Book summary “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order”: summary

Introduction

You live in a world where the old certainties of the Cold War have collapsed, leaving you to navigate a confusing global landscape. You might wonder if globalization brings universal peace or if deeper divisions are tearing nations apart.

In the post-Cold War world, global politics is being reconfigured along cultural and civilizational lines where the primary sources of conflict involve different cultural entities rather than socio-economic classes.

Samuel P. Huntington explains this new reality by examining how civilizations shape international conflict and cooperation. You will discover why modernization does not equal Westernization and how cultural identity replaces ideology.

The book answers several key questions:

• How do cultural boundaries replace ideological borders?
• Why are non-Western societies modernizing without adopting Western values?
• What drives the resurgence of religion and traditional identities?

1. Paradigms of World Politics

The post-Cold War world requires new intellectual tools to make sense of international relations. You must abandon outdated assumptions that treat global politics as a simple continuation of the past.

Post-Cold War international relations are best understood through a civilizational framework rather than flawed paradigms like the one world, two worlds, statist, or chaos models.

Samuel P. Huntington explains that paradigms help you order and generalize about reality. You need these maps to understand causal relationships among phenomena and anticipate future developments. Good models also help you distinguish what is important from what is unimportant and show you what paths you should take to achieve your goals.

Four flawed intellectual paradigms have dominated discussions since the collapse of the Soviet Union:

• The harmonious "one world" paradigm
• The bifurcated "two worlds" rich-versus-poor or East-versus-West dichotomy
• The "realist" statist 184-state model
• The "chaos" model highlighting anarchy without order

Each model captures some elements of reality but fails to provide a comprehensive guide. The "one world" model ignores ongoing ethnic and cultural conflicts. The "two worlds" view oversimplifies a diverse non-West. The statist paradigm misses how culture shapes national interests. The chaos model highlights anarchy without offering structural order.

Dividing the world into seven or eight major civilizations offers an optimal analytical framework. This civilizational approach balances parsimonious simplification with empirical reality. It incorporates elements of other paradigms by recognizing that nation-states remain key actors.

The Civilizational Approach

Cultural identity has become the most meaningful basis for human association and division. You see people actively mobilizing around cultural symbols, flags, and heritage to define their identities.

On April 18, 1994, two thousand people rallied in Sarajevo waving Saudi and Turkish flags. On October 16, 1994, in Los Angeles 70,000 people marched beneath Mexican flags to protest Proposition 187. That initiative later won approval from 59 percent of California voters.

Culture acts as both a unifying force for peoples with shared heritage and a divisive force. Societies united by ideology but divided by civilization come apart or face intense strain. As of early 1993, there were 48 ethnic wars occurring throughout the world. Evaluating those conflicts through a civilizational lens shows that slightly less than half occurred between groups from different civilizations.

For the first time in history, global politics is both multipolar and multicivilizational. Non-Western societies are rising in power while modernization remains distinct from Westernization. You must recognize that global politics has moved beyond four hundred years of Western colonial expansion into a new phase defined by civilizational clashes.

2. The Nature of Civilizations

A civilization is the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity. It serves as a culture writ large.

Civilizations are the highest cultural groupings of people defined by objective elements like religion and language, evolving through three historical phases into a multicivilizational system.

You can identify these comprehensive cultural entities by common objective elements. They share language, history, religion, customs, and institutions alongside subjective self-identification. Civilizations are mortal yet extremely long-lived. They endure far longer than transient political systems and empires in the longue duree.

The Athenians justified not betraying the Spartans to the Persians by citing shared blood. They mentioned common language, religious temples, and similar customs.

Religion is usually the most important objective element defining civilizations. Major world religions identified by Weber serve as the foundations upon which major civilizations rest. People sharing ethnicity and language in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and the Indian Subcontinent slaughtered each other due to religious differences.

Civilizations in History

Scholars generally agree on the identification of major contemporary civilizations. They include:

• Sinic;
• Japanese;
• Hindu;
• Islamic;
• Orthodox;
• Western;
• Latin American;
• African.

Japan emerged as a distinct civilization between A.D. 100 and 400 as an offspring of Chinese civilization. Latin America is an offspring of European civilization that evolved along a corporatist, authoritarian path.

Relations among civilizations have evolved through three distinct phases:

1. limited encounters before 1500;
2. the unidirectional impact and expansion of the West;
3. modern multidirectional interactions.

Steppe-traversing horses rather than ocean-traversing sailing ships were the primary means of linking separate Eurasian civilizations before A.D. 1500. This gave way around 1500 to the overpowering, unidirectional impact of Western expansion.

The rise and global expansion of the West was driven primarily by its superiority in applying organized violence. European powers and their overseas offspring increased their territorial control from 35 percent of the earth's surface in 1800 to 67 percent in 1878, reaching 84 percent in 1914. The size of the British Empire in 1800 was 1.5 million square miles with a population of 20 million people. By 1900, the Victorian empire spanned 11 million square miles and governed 390 million people.

As the world moves out of its Western phase, modern political ideologies are declining. Religions and culturally based forms of identity are taking their place. Modernizing and revolutionary elites like Lenin, Mao, and Ho imported European Marxism and adapted it to challenge Western power.

3. Universal Civilization and Modernization

The spread of Western popular culture and Davos culture does not mean the world is adopting Western values, as modernization ultimately promotes de-Westernization.

A thin intellectual elite across the globe shares common Western-leaning values, known as the Davos Culture, but this culture has very shallow roots outside the West. The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, brings together global elites who control international institutions and a bulk of global economic and military capabilities. As few as one-tenth of 1 percent of the world's population shares this culture globally, with less than 50 million people or 1 percent of the world's population participating outside the West.

The global spread of Western consumer goods and popular culture does not imply the adoption of Western political values or a universal civilization. Consuming Western products, listening to pop music, or watching Hollywood films does not alter the underlying culture or political orientation of recipient societies. In 1993, 88 out of 100 films most attended throughout the world were American. CNN International estimated 55 million potential viewers in 1994, which is about 1 percent of the world's population.

Young men in the Middle East might wear jeans, drink Coca-Cola, and listen to rap while building a bomb to blow up an American airliner.

English serves as the world's principal language of wider communication, but its global use does not mean people are becoming Anglofied or speaking a single global language. Data from 1958 to 1992 show declines in proportions of major Western language speakers. English speakers dropped from 9.8 percent to 7.6 percent among major language speakers between 1958 and 1992. The world population speaking the five major Western languages declined from 24.1 percent to 20.8 percent from 1958 to 1992. In 1992, Mandarin was spoken by 15.2 percent of the world population. Estimated English speakers in India reached 18 million out of 733 million in 1983 and 20 million out of 867 million in 1991.

Increased global interactions through trade, travel, and communications do not create a common culture; instead, they exacerbate civilizational, societal, and ethnic self-consciousness. According to distinctiveness theory and globalization theory, people define their identities by what makes them different from others. An Ibo person identifies as Owerri Ibo or Onitsha Ibo locally, simply as an Ibo in Lagos, as a Nigerian in London, and as an African in New York.

Responses to the West

Western civilization possesses a unique combination of historical characteristics that existed long before the West began to modernize. European societies developed diverse autonomous groups not based on blood relationships, such as monasteries, guilds, and class-based associations, contrasting with centralized bureaucratic empires elsewhere.

Non-Western political and intellectual leaders have responded to Western impact through rejectionism, Kemalism, or reformism. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created a new Turkey by launching a massive effort to Westernize and modernize it, making it a torn country.

While early Westernization promotes modernization, later modernization promotes de-Westernization and the revival of indigenous cultures. Non-Western societies selectively borrow external techniques and forms from other civilizations while adapting and assimilating them to preserve their core values.

4. Western Power and Cultural Resurgence

While the West's relative economic, demographic, and territorial power is declining, a global religious revival is fueling the indigenization of non-Western cultures.

There are two contrasting perspectives on Western power: one of overwhelming global dominance and another of a civilization in relative and accelerating decline. While the West remains the sole superpower controlling the international banking system, hard currencies, and advanced technologies, its relative share of world political, economic, and military power is declining as other civilizations modernize. The declinist thesis sits alongside the use of soft power and hard power by dominant nations.

The territorial and demographic dominance of the West has sharply diminished over the course of the twentieth century. In 1920, Western powers directly ruled about 25.5 million square miles, close to half the earth. By 1993, Western territorial control was cut in half to about 12.7 million square miles. In 1993, Westerners amounted to slightly over 13 percent of humanity, and this figure is projected to drop to 10 percent by 2025.

Social mobilization through urbanization and literacy empowers populations and renders traditional authoritarian control methods ineffective. In 1953, less than 15 percent of Iranians were literate and less than 17 percent urban, which allowed Kermit Roosevelt and CIA operatives suppressing an insurgency easily to restore the Shah. In 1979, with 50 percent of Iranians literate and 47 percent living in cities, no amount of U.S. military power could keep him on the throne. Socially mobilized societies challenge centralized control.

The Western dominance of manufacturing output and global economic product is a historical blip that is returning to pre-nineteenth-century patterns. The industrialization of the West led to the deindustrialization of the rest of the world during the nineteenth century, peaking in 1928 at 84.2 percent of world manufacturing output before beginning a steady decline. The West accounted for roughly 64 percent of gross world product in 1950, dropping to 49 percent by the 1980s. By 1980, the West accounted for 57.8 percent of global manufacturing output.

Post-Cold War military capabilities are shifting toward regionalization, with declining Western and Russian forces contrasted against rising East Asian military spending. Between 1985 and 1993, NATO defense expenditures declined by roughly 10 percent from $539.6 billion to $485.0 billion, driven by U.S. defense spending reductions under the Bush and Clinton administrations dropping from $342.3 billion in 1990 to $222.3 billion in 1998. Over the same period from 1985 to 1993, East Asian military expenditures rose by 50 percent from $89.8 billion to $134.8 billion, alongside the broad diffusion of weapons of mass destruction.

Culture follows power, and as Western hegemony recedes, non-Western societies are experiencing a resurgence of indigenous values and institutions. Soft power must rest on a foundation of hard power, so as non-Western societies increase their economic and military capacity, they reject Western universalism and assert the superiority of their own cultures through indigenization. First-generation Western-educated leaders like Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Lee Kuan Yew, and Solomon Bandaranaike gave way to a second-generation indigenization phenomenon where new elites revert to their ancestral cultures.

The adoption of Western democratic institutions in non-Western societies paradoxically empowers nativist, anti-Western, and nationalist political movements. Electoral competition stimulates non-Western politicians to fashion popular appeals that are ethnic, nationalist, and religious rather than cosmopolitan and Western. This democracy paradox appeared when Islamic fundamentalist groups won elections and threatened to come to power in Algeria before the 1992 election was cancelled.

La Revanche de Dieu

Modernization has failed to eliminate religion, sparking instead a global religious revival that seeks a sacred foundation for society. Rather than leading to secularization, rapid modernization disrupts traditional identities, causing people to turn to mainstream and fundamentalist religions for community, moral guidance, and meaning. This unsecularization of the world manifests as la revanche de Dieu, demonstrated by the dramatic growth of functioning mosques in Central Asia from 160 and one medressah in 1989 to about 10,000 mosques and ten medressahs by early 1993.

When traditional dominant religions fail to meet the psychological needs of urbanizing populations, emotionally satisfying religious imports or alternatives expand rapidly. Rapid urbanization and stress in societies undergoing compressed modernization lead populations to abandon quiescent or slow-adapting traditional faiths in favor of evangelical Protestantism or active Christian churches. This shift fueled the growth of Protestants in Latin America from roughly 7 million in 1960 to about 50 million in 1990.

5. Challenger Civilizations: Asia and Islam

Asia and Islam stand out in the late 20th century through their confident cultural and political assertiveness against the West, driven by different underlying causes. Asian assertiveness is rooted in economic growth, while Muslim assertiveness stems from social mobilization and population growth. Both create highly destabilizing impacts on global politics by altering the balance of power and threatening non-Muslim societies.

East Asia's rapid economic development has generated self-confidence and a rejection of Western standards.

Beginning in Japan, economic development spread to the Four Tigers and then to China, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. These countries regularly sustained 8-10 percent annual growth rates and outperformed the West.

Kishore Mahbubani pointed out that while it took Britain and the United States 58 and 47 years respectively to double per capita output, Japan did it in 33 years, Indonesia in 17, South Korea in 11, and China in 10. Ambassador Tommy Koh noted in 1993 that a cultural renaissance was sweeping across Asia, with Asians no longer regarding everything Western as the best.

China rejected total Westernization, instead adopting a modern version of Ti-Yong by combining capitalism and global economic integration with political authoritarianism and traditional cultural nationalism. The post-Tiananmen regime eagerly embraced Chinese nationalism and consciously aroused anti-Americanism to power its legitimacy.

The East Asian affirmation consists of several distinct attitudes:

• economic supremacy over the West;
• cultural superiority rooted in collectivist values;
• regional commonalities shared among Confucian societies;
• the Asian model serving as a global replacement for the Anglo-Saxon model.

The Islamic Resurgence

The Islamic Resurgence is a mainstream, comprehensive intellectual and social movement seeking modernization through Islam rather than Western ideologies. The movement encompasses personal piety, religious observances, Islamic banks, and social welfare services, functioning as an adjustment of Islamic civilization to modernity.

A top Saudi official explained in 1994 that foreign high-tech things are nice, but intangible social and political institutions from elsewhere can be deadly. The Islamic Resurgence is usefully analogized to the Protestant Reformation as a reaction against institutional stagnation that preaches reform, discipline, and a return to pure religious roots.

Islamist groups built extensive social welfare infrastructures that paralleled or supplanted frail secular state institutions. After the 1992 earthquake in Cairo, Islamic organizations were on the streets within hours handing out food and blankets while government relief efforts lagged.

In Jordan, where the Muslim Brotherhood operated in a population of 4 million people, the organization ran a large hospital, 20 clinics, 40 Islamic schools, and 120 Koranic study centers. Indonesia's Muhammadijah organization reached 6 million members by the early 1980s, providing cradle-to-grave services.

Rapid population growth and a massive demographic bulge of young people in Muslim societies provide the primary recruits for fundamentalism, insurgency, and migration. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia stated in 1988 that the greatest threat to his country was the rise of Islamic fundamentalism among its youth. Muslims made up an estimated 18 percent of the world population in 1980, 20 percent by 2000, and a projected 30 percent by 2025. Liberal democratic opposition groups have consistently failed to achieve sustained popular support in Muslim societies due to the inhospitable nature of Islamic culture to Western liberal concepts.

6. The Cultural Reconfiguration of Politics

Cultural identity has replaced ideology as the central factor shaping a country's global associations, antagonisms, and political boundaries. Modernization drives global politics to reconfigure along cultural lines. Peoples and countries with similar cultures come together and those with different cultures pull apart. You find that the fundamental question in world politics has shifted. States no longer ask which side you are on, but rather who you are.

Following the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, former Warsaw Pact and Baltic states moved to join the European Union and NATO. Meanwhile, Balkan alignments reformed along religious lines into Orthodox and Islamic axes.

Interactions between entities of the same civilization differ fundamentally from interactions between entities of different civilizations. Human history consistently shows a division between the civilizational us and the extracivilizational them, governed by separate codes of behavior. This stems from feelings of superiority, fear, lack of trust, communication barriers, and unfamiliarity with foreign social practices. Historical separations included Christendom versus heathens, Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-harb, and Chinese versus non-Chinese foreigners. Modern equivalents involve broad regional and religious solidarity among Bosnians, Chechens, and Russians.

Economic integration and regional cooperation proceed much faster and further when they are based on cultural and civilizational commonality. Geography alone does not ensure cooperation because propinquity without shared culture can foster friction. Single-civilization entities like the European Union and Mercosur achieved high levels of integration. In 1980, 50.6 percent of the European Community's total trade was internal, rising to 58.9 percent by 1989. In contrast, 30 percent of total trade was within the Chinese cultural zone by 1992, up from less than 20 percent in 1970. Multicivilizational organizations like the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation remained ineffectual, and ASEAN experienced severe limitations.

Civilizations possess distinct political structures categorized by member states, core states, lone countries, cleft countries, and torn countries. Japan functions as a lone country with no cultural kin. Sudan and Nigeria are cleft countries divided by religious fault lines. Russia, Turkey, and Mexico serve as torn countries attempting civilizational shifts.

Torn Countries

Political leaders attempting to fundamentally reshape their society's culture are destined to fail, producing a permanent condition of cultural schizophrenia.

Russia evolved separately from Western historical phenomena like the Renaissance and Reformation, developing through indigenous roots, Byzantine impact, and Mongol suzerainty. In a 1992 poll of 2069 European Russians, 40 percent were open to the West, 36 percent closed, and 24 percent undecided. In the 1996 Russian presidential election, roughly 43 percent of the public supported Western-oriented candidates like Yeltsin, while 52 percent voted for nationalist and communist candidates.

Despite decades of Kemalist secular reforms, Turkey remains a torn country because Western elites reject its Muslim identity. In the December 1995 elections, the fundamentalist Welfare Party won the highest number of votes and seats in parliament. Turkey launched $1.5 billion in long-term low-interest loans for Turkic republics in 1991 and 1992, while 60 million Muslims represented a population immigration concern for European nations.

Mexico shifted from a nationalist stance opposing the United States to a torn country attempting North Americanization. President Salinas argued for NAFTA under the premise that the United States must either accept Mexican goods or accept massive Mexican immigration.

Australia attempted a civilizational shift to enmesh itself in Asia, becoming a torn-country-in-reverse. By 1993, 46 percent of the Australian public favored ending the monarchy, up from 21 percent in 1987. Exports to East and Southeast Asia rose from 39 percent in 1971 to 62 percent by 1994. Yet Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad opposed Australia joining the East Asian Economic Caucus because its European culture makes Australians prone to judging others. Leaders in torn countries regularly describe their nations as a bridge between two cultures to euphemistically confirm their status.

7. Core States and Civilizational Order

In the emerging world order, civilizations are organized around core states that act as primary poles of attraction and repulsion, making global stability dependent upon spheres of influence.

Civilizations are organized around core states and spheres of influence that maintain regional order and act as poles of attraction.

Regional peace can only be achieved through the responsible leadership of core states whose authority is legitimated by cultural kinship, rendering international bodies ineffective substitutes. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's 1994 rule restricting regional powers from providing more than one-third of peacekeeping forces defied the geopolitical reality that only dominant regional states can enforce peace.

Spheres of Influence

Fault line wars cannot be halted by primary participants or disinterested parties; they require the intervention of interested secondary and tertiary core states with leverage over their kin. Core states use a three-level game approach involving carrots and sticks to negotiate broad terms among themselves, pressure secondary governments, and force primary actors to accept compromises. The Dayton accords were established by the Contact Group of core states and enforced through external pressure and diplomacy applied by Russia, Germany, and the United States, agreeing on a 51 percent to 49 percent division of Bosnia.

Maintaining peace in a multicivilizational, multipolar world requires core states to follow three fundamental rules:

• Refrain from intervening in conflicts in other civilizations as core states.
• Negotiate with each other to contain or halt fault line wars between states or groups from their civilizations.
• Search for and attempt to expand the values, institutions, and practices peoples in all civilizations have in common.

10 Key Ideas

1. In the post-Cold War world, global politics is being reconfigured along cultural and civilizational lines where the primary sources of conflict involve different cultural entities rather than socio-economic classes.
2. Post-Cold War international relations are best understood through a civilizational framework rather than flawed paradigms like the one world, two worlds, statist, or chaos models.
3. Civilizations are the highest cultural groupings of people defined by objective elements like religion and language, evolving through three historical phases into a multicivilizational system.
4. The spread of Western popular culture and Davos culture does not mean the world is adopting Western values, as modernization ultimately promotes de-Westernization.
5. While the West's relative economic, demographic, and territorial power is declining, a global religious revival is fueling the indigenization of non-Western cultures.
6. East Asia's rapid economic development has generated self-confidence and a rejection of Western standards.
7. The Islamic Resurgence is a mainstream, comprehensive intellectual and social movement seeking modernization through Islam rather than Western ideologies.
8. Cultural identity has replaced ideology as the central factor shaping a country's global associations, antagonisms, and political boundaries.
9. Political leaders attempting to fundamentally reshape their society's culture are destined to fail, producing a permanent condition of cultural schizophrenia.
10. Civilizations are organized around core states and spheres of influence that maintain regional order and act as poles of attraction.