Civilizational Clash!
The Tyranny of the New World Order

^[1]3,364 words

Samuel P. Huntington
The Clash of Civilizations & the Remaking of World Order
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996

From 1994 to 1996, the Russians waged war against the Chechens. In 1999 the war resumed, ending in 2000 with the Russians firmly in control of the ruins of Chechen cities. In 2008, the Russians attacked Georgia and set up the independent state of Ossetia. Other than the warmongers and anti-Russians in the United States government, nobody in America or Western Europe really cared.

In 2022, the Russian army has now attacked Ukraine. The Russian attack is being met with intense hostility across North America and Western Europe. When oil prices spiked due to the crisis, oil producers Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates refused to take calls ^[2] from US government officials who want them to increase production. Furthermore, the UAE has refused to condemn the Russian invasion ^[3] at the United Nations, although American troops have consistently defended that nation throughout several war scares with Iran. What, you might ask, is going on? The answer can be found in Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations.

Huntington divided the world into nine different civilizations. They are:

Western: North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe. This civilization is influenced by the ancient cultures of Egypt, Canaan, Greece, and Rome. Religiously, it is influenced by the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation. For example, John Calvin (Protestant) and Ignatius Loyola (Catholic) both attended the University of Paris. The West is also influenced by the Enlightenment and the Renaissance.

Latin American: North America south of the Rio Grande River, including South America and most of the West Indies. Latin American civilization is very similar to Western civilization in many ways, but its religious structure is entirely Catholic, heavily influenced by the Catholicism of sixteenth-century Spain. There is much in the way of cultural and racial differences within Latin America as well. In some parts of Latin America the population is no different from the rest of Western civilization; in other places, the population is mostly indigenous Amerindians, mestizos, or other non-white mixtures. “Latin America could be considered either a sub-civilization within Western civilization or a separate civilization closely affiliated with the West and divided as to whether it belongs in the West” (p. 46).

Orthodox: This civilization is also very close to Western Civilization, but it is less influenced by ancient Rome than its Greek successor, the Byzantine Empire. Orthodox civilization did not experience the Reformation, Renaissance, or the Enlightenment. Its original center of gravity, Constantinople, was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and Russia was under the rule of the Mongols for nearly two centuries. Both of these conquests further separated Orthodox civilization from the West.

Islamic: “Originating in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century A.D., Islam rapidly spread across North Africa and the Iberian peninsula and also eastward into central Asia, the Subcontinent, and Southeast Asia. As a result, many distinct cultures or sub-civilizations exist within Islam, including Arab, Turkic ^[6], Persian, and Malay.” (p. 45)

Sinic: A distinctly Chinese civilization that goes back to at least 1500 BC. This civilization is heavily influenced by Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Sinic civilization is comprised of more than China, though, and includes Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

Japanese: This civilization is the offspring of Sinic civilization and it emerged between 100 and 400 AD. Japanese civilization is orderly, efficient, and creative.

Hindu: This civilization is centered on the Indian subcontinent since the second millennium BC. Its religion is a living example of the ancient faith of the Indo-Europeans, and it consists of sharply-defined social classes.

Buddhist: This civilization is bifurcated into the Theravada Buddhist nations of Burma, Cambodia ^[7], Thailand, and Laos, and the Lamaist Buddhist lands of Tibet, Mongolia, and Bhutan.

African: Sub-Saharan Africa. Pockets of this cultural zone also exist in the various sub-Saharan ghettos of the West. African civilization is influenced by ancient tribal religions like Voodoo and Christianity. This civilization produces few cultural works of value and is highly tribal. Ethiopia is part of African civilization, but is above and separate from it in many ways. Many of the people there speak a Semitic Language ^[8], and the nation has cultural and economic ties to Greece and the Near East that stretch back thousands of years ^[9].

Ethiopia is an example of what Huntington calls a lone country. These countries are nations which stand apart from their respective civilization in some way. Iran is also a lone country; it is a Shi’a nation in a mostly Sunni Islamic civilization. The lone country of Haiti is likewise more African than Latin American, but not fully in one or the other civilization.

Huntington argues that most civilizations have a leading polity — a core state. The most powerful part of Western civilization is the United States, with other centers of gravity in Britain and the French-German core of the European Union. In Orthodox civilization it is Russia, and the Sinic world is led by China. Not all civilizations are led by one particular country, though. Latin American civilization could be said to be led by Spain, but the Spanish have chosen to be Western. Brazil could take the lead, but it is Portuguese-speaking, so it is too different from the Spanish-speaking nations around it to assume that role. Islamic civilization has no core state leading it, and neither does African.

It is difficult for knowledge and philosophical ideas to spread from one civilization to another. For example, Buddhism took 600 years to be transmitted from India to China. Printing was developed in China in the eighth century AD, and movable type in the eleventh century, but that technology didn’t reach Europe — as the case can be made that it was independently developed there — until the fifteenth century. Likewise, gunpowder arose in ninth-century China, but only got to Europe in the fourteenth century.

Reactions to the Rise of the West

The Europeans greatly improved the use of the Chinese printing press and gunpowder. Since 1492, the West has risen above ^[13] and, apart from a few exceptional areas, completely dominated the other civilizations. During the Cold War, Western civilization led a coalition of nations that crossed civilizational boundaries against the Communist bloc, which had also crossed civilizational boundaries.

When the Cold War ended, an idea arose that global society had reached the so-called End of History. This describes an era when liberal, free-market economics and democracy prevail across a peaceful world. The End of History turned out to be a blip, however. Cross-civilizational conflict started immediately after the Cold War ended.

The first thing one needs to recognize in this clash is that all the other civilizations must react to Western civilization. The other civilizations have reacted in three ways:

Rejectionism: Japan did this after their first contact with the west in 1542 until the middle of the nineteenth century. China also attempted to close its society off from the West, but nevertheless came to be dominated by it after the Opium War of 1839-1842.

Kemalism ^[14]: This is when a civilization — or part of a civilization, as in the case of Turkey — transforms itself along Western lines. The Turks changed their alphabet ^[15], their way of government, and general outlook to match that of Europe and the West, for example. Czar Peter the Great likewise attempted this in Russia. Some Japanese and Chinese intellectuals unsuccessfully suggested this as well. Nations that follow the Kemalist reaction end up as torn countries: “the people of torn countries agree on who they are but disagree on which civilization is properly their situation” (p. 138). Turkey, Russia, and Mexico fit into this category, but none of these nations have really shifted from one civilization to the other.

Reformism: This reaction to the West rejects the two courses of action described above. Reformers embrace technological modernity while preserving the central values, practices, and institutions of their society’s indigenous culture.

Western civilization reached its apogee between 1918 and 1923, when just a few Western political leaders ^[16] on the “winning” side of the First World War were able to divide the world according to their own wishes. Since then, it’s been a slide downwards. The key problems are a low white birth rate, a lowered work ethic, lack of savings, de-industrialization ^[17], substance abuse ^[18], and other ^[19] pathologies ^[20].

On the other hand, Western civilization continues to lead in space technology, science, finance, control of the sea lanes, and aviation. It can also project military power around the world.

The Emerging Rivals

The key problem for Western civilization has been the rise of two rival civilizations, Sinic and Islamic, and their successful embrace of reformism. Indeed, reformism is the most effective way for non-Western peoples to wage civilizational competition. Muslim youths can drink Coke and watch soccer on a TV made in Japan while conspiring to bomb a European or American airline. Furthermore, “democracy” doesn’t make a society “Western” in any way. Voters in different civilizations vote for the candidate that is truer to their civilizational values. The idea of a “universal civilization,” developed by anglophile V.S. ^[21] Naipaul ^[22], is simply not realizable.

Sinic civilization’s rise is entirely due to industrialization and economic growth. American diplomatic and military policy allowed and encouraged industrialization in South Korea, and American plutocrats in the early 1990s rigged the system to encourage China to industrialize. In 1970, South Koreans looked upon the Americans with favor, but by 1988, they started to become hostile and anti-American ^[23]. It all comes down to manufacturing and money flows. In the mill-towns of America’s heartland, the factories are gone and everything is in decline. Across Sinic civilization, factories have been springing up from nowhere, the cities are growing, and ultra-modern high-rises are being built.

Islamic civilization has grown in power due to its high birthrate that began in the mid-twentieth century and only recently started to stall. The problems between the West and Islam are long-standing.

Huntington writes:

Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise. The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity. At times, peaceful coexistence has prevailed; more often the relation has been one of intense rivalry and of varying degrees of hot war. (p. 209)

Islamic Civilization strikes out violently upon its frontiers. Islamic attacks on all the other civilizations are universally known and so numerous that enumerating the particulars here is un-necessary. Within Islamic Civilization there is also considerable violence. Huntington writes, “In the early 1990s Muslims were engaged in more intergroup violence than were non-Muslims, and two-thirds to three-quarters of inter-civilizational wars were between Muslims and non-Muslims. Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards. (p. 257)

Intra-Islamic loyalty is U-shaped: Muslims are loyal to their immediate family and clan, less loyal to their government, and very loyal to their civilization.

Civilizational Fault Lines & Cleft Nations

There are nations or groups of nations that clearly fall into one civilization or another. These are member nations. Egypt is a member nation of Islamic civilization. East and West Germany were both Western. When they unified after the Cold War, there were few issues between them aside from those of economic policy.

Then there are cleft countries. These nations are those whose territory stands along a civilizational fault line. Most polities that have been divided between two civilizations since the end of the Cold War have fallen apart or undergone ferocious civil wars. Sudan divided along civilizational lines in 2011, and Sri Lanka had a cross-civilizational civil war that lasted for 26 years.

Yugoslavia was another cleft country. Three civilizational fault lines overlapped in that Communist polity. When the Cold War ended, polarization started immediately. Moderates on the political scene were replaced by radicals. Then, as the fighting started, the small nations made appeals to the larger nations within their civilization. The Western nation of Croatia was particularly successful in this.

Huntington writes:

The response of the West [to Croatia’s appeals for aid] was defined by Germany, and the response of Germany was in large part defined by the Catholic connection. The Bonn government came under pressure to act from the German Catholic hierarchy, its coalition partner the Christian Social Union party in Bavaria, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other media. The Bavarian media, in particular, played a crucial role in developing German public sentiment for recognition.

“Bavarian TV,” Flora Lewis noted, “much weighed upon by the very conservative Bavarian government and the strong, assertive Bavarian Catholic church which had close connections with the church in Croatia, provided the television reports for all of Germany when the war [with the Serbs] began in earnest. The coverage was very one-sided.” The German government was hesitant about granting recognition, but given the pressures in German society it had little choice.” (pp. 281-282)

So, Croatia^Western made an appeal to Bavaria^Western, which in turn made an appeal to Germany^Western, that ultimately got the United Kingdom^Western, France^Western, and the US^Western on their side. Likewise, Serbia^Orthodox successfully appealed to Greece^Orthodox and Russia^Orthodox. For their part, Bosnian Muslims^Islamic appealed to Turkey^Islamic and Saudi Arabia^Islamic, receiving funding and support.

NATO & the Clash of Civilizations

During the Cold War, the United States and Great Britain surrounded the Communist bloc with several defensive treaty organizations. There was the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO ^[26]), the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO ^[27]), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ^[28]). Of the three organizations, only NATO still exists. The other two perished before the Cold War ended. The CENTO organization dissolved because of the civilizational clash that was Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and SEATO came unglued in an absence-of-mind sort of way.

The case can be made that CENTO and SEATO fell apart because its members were in different civilizations. NATO continued to exist because most of its members are squarely rooted in Western civilization.

But NATO also nearly came apart along civilizational lines in 1974. The Greek^Orthodox government wished to annex Cyprus^Orthodox. There was a coup on July 15 of that year. However, the Turkish Cypriots^Islamic resisted, and five days later the Turkish^Islamic military invaded the island and set up Northern Cyprus as a Turkish Cypriot ethnostate. A great deal of ethnic cleansing and forced deportations followed, and today the island is effectively divided.

After the Cold War ended, NATO’s civilizational issues became an issue again when Greece and Turkey wound up supporting opposite sides in the Yugoslav Wars, and they were both opposed to the creation of the Western-backed nations of Slovenia and Croatia.

Of this, Huntington writes:

During the Cold War, Greece and Turkey were in NATO, Bulgaria and Romania were in the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia was nonaligned, and Albania was an isolated sometime associate of communist China. Now these Cold War alignments are giving way to civilizational ones rooted in Islam and Orthodoxy. Balkan leaders talk of crystallizing a Greek-Serb-Bulgarian Orthodox alliance. The “Balkan wars,” Greece’s prime minister alleges, “. . . have brought to the surface the resonance of Orthodox ties. . . . this is a bond. It was dormant, but with the developments in the Balkans, it is taking on some real substance. In a very fluid world, people are seeking identity and security. People are looking for roots and connections to defend themselves against the unknown.” (p. 126)

NATO has continued to expand since Huntington wrote the book in 1996. He argued that accepting Western nations such as Poland and the Baltics and bringing in Orthodox nations would also bring about more internal friction. Since then, NATO has indeed incorporated Poland and the Baltics, along with Albania^Islamic and the Orthodox nations of Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Macedonia. And it was the possibility of bringing Ukraine into NATO that sparked the present war.

Ukraine

Russia and Ukraine are nations every bit as influenced by Viking settlers as England and Normandy, but Russia has more Mongol and Tartar influence and Ukraine has less. Western Ukraine also has very deep connections with Western civilization.

Concerning Ukraine, Huntington wrote:

Ukraine . . . is a cleft country with two distinct cultures. The civilizational fault line between the West and Orthodoxy runs through its heart and has done so for centuries. At times in the past, western Ukraine was part of Poland, Lithuania, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A large portion of its population have been adherents of the Uniate Church which practices Orthodox rites but acknowledges the authority of the Pope. Historically, western Ukrainians have spoken Ukrainian and have been strongly nationalist in their outlook. The people of eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, have been overwhelmingly Orthodox and have in large part spoken Russian. (p. 165)

This division led to one war starting in 2014 and another in 2022. Westerners have overwhelmingly begun supporting Ukraine against Russia. While connections between, say, Sinic civilization and the West are few and fraught with hostility and mistrust, the relationship between Ukrainians and other Westerners are large and varied. For example, the United States and Ukraine are connected in terms of their militaries, agricultural industry, religious institutions (both Catholic and Protestant), and political connections ranging from the far Left to the far Right.

Meanwhile, while NATO appears to be unified and there is all sorts of excitement about the Russo-Ukrainian War, it is important to remember that all wars start out with cheers and flowers and end in tears. Additionally, NATO still has considerable civilizational splits. Poland^Western is aggressively sending aid to Ukraine and lobbying the other members, especially the United States^Western, to do more. Turkey^Islamic is likewise providing armed drones to aid in Ukraine’s defense. Bulgaria^Orthodox and Greece^Orthodox remain unenthusiastic as seen through the smoke of the mainstream media’s sensationalist reporting. Serbia^Orthodox, which is not a member of NATO but lies in the middle of the bloc, is very pro-Russian.

Ending the war will be quite difficult. Should Russia triumph by force of arms and put down a possible Ukrainian insurgency, Ukraine will be absorbed as a reluctant satrapy into the Russian empire, and that will be that. But should Ukraine manage to effect a stalemate that changes Russian attitudes, a peace treaty will be negotiated.

Huntington writes:

Fault line wars are almost never halted by direct negotiations between primary parties alone and only rarely by the mediation of disinterested parties. The cultural distance, intense hatreds, and mutual violence they have inflicted on each other make it extremely difficult for primary parties to sit down and engage in productive discussion looking toward some form of ceasefire. The underlying political issues, who controls what territory and people on what terms, keep surfacing and prevent agreement on more limited questions. . . . The Pope could successfully mediate the Argentine-Chilean boundary dispute. In conflicts between groups from different civilizations, however, there are no disinterested parties. Finding an individual, institution, or state whom both parties think trustworthy is extremely difficult. (pp. 291-292)

The situation in Ukraine is unclear and the future is uncertain, but should they hold the line and Russia sue for peace, I propose that peace should be mediated by the Greek government. That nation is both in NATO and is part of Orthodox civilization. There doesn’t seem to be any anti-Russian hysteria in Greece, as in the American Deep State or in the Polish government.

Regardless, the clash of civilizations is here to stay. It is indeed the tyranny of the New World Order.

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.

• First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
• Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:

Paywall Gift Subscriptions

^[32]If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:

• your payment
• the recipient’s name
• the recipient’s email address
• your name
• your email address

To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.