When the Cold War ended, the search began for a framework that could explain the emerging order. The political scientist Samuel Huntington offered a provocative contribution to that debate in his 1993 Foreign Affairs essay, “The Clash of Civilizations?” As the ideological blocs of the previous decades disappeared and modern technology brought the world closer together than ever before, “the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural,” Huntington argued. “The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”
The essay immediately caused a stir. The subsequent issue of Foreign Affairs opened with a wide-ranging set of responses, some more sympathetic to Huntington’s conclusions than others. “Civilizations do not control states,” Fouad Ajami argued. “States control civilizations.” Kishore Mahbubani pointed out that the West’s own actions stoked tensions and accelerated its relative decline. And Jeane Kirkpatrick offered counterpoints to Huntington’s description of discrete civilizations, citing the diversity and fluid identities of the countries they contained.
Revisiting “The Clash” three decades later, there is still plenty to debate. But one of Huntington’s warnings remains particularly apt. “Differences do not necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily mean violence,” he wrote. In “a world of different civilizations,” each “will have to learn to coexist with the others.”
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— Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Editor
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