Huntington Revisited

Writing for Reuters, Oxford research fellow John Lloyd reports the introduction of a new conflict-descriptive term: civilizationism.

In 1992, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine whose core was a few short sentences: “The principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

In another article in Foreign Affairs this month, Rogers Brubaker, a sociologist at the University of California in Los Angeles, detects a new ideology – civilizationalism – developed by far right, anti-immigrant parties, mainly in Europe. According to Brubaker, it’s a warrior ideology, “a pan-European civilizational identity”, threatened by and ready to threaten another civilizational identity – Islam. In doing so, it “poses grave dangers to liberal democracy.”

COTTonLINE believes we confront a warrior ideology in Islam, responding as warriors is the appropriate riposte. Anything else is suicidal. In a clash of civilizations, there is no prize for second place.