The End of History and Clash of Civilizations are complementary, not contradictory
Evidence
Fukuyama declares that Western liberal democracy has triumphed over all the alternatives; Huntington recasts this triumphalist idea in the language of conflict, proposing that Western civilization now faces great threats from its Islamic and Chinese nemeses. While Fukuyama’s 1989 essay coincides with— and celebrates—the demise of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc and the rise of a unipolar US imperialism, Huntington’s 1993 essay coincides with the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center, on February 26,1993, by a band of militant Muslims. Thus, between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the first attack on the World Trade Center—namely, the period of George H. W. Bush’s presidency and the rise of what he termed the “New World Order”—Soviet communism yielded to Islamism as the West’s new nemesis. The two essays dovetail beautifully. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 77
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the earlier claim that Huntington defines non-Western peoples in religious rather than national terms — this passage adds the institutional lineage via Leo Strauss.
Related
- Fukuyama’s end-of-history and Huntington’s clash-of-civilizations theses are complementary, not opposed (similarity 0.86)
- The Cold War’s end did not make liberal democracy inevitable across civilizations (similarity 0.82)
- Huntington premised the Clash of Civilizations thesis a decade before its wartime use (similarity 0.80)
- Intercivilization conflict divides into micro-level religious fault lines and a macro-level West-versus-rest division (similarity 0.79)
- Huntington popularized a clash-of-civilizations thesis built on Lewis’s earlier Orientalist work. (similarity 0.78)