Key insights from The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

By Samuel Huntington

What you’ll learn

Not since the 1940s had a Foreign Policy piece elicited such strong reactions as Samuel Huntington’s piece titled “The Clash of Civilizations?” So furious was the pushback and frequent the misinterpretations of his thesis that Huntington turned his essay into a lengthy treatise, arguing that the strongest alliances and divides between peoples will not be between social classes, the rich and poor, or political ideologies, but between civilizations. Even decades after its publication, it is every bit as controversial and illuminating, and still considered one of the most significant essays on geopolitics.

Read on for key insights from The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

1. The sad truth of geopolitics is that you can’t have true friends without true enemies.

In the Cold War era, nations could be clumped into three groups: the free world, comprised mostly of Western, democratic nations with the United States its flagship, a group of poorer, communist nations, rallying around the Soviet Union, and poor, politically unstable nations that were not aligned with either camp, but where much of the conflict between the USSR and United States flared up. During the Cold War, conflicts emerged around political and ideological lines. In the post-Cold War world in which we find ourselves, lines will be drawn around culture and cultural identity.

The largest unit of culture is civilization. There are eight major civilizations: Western, Hindu, Japanese, Orthodox, African, Islamic, Latin American, and Sinic, or Chinese.

Unlike the past, where civilizations had little contact with one another, we now live in an era where there is constant confrontation. This increase in cultural exchange has given birth to a more desperate search for cultural identity leading many to return to their cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious roots for a sense of stability. In an era of uncertainty, people are looking to what they consider most meaningful.

The sad truth of geopolitics that many have tried to ignore is that you can’t have true friends without enemies, and you can’t know who you are without knowing who you are not. The growing awareness of and connectedness to other civilizations is increasingly perceived as threatening. Civilizations are finding the need to shore up identities, which is why the strongest patterns of association and conflict have and will continue to fall along ethnic cultural fault lines.

2. Competing views of international relations all suffer from significant defects.

There are numerous ways to understand global affairs. Each has its merits but also huge drawbacks. For example, the one-world view holds that a universal global culture is emerging. This view was popular in the years following the end of the Cold War. Many interpreted the fall of the Soviet Union as the final victory of Western liberal democracy. We had reached, as one scholar put it, “the end of history.” Countries will rally around the winning ideal of democracy, and global affairs will become gloriously boring.

Recent events have been anything but boring, however, suggesting that the one-world view is not the most realistic option. The resurgence of fascist and communist organizations, the uptick in ethnic cleansings, along with China’s increasing assertiveness are enough to bury this naïve view.

The two-world order is another common way theory of geopolitical relations. During the Cold War, the world was understood as split between Soviet East and Free West. Other commonly made divisions have been the Occident and the Orient and the global North and South. With Islamic civilization, the classic divide has been Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, or the realms of peace and the realms of turmoil.

This us-and-them thinking is common, particularly the East versus West comparisons. The rhetoric often suggests that the West is familiar and superior and the East is strange at best and at worst backwards and inferior. The fact is that there are numerous “Easts.” They all get lumped into a monolith that is simply “not Western.” Unlike Cold War times, where there was an ideological spectrum with communism on one side and democracy on the other, culture is far too diverse for us to make a similar spectrum. What would we put at the two poles? North and South, East and West, black and white—these fail to capture the world’s cultural complexity.

Another proposal is that nation states are the best way to understand global affairs, arguing that the goal of each state is to secure its own interests and maximize power. This so-called realist perspective on international relations is more realistic than the one- or two-world views, but it mistakenly assumes that nations all go about the process of securing interests and increasing influence in the same ways.

Nations do declare wars, send diplomats, sign peace treaties, and shape the contours of production and trade patterns, but borders are becoming increasingly permeable. There is a significant flow of people, goods, ideas, and money across borders over which respective governments have little control.

The loosening grip of the state has led some scholars to argue for a theory of total chaos. This view of geopolitics takes  genocide, growing threats of terrorism, tribal and ethnic tensions, refugee crises, and threats of nuclear and biological warfare as evidence of growing anarchy. This view is accurate in some sense, but it also fails to tell us much about the world other than it’s falling apart. It’s a grid without a grid, a view that, by itself, gives us little ability to figure out what global events are significant or insignificant, or what its causes or effects are. There may be chaos in the world, but there are still patterns to the chaos.

3. The civilization view of geopolitical relations has many of the strengths of competing theories, without their weaknesses.

It is important to bear in mind that clash of civilizations thesis is a paradigm, a roadmap, if you will. Its significance doesn’t lie in its ability to predict or explain every single global event, but in its ability to do so more accurately than others. There will be stand-offs and flare-ups that lend themselves to other theories, but the main question is what road map most helpfully explains the geopolitical lay of the land.

The perspective that culture is what makes the biggest difference in geopolitics is compatible with the best parts of the other theories. It is true that the world is getting smaller, but far from becoming a unified whole, there is a counter tension in which groups cling to civilizational identity and assert their culture’s distinctiveness. The “West and the Rest” is a helpful view given the West’s historical dominance, but that dominance is slipping, and the Rest is multi-faceted, and most helpfully sorted into civilizational chunks. States will certainly be actors in global affairs, but where they make alliances and where they make wars will be influenced by cultural and civilizational considerations.

4. The West must hold its values as unique rather than universal if it hopes to minimize clashes with other civilizations.

We must be clear when talking about the hallmarks of Western civilization. Fast food and Hollywood and fashion are the images that come to mind for many, but these are not its defining characteristics. Individual rights and freedoms, rule of law, limited, representative government, the distinction between spiritual and political bodies, Greco-Roman influences, and, even more profoundly, Catholicism and Protestantism are central elements, which, taken together, constitute the core of the Western tradition.

Each of these characteristics has been present in different countries and civilizations, but it is the fact that all of these characteristics have been present and sprang from a culture that makes Western culture unique.

The Magna Carta is at the core of Western values—not the Magna Mac. It would be naïve to assume that people outside the West are becoming more Western simply because they’re consuming Western goods. Put another way, behind the Chanel sunglasses are often eyes that see the world in radically different ways than someone from the West. Western culture’s deeper beliefs and institutions will not readily thrive in other civilizations, whatever Davos and UN elites might tell themselves.

Moreover, the resurgence of cultural consciousness is leading other civilizations to reject the West’s attempts import culture. Continued triumphalism, bringing Western values and institutions to other parts of the world, will increasingly be interpreted as Western hubris—particularly by intolerant Islamic and aggressive Sinic civilizations.

A universal civilization brought together through a common language, religion, or political structure is highly unlikely, and it would almost certainly not be Western.

5. Each civilization has a core country that orients other countries in its cultural sphere of influence.

The structure of civilizational powers will likely consist of a core state as a center of power, with concentric circles emanating out from that central nation. The core states orient and speak for the interests of the counties in their cultural orbit. The countries that move toward the innermost concentric circles will be those that most closely identify with and emulate their core state’s culture. This is most clearly seen in the West, Sinic, and Orthodox civilizations.

In Orthodox civilization, for instance, Russia is the country that all other Orthodox nations take their cues from. In Sinic civilization, it is China that will continue to pull the Tigers (i.e., South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong) and other East Asian countries within its orbit. In the West, the United States is the flagship for the West.

Indian civilization will fail to pull Pakistan and Bangladesh into its orbit because of religious differences. This falls in line with the civilizational model because almost all of the world’s civilizations are shaped by a religious figure (Muhammad in Islamic, Confucius in Sinic, Jesus in Orthodox, and arguably, Western civilization as well). Those civilizations with no core state will be prone to instability.

Islam is the only civilization that lacks a central country that speaks for all Islamic civilizations. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Indonesia have all vied for this position in their own ways, but none has consolidated the power and influence to be the flagship of Islam which speaks for its interests and negotiates with the non-Islamic world. This has and will continue as a source of instability in the region with implications for its relations with other civilizations. Add to this a population boom that has led to a youth bulge throughout the Middle East. Youth bulges tend to lead to upticks in violence and extremism.

6. China’s skyrocketing economy and confidence will disrupt global status quos.

China’s economy continues to boom. So do many economies in East Asia. These are encouraging developments for those who assume more trade leads to greater peace and stability between nations. This belief, however, is ill-founded. Increased contact is not the same as improved relations. In fact, growing tensions and jockeying for global prominence are far more likely outcomes than peace.

The economic success of China and other East Asian countries has given them a confidence boost. This new assertiveness has and will continue to change the dynamics of global politics. This disruption will be at least threefold. East Asia’s economic growth will lead to the development of greater military capacities, the greater chances of the Chinese contesting the West—especially the United States—and, lastly, the drawing in of surrounding nations into an economic hegemony, thereby increasing its regional and global influence.

Ever since the early 1990s, we have been witnessing the power shift occurring. The United States has backed down from opportunities to put pressure on Asian nations that, in the past, they would not have hesitated to act on. The United States’ tactic of anticipated reciprocity, in which they make concessions in hopes of East Asian countries making similar concessions in return is interpreted not as a kind, cooperative move, but as a weakness. This will likely heighten tensions between China and the West as well as Japan.

Some scholars are framing things as Europe’s past and Asia’s future, but, really, it will be China’s return to a position of global prominence that it enjoyed for many centuries while Europe was still a barbaric backwater.

7. Islam and the West have a long, bloody history—and the resurgence of religious identity makes it likely this will continue.

Many U.S. presidents in recent memory have argued that the West takes no issue with Islam—just Islamic extremism. This is a diplomatic stance, but not one that accurately reflects the dynamic that has been at play between the West—historically called Christendom—and Islamic civilization. The twentieth-century ideological war between communism and democracy was a minor scrap compared to the often-tumultuous Christian-Islamic relations over the past fourteen centuries.

Historically, Islam’s borders have been very bloody, and their neighbors have often been Christians, both Western and Orthodox strands. Though there has a period of relative peace, the 1980s and 1990s have witnessed growing intolerance in the West . The global resurgence of religions is a clear manifestation of civilizations renewing cultural identity, and the most heated fault line is between Christianity and Islam.

Western assertion and attempts to spread its “universal” values of freedom and democracy will will increasingly meet with resistance. Islamic civilization can modernize without becoming Western. This is a distinction that many in the Middle East and North Africa are making and that the West must also acknowledge if it hopes to avoid clashes. The West’s presumed superiority rubs Islamic civilization the wrong way and exacerbates tensions. Islamic civilization’s inferior economic and military position is another source of embitterment, as many hold the West responsible for their predicament. The problem for the West is not radical Islam, but Islam itself—a civilization that has tended to be in a state of contest with the West rather than coexistence for over a millennium.