Post-Cold War politics are organized around civilizational roles rather than superpower alignments

Evidence

In the Cold War, countries related to the two superpowers as allies, satellites, clients, neutrals, and nonaligned. In the post-Cold War world, countries relate to civilizations as member states, core states, lone countries, cleft countries, and torn countries. Like tribes and nations, civilizations have political structures. A member state is a country fully identified culturally with one civilization, as Egypt is with Arab-Islamic civilization and Italy is with European-Western civilization. A civilization may also include people who share in and identify with its culture, but who live in states dominated by members of another civilization. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 368

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the member state / core state taxonomy central to Huntington’s framework.
• XREF: The member-state/cleft-state/lone-state taxonomy echoes the earlier civilizational classifications; pairs with the ‘lone country’ status of Japan and cleft countries discussed elsewhere in the book.