Huntington vs. Inglehart & Norris: The Clash of Civilizations
This paper compares and contrasts Samuel Huntington's 1993 thesis in "The Clash of Civilizations?" with the reassessment offered by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris in their 2003 article "The True Clash of Civilizations." While Inglehart and Norris concede that cultural differences drive conflict between the Western and Muslim worlds, they narrow the wedge issue to attitudes about sex, gender equality, and social liberalism. The paper argues that this focus on sexual and social attitudes is too narrow and misses Huntington's broader and more historically grounded argument: that civilizational conflict is rooted in deep cultural and religious identity. Drawing on the Peace of Westphalia as historical context, the paper maintains that Huntington's thesis is the more correct and comprehensive framework.
- Introduction: Two Theses on Civilizational Conflict: Overview of Huntington and Inglehart-Norris theses
- Inglehart and Norris: Culture Reduced to Sexual Politics: Critique of narrow focus on sex and liberalism
- Huntington's Broader Cultural Argument: Historical grounding via Westphalia and religious schism
- Conclusion: The Correct End of the Lens: Huntington's thesis affirmed as more comprehensive
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What makes this paper effective
- Takes a clear, confident argumentative stance early, telling the reader exactly whose thesis it will defend and why the opposing view falls short.
- Uses a pointed counter-example — that the Founding Fathers did not ground democracy in sexual liberalism — to expose the logical weakness in Inglehart and Norris's narrow cultural framing.
- Grounds the argument in historical context (the Peace of Westphalia, the Catholic-Protestant split) to show that Huntington's thesis operates at the correct level of analytical scale.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative thesis analysis: it does not simply summarize two positions but sets them against each other at the level of analytical scope. By showing that Inglehart and Norris's argument is a subset of Huntington's — one symptom mistaken for the whole disease — the paper argues from scale and historical depth rather than from factual dispute alone.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a summary of both theses and a declared argumentative position. The second section critiques Inglehart and Norris's "sex as wedge" argument directly and links it back to Huntington's framework. The third section supplies historical evidence (Westphalia, religious schism) to reinforce Huntington's broader thesis. A brief conclusion restates the verdict using an effective optical metaphor ("the wrong end of history"). Four sections total; compact but coherent.
Introduction: Two Theses on Civilizational Conflict
In Samuel Huntington's (1993) essay "The Clash of Civilizations?", the political scientist posited that whereas nation states had previously aligned on cultural terms, in the coming years of the modern world these terms would become disjointed as various cultures emerged or re-asserted themselves. Along these cultural lines, the discourse of modern politics would be situated. In other words, Huntington (1993) viewed the cultures of various civilizations as the primary source of conflict in the coming era — conflict driven not by economics or geopolitical aims, but by the deep cultural identities of the world's civilizations.
This paper compares and contrasts Huntington's thesis with the thesis advanced by Inglehart and Norris (2003) who, in the wake of 9/11, re-assessed Huntington's idea and found it to be only half-right. It argues that Huntington's thesis remains the correct one and that Inglehart and Norris (2003) are too focused on a narrow dimension of cultural difference and therefore miss the main point of Huntington's broader argument.
Inglehart and Norris: Culture Reduced to Sexual Politics
Inglehart and Norris (2003) concede that culture plays a part in the differences between the Western world and the Muslim world, but they pinpoint a precise issue that they claim serves as the ultimate wedge between the two: attitudes toward sex and social liberalism. The researchers state that "according to a new survey, Muslims and their Western counterparts want democracy, yet they are worlds apart when it comes to attitudes toward divorce, abortion, gender equality, and gay rights — which may not bode well for democracy's future in the Middle East" (p. 63).
This argument is patently flawed because the West for many years was considered to embrace democratic principles, yet it never held the views and attitudes toward sex, divorce, abortion, gender equality, or gay rights that it holds today. If these attitudes are the bulwark of democracy, the Founding Fathers certainly did not view them as such. This over-emphasis on sex as the wedge between two warring cultures — the West and the Muslim Middle East — is telling in the sense that it reflects the Western obsession with liberal ideas, or rather with a liberalized culture that increasingly drives the political discourse of Western nations' leaders.
This discourse is rejected by nations that do not share the same liberalized culture or liberal ideals — and that rejection is precisely the underlying point of Huntington's thesis: the wars of tomorrow will be fought on cultural grounds. Attitudes toward sex are but one manifestation of culture and the cultural beliefs of nation states; they are a symptom, not the disease.
Conclusion: The Correct End of the Lens
Huntington (1993) correctly identifies the main issue underlying the world's conflicts: a deep and enduring cultural war rooted in religious and civilizational identity. Inglehart and Norris (2003) merely identify one aspect of cultural differences and mistakenly elevate it to the heart of the problem. They are looking through the wrong end of history, and in doing so, they reduce a sweeping civilizational argument to a debate about social attitudes — missing the forest for the trees.
References
Huntington, S. (1993). The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 22–49.
Inglehart, R., & Norris, P. (2003). The true clash of civilizations. Foreign Policy, 135, 63–70.
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