Global politics at its great power weight class has returned to a state of competition not that competition at any level entirely ceased between 1993 and today. Some quarter century later, understanding what Huntington got right, and where he may have missed the mark, is worth the effort. His attempt to determine where we, as a species, are in terms of political and social development arguably represents the pinnacle of Huntington’s work as a political thinker. But Huntington’s “Clash” caused a stir for a special reason: He flew against prevailing zeitgeist, which had room for only a globalist versus nationalist conception, by proposing the concept of culture, and by extension civilization, as the organizing principle for global politics in the post-Cold War era. Grand theoretical views by eminent thinkers deserve to cause stirs, whether they are right in the main or not-for being wrong grandly can start ultimately useful conversations in ways that being right trivially cannot. Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” caused a stir when Foreign Affairs published it in the summer of 1993.
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