32 pages • 1 hour read
The Clash of Civilizations
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Key Figures
Samuel P. Huntington
Huntington was an American academic, political scientist, and presidential advisor. For most of his career, he was associated with Harvard, where he served as the chairman of the Department of Government and a director of the Center for International Affairs. He was appointed as the Albert J Weatherhead III University Professor for a time, a highly prestigious position at Harvard. He also taught at Columbia. His major publications include “The Solider and the State” (1957), “Political Order in Changing Societies,” and The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Centuries (1991). “The Clash of Civilizations?” (1993) is considered his most influential work.
Huntington’s life-long research in geopolitics and international relations and his academic accomplishments established him as a respected figure in his field. He founded the academic journal Foreign Policy, in which this essay was published. He served as the president of the American Political Science Association, as well as the White House coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. He was also an advisor to Vice President Hubert Humphrey during the latter’s 1968 presidential campaign.
His deep study of the geopolitics, combined with his many years of experience in governmental roles, made him especially qualified to write “The Clash of Civilizations?” That said, Huntington has received criticism for his simplified model of civilizations, which paints highly diverse populations as monolithic groups.
Saddam Hussein
Born in 1937, Saddam Hussein was the leader of the Ba’ath Party, an Arab nationalist group. He became a key figure in the 1968 coup that brought the party to power. In the position of deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, Hussein was a major figure behind the party’s consolidation of power. By 1979, he had become the president of Iraq. Hussein presided over major modernization of the Iraqi economy, including bolstering the country’s oil production. However, he was considered a brutal, authoritarian, and aggressive dictator, and he initiated several conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq War and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait prompted a Western response. A coalition of Arab countries led by the United States invaded Kuwait and ousted Iraq’s forces, chasing them back across the borders. Huntington argues that Hussein used this experience to issue a call to arms for Islamic groups, a “kin-country” effect, and frames the Gulf War as emblematic of the tensions between Western Christian civilization and Islamic civilization, developing his theme of Islam as a Rival to the West.
Japan
Japan stands apart in Huntington’s analysis as a civilization of one nation. He distinguishes it from other East Asian countries on the basis that it purportedly has a more distinct culture, though Japan actually shares much of its history and culture with its neighbors. It has Confucian religious influences, its kanji writing system has roots in China, and it has a long history of relations (both peaceful and hostile) with Korea and China. However, where Korea and China are grouped into the Confucian civilization in Huntington’s framework, Japan is not.
This may be due to the post-WWII state of affairs that resulted in Japan’s isolation. It may also be due to the special interest that the West took in the postwar recovery of Japan. The country was flooded with investments and given access to markets and economic measures that no other country in the region was. Thanks to this Western financial bolstering, Japan became the fastest-growing economy in history. Huntington ultimately considers Japan an ally to the West, which factors into his arguments about how economic relationships cement civilizational borders.
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