Are We Living Through a "Clash of Civilizations"?

In 1993, America and the West was still digesting the fact that it had ‘won’ the Cold War. With the Berlin Wall crumbling less than four years before, liberal democracy and Western values were triumphant.

Then in the summer of 1993, Harvard professor Samuel P Huntington fired a missile at this self-satisfied version of events.

His article in Foreign Affairs, "The Clash of Civilizations?" said that rather than a moment of victory, the end of the Cold War was exposing just how transient had been the division of the world into East and West, communist and capitalist.

More significant and older cultural and religious fault lines were revealing themselves again. For example, the bloody collapse of the former Yugoslavia and its reconfiguring according to religion (Christian, Orthodox, Muslim) and ethnicity.

Huntington had other uncomfortable things to say, including that the West’s influence was declining while Asian civilization was on the rise. Islam was undergoing a “demographic explosion” that would destabilize Muslim countries and their neighbors.

The biggest conflicts in the 21st century would be the West & Islam, and the West & China. Instead of trying to impose itself on the world, the West should unite to affirm its unique identity and protect its values against non-Western societies, including limiting immigration.

Countries around the globe were happily accepting modernization, but rejecting being Westernized. World peace rested on each civilization accepting the other’s dominance in their own sphere, and cooperating so that those spheres are respected.

Yet as long as the West relinquished its claim to moral superiority, the world had a chance of remaining stable and without major wars.

In the next Memo I go into more depth on Huntington's arguments on the clash of civilizations - and where it may end up:

https://memod.com/TomButlerBowdon/why-the-west-won-t-inherit-the-earth-6963

Why The West Won't Inherit The Earth Thirty years since its publication, can we say that Samuel P. Huntington’s book