The Huntington Thesis and Turkey's New Role

Robert W. Merry 

It has been eighteen years since Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington published his famous essay “The Clash of Civilizations’’ in Foreign Affairs, later expanded into a book. Although the man was widely praised for the provocative thrust of his thinking, the thesis has been roundly attacked or blithely ignored over the past two decades. This is remarkable because world history has unfolded over those eighteen years in ways that have bolstered the Huntington thesis, the essence of which was that with the end of the Cold War, cultural impulses and feelings would rise to the surface and drive global events to a much greater extent than before.

But Americans collectively didn’t want to confront the idea that civilizational clashes—which implied ethnic and religious frictions—would become a fundamental reality of international relations, even as civilizational sensibilities were defining much of what was happening in the world. And so the intellectual discourse has sought some other framework—almost any framework—for understanding the course of global events. And Huntington found himself widely mischaracterized by commentators wishing to blunt his impact on public discourse.

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