The Clash of Civilizations

Huntington’s concepts of civilization consciousness, the fault lines between civilizations, and the shape of the post-Cold War world center on his prediction that the chief rival of the West will emerge from the Islamic world. He introduces this concept in the section titled “The Fault Lines Between Civilizations,” explaining how in post-Cold War Europe, the most significant fault line is the boundary separating Western Christianity from Orthodox Christianity and Islam, which dates back to the year 1500. The southern reaches of this line correspond nearly exactly to the historical boundaries between the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires. The nations to the west and north are traditionally considered to comprise Western Europe. They have a shared history, particularly since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. To the east and south, the nations are either Orthodox or Muslim, but even the former were at one point under Islamic rule. He concludes this sketch by referencing conflicts in Yugoslavia, which would eventually split and result in a bloody war between Christian Slovenia and Muslim Albania. Thus, the Islamic world emerges as the main “threat” to the West, and that threat takes the form of violence in Huntington’s essay.

Huntington contextualizes this framing with reference to history, noting that conflict along the borders of Western Christianity and Islamic civilization has been going on for 1,300 years and in both directions. He references the Moorish conquest of southern Spain as well as the Christian Crusades to recapture the “holy land,” which was under Islamic rule at the time. He also details conflicts closer to modern times, including the Algerian struggle for independence from France in the 1950s, the British and French invasions of Egypt in 1956, American forces in Lebanon in 1958, and the long-standing conflict between Israel (a Western-founded state, in his words) and its neighbors. In Huntington’s framing, the climax of this warfare between the West and the Islamic world (at least thus far) was the 1990 Gulf War, in the aftermath of which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization reoriented its policies and plans toward threats and instability from its “Southern tier”: the states within Islamic civilization.

Huntington predicts that this military action between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline, as in the post-Gulf War world, many Islamic states are resentful of the West’s interventionism. In particular, Huntington warns of a “Confucian-Islamic” connection, noting that while Western powers are demilitarizing, China and various Islamic states are building up their nuclear, chemical, and biological arsenals and asserting their right to acquire weapons to bolster their security, motivated largely by opposition to Western power. In his conclusion, Huntington suggests that Western states pursue policies to limit the military strength of Islamic states—a sentiment that has significantly informed many US foreign policy decisions, particularly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York.

The 9/11 attacks might seem to bear out Huntington’s claims about the inevitability of conflict between the Western and Islamic worlds. However, Huntington’s claims about what he terms “Islamic civilization” have also sparked some of the essay’s fiercest criticism. For one, Huntington arguably overstates not only the homogeneity of the Islamic world but also its degree of difference from the Western world; for instance, he notes the clashes that occurred between Islamic and Christian cultures throughout the Middle Ages but not the substantial cultural interchanges that took place during the same period. Moreover, Huntington implicitly frames Islam as violent, writing that “Islam has bloody borders” (Paragraph 33). Thus, while Huntington at times notes the role that Western powers have played in provoking conflict, he tempers Western responsibility by implying that there is something uniquely antagonistic about Muslim societies.