslim and Christians, contending that followers of both faiths should try to work together to find common ground between them. This is in line with the Qur’anic decree: ‘Say: O People of the Scripture? Come to a common word between us and you: that we worship none but God’ (Qur’an, Chapter three, Verse 64). It also accords with the Biblical commandment to love God and one’s neighbour (Matthew, Chapter 22, Verses 37 and 39). The open letter set in train a spirited interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims. In 2008 ‘A Common Word’ was awarded the Eugen Biser Award, given by a German foundation, and the Building Bridges Award from the UK-based Association of Muslim Social Scientists (‘“A Common Word” Receives AMSS (UK)’ 2008). The initiative did not attract support from all Christians. According to Pavlischek (2008, 61), this was because, following ‘the initial flurry of responses following its publication in November 2007, more careful measure has been taken of “Loving God and Neighbor”’. Pavlischek, an evangelical Christian, writing in the pages of The Review of Faith & International Affairs , contends that ‘A Common Word’ received ‘withering theological criticism’, including its ignoring of the crucial issue of religious liberty. Pavlischek notes that while the Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute was sending out ‘A Common Word’ it was simultaneously issuing ‘fatwas denouncing apostates on a website it sponsors’. The open letter was published in October 2007. By February 2008, the fatwas to which Pavlischek refers had been removed from the website (Durie 2008). The Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought (2009) issued a summary document on the open letter, which also included a commentary. It stated that ‘ takfir (declarations of apostasy) between Muslims’ are forbidden. It is not known why the fatwas were removed. However, for some Christians, this was the most crucial aspect of the open letter, highlighting what appeared to be a fundamental difference between Christians and Muslims and which supported the ‘clash of civilizations’ argument that the values of the different worldviews (Western and Muslim) were so different as to make the finding of common ground difficult or even impossible. Pavlischek (2008) argued that whereas Christians assert ‘the right of individual human beings to choose, proclaim, and change their religion without fear of legal sanctions’, in Islam there is nothing like the same freedom to move to another religion. In short, the issue of religious freedom is one of the main critiques of Islam from Christians. This is because, as Marshall (2016) explains, ‘major factors in contemporary Christian persecution [include] Christianity’s virtually intrinsic association with pluralism and freedom’ (Paul Marshall 2016, quoted in Philpott and Shah 2017, 4).

What of the goal of improved cross-cultural relations between diverse nations and communities, in direct riposte to Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ argument? Historically, neither the Christian/Western nor Muslim worlds have worked assiduously to achieve improved inter-civilizational dialogue and bridge building. Yet, a new and mutually rewarding relationship has the potential to emerge between the Muslim and Christian worlds, where accumulated wisdom and insights for necessary progress provide the basis of a valued coexistence. After 9/11, it is clear that such an improved relationship would be premised not on ideas of cultural superiority, but on mutual respect and openness to cultural eclecticism. In other words, Muslims and Christians can learn from each other and cooperate in the pursuit of shared values. The goal is to engage meaningfully and consistently in inter-civilizational bridge-building so as to develop and deepen normatively desirable values and expand common understandings of truth, to transform an increasingly conflict-filled relationship to one with collective good works serving humanity and the demonstration of the soundness of common values and contribution to civilizations (Said 2002, 7). It remains a moot point, however, the extent to which the pursuit – and the finding – of common ground between the West and the Muslim world is destined to replace the confrontational rhetoric of Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’. We have seen that both the UN and ‘moderate’ Muslims have stressed that interreligious and intercultural dialogue is the way forward. But, will politicians like Donald Trump listen and act accordingly?

[1] It did not help that Khatami was a former president of Iran during an era when relations between Iran and the West, especially the US, became strained as a result of Iran’s nuclear power aspirations.

[2] ‘A Group of Friends is a usual practice both in the UN framework and in other international arenas by which the country which is sponsoring a particular international initiative – whereas it is Spain and Turkey at the Alliance of Civilizations process, Finland with the Helsinki Process, or Canada in the Responsibility to Protect – creates an informal group with those other member states supportive of the initiative to promote it, give support and content and ensure its advance in the agenda of the different intergovernmental bodies’ (Manonelles, 2007: fn. 3).

References

Bush, George W. 2001. “‘Islam Is Peace’, Says President.” Remarks by the President at Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. The White House , 17 September. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-11.html Accessed 12 April 2017.

Durie, Mark. 2008. “The Apostasy Fatwas and ‘A Common Word Between Us and You’.” http://acommonword.blogspot.de/2008/02/apostasy-fatwas-and-common-word-between.html Accessed 12 April 2017.

Huntington, Samuel. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer): 22–49.

Huntington, Samuel. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order . New York: Simon & Schuster.

“I Think Islam Hates Us.” 2017. The Editorial Board, The New York Times 26 January: A28.

Kamali, Mohammad Kashim. 2015. The Middle Path of Moderation in Islam. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, Bernard. 1990. “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” The Atlantic , September, 266(3): 47–60.

Manonelles, Manuel. 2007. “Peace Human Rights.” Pace Diritti Umani , No. 1, January–April. http://unipd-centrodirittiumani.it/public/docs/PDU1_2007_A041.pdf Accessed 27 October 2017.

Markiewicz, Sara. 2016. World Peace Through Christian-Muslim Understanding . Göttingen: V&R unipress GmbH.

Marshall, Paul. 2016. “Patterns and Purposes of Contemporary Anti-Christian Persecution.” In Christianity and Freedom: Volume 2, Contemporary Perspectives , edited by Allen Hertzke and Timothy Samuel Shah, 58–86. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Obama, Barack. 2009. “The President’s Speech in Cairo: A New Beginning.” The White House , 4 June. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2009/06/04/presidentrsquos-speech-cairo-a-new-beginning Accessed 12 April 2017.

Pavlischek, Keith. 2008. “Why I Would Not Have Signed the Yale Response to ‘A Common Word’.” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 6(4): 61–63.

Petito, Fabio. 2007. “The Global Political Discourse of Dialogue among Civilizations: Mohammad Khatami and Vaclav Havel.” Global Change, Peace & Security, 19(2): 103–25.

Philpott, Daniel and Timothy Samuel Shah. 2017. “In Response to Persecution: Essays from the Under Caesar’s Sword Project.” The Review of Faith and International Affairs 15(1): 1–11.

The Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute. 2009. The Amman Message . Amman: Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre.

Said, Abdul. 2002. “The Whole World Needs the Whole World: Establishing a Framework for a Dialogue of Civilizations.” Washington, DC: The American University.

Trump, Donald. 2017. “The Inaugural Address.” The White House, 20 January. https://www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural-address Accessed 12 April 2017.

The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. 2017a. “Group of Friends Members.” http://www.unaoc.org/who-we-are/group-of-friends/members/ Accessed 14 November 2017.

The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. 2017b. “Partner Organizations.” http://www.unaoc.org/who-we-are/partner-organizations/ Accessed 14 November 2017.

The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. 2017c. “Who We Are.” http://www.unaoc.org/who-we-are/ Accessed 14 November 2017.

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — International Relations — Clash of Civilizations: Origins, Implications, and Relevance

Clash of Civilizations: Origins, Implications, and Relevance

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Origins and evolution of the clash of civilizations debate, implications for international relations, relevance in the contemporary world.

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Exploring how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.

Theorizing Modernities article

Why are we still talking about the “clash of civilizations” anne norton and the search for the andalusias of modernity.

The Long Legacy of Bad Scholarship

Why does a case of bad scholarship remain so pivotal for discussions of religion and modernity, specifically concerning Muslims and Islam, in the contemporary moment? The “ clash of civilizations ” thesis is a construct that Samuel Huntington did not invent but did popularize, and it is no doubt an example of bad scholarship. Huntington sits comfortably in a genealogy that includes Bernard Lewis in the twentieth century and Ernest Renan in the nineteenth century. Further, his scholarship is but another example of shoring up the power of European states under the guise of “objective scholarship.” As Dipa Kumar has shown, the vilification and othering of Islam during the time when European empires were expanding consolidated an air of Christian secular/modern superiority. Kumar’s materialist analysis underscores and traces how the othering of Muslims during this time also entailed their racialization: “the political economy of empire…creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism, and Islamophobia sustains empire” (24). For Kumar, “anti-Muslim racism [is] a product of empire” and the “normal modality of imperial domination” (not only the right-wing fringe) with which the construction of “free” liberal societies in the west is constituted. Norton, for her part, reaffirms Kumar’s point that Islamophobia is not about religious intolerance but rather about racism (31) and thus requires anti-racist praxis rather than depoliticized interfaith dialogue. Norton’s book constitutes a robust addition to the genre of scholarship that contests the “clash of civilizations” thesis.

There is good reason for this continued response. There are still many in the academy and at think tanks and other sites of cultural production who affirm Huntington’s racist and jingoistic argument. This argument first seeks to attribute the causes of violence ahistorically to cultural identities, and second, argues—with all the empirical pretenses of social science—for the normative superiority of the “west.” The latter is a construct associated with modernity and secularity, which we should understand not as part of a binary of the religious and secular but rather as a politico-theological settlement. Elizabeth Shakman-Hurd exposes this settlement in Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion .

Norton’s book constitutes a robust addition to the genre of scholarship that contests the “clash” of civilizations” thesis.

Norton’s book captures how the “Muslim Question” is deployed, by whom it is deployed, and the purposes it serves specifically in Euro-American cases. Sexual politics , whether veiling, unveiling, or queering , is evident on all fronts where a civilizational logic of othering Muslims is deployed. Norton’s book illuminates the dynamics of sexual politics and how they operate to exclude, securitize, and otherize Muslims. As I demonstrate by drawing on my encounters with Huntington below, this thesis continues to hold a grip on conversations about Islam in the US academy, even as those who oppose it try to imagine new possibilities beyond it. Following this discussion, I turn to the relationship between “the Jewish question” and the “Muslim question” to help us imagine those possibilities.

Grasping for Andalusias

Norton’s book is a compelling demolition of the persistent orientalism that has defined modernity and, specifically, the project of liberal political citizenship, which was born with western Christian colonialism. Under this project, attaining freedom and capital depended upon slavery, depopulation, exploitation, and genocide in colonial spaces. This is Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus which Walter Benjamin described as propelled by a destructive wind that piled up debris and suffering as it moved into the future. But the “progress” narrative conceals the debris—how it was caused and who caused it. Benjamin writes powerfully: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Norton’s book documents this barbarism.

But Norton’s book is also compelling for illuminating moments of interruption to this progressive and violent narrative. Like Benjamin’s concept of messianic time and his rejection of victors’ history of progress, Norton, to quote Benjamin, “seize[s] hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” This is the memory of Andalus, a moment in Spanish history where one can find “a Europe shaped by more than Christianity” (156). Norton continues: “All three faiths still live in Andalusia. They still mix. They still exchange people and ideas. Catholic schoolchildren on field trips pose at the feet of the statue of Maimonides. Modern Spaniards, like the Spaniards of the past, still move between the Abrahamic faiths” (157). Al-Andalus, Norton underscores, is not “a singular paradise, incomparable and lost” (157). Rather, there are other Andalusias that offer “alternative pasts and open to alternative futures” (157). One such Andalusia, Norton finds in Juha, a “gay Hawaiian Palestinian” band “that challenges not only the clash of civilizations thesis but the politics of sexuality” (200). Juha, for example, weaves Hawaiian kitsch with the traditional call for prayers (201). Another historical irruption is the graphic novel Cairo by G. Wilson and M. K. Perker. The latter, Norton notes, captures an Andalusia by tracing how “the enemy [an Israeli soldier] becomes the ally and friend” (207). Norton reads Cairo as retrieving and reimagining an “ancient, non-Western cosmopolitanism” which unsettles the self-righteous certainty (the progress narrative) of “the liberal model of prescriptive cosmopolitanism fielded by John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum” (208). Accordingly, Norton tells us that “[t]he novel challenges the rule of law as a transcultural panacea; it refuses the divide between sacred and secular that buttresses the ‘clash of civilization’ thesis” (208). Her aim here is not a conservative and reactionary one that would seek to reclaim a “golden age” before the script of European barbarity began to be written on the bodies of marked humans. Neither is her aim to recover a lost tradition destroyed by the imposition of liberal accounts of the law. Rather, she hopes to find in contemporary Andalusias a robust source for an anti-racist re-scripting of the secular. Another Andualisan indicator she highlights is Paul Gilroy’s concept of “conviviality,” which denotes a life together (196) where ordinary and “everyday projects of hybridity and synthesis” interrupt the ugly world that Huntington saw (196). Norton’s Andalusias are sites for reimagining the secular rather than romantic longing for past utopias. Unfortunately, the Huntington thesis is still haunting us and before moving too quickly to these alternatives, we must spend more time countering it.

Her aim here is not a conservative and reactionary one that would seek to reclaim a ‘golden age’ before the script of European barbarity began. . . . Rather, she hopes to find in the contemporary Andalusias a robust source for an anti-racist re-scripting of the secular.

I now turn to my own experience with Huntington to show how his thesis reflects an anti-Andalusian and ideological account of history, politics, and religious traditions. Here, I will highlight Norton’s discussion of the intimate relations between the “Muslim Question” and the “Jewish Question” in Christian European modernity. I will show how it unsettles, like the recovery and reimagining of Andalusias, the Huntingtonian ahistoricity and ideological differentiation between Jews and Muslims as the former become assimilated into Whiteness and the latter remain constructed as Europe’s other.

Haunting the Syllabus

Over twenty years ago, I was a graduate teaching fellow in Harvard University’s Religion and Global Affairs course. The course was typically co-taught by my dissertation advisor David Little, and then alternately by Jessica Stern and Michael Ignatieff as well as Monica Toft as a second professor. For at least three iterations of the course, it was also taught by Samuel Huntington. The late political scientist provoked and upset many students while he confirmed the biases and ideological stances of others. I was a teaching fellow for this course multiple times. Huntington haunted the syllabi in person or through his false and harmful thesis when he was not physically present. At a particularly memorable moment, he exclaimed, “the problem with all religion is sexual repression.” During that moment, he was referring to the sex scandal in the Catholic Church. Still, his proclamation was intended for all who see themselves as religious. A robust contingent of female Muslim students, some wearing hijabs and some without covering, erupted and demanded an apology. He did not offer one. He proclaimed that this was just a fact.

As a professor, I teach versions of this course today, and Huntington is still haunting and lurking in the background and foreground, although I never assign him. Instead, I have students read Edward Said’s critique of the original 1993 Foreign Affairs piece. Huntington’s piece offered policymakers the paradigm they needed when the Cold War framework was supposedly eroding. The same Huntington of the “clash of civilizations” then wrote a book that is highly consistent with the ideological thrust of the “clash.” In the book, he looked globally at the international system and blocks of civilizations (which he used interchangeably with religions) and claimed that inter-civilizational conflict needed to be managed because of the essential incompatibility of civilizations. This value reductionism is harmful as it robs people of their complex histories, politics, and social lives. In a later book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2005), Huntington turns to a discussion of what he interprets as the religio-cultural forces threatening what he deems the “true” Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity (the tripartite Protestant, Catholic, Jewish frame ) of the US. What is unmistakable here is a tragic connection between the “Global War on Terrorism,” the securitizing of Muslims globally (including at mosques and community centers in places such as the UK, France, and the US), and the emergence of Trump. Indeed, the reactionary fear around the ontological security of the US, both in terms of its physical and ideological borders, is highly connected to the policies that Huntington’s thesis has informed, the xenophobic fear-mongering rhetoric it has fueled, and the simplistic ways in which it is so deeply ahistorical.

Over twenty years ago, in the classroom, we were preoccupied with 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Devastating events twenty years later, including a hurried and disorganized US withdrawal from this “graveyard of empires,” should have finally put this clash argument to rest and led to a reassessment of the horrific policies that informed the US in the aftermath of 9/11. Yet, this has not been the case, and given the previous years’ events, it is not surprising. Norton brilliantly takes the reader through an analysis of the torture and sexualized images that emerged from Abu Ghraib and what they signify. Here the “iconic” image of “a hooded prisoner standing on a box, his outstretched arms attached to electric wires” (181) evokes “religious images” but also one of the Klan: “the campaign against the Arab and the Muslim tried to identify Arabs and Islam with bigotry against Jews and Christians, and made the bigotry the license for invasion, war, and war crimes” (182). Indeed, this historic moment during an unjustified war—which built on the conflation of secularity with Christian democracy during the Cold War, the promotion of religious freedoms as a rhetorical weapon, and the “cleansing” of Christian Europe’s long legacy of antisemitism through its acquiescence and active support of Zionism—set the stage to pivot to anti-Muslim policies, securitizing racialized and gendered postcolonial Muslim subjects and bodies, and developing a set of policies called “countering violent extremism.” These policies were too large (and invested in) to fail even when analysts repeatedly concluded that the evidence did not support the ideological claims (as Lydia Wilson has shown). Indeed, it is not surprising that the sequel to Huntington’s “clash” was “who are we” because the securitizing of Muslims as part of the supposedly global war on terrorism directly relates to the consolidation of right-wing exclusionary ethnoreligious populist movements. These movements deploy civilizational language often through the registers of incompatibility between supposedly “Judeo-Christian values” and Islam.

What about the Jewish Question?

The emergence of racist right-wing populism in recent decades in multiple contexts—from France, Italy, and the Netherlands to the US and India—share an anti-Muslim racism that is often conveyed through the idioms of values, heritage, and religion (including laïcité). As I have already telegraphed, one of Norton’s most critical theoretical moves is to reconnect Europe’s “Jewish Question” with its “Muslim Question.” She shares this significant move with thinkers such as Yolande Jansen and Anya Topolsky , as well as Santiago Slabodsky and Gil Anidjar . This is an important move because it is an Andalusian interruption of the logic of the “clash” that assimilated (White) Jews into a civilizational discourse, as Slabodsky notes. It is an assimilation of the Jews into a Judeo-Christian construct that erases Jews and imposes violent supersessionism in the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Anidjar powerfully examines the Musselman in the death camps of Nazi Germany to explain the inextricable link between the Muslims and the Jews as Europe’s others . For Anidjar , 1492 and the Inquisition are significant points in the chronology. They denote the end of Andalusia and the beginning of the racialization of religious communities and their exclusion and targeting as a mechanism of proto-nationalism, the political project of modernity. Muslims and Jews were both targets of the Inquisition, which disrupted the interwoven socioreligious fabric of Spain.

Norton’s foregrounding of the Jewish Question in her discussion of the Muslim Question is a critical interruption of the ‘clash’ and connects with the constructive yet neither romantic nor utopian aspiration for an alternative Andalusian logic of the secular.

It is beyond the scope of this reflection to go into the historical work and contextualization of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish praxis and theologies in the formation of modernity. I’ll here only underscore that Norton shows how a certain amnesia about the “Jewish Question,” which is otherwise definitional of European modernity and the formation of secular conceptions of citizenship, obscures reality on the ground. Any discussion of the “Muslim Question” in isolation from the “Jewish Question” reflects an ideological move that must be resisted. Instead, what is necessary is an Andalusian frame or what Gil Hochberg has recently described as an “archive of the future,” where it is possible to identify messianic interruptions of violent narratives of history. This move is critical for finally pushing the “clash” out of our syllabi. Indeed, it is not so much an amnesic issue but rather a presumption that the “Jewish Question” was somehow solved with the establishment of Israel. Marc Ellis explains it in terms of an “ ecumenical pact” agreed to on the backs of Palestinian natives. This is the same Europe that created the skeleton Musslemann of the camps: the racialized bare life Jewish skeleton, nicknamed “Muslim,” who was clearly marked for imminent death by starvation. The problem with presuming that the Jewish Question has been solved is not only that it was “solved” on the back of Palestinians and through settler-colonial mechanisms, but also that it is nowhere to be found in anti-Muslim securitizing discourses. What is present is a vague appeal to Judeo-Christian civilizational roots, an appeal that itself telegraphs centuries of classical antisemitism. Here it is important to recall the Algerian French public intellectual Houria Bouteldja’s interpellation to the Jews to join the struggle and to leave behind their position as a “buffer people,” which leaves them operating under a persistently colonial logic. Hence, Norton’s foregrounding of the Jewish Question in her discussion of the Muslim Question is a critical interruption of the “clash” and connects with the constructive yet neither romantic nor utopian aspiration for an alternative Andalusian logic of the secular. I conclude by referring to Ebrahim Moosa’s profound point about being a critical traditionalist. What does it mean to be a critical traditionalist within the modern/secular world, but through an Andalusian frame?

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Samuel Huntington’s Great Idea Was Totally Wrong

His “clash of civilizations” essay in foreign affairs turned 30 this year. it was provocative, influential, manna for the modern right—and completely and utterly not true..

The “Kennan Sweepstakes,” they called it in the early 1990s. Decades earlier, the diplomat George Kennan had won lasting renown (and lifelong self-torture) with his writings at the Cold War’s outset that outlined the nature of the Soviet threat to the United States and prescribed a vague strategy to counter it. Now, as the Soviet Union relaxed its grip on Central Europe and then imploded, leading thinkers, government officials, and policy wonks scrambled to define the nature of this new age in foreign affairs (ideally via a catchy term like Kennan’s “containment”).

Francis Fukuyama’s essay on “The End of History?” in The National Interest is only the best-remembered of the ideas that were tossed around. The journalist Charles Krauthammer identified a “unipolar moment” where peace could only be assured by the United States having “the strength and will to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.” With less literary felicity, the political scientist John Mearsheimer foresaw a Europe dissolving into chaos and war as “Germany, France, Britain, and perhaps Italy will assume major-power status” and battle for power. Leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev, George H.W. Bush, and Joe Biden called for a renewed emphasis on cooperation through the United Nations and anticipated reduced military conflict, while, in 1993, President Bill Clinton floated “democratic enlargement” as his guidepost.

This was the context when Samuel Huntington injected his famous ideas into public consciousness 30 years ago. A 1993 Foreign Affairs essay he expanded into a bestselling book with a slightly different title three years later, “The Clash of Civilizations?” argued that the source of conflict in the world in the coming decades would not be primarily economic or ideological, as it had been. Rather, cultural issues would rise to the forefront of the international arena in unprecedented ways. “The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics,” he wrote, making a bold prediction despite the question mark in the essay’s title. Countries should be grouped together not by their political systems or levels of economic development but by civilizational belonging and be “differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion.” Nation-states would still be the predominant actors in the world, but they would battle less over geopolitics as it had been traditionally understood since the seventeenth century than over resurging cultural and religious identities. “The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations.”

Huntington clarified that he wasn’t eager to see a clash of civilizations—he advised Western policymakers to be cognizant of the tremendous sensitivities around cultural issues so they would avoid imposing their values on non-Western peoples and refrain from interfering in their affairs. “The reason he wanted to put the question mark is that he didn’t want the world to go down this direction; he wanted there to be cooperation among civilizations—reconciliation and dialogue,” recalled his one-time doctoral student Fareed Zakaria, who commissioned Huntington’s article as managing editor of Foreign Affairs . That call for peaceful collaboration between civilizations was largely lost in the subsequent furor over the article, although calls for cooperation were admittedly not the bulk of the essay or the book but merely a small component.

Huntington died in 2008, but the argument he ignited has long outlasted him. The debate over the clash has not abated, 30 years on. It is still common each month to read in the media about a civilizational clash or hear elected officials and intellectuals reference the catchphrase, as a random sample indicates. “The Theory Is Alive,” the Indian version of The Telegraph declared in April. In June, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI said that the world was witnessing not a clash of civilizations but a “clash of ignorances.” Chinese leaders recently proposed an “equality of civilizations” in place of the West’s clash, according to The Economist , which reported a diplomat lamenting that “the antiquated thesis of a ‘clash of civilisations’ is resurfacing.”

Indeed, Huntington’s argument is so antiquated that it has already gone through several afterlives and been resurrected, like a horror movie villain. As the twentieth century ended and liberal capitalist democracy seemed unrivaled, it appeared as though The Clash of Civilizations was unduly pessimistic and perhaps irrelevant to the international arena. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Huntington’s book became a bestseller for a second time, as conservatives across the United States and Europe cited its arguments for why Islam was fundamentally incompatible with Western society. When refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East attempted to find stability in white-majority countries, Huntington’s ideas were invoked as a reason for opposing such ventures. Right-wingers like Steve Bannon have utilized the Clash of Civilizations thesis to reject immigration to the United States. Perhaps most surprisingly, thinkers around Russian leader Vladimir Putin have argued that their country is the leading defender of a Christian civilization that the rest of Europe has largely abandoned, providing yet another lifeline to a 30-year-old essay.

Huntington would almost certainly abhor many of the uses of his arguments, given his interpersonal decency, frequent travel to universities and legislatures around the world, mentorship of and friendship with people of color, and lifelong support for U.S. interests. “I think he would have absolute contempt for this type of stuff,” said Gideon Rose, another of Huntington’s students and the Foreign Affairs managing editor following Zakaria. “He would have been appalled at the disorder, he would have been appalled at the prejudice, he would have been appalled at the anti-intellectualism. He was no fan of elites, but he was also in no way a populist.”

And yet, by simplifying the world into categories defined largely by culture and religion and declaring them inevitably hostile to one another, Huntington established an intellectual template for what has followed in his wake. By portraying the West as a unique civilization under siege from mass immigration and Islam, he drastically underestimated America’s assimilative power and most Muslims’ rejection of fundamentalist Islam. Even worse, Huntington’s ideas were so powerful and popular that they deepened currents hostile to peaceful coexistence between Western countries and others. One of the most prescient comments on Huntington’s ideas came from the Indonesian Australian writer Wang Gungwu, who observed in 1996, “This is what is so stunning about The Clash of Civilizations : it is not just about the future, but may actually help to shape it.” Wang was right about that, and we are largely worse off for it.

Huntington was a shy political scientist who began teaching at Harvard in 1949. A quintessential WASP, he’d registered as a Democrat the year earlier at the age of 21, met his wife while writing speeches for Adlai Stevenson, advised presidential nominees Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Michael Dukakis in 1988, and served on Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council. A visit to his archive at Harvard reveals that he offered some thoughts on foreign policy to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992, around the time he was putting the finishing touches on the “Clash” essay.

Despite his long relationship with the Democratic Party, Huntington was anything but a partisan hack. Before he gained international fame, he already stood at the top of his profession for his contributions to subfields of political science. His first book, The Soldier and the State , had an enormous impact on the theory of civilian-military relations. His next major work, Political Order in Changing Societies , was a landmark in comparative politics. And his book immediately preceding Clash , The Third Wave , introduced that phrase to encompass the series of transitions to democracy that numerous countries undertook in the late 1970s and 1980s. (It also displayed Huntington’s knack for fashioning memorable neologisms to describe political phenomena.) Mixed in with these achievements were other books and many journal articles he wrote, alongside co-founding Foreign Policy and serving as president of the American Political Science Association. In a 1999 cover story for this magazine on the decline of political science, Jonathan Cohn called Huntington “arguably his generation’s most influential student of international relations.”

With his skeptical worldview, Huntington was slow to see that the Cold War was ending as the 1980s wound down. But when it did, he anticipated not Fukuyama’s pacific ideal but a “jungle-like world of multiple dangerous, hidden traps, [and] unpleasant surprises,” he said in a 1990 lecture. He added, “We need a good word to describe the international relations of this new world … the right phrase to replace [Walter] Lippmann’s Cold War as a label for this much more complicated situation of ambiguous relationships and multiple conflicts.” Over the next two years, he set himself to that task.

Some of The Third Wave had examined the relationships between cultures and democratization. The book argued that changes within the Roman Catholic Church and economic development had led countries with Catholic majorities toward democracy, whereas before the 1970s, democratic countries had mostly contained Protestant majorities. Huntington attached a great deal of importance to culture’s role in political affairs, and “The Clash” was an extension of this. But his thinking evolved in spurts, and it was comfortable with nuances to the point of being contradictory.

In October 1992, Huntington wrote a memo to Bill Clinton’s campaign suggesting the Arkansas governor prioritize the expansion of democracy. “A world in which Russia and China were democracies like all the other great powers would truly be a democratic and a highly secure world,” he wrote. But that same month, Huntington debuted a far more pessimistic thesis about a clash of civilizations in a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank.

He adopted the term after reading the historian Bernard Lewis’s 1990 essay in The Atlantic on “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” Lewis argued that the separation of church and state arose from Christian principles, not universal ones. Conversely, many Muslims were reverting to what he called the “classical Islamic view” that deemed secularism, modernity, and the equality of nonbelievers with godly people as heretical. “This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both,” Lewis wrote.

Lewis was a conservative-leaning scholar, charged as a quintessential contemporary Orientalist scholar by the left-leaning literary critic and Palestinian activist Edward Said. But Huntington was an admirer of Lewis, being a conservative Democrat, as devoted to order, security, and American traditions as any Republican. And so his appearance at AEI was unsurprising. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural,” he announced. “The major conflicts will [be] between peoples of different civilizations.” He said he was not offering a prediction but a hypothesis, although that uncertainty decreased in the following years.

Huntington circulated a version of the speech as a working paper for Harvard’s now defunct John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, which he directed (the Olin Foundation was a longtime funder of conservative causes). His students included Zakaria and Rose. Senator Bill Bradley and historian Paul Kennedy also discussed the essay, and Huntington’s archives contain a handwritten note from former President Richard Nixon congratulating the professor for writing the best post–Cold War essay and having “raised issues [in the AEI lecture] that no one else, in or out of government, has adequately addressed.” Even before it was published, then, the essay was generating buzz.

When Zakaria became managing editor, he asked Huntington to adapt the paper as the cover story for the summer 1993 issue of a redesigned Foreign Affairs . “I definitely knew it was going to be big because it was so provocative,” Zakaria recalled. “And he wasn’t famous, but he was famous enough that he had authority.” Zakaria admired Huntington’s prescient understanding of the power of culture in the post–Cold War era and his willingness to dispel liberal illusions around the triumph of globalization, free markets, and democracy.

But nobody, not Zakaria nor Huntington, could possibly anticipate how big Huntington’s essay would be. With some changes made to the Olin paper at Zakaria’s suggestion, “The Clash of Civilizations?” attracted more attention than anything Foreign Affairs had published since Kennan’s Cold War essays, and more than anything it has published since. Editors were deluged with requests to reprint the article and responses from other intellectuals, some of which they printed. Huntington was flooded with interview and lecture requests from around the world, where readers seemed as fascinated by, supportive of, or angry about the “Clash” thesis as were Americans. As much as any article in a popular foreign policy journal can, “The Clash” penetrated into the public consciousness and began influencing world events immediately. The U.S. ambassador to Indonesia cabled the State Department in August 1993 complaining that the article had “caught on like wildfire in Asia,” to the point that “dealing with the issue is as great a challenge for policy and public diplomacy as any in the post–Cold War era.”

What made “The Clash” radioactive was not just its unfashionable pessimism or its author’s establishment pedigree. Rather, it seemed to explain complex global realities in a novel, simple way. The Gulf war could, if one squinted hard enough, impersonate a conflict between different countries from different civilizations. The same was true of the Yugoslav Wars then raging , the Israeli-Arab conflict, and China’s opposition to U.S. policies. Any friction between states with different cultures could appear as evidence of a clash between civilizations, as could any friendship between countries with similar cultures, which Huntington called “kin countries.” Even an inchoate sense that other people around the world were just somehow different from Westerners could be justified in civilizational terms.

Huntington also had something going for him that most political scientists do not: He could really write. His sentences were clear, bold, and blunt, perhaps at times to a fault. “Differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic,” he wrote. Huntington was notable for his confidence in writing declarative sentences that simplistically categorized billions of people. The world would be shaped, he said, by “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African civilization.” Billions of humans were assigned to these eight groups. Each group possessed their own “philosophical assumptions, underlying values, social relations, customs, and overall outlooks on life.” This cultural determinism was nearly inescapable and explained the world’s complicated political and economic circumstances. “Islamic culture explains in large part the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Muslim world,” he wrote, minimizing such weighty factors as geography, history, imperialism, economics, and leadership quality. Comprehending Huntington’s paradigm didn’t require knowing any history or global politics; anyone could just look at a globe, see the divisions, and chalk them up to inevitable cultural differences.

Huntington’s blithe generalizations about millions of people recalled discredited modes of thinking. In the book, he wrote that “civilization and race are not identical” but conceded that “a significant correspondence exists between the division of people by cultural characteristics into civilizations and their division by physical characteristics into races.” Civilizations as entities defined by stubborn cultural elements differed from civilizations defined by immutable racial characteristics—but the two were close enough to be kin themselves.

Relatedly, Huntington portrayed the West as unique and fretted that its very survival was threatened by mass immigration and Islam. Mexican immigrants particularly were not assimilating into the United States, inciting a “demographic invasion.” He saw civilizational conflict in such minor developments as Mexican immigrants demonstrating in Los Angeles against a referendum meant to deny state benefits to undocumented people. These sections of his book have largely been forgotten, but swaths of The Clash of Civilization s read like a Trump campaign brochure with footnotes.

Huntington responded to little of the barrage of criticisms the book inspired. He argued that his paradigm was more accurate than any other, and that simplifications of international relations were always necessary. Otherwise, he addressed only what he saw as misrepresentations of his argument, and even then he did so only occasionally. “His modus operandi would be to do his work on a subject, answer a question to his own satisfaction, and then to move on to another topic that he found interesting,” recalled Gideon Rose. However, Huntington, unafraid of being unpopular, did grant many interviews and traveled internationally to address his argument to local audiences.

But while Huntington was largely content to let the furor over his argument rage, he grew increasingly vocal with his alarm about Latino immigration to the United States. When he cast his vote for Bob Dole in 1996, he was voting for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time. “Recent Mexican and Muslim immigrants identify more with their country of origin than with the United States,” he said in 1998. He said multiculturalism had replaced a national feeling among elites, alienating them from ordinary Americans. “If multiculturalism continues to spread, it is likely at some point to generate an ethnic and possibly racist populist reaction from white Americans,” he predicted. “If this occurs, the United States would become isolationist and hostile toward much of the outside world.”

Huntington was correctly, brilliantly anticipating the direction in which the United States was headed, but he absolved white Americans of their xenophobic, authoritarian turn, perhaps because he shared some of their anxieties and prejudices about Latin Americans. His concern about Mexican immigration became a panic, one he said could jeopardize the country’s future, not just its allegedly fragile national identity. His last book, 2004’s Who Are We?, was borderline hysterical about the failures of the United States to remain unified in the face of the “illegal demographic invasion” and cosmopolitan elites. In this final work, Huntington did not just foresee the Trump movement that would emerge more than a decade later; he supported some of its primary grievances. “Cultural America is under siege,” he wrote. “Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s,” he wrote. Huntington suggested that Mexican culture and values were different from American ones, citing observers who believed “Hispanic traits” included mistrust of people outside the family, laziness, low regard for education, and an acceptance of poverty as a precondition to entering heaven. If the United States did nothing to reaffirm its “historic Anglo-Protestant culture,” it would devolve into two countries, he believed: one that retained its traditional values, the other a Hispanicized bloc that undermined what had established American greatness.

After Who Are We? , Huntington commenced a new work about the relationship between religion and nationalism called Chosen Peoples . Sadly, he never finished it, suffering health failures for years before dying in 2008. Even his many critics admitted that few other academics had shifted the world outside the academy as he had.

After 9/11, when The Clash of Civilizations hit the bestseller list for the second time, Simon & Schuster rushed 20,000 new copies of it into print. With extremists claiming to attack major American capitalist and governmental symbols in the name of Islam, it was easy to mistake Huntington for a prophet. Within hours of the attacks, fretful voices worried about making a civilizational clash a self-fulfilling reality. On September 11 itself, Pakistan’s ambassador to Russia said, “This must not be seen as a clash of civilizations between the Islamic and the Christian world. You must pay attention to the fact that every Islamic nation worth its name has condemned this.”

To some degree, his caution was heeded. French, German, Canadian, and Arab leaders swiftly cautioned against perceiving the attacks as part of a clash of civilizations, demonstrating how deeply and widely Huntington’s phrase had penetrated. President George W. Bush repeated that Islam was a great world religion not represented by terrorists and invoked Huntington’s phrase to repudiate it. “This struggle has been called the clash of civilizations,” Bush said . “In truth, it is a struggle for civilization.” Even Henry Kissinger warned against feeding into the narrative of a clash, as did analysts at the Heritage Foundation. Rudy Giuliani, at his zenith disguising himself as a big-hearted statesman, told the United Nations, “Surrounded by our friends of every faith, we know this is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a conflict between murderers and humanity.”

Others were less circumspect, in the United States and elsewhere. “It’s a clash of civilizations,” former Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick said on The O’Reilly Factor on September 13. The Economist praised Huntington’s views on Islam as “cruel and sweeping, but nevertheless acute.” The Atlantic featured a glowing, nearly 9,500-word profile of Huntington, written by the journalist Robert Kaplan. A few years earlier, Kaplan had written Huntington a letter, found in his archives, praising the political scientist for being a bomb-thrower. “The real purpose of the intellectual is to constructively disturb ,” Kaplan wrote. “That is exactly what you have done.”

Indeed, Huntington seemed to enjoy the role of provocateur, and it gradually overtook his vocation as a detached political scientist. The Boston Globe profiled his revived fame in a front-page article, and Huntington believed a real clash was forthcoming as the West responded to the attacks, telling the paper, “I fear that while Sept. 11 united the West, the response to Sept. 11 will unite the Muslim world.” He believed that, as Osama bin Laden reportedly hoped, Muslims everywhere would revolt against the West and foment a world war. Soon after, Huntington wrote a Newsweek essay that was more narrow-minded than anything he had written. “Contemporary global politics is the age of Muslim wars,” he argued. “Muslim wars have replaced the Cold War as the principal form of international conflict.” Few other academics were writing anything like this for popular periodicals at the time. Huntington also strengthened the panic around terrorists using deadlier weapons than airplanes to attack the United States, estimating that bin Laden ran a network “with cells in perhaps 40 countries,” and 9/11 had “highlight[ed] the likelihood of chemical and biological attacks.”

Huntington’s caricatured generalizations about Islam legitimized other voices espousing religious and cultural essentialism. Talk about Islam as a dangerous, monolithic entity represented by its most violent elements became mainstreamed. The military historian John Keegan complimented Huntington’s prescience and declared , “A harsh, instantaneous attack may be most likely to impress the Islamic mind.” The syndicated columnist Richard Cohen wrote that “a rereading of [Huntington’s] article shows that much of it has held up” because “whatever happens to bin Laden or, for that matter, the Taliban, the cultural roots of this conflict will persist.” Another columnist, Rod Dreher, wrote in National Review , “it is unarguable that very many Muslims and their leaders despise non-Muslims, attack us rhetorically in religious terms, and wish to see us die for our infidelity to Allah.” He added menacingly, “if there is an Islamic fifth column in this country, the American public needs to know about it.” Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi got in on the action, declaring that “our civilization is superior to Islam.” But his views were widely criticized, and he took the rare step of half-heartedly apologizing .

In the ensuing years of Bush’s tenure, however, fewer apologies would be made for such denigrations of Islam as a religion and a civilization. As jihadists occasionally attacked Western countries, Muslim immigration continued, and Western armies occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamophobia became more politically acceptable, first on the religious right, then among think tankers such as Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes, and, finally, among more moderate intellectuals such as Martin Amis and Sam Harris. Amis said , “I don’t think that we can accommodate cultures and ideologies that make life very difficult for half the human race: women.” By the time Barack Obama ran for president, anti-Islamic sentiment was widespread enough to facilitate frantic rumors about his religion. A language was needed to sanitize the anxieties of what was often sheer bigotry, and Huntington provided the lexicon and establishment imprimatur.

But even as Huntington’s thesis hardened into conventional wisdom in segments of the foreign policy and journalism worlds, matters took quite a different direction in the academy. In the book version of Clash , Huntington laid down a simple marker to help determine the value of his argument. “A crucial test of a paradigm’s validity and usefulness is the extent to which the predictions derived from it turn out to be more accurate than those from alternative paradigms,” he wrote. Soon after he published those words, scholars took up the challenge and began testing his theory. Among the first was a 2000 paper in Journal of Peace Research , in which three political scientists examined conflicts between 1950 and 1992 to determine if states from different civilizations were likelier to be in conflict, and to assess whether other theories better accounted for these conflicts. “There is little evidence that civilizations clash,” they found. Traditional international relations theories like realism better accounted for world events. Huntington responded that his thesis was meant to apply to the post–Cold War world, not the bulk of the years his critics had studied, although his essay made numerous present-tense statements about anti-Western civilization alignments, such as, “A Confucian-Islamic military connection has thus come into being, designed to promote acquisition by its members of the weapons and weapons technologies needed to counter the military power of the West.”

The following year, two different political scientists looked in International Studies Quarterly at the relationship between civilizations and wars over nearly two centuries, between 1816 and 1992. They, too, found little support for Huntington’s theory. “Most importantly, our analysis reveals that during the post–Cold War era (1989–1992), the period in which Huntington contends that the clash of civilizations should be most apparent, civilization membership was not significantly associated with the probability of interstate war,” they wrote.

In 2002, still another scholar looked at conflicts between 1946 and 1997, also in Journal of Peace Research . This analysis, too, found that “state interactions across civilizational lines are not more conflict prone.” The same was true for the eight years since the Cold War ended, pace Huntington. Again in 2002, when Huntington’s retrograde ideas about Islam were coursing through American life, a paper in the British Journal of Political Science looked at data to assess whether ethnic conflicts since the Cold War that could be defined as civilizational had increased in quantity or intensity, let alone defined the period. Alas, “civilizational conflicts make up only a minority of ethnic conflict in the post–Cold War era.” Nor were those conflicts more intense than those wars waged by states in common civilizations.

The research empirically finding Huntington’s theory to be wrongheaded continued to mount. A 2006 European Journal of International Relations paper found that “violence is more likely among states with similar ties, even when controlling for other determinants of conflict.” Other scholars took aim at particular aspects of Huntington’s thesis. In a 2009 article in the British Journal of Political Science , two political scientists looked at data to assess civilizational clashes not in terms of war but in terms of terrorism. The Clash had gained renewed attention following 9/11 after all, and Huntington had cited jihadist terrorism against the West as evidence of his thesis. “Significantly more terrorism is targeted against nationals of the same country than against those of other countries,” they found. Examining Huntington’s most controversial claim, they concluded that there was “no significant effect with respect to terrorism from the Islamic civilization against nationals of all other civilizations in general.” As for migrants, a 2003 report in Comparative Political Studies crunched the numbers and determined that “diasporas and immigrants did not increase intercivilizational conflicts.” Later studies have confirmed these shortcomings and added more.

Not all academic research pointed away from Huntington. A 2010 article in the journal Cooperation and Conflict buttressed several components of Huntington’s theory, looking at wars between states from 1989 to 2004. “The findings illustrate that Western countries paired with a country from any other civilization, in particular the Islamic bloc, increases the likelihood of violent international conflict,” it read.

But the analysis was an outlier: Most studies empirically testing Huntington’s argument found the data lacking. Peer-reviewed studies aside, the world’s conflicts demonstrate the failures of Huntington’s thesis. Huntington’s wrongheaded belief that the Muslim world would unite in response to what was then called the war on terrorism revealed his limited understanding of the divisions among, and motivations of, the hundreds of millions of people in Muslim-majority countries, who are as divided along nationalist, ethnic, and intra-religious lines as any other civilization. Similarly, by far the deadliest war of the twenty-first century so far has been the Second Congo War, which lasted from 1998 to 2003. Most of the three million people killed in the war were civilians. The ongoing Syrian Civil War has claimed the lives of more than 300,000 civilians. That number is similar to the number of people killed in Sudan in the war that began in 2003. These three wars top the list of the worst conflicts of the twenty-first century, and they have something in common: they were largely fought within civilizations.

And then there is the Russo-Ukrainian War, the conflict with the most potential to escalate into a nuclear exchange. In The Clash , Huntington argued specifically that the future relationship between Russia and Ukraine would serve as a test of his theory. He rebutted John Mearsheimer’s claim that the two countries were headed for conflict because of a long, undefended border, a history of mutual enmity, and Russian nationalism. “A civilizational approach, on the other hand, emphasizes the close cultural, personal, and historical links between Russia and Ukraine and the intermingling of Russians and Ukrainians in both countries, and focuses instead on the civilizational fault line that divided Orthodox eastern Ukraine from Uniate western Ukraine, a central historical fact of long standing,” Huntington wrote. “While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian-Ukrainian War, a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia.” Here as elsewhere, the civilizational approach proved demonstrably, even catastrophically wrong, highlighting the limits of a perspective that overemphasizes the role of culture in world affairs. Putin might eventually conquer some of eastern Ukraine, but that occurrence wouldn’t result from some civilizational kinship. “By May 2022, only 4 percent in Ukraine’s east and 1 percent in the south still had a positive view of Russia,” according to an analysis by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Amazingly, people who had called themselves Russians living in Ukraine are now patriotic Ukrainians. “Cultural and historical preferences have also changed dramatically. Sixty-eight percent of respondents from the south and 53 percent from the east now describe Ukrainian as their native language,” the Carnegie analysis found, consistent with other studies. These evolutions illustrate how cultural identities are far more malleable than Huntington suggested.

But even as research and events have discredited Huntington’s argument, it has found important adopters among the far right worldwide. Steve Bannon, the influential adviser to the Trump administration, has adopted variations of the ideas, saying, “If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers … kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours, or other places.” No wonder that Trump’s White House extensively limited immigration, singled out Muslim refugees as primed for violence, overstated the threat posed by jihadist terrorists, and made defending an apparently embattled American civilization fundamental to its worldview.

Beyond the United States, right-wing figures globally increasingly used the language of clashing civilizations. Pim Fortuyn, a pioneer in the far-right populist crusade against Islam, represented himself as “the Samuel Huntington of Dutch politics.” Russian leader Putin styles himself as the defender of Christendom, saying “Euro-Atlantic countries” were “rejecting their roots,” which included the “Christian values” that were the “basis of Western civilization.” Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister who has become the de facto leader of Christian conservatives, told an American conference of right-wingers that “Western civilization” was under attack by people who hated Christians and globalists who “want to give up on Western values and create a new world, a post-Western world.”

Huntington likely would have despised some of his new fans. He was a nationalist who was skeptical of immigration, but he was simultaneously a small- d democrat who devoted his life to defending America’s interests and its democratic system. Most importantly, he wanted to avoid the clash of civilizations he foresaw, not provoke one, as people like Bannon are eager to do. Praise for a violent, anti-Western dictator like Putin is unimaginable coming from him. But however inadvertently, Huntington furthered the cause of far-right populists everywhere by giving them a language and academic cover for their apocalyptic, xenophobic sentiments. These reactionaries have targeted Muslims and migrants with brutal rhetoric and actions, fueling the global, cultural, and religious tensions that Huntington wanted to reduce. But that is the thing about theories: Sometimes they clash with the real world, to disastrous effect.

Jordan Michael Smith has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post .

The Clash of Civilizations

By samuel huntington, the clash of civilizations quotes and analysis.

“The crucial distinctions among human groups concern their values, beliefs, institutions, and social structures, not their physical size, head shapes, and skin colors” 42

This quote reveals the kinds of arguments Huntington stands behind, and those he does not. Huntington believes that the biggest distinguishing factors between people are their “values, beliefs, institutions, and social structures.” In general, he refers to these as “culture” and defines civilizations as areas in which these factors are unique. Huntington does not believe that physical attributes have a significant impact in distinguishing different peoples from one another. For him, “culture” is more important than ethnicity. Huntington does subscribe to the belief that people are fundamentally separated along certain lines. This quote specifies exactly what kinds of lines he believes in; throughout the text, he will go on to analyze the origins and implications of these cultural or civilizational differences.

“It would, as Braudel observes, almost ‘be childish’ to think that modernization or the ‘triumph of civilization in the singular’ would lead to the end of the plurality of historical cultures embodied for centuries in the world’s great civilizations. Modernization, instead, strengthens those cultures and reduces the relative power of the West. In fundamental ways, the world is becoming more modern and less Western.” 78

This quote summarizes Huntington’s main argument in this third chapter of his first section. Huntington believes modernization has been falsely equated to Westernization. In other words, he thinks people have wrongly assumed that as countries become more modern they will also become more “Western” in their values and outlook. Instead, Huntington actually believes the opposite: modernization makes other cultures stronger by allowing them to define themselves against what they are not. As they gain strength in general, they gain influence internationally and are able to assert their own values over Western ones. Thus, Huntington concludes that as the world becomes more modern it actually becomes less Western. The influence of the West is declining worldwide.

“More broadly, the religious resurgence throughout the world is a reaction against secularism, moral relativism, and self-indulgence, and a reaffirmation of the values of order, discipline, work, mutual help, and human solidarity” 98

In this quote, Huntington attempts to explain the resurgence of religion across the world. Namely, it represents a rejection of values that he identifies with the West. Thus, by reviving religion as an important force for social mobilization—particularly in Muslim countries—populations are turning against Western power, and gaining confidence in their own traditional cultural values. These values tend to emphasize solidarity over individualism, discipline over moral relativism, and faith over secularism.

“The distribution of cultures in the world reflects the distribution of power. Trade may or may not follow the flag, but culture almost always follows power. Throughout history the expansion of the power of a civilization has usually occurred simultaneously with the flowering of its culture and has almost always involved its using that power to extend its values, practices, and institutions to other societies” 91

This quote reflects a central argument in Huntington’s text. He traces cultural trends because he believes that they reveal the distribution of power in global politics. This means that Huntington tends to focus on details and some subjective facts about a given population’s beliefs; he connects this cultural information to its political relevance. For example, he traces how the resurgence of religion in Muslim countries reflects the increased size and mobilization of their populations. Throughout the text, Huntington continues to draw on information about cultural trends in order to build his argument about the future of international politics. Overall, he argues that the flowering of East Asian and Islamic culture corresponds to the expansion of power of these two civilizations, as well.

“While a country could avoid Cold War alignment, it cannot lack an identity. The question, ‘Which side are you on?’ has been replaced by the much more fundamental one, ‘Who are you?’ Every state has to have an answer. That answer, its cultural identity, defines the state’s place in world politics, its friends, and its enemies” 125

Huntington defines the difference between pre- and post-Cold War global politics as one based in ideological alignment versus cultural identification. Whereas the Cold War required countries to choose a “side”—either that of liberal democracy or that of Communism—this new world order emphasizes each country’s identity. A country can avoid choosing sides in an ideological conflict, but it cannot avoid confronting its identity. In this sense, every state has to provide an “answer.” This answer corresponds to a political alignment, as well, because cultural identity is tied to political alliances. Today, countries of similar cultures tend to stick together, while those from different cultures are more likely to conflict. No state is exempt from aligning itself in this general, culturally-defined order.

“A core state can perform its ordering function because member states perceive it as cultural kin. A civilization is an extended family and, like older members of a family, core states provide their relatives with both support and discipline. In the absence of that kinship, the ability of a more powerful state to resolve conflicts in and impose order on its region is limited” 156

In a world order based on culture, a core state is the dominant member of a given civilization. Core states are historically or politically the most stable and powerful countries in a given civilization. They are also typically completely aligned with that given civilization and its culture. We can think of a civilization as a “family,” and of core states as important, leading members of this family. As such, core states are both supportive and help to maintain order and discipline over their “younger relatives,” or weaker member states. This allegory helps readers to understand Huntington’s conception of how civilization shapes global politics in a regional direction; core states are most concerned with controlling their own regions, much the same way an older relative might have a particular concern with his extended relatives’ behavior.

"The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world." 217

This quote clarifies the real reasons for conflict in a world built along civilizational lines, according to Huntington. It is not institutions that are in conflict with one another. In other words, it is not Islamic fundamentalist groups or the CIA that are directly engaged in conflict. The conflict is much deeper, and more basic. Islamic civilization and Western civilization have historically been pitted against one another, and they continue to butt heads today. This implies that the ongoing conflicts between Western and Muslim countries can only be resolved by addressing the underlying cultural differences that cause them.

"The relatively simple bipolarity of the Cold War is giving way to the much more complex relationships of a multipolar, multicivilizational world." 245

Huntington explains that the relationships among core states of different civilizations are more complicated today than they used to be. In the course of the Cold War, the global power dynamic was clearly divided between the Soviet Union and the United States. These were the two major players on the world stage, and other countries tended either to bandwagon with them or oppose them. Today, however, relationships are more complicated across the board because there are multiple competing centers of power. For example, China is an important core state in East Asia, while Japan is the core state of its own civilization, and the West continues to concentrate power in the United States and Britain. These three core states all have different relations with one another. Even within civilizations, different countries interact with a second civilization in very different ways. Overall, this makes global politics more difficult to predict and more complicated.

"A multicivilizational United States will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations." 306

Here Huntington explains the major problem with the US embracing multiculturalism. He believes that America is defined by its Western heritage. By rejecting this heritage in favor of becoming a multicultural country, the United States would be turning away from its own unique culture. It would no longer be a country, which is defined by a holistic culture and set of values. Instead, it would become an institution more like the United Nations, which represents the interests of several different civilizations. No country can exist in which a multitude of cultures are represented equally; one culture must always triumph over others.

"Societies that assume that their history has ended, however, are usually societies whose history is about to decline." 301

Huntington returns to the idea that every civilization is arrogant in its own way. Each civilization tends to believe that it represents the pinnacle of human achievement. They also tend to assume that their civilization will not come to an end, because it is simply superior to all others that have come before. This applies to the West, as well; today, most Westerners believe that their "history has ended," meaning that conflict and struggle are only in the past. While this may be true for a short period of time, it usually precedes the fall of a civilization. In the past, civilizations that go through a "golden age" in which they experience unprecedented peace and prosperity then begin to spiral toward their decline shortly thereafter. This is an important lesson to keep in mind for the West, if it wants to avoid a similar fate. Instead of maintaining its arrogant stance and pretensions to universalism, the West should begin protecting its own culture and recognize the new multicivilizational reality of the world.

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Ukraine defined as cleft country with two different cultures.

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The Clash of Civilizations: a Critical Analysis
THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS Eqba! Ahmad* There are three broad questions relating to Professor Samuel Huntington's essay The Clash of Civilizations?'. First, the essay itself, its conceptual value and its empiri-cal soundness. Second, the reception that this essay has had in the United States and Europe which appears to me to be
Clash of Civilizations
The "Clash of Civilizations" is a thesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post ... by Girilal Jain in his analysis of the Ayodhya dispute in 1988, ... " Nationalities Papers; James Kurth, The Real Clash, The National Interest, 1994; Meaney, Thomas (March 11, 2022).
The Clash of Civilizations Summary
The Clash of Civilizations study guide contains a biography of Horatio Alger, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes.
The Clash of Civilizations: a Critical Analysis
Institute for Political and International Studies. Tehran, Iran. The Clash of Civilizations: A Critical Analysis. and finally the two world wars which originated in conflict. within the Christian civilization itself. Other regional conflicts have causes like nationalistic, ethnic, religious, socio-economic, political and national interests.
(PDF) A Critical Review of "The Clash of Civilizations?" by Samuel
Most importantly, our analysis reveals that during the post-Cold War era (1989-1992), the period in which Huntington contends that the clash of civilizations should be most apparent ...
The Clash of Civilizations Thesis: A Critical Appraisal
Despite the copious criticisms targeting Huntington's epistemology, methodology and ethics - the clash of civilizations thesis flourishes throughout the globe. Any attempt to check this trend requires a serious probing into the issue of how people become so receptive to such a provocative body of knowledge.
Introduction: The "Clash of Civilizations" and Relations between the
The special issue comprises an introductory article and eight papers which collectively seek to examine the explanatory value today of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" paradigm. The contributions jointly seek to explain how and why Huntington's paradigm is still influential for scholars, policy makers, and commentators some ...
The Clash of Civilizations Summary and Analysis of Part 1, Chapters 1-3
The Clash of Civilizations study guide contains a biography of Horatio Alger, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes.
A Look Back At A Predicted 'Clash Of Civilizations' : NPR
The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record. It was 20 years ago that Samuel Huntington's essay on what he termed "the clash of civilizations" was first published in the ...
The Clash of Civilizations
In political science: Systems analysis …in 1993 and a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996, used cultural theory to propose that the emerging international system constituted a "clash of civilizations."Several civilizations, each based mostly on religion, variously clashed and cooperated. The worst clashes, he argued, took…
Huntington's Clash of Civilizations
He later turned this essay into a 1996 book titled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which argues that conflict is caused by cultural differences among civilizations ...
Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations' Today: Responses and Developments
Origins and Development of the Clash of 'Clash of Civilizations' Bernard Lewis (1990), the British orientalist, was the first to claim there was a 'clash between civilizations' in a speech at Johns Hopkins University in 1957. Lewis argued that Islam and the West had differing values which would only be resolved following conflict.
Clash of Civilizations: Origins, Implications, and Relevance: [Essay
The origins of the clash of civilizations theory can be traced to the dramatic shift in the global landscape following the end of the Cold War. Samuel P. Huntington, a prominent political scientist, argued that the world was entering a new era where conflicts would no longer revolve around ideological clashes, as they did during the Cold War.
The Clash of Civilizations Themes
Western civilization is the most recent and salient example of a civilization that strives for universalism. This means that it believes its own cultural values are superior to others. For example, the values of individualism, self-determination, etc as pitted against opposite values of community, authoritarianism, etc.
PDF CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
4.4. Shares of World Manufacturing Output by Civilization or Country, 1750-1980, p. 86 4.5. Civilization Shares of World Gross Economic Product, 1950-1992, p. 87 4.6. Civilization Shares of Total World Military Manpower, p. 88 5.1. Youth Bulge in Muslim Countries, p. 119 8.1. Selected Chinese Arms Transfers, 1980-1991, p. 189 8.2.
The Clash of Civilizations Essay Questions
The Clash of Civilizations Questions and Answers. The Question and Answer section for The Clash of Civilizations is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Ukraine defined as cleft country with two different cultures. The author discusses the existence of both Western and Orthodox culture in Ukraine as an example ...
Why are We Still Talking about the "Clash of Civilizations"? Anne
The essays collected here, and originally presented during the symposium, use these books as jumping off points for further reflection on the continued challenges of Islamophobia in the west and the relationship between theology and the social sciences in the modern academy. ... Kumar's materialist analysis underscores and traces how the ...
Samuel Huntington's Great Idea Was Totally Wrong
His "Clash of Civilizations" essay in Foreign Affairs turned 30 this year. It was provocative, influential, manna for the modern right—and completely and utterly not true.
The Clash of Civilizations Quotes and Analysis
The Clash of Civilizations Quotes and Analysis. "The crucial distinctions among human groups concern their values, beliefs, institutions, and social structures, not their physical size, head shapes, and skin colors". 42. This quote reveals the kinds of arguments Huntington stands behind, and those he does not.
Clash Of Civilizations Essay
Critical Analysis Of The Clash Of Civilization. In The Clash of Civilization, Samuel P. Huntington argues that globalization has united cultures that were normally very withdrawn. It has increased contact between these cultures, which then led to an increase in misunderstanding, resentment, and eventually conflict.
Samuel P. Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations?
The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern international system with the Peace of ...