The Clash Of Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is a book written by Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington in which he states that it is his belief that the conflict of the Post Cold War era is going to be derived from religious/cultural differences.

The book was met with consternation and anger by some, who saw this work as an oversimplification of the incredible complexity of international affairs. There were many errors to point in this direction; for example, Huntington classified Israel as a nation in the Muslim Culture. The academic journal Foreign Affairs published a refutation of the book, entirely in verse, quoted below:

"We owe to Samuel Huntington a potent provocation,

A trenchant tract to counteract a clear exaggeration:

The notion that the West has won, its culture now supreme,

His book rejects--and then corrects--as wishful in extreme.

For, he insists, our world consists of cultural formations

Arising (and revising) out of eight great civilizations.

He sets our pulses pounding and our wisdom teeth to gnashing

With come-to-blows scenarios of different cultures clashing.

This is of course a tour de force, but somewhere in the tour,

Huntington has been undone by paradigm-amour."

Although partly a joke - a jab that the book can be so easily dismissed as with a poem - the poem encapsulates most of the criticisms of Huntington's work.[1]

See also[edit]

• A Study of History
• Near abroad

External links[edit]

• The Clash of Civilizations?, Samuel P. Huntington, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993.