Clash of Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P Huntington, 321 pages

First published in 1993 and generally considered a response to Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man published the year before, in The Clash of Civilizations author Huntington argues that Modernization and Westernization represent two distinct concepts, and that while much of the world pursues the former, the latter is becoming less and less attractive.  Long papered over by Western dominance and the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century, the end of the Cold War and the decline of the relative power of the West have again revealed the deep divisions between different ways of life, themselves slowly developed over the course of centuries and more enduring than nation-states.  The result is that, contrary to widely held expectations, the world is not converging into a universal, fundamentally Western culture, but rather coalescing into cultural blocs with different - sometimes radically different - values, with all the possibilities for conflict that follow.

It is certainly possible - and entertaining - to quibble over Huntington's divisions.  Why is South Korea included in the Sinic sphere while Japan gets its own classification?  If Latin America is considered separately from the West due to its somewhat divergent history, shouldn't the Iberian states be as well?  And if them, then why not France and Italy as equally "Latin" cultures?  What does that mean for the concept of "the West"?  Should the Anglosphere be considered as its own "civilization"?  Is there really such a thing as an "African civilization" embracing everything from Ethiopia to Nigeria to South Africa?  Such arguments are beside the point except to the extent that they are the point - such arguments as whether the Ukraine is "Orthodox" or "Western" or whether Tibet is "Sinic" or "Buddhist" or whether the UK is a part of "Europe" are even now being debated on streets, in parliaments, and on battlefields around the world.