(PUC-Rio -2008)THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?Samuel P

(PUC-Rio - 2008)

THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?

Samuel P. Huntington

¹World politics is entering a new phase, and ⁵intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be - the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet ⁴they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years.

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern international system with the Peace of Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were largely among princes-emperors, absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mercantilist economic strength and, most important, the territory they ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution the principal lines of ⁷conflict were between nations rather than princes. In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put ⁶it, ²"The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun." This nineteenth-century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result of the ⁹Russian Revolution and the reaction against ⁸it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-nazism and liberal democracy, and then between ¹¹communism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, ³this latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, neither of ¹⁰which was a nation-state in the classical European sense and each of which defined its identity in terms of its ideology.

These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, "Western civil wars", as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the ¹³earlier wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of ¹²its Western phase, and its centerpiece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as ¹⁴movers and shapers of history.

From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993.

Mark the only correct statement.