The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

What defines global politics after the Cold War? In Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the author argues that culture—especially civilizational identity—replaces ideology and power politics as the main organizing principle of international relations. Where once the world was divided by capitalism and communism, it is now divided by cultural civilizations rooted in religion, history, and identity. Huntington’s provocative claim is that future conflicts will arise not between states or classes, but along the fault lines separating civilizations.

You can imagine these civilizations as broad cultural families—Western, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Japanese, Latin American, and possibly African. Each possesses shared traditions, moral assumptions, and institutions that bind its members across borders. When political or military disputes occur between actors from different civilizations, they become not just territorial disputes but battles over identity, legitimacy, and meaning.

From Ideological Rivalry to Cultural Pluralism

Huntington organizes the post–Cold War transformation as a shift from a bipolar to a multipolar, multicivilizational world. During the Cold War, two superpowers imposed ideological coherence; afterward, a diverse set of major powers—each representing a different civilization—reshaped global politics. These include the United States (Western), China (Sinic), Japan (Japanese), India (Hindu), Russia (Orthodox), Europe (Western), and parts of the Islamic world. Balancing among these powers no longer reflects simple material interest but also shared cultural heritage.

When you look at real-world examples—Russia defending Orthodox Serbs during the Yugoslav wars or Muslim countries aiding Bosnian Muslims—what you see is what Huntington calls kin-country rallying: an instinctive civilizational solidarity that transcends borders. The new global order is less about alliances of convenience and more about alliances of identity.

Defining Civilization

A civilization, Huntington argues, is the highest level of shared cultural identity short of all humanity. It encompasses religion (the most crucial factor), language, institutions, and shared historical experience. Civilizations evolve slowly, borrow elements from one another, and occasionally fragment—but their deep continuity makes them durable actors in world affairs. Each typically coalesces around a core state—for example, China in the Sinic world or the United States and Western Europe in the West—which provides leadership and coherence.

Civilizations, then, act like extended families of nations. They may contain siblings who feud, but outsiders are treated with suspicion. Understanding this structure helps explain why the European Union (a culturally coherent Western bloc) works more efficiently than multi-civilizational organizations like ASEAN.

Modernization Without Westernization

One of Huntington’s most useful clarifications is that modernization does not equal Westernization. Industrialization, education, and technology spread globally, but they do not erase distinct cultures. Non-Western societies adapt modern techniques while reasserting their own values—a process Huntington calls indigenization. Thus, Japan’s Meiji reforms, China’s Ti-Yong philosophy (Chinese learning as essence, Western learning for application), or India’s hybrid institutions modernized their societies without Westernizing their souls.

By contrast, wholesale Westernizers like Turkey’s Ataturk created torn countries, where elites embrace the West but the masses retain older faiths and customs. Huntington advises policymakers to respect these cultural limits: to promote modernization without assuming that Western liberal democracy or secularism will follow automatically.

The Decline of Western Monopoly and the Rise of the Rest

While the West remains rich and influential, its demographic weight, territorial reach, and cultural dominance are shrinking. The twentieth century was, in Huntington’s phrase, a “brief Western blip.” As Asia industrializes and Islam demographically explodes, the world rebalances toward plural power centers. The resurgence of religion—a “revenge of God”—provides spiritual meaning amid disorienting modernization. Orthodox Christianity revived in Russia; Islam flourished in Central Asia; and Hindu or Buddhist renewals transformed South and Southeast Asia. Modernizers who once dismissed faith now face its political potency.

Identity Politics and Civilizational Alignments

As people and states ask “Who are we?” after the ideological era, they increasingly answer in cultural rather than political terms. States seek partners who share their civilization—Baltic states turn to Europe, China networks with overseas Chinese, and Muslim states cooperate under the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Huntington offers helpful typologies: cleft countries like Ukraine contain multiple civilizations within their borders, while torn countries like Turkey attempt to change civilizational allegiance. These categories help you predict internal instability or policy ambiguity.

West versus the Rest

Civilizations rub most painfully at their borders. Huntington highlights three flashpoints where Western universalism meets non-Western resistance: weapons proliferation, human rights, and immigration. Non-Western societies seek nuclear deterrence against superior Western arsenals; Asian and Islamic diplomats resist moral lectures on democracy; and Western publics, beset by immigration and multicultural anxieties, harden their cultural boundaries. The same cultural identity that unites civilizations globally can divide them internally.

Toward a Multicivilizational Order

Huntington ends with sober realism. He urges the West to renew its internal cohesion—anchoring North America and Europe around shared heritage—and to accept that coexistence, not domination, is the path to peace. His three “rules for peace” are abstention (no interfering in other civilizations’ internal affairs), joint mediation (core states co-manage conflicts at civilization frontiers), and commonality (build a thin consensus of basic moral norms). The alternative—pursuing universalism as cultural imperialism—would make civilizational conflict self-fulfilling. In a world of many civilizations, peace depends on cultural humility as much as deterrent power.

To understand Huntington’s theory, you first need to grasp what he means by a civilization. It is a vast cultural community defined by shared language, religion, institutions, and history—the broadest form of human identity short of humanity itself. Civilizations are not political entities like states, nor ideological categories like ‘democratic’ or ‘authoritarian.’ They are long-lived frameworks of meaning and belonging.

How Civilizations Take Shape

Huntington identifies eight to nine major civilizations in today’s world: Western, Sinic (Chinese), Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African. Religion is their core axis. Civilizations endure because they transmit moral codes, social structures, and mythic memories through generations. Boundaries blur—cultures borrow and influence—but central identities persist.

Core and Periphery

Each civilization features a core state—a leader that embodies and protects its values. The U.S. and Western Europe together anchor Western civilization; China anchors the Sinic world; Russia the Orthodox; India the Hindu. Weak civilizations without a strong core, such as the Latin American or African groupings, struggle to coordinate. Core leadership resembles family hierarchy: core states are elder siblings setting norms and offering protection. When outsiders intervene, the reaction is instinctively defensive because legitimacy stems from shared culture, not universal principles.

Civilizational Continuity

Civilizations last centuries. They outlive empires, ideologies, and technologies. Toynbee and Braudel’s concept of la longue durée—the long span—underpins Huntington’s analysis. Civilizations mutate but rarely vanish; they remain the deep grammar of world politics. If you want to forecast the future of an area, understand which civilization’s moral universe defines it. That is Huntington’s enduring analytic rule.

Huntington’s sharpest distinction is between modernization and Westernization. Modernization spreads technology, industry, and education worldwide; Westernization implies adopting Western cultural, political, and moral norms. Many Western analysts wrongly equate the two, assuming that as societies become wealthier and more educated, they will inevitably liberalize and secularize. Huntington shows otherwise.

Selective Borrowing and Indigenization

Non-Western powers typically modernize through selective borrowing. Japan’s Meiji Revolution became the model: adopt Western methods for power and prosperity while maintaining Japanese ethos. China’s late Qing reformers coined the slogan Chinese learning for essence, Western learning for application. Even Turkey’s radical Kemalist Westernization produced cultural backlash among the populace. Successful modernizers—Japan, Korea, China—absorbed science and technology but indigenized institutions to fit their cultural codes. That’s why modernization increases, not erases, cultural diversity.

The Fallacy of a Universal Civilization

Many intellectuals, dazzled by globalization, claim a ‘universal civilization’ is emerging. Huntington disagrees. Shared consumption (Coke, McDonald’s) or English-speaking elites don’t equal shared values. English is the global lingua franca of trade and aviation, but language utility doesn’t change belief systems. The difference between Western and other modernities thus remains critical. (Note: this forecast anticipated contemporary debates about “multiple modernities.”)

Responses to the West

Huntington names three patterns of response: rejection (isolation and resistance, as in Tokugawa Japan), Kemalist adoption (wholesale Westernization), and reformist synthesis (selective adaptation). History favors the reformist route: it preserves self-respect while achieving modernization. This framework advises policymakers that modernization campaigns grounded in local values succeed best, while cultural conversion projects fail.

Practical Implications

If you aim to promote development abroad, focus on technology transfer compatible with indigenous values. Don’t confuse liberal democracy with the universal endpoint of modernity. In a world where power diffuses beyond the West, the ability to adapt modern tools without adopting Western mores defines future success.

Another central strand in Huntington’s argument is the relative decline of Western dominance and the simultaneous religious resurgence worldwide. As non-Western states modernize and urbanize, they become materially stronger and culturally self-confident, prompting a turn toward indigenous traditions and faiths. Religion, far from fading under modernity, fills the spiritual vacuum created by secularization.

The West’s Waning Share

At its early-twentieth-century peak, the West occupied a quarter of the world’s land and nearly a third of its population. By the 1990s, those shares had fallen by half. East Asia recaptured industrial leadership, reducing Western economic dominance. Demographic decline in Europe and North America contrasts with youth surges in Asia and Africa. These shifts signal not collapse but normalization: a return to the historical pattern of multiple dynamic centers of power.

Indigenization and Second-Generation Elites

As postcolonial societies modernize, elites no longer study in London or Paris but in Beijing, Moscow, or Jakarta. They reassert cultural confidence. Ronald Dore called this “second-generation indigenization.” It manifests in China’s Confucian revival, India’s Hindu nationalism, or Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Confidence comes with the ability to say no to Western tutelage.

The Return of Faith

Modernization uproots communities, creating alienation. Religion restores belonging. In Russia, parishes reopened rapidly: churches around Moscow multiplied fivefold between 1988 and 1993. In Central Asia, functioning mosques rose from a few hundred to ten thousand in the same period. Islam, Orthodoxy, and Hinduism all regained vitality as motors of identity and political legitimacy. This religious resurgence underlies the mobilization of entire civilizations.

Analytical Lesson

For policymakers, Huntington warns: ignore religion at your peril. Development aid, democratization campaigns, or human-rights dialogues that overlook faith misread motivations. Secular ideologies may weaken; sacred identities re-politicize society. In a de-Westernizing world, religion is both resource and rallying flag.

Huntington singles out two transformative movements—East Asia’s economic ascent and the Islamic world’s demographic and cultural resurgence. Each reshapes the balance of global power but in different directions: one through material productivity, the other through cultural mobilization.

Asian Confidence and the Economics of Culture

By the 1990s, Japan, the Four Tigers, and China had redefined development speed. Economies like South Korea doubled per capita incomes in a decade—faster than Britain’s industrial revolution pace. This “Asian affirmation” spurred leaders like Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad to champion “Asian values”: hard work, family discipline, respect for authority. These shared Confucian or communitarian traits were presented as moral alternatives to Western individualism. The result was not only growth but political confidence; Asian states began resisting Western lectures on democracy or human rights.

Islamic Demography and Identity

Islam’s resurgence arises primarily from demography. In the late twentieth century, Muslim populations surged, generating massive youth cohorts vulnerable to unemployment and open to activism. The “youth bulge” fostered Islamist mobilization, from Iran’s revolution to Algeria’s FIS movement and the spread of pan-Islamic networks. Saudi oil wealth financed global religious institutions; mosques and madrassas multiplied from West Africa to Southeast Asia. This isn’t merely extremism—it is a civilizational reawakening asserting moral independence.

Different Outcomes

Asian modernization strengthens states and enhances bargaining power globally; Islamic mobilization often challenges existing states, producing internal volatility and identity wars. Together they symbolize what Huntington calls “the rise of the rest”: modernization with cultural self-assertion. To manage global stability, you must treat Asia as a competitor and Islam as a complex identity movement—civilizational forces, not passing crises.

Post–Cold War politics is about who we are. Huntington shows how identity itself organizes international coalitions and domestic stability. When ideology fades, people turn to culture and religion to define belonging. This logic shapes blocs, conflicts, and migration politics alike.

Cultural Groupings

Once the superpower structure vanished, new natural clusters formed: Orthodox states around Russia, Muslim solidarity over Bosnia and Palestine, and Sinic cooperation through Chinese business networks. The pattern: stability within a civilization, friction across civilizations. Fault-line conflicts—like Bosnia or Chechnya—draw external aid from co-civilizational allies, internationalizing local wars.

Cleft and Torn Countries

Huntington’s typologies sharpen analysis. Cleft countries (e.g., Ukraine) house populations from distinct civilizations—Western-oriented Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Russians—making unity fragile. Torn countries (e.g., Turkey or Mexico) have elites seeking to switch civilizational identity, facing resistance both at home and from the target civilization. These internal tensions explain ongoing instability and oscillating foreign policies.

Migration and Cultural Boundaries

Immigration, viewed through this lens, is civilizational contact at home. Europe’s Muslim inflows and America’s Latin American inflows stirred identity anxieties; polls in the 1990s show majority demand for restriction. Political leaders across France, Germany, and the U.S. echoed the same cultural alarm: immigration was no longer about economics but cultural survival. Where integration fails, new cleft societies emerge.

Policy Relevance

States that ignore cultural foundations of identity risk instability. Regional cooperation succeeds when cultures align (e.g., the EU), and falters where they diverge (ASEAN). Understanding civilizational identity helps explain both domestic coalition politics and the architecture of global alliances.

When civilizations collide, their conflicts divide the world. Huntington describes two major types of clashes: core-state conflicts between great powers of different civilizations, and fault-line wars between communities where civilizations meet geographically. Both reveal the limitations of Western dominance and the dangers of assuming cultural universality.

Core-State Rivalries

At the macro level, competition occurs over influence in global institutions, trade, military technology, and values. U.S.–China, U.S.–Islamic, and Western–Orthodox frictions all fit this model. Non-Western powers pursue nuclear capabilities as cheap deterrence against Western superiority. The West compensates with containment and moral pressure—but faces resistance as cultural legitimacy wanes.

Fault-Line Wars

At the micro level, you see Bosnia, Kashmir, Chechnya—ethnic and religious wars fed by identity polarization and diaspora involvement. Once violence begins, moderates disappear, and external co-religionists pour in funds and fighters. Huntington’s “kin-country syndrome” explains this pattern: conflicts between different civilizations almost never stay local. Ceasefires require core states to press their kin; otherwise, violence rekindles.

Islam and the West: The Quasi-War

Huntington devotes special attention to Islam’s recurrent conflict with the West. From the Crusades to colonialism to modern interventions, antagonism recurs. The post-1979 “quasi-war” encompasses terrorism, covert actions, and punitive strikes—17 U.S. military operations in the Muslim world between 1980 and 1995 underscored the pattern. For many Muslims, these confrontations confirm civilizational siege rather than isolated disputes. The issue is not extremism alone but enduring cultural rivalry.

Asian Power Balances and China

East Asia emerges as the key testing ground. China’s resurgence challenges existing balances; neighbors must choose whether to balance (ally against it) or bandwagon (accommodate it). Huntington anticipates that Confucian norms favor hierarchy and bandwagoning, while Western histories of rivalry favor balancing—creating mixed regional reactions. The ultimate danger: a U.S.–China confrontation ignited by mismanaged deterrence across civilizations.

Limits of Western Universalism

Weapons proliferation, human-rights disputes, and immigration reveal the same structural truth: the West’s cultural universalism no longer commands automatic legitimacy. Power still matters—but in a culturally plural world, moral authority is relative. Understanding this limit is key to managing a peaceful multipolar order.

Huntington concludes with a challenge: the West can survive and lead only by renewing its internal cohesion and adopting realistic rules for coexistence in a diverse world. The goal is not domination but sustainable peace among civilizations.

Revitalizing Western Civilization

The West faces demographic stagnation, moral fragmentation, and multicultural strains. Low birthrates and internal diversity test its sense of common identity. Huntington warns America in particular that civic procedures alone cannot sustain unity; a shared cultural core—language, heritage, moral values—is essential. Without it, Western civilization loses confidence and coherence, weakening both domestically and abroad.

Policy Priorities

To preserve influence, the West should deepen transatlantic integration (NATO, EU), extend cooperation with culturally close societies (Latin America), and maintain technological superiority. But it must also restrain its impulse to impose values on others. Military intervention in non-Western civil wars often backfires, invoking anti-Western solidarity. Cultural humility and prudence prolong peace far better than moral crusades.

Rules for Global Peace

• Abstention: Core states stay out of other civilizations’ internal issues.
• Joint Mediation: Core states from involved civilizations manage conflicts together to prevent escalation.
• Commonality: Cultivate shared, minimal moral and legal norms to limit violence without erasing diversity.

Huntington’s final counsel: Renounce cultural imperialism but not cultural confidence. The West must rediscover its strengths—rule of law, liberty, pluralism—while recognizing they are products of its civilization, not universal defaults. A peaceful world order is possible only if civilizations coexist with respect and self-restraint.