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Rating: Unfortunately for you, I want to try to ride this tidal wave that for some days has been pushing me to press keys with such frantic frequency. After "Cocaine Bear," in a continuum devoid of logical sense, I proudly continue by offering you what I believe to be a good book. However, when thinking of this review, I imagine an empty room with only a couple of patrons at most. Let's face it clearly: good old Samuel P. Huntington is not one of those well-known authors. The title of the work, "The Clash of Civilizations and the New World Order," doesn’t exactly invite reading. I can already see you flying gracefully far, far away to browse the Home Page and land on reviews more attractive and juicy than an unknown geopolitics text. But if there’s time for "Cocaine Bear," well, there's also time for "The Clash of Civilizations and the New World Order."
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, wrote an essay "The End of History?" and the thesis was further developed three years later with the publication of the book "The End of History." Same for Huntington who wrote the essay "The Clash of Civilizations?" in 1993. Three years later, the question mark of the essay vanished.
The two academics had very different visions of the post-Cold War era but have one thing in common. Precisely the question mark (?) of their essays. Almost no one emphasizes the importance of that special character.
Fukuyama hypothesized, wrongly, the birth of a unipolar world, globalized with growing development of liberal democracies. In hindsight, we can say that his book has aged poorly and his name is closely linked to the economic and geopolitical policies espoused by the Clinton administration. Of course, they were forecasts. The book, 900 pages long, also hypothesized other adverse scenarios that were spot on, Chinese growth and unheeded warnings that came true, but it’s known that man tends to simplify. So, Francis became known as the optimistic academic who thought history was over and that the post-Cold War world would have fewer frictions. He believed it was one of the possible scenarios, more probable than others.
And Huntington? He wrote "The Clash of Civilizations and the New World Order" precisely as a response to Fukuyama's work, and omitting the question mark was a godsend. Thirty years later, we can say his predictions were more accurate. But even in this case, the book is denser and more profound than it might seem. Just to give an example, he considered a conflict between Ukraine and Russia highly unlikely (p. 38) due to the cultural affinities that bound them. He did not foresee the deep internal crisis of the United States, which is the massive Western problem for which books are worth writing now. And I could go on for paragraphs.
For Huntington, a universal civilization cannot exist. Civilizations (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Muslim, Western, and finally African and Latin American) have a millennial duration that outlasts empires and states. Religion and language are the hinges of civilizations, united with demographic factors, customs, and traditions. In the 1900s, at its peak, the English language was spoken by less than 10% of the global population. The Western demographic collapse is accelerating the process of multipolarism that Huntington had foreseen but with longer timelines.
The book delves into themes such as the dynamic relationship between power and culture and the unstable and temporary equilibria resulting from the inevitable clash between various civilizations. At the end of the 1900s, the major friction themes were Western universalism, Muslim extremism, and Chinese growth.
I want to stay vague and avoid going into particulars to make two general reflections before closing. Perhaps the most suitable place would be an editorial, but now I'm almost at the end.
In my opinion, we live in a world of black and white, of extreme simplification and synthesis. This is fine up to a certain point because we are not children and obviously reality is interconnected, complicated, and the books I have talked about are very gray, interesting, and intriguing precisely for this reason. Because ex post, we are all experts at reading what should have been done and explaining history. But trying to imagine today what the future developments could be, looking at the medium and long term, is not so easy. And that is why Fukuyama and Huntington had put a question mark in their essays.
I would like someone to read books that unravel and hypothesize different theories on the same theme. This, in my opinion, would enhance critical spirit. And the loss of critical spirit is what scares me the most. By now, we are pushed to relate to people who think the same way and to categorize others a priori as ignorant fools. Society polarizes between us and them. We are the white and they are the black.
I lean more towards Huntington's vision, but Fukuyama, in his philosophical and environmental analysis, has hit some very interesting points. Both have made wrong predictions, and certainly, Fukuyama has made more noise in falling. But to arrive at this conclusion, I have read their books from cover to cover.
Being curious, feeling profoundly ignorant, and taking inspiration from those who think differently to change perspective is perhaps the only way to be more immune to fake news, more reprehensible populism born of ignorance.
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