The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.

• Author: Stracke, Christian
• Position: Review

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) 367 pp.

After Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations" appeared in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993, the editors of that journal claimed that it had generated more debate than George Kennan's "X" article at the dawn of the Cold War. Huntington, writing at the dawn of the post-Cold War era, had undertaken to recast our general understanding of global political dynamics. The new dynamic, Huntington wrote, would be shaped by civilizational conflict--as nations coalesced into larger supernations founded on common cultural and historical dimensions, global political competition would consist of these civilizational blocs vying against one another for power, influence and resources. The global dynamic, Huntington argued, would no longer be one of national superpowers competing for allies and influence in every corner of the world, but instead one of broad civilizational "fault lines" along which the world's newly resurgent civilizational blocs would engage each other.

Those who responded to Huntington in the wake of the Foreign Affairs article were, to say the least, of divergent opinions. Some praised Huntington for having the intellectual courage to break from the dominant realist paradigm of international relations theory; offering a more realistic, more subtle and more human approach to understanding world politics. Others, as Huntington had anticipated, rejected his decidedly anti-rational choice model for these civilizational blocs, in which mysterious centripetal force is engendered not by raw self-interest but instead through tradition, culture and history Nations would continue to compete as rational actors, these critics argued, in a continuation of the great game; when leaders see that it is in their best interest to bolt from their civilizational pack, they will do so and defect to a more attractive suitor in another socio-cultural camp.

Yet, while the debate that ensued covered many of the important and radical elements of Huntington's international relations theory; the majority of the critics overlooked a much more serious and ultimately perhaps more interesting element of Huntington's new paradigm. This element comes to the fore much more clearly in the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Underneath his debunking of traditional models of international relations...