Samuel P. Huntington’s The Conflict of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order turns 30 this 12 months. The e book was a worldwide hit within the late Nineties and has been revealed in some 30 translations, together with in Arabic, Chinese language, and Bengali. After 9/11, the primary a part of the title virtually turned a family phrase. Huntington had been an eminent political scientist at Harvard, however his 1996 e book made him a world superstar. (I first met him once I was a Ph.D. pupil at Harvard, and we later turned buddies.)
The gist of Huntington’s argument: The top of the Chilly Warfare didn’t mark the “finish of historical past,” because the political theorist Francis Fukuyama had argued in a broadly mentioned article and subsequent e book imagining that the collapse of the Soviet empire would nearly finish the strife amongst states of millennia previous and that liberal democracy and market economics would now rule.
Huntington predicted {that a} new battle would rage after the demise of Communism. No longer states, however the nice civilizations, would conflict “alongside the cultural fault strains” separating them, together with “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and probably African.” Within the twenty first century, the altar would once more be mightier than the throne. Inter-civilizational battle would “displace the political and ideological boundaries of the Chilly Warfare because the flash factors for disaster and bloodshed.”
At first blush, the predictions in Conflict appear to have panned out. Russia is now propelled by not Marxism however nationalism underneath the two-beamed cross of Orthodoxy. The Confucians—that’s, the Chinese language—are difficult the West throughout the board. Serbs went after Muslims within the former Yugoslavia. The Orthodox in Ukraine’s east clashed with the Catholics in its west alongside exactly the fault line Huntington sketched.
Huntington appeared most prescient relating to Islam. This civilization, he wrote in a infamous line, has “bloody borders.” Al-Qaeda murdered almost 3,000 People on 9/11. Quickly after, the US went to conflict with the Muslim nations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The path of terror since is just too lengthy to put out in all its horrifying element—in Madrid and Munich, in Strasburg and Stockholm, and all the way in which to Hamas’s mass homicide of Jews on October 7, 2023.
However upon nearer inspection, Huntington’s predictions start to wobble. Three a long time after Conflictrivalries among the many nice powers, fairly than a brand new conflict amongst faith-based civilizations, proceed to dominate the globe. Throughout the Chilly Warfare, two heavies, the U.S. and the usS.R., had been the lead gamers. Now the battle has been joined by China.
Buddhist-Taoist Japan, anointed as a brand new large in Conflicthas all however withdrawn from the stage. India, with its nuclear weapons and 1.4 billion folks, has defied Huntington’s expectations as effectively. As an alternative of demanding a seat on the desk of the Large Three, not to mention dominating Asia, India retains maneuvering among the many U.S., China, and Russia to extract advantages from every.
And Europe? The previous grasp of the universe is an financial colossus however, strategically, its civilization is an also-ran. Even in the course of the presidency of Donald Trump, the European Union is dependent upon the US to be its protector towards Russia’s stockpile of 4,300 nuclear weapons, which dwarf the diminutive deterrent of Britain and France.
The issue: 27 is lower than one. What feels like unhealthy arithmetic is right politics. The 27 EU members don’t quantity to a unitary actor on the worldwide stage. The EU’s $20 trillion GDP doesn’t translate into political weight, as a result of Europe doesn’t obey a single will. So this civilizational large finally ends up a political light-weight.
As for Islam, the important thing borders run inside this tradition, one thing Huntington talked about solely in passing. We aren’t witnessing a conflict of civilizations, not to mention “The West towards the Relaxation,” to invoke one other well-known Huntington line. What tortures the Muslim realm is the reverse: a tradition of clashes at residence.
Some telling examples: The longest conflict within the trendy Center East pitted Iraq towards Iran from 1980 to 1988—incurring 1 million casualties. In Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, from 2014 to 2024, 350,000 died, based on the United Nations—or near twice that many, as counted by expatriate outfits. Within the ongoing Yemeni civil conflict, near 400,000 have died since 2014—and the quantity will go greater nonetheless.
Likewise, the Christian West has by no means been a bunch of choir boys. Within the seventeenth century, the Thirty Years’ Warfare between Catholics and Protestants claimed as many as 8 million victims, a couple of fifth of the inhabitants within the Central European battlefield.
And China’s civil conflict in the course of the previous century left behind as many as 10 million lifeless. Mao Zedong is alleged to have been chargeable for one other 40 million.
Huntington’s conflict amongst cultures can’t clarify any of those blood orgies. What can? The culprits are, as all the time, states and empires looking for energy, possession, and primacy, irrespective of whom they revere, whether or not Jesus, Marx, or the Prophet Muhammad.
And thus in historical past, if Huntington had been proper, Catholic France wouldn’t have fought with Germany’s Protestant princes towards the Catholic Habsburgs within the Thirty Years’ Warfare. Why did France’s King Francis I ally with the Muslim Ottomans towards the Spanish-Austrian Empire, unified underneath Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1519? Simple—as a result of the king needed to interrupt the encirclement on his japanese and southern flanks. So convey within the Turks. Energy politics beat perception then, and it continues to take action now.
Cultures and creeds had been by no means the true engines of bloodshed—and aren’t in our day, both. Russia needs to swallow Ukraine, although each nations share Orthodox rites. The driving force is dominion, not faith.
On the similar time, there may be the rapprochement between Israel and Arab states, which started with the nation’s peace offers with Egypt and Jordan—after which there may be Israel’s latest Abraham Accords with sundry Muslim states, together with Morocco and Sudan, with Saudi Arabia as silent associate. The widespread foe of all is expansionist Iran and its handmaidens Hamas and Hezbollah.
States hold calling the photographs. South Korea and North Korea are rooted in the identical tradition, as are China and Taiwan. But they’re lethal enemies. Chilly-blooded curiosity beats ethos and religion.
Lastly, a phrase on our current second: When The Conflict of Civilizations got here out, the tradition conflict within the West was in its infancy. It didn’t match into the e book’s scheme.
Eight years later, Huntington revealed a brand new e book. It’s titled Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s Nationwide Identificationand it zeroes in on what he glossed over again in 1996. What then centered his thoughts was the conflict inside the US—and by extension the remainder of the West. Uncontrolled immigration by Latinos and Muslims, he darkly warned, would divide America into “peoples, cultures and languages.” He felt it was time to reaffirm Protestant values and English because the nationwide language of the US.
In Who Are We?Huntington concedes that the deepest fault strains run not amongst clashing civilizations however inside them. And at the moment, the dominant battle inside the US is between those that are “woke” and those that need to conduct a “conflict on woke.”
Even nice minds err, however the biggest revise their predictions once they fail.
