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The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. By Samuel P. Huntington. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. 368p. $25.00.
Samuel Huntington has made many important contributions to the fields of international relations and comparative politics. He has called to our attention the distinction between quantitative and qualitative arms races, advanced our understanding of modernization and institutionalization processes in the Third World, and contributed to our knowledge of "transnationalism in world politics" and of the effect of democratization. One important measure of creativity in the field is the number of new and important variables a scholar introduces. Huntington's previous work leaps this hurdle with room to spare. The Clash of Civilizations dramatically continues this process, uniting both comparative and international analyses in a forcefully argued analytic tract. Though admittedly not a work of social science, Huntington's new essay offers powerful food for thought for scholars, governments, and revolutionaries: Will differences between "civilizations" agitate world politics? What can be done to reduce conflict and allow Western civilization to survive?
Huntington's broad subject follows in the path of Arnold J. Toynbee and Karl W. Deutsch, who understood that religious, linguistic, and ethnic differences could evoke and even determine social conflict, domestically and internationally. Toynbee observed the response of civilizations to challenge and graded their performances accordingly. Deutsch knew that as latent ethnic populations were mobilized to political activity, the very definition of the nation could undergo change. Toynbee observed that Sumerian, Egyptian, and Classical civilizations ultimately failed to respond to multiform challenges. In like manner, Deutsch witnessed the transformation of nation-states from one nationality to another. To take but one of his examples, Finland was initially dominated by its mobilized Swedish population, then ruled by Russians. The latent Finnish population became fully politically participant only in the twentieth century.
Unlike Toynbee and Deutsch, however, Huntington offers a theoretical approach to what has happened since the end of the Cold War and what will happen in the future. The division of the world into two blocs, which prevailed during the Cold War, no longer exists. But Huntington does not believe that the world has thereby degenerated into a realist anarchic system of nation-states in which the only protection is nuclear deterrence. The "one-world" theory of politics...