The vindication of Sam Huntington?

Naill Ferguson has a great piece in today's London Telegraph. He thinks Huntington and not Fukuyama has the better track record.

It is nearly 13 years since my colleague and near neighbour, Samuel Huntington, published his seminal essay "The Clash of Civilisations?" in Foreign Affairs. As works of academic prophecy go, this has been a real winner - up there with George Kennan's epoch-making 1947 essay, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", on the containment of the Soviet Union.

"In this new world," wrote Huntington, "the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilisations? The fault lines between
civilisations will be the battle lines of the future."

The other great think-piece of the post-Cold War period, Francis Fukuyama's The End of History - published in the summer of 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall - went from seeming prescient to seeming over-optimistic within just a few years. In
particular, Bosnia's bloody civil war showed how history might actually resume with a vengeance in some post-Communist societies.

By contrast, Huntington's vision of a world divided along ancient cultural fault-lines seems to have stood up much better to the test of time. Indeed, the Bosnian war was a good example of what Huntington had in mind, since it was a conflict located precisely on the fault line between Western Christianity, Orthodoxy and Islam.

Muslims were the losers in Bosnia, though belated international intervention prevented their complete expulsion from the country. Huntington's point, however, was that in other respects Islam was a civilisation in the ascendant, not least because of the extraordinarily high birth-rates prevalent in most Muslim societies. The terrorist attacks of September 2001 were interpreted by many Americans in
Huntington's terms; this was an attack on America's "Judaeo-Christian" civilisation by the fanatical followers of a prophet spurned by both Jews and Christians.

Also in the ascendant, Huntington argued, was Confucianism, the civilisation of China. This forecast, too, has been vindicated by the seemingly unstoppable growth of the Chinese economy. How can the Chinese have what seems to be a dynamic market economy without Western-style institutions like the rule of law and representative government? The pat answer is that Confucianism permits the coexistence of liberal economics and patriarchal politics.

Huntington's model makes sense of an impressively high proportion of the news. When young Muslim men riot in protest against Danish cartoons of Mohammed, it looks like yet another case of clashing civilisations. Small wonder so many congressmen are baffled by the Bush administration's willingness to let a
Dubai-based company take over terminal operations at six US ports: Sorry, wrong
civilisation. And when the European trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, announces protectionist measures against imports of Chinese footwear, he's also
playing a part in the great culture war. Those Confucian trainers are just too damned cheap.