As the liberal international order that coalesced after the fall of the Berlin Wall lies dying, says Nils Gilman in Foreign Policy, the central question gripping geopolitical thinkers today is the “nature of the new order struggling to be born”. During the last great re-ordering, in the 1990s, the most prominent debate in international relations was between Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which prophesied a world where liberal democracy spread to all corners of the globe, and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations, which saw the future defined by conflict along the “fault lines” of seven or eight major civilisations. For decades – as the EU integrated itself, US leaders checked with international bodies before waging war, and the Russians and Chinese hinted at reform – liberal internationalists could convince themselves Fukuyama had won the argument. Today, “Huntington is getting his revenge”.

The Clash of Civilisations argues that, once the universalising ideologies of the Cold War waned, older group identities would re-emerge, and powerful “core states” would enforce dominance within their own cultural spheres of influence: Western, Confucian, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic Orthodox and so on. Now, as Huntington predicted, the forces animating geopolitics are explicitly civilisational. Russia justified its invasion of Ukraine by arguing it had always been part of the “Russian world”; Xi Jinping sees Taiwan the same way. Narendra Modi’s rule in India is premised on the ideology of “Hindutva”, which presents India as a civilisational state based on the Hindu religion (never mind the hundreds of millions of non-Hindus). Donald Trump’s Maga movement views itself as the defender of Western civilisation. The dream of “universal liberal democracy and technocratically managed global capitalism” is dead, and the civilisational clashers are ascendent almost everywhere. “I expect Huntington is smiling from the grave.”

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