The 9/11 attacks had been preceded by others which, with hindsight, could be seen as initial signs of a ‘civilizational war’ between the West and the Muslim world. But the events of 9/11 made Huntington’s arguments mainstream and centre stage. Had things turned out differently, Huntington’s arguments on the ‘clash of civilizations’ would probably have been debated only by a few scholars, without much impact on policy-makers or popular understanding of how the world works. The relationship between a scholarly argument relating to, and popular understanding of, a phenomenon is not always clear. Because of their differing values, it would not be possible for them to unite to defeat humanity’s myriad common problems (such as climate change, poverty, and gender inequality). Like Lewis, 40 years earlier, Huntington argued that one of the two ‘sides’ was ideationally destined to prevail over the over.
This was the claim of Samuel Huntington, who contended that a clash between the West and the ‘Muslim world’ would be the key foreign policy issue for the US (and the West more generally) after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. Four decades later, Lewis’s clash between civilizations had become a clash of civilizations. This was hardly surprising given that the main foreign policy issue confronting the West in the late 1950s was dealing with what was widely perceived as an expansionist Soviet Union. Initially, however, Lewis’s contention did not create much of a stir. Lewis argued that Islam and the West had differing values which would only be resolved following conflict. Origins and Development of the Clash of ‘Clash of Civilizations’īernard Lewis (1990), the British orientalist, was the first to claim there was a ‘clash between civilizations’ in a speech at Johns Hopkins University in 1957. Why are the article and book so important for our understanding of the post-Cold War world? Why are they collectively a touchstone for nearly all contemporary debates about the capacity of different groups to live together in relative amity not enmity?
22–48), followed three years later by a book-length treatment of the same issue. In 1993, the late Samuel Huntington published one of the most cited articles in international relations literature: ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ ( Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, pp. Since the late 1970s, the talk has been of the impossibility of different sets of values, norms and beliefs living side-by-side in an increasingly globalized world. It is now a quarter of a century since Samuel Huntington first published his treatise about what he understood as an epochal event in international relations: the post-Cold War ‘clash of civilizations’.
This is an excerpt from The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ 25 Years On: A Multidisciplinary Appraisal. Download your free copy here
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