Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order turns 30 this year. The book was a worldwide hit in the late 1990s and has been published in some 30 translations, including in Arabic, Chinese, and Bengali. After 9/11, the first part of the title practically became a household phrase. Huntington had been an eminent political scientist at Harvard, but his 1996 book made him a global celebrity. (I first met him when I was a Ph.D. student at Harvard, and we later became friends.) The gist of Huntington's argument: The end of the Cold War did not mark the 'end of history,' as the political theorist Francis Fukuyama had argued in a widely discussed article and subsequent book imagining that the collapse of the Soviet empire would virtually end the strife among states of millennia past and that liberal democracy and market economics would now rule. Huntington predicted that a new conflict would rage after the demise of Communism. Now not states, but the...
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