Clash of civilizations.

On 23 July 02005 with 4 comments

It occurs to me that there are people — bloggers, particularly — who have put a good bit of thought into the matter of terrorism, yet have never read Samuel Huntington’s seminal work, “The Clash of Civilizations.” Not the book by that title, but the original article, as published in Foreign Affairs in 1993. In it, Huntington famously (and contentiously) declared “the end of history” (which is to say, the end of post-Westphalian liberal democracy) and that, with the Cold War over, a new “clash of civilizations” will inevitably come about:

Westerners tend to think of nation states as the principal actors in global affairs. They have been that, however, for only a few centuries. The broader reaches of human history have been the history of civilizations. In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee identified 21 major civilizations; only six of them exist in the contemporary world.

Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.

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Civilization rallying to date has been limited, but it has been growing, and it clearly has the potential to spread much further. As the conflicts in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia continued, the positions of nations and the cleavages between them increasingly were along civilizational lines. Populist politicians, religious leaders and the media have found it a potent means of arousing mass support and of pressuring hesitant governments. In the coming years, the local conflicts most likely to escalate into major wars will be those, as in Bosnia and the Caucasus, along the fault lines between civilizations. The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations.

I can’t overstate the importance of being familiar with “The Clash of Civilizations,” at least for anybody with a passing interest in geopolitics. While some see Huntington as discredited, in light of recent global events, others see him as highly prescient. I count myself, cautiously, as among the latter.

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