Eh, the author identifies another angle worth considering beyond Huntington's, but doesn't actually demonstrate that Huntington wasn't onto another valid angle worth taking into account. As someone who was in college when Huntington's thesis was at its most influential, I've never understood the reflexive urge to REFUTE him rather than incorporate his arguments into a broader point of view. It shouldn't be controversial that some cultures will be more receptive and adaptive to quasi-democratic modernity than others, and avoiding that reality can only lead to grief.
From the article: “there are, of course, cultural and institutional impediments to liberal democracy in many countries.” Huntington’s argument was very ambitious and he made demonstrably incorrect predictions. I’m not saying it should be discarded completely, but I think it’s directionally wrong.
We've had the benefit of several decades of hindsight to refine Huntington's theses, but that doesn't mean he didn't give us a lot of nutritious ideas to chew on. The deliberately destructive governing and rhetorical styles of Sadiq Khan and Zohran Mamdani demonstrate that the clash of civilizations continues apace whether polite society chooses to acknowledge it or not.
When a country or at best a nation state begins an experiment with liberal democracy within its own culture and institutions, what happens? Do the cultural and institutions adapt to the liberal democratic ideology? If the culture and institutions do not adapt, does the experiment fail?
I'm almost certain, in fact, that in Huntington's original article, his civilizational line of demarcation actually runs *through* Ukraine, separating the Europe-leaning western part from the Russian-leaning eastern part. By now, Russia has managed to eliminate most of that Russian sympathy throughout the entire country, but the intra-Ukrainian tensions before the war did in fact run more or less along H/ton's line.
In the relevant passage about the likelihood of conflict, he refers to Ukraine as a whole—not Eastern Ukraine specifically. From Huntington:
“In 1991 and 1992 many people were alarmed by the possibility of violent conflict between Russia and Ukraine over territory, particularly Crimea, the Black Sea fleet, nuclear weapons and economic issues. If civilization is what counts, however, the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each other for centuries. As of early 1993, despite all the reasons for conflict, the leaders of the two countries were effectively negotiating and defusing the issues between the two countries. While there has been serious fighting between Muslims and Christians elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and much tension and some fighting between Western and Orthodox Christians in the Baltic states, there has been virtually no violence between Russians and Ukrainians.”
It's a fair point, but I think it somewhat arbitrarily defines "conflict" in overly narrow terms. The current out-and-out war in Ukraine goes back to Maidan and before that the Orange Revolution, and in both those cases the internal Ukrainian tensions fell precisely along H/ton's line. One could retort that those earlier conflicts were ideological, and that would be correct. But I think in a case like this, culture and ideology are overlaid, and both play a role. All things considered, I think what has happened in Ukraine over the past twenty years is actually reasonably strong evidence in favor of H/ton's thesis.
Please don't get me wrong, though, I'm not disagreeing with you on the broader point that the chief division in today's world is along ideological lines, liberal democracy vs. authoritarianism. I think you're right. I simply would not dismiss H/ton's argument entirely. Instead of insisting on the "civilizational" blocs he sketched out, which have not held up so well, I would just say that what his analysis reminded us of--that people like Fukuyama or (say) Mearsheimer, for example, didn't--was the continued importance of culture to international relations. And in a world where the most powerful ideology arguably remains neither liberal democracy nor authoritarianism but nationalism, that reminder is still relevant.
The article rightly points out that ideology matters more than civilization. However, it treats universities, media, NGOs, bureaucracies, and European governments as defenders of liberal democracy, while ignoring how often they push speech codes, DEI rules, immigration policies, and a culture of intellectual coercion that the public as a whole never voted for and often opposes.
Trump’s appeal is not simply hostility to democracy. It is also a backlash against institutions that call themselves liberal while acting without democratic consent.
Agreed on any number of specific criticisms of Huntington's specific theory but ... I don't know if this really captures everything important. Just as "if the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," then likewise, "if the only thing you believe in is liberal democracy, then everything else looks like an 'enemy' of liberal democracy."
But even if you lump everything else into the 'enemies' bucket, there's still the Douthatian view that the level of speech suppression, state intervention and de facto blasphemy laws required to manage the sectarian tensions created by mass immigration in a place like the present-day Yookay hardly qualifies as "liberal" -- rather, "managerial multiculturalism" is what the UK/EU thought police have in mind as they patrol the internet for crimethink.
"the main alternative adaptation to mass migration and aging native populations is what you might call managerial multiculturalism, which tries to preserve the post-1989 vision through means that look increasingly illiberal — involving the policing of speech and debate, especially, with explicit limitations on acceptable opinion and even jail time if you step too far out of line."
"This is how you end up with Britain trying to suppress the ethnic and religious tensions in its increasingly diverse society by arresting people for social media posts and online trolling. Or Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government engaging in “de-banking” and other methods to smother populist protests in 2022. Or German authorities contemplating an outright ban on the nationalist Alternative for Germany Party."
"Managerial multiculturalism is a model with clear appeal to certain progressive elites, because it imagines that the more utopian ambitions of the post-Cold War era can still be realized if you just give technocrats a little extra power — to police disinformation, suppress “hate speech” and sometimes remove inconvenient parties and candidates from the ballot entirely."
Robert Kagan made roughly this argument very effectively, and relatively early, in "The Return of History and the End of Dreams." When I teach Fukuyama and Huntington, I always include Kagan's little book also, considering it the most insightful of the three.
One of Huntington's errors is that he treats culture as the primary driver of political ideology and political systems, rather than as the nurture environment through which more fundamental human psychological predispositions are expressed. This leads him to overestimate the stability of civilizations and underestimate their capacity for political transformation.
Individual political outlooks are partly shaped by heritable psychological predispositions: the "nature" component of personality. These include tendencies along spectra such as hierarchy versus egalitarianism, conformity versus independence, security versus openness, and in-group loyalty versus universalism. Such predispositions shape the moral and emotional foundations that influence which political ideologies individuals find persuasive (Jonathan Haidt).
These underlying tendencies are reinforced, moderated, or suppressed by nurture: family, institutions, social norms, and wider culture. However, culture itself is not an independent force. It is an emergent product of human psychology interacting with historical and institutional circumstances. Cultures therefore shape people, but people also continually reshape cultures.
Political change can occur when shifting circumstances alter the balance between competing psychological predispositions already present within a population.
A second error is Huntington's tendency to conflate the ideology of a country's leadership with that of its population. In liberal democracies governments reflect public preferences, but imperfectly; in authoritarian systems they may reflect them hardly at all. The ideology of the ruling elite can therefore tell us more about who holds power than about the underlying character of the people.
In reality, every society contains a broad range of political predispositions: people who find comfort in hierarchy and strong leadership, people who prioritise freedom and equality, and many positions in between. These predispositions are always present, even when prevailing institutions or cultural norms limit their public expression.
Unfortunately, not all ideologies enjoy equal opportunities for expression. Authoritarianism possesses a structural advantage over liberalism because authoritarian values can be imposed through coercion. Liberal values, by definition, cannot. People can be compelled to obey, but they cannot be compelled to become genuinely liberal. Rousseau's notion that people can be "forced to be free" has always been problematic because freedom imposed from above is no longer freedom in the liberal sense.
Liberal democracy therefore depends upon something that authoritarian systems do not: the voluntary acceptance of norms such as tolerance, compromise, free expression, and the legitimacy of opposition. Authoritarianism can be established by a determined minority; liberalism requires the continuing consent of a substantial proportion of society. That makes it more fragile, but also more legitimate when it succeeds.
In short, civilizations do not clash because they possess immutable political characters. Political conflict arises because every civilization contains the same enduring tension between competing human predispositions: hierarchy and equality, conformity and independence, security and openness, tribalism and universalism.
I would contend that the split in Ukraine is more ideological than civilisational, with those that wanted to merge with Russia being ethic Russians with conservative mind-sets, which would give them a strong sense of their original identity, let’s say half of the 58 - 65% of ethnic Russians in the Crimea at the time.
Although the Russian govt’s propaganda claimed that in the 2014 Crimea referendum 97% of voters wanted to join Russia with an 83% turnout. This propaganda was unmasked when the Russian President’s Human Rights Council suggested the actual support was somewhere between 15 and 30% with an estimated turnout of 30 – 50%. No doubt pragmatics also played a part in the vote, such as security and economics.
Eh, the author identifies another angle worth considering beyond Huntington's, but doesn't actually demonstrate that Huntington wasn't onto another valid angle worth taking into account. As someone who was in college when Huntington's thesis was at its most influential, I've never understood the reflexive urge to REFUTE him rather than incorporate his arguments into a broader point of view. It shouldn't be controversial that some cultures will be more receptive and adaptive to quasi-democratic modernity than others, and avoiding that reality can only lead to grief.
From the article: “there are, of course, cultural and institutional impediments to liberal democracy in many countries.” Huntington’s argument was very ambitious and he made demonstrably incorrect predictions. I’m not saying it should be discarded completely, but I think it’s directionally wrong.
We've had the benefit of several decades of hindsight to refine Huntington's theses, but that doesn't mean he didn't give us a lot of nutritious ideas to chew on. The deliberately destructive governing and rhetorical styles of Sadiq Khan and Zohran Mamdani demonstrate that the clash of civilizations continues apace whether polite society chooses to acknowledge it or not.
When a country or at best a nation state begins an experiment with liberal democracy within its own culture and institutions, what happens? Do the cultural and institutions adapt to the liberal democratic ideology? If the culture and institutions do not adapt, does the experiment fail?
I'm almost certain, in fact, that in Huntington's original article, his civilizational line of demarcation actually runs *through* Ukraine, separating the Europe-leaning western part from the Russian-leaning eastern part. By now, Russia has managed to eliminate most of that Russian sympathy throughout the entire country, but the intra-Ukrainian tensions before the war did in fact run more or less along H/ton's line.
In the relevant passage about the likelihood of conflict, he refers to Ukraine as a whole—not Eastern Ukraine specifically. From Huntington:
“In 1991 and 1992 many people were alarmed by the possibility of violent conflict between Russia and Ukraine over territory, particularly Crimea, the Black Sea fleet, nuclear weapons and economic issues. If civilization is what counts, however, the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each other for centuries. As of early 1993, despite all the reasons for conflict, the leaders of the two countries were effectively negotiating and defusing the issues between the two countries. While there has been serious fighting between Muslims and Christians elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and much tension and some fighting between Western and Orthodox Christians in the Baltic states, there has been virtually no violence between Russians and Ukrainians.”
It's a fair point, but I think it somewhat arbitrarily defines "conflict" in overly narrow terms. The current out-and-out war in Ukraine goes back to Maidan and before that the Orange Revolution, and in both those cases the internal Ukrainian tensions fell precisely along H/ton's line. One could retort that those earlier conflicts were ideological, and that would be correct. But I think in a case like this, culture and ideology are overlaid, and both play a role. All things considered, I think what has happened in Ukraine over the past twenty years is actually reasonably strong evidence in favor of H/ton's thesis.
Please don't get me wrong, though, I'm not disagreeing with you on the broader point that the chief division in today's world is along ideological lines, liberal democracy vs. authoritarianism. I think you're right. I simply would not dismiss H/ton's argument entirely. Instead of insisting on the "civilizational" blocs he sketched out, which have not held up so well, I would just say that what his analysis reminded us of--that people like Fukuyama or (say) Mearsheimer, for example, didn't--was the continued importance of culture to international relations. And in a world where the most powerful ideology arguably remains neither liberal democracy nor authoritarianism but nationalism, that reminder is still relevant.
The article rightly points out that ideology matters more than civilization. However, it treats universities, media, NGOs, bureaucracies, and European governments as defenders of liberal democracy, while ignoring how often they push speech codes, DEI rules, immigration policies, and a culture of intellectual coercion that the public as a whole never voted for and often opposes.
Trump’s appeal is not simply hostility to democracy. It is also a backlash against institutions that call themselves liberal while acting without democratic consent.
Agreed on any number of specific criticisms of Huntington's specific theory but ... I don't know if this really captures everything important. Just as "if the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," then likewise, "if the only thing you believe in is liberal democracy, then everything else looks like an 'enemy' of liberal democracy."
But even if you lump everything else into the 'enemies' bucket, there's still the Douthatian view that the level of speech suppression, state intervention and de facto blasphemy laws required to manage the sectarian tensions created by mass immigration in a place like the present-day Yookay hardly qualifies as "liberal" -- rather, "managerial multiculturalism" is what the UK/EU thought police have in mind as they patrol the internet for crimethink.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/opinion/south-korea-liberalism-nationalism.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/opinion/uk-elections-post-liberalism.html
"the main alternative adaptation to mass migration and aging native populations is what you might call managerial multiculturalism, which tries to preserve the post-1989 vision through means that look increasingly illiberal — involving the policing of speech and debate, especially, with explicit limitations on acceptable opinion and even jail time if you step too far out of line."
"This is how you end up with Britain trying to suppress the ethnic and religious tensions in its increasingly diverse society by arresting people for social media posts and online trolling. Or Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government engaging in “de-banking” and other methods to smother populist protests in 2022. Or German authorities contemplating an outright ban on the nationalist Alternative for Germany Party."
"Managerial multiculturalism is a model with clear appeal to certain progressive elites, because it imagines that the more utopian ambitions of the post-Cold War era can still be realized if you just give technocrats a little extra power — to police disinformation, suppress “hate speech” and sometimes remove inconvenient parties and candidates from the ballot entirely."
Robert Kagan made roughly this argument very effectively, and relatively early, in "The Return of History and the End of Dreams." When I teach Fukuyama and Huntington, I always include Kagan's little book also, considering it the most insightful of the three.
One of Huntington's errors is that he treats culture as the primary driver of political ideology and political systems, rather than as the nurture environment through which more fundamental human psychological predispositions are expressed. This leads him to overestimate the stability of civilizations and underestimate their capacity for political transformation.
Individual political outlooks are partly shaped by heritable psychological predispositions: the "nature" component of personality. These include tendencies along spectra such as hierarchy versus egalitarianism, conformity versus independence, security versus openness, and in-group loyalty versus universalism. Such predispositions shape the moral and emotional foundations that influence which political ideologies individuals find persuasive (Jonathan Haidt).
These underlying tendencies are reinforced, moderated, or suppressed by nurture: family, institutions, social norms, and wider culture. However, culture itself is not an independent force. It is an emergent product of human psychology interacting with historical and institutional circumstances. Cultures therefore shape people, but people also continually reshape cultures.
Political change can occur when shifting circumstances alter the balance between competing psychological predispositions already present within a population.
A second error is Huntington's tendency to conflate the ideology of a country's leadership with that of its population. In liberal democracies governments reflect public preferences, but imperfectly; in authoritarian systems they may reflect them hardly at all. The ideology of the ruling elite can therefore tell us more about who holds power than about the underlying character of the people.
In reality, every society contains a broad range of political predispositions: people who find comfort in hierarchy and strong leadership, people who prioritise freedom and equality, and many positions in between. These predispositions are always present, even when prevailing institutions or cultural norms limit their public expression.
Unfortunately, not all ideologies enjoy equal opportunities for expression. Authoritarianism possesses a structural advantage over liberalism because authoritarian values can be imposed through coercion. Liberal values, by definition, cannot. People can be compelled to obey, but they cannot be compelled to become genuinely liberal. Rousseau's notion that people can be "forced to be free" has always been problematic because freedom imposed from above is no longer freedom in the liberal sense.
Liberal democracy therefore depends upon something that authoritarian systems do not: the voluntary acceptance of norms such as tolerance, compromise, free expression, and the legitimacy of opposition. Authoritarianism can be established by a determined minority; liberalism requires the continuing consent of a substantial proportion of society. That makes it more fragile, but also more legitimate when it succeeds.
In short, civilizations do not clash because they possess immutable political characters. Political conflict arises because every civilization contains the same enduring tension between competing human predispositions: hierarchy and equality, conformity and independence, security and openness, tribalism and universalism.
One place with ethnic divides and democracy is Switzerland. The way in which this system works is very much not the same as American democracy.
This 2020 article from The National Interest insists that Huntington got Ukraine right, though it also promotes the pro-Kremlin 'the war is really our fault and Ukraine's fault' bargle that The National Interest and its 'realists' were famous for. https://peacediplomacy.org/2022/03/09/william-s-smith-in-the-national-interest-ukraine-and-the-clash-of-civilizations/
I would contend that the split in Ukraine is more ideological than civilisational, with those that wanted to merge with Russia being ethic Russians with conservative mind-sets, which would give them a strong sense of their original identity, let’s say half of the 58 - 65% of ethnic Russians in the Crimea at the time.
Although the Russian govt’s propaganda claimed that in the 2014 Crimea referendum 97% of voters wanted to join Russia with an 83% turnout. This propaganda was unmasked when the Russian President’s Human Rights Council suggested the actual support was somewhere between 15 and 30% with an estimated turnout of 30 – 50%. No doubt pragmatics also played a part in the vote, such as security and economics.