Newspaper Article

Global cultural conflict prophesied

Reviewed by Richard Bernstein Note: TITLE: The Clash Of Civilizations And The Remaking Of World Order. AUTHOR: Samuel P. Huntington. PUBLISHER: (Simon & Schuster, 367 pages).

1996

Overview

THE Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington is one of those books so sweeping in its effort to incorporate a vast panorama into a single concept that it almost challenges you to poke holes in it. No doubt many fellow students of the Big Questions in post-Cold War politics will do just that. Huntington's answer does not come as a surprise, since his new book is a lengthy elaboration of an argument he made three years ago in a well-known article in Foreign Affairs. That article elicited the most heated and voluminous response that Foreign Affairs has had since the even more famous article of 1948 in which \"X\" (actually George Kennan) advanced the containment doctrine to deal with the Soviet Union. His detailed account of the Bosnian war as \"one more bloody episode in an ongoing clash of civilisations\" is a case in point. Huntington's claim is based on the idea that the various groups in Bosnia were helped or hindered by other countries with cultural and religious affiliations. The Muslim countries backed the Muslims, Roman Catholic parts of Europe backed Roman Catholic Croatia, and Orthodox Greece and Russia backed the Orthodox Serbs.

• Publisher: The New Straits Times Press (M) Berhad