The essay “The Clash of Civilizations?” was written by Samuel P. Huntington and was first published on June 1, 1993, in the summer edition of Foreign Affairs magazine. Born in New York City in 1921, Huntington was a political scientist and held the prestigious Albert J Weatherhead III University Professor position at Harvard University. He also served as the White House coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council during the Carter administration. Written after the end of the Cold War, “The Clash of Civilizations?” argues that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the next global conflict will be between civilizations rather than countries and will reflect cultural and religious differences rather than ideological ones. In particular, the essay explores The Influence of Civilizational Identity, The Dominance of the West, and Islam as a Rival to the West.

This guide refers to the summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Content Warning: The source text references terrorism, warfare, and racial and religious prejudice and has drawn criticism for perceived racism and bias, particularly Islamophobia. This guide refers to these topics.

Summary

Huntington opens this essay by explaining that world politics are entering a new phase. Many intellectuals have posited theories of what this may look like. Some say that there will be a return to the traditional, pre-World War II rivalries between nations, while others imagine that the nation-state will decline in importance as tribalism and globalism grow. Huntington judges these to be only partial explanations at best, as they are missing a crucial central aspect.

Huntington argues that clashes between civilizations will be the next phase of conflict. He hypothesizes that the source of conflict in this new phase of history will not be ideological or economic but cultural, stating, “The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future” (Paragraph 2). He then paints a history of world conflict. In the pre-modern era, monarchs fought over territory and power. This laid the groundwork for the creation of nation-states, and with the advent of the French Revolution and the end of monarchy, world conflict moved into a phase of conflict between nations. Huntington quotes historian R. R. Palmer: “The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun” (Paragraph 3).

This phase eventually ended with World War I and the Russian Revolution, after which ideological conflicts between political and economic belief systems became the main source of geopolitical clashes. Fascism-Nazism fought with communism and liberal democracy during World War II, and in the Cold War, communism fought with liberal democracy. The Cold War wasn’t a conflict between traditional nation-states but between ideological blocs.

Huntington defines civilizations as cultural entities, the highest level of cultural grouping and one that encompasses nationality, locality, and individual concepts of identity. Civilizations may involve a large number of people, like China. They can be made up of several nations (as with “the West”) or just one (as with Japan). They are dynamic entities that rise, fall, split, and blend together with other civilizations.

Huntington describes several factors that create tensions between civilizations and can lead to conflict. Some are basic differences like language, traditions, history, culture, and religion, the last of which he views as most important. Different civilizations will have different views on the relationships between men and women, children and parents, and humanity and God. These differences are established over centuries and aren’t easily changed. Huntington is careful to clarify that these differences do not always lead to conflict and that conflict doesn’t always mean bloodshed. However, the differences between civilizations have been the source of some of the most prolonged and violent conflicts in history.

The increasingly interconnected world of the 20th century led to people from different civilizations encountering each other more often, and these interactions caused people to develop a civilization consciousness: an awareness of the cultural differences between them and other peoples. This invigorated animosity that stretches (or is imagined to stretch) back into history. As modernization and social change swept across the world, people became increasingly detached from their local identities, which also weakened the idea of a nation-state as an aspect of individual identity. World religion filled this gap, leading to the revival of “fundamentalist” religious movements in Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Meanwhile, the West has grown dominant in global and cultural affairs, which has prompted a response—a revival of indigenous identities, or a “return to roots” movement. These cultural identities are slow to change and harder to compromise over. The resulting civilizations clash on two levels: the micro level, where groups on the fault line between civilizations struggle, and the macro level, where states from different civilizations compete for military and economic dominance.

At the essay’s midpoint, Huntington explains how the fault lines between different civilizations are increasingly replacing the geopolitical boundaries and alliances of the Cold War. He uses several contemporary and historical examples in Europe and across the globe, but he makes special mention of the clashes between Western Christianity and Islam. After World War II, many Western powers withdrew from their former colonial holdings. This was followed by the growth of Arab nationalism and fundamentalism. Western reliance on oil in the Persian Gulf forced the two civilizations to interact and clash, culminating in the First Gulf War in the 1990s.

Huntington then focuses on other historical clashes between various civilizations. These include but aren’t limited to Arab Islamic groups and African peoples, Orthodox Christianity and Islam in Bosnia and Sarajevo, and the hostilities between the Serb and Albanian peoples. He points out that in these examples, cultural differences exacerbated conflict. As evidence, he notes that economic issues between the US and Europe are no less serious, but they don’t have the same intensity thanks to a shared civilizational identity. He concludes by arguing that the most consistent and violent clashes on the Eurasian continent have been on the borders of Islamic civilization.

Huntington says that a group or state that becomes involved in war with another civilization will try to rally support from members of its own civilization. He credits S. Greenway with creating the term that describes this “kin-country” syndrome. Huntington claims that this will replace ideology as the principal basis of cooperation, and he illustrates this by citing the Gulf War. The situation was originally a conflict between Arab peoples, but when Western powers entered the conflict, Saddam Hussein defined the conflict as a war of civilizations between Islam and the West. This garnered sympathy from those of a similar cultural background and eventually led to some Arab governments distancing themselves from or opposing Western efforts to apply pressure on Iraq. He also uses examples of Turkey and Azerbaijan and the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Huntington paints a picture of the situation that he believes the West will be facing going forward. He points out that the West is at the peak of its power and that conflict between Western states is nearly unthinkable. The West faces no economic challengers, and it dominates international political and security institutions. However, this monopoly on power and the struggle for institutional and military dominance are invariably going to be sources of conflict between the West and other civilizations. Differences in culture will be another. Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations, and Western efforts to propagate Western norms will result instead in a reaction and a reaffirmation of indigenous values. Huntington uses this to argue that the central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be the conflict between “the West and the Rest”: the response of non-Western civilizations to Western power and values.

Huntington then argues that as people define themselves increasingly by civilization, countries with large populations of different civilizations are at risk of strife and perhaps disintegration. He calls these “torn countries.” In some cases, the leaders of a torn country may want to Westernize, but the history, culture, and traditions of their people will push against this. To successfully redefine its civilizational identity, a torn country must meet three requirements. First, its political and economic elite must support this move. Second, its public must accept the redefinition. Third, the dominant forces among the civilization that the torn country is trying to enter have to be willing to accept it.

Huntington explains that harmony between some civilizations is more likely than with others. The differences between Latin American culture and that of the United States are much lesser than the differences between Europe and Slavic-Orthodox Russia, in his example. However, some civilizations that would otherwise be in conflict may reach a point of agreement over a rival. He cites the alliances between some Arab states and China when it comes to the acquisition and proliferation of weapons, a response to the West’s dominance. He calls this the Confucian-Islamic connection.

In his conclusion, Huntington says that other identities will continue to exist alongside civilizational ones. Moreover, nation-states will remain political actors rather than merging along civilizational lines. His argument is instead that civilizational differences are significant and that civilization consciousness is increasing, which will lead to civilizational conflicts eclipsing other forms of strife. He says that the central global conflict in the next century will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states.

The West should build its policy around this likelihood, with short-term policy focused on promoting greater cooperation and unity within its own civilization and similar neighboring civilizations. To limit the military expansion of Islamic-Confucian states and to support groups sympathetic to Western values in the long term, the West will have to maintain its economic and military power as non-Western civilizations modernize and grow. The West will also have to develop a deeper understanding of the cultural and religious backgrounds of other civilizations and find shared ground to create a world where different civilizations can coexist.