Clash of Civilizations—or Clash Within Civilizations?

As parlous as the clash of civilizations might be, the implosion of our own is much more to  be feared.

Seth Cropsey & Harry Halem, The American Interest September 4, 2018

 

The third in a series of three essays celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the publication of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. Other contributors include Francis Fukuyama and Daniel E. Burns.

Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” caused a stir when Foreign Affairs published it in the summer of 1993. Grand theoretical views by eminent thinkers deserve to cause stirs, whether they are right in the main or not—for being wrong grandly can start ultimately useful conversations in ways that being right trivially cannot. But Huntington’s “Clash” caused a stir for a special reason: He flew against prevailing zeitgeist, which had room for only a globalist versus nationalist conception, by proposing the concept of culture, and by extension civilization, as the organizing principle for global politics in the post-Cold War era. His attempt to determine where we, as a species, are in terms of political and social development arguably represents the pinnacle of Huntington’s work as a political thinker............

Huntington divided the world into nine distinct civilizational zones. Western civilization spans the Atlantic, encompassing the United States and Canada, Western Europe, parts of Central Europe, the Baltic States, Poland, and Australia.

Both Japanese and Latin American civilization can be considered loose affiliates of the West, although in Latin America cultural differences make that linkage highly variable.

Slavic-Orthodox, Central Asian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Sinic, and African civilizations encompass the rest of the world’s nations, generally breaking down along ethno-religious lines.........To Read More.....