GULLA, Jan Faye A.

Contemporary World

2A1 Mr. Paul Micah Francisco

THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

Reflection Paper

Huntington argues that the primary source or the main reason of conflicts between nations is

neither ideological nor economical aspect but rather, the different beliefs, religions, traditions and cultures

of countries. These differences results to diverse civilizations and thus, as Huntington concluded, will

dominate world politics. He then continues his argument by explaining the nature of civilization and its

impact on the emergence of every war and clashes. Although Huntington has a valid claim since the

occurrence of wars and conflicts in the past decades was mostly because territory expansion, sharing of

tradition, establishment of identity or basically to amplify their civilization, I believe that his basis on his

arguments specifically that a clash of civilization based on cultural differences are somehow narrow and

insufficient to hypothesize such claims considering the modernization and dynamic changes in this world.

He provided the reasons on why the civilization will clash, mainly because of various differences-

tradition, language, history and religion, economic modernization and social change which separates

primordial local identity, civilization consciousness growth, cultural differences and economic

regionalism. Basically, because of these differences and changes, Huntington believes that people will

form alliances not ideologically but culturally. Furthermore, he divided the world into eight major

civilizations- the Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Western, Latin and Africa. However,

Huntington somehow exemplifies the Westerners too much that it became discriminatory to other groups,

cultures or civilization. Moreover, he fails to recognize that living in the same civilization doesn’t mean

that they already have the same culture or identity resulting to generalization of claims. Nevertheless, I
agree that our differences are oftentimes the source of conflicts between nations but it doesn’t stop there

considering the social and modern changes happening in this world.

Huntington’s arguments on culture as the cause of civilization clashes are in some way broad and

overlooked because his claims are often generalized resulting to a false or even biased conclusion.

Although, when I read his article, an important aspect in the text is the concept of having differences and

commonalities as the result of conflict and the solution at the same time. Considering the changes in this

fast-paced world, I believe that conflicts or clashes are truly inevitable because nations will always

interact and pursue what they think is good for their territories or even pursuing their self-interest.

Therefore culture is not the only source of conflicts, a lot of factors do especially during the emergence of

globalization where we are able to interact between nations, trade goods and even migrate. This modern

world allows nations to be independent and establish their own identity but at the same time creates and

common ground between different nations.