Why we should revisit "The Clash of Civilizations" (but not for the reasons you might think)
Generating conflict has become an export
On Monday Oct 13, 2025, the New York Times published a detailed report about how a right-wing group from the United States — one that had been active in the campaign to overturn Roe. The group in question, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), “wants to empower conservative Christianity in Europe, and it sees Britain as a key bridgehead.” Apparently, pushing right-wing culture wars in the United States isn’t enough. It needs to be exported.
Let’s turn back the clock to 1993.
That year, Samuel Huntington published his “Clash of Civilizations” article in Foreign Affairs. The thesis was simple. Because of the end of the Cold War, and the success of democratic capitalism — Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis — the next dividing line of conflict in the world would be civilizational.
When I first read the article, I was shocked at an argument that seemed to suggest that people from different cultures were inevitably going to be fighting each other because of their culture. My own concerns notwithstanding, the argument proved to be popular.
More than a decade after the Foreign Affairs article was published, Peter J. Katzenstein discussed it in his 2009 APSA Presidential Address. Katzenstein did not describe the theory as racist. However, he did point out the role that the European belief in their superiority played in historical civilizational clashes — what we would otherwise refer to as empire and colonialism. That sense of Western civilizational superiority was also how President George W. Bush explained the 9/11 terrorist attack.
Anyway, in International Relations, the clash of civilizations became a way to think about the future trajectory and character of the global order. But that view misses another side of Huntington’s theory. The clash of civilizations might not have been a theory of international relations, but a commentary on American domestic politics.
In fact, a significant part of Katzenstein’s APSA address (or rather, the published version of it) spends a lot of time discussing America, not international relations.
Part of Katzenstein’s critique is about the framing of civilization that Huntington uses, suggesting that there are two approaches unitary or pluralist.
Huntington takes a kind of unitary perspective, whereas any nuance or diversity that comprises a civilisation are dismissed. That view shares something with primordial theories which, to put it crudely, emphasise a singular moment of creation that defines a group, possibly, forever. The shared similarity is in the general treatment of a group as necessarily homogeneous.
In Katzenstein’s own words: “Though lacking in conceptual richness and empirical support, unitary conceptions of civilizations are very popular outside academia. How do we account for their broad appeal? Primordiality is a simplifying crystallization of social consciousness around nodes such as civilization, gender, and race. What matters is not so much the category in and of itself but the political act of reification, the public exposure it receives, and the fact that it is believed in.”
His criticism of Huntington was that civilisations are not unitary, but pluralist. He goes on to ask what type of civilization America represents, and answers by saying that America is a pluralist civilization because it holds a kind of liberal diversity.
Of course, many view America that way. But, it is obviously not how the ADF does, not is it how President Trump or Vice-President Vance do, nor their many acolytes and supporters.
Which brings us back to the clash.
What’s so interesting about the international efforts of the ADL is that it demonstrates not that there exists a clash of civilisations, but the attempt to make one.
To put this a different way, the clash of civilizations thesis was (sort of) correct to emphasize that some cultural groups see themselves in civilizational (and unitary) terms that demarcate fault lines. These lines could be a cause for future conflict. However, the important point here is not that civilization is a fault line for conflict. Instead, the pain is in how the idea of civilization can be used to justify conflict.
Scholars of international political won’t be surprised about the important role of ideas, although I’d wager that seeing ideas being deployed in order to generate social strife in other democracies is probably not what comes to mind. Of course, the battle over ideas was a large part of the Cold War, when the CIA used dystopian novels such as 1984 and Brave New World in their “spy book program” that involved sending these books into Warsaw Pact countries.1 Nevertheless, there does seem to be something a bit different going on if we look at Vance’s Munich Speech and the ADF efforts written about in the New York Times.
There has certainly been no shortage of commentary about the culture wars in contemporary Western politics, especially America. And I guess because America’s dysfunctional political landscape is so wonderful, it is spreading (although not in a good way — in case you were unsure where I was going with this).
Some of the literature about culture in American politics is more interesting than others, but exporting the values in Peanuts (i.e. Charlie Brown) is not the type of politics that characterizes MAGA America.
The disfunction and extreme partisanship in America is partly a result of how the political parties, Republicans in particular, have deployed identity and culture as a weapon, and it is spreading. In Canada, it used to be the case that cultural battles in the public sphere were largely dominated by French language laws. However, the freedom convoy and a curious (but tragic) case involving an Ostrich Farm in Courtney (on Vancouver Island, British Columbia) have been using more American style language about freedom than has been typically the case in Canada. Attempts at bringing American-style cultural divisions into the UK have not fared especially well, although not from lack of trying, and Reform’s success in the polls could be reversing that. Certainly, the rise of a xenophobic populist right build on a narrative about social breakdown is spreading across the (democratic) world. The social breakdown, however, is often framed by weaving a narrative that includes a racial anti-immigrant take on political freedom, rending one unitary society or civilization, fighting to save itself against another. If that sounds a lot like the Brexit campaign, it’s not by accident.
I am not suggesting that there is a clash of civilisations taking place. But I am suggesting that the populist right is trying, very hard, to generate one.2
See, Alfred A. Reisch, Hot Books in the Cold War: The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain (Amsterdam: Central European University Press, 2013); Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War (London, England: William Collins, 2025).
Great post, thanks. Michael Lee read the writing on the wall a few years back. He wrote an article titled (something along the lines of) “what would a populist world order look like?”
We live in interesting times…