Editing Samuel P. Huntington (section)

==="The Clash of Civilizations"===
{{further|Clash of Civilizations}}
[[File:Clash of Civilizations mapn2.png|thumb|Map of the nine "civilizations" from Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations"]]
In 1993, Huntington provoked great debate among [[international relations]] theorists with the interrogatively titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", an influential, oft-cited article published in ''[[Foreign Affairs]]'' magazine. In the article, he argued that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Islam would become the biggest obstacle to Western domination of the world. The West's next big war therefore, he said, would inevitably be with Islam.<ref>{{Cite news|last=Haruna|first=Mohammed|date=26 September 2001|title=Nigeria: September 11 And Huntington's Prophecy|newspaper=Daily Trust|url=http://allafrica.com/stories/200109270278.html|url-access=subscription }}</ref> Its description of post-Cold War [[geopolitics]] and the "inevitability of instability" contrasted with the influential "[[The End of History and the Last Man|End of History]]" thesis advocated by [[Francis Fukuyama]].

Huntington expanded "The Clash of Civilizations?" to book length and published it as ''[[The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order]]'' in 1996. The article and the book posit that post-Cold War conflict would most frequently and violently occur because of cultural rather than ideological differences. That, whilst in the Cold War, conflict occurred between the Capitalist Western Bloc and the Communist Eastern Bloc, it now was most likely to occur between the world's major civilizations—identifying eight, and a possible ninth: (i) Western, (ii) Latin American, (iii) Islamic, (iv) Sinic (Chinese), (v) Hindu, (vi) Orthodox, (vii) Japanese, (viii) African, and (ix) Buddhist. This cultural organization contrasts the contemporary world with the classical notion of sovereign states. To understand current and future conflict, cultural rifts must be understood, and culture—rather than the State—must be accepted as the reason for war. Thus, Western nations will lose predominance if they fail to recognize the irreconcilable nature of cultural tensions. Huntington argued that this post-Cold War shift in geopolitical organization and structure requires the West to strengthen itself culturally, by abandoning the imposition of its ideal of democratic universalism and its incessant military interventionism. Underscoring this point, Huntington wrote in the 1996 expansion, "In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://contemporarythinkers.org/samuel-huntington/|title=A Guide to the Work of Samuel Huntington|publisher=contemporarythinkers.org}}</ref>

The identification of Western Civilization with [[Western Christianity]] (Catholic-Protestant) was not Huntington's original idea, it was rather the traditional Western opinion and subdivision before the Cold War era.<ref>[[Peter Harrison (historian)|Peter Harrison]], [http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2018/01/17/4790945.htm An Eccentric Tradition: The Paradox of 'Western Values']</ref> Critics (for example articles in {{Lang|fr|[[Le Monde Diplomatique]]}}) call ''The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order'' the theoretical legitimization of American-caused Western aggression against China and the world's Islamic and Orthodox cultures. Other critics argue that Huntington's taxonomy is simplistic and arbitrary, and does not take account of the internal dynamics and partisan tensions within civilizations. Furthermore, critics argue that Huntington neglects ideological mobilization by elites and unfulfilled socioeconomic needs of the population as the real causal factors driving conflict, that he ignores conflicts that do not fit well with the civilizational borders identified by him, and that his new paradigm is nothing but [[Realism (international relations)|realist]] thinking in which "states" became replaced by "civilizations".<ref>see [[Richard E. Rubenstein]] and Jarle Crocker (1994): Challenging Huntington, in: Foreign Policy, Number 96 (Autumn, 1994), pages 113–28</ref> Huntington's influence upon US policy has been likened to that of historian [[Arnold J. Toynbee|Arnold Toynbee]]'s controversial religious theories about Asian leaders during the early twentieth century. The ''[[New York Times]]'' obituary on Huntington states that his "emphasis on ancient religious empires, as opposed to states or ethnicities, [as sources of global conflict] gained ... more cachet after the [[September 11 attacks|Sept. 11 attacks]]."<ref>[http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/samuel-huntington-foreign-policy-theorist-dies-at-81/ Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard Dies at 81], ''The New York Times'', December 27, 2008</ref>

Huntington wrote that Ukraine might divide along the cultural line between the more Catholic [[western Ukraine]] and Orthodox [[eastern Ukraine]]:
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While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian-Ukrainian war, a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than [[Dissolution of Czechoslovakia|that of Czechoslovakia]] but far less bloody than [[Breakup of Yugoslavia|that of Yugoslavia]].<ref>"[http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2014/3/1/204/17909 Testing Huntington in Ukraine]". European Tribune.</ref>
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