The Clash of Civilizations

the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.

Civilizations may involve a large number of people... or only one, as is the case with Japanese civilization.

civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future.

the most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.

These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear.

Modern societies thus have much in common. But do they necessarily merge into homogeneity? The argument that they do rests on the assumption that modern society must approximate a single type, the Western type.

Western civilization emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries and developed its distinctive characteristics in the following centuries. It did not begin to modernize until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The central characteristics of the West... include the Classical legacy.

Separation of spiritual and temporal authority... has been a prevailing dualism in Western culture.

Individualism developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries... remains a distinguishing mark of the West among twentieth-century civilizations.