“The idea of a global ‘clash of civilizations’ was not wrong: it was simply premature,” argues Nils Gilman in the latest issue of the U.S. magazine Foreign Policy. The context: we are witnessing a realignment of international relations as significant as those of 1989, 1945, or 1919. As with these previous critical moments, the end of the liberal international order formed in the 1990s is a moment filled equally with uncertainties and fears, as old certainties, both good and bad, fade away.

Precisely in the 1990s, one of the most prominent debates in international relations was between Francis Fukuyama’s essay The End of History (which appeared, prophetically, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall) and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, published four years later.

While the liberal internationalist Fukuyama anticipated that the end of the Cold War signaled a perpetual peace among states aligned with the general principles of electoral democracy and capitalism—what Fukuyama called “the final form of human government”—the realist Huntington instead predicted a world marked by continuous conflict, though along completely different axes.

For Huntington, the most relevant geopolitical actors in the post-Cold War order would be “civilizations,” defined in terms outlined by the British historian Arnold Toynbee, and the “fault lines” between them would be places of rupture or friction points.

Huntington—who did not conceal his Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism—enumerated seven or eight main “civilizations”: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African. The most important conflicts of the future, he ventured, would occur along the cultural fault lines that separated these “civilizations” from one another.

Huntington’s vision of the new order was decidedly more pessimistic than Fukuyama’s, though both were inconclusive. Fukuyama concluded his essay with the famous argument that the price of “perpetual peace” would be technocratic boredom, where “audacity, courage, imagination, and idealism” in ideological struggles would give way to “mere economic calculation, the endless resolution of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” For Fukuyama, the coming “centuries of boredom” would create an existential crisis for people seeking social recognition in a world devoid of opportunities for political glory.

In contrast, Huntington argued that group identities, based on antagonistic cultural distinctions, would become more evident as the universalizing ideologies of the Cold War receded. In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations, which expanded on his original article, he predicted an unstable balance based on central powers imposing their dominance over their own “spheres of influence.” He also anticipated that hostility toward immigrants would be a defining feature of domestic politics in a world order defined by the clash of civilizations.

Thus, for Huntington, on one hand, the clash of civilizations was “the greatest threat to world peace” in the sense that the emphasis on inescapable cultural difference would form the substrate of endless hostility. On the other hand, as long as the main actors recognized the impossibility of attempting to impose their own cultural system on “foreign” civilizations, “an international order based on civilizations (would be) the safest safeguard against world war.” Cultural hostility between civilizations might be inevitable, Huntington concluded, but with luck, the “clash” could simply be a metallic noise rather than violent conflict.

However, the argument contains a controversial assumption: associating civilizations with distinctive geographic spaces and established geopolitical borders. Here “we, the Westerners,” and there “they, the Muslims”; here “we, the Latin Americans,” and there “they, the Africans.” Thirty years ago, this way of categorizing was debatable, but today it is decidedly whimsical and arbitrary. Globalization has unleashed the Genie from the lamp, and attempting to force it back in might lead to greater cracks, fissures, and barriers within societies themselves. Contemporary civilizations, starting with the Western one, are multicultural by nature.

While the old order dies, the central question now in international relations is the nature of the type of order to come. It is clear that there is no “end of history,” nor is it written that it will be marked by a “clash of civilizations.” Gilman concludes on this matter: “Whatever label is ultimately assigned to this new order, its defining characteristics will include zero-sum transactionalism in the international economy, the Thucydidean power politics in which ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,’ and bold assertions of identity-based policies centered on ‘civilizational states.’ In terms of the Chinese augury—whether a blessing or a curse—there is no doubt that we will live in ‘interesting times.'”

Text originally published in the newspaper Clarín

_{*Machine translation proofread by Janaína da Silva.}