In 1993, American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote a thesis paper titled Clash of Civilisations for Foreign Affairs magazine, in which he discussed that conflicts in the post-Cold War world would be based on people’s cultural and religious identities. This idea was later expanded into a book and published in 1996. His primary argument was that civilisations would confront each other on the basis of their differences in culture and religion, rather than fighting on the political, ideological or economic fronts. This thesis came after Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and The Last Man in 1992, in which the author posited that liberal democracy is the only ideology that would survive in the post-Cold War world, marking the end of the world’s political history as no other system would emerge after that.
Critics argue that this theory oversimplifies and generalises the role of cultural differences in determining the chances of conflict between two nations. It also completely eliminates the influence of political factors, regarding civilisations as the primary actors instead of nation-states in the international political system. This critique can not be ruled out completely. Interestingly, however, the conflicts emerging with the dawn of the twenty-first century seem to back Huntington’s theory of the Clash of Civilisations. The question arising, therefore, is whether Huntington’s theory is correct, considering the nature of present-day conflicts.
The Eight Civilisations
Huntington describes that a civilisation is the highest grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have. His theory presumes that the world would be divided into a total of eight civilisations: Western, Islamic, Hindu, Confucian (Chinese), Japanese, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly an African civilisation. He argued that in the case of a conflict occurring in the post-Cold War world, these civilisations would fight each other along their cultural fault lines, and factors such as globalisation, economic modernisation, social changes, and the eroding sense of national identity would lead to a possible clash of civilisations. Moreover, his argument of Western dominance on one side, the Asianisation in the East Asian region on the other, and a Hinduisation of India after Nehru are already on the roll.
A Deeper Look
If one views the current state of affairs in light of Huntington’s theory, it becomes quite clear that cultural globalisation has overtaken the world, particularly emerging from the East Asian countries of Korea and Japan through media, technology and international travel. Similarly, the rapid expansion of Islam has made it the second largest religion in the world, with around 1.9 billion Muslims already present in different states of the world, thus creating a Muslim community which has spread beyond the Arab and South Asian states.
It is also important to discuss the influence of the religious-nationalist Hindutva ideology that has become a threatening force against religious minorities in the BJP-led India. Hindutva influences the Indian Prime Minister’s domestic and foreign policies and has, therefore, turned the South Asian region into a nuclear flashpoint. In the Middle East, a clash between two civilisations manifests in its worst form. The Western-backed Zionist state of Israel has been involved in the genocide of Palestinians, murdering women, innocent children, and the elderly, turning entire cities into rubble. These atrocities have been committed under the guise of their religious claim over the ancient land that had been shared by Muslims, Christians and Jews for thousands of years. The deafening silence of the Western world over this blatant massacre of the people indigenous to that land shows the emergence of Zionism as a shared identity and a force of influence.
In Eastern Europe, the war between Russia and Ukraine since February 2022 is, predominantly, a clash between two civilisations. Ukraine is backed by the Western NATO countries, a bloc created solely against the Soviet Union (the former identity of Russia) during the Cold War. The same bloc has been funding and arming Ukraine, displaying the strength and unity of Western civilisation as a single entity beyond nation-states, alluding to Huntington’s theory of Eight Civilisations.
In a nutshell, this article attempts to test Samuel P. Huntington’s theory of the Clash of Civilisations in the context of today’s conflicts in different parts of the world. The readers are encouraged to debate over this.