BRIEF SUMMARY OF HUNTINGTON'S CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS THESIS

[For more detail, see Samuel P. Huntington: Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993 and Nov/Dec 1993; The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996); For a critical assessment of Huntington's ideas, see W.H.McNeill, 'Decline of the West?', New York Review of Books, Jan. 9,1997, pp.18-22.]

Huntington's eight major civilizations.

  1. Western (European, No. American)
  2. Confucian (China and most of SE Asia)
  3. Japanese (Shinto, Buddhist, Confucian)
  4. Islamic (Arab, Turkic, Malay)
  5. Hindu
  6. Slavic-Orthodox
  7. Latin American
  8. African

Huntington's concept of a torn country.

Huntington labels countries in which two or more of the above civilizations exist within the country's borders torn countries.
For example:
a) Mexico (Latin American and Western)
b) Former Yugoslavia (Western, Islamic, and Slavic-Orthodox)
c) South Africa (Western and African)
d) Kashmir (Islamic and Hindu)
e) Turkey (Islamic and Western)
f) Russia (Slavic-Orthodox and Western)

McNeill's summary of the three KEY policy lessons International leaders should draw from Huntington's analysis.

(The following phrases or sentences in quotes are from Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations article. The rest of the text is from McNeill's article. Core states are powerful states within a specific civilization.)
  1. Policy on spheres of influence:
    "the avoidance of major intercivilizational wars requires core states to refrain from intervening in conflicts in other civilizations." In other words, spheres of influence must be clearly drawn among the different civilizations and meticulously observed.
  2. Policy on local intercivilization wars and tensions:
    in the messy regions where civilizations overlap or abut directly on one another, core states must engage in joint mediation "to contain or to halt fault line wars between states or groups from their civilizations."
  3. Policy concerning Civilization versus barbarism:
    • "Peoples in all civilizations should search for and attempt to expand the values, institutions, and practices they have in common with peoples of other civilizations."
    • "In the greater clash, the global real clash, between Civilization and barbarism, the world's great civilizations, with their rich accomplishments in religion, art, literature, philosophy, science, technology, morality, and compassion, will .... hang together or hang separately. In the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war."

Note on policy lesson#3 above: My General Theory of Religion can be of some assistance on this policy lesson. The theory 'searches for and attempts to expand the values, institutions, and practices' that the various major civilizations have in common.

Critical assessments of Huntington's thesis:

  1. Robert D. Kaplan's critique:
  2. (under construction)

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