Clash of Civilizations Thesis

The essay outlining the thesis about whether global politics was entering a stage characterized by a “clash of civilizations” (originally posed with a question mark at the end of the title phrase) was first published in 1993 in the journal Foreign Affairs and later expanded into a book titled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which has since been translated into 39 languages. The controversial thesis was the contribution of Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008), whom Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek magazine, eulogized as “the greatest political scientist of the last [Page 234]half-century” (Newsweek, January 3, 2009). Many scholars have suggested that the clash of civilizations thesis (although seen as polemical and ferociously criticized) has a significant influence on how American and Western policy makers have viewed the post–Cold War world.

Huntington's seemingly prescient hypothesis stated that the forces of globalization and modernization notwithstanding, future violent conflict—clashes—in the “new world” would come from cultural, primarily religious, differences between “civilizations”—that is, the “great divisions among humankind” (Huntington, 1993, p. 22). “The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future” (p. 25). The primary conflict would be between Islamic civilizations and the West, fueled by a conservative Islamic resurgence and the demographic explosion in Islamic nations, coupled with opposition to Western universalism and Western economic power. Many civilizations would seek to reify their religious and cultural characteristics in opposition to Western values. “Kin countries” that shared civilizational characteristics or shared interests would “rally” to each other's aid, to oppose the West—the primary example being the creation of a Sino-Islamic axis counter to the Judeo-Christian West.

This intercivilizational conflict would manifest itself in two forms: fault line conflicts (local conflicts between neighboring states) and core state conflicts (between major states of different civilizations).

Huntington described seven “civilizations”: Western, Latin American, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, and Slavic-Orthodox. They are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition, and religion and determine fundamental relationships, including the following:

The relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. (Huntington, 1993, p. 27)

The focus on religion as a source of conflict triggered active debate about relations between the Western and Islamic worlds, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attack on the United States. The clash of civilizations thesis has been broadly criticized by scholars all over the world for being too simplistic, for not defining the concept of a civilization clearly, for not sufficiently distinguishing between religion as a distinct factor as opposed to civilization more broadly, and for ignoring indigenous civilizations completely.