Samuel P. Huntington — The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

718 published claims from this book.

• 1910 was the peak of global political-economic unification until the late twentieth century
• A cease-fire holds only while its sponsoring core state retains strategic interest.
• A civilizations-based world order best prevents world war
• A conflict’s perception as civilizational determines whether it becomes one.
• A diaspora created by 19th-century conquest empowered 1990s Chechen resistance
• A great power can leverage backing one side to gain influence over both rivals
• A Japan-China alignment would negate Western naval power against China’s coast.
• A lingua franca succeeds by being detached from any single ethnic or ideological identity
• A major social science encyclopedia had no primary entry on civilization
• A nineteenth-century diaspora still shapes Chechnya’s war financing and host-state diplomacy
• A non-Western America cannot be American, but a truly multicultural world is unavoidable
• A Pacific identity could reconcile Australia’s Western culture with its geography
• A paradigm too close to raw reality yields no ordering or predictive power
• A paradigm’s value is judged by usefulness relative to alternatives, not completeness.
• A proxy’s military success can harm the patron state’s diplomatic interests
• A secular tyrant could win legitimacy by adopting religious identity
• A shared enemy cannot hold alliance partners whose ambitions conflict
• A shared external enemy can suspend internal conflicts among rival groups.
• A shared external enemy unifies previously warring Muslim factions
• A state’s desire for club membership gives outsiders leverage to constrain its behavior
• A Torn country’s Western alignment draws condemnation from both nonaligned and religious peers
• A tradition of law as external restraint on rulers is distinctive to the West
• A universal civilization would grow by expanding cross-civilizational commonalities
• A universal civilization would leave no term for civilizational sub-groups
• A Western society can voluntarily seek to defect from the West.
• A world with one or two nuclear-armed core states per civilization could be stable
• Adopting Western ideology drew Russia closer to the West than ever
• Afghan war veterans formed a floating Islamist international fighting across many conflicts.
• Africa is de-Westernizing culturally while Latin America Westernizes
• Ambiguous last-minute trade deals let both sides claim victory while nothing changes
• Ambiguously phrased trade deals let both sides claim victory while Japan kept its policies
• America’s West identity emerged only after it met non-Western peoples
• American arms, Saudi funding, and Muslim demographics defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan
• American concessions to Asian states were read as weakness and exploited
• American elites ignored civilizational divides that non-Western leaders recognized
• American elites lag behind the rest of the world in recognizing civilizational politics
• American moral framing, not strategy, drove its anomaly in the Bosnian war
• American pro-Bosnian policy could not be explained as anti-Iranian civilizational realpolitik
• American statecraft historically treated unity as central, reversing by the 1990s
• Americans conflate friendliness with desirability in international relations
• Americans conflate harmony with desirability in judging international relations
• Americans perceived Mexican immigration as the primary cultural threat in 1990
• An intercivilizational quasi war between Islam and the West developed after 1979
• Analytical paradigms should be judged by relative utility, not completeness or permanence.
• Anti-immigration backlash in America peaked at state and local levels
• Anti-war public opinion pushed Muslim governments away from the coalition.
• Anti-Western contempt historically recurs as Western power relatively declines
• Anti-Western movements readily adopt modern technology to spread their message.
• Arab governments shifted to oppose Western military action in Iraq
• Arab publics experienced Gulf War defeat as cultural humiliation
• Arab publics supported Saddam despite reviling him, because he resisted the West
• Armenia’s strategic dependence on Russia centers on protection against Muslim neighbors
• ASEAN shows the limits, not the success, of multicultural regional organizations
• Asia will likely choose peace through Chinese hegemony over balanced multipolar conflict
• Asian assertiveness stems from economics while Muslim assertiveness stems from demographics
• Asian economic growth will destabilize the Western-dominated world order
• Asian leaders claimed their development model superseded the Anglo-Saxon one globally
• Aspirations toward cultural membership can be undermined by the aspirant’s own values and style
• Ataturk’s Westernizing project made Turkey a torn country
• Australia’s leaders chose to redefine it as an Asian society.
• Autonomous non-kin groups and a strong aristocracy blocked absolutism in the West
• Axial Age civilizations were defined by transcendent myths voiced by a distinct intellectual class
• Balancing is intrinsically safer and more influence-yielding than bandwagoning.
• Balkan Cold War alignments dissolved into religious-civilizational blocs
• Before 1500, civilizations were linked mainly by land routes, not sea commerce.
• Belarus voters overwhelmingly chose pro-Russian leadership and integration with Russia.
• Belief in Western cultural universality is false, immoral, and dangerous
• Betrayal of kin is the price of peace in a fault line war
• Booming Chinese economy pulled ideologically hostile Singapore into bandwagoning alignment
• Bosnia circumvented the Dayton troop-withdrawal clause to retain Islamist fighters
• Bosnia’s reversed demographic proportions from 1961 to 1991 fueled ethnic cleansing.
• Both sides formally declared the Islam-West conflict a war through words and designations
• Both sides in fault line wars benefit from redefining local conflict as civilizational
• Both the Spanish and Bosnian wars mobilized outside fighters along identity lines
• Broader civilizational forces, not specific disputes, drove U.S. conflict with both Japan and China
• Buddhism failed to anchor a major civilization despite being a world religion
• Cease-fire negotiation complexity scales with the number of nested party levels.
• Central Asian loyalties ran to clan and Islam, never to nation
• China claims authority over all ethnic Chinese regardless of citizenship
• China converted economic growth into military power in the late 1980s and 1990s
• China refuses formal anti-Western alliances but seeks informal oil partners among Islamic states.
• China supplied Iran’s nuclear and missile programs despite Western opposition
• China was Pakistan’s most extensive supplier of military hardware and nuclear assistance
• China was the primary conduit of weapons technology to Muslim states
• China, Pakistan, and Iran formed a trilateral nuclear and missile cooperation pact
• China’s foreign policy identity has flip-flopped as superpower competition shifted
• China’s military leadership pushed for confrontation with the United States
• China’s missile tests near Taiwan ports deterred Taiwan’s push for recognition
• China’s post-reform regime rests on performance and nationalist legitimacy, not ideology
• China’s rise is a greater war risk than fault line conflicts
• China’s statehood masks its civilizational identity.
• Chinese business trust rests on personal relationships rather than contracts or law.
• Chinese cultural identity is being rebuilt on enduring cultural elements after Western assaults
• Chinese demographic and economic pressure in Siberia threatens centrifugal forces pulling Russia eastward
• Chinese demographic pressure into Siberia threatened Russia’s eastern periphery in the 1990s
• Chinese diaspora cultural ties, not states, drove East Asian economic integration.
• Chinese diaspora identity is being redefined in racial rather than civic terms
• Chinese economic growth creates social foundations for political pluralism
• Chinese elites reversed their assessment of Confucianism across the twentieth century
• Chinese hegemony in East Asia comes at the cost of American influence
• Chinese hegemony in East Asia is advancing through economic and maritime pressure.
• Christian missionaries spread Western culture more effectively than secular ideals do
• Church-state separation is historically unique to the West and drove its freedom.
• Civilization and race are not identical, and culture outranks physical traits in dividing humanity
• Civilization core states replace superpowers as poles of attraction in global politics
• Civilization identity determined which states backed each Bosnian faction.
• Civilization in the singular coexisted historically with many civilizations
• Civilization is defined as culture writ large across all major theorists
• Civilization scholarship defines cultural identity hierarchically against what separates humans from other species.
• Civilization wars shift global power to abstaining southern states
• Civilization-based analysis of world politics independently arose across many scholars
• Civilization-based international order is the best safeguard against world war
• Civilization-level nuclear proliferation could produce stability rather than chaos
• Civilization-level rallying can override doctrinal divisions within a civilization.
• Civilizational achievement may be cyclical, not linearly progressive
• Civilizational analysis divides humanity into five great culture areas.
• Civilizational confidence asymmetry drives Muslim-Western conflict
• Civilizational contact shifted from multidirectional exchange to one-way Western dominance.
• Civilizational culture determines economic and political development outcomes
• Civilizational decay is reversible through intentional renewal
• Civilizational domino fears drove major states to treat distant border conflicts as their own.
• Civilizational fault lines running through states breed chronic civil war and secession
• Civilizational identity replaced communist ideology as a dividing force after 1989
• Civilizational identity shifts fail without elite support, public acquiescence, and host acceptance
• Civilizational identity shifts need both sender and receiver to be willing
• Civilizational international societies have dominated history over functional ones
• Civilizational kin allegiances drive fault-line conflicts to escalate far beyond their origins
• Civilizational kin provide decisive aid while outsiders refrain from helping
• Civilizational kinship with Russia is pulling Greece from the Western alliance
• Civilizational pride, not just security, drove Pakistan’s nuclear program
• Civilizational wars cannot end because no side can win decisively
• Civilizational wars require interested outside powers to broker any pause
• Civilizations are cultural not political and rarely match state boundaries.
• Civilizations have always been the broadest framework for human identity
• Civilizations lacking a core state struggle to get conflicts mediated
• Civilizations that believe their history has ended are about to decline
• Civilizations with little cultural affinity can still align against a shared rival
• Clear domestic hierarchies in China produce bandwagoning, while uncertainty produces balancing.
• Clinton delinked human rights from trade in 1994, conceding leverage over China
• Cold War alignment masked U.S.-Asian civilizational conflicts that resurfaced after 1991
• Cold War alliances crossed civilizations but postwar groupings are realigning around civilizational lines.
• Cold War bipolarity temporarily suppressed preexisting civilizational dynamics
• Cold War institutions outlive the conditions that justified them
• Cold War rivals shared a common secular-modern ideological language
• Combining opposing paradigms yields no rule for which trend prevails when
• Combining terrorism with nuclear weapons could empower the weak
• Communism and liberal democracy shared a common modern secular language
• Confucianism is only one component of a broader Sinic civilization
• Constitutional secularism barred Turkey from leading the Islamic world
• Consuming a civilization’s goods does not align one with its values or politics
• Consuming Western goods does not Westernize non-Westerners
• Consuming Western pop culture does not mean adopting Western values
• Core states must abstain from intervention in other civilizations to preserve peace
• Core-state intervention in other civilizations’ disputes is the key cause of civilizational war
• Croatia taxed Bosnian arms shipments by taking a third and blocking heavy weapons
• Cross-civilization conflicts have no credible disinterested mediators
• Cross-civilizational coalitions based on mutual rationality and restraint are essential to manage interstate relations.
• Cross-civilizational conflicts have greater escalation potential than intra-civilizational ones
• Cross-civilizational conflicts lack any mediator both sides can trust.
• Cultural affinity does not override historical antagonism in balancing behavior
• Cultural affinity now outweighs shared ideology as a political glue
• Cultural affinity plus Beijing’s coercive leverage drove Hong Kong’s economic pre-integration before 1997
• Cultural commonality increasingly determines patterns of international trade
• Cultural commonality raises trust and thus the likelihood of bandwagoning
• Cultural commonality, not just shared interests, underlies international trade and cooperation.
• Cultural difference determines Australias exclusion from Asia just as it does Turkeys from Europe
• Cultural identification, not economic logic, drove the proposed East Asian Economic Caucus.
• Cultural identity has replaced ideology as the defining basis of state alignment
• Cultural identity overrides ideological unity in determining state cohesion
• Cultural isolation causes states to be excluded from regional alliances and aid.
• Cultural kinship and commerce together defeated UN sanctions against Serbia
• Cultural kinship, not merely power balance, prevents hegemonic war between great powers
• Cultural similarity does not guarantee alignment when historical grievances persist
• Cultural universalism logically demands imperial imposition to be realized
• Cultures differ thickly while sharing a thin universal morality of prohibitions
• Democracy in Turkey incentivized political surrender to religious populism
• Democratic participation tends to erode colonial elite languages in favor of indigenous ones.
• Democratic politics in Turkey drove a resurgence of Islamic religiosity
• Democratic transitions succeeded mainly where Western Christian influence was strong
• Democratization in non-Western states drives out colonial languages
• Democratization succeeds mainly where Christian and Western influence is strong.
• Demographic anxiety supplied the political opening that elevated Milosevic to power
• Demographic disparities between neighboring peoples generate conflict and migration pressure
• Demographic displacement, not ideology, was Yugoslavia’s key conflict trigger.
• Demographic dominance in a province drove political demands for autonomy and secession
• Demographically mature societies lack the vitality to be expansionist
• Diapsora communities fight hardest while kin-state governments simultaneously support and restrain them.
• Diaspora communities can determine whether an embattled homeland survives
• Diaspora Iraqis have accepted that their homeland no longer exists
• Diaspora-based ultranationalists can undermine a peace process their own state accepted
• Diasporas out-radicalize kin states, which simultaneously support and restrain local fighters
• Dissatisfied revisionist states tend to bandwagon with rising powers.
• Domestic political opposition drove Russia’s pro-Serbian foreign policy
• Domestic political pressure drove Russia’s pro-Serb diplomacy despite Western alignment
• Dominant paradigms can blind analysts even while outperforming all rivals
• Each side’s perception of the other’s hostility rested on concrete grievances
• Each Yugoslav faction narrated its local war as an epic civilizational mission
• Each Yugoslav party claimed a civilizational mission and victimhood identity
• East and West are unstable geographic labels relative to the observer
• East Asia lacks an institutionalized international society comparable to Europe’s
• East Asia lacks Western Europe’s political and economic homogeneity
• East Asian countries sustained decade-plus growth rates of 8-10 percent annually.
• East Asian economic success generated a cultural self-assertion movement
• East Asian elites articulated a shared Confucian-tinged civilizational identity against the West
• East Asian leaders argue shared culture justifies regional economic union
• East Asian states backed each other against American pressure on trans-Pacific issues.
• East Asian states’ bandwagoning toward China varies with shared Confucian culture
• East-West and North-South divisions misrepresent the world’s true complexity
• Economic differences between Japan and America are rooted in cultural differences that resist convergence.
• Economic growth ultimately shifts power from governments to their own middle classes
• Economic growth will first strengthen Asian states, then their societies.
• Economic incentives and cultural kinship made U.N. sanctions against Serbia ineffective
• Economic integration among Asian states requires cultural commonality Japan lacks
• Economic integration succeeds fastest when partners share a common culture
• Economic interdependence prevents war only when states expect future trade to persist
• Economic reform on the mainland ended three decades of Taiwanese non-contact policy
• Economic success fuels perceived cultural superiority
• Economic success generates cultural self-assertion and resistance to Western pressure
• Economics alone cannot override culture in reshaping a nation’s identity
• Elite consensus and public support are prerequisites for any civilization shift
• Emotionally arid faiths are vulnerable to losing adherents under modernization.
• Encountering Arab employers disrupts migrants’ ideal of pure Arab Islam.
• Ending ethnic wars requires outside core-state sponsorship, not local effort
• Ending the Cold War removed the common interest that had suppressed Asian-American conflicts
• English is a working lingua franca, not a majority spoken tongue
• English-language global media reached only about one percent of the world’s population in 1994
• Ethnic Chinese minorities dominated Southeast Asian economies out of all proportion to their numbers.
• Ethnic favoritism operated inside the Soviet army well before its collapse
• Ethnic identity wars grew from half to three-quarters of civil wars across decades
• Ethnic wars and territorial disputes proliferated across the post-Soviet world by 1993
• EU expansion favored Central European states over Turkey despite Turkey’s earlier application
• Europe’s domestic feudalism grounded its international balance-of-power norms
• Europe’s eastern boundary follows the divide between Western and Orthodox Christianity
• Europe’s eastern boundary was undefined until the Cold War ended
• Europe’s non-assimilation of immigrants yields divided societies unless hardened by expensive immigration restriction
• Europe’s past of war may become Asia’s future
• Europe’s rise depended on borrowing from more advanced Islamic and Byzantine civilizations
• European anti-immigration parties mirror Islamist parties in structure and appeal.
• European anti-immigration parties rarely exceeded fifteen percent nationally in the 1990s.
• European balance-of-power politics mirrored its domestic feudal pluralism.
• European expansion episodes were mass migrations driven by population growth
• European integration proposals in the 1990s envisioned concentric circles around a Franco-German core.
• European prejudice targets culture rather than race
• European secularization reflects indifference rather than hostility to religion
• Evangelical growth in Latin America expanded religiosity rather than merely shifting it
• Even fully Westernized first-generation leaders must indigenize to lead postcolonial nations
• Even liberal Western-celebrated Muslim intellectuals portray the West harshly.
• Even those who deny using models act on hidden assumptions and biases
• Even Western praise of Muslim liberals obscures sharply anti-Western views
• Every civilization at its peak falsely believes its history has ended
• Every civilization has historically applied different rules to insiders versus outsiders
• Excluded great powers can seize initiatives to force their way into settlement processes
• Exhaustion-driven truces are self-limiting and war resumes when strength returns
• Exporting 55 million people drove the rise of the West
• External enemies can briefly unite groups that have been murdering each other.
• External great powers aligned with different faiths in the Yugoslav wars.
• External Muslim aid was essential to Bosnian state survival and shaped its Islamization.
• Failed immigrant assimilation can cleave a country into opposed civilizations
• Failed negotiations in communal wars empower radicals over moderates
• Failed secular ideologies push non-Western peoples back toward religious revival.
• Fault line crises are resolved only by pressure from outside core states.
• Fault line violence spreads globally while intra-civilizational violence stays local
• Fault line wars aim to conquer and ethnically cleanse sacred territory
• Fault line wars center on sacred territory, not people
• Fault line wars in the early 1990s killed hundreds of thousands
• Fault line wars involve more internal and cross-cutting parties than ordinary negotiations
• Fault line wars involve three tiers of participants plus diasporas
• Fault line wars oscillate between extremism and renewed moderate compromise
• Five structural forces amplified late-twentieth-century Islam-West conflict
• Foreign Muslim aid decisively transformed the Bosnian army into a winning force
• Foreign Muslim support transformed Bosnia’s ragtag army into a competent force
• Fundamentalist movements recruit where land pressure and urban media dismantle peasant life
• Generational memory of war shapes elites’ willingness to resist foreign pressure.
• Geographically intermixed groups within states erupt into repeated communal violence
• German foreign policy on Croatia was driven by Catholic networks and Bavarian media
• Germany’s constitutional guarantee of asylum was amended, sharply cutting asylum arrivals
• Global English is splitting into mutually unintelligible regional variants like Latin did
• Global interconnectedness made total rejection of modernization untenable.
• Global media consumption does not produce convergence in attitudes and beliefs
• Global politics is now multipolar and multicivilizational for the first time.
• Global secularization reversed in the mid-1970s toward religious revival
• Good intentions without strategic interests shaped a harmful US policy in Bosnia
• Governments’ own Cold War policies helped Islamists dominate Muslim political opposition
• Great-power alignments in South Asia shift with the strategic threat environment
• Great-power approval empowered Milosevic to deliver the Bosnian Serbs to Dayton
• Great-power war enables regional powers to settle scores opportunistically
• Greece and Turkey’s Western institutional membership may be Cold War relics
• Group identity formation requires the existence of enemies to define the self against
• Growing Asian economic power and business interests blunted Western human rights pressure
• Guénon saw Western modernity as a unique materialist anomaly amid otherwise cyclical civilizations
• Half of all interreligious wars from 1820-1929 pitted Muslims against Christians
• Half of wars between different-religion states were Muslim-Christian conflicts
• Han nationalism serves to suppress China’s internal differences while demarcating minorities
• Havel’s global civilization is a thin veneer over deeper cultures
• Herodianism holds that non-Western societies must abandon their cultures to modernize
• Highly centralized imperial states alone resisted Western subjugation between 1500 and 1900.
• Historical animosity alone cannot explain the outbreak of ethnic violence.
• Historical conflict legacies remain live resources for contemporary political mobilization
• Historical grievances alone cannot explain the timing of ethnic violence’s resurgence
• Home-educated second generations reject the Westernized first generation’s values.
• Huntington predicted a 2010 US-China war over the South China Sea and Vietnam
• Huntington’s strategic assessment shaped both Carter and Reagan cold war policies
• Identity formation requires defining enemies across cultural fault lines.
• Identity wars are vicious, lengthy, and prone to genocide after decisive victory
• Identity wars rose from half to three-quarters of civil wars by the 1970s-80s
• Identity-based civil wars resist decisive resolution and breed genocide
• Ideological and material disputes allow compromise, but cultural disputes are zero-sum
• Ideological conflicts remain bridgeable while civilizational differences do not
• Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of cultural universalism.
• In 1991 each nation displaced the Soviet Union as the other’s top security threat
• In 1991 Japan and America replaced the USSR as each other’s top threat
• In 1993 a fifty-state Asian-Islamic bloc formed to oppose Western human rights positions
• In communist states, Marxist-Leninist ideology suppressed, not resolved, underlying civilizational divisions that then resurfaced
• India and China are on a collision course as competing Asian great powers
• Indigenous cultures resist, contain, and adapt Western imports rather than being replaced
• Individualism is the West’s most distinctive civilizational trait
• Inter-civilizational conflicts escalate while intra-civilizational ones stay contained
• Intercivilization conflict divides into micro-level religious fault lines and a macro-level West-versus-rest division
• Intercivilizational relations will range from cold peace to violent conflict, rarely warm.
• Intercontinental trade routes linked the four great cultures by the Christian era
• Interested kin-ralliers, not neutral mediators, end fault line wars
• International politics’ primary arena shifted from Europe to Asia
• Intra-civilizational conflict vastly outnumbered intercivilizational contact in history.
• Intraregional trade grew faster than interregional trade in the 1980s
• Islam has had more violent intercivilizational conflicts than other civilizations
• Islam is the only civilization with a religion-based interstate organization
• Islam, Latin America, and Africa lack civilizational core states largely because of Western imperialism
• Islam’s civilizational borders are disproportionately violent
• Islam’s early expansion produced multiple distinct subcivilizations across three continents
• Islam’s lack of core states fuels instability without central mediation
• Islamic cohesion efforts fragment into competing power-center bids
• Islamic cohesion is pursued through rival power centers competing for leadership
• Islamic fundamentalism is best understood through English Calvinist Puritanism
• Islamic resurgence accepts modernity while rejecting Western culture
• Islamic resurgence parallels the Protestant Reformation structurally
• Islamist militants were educated urban professionals from modest provincial origins
• Islamist movements drew their active membership from modern urban professionals, not peasants
• Islamist movements first gained power through student unions and universities
• Islamist movements recruit modernization’s mobile young rather than the traditional rural poor
• Islamist movements recruit modernized youth, not traditional rural populations
• Islamist organizations won support by providing welfare where governments failed.
• Islamization advanced largely by building parallel civil-society institutions that supplanted secular ones.
• Islamization flowed from the cultural realm into social and political spheres.
• Japan faces an unresolved strategic trilemma between China, US, and self-defense.
• Japan historically seeks security by allying with the dominant power
• Japan modernized by borrowing Western techniques while preserving its cultural essentials, China did not
• Japan’s 1994 rejection of US import targets marked a turning point in Asian-American relations.
• Japan’s alignment with China would shield the Chinese coast from U.S. naval power
• Japan’s alliance pattern is bandwagoning rather than balancing
• Japan’s cultural borrowing cycled between open contact and isolation that preserved identity
• Japan’s cultural uniqueness prevents it from leading an East Asian economic bloc.
• Japan’s economy defied Western economic predictions about currency, inflation, and unemployment
• Japanese containment of China hinges on confidence in American reliability and cost.
• Japanese macroeconomics defied standard Western economic laws
• Karl Deutsch compared the West to nine civilizations across twenty-one factors
• Kin-country influence over co-ethnics is powerful but cannot guarantee compliance
• Lacking a core state causes Islam’s pervasive internal conflict
• Lacking cultural affinity with a client state weakens a power’s ability to pressure it.
• Lacking cultural commonality with a client state weakens great-power leverage over it
• Land-based Muslim expansion created intermingled populations while Western sea expansion did not
• Large unassimilated immigrant communities risk dividing Western societies into separate civilizational blocs
• Large youth cohorts historically coincide with protest, extremism, and revolution
• Latin America is converging with the West culturally and militarily.
• Latin America’s convergence with the West will be slow and uneasy.
• Latin American civilization may merge into the West as a subvariant
• Latin American identity is internally contested over whether it belongs to the West
• Latin American Protestant growth represents intensified religiosity, not mere religious substitution.
• Levels of civilization rise and fall in cycles tied to each civilization’s life phase
• Lewis framed Muslim rage as a civilizational reaction, not a policy dispute.
• Liberal democracy repeatedly failed to take root in Muslim societies for a century
• Lingua francas arise from the cost of translation between many tongues
• Loyalty to small cultural groups strengthens attachment to the larger civilization
• Mainstream French politicians across parties embraced zero-immigration rhetoric in the 1990s
• Major Western theories of history never ranked America as a civilization
• Majority groups trigger deep division by imposing their culture on the state
• Managing today’s world requires cross-civilizational coalitions built on reciprocal restraint
• Marxism succeeded only where non-Western elites used it to resist the West.
• Mass Mexican immigration made Mexico’s redefinition acceptable where Turkish immigration blocked Turkey’s.
• Meiji Japan’s pro-Western turn reversed into a late-century Asia-facing revival
• Mexican democratization may trigger de-Westernization and weaken NAFTA.
• Milosevic’s embargo on Serb forces hindered them in the Bosnian war
• Misreading civilizational borders causes catastrophic errors in global perspective
• Missing Islamic core states force outsiders into failed ordering roles.
• Missionaries, not economists or democrats, are the West’s most effective cultural agents
• Modern communications forged a transnational Muslim identity beyond state borders
• Modern moral progress may be a Western artifact that reverses as Western power fades
• Modernization and democratization may push Mexico away from the West.
• Modernization drives cultural resurgence through growing power and identity crises
• Modernization is distinct from Westernization and does not create a universal civilization
• Modernization itself drives rather than kills religious revival
• Modernization itself drives religious resurgence by creating identity crises.
• Modernization need not require Westernization
• Modernization requires no particular political ideology or Western institutions
• Modernization seriously deteriorated religious tolerance in the Middle East
• Modernization strengthens indigenous cultures and weakens Western dominance
• Modernization strengthens local cultures and reduces Western relative power, not the reverse.
• Moral values may have a shared universal core beneath cultural variation
• Most fault line wars occur along the Muslim-non-Muslim boundary
• Most late-century migration occurred between non-Western societies, not into the West
• Most scholars treat Japan as a distinct civilization descended from China
• Multicivilizational groupings like ASEAN fail to achieve deep integration
• Multiculturalist intellectuals attacked both cultural and creedal bases of American identity
• Muslim Arabs borrowed Greek science but rejected Greek thought conflicting with Islam
• Muslim groups were in violent conflict with almost every neighboring civilization in the 1990s.
• Muslim hostility toward the West stems from multiple overlapping sources beyond religion.
• Muslim intellectuals themselves framed tensions with the West as civilizational conflict.
• Muslim societies grew far faster than the world average across 1965-1990
• Muslim states committed real peacekeeping troops to Bosnia while Western powers hedged on intervention
• Muslim states created the only religion-based interstate organization
• Muslim states enacted shari’a law where Islamists threatened their rule.
• Muslim states resorted to violence in international crises far more than Western powers
• Muslim states supplied roughly two billion dollars in arms to Bosnian Muslims
• Muslim violence tracks a youth bulge that is now aging out
• Muslim youth bulges exceed 20 percent and fuel Islamist movements
• Muslim-majority republics inside Russia actively resisted the Chechen war
• Muslims across political divides share a belief they are culturally distinct from the West
• Muslims dominate European immigration and resist cultural integration
• Muslims have been disproportionately involved in intergroup violence
• Muslims participated in more than half of all ethnopolitical conflicts in 1993-94.
• Muslims were disproportionately involved in intergroup violence relative to their share of world population.
• Mutual-vulnerability deterrence doctrine is obsolete against terrorist nuclear threats
• Nagorno-Karabakh fighting reanimated centuries-old Russo-Ottoman and Armenian-Turkish antagonisms
• Nation states remain weak rivals to tribe and ummah in Muslim loyalty
• NATO-member Greece sided with Serbia over its Western allies
• Nested cultural identities reinforce rather than displace loyalty to larger wholes
• No single Western trait is unique; their combination distinguishes the West
• Non-Western civilizations broadly resisted Western democratization pressure by 1995
• Non-Western elites favored combining modernization with preserving indigenous culture
• Non-Western migrants now drive nearly all population growth in Western societies.
• Non-Western peoples read Western universalism as imperialism and threat
• Non-Western populations rapidly closed gaps in health, literacy, and urbanization
• Non-Western regions in the late 20th century uniformly turned back toward indigenous identities
• Non-Western societies now shape Western history rather than merely receiving it.
• Non-Western societies respond to Western dominance by either bandwagoning or balancing.
• Non-Western states read nonproliferation as a tool of Western hegemony
• Nonproliferation is perceived as serving Western hegemony rather than universal order
• Objective representation of the Orient required erasing the European observer from the picture
• Observers and participants came to read the Yugoslav wars as religious wars
• Official reasons for denying Turkey EU membership disguised religious objections
• Oil wealth visibly underwrote the Islamic revival and enabled reversal of West-Muslim power relations
• Only the West has a millennium-deep representative body heritage
• Only the West has a millennium-long heritage of representative institutions
• Orthodox religious identity united Russia behind Serbia during the Yugoslav wars
• Orthodox states armed Serbia despite the UN arms embargo
• Ottoman imperial history binds Turkey emotionally to Balkan Muslim causes
• Overland Muslim expansion caused demographic proximity that maritime Western expansion avoided
• Overseas Chinese business networks drive East Asian economic integration
• Overseas Chinese communities supplied the dominant share of China’s foreign investment.
• Overseas Chinese supplied the vast majority of post-1992 foreign investment in China.
• Pakistan, Iran, and China formed a de facto anti-Western axis by the mid-1990s.
• Pakistan’s backing transformed the Kashmir insurgency from secular to Islamist.
• Peace between civilizations requires proactive expansion of shared values
• Peace negotiations succeed when secondary and tertiary parties from both sides participate
• Peter the Great’s Westernization began with surface appearance and moved to military modernization
• Phonetic wordplay can dismantle imperial ideology by fragmenting it
• Pipes argues Islam offers no path to modernization except full Westernization
• Political crisis can convert a secular minority into a mobilized religious-civilizational bloc
• Political principles are too fickle to sustain a lasting national community.
• Political systems are transient whereas civilizations endure across millennia.
• Polycentrism in Islam, like no core state, undermines unity
• Population growth, not oil, sustained the Islamic Resurgence after the 1980s
• Post-1990 migration to the West came overwhelmingly from non-Western societies.
• Post-Cold War arms competition is buildup versus hold-down, which the West cannot win
• Post-Cold War Balkan alliances reorganized along Orthodox-versus-Muslim civilizational lines.
• Post-Cold War events largely followed predictions derived from civilizational identity
• Post-Cold War global conflict centers on the West versus challenger civilizations
• Post-Cold War global politics is now multipolar along civilizational lines.
• Post-Cold War leaders widely assumed durable global harmony
• Post-Cold War military security is shifting to regional power distributions, not global superpower balance.
• Post-Cold War NATO planning redirected from East to southern threats
• Post-Cold War NATO’s core purpose is preventing renewed Russian control of Central Europe
• Post-Cold War order must be organized by civilizations or not at all
• Post-Cold War politics are organized around civilizational roles rather than superpower alignments
• Post-Cold War politics reconfigured itself along cultural identity lines.
• Post-Cold War regional economic integration succeeds mainly among culturally homogeneous states.
• Post-Cold War WMD proliferation concentrated in Islamic and Confucian states
• Post-Cold War world divides people primarily by culture, not ideology or economics.
• Post-Cold-War order now rests on civilizations, not global power.
• Post-communist states saw explosive simultaneous Christian and Islamic revivals after ideology collapsed
• Post-imperial Islam-West conflicts center on issues beyond territory
• Post-Mao China replaced Marxist legitimacy with performance and nationalist legitimacy
• Post-Soviet conflicts across the former USSR followed Orthodox-Muslim civilizational fault lines.
• Post-Soviet Russia relapsed into the classic Westernizer versus Slavophile divide
• Post-Tiananmen Chinese nationalism frames both democracy and Leninism as foreign impositions
• Postcolonial pro-Western Muslim governments were successively replaced by anti-Western ones
• Pre-modern cultural diffusion across civilizations took centuries to complete.
• Pre-modern cultural influence spread so slowly it could arrive centuries out of date
• Quigley predicted Western civilization will expire before 2500
• Rapid compressed industrialization produces religious resurgence
• Rapid industrialization historically drives major powers toward expansion and imperialism
• Rapid literacy growth in Arab societies creates a knowledge-power gap between generations
• Rapid urban migration swelled the Islamist constituency in the 1970s and 1980s.
• Rapid urbanization and displacement drove migrants to Islamist welfare networks
• Rapid urbanization and modernization create religious demand that traditional faiths fail to meet.
• Rapidly industrializing societies experience compressed cultural dislocation that fuels religious revival
• Reducing civilizational conflict to a freedom-versus-hate slogan produced self-destructive policy consequences.
• Refusing to acknowledge civilizational divides guarantees failure in confronting them
• Regional cooperation flourishes only where shared culture underlies shared geography
• Regional order requires perceived cultural kinship with the dominant state.
• Rejectionist isolationism was broken by Western military force.
• Religion is the most important element defining civilizations
• Religion most often defines civilizations and can override shared ethnicity and language.
• Religions that fail the uprooted lose followers to those meeting emotional needs
• Religious and ethnic ties outweighed communist ideology in post-Soviet Russian foreign policy
• Religious and media pressure drove Germany to recognize Croatia’s independence
• Religious revival flourishes where rapid social change destroys established identities
• Religious revival movements accept modernization while rejecting Westernization.
• Religious revival signals anti-Westernism, not rejection of modernity
• Religious revival thrives in advanced, secularized Muslim societies, not backward ones.
• Religious revivalism recruits educated urban middle classes, not peasants
• Religious revivalists are young, urban, modern, well-educated professionals
• Renewed Western unity hinges on the United States defining itself as Western
• Republic-level elections incentivized nationalist separatism in collapsing Soviet and Yugoslav states
• Resolving one conflict generates new enemies and conflicts
• Resolving one conflict merely produces a fresh enemy to define oneself against
• Retaining a regional accent resists class subordination because the bourgeoisie share one accent
• Rising U.S. immigration opposition tracked culture, not economic conditions
• Roughly 35 million Indians speak and write some form of English
• Russia and China aligned in the 1990s to counter Western power.
• Russia developed outside every defining feature of Western civilization except a Byzantine-mediated classical legacy
• Russia engineered secession pressure to pull Moldova back from Romanian reintegration
• Russia lacked nearly all defining features of Western civilization
• Russia reframed Chechnya and Tajikistan as centuries-old Orthodox-Islamic civilizational clashes
• Russia waged three successive fault line wars against its southern Muslim neighbors after 1979.
• Russia, Japan, and India act as swing states between West and challengers.
• Russia’s defection to the West would annihilate Orthodox civilization itself
• Russia’s identity debate between Westernizers and Eurasianists reemerged after communism collapsed
• Russia’s Orthodox civilization diverged from Western Europe through Byzantine and Tatar influences
• Russian ‘peacekeeping’ troops provided cover for the first post-Soviet ethnic cleansing
• Russian military coercion forced independence-minded Georgia back into its orbit.
• Russian peacekeeping troops shielded the first ethnic-cleansing operation in the Russian Federation
• Russian pressure and economic leverage pulled Moldova away from Romanian reunification.
• Russian Westernizers sought central power rather than democracy.
• Salinas’s reforms aimed to shift Mexico’s civilizational identity from Latin to North American.
• Sanction pressure can drive a patron state to abandon its proxy kin
• Saudi influence bought globally but its small population forces Western dependence
• Saudi petrodollars laundered and popularized radical Islamist ideas worldwide
• Scholars predicted a societal cold war with Islam already in 1991
• Second-generation native elites reject Western values as a career strategy, not just ideology
• Secular Muslim rulers adopted Islamic identity rhetorically to compete with Islamists
• Secular Muslim rulers co-opted Islamic symbols to counter Islamist challengers.
• Secular Turkey’s government heavily funded Islamic religious institutions to co-opt Islamists.
• Separatist movements arise when cultural differences align with geographic boundaries
• Separatist violence arises when cultural and geographic divisions coincide
• Serbian genocide claims about Kosovo were greatly exaggerated but not baseless.
• Serbs exaggerated the Kosovo threat as genocide despite real Albanian violence
• Settler states resort to expulsion when indigenous populations resist cultural reengineering
• Shared cultural identity dampens conflict between divided-nation rivals
• Shared cultural identity materially lowered transaction costs in Taiwan-mainland trade
• Shared culture legitimates a dominant state’s leadership over its region
• Shared language and culture lowered transaction costs in Turkish-Central Asian trade
• Shared minimal morality cannot explain historical change
• Shared Orthodox Slavic civilization made violence between Russia and Ukraine unlikely
• Shifting demographic ratios in Bosnia directly drove ethnic cleansing by the losing group
• Simplified paradigms are necessary to comprehend and act in world politics.
• Simultaneous global cultural developments require a single global explanation
• Singapore balanced collectivist shared values against individual merit
• Singapore deliberately defined its identity as culturally Asian to preserve its competitive edge
• Singapore’s government sought shared values to counter Western individualism
• Singaporean leaders framed Asia’s rise as Confucian virtue against Western decadence
• Singaporean leaders mounted a deliberate cultural counter-attack against the West
• Single-power groups could redraw world borders in 1919 but not today.
• Sino-American conflict stems from rival visions of East Asia’s power balance.
• Small Chinese minorities dominate Southeast Asian economies out of proportion to their numbers
• Social mobilization made Iran impossible to control via covert intervention
• Societies move from Westernization to cultural revival as modernization accelerates
• Southeast Asian states align with China partly based on Confucian cultural affinity
• Soviet boundary-drawing deliberately created divided republics along civilizational lines
• Soviet communism reframed Russia’s identity debate as Europe’s left-right argument
• Soviet defeat in Afghanistan depended on American technology, Saudi money, and Muslim demographics.
• Soviet ideology’s global appeal collapsed when its economy stagnated
• Soviet wartime deportations created unresolved property disputes that ignited post-Soviet ethnic wars
• States can opt out of alignment but cannot escape cultural identity.
• States respond to perceived cultural-ideological threats, not raw power balances
• States respond to rising powers by either balancing against or bandwagoning with them.
• States that ignore civilizational divides are doomed to policy frustration
• Structural conditions made US immigration politics less intense than Europe’s in the 1990s
• Subcivilizational differences block otherwise-qualified states from becoming core states
• Successful leaders must indigenize regardless of their own Westernization.
• Sudan hosts roughly five hundred politically significant tribes
• Taiwan’s evolving self-definition toward de facto independence triggers Chinese readiness to use force
• Taiwanese voters preferred stability over formal independence in the early 1990s
• Technical modernization without cultural Westernization was attempted in Egypt and Japan
• The 1990s produced a recognized picture of a world in anarchic chaos
• The 1990s showed a global breakdown of law, order, and social solidarity
• The 1991 Gulf War made the Persian Gulf an American military lake
• The 1993 Vienna declaration was weaker on core freedoms than the 1948 Universal Declaration
• The 2000 Olympics became a proxy geopolitical contest between China and the West
• The Afghan war bequeathed a confident Islamist network primed for further victories
• The Afghan war created an Islamist infrastructure and mindset aimed at further victories.
• The capability to build nuclear weapons, unlike the weapons themselves, cannot be destroyed
• The clash-of-civilizations thesis won over its own skeptical early readers
• The Cold War threat justified technology controls that later became hard to enforce.
• The Cold War’s end did not make liberal democracy inevitable across civilizations
• The collapse of the Soviet state dissolved its armed forces within months.
• The end of the Cold War triggered massive Western military disarmament
• The end of the Cold War triggered religious identity revival in Turkey.
• The EU admitted post-communist European states ahead of Turkey despite Turkey’s earlier application.
• The EU arranged itself in concentric rings around a Franco-German core.
• The French Revolution shifted conflict from wars among princes to wars among nations.
• The great beneficiaries of a civilizational war would be abstaining civilizations
• The Gulf War escalated in perceived scope from Iraq-Kuwait to East-versus-West
• The Gulf War made the Persian Gulf an American lake
• The Gulf War’s meaning shifted from local conflict to civilizational one
• The ideal of a universal civilization serves Western dominance interests
• The intrinsic-extrinsic religious motivation distinction reflects American Protestant norms, not universal values.
• The Islamic Resurgence matters politically as much as the Reformation did
• The Islamic Resurgence will fade as its demographic fuel declines
• The Islamic revival is a direct response to modernist identity crisis, not pure tradition
• The Islamic world collectively declared the UN arms embargo invalid to arm Bosnian Muslims
• The level of Civilization across humanity cannot be readily charted or trended
• The main global divide is between one Western civilization and many dissimilar others
• The nation-state has weaker legitimacy in Islam than tribe and faith
• The Paris Peace Conference marked the peak of Western power concentration
• The phrase ‘world community’ legitimizes Western interests as universal ones
• The post-1979 Islam-West conflict is a quasi war by Huntington’s three defining traits
• The post-Cold War West believed democracy would spread worldwide.
• The postwar universal human rights regime depended on American hegemony for its relevance
• The quasi war is more lethal than the direct US-Soviet Cold War confrontation
• The removal of the Soviet threat dissolved the Greece-Turkey NATO alliance.
• The Russian internal identity debate relocated to Europe as a left-right contest
• The Soviet collapse bred a Western belief that democracy would spread worldwide
• The term the West masks that the civilization is historically European and Christian
• The terms East and West lack fixed geographic reference points
• The UN Security Council’s Western-biased membership underrepresents most world civilizations
• The United States reversed its historic promotion of unity toward diversity promotion
• The United States uniquely broke the civilizational pattern in Bosnia.
• The United States was the sole non-Muslim power aiding the Bosnian Muslims
• The unity of the non-West is a Western-created myth
• The universality of human rights versus cultural relativism is the core civilizational divide
• The US treated shared monotheism as a Cold War strategic asset against communism
• The Vatican acted as a partisan in the Yugoslav conflict, not a neutral arbiter
• The West alone has interests and influence across every other civilization
• The West conquered the world through superior organized violence, not ideas
• The West inherited Classical civilization more fully than Islam or Orthodoxy did.
• The West is unusual among civilizations in lacking one core language.
• The West promotes a universal culture it is increasingly unable to impose.
• The West pushes nonproliferation, democracy, and immigration restriction against the rest.
• The West’s global weight depends overwhelmingly on the United States’ population and position.
• The West’s share of power resources peaked in the early twentieth century.
• The West’s territorial control halved from 1920 to 1993 while Islamic lands expanded sixfold.
• The Western economic dominance since 1800 is a temporary historical anomaly.
• The world is an international system but only a weak international society
• The world’s largest economies are spread across multiple civilizations, not dominated by the West.
• Those perceived as traitors draw fiercer hatred than external enemies.
• Three non-Western responses to the West differ on modernization’s compatibility with Westernization
• Three-tier kin structures escalate then constrain ethnic conflicts
• Torn countries differ from cleft countries in whether their people agree on identity
• Total defeat in war can collapse an entire civilization’s cultural self-confidence
• Total rejection of modernization is not viable in the modern world
• Trade produces conflict as well as profit, not automatic peace
• Trade reorientation toward Asia drove Australia’s identity redefinition gamble.
• Transnational criminal networks now structurally mirror and assault Civilization itself
• Transnational Muslim solidarity supplied real military material to the Chechen cause
• Turkey could abandon secularism and become the leading Islamic state
• Turkey could reposition itself as leader of the Islamic world by abandoning Western secularism
• Turkey marketed itself as a secular Muslim counter-model to Iran and Russia
• Turkey’s Central Asia pivot aimed to counter Iranian and Saudi influence
• Turkey’s EU rejection was driven by religious identity, not stated criteria
• Turkey’s foreign policy across three regions became increasingly Islamicized
• Turkey’s pro-Western Gulf War stance went unrewarded by Europe
• Turkish Islamist party rose fastest among urban migrant poor
• Twentieth-century elites assumed modernization would eliminate religion entirely
• Two-thirds to three-quarters of intercivilizational wars pitted Muslims against non-Muslims
• Ukraine is split along a centuries-old cultural boundary between western and eastern halves
• Ukraine’s cleaved, semi-united status is Russia’s most likely near-term outcome
• UN peacekeeping cannot substitute for regional great-power leadership
• Unequal population growth between neighboring cultures generates adjustment and conflict pressures
• Universal civilization advocates demand Western domination they refuse to endorse
• Universalist moral claims inevitably produce visible double standards in practice.
• Urban modern middle classes, not just traditional bazaaris, supplied most Islamist activists
• US and Japanese public goodwill toward each other collapsed between 1985 and 1993
• US relations deteriorated simultaneously with both Japan and China despite contrary national interest
• US relative power faces accelerating decline, including toward nonstate actors
• US voters abandon distant wars once they yield no clear homeland stakes
• Useful maps must balance fidelity to reality against simplification
• Useful models must both represent reality and simplify it for specific purposes
• Victim-narrative explanations fail for conflicts inside Muslim-majority states
• War and external pressure transformed Bosnia from pluralist to Islamist state
• War stress can paradoxically increase family sizes in defeated communities
• War transformed Bosnian multiculturalism into Muslim nationalist dominance
• War-weary extremists who compromise become hated more than enemies
• Wars end through interested patrons, not neutral mediators.
• Wars without kin-rallying parties are hardest to end
• Wealth can coexist with low investment in future capabilities
• Weapons proliferation reflects the inevitable diffusion of power across civilizations.
• West Bank settlers and Bosnian Serbs made identical treason accusations against their own governments
• West-non-West conflict centers on weapons, values, and immigration
• Western aid neglect forced Afghan commanders into jihadist funding or the drug trade
• Western arms forcibly ended Japanese and Chinese isolationist policies
• Western belief in its own cultural universality is false, immoral, and dangerous.
• Western civilization has not escaped universal civilizational evolutionary patterns
• Western civilization’s eastern boundary set by 1200 and barely moved since
• Western client Muslim regimes could collapse like Soviet satellites
• Western control of power resources peaked in the 1920s and is declining
• Western development has not deviated from common civilizational patterns
• Western dominance rested on organized violence, not superior ideas
• Western governments lose enthusiasm for democracy when elections produce hostile leaders
• Western identity developed centuries before it modernized, so it is not reducible to modernity
• Western identity predates and is independent of modernity
• Western identity was defined by Christianity before and during its global conquest.
• Western industrialization actively deindustrialized the rest of the world
• Western policy on nuclear proliferation will inevitably shift from containment to accommodation
• Western political integration could offset the West’s relative demographic and economic decline
• Western primacy will erode as power diffuses to Asian civilizations and China
• Western publics and leaders perceived Islam as the post-Cold War threat
• Western self-centered history remains the dominant conceit despite a century of scholarly critique
• Western universalism functions as imperialism from the perspective of non-Western societies
• Western universalism inevitably produces exposing double standards.
• Western universalism persists even as Western relative power and cultural appeal decline
• Western withdrawal after Tiananmen redirected investment flows to co-ethnic Chinese networks.
• Western-aligned Muslim regimes depend on Western support like Soviet satellites did
• What distinguishes Western conquest is imposing its worldview, not conquering itself
• Whole countries can attempt to defect from their civilization and bandwagon with rising ones
• Winning the Cold War left the West exhausted rather than triumphant
• WMD acquisition is a cheap alternative to matching Western conventional forces
• Youth bulges of unemployed young men drive Muslim political violence
• Yugoslav war parties framed local enemies as confrontations between entire civilizations