In 1993, Samuel Huntington published "The Clash of Civilizations", where he offered a provocative thesis: the next great conflicts wouldn't be about ideology or economics, but culture. Up until the Cold War ended, he argued, most major conflicts were essentially "civil wars of the West"—European powers or their proxies battling it out. But in contemporary times, Western and non-Western civilizations were all interacting as shapers and movers of history.
Huntington mapped the world into distinct civilizations1, each with its own deep cultural DNA:
Western
Orthodox
Islamic
Sinic
Latin America
Sub-Saharan Africa
Hindu
Buddhist
Japan
For Huntington, civilization represented "the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of what distinguishes humans from other species." These are differentiated by history, language, traditions, and religion. They embody fundamentally different views about the nature of God, the relationship between individual and group, the role of the state, family structures, gender relations, even concepts of liberty and authority.
Why a Clash?
Huntington identified several forces driving these civilizations toward conflict.
Globalization, paradoxically, was making the world smaller while making differences more visible. He quotes Donald Horowitz: "An Ibo may be… an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in what was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he is simply an Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an African." These expanding circles of identity were creating new tensions. The interactions between peoples of different civilizations were intensifying, and with them, civilization consciousness.
Immigration was accelerating these encounters. But more fundamentally, Huntington argued that as liberal systems hollowed out traditional identities, people were responding by turning back to religion and traditions for meaning. The rise of fundamentalist movements wasn't driven by the poor and ignorant, but by the young, educated middle classes seeking something the secular state couldn't provide (similar to Thiel’s take I wrote about).
Cultural differences, he insisted, are less mutable than political or economic ones. A socialist can become a capitalist, the poor can become rich, but an Armenian cannot become Russian. There are differences between civilizations that may not be reconcilable because they offer different beliefs about human nature, gender, transcendence, and the very purpose of life.
My Reading: The Multipolar Scramble
I feel Huntington's framework is simplistic because it ignores how ideology, class, and technology fragment civilizations from within (more on that later). A civilization is never static.
Yet, it illuminates something essential about our emerging world order. It reveals the fault lines that will matter as regional powers assert themselves in an increasingly multipolar world—one where the West's unifying power is waning. Islam, China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America—all will participate in a new scrambling for position in the vacuum that the United States and Europe are gradually leaving behind.
Huntington concluded his essay claiming it would be "the West versus the rest" because the West held absolute military, political, and economic power in 1993 when he published it. Oh, how things have changed in thirty years.
The Ideology Factor
Where I diverge from Huntington is in recognizing how ideology fractures civilizations from within. The West isn't a monolith—it's splintering between progressive movements pushing DEI and gender ideology, populist nationalism exemplified by Trump and European right-wing parties, techno-libertarianism from Silicon Valley, climate activism demanding systemic change, and a resurgent socialism among younger generations. In America, the culture wars have become so intense that Democrats and Republicans increasingly live in separate realities (at least in separate states), with only around 4% marrying across party lines. This polarization is a kind of canary in the coal mine, suggesting that ideology will become a growing force to reckon with as it moves out of the West across borders.
China already has economic might, and will achieve global military dominance. Its sphere of influence will grow larger, with influence spreading globally through economics rather than culture. The Chinese have historically been an inward-looking empire—they don't seek to export their culture the way the West exported liberalism or Islam spreads faith. They want respect and resources, not converts.
Meanwhile, India—now the world's fourth-largest economy and a population of 1.4 billion—emerges as a crucial counterbalance to China in Asia while managing its own tensions with Pakistan and internal religious dynamics.
But the real civilizational drama may unfold elsewhere.
Islam Versus the Rest
If any thesis emerges from recent history, it's not "the West versus the rest" but potentially "Islam versus the rest." As Huntington noted, conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has persisted for 1,300 years—from the conquest of Spain to the siege of Vienna, from the Crusades to the fall of Constantinople.
"The West's next confrontation," observed M.J. Akbar, an Indian Muslim author Huntington quoted, "is definitely going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin."
This has already manifested in the Balkans in the 1990s, in the Middle East's perpetual conflicts, in Africa where Islam meets both Christian and traditional African religions, and in South Asia through Pakistan's tensions with India. Today, there are about 53 Muslim-majority countries. As Huntington observed with remarkable prescience (and controversy): "Violence occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders."
The question that interests me is whether some cultures are more prone to expansionism than others. China may be economically aggressive but culturally insular. They've forced homogenization in Tibet and Xinjiang, but these are considered internal frontiers, not evangelical projects. Islam, by contrast, has expansion built into its theology. The faith spreads not just through conversion but through demographic momentum. Which leads me to Europe.
Europe's Demographic Revolution
Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in Europe's kindergartens. According to the latest statistics reported by the Austrian outlet Der Standard, 41.2% of students in Vienna's primary and secondary schools identify as Muslim. In Amsterdam it’s 43%, while Muslims form around 17% of the capital’s total population. These aren't projections—this is now.
The median age of Muslims throughout Europe was 30.4, 13 years younger than the median for other Europeans (43.8). Muslim women in Europe average 2.6 children, compared to 1.6 for non-Muslims. Europe's Muslim population is projected to increase by about 10 million people, from an estimated 25.8 million Muslims in 2016 to 35.8 million in 2050 even in conservative scenarios. In high-migration scenarios, Muslims could constitute 14% of Europe's population by mid-century.
The transformation is particularly striking in Western Europe's major nations. France currently has 5.7 million Muslims (8.8% of the population), with projections suggesting this could reach 17% by 2050. Germany has 5 million Muslims (6.1%), potentially rising to 20% by mid-century under high-migration scenarios. The Netherlands, where Muslims comprise about 6% of the population, has seen Islam become the fastest-growing religion among youth. Sweden, despite its smaller population, has experienced dramatic demographic shifts—Muslims could constitute 20.5% of the population by 2050 even in medium migration scenarios, and up to 30% in high-migration scenarios.
This isn't just about numbers—it's about values, traditions, and the very nature of European identity.
The Internet as the West's Last Project
One ray of hope in a not-very-bright future for the West is with the internet. I agree with Balaji Srinivasan's thesis that the internet may become (or has become already) the West's greatest decentralized project. Even as Western nation-states stagnate and fragment, the values of open inquiry, individual expression, and liberal discourse live on in digital spaces. The internet speaks English, runs on protocols developed in the West, and embodies values of openness and innovation that are fundamentally Western.
"Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state," Huntington wrote, "often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures." Yet these ideas proliferate online, creating a parallel civilizational space that transcends geography.
Granted, this digital civilization faces its own challenges. Can it maintain coherence as non-Western powers build their own internets? Can it preserve liberal values while accommodating billions of users who might not share them? Will it establish real-life territories? (See Balaji's book: The Network State).
The Question of Modernity Without Westernization
As I explained in my last piece about China, countries are modernizing without Westernizing. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan suggest one path—economic development with cultural preservation, and a selective adoption of democratic norms. China and the Gulf states offer another—material prosperity without political freedom.
I feel the coming world order's real clash will be between different visions of modernity itself. The West's version, premised on individual rights and secular rationalism, competes with China's techno-authoritarian efficiency, Islam's attempt to reconcile faith with development, and other emerging models we haven't yet imagined.
What seems certain is that we're moving toward a genuinely multipolar world—not the unipolar moment America enjoyed after the Cold War—the Pax Americana, but something more complex and unstable. Regional civilizations are asserting themselves, each with its own logic and legitimacy.
The West might lose its dominance, but its ideas—transmitted through technology, encoded in international institutions, embedded in global systems—will persist and evolve. Whether that's enough to prevent Huntington's darkest predictions from coming true remains to be seen. Civilizations clash, but they also merge, evolve, and surprise us.
Maybe we'll find new forms of coexistence in a world where the West no longer writes all the rules, where multiple modernities compete for allegiance, and where the internet remains the arena in which liberal values are debated, forked, and refined beyond their original context. As Balaji puts it, the internet is to the West what America was to Britain—the successor that carries forward its predecessor's best ideas while transcending its limits.
That's the world we're entering, ready or not.
postscript 📮
29 essays published in 29 days! Tomorrow is my last day!
If you had to choose, which splits the West more—class, ideology, religion?
Have you read Balaji’s book on Network States?
I’m using Huntington’s revised “civilizations” from his book of the same name, which he published three years later. The original ones on his essay are: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, African (possibly).