I recently revisited the famous 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs by Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” . In this post I review the historical context of its publication, the degree to which its ideas have or have not proven prescient regarding current geopolitics of the 21st Century, and the ways in which his theory can be used to examine how different civilizations have experienced and responded to the digital revolution of the Internet age.
Two of the main intellectual paradigms for understanding the post-Cold War world were Huntington’s concept (which described inevitable future conflicts between civilizational blocs around the globe) and Francis Fukuyama’s view of “The End of History,” which observed that governments around the world seemed to be converting en masse to democratic politics and market economics.