Happy anniversary? Reflections on Samuel Huntington's “clash” thesis at thirty

Abstract

This article takes a retrospective look at the controversial “clash-of-civilizations” thesis articulated by Samuel Huntington in the early 1990s. In some respects, the “pearl anniversary” of the thesis reveals it to have stood up reasonably well. If one notable aspect of the Huntingtonian prognosis was its skepticism about the prospects of enduring peace subsequent to the ending of the Cold War, then it could be remarked that the Harvard professor turned out to be prescient. But one can be right for the wrong reasons, and the argument of this article is that Huntington erred in imagining that “civilizational rallying” would develop into the preeminent feature of future global conflict. Specifically, Huntington erred in conflating the affective pull of “nationalism” with that of “civilizationalism.”