Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" is a theory based upon geographic locations and political movements. It describes how these have intersected in the past with religion in determining cultural identity. His views on a new world order emerging after the Cold War relate to modernism, secularism, and the global economy, and how these have interlaced people from across the world; however, these intersections have not overcome fundamentalist religions, which continue to defy understanding. As a predictable outcome, the world is indeed experiencing a tremendous clash of civilizations, thus my agreement with Huntington's theory.
Huntington's thesis contains distinct points of conflict that can be viewed from a predominantly religious perspective, and he supports his opinions about how the aspects of religion are able to explain very troubled areas of the world. Historically, Huntington describes the transition from "the Peace of Westphalia" (Huntington, 1993) to the French Revolution, quoting R. R. Palmer from 1793 along the way, when he said 'The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun', then quickly moved to how the Russian Revolution and World War I "yielded a conflict of ideologies" (Huntington, 1993). Those ideologies were communism, fascism, and democracy. With the elimination of fascism in World War II, the world became divided along the lines of communism and democracy; when the Cold War era began, with expansive military build-up and rapid economic growth, the demise of communism also began. This ultimately left democracy as a prevalent ideological structure, but it also allowed for more power and culture to emerge and rise along the very fundamental lines of religion.
Various conflicts in the world illustrate how religion is emerging above other political ideologies. Huntington states the "most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating" (Huntington, 1993) what he identified as eight specific civilizations: "Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and African" (Huntington, 1993).
