Michael: The more the world connects, the more we drift apart. We all watch the same Netflix shows and use the same iPhones, but paradoxically, that might be what's driving us back into our ancient cultural tribes. What if globalization isn't creating a global village, but sharpening the battle lines for a global clash? Kevin: That’s a chilling thought. It feels completely backwards. You’d assume that shared technology and media would bring us all together into one big, happy, consumerist family. Michael: You would think so. But that very paradox is at the heart of a book that completely shook up international relations, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington. Kevin: Ah, Huntington. I feel like he's one of those authors everyone in politics has to read, even if they completely disagree with him. His work is polarizing, to say the least. Michael: Exactly. He was a major Harvard political scientist, a consultant for multiple U.S. administrations, and he wrote this in the early 1990s, right after the Cold War ended. At the time, the prevailing idea, made famous by Francis Fukuyama, was the 'end of history'—this optimistic belief that liberal democracy and capitalism had won for good. Kevin: Right, the Berlin Wall fell, and the assumption was everyone would eventually become like the West. Michael: Huntington looked at the world and said, 'Not so fast.' He argued the great conflicts of the future wouldn't be between countries or ideologies like capitalism and communism. They would be between civilizations.

Kevin: Okay, hold on. What exactly does he mean by a 'civilization'? That sounds like a super broad and kind of old-fashioned term. Is he just lumping billions of people into a few giant boxes like 'Western,' 'Islamic,' and 'Sinic'? Michael: That's the first and most common criticism, and it's a fair question. For Huntington, a civilization is the biggest 'we' you can have. It’s the broadest level of cultural identity. It’s defined by shared elements like language, history, customs, and most importantly, religion. He identified about eight major ones: Western, Confucian or Sinic, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African. Kevin: So it’s less about your passport and more about your deep cultural programming? Michael: Precisely. And this leads to his most crucial point, one that I think is still incredibly relevant today: modernization does not equal Westernization. A country can build skyscrapers, develop advanced technology, and create a market economy, but that doesn't mean it will adopt Western values like individualism, liberal democracy, or the separation of church and state. In fact, it might do the opposite. Kevin: I’m curious, how does that work? Give me a real-world example of a country getting more modern but less Western. Michael: The perfect case study he points to is the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s. You had these 'Asian Tiger' economies—South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia—that had modernized at a breathtaking pace. They were global economic success stories. Kevin: I remember that. They were seen as the future. Michael: They were. Then, in 1997, a financial crisis hits, starting with the Thai currency. It spreads like wildfire. Stock markets crash, businesses fail, and there's massive social unrest. The International Monetary Fund, or IMF, which is largely a Western-led institution, steps in to offer bailout packages. Kevin: The cavalry arrives to save the day? Michael: Well, the cavalry arrived with a very specific set of instructions. The IMF demanded harsh austerity measures and deep structural reforms, basically telling these countries they needed to run their economies the 'Western way.' The problem was, this one-size-fits-all solution was seen as deeply humiliating and intrusive. It felt like a new form of colonialism. Kevin: I can see how that would cause a backlash. Michael: It was a massive backlash. Leaders and intellectuals across Asia didn't just question the economic advice; they pushed back on a cultural level. There was a powerful resurgence of talk about 'Asian values'—discipline, community focus, respect for authority—as a direct contrast to what they saw as flawed Western individualism. They essentially said, "We'll take your modern economy, thank you very much, but we're keeping our own culture. In fact, we're doubling down on it." Kevin: Wow. So the crisis, which was economic, actually triggered a powerful cultural affirmation. They modernized their finances but de-Westernized their identity in response. Michael: Exactly. It’s a perfect illustration of the thesis. As societies gain economic and military power, they feel more confident to assert their own cultural identity. They stop imitating the West and start reaffirming their own roots. Huntington saw this happening not just in Asia but across the Islamic world and elsewhere. Kevin: That makes a strange kind of sense. It’s like the teenager who finally gets their own apartment and immediately stops dressing like their parents. They have the independence to define themselves on their own terms. Michael: That’s a great analogy. And for Huntington, this process is reshaping the entire globe. The world is becoming multipolar, with different civilizations rising as centers of power, each with its own distinct values. The era of Western dominance, in his view, is fading.

Kevin: Okay, so he's drawn this new map with these big civilizational blobs, each getting more confident in its own identity. What happens when they touch? Does he think they just have polite disagreements over tea? Michael: This is where the title of the book gets its punch. He argues that the most dangerous conflicts of the future will happen along the 'fault lines' between these civilizations. These are the places where different cultures physically meet and grind against each other, like tectonic plates. He calls them 'fault line wars.' Kevin: That sounds ominous. And I’m guessing he’s not talking about trade disputes. Michael: No, he's talking about brutal, identity-driven conflict. And the most tragic example he uses to illustrate this is the Bosnian War in the early 1990s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia broke apart. The war that followed in Bosnia wasn't about capitalism versus communism. Kevin: Right, it was ethnic. Michael: It was civilizational. You had three groups living in the same area but belonging to three different civilizations: Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks. The fault lines between the Western, Orthodox, and Islamic civilizations ran right through the streets of cities like Sarajevo. Kevin: And it was horrific. The siege of Sarajevo, the Srebrenica massacre... Michael: Utterly horrific. Over 100,000 people were killed. And the war had another feature Huntington predicted: the 'kin-country syndrome.' Other Orthodox countries, like Russia and Greece, tended to sympathize with the Serbs. Catholic nations in Europe sympathized with the Croats. And Muslim countries, from Turkey to Iran, rallied to support the Bosniaks. The conflict wasn't contained; it sent out cultural shockwaves. Kevin: It became a proxy war for entire civilizations. Michael: In many ways, yes. It was a war over identity, territory, and history, fought along a civilizational seam. For Huntington, this was the new face of warfare. Kevin: This is where it gets really uncomfortable for me, and I know for many of his critics. Was Huntington a prophet who brilliantly saw this coming, or did this theory give people a neat, academic framework to justify these kinds of ancient ethnic and religious hatreds? Is it a description of the world, or a prescription for conflict? Michael: That is the million-dollar question, and it's why the book remains so controversial. Critics argue that by framing the world as an inevitable clash of monolithic cultures, he provides intellectual fuel for an 'us versus them' mentality. After the 9/11 attacks, for instance, his thesis was seized upon by many to frame the conflict as an unavoidable war between the West and Islam. Kevin: It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell everyone they're destined to clash, they might just start believing it and acting on it. It ignores all the diversity within civilizations and all the cooperation between them. Michael: Absolutely. And that's a powerful critique. Huntington's defenders would say he wasn't advocating for these clashes; he was a realist issuing a warning. He was telling the West, specifically, to stop its 'universalist' pretension—the idea that its values of democracy and human rights are, or should be, universal. He argued that pushing these values on other civilizations is seen as cultural imperialism and is a primary driver of conflict. Kevin: So his advice was basically for everyone to stay in their own cultural lane to keep the peace? Michael: In a simplified sense, yes. He advocated for a world order based on civilizations coexisting, with each major civilization having a 'core state' that maintains order within its sphere of influence. He urged the West to recognize it's just one civilization among many, not the universal standard for all.

Kevin: So, pulling this all together, whether you see him as a prophet or a provocateur, it seems like Huntington’s core contribution was forcing the world to look at culture. Michael: I think that's exactly right. Before him, so much of international relations theory was focused on economics, political systems, or military power. Huntington put culture and identity front and center on the world stage. He argued that these deep, primal forces—our religion, our history, our sense of 'us'—are powerful motivators of human action, and that ignoring them in our models of the world is both naive and incredibly dangerous. Kevin: It’s a pretty bleak outlook, though. The idea that our deepest differences are insurmountable. Michael: It can be. But there’s another way to look at it. The ultimate takeaway from Huntington might not be that we must clash. The deeper insight is that to avoid these clashes, we first have to understand that these powerful cultural currents exist. You can't build bridges between civilizations if you pretend they aren't there. His work, for all its flaws, is a powerful argument against a kind of simplistic globalism that thinks a shared market will solve all our problems. Kevin: It’s a call to recognize and respect deep differences, rather than assuming they’ll just melt away. Michael: Exactly. The first step to a genuine dialogue is acknowledging that the person across from you sees the world through a fundamentally different cultural lens. Kevin: It makes you wonder, in your own life, when you see conflicts in the news or even in your community, how much of it is driven by these deep, unspoken cultural identities? And is recognizing them the first step to conflict, or the first step to understanding? Michael: A profound question to ponder. Kevin: Indeed. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.