The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is a 1996 book by American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, in which he developed the clash of civilizations thesis that argues that cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War world.
After the end of the Cold War, some thinkers argued that capitalism, liberal democracy, human rights and a market economy had become the only remaining ideological possibilities. In particular, Huntington's former student Francis Fukuyama proposed in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man that liberal democracy may represent the end of history in a Hegelian sense. Huntington responded to Fukuyama in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, and later expanded his ideas in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled The Clash of Civilizations? and his subsequent 1996 book.
Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict. Huntington argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. He posited that the concept of civilizations, as the highest category of cultural identity, will become increasingly useful in analyzing the potential for conflict. Toward the end of his 1993 article, Huntington stated that this theory was not an argument for the desirability of such conflicts, but that it was necessary to consider its "implications for Western policy".
For Huntington, the clash of civilizations represents a development of history. In the past, world history was mainly about the struggles between monarchs, nations and ideologies, such as that seen within the Western civilization. However, after the end of the Cold War, he believed that world politics moved into a new phase in which non-Western civilizations are no longer the exploited recipients of Western civilization but have become additional important actors joining the West to shape and move world history.Murden S. Cultures in world affairs. In: Baylis J, Smith S, Owens P, editors. The Globalization of World Politics. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press; 2011. p. 416-426.
Huntington's thesis was influential in academia and politics. It is argued to have motivated both the strategies of Islamic extremism and the war on terror, and has been identified as an ideological influence on nationalist politicians such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Benjamin Netanyahu. The thesis has been criticized for exaggerating cultural differences, for failing to accurately predict where conflicts would occur, and for misidentifying the sources of conflict. Critics argue that conflicts such as the Syrian civil war, the Yemeni civil war and the Russo-Ukrainian war (a possibility that Huntington explicitly rejected) demonstrate that the most significant conflicts have occurred within and not between Huntington's civilizational groupings.
Background The phrase "clash of civilizations" was used in 1946 by Albert Camus to refer to decolonization, by Girilal Jain in 1988 in his analysis of the Ayodhya dispute,Elst, K. India's Only Communalist: an Introduction to the Work of Sita Ram Goel, in Sharma, A. (2001). Hinduism and secularism: After Ayodhya. Basingstoke: Palgrave. by Bernard Lewis in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled The Roots of Muslim RageBernard Lewis: The Roots of Muslim Rage The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990 and by Mahdi El Mandjra in his 1992 book La première guerre civilisationnelle.Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (1996), p. 246: " 'La premiere guerre civilisationnelle' the distinguished Moroccan scholar Mahdi Elmandjra called the Gulf War as it was being fought." Even earlier, the phrase appears in a 1926 book regarding the Middle East by Basil Mathews: Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations. This expression derives from clash of cultures, already used during the colonial period and the Belle Époque.Louis Massignon, La psychologie musulmane (1931), in Idem, Ecrits mémorables, t. I, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2009, p. 629: "Après la venue de Bonaparte au Caire, le clash of cultures entre l'ancienne Chrétienté et l'Islam prit un nouvel aspect, par invasion (sans échange) de l'échelle de valeurs occidentales dans la mentalité collective musulmane."
Huntington's thesis
Major civilizations
Huntington divided the world into the following major civilizations:
Western civilization (or colloquially as Christendom), comprising the United States and Canada, Western and Central Europe, most of the Philippines, Australia, and Oceania. Whether Latin America and the former member states of the Soviet Union are included, or are instead their own separate civilizations, will be an important future consideration for those regions, according to Huntington. The traditional Western viewpoint identified Western Civilization with the Western Christian (Catholic-Protestant) countries and culture. Latin American civilization, including South America (excluding Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana), Central America, Mexico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic may be considered a part of Western civilization. Many people in South America, Central America and Mexico regard themselves as full members of Western civilization. The Southern Cone is, demographically speaking, the most Western region in Latin America. Orthodox civilization, comprising Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Romania, great parts of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Countries with a non-Orthodox majority are usually excluded e.g. Muslim Azerbaijan and Muslim Albania and most of Central Asia, as well as majority Muslim regions in the Balkans, Caucasus and central Russian regions such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, Roman Catholic Slovenia and Croatia, Protestant and Catholic Baltic states. However, Armenia is included, despite its dominant faith, the Armenian Apostolic Church, being a part of Oriental Orthodoxy rather than the Eastern Orthodox Church. Kazakhstan is also included, despite its dominant faith being Sunni Islam, though this is likely due to there being an Orthodox plurality at the time of publication. The Eastern world is the mix of the Islamic, Sinic, Hindu-Buddhist (Dharmic and Indic), and Japonic civilizations. The Sinic civilization of China, the Koreas, Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam. This group also includes the Chinese diaspora, especially in relation to Southeast Asia. Japan, considered a hybrid of Chinese civilization and older Altaic patterns. The Buddhist cultures of Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia; and also Tibet, Mongolia, and Bhutan, are identified as separate from other civilizations, but Huntington believes that they do not constitute a major civilization in the sense of international affairs. The Hindu civilization (or colloquially as Hindudom), located chiefly in India and Nepal, and culturally adhered to by the global Indian diaspora. Part of Islamic, located in Islamic countries which includes South Asian countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh; and South East Asian countries of Indonesia and Malaysia. The Muslim world of the Greater Middle East (excluding Armenia, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Georgia, Israel, Malta and South Sudan), northern West Africa, Albania, Pakistan, Bangladesh, parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brunei, Comoros, Indonesia, Malaysia, Maldives and parts of south-western Philippines. The civilization of Sub-Saharan Africa located in southern Africa, Middle Africa (excluding Chad), East Africa (excluding Ethiopia, the Comoros, Mauritius, and the Swahili coast of Kenya and Tanzania), Cape Verde, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Considered as a possible eighth civilization by Huntington. South Africa is a stand-alone nation once part of the Western world, now belonging to the African world. Afrikaners and White South Africans are part of the Western world, while Black South Africans are the majority and dominate South African politics. The latter do not identify as Westerners, instead affiliating themselves with Africans. South Africa is also a Civilization state because it aims to represent the whole of the African world, including the Caribbean. Pan-Africanism is the leading ideology in South Africa; it opposes the west in the international stage. Instead of belonging to one of the major civilizations, Ethiopia and Haiti are labeled as Lone countries. Israel could be considered a unique state with its own civilization, Huntington writes, but one which is extremely similar to the West. Huntington also believes that the Anglophone Caribbean, former British colonies in the Caribbean, constitutes a distinct entity. There are also others which are considered cleft countries because they contain very large groups of people identifying with separate civilizations. Examples include Ukraine (cleft between its Eastern Rite Catholic-dominated western section and its Moscow Patriarchate Orthodox-dominated eastern section), French Guiana (cleft between Latin America, and the West), Benin, Chad, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Togo (all cleft between Islam and Sub-Saharan Africa), Guyana and Suriname (cleft between Hindu and Sub-Saharan African), Sri Lanka and Bhutan (cleft between Hindu and Buddhist, although it can be put under the larger Dharmic civilisation), and the Philippines (cleft between Islam, in the case of south western Mindanao; Sinic, in the case of Cordillera; and the westernized Christian-majority). Sudan was also included as cleft between Islam and Sub-Saharan Africa; this division became a formal split in July 2011 following an overwhelming vote for independence by South Sudan in a January 2011 referendum.
Civilizational clash
Huntington argues that the trends of global conflict after the end of the Cold War are increasingly appearing at these civilizational divisions. Wars such as those following the break up of Yugoslavia, in Chechnya, and between India and Pakistan were cited as evidence of inter-civilizational conflict. He also argues that the widespread Western belief in the universality of the West's values and political systems is naïve and that continued insistence on democratization and such universal norms will only further antagonize other civilizations. Huntington sees the West as reluctant to accept this because it built the international system, wrote its laws, and gave it substance in the form of the United Nations.
Huntington identifies a major shift of economic, military, and political power from the West to the other civilizations of the world, most significantly to what he identifies as the two challenger civilizations, Sinic and Islam.
In Huntington's view, East Asian Sinic civilization is culturally asserting itself and its values relative to the West due to its rapid economic growth. Specifically, he believes that China's goals are to reassert itself as the regional hegemon, and that other countries in the region will bandwagon with China due to the history of hierarchical command structures implicit in the Confucian Sinic civilization, as opposed to the individualism and pluralism valued in the West. Regional powers such as the two Koreas and Vietnam will acquiesce to Chinese demands and become more supportive of China rather than attempting to oppose it. Huntington therefore believes that the rise of China poses one of the most significant problems and the most powerful long-term threat to the West, as Chinese cultural assertion clashes with the American desire for the lack of a regional hegemony in East Asia.