The Clash of Civilizations Was an Inside Job

"The gist of Huntington's argument: The end of the Cold War did not mark the "end of history," as the political theorist Francis Fukuyama had argued in a widely discussed article and subsequent book imagining that the collapse of the Soviet empire would virtually end the strife among states of millennia past and that liberal democracy and market economics would now rule."

"Huntington predicted that a new conflict would rage after the demise of Communism. Now not states, but the great civilizations, would clash "along the cultural fault lines" separating them, including "Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African." In the 21st century, the altar would again be mightier than the throne. Inter-civilizational conflict would "displace the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed.""

"At first blush, the predictions in Clash seem to have panned out. Russia is now propelled by not Marxism but nationalism under the two-beamed cross of Orthodoxy. The Confucians-that is, the Chinese-are challenging the West across the board. Serbs went after Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. The Orthodox in Ukraine's east clashed with the Catholics in its west along precisely the fault line Huntington sketched."

End of the Cold War did not produce a universal triumph of liberal democracy and market economics; global conflict reoriented around civilizational identities rather than ideological blocs. Great civilizations — Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African — became primary axes of contention, clashing along cultural fault lines. Inter-civilizational disputes displaced Cold War political and ideological boundaries as flash points for crisis and bloodshed. Post–Cold War developments include Orthodoxy-infused Russian nationalism, a Confucian (Chinese) challenge to the West, ethnic and religious violence in the Balkans, and east–west fissures within Ukraine.

Read at The Atlantic