HUNTINGTON´S "CIVILIZATIONS": AN IRRELEVANT PARADIGM
HUNTINGTON´S "CIVILIZATIONS": AN IRRELEVANT PARADIGM

Summary/Abstract: The author notes how, during the 1990s, US commentators constructed a false opposition between the European and Islamic worlds and totemised it with the label "clash of civilizations". Allcock points out how such a Manichean approach implies that a complex,multi-layered identity for the Bosniaks and Bosnia´s other citizens (European and Balkan, Christian and Islamic, etc.) is a historical anomaly, and that Bosnia´s fate is "sooner or later [to] be eliminated as the "fault-lines" [between civilizations] move". "Why Huntington? In the summer of 1993, in the journal Foreign Affairs, the American Historian Samuel P. Huntington published an article, "The clash of civilizations?", which has had a substantial impact upon discussion of the shape of international relations following the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. The vigour of the debate which this piece stimulated is suggested by the publication shortly afterwards of a volume of critical responses to it (Huntington, 1996). Subsequently Huntington revised and elaborated his original thesis in a best-selling book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1997). Huntington´s book is of interest and importance for at least two reasons." (...)

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