The Clash Was Never Between Civilizations
The clash of civilizations is the phrase everyone in the foreign policy trade reaches for and almost nobody finishes the argument behind. It has become a mood, a shorthand, a polite way of saying these people are not like us and never will be. That is not what Samuel Huntington wrote; it is not the strongest version of what he wrote; and it is not the useful version either.
I want to take the thesis seriously, which means doing the thing its fans and its critics both skip. The fans stop at the title. The critics stop at the outrage. Neither reads to the end. The end is where it gets interesting, because the honest verdict is that Huntington was half right about the wrong thing, and the half he got right points somewhere he did not want to go.
Stripping the 1993 essay and the 1996 book to the frame. After the Cold War, Huntington argued, the deep dividing lines between people would stop being ideological or economic and become cultural. States would still be the main players, but the conflicts that mattered would run along the seams between civilizations: large blocs held together less by politics than by history, language, and above all religion. He counted seven or eight or nine of them, depending on which page you are reading, Western, Orthodox, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Japanese, Latin American, African, and drew fault lines where they met.
Two lines from the book did most of the damage to his reputation and most of the work in his argument. “The West and the rest.” And the one everybody remembers: “Islam has bloody borders.” He meant it as a statistical observation about the frequency of conflict on the edges of the Muslim world. It was received, understandably, as a civilizational slur. Both readings have followed the book ever since.
Here is the part European seminars are reluctant to concede: a great deal of what happened after 1993 looks exactly like the thing Huntington said would happen.
The 1990s were supposed to be the decade when history ended and everyone quietly converged on liberal democracy and open markets. Instead we got the Balkans, where Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Bosnian Muslims sorted themselves and killed each other along lines that mapped almost too neatly onto his map. We got the return of religion as a mobilizing force precisely where the modernization theorists had promised it would fade. We got September 11, and then a global insurgency that spoke, explicitly, the language of civilization and faith. If you had read only Huntington and gone to sleep in 1996, you would have woken up in 2005 less surprised than most of the people who had laughed at him.
He was also right about something subtler, and this is the part worth keeping note of. He saw that the universalist assumption at the heart of the ‘Western’ project, the belief that our arrangements are not ours but everyone’s, waiting to be discovered, was itself a provincial idea. Davos man, the frictionless global citizen who is at home everywhere and loyal to nowhere, turned out to be a rounding error. Most people, when the pressure comes on, reach for the older loyalties: the faith, the nation, the kin. Huntington understood that culture is stickier than income, and that a Turkish worker in Germany does not become German the way the integration brochures assumed. As a piece of political anthropology, that has aged better than almost anything written by his optimistic contemporaries.
And yet the thesis fails, and it fails in a way that matters more than the places it succeeds.
The first problem is that civilizations are not billiard balls. Huntington needed them to be solid, bounded, and internally coherent, so that one could clash against another. They are none of those things. The bloodiest conflicts of the era he was describing did not run between his civilizations; they ran straight through the middle of them. Iran and Iraq, both Muslim, spent eight years killing a generation. The Arab Spring was Muslims against Muslims. Sunni and Shia have a quarrel older and deeper than anything either has with Copenhagen. If Islam is a civilization at war, most of its casualties have been inflicted by itself.
The second problem is that the thesis smuggles in an answer to a question it never asks: which identity, of the many any person carries, is the one that decides how they act? Amartya Sen called this the illusion of singular belonging, and it is the sharpest thing anyone has said against Huntington. A Bangladeshi is a Muslim, yes, and also a Bengali, a speaker of a language his neighbors in Pakistan once tried to suppress, a farmer or a garment worker or a cricket fan, a member of a class, a citizen of a state. Huntington’s method requires you to pick one of those and paint the whole person in its color. Reality does not cooperate. The garment worker’s quarrel with her employer does not become a civilizational fault line because both parties happen to pray toward Mecca.
Edward Said gave the third objection its name: the clash of ignorance. To speak of Islam and the West as two things that can face each other across a line, you have to first pretend that each is one thing. You have to forget that what we call the West was built partly out of Greek philosophy transmitted through Arab scholars, that Christianity is an Eastern religion which went to Europe on business, that the categories leak at every edge. The clash needs the ignorance in order to work.
There is a fourth objection, the one a practitioner feels most. The thesis is self-fulfilling. Tell a population for twenty years that it is locked in a civilizational struggle, arm the telling with grievance and a satellite channel, and you will eventually get the struggle you described. Huntington wrote a weather report and then helped make the weather.
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And there is a fifth, which is the one the realists make. Follow the money and the borders, they say, and most of the conflicts that dress themselves in civilizational robes turn out to be ordinary contests for land, water, and power, with the culture painted on afterward to raise morale. Russia’s war on Ukraine arrives wrapped in Orthodox civilizational language, a defense of the Russian world against a decadent West; strip the wrapping and you find a fairly conventional imperial project to hold a borderland and a warm-water route. The costume is not nothing. It recruits soldiers and it excuses atrocities. But it is a costume, worn over interests that Metternich would have recognized without needing a single word about civilization.
We in Denmark do not get to discuss this one from a safe distance, because we ran the experiment ourselves, and the whole world watched.
In September 2005 the newspaper Jyllands-Posten printed twelve drawings of the Prophet Muhammad. What followed, over the next half year, became the textbook illustration of the clash of civilizations: embassies burned, boycotts of Danish butter and insulin, dozens of people dead in protests from Nigeria to Pakistan, a small Nordic country suddenly cast as the frontline of a war between the secular West and the offended Muslim world. If you wanted a single event to hand a student and say “this is what Huntington meant,” this was it.
Except that it was not really that, and the insider read is the more useful one. The cartoons began as a domestic argument, a very Danish and rather parochial fight about self-censorship, about the church-shaped assumptions still buried in our secularism, and about whether a culture editor could provoke his way onto the front page. For four months almost nothing happened abroad. The crisis went global only when a delegation of Danish imams toured the Middle East with a dossier, and, more decisively, when governments that had their own reasons to perform outrage decided to use it. Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia did not discover a wounded faith in early 2006; they discovered a cheap way to look pious to their own populations and to lean on a European government, and the cartoons were lying there ready to hand. The offense was genuine for many ordinary Muslims. The escalation was manufactured by states doing what states do.
That is the pattern the civilizational frame hides. What looked like Islam clashing with the West was, underneath, a set of governments reaching for the language of civilization because it was useful, exactly as European politicians reach for “our values” when an election is close and the subject is immigration. The vocabulary of the eternal culture war is, most of the time, a tool held by people with very present and very secular interests. Moral is good, double moral is twice as good.
I read all of this, appropriately for a religious-studies training that I like to keep in the frame, by asking what the religion is actually doing rather than what it is said to be doing. And what religion mostly does, in these conflicts, is supply the vocabulary and the boundary markers for a fight whose engine sits somewhere else. Faith is rarely the reason people go to war; it is reliably the language they use to name their side once they have gone.
That is not a small role, and I do not want to wave it away in the fashionable manner that treats every holy war as really about economics. A shared scripture turns a border dispute into a duty and a neighbor into an apostate; it makes compromise feel like betrayal in a way that a quarrel over tariffs never could. Religion is the accelerant, and sometimes the accelerant decides whether the fire spreads. But it is a role religion plays, not a cause religion simply is. Mistake the flag for the engine and you will spend your diplomacy arguing theology with people whose actual grievance is a checkpoint, a humiliation, or an unemployment rate. The clash of civilizations is attractive precisely because it lets everyone argue the theology and skip the checkpoint.
If it is not Islam against the West, and the evidence says it is not, then the title still has to answer for itself. Something is clashing. What?
Here is where I stand. The real fault line of our era does not run between civilizations; it runs through every one of them, and it separates the same two camps in each. On one side stand the people, of every faith and none, who accept that they have to share a crowded world with others they did not choose and cannot convert, and who will trade some of the purity of their identity for the ability to live next to their neighbor. On the other stand the people, of every faith and none, who experience that same pluralism as a wound, an insult, a thing to be reversed, and who will burn a good deal down to get back to a world in which their group is unmixed and unquestioned. That line runs through Cairo and through Copenhagen. The Danish nativist who wants the Muslims gone and the Islamist who wants the cartoonists dead are not opposite civilizations. They are the same instinct in two costumes, and each is the other’s best recruiter.
Huntington saw a clash and reached for the largest container available to hold it. Civilizations were the wrong container, because the thing he was watching is at once smaller and more intimate than a civilization and larger than any single one of them. It is the oldest political argument there is, older than Islam or the West, about whether difference is a threat to be removed or a fact to be managed. Every civilization runs that argument inside itself, all the time, and the outcome is never settled for good.
This is not the comforting conclusion. The comforting conclusion would be that the clash is a misunderstanding, that we are all fundamentally alike and a little more dialogue would dissolve it. That is the mirror image of Huntington’s error, and it is just as false. The people who want the world unmixed are not confused; they mean it, and they sit in every country, including this one. But they are not a civilization, and treating them as one hands them exactly the flag they are looking for.
For the small states, and Denmark is one, the practical lesson is narrow and worth writing down. When the civilizational language comes for you, and after 2006 we know it can arrive without warning and aimed at a country most of the people burning your flag could not find on a map, the mistake is to accept the part it hands you. The moment we agree that this is the West against Islam, we have joined a war on the enemy’s terms and lost the plainer, truer argument, the one that holds that a person can pray however they like and still stand in the same line at the same bakery. That argument is not glamorous. It does not sell a book with a map of colored blocs on the cover. It is only correct, and being correct, in a small country that has to live with everyone, is most of the job.
Originally published at https://iqulture.substack.com on September 30, 2026.
