IT HAS BEEN nearly 13 years since Samuel Huntington published his seminal essay "The Clash of Civilizations?" in Foreign Affairs. As works of academic prophecy go, this has been a real winner -- up there with George Kennan's epoch-making 1947 essay "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," which laid out the rationale for containment of the Soviet Union.
"In this new world," wrote Huntington, "the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.... The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."
The other great think-piece of the post-Cold War period was Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History." Published in 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it argued that liberal democracy had conquered, once and for all, rival ideologies such as fascism and communism. But Fukuyama went from seeming prescient to seeming overoptimistic within just a few years. In particular, Bosnia's civil war showed how history might actually resume with a vengeance in some post-communist societies.
By contrast, Huntington's vision of a world divided along ancient cultural fault lines has stood up much better. Indeed, the Bosnian war was a good example of what Huntington had in mind, because it was a conflict located precisely on the fault line between Western Christianity, Orthodoxy and Islam.
Muslims were the losers in Bosnia. But Huntington's point was that in other respects, Islam was an ascendant civilization, not least because of the high birthrates prevalent in most Muslim societies. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were interpreted by many Americans in Huntington's terms; this was an attack on America's Judeo-Christian civilization by the fanatical followers of a prophet spurned by both Jews and Christians.
Also ascendant, Huntington argued, was Confucianism, the civilization of China. This forecast, too, has been vindicated by the seemingly unstoppable growth of the Chinese economy.
Huntington's model makes sense of an impressively high proportion of the news. When young Muslim men riot in protest against Danish cartoons, it looks like another case of clashing civilizations. Small wonder many congressmen are baffled by the Bush administration's willingness to let a Dubai-based firm take over terminal operations at six U.S. ports: wrong civilization.
Strife between Nigerian Muslims and Christians? Chalk up another one to Huntington. Trouble in the Caucasus? That's two. Darfur? Three, and counting.
