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Civilisations and Their Discontents:

Political Geography and Geopolitics in
the Huntington Thesis
a
Mark Bassin
a
Department of Geography , University of Birmingham , UK
Published online: 31 May 2007.

To cite this article: Mark Bassin (2007) Civilisations and Their Discontents: Political Geography and
Geopolitics in the Huntington Thesis, Geopolitics, 12:3, 351-374

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650040701305609

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 Geopolitics, 12:351–374, 2007
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online
DOI: 10.1080/14650040701305609

Civilisations and Their Discontents:

Geopolitics, Vol. 12, No. 3, mar 2007: pp. 0–0
1557-3028
1465-0045
FGEO
Geopolitics

Political Geography and Geopolitics

in the Huntington Thesis

MARK BASSIN
Civilisations
Mark Bassin and Their Discontents

Department of Geography, University of Birmingham, UK

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This article considers the place of political geography and geopoli-

tics in Samuel Huntington’s celebrated work Clash of Civilizations.
It is argued that Huntington’s engagement with geography is fun-
damentally ambivalent. On the one hand, he frames his entire
analysis as a form of what he calls political geography, and he
invokes geographical factors in various ways throughout the entire
text. At the same time, however, he explicitly discounts the signifi-
cance of space or territory in the civilisational framework that he
depicts. An analysis of Huntington’s inconsistency in this regard
contributes to a broader critique of his overall premises, logic, and
conclusions. Beyond this, it provides insight into the uncertain
position of geography more broadly in contemporary discourses of
international relations and international security. Ultimately, I sug-
gest that the ambivalences in the Clash of Civilizations are indica-
tive of certain ‘fault lines’ — to borrow from Huntington’s own
lexicon — that have been characteristic for the American security
imagination across much of the twentieth century.

INTRODUCTION

Of the many attempts to chart out the contours of global politics after the
Cold War, none can quite match the importance and influence of Samuel
Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. Presented initially as an essay in Foreign
Affairs1 and then comprehensively expanded into a book some years later,2
Huntington’s thesis has elicited a truly remarkable reaction around the
world and achieved a mixture of celebrity and notoriety that puts it today at

Address correspondence to Mark Bassin, Department of Geography, University of

Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. E-mail: m.bassin@bham.ac.uk

351
 352 Mark Bassin

the very epicentre of debate about the dynamics of the emerging New
World Order.3 It is worth noting that this was not so self-evident even a few
short years ago, when at the turn of the millennium it seemed that Hunting-
ton’s grim vision of international relations in the twenty-first century might
well fade as a relic of a peculiar sort of anti-euphoria stirred in some
observers by the much-unanticipated collapse of the Cold War order. As
Edward Said and others have pointed out, however, such expectations were
aborted instantaneously, and it would now seem permanently by the attacks
of 11 September.4 Huntington’s primordialist view of civilisational essences
and of the irrational but indelible antagonisms that set them apart has effec-
tively become a discourse in their own right, which today sets the terms of
debate even for those who are resolutely opposed to his message itself.5
Among geographers, Huntington has had a rather uneven reception. In
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the most general terms, his work is referred to quite broadly (and for the
most part quite critically) right across the literature in political geography
and beyond. At the same time, however, there have been relatively few
detailed studies of his assumptions and his arguments.6 In view of his
acknowledged celebrity and importance, this lack of attention seems sur-
prising, and the reasons for it are not immediately clear. It might well relate
to a mixed evaluation shared by many geographers, who on the one hand
readily recognise Huntington’s unquestionable significance for the geopolit-
ical “revisioning” of global politics and international relations after the Cold
War but tend to conclude nonetheless that his work is somehow not very
geographical and thus not compellingly in need of close examination. Thus,
one expert concludes that despite certain “gestures” to geography,
Huntington’s civilisational approach nonetheless effaces “the geographical
specificity and place-based particularity of conflicts,” while others point out
that by virtue of this, his perspective is “diametrically opposed” to the cur-
rent attempts to reformulate geopolitics “as a political science.”7 Yet another
political-geographical text speaks of an “antigeographical” bias in Huntington
“which tends to ignore the complex geographies of world politics.”8
These critical judgements are not misplaced, for the position and pro-
file of geography in Huntington’s work is indeed highly problematic. What
this essay will suggest, however, is that they are incomplete. While Hunting-
ton’s analysis can in a sense be said to be genuinely “antigeographical,”
geography at the same time represents a fundamental and intrinsic element
of his overall perspective. He explicitly frames his analysis as a form of what
he calls political geography, and he engages with geography in various
ways throughout the entire text. Like much else in his work, this engage-
ment is ambivalent and riven by deep-running analytical tensions. For all of
this, I will argue, it remains a highly significant subject for our attention. On
the one hand, it is significant because an analysis of the inconsistency of
Huntington’s deployment of geography can contribute to a broader critique
of Huntington’s overall premises, his logic and his conclusions. Beyond this,
 Civilisations and Their Discontents 353

such an analysis provides considerable insight into the uncertain position of

geography more broadly in contemporary discourses of international rela-
tions and international security. Finally, I will suggest that the ambivalences
in the Clash of Civilizations are indicative of certain “fault lines” – to borrow
from Huntington’s own lexicon – that have been characteristic for the American
security imagination across much of the twentieth century.

CIVILISATIONAL VERSUS REALIST PARADIGMS

At an early point in the Clash of Civilizations, Huntington explains his fun-

damental intention as the elaboration of a new paradigm for understanding
and envisioning political relations across the globe after the Cold War.9 As
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his title indicates, this new perspective is founded on a vision of humanity

divided and classified in terms of the respective “civilisations” to which indi-
viduals and communities belong. This civilisational approach is not original,
as Huntington is well aware, and indeed he discusses at some length the
rich legacy of scholarship – Spengler, Toynbee, Max Weber, Durkheim,
Eisenstadt, Braudel, and others – that he is drawing on.10 Most basically, this
perspective identifies civilisations as heterogeneous but coherent macro-
agglomerations: assemblages of various types of socio-political units, such
as tribes, religious communities, ethnic groups, and entire nations. Across
history, these agglomerations have represented the most fundamental units
of social organisation, “the highest cultural grouping of people” as Huntington
explains, “short of that which distinguishes humans from other species.”11
The precise spectrum of the inter-personal and inter-group affinities
that bind a civilisation into a single unit has been defined in various ways.
For his part, Huntington is at pains to stress the importance of culture, and
in particular cultural identity, as the cement which has always provided
coherence and held civilisations together. Cultural identity encompasses a
variety of elements, including ethnicity (“blood,” “family,” “kin,” “similar
ancestry”), spiritual belief, language, genre de vie, shared values, customs
and institutions. He focuses particular attention on religion, singling it out
consistently as the “principal defining characteristic” of culture.12 Signifi-
cantly, neither territory per se nor geography in a more general sense figure
in his understanding of identity (a point to which we will return later in this
essay). The ancient lineage of civilisations provides them with a sort of pri-
mordial permanence. “Human history is the history of civilisations. It is
impossible to think of the development of humanity in any other terms.
Throughout history, civilisations have provided the broadest identifications
for people.”13 And because they are primordial and stable, their cultural
attributes are understood as essentialised identity structures that are inflexi-
ble – neither susceptible to nor indeed even particularly capable of funda-
mental change. Very much to the contrary, Huntington emphasises the
 354 Mark Bassin

“strength, resilience, and viscosity” of the primal civilisational ethos and the
ability of civilisations always to “renew themselves” in terms of it, even after
protracted periods of intervention and disruption.14
By virtue of their essentialised identity structures, Huntington argues,
civilisations are mutually incompatible, and this incompatibility is character-
ised by the same primordial permanence as are all other civilisational
attributes. Huntington dismisses what he derisively terms the “Endism” of
his former student Francis Fukuyama, 15 who famously predicted that the
conclusion of the Cold War would bring with it the end of conflict between
societies and states.16 Rather, he insists that conflict on all levels will not
only continue but indeed will become ever more pronounced.17 “The end
of the Cold War has not ended conflict but rather given rise to new identi-
ties rooted in culture and to new patterns of conflict among groups from
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different cultures which at the broadest level are civilizations.”18 Unlike the
political-ideological conflicts of the Cold War conflicts, moreover, civilisa-
tional conflicts are “interminable” and “rarely end permanently.”19 In the
final analysis, the sources of these conflicts are located in the very deepest
core of social psychology, where self-identity is inextricably fused with a
perceived opposition to an external Other. “Identity at any level – personal,
tribal, racial, civilizational,” he explains, “can only be defined in relation to
an ‘other,’ a different person, tribe, race, or civilization.”20 “We know who
we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know
whom we are against.”21
The “us-them” opposition is a well-established axiom of conservative
political theory, reformulated in the twentieth century perhaps most influen-
tially in Carl Schmitt’s identification of the ‘friend-enemy’ distinction as the
essence of “the Political.”22 Huntington generalises this juxtaposition into a
“constant” in human history and the existential basis for all relations
between cultures and civilisational groups. Effectively, inter-civilisational
hostility becomes business as usual and the normal state of affairs, for as he
coolly observes:

It is human to hate. For self-definition and motivation people need enemies:

competitors in business, rivals in achievement, opponents in politics.
They naturally distrust and see as threats those who are different and
have the capability to harm them. The resolution of one conflict and the
disappearance of one enemy generate personal, social and political
forces that give rise to new ones.23

Viewed from this particular perspective, global relations during the second
half of the twentieth century emerge as something of historical aberration.
During this period, fundamental civilisational distinctions were obscured by
an over-weaning adherence to political ideologies, and contending commit-
ments to communism or free-market capitalism took precedence over indig-
 Civilisations and Their Discontents 355

enous identities and cultural affinities. With the end of the Cold War,
however, the old patterns and priorities immediately began to reassert
themselves. The 1990s “have seen the eruption of a global identity crisis.
Almost everywhere one looks, people have been asking, ‘Who are we?’
‘Where do we belong?’ and ‘Who is not us?.’”24 This is a challenge which
cannot be evaded, and every social community has to have an answer.
“That answer, its cultural [i.e. civilisational] identity, defines the state’s place
in world politics, its friends, and its enemies.”25 The most important distinc-
tions among people in the twenty-first century, he concludes, “are not ideo-
logical, political, or economic. They are cultural.”26
Given the absolute centrality of the concept of civilisation, it is impor-
tant to note that Huntington uses the term in two quite distinct ways. On the
one hand, civilisation is simply a synonym for ‘culture,’ that is to say an
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ethos or distinctive body of beliefs, attitudes, traditions, and prejudices. This

ethos is shared uniformly across a group of social communities which may
differ considerably in terms of their respective size, organisational structure,
and geographical scale. Borrowing a concept from the ethnographer Leo
Frobenius, Huntington likens this sense of civilisation to a Paideuma, that
is to say a cluster of core values which inspire a collection of disparate
communities and bind them into an organic cultural entity.27 Because in
Huntington’s scheme identity itself does not possess a defined geographical-
territorial dimension, civilisation in this particular sense is correspondingly
non-geographical. In its second sense, however, a civilisation represents the
agglomeration of communities itself as a tangible geographical entity. Here
civilisation is identified more specifically as the highest geographical or spa-
tial order of cultural affinity, the “broadest level of cultural identity,” and the
“biggest ‘we’ in which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all
the other ‘thems’ out there.”28 Huntington names seven or eight of these
civilisational macro-agglomerations that have existed over the past millen-
nium: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islam, Orthodox, Western, Latin-American,
and possibly Africa.29 In his view, these represent the “traditional” and
enduring global division of humanity, and it is these civilisations that will
define the fabric of the international order in the twenty-first century.
While throughout his work Huntington puts primary emphasis on the
“civilisational” paradigm just discussed, it is not the only generalised model of
global political relations that he operates with. Very much to the contrary, an
alternative paradigm – the so-called Realist perspective on state politics and
international relations – also plays a significant role in his analysis. Realism
takes the existing state system rather than civilisational agglomerations as the
fundamental framework for analysing these relations, and focuses on individ-
ual nation-states as the prime actor-units in global politics. It views the com-
plex pattern of relations between them largely in terms of a Realpolitik
calculus of differing power potentials, within which states behave in such a
way as to defend and enhance their own interests and relative advantage. In
 356 Mark Bassin

so doing, they are influenced and constrained among other things by the
external material factors that affect the power at their disposal, such as size,
population, location, economic development, and resource endowment.
In developing his civilisational perspective, Huntington criticises the
Realist approach, in particular the attempts of prominent adherents such as
Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer,30 to reformulate a “neo-Realism”
adapted to the conditions of the post-Cold War world.31 He points out how
his own emphasis on cultural identity, which is neither directly correlated to
power calculations nor congruent with existing political boundaries, obvi-
ously contravenes the very bases of Realist premises. While he concedes
that the pursuit of “state interest” is indeed a critical element in shaping
political behaviour, he insists that subjective factors such as values and
culture “pervasively influence” how states in fact define these interests.32
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Beyond this, Huntington takes up the argument that in an increasingly glob-

alised world, the sovereignty and power of the nation-state are being
steadily eroded, as state borders become increasingly permeable. The “grad-
ual end of the hard ‘billiard ball’ state” is at present a real possibility, he
reckons, to be replaced by a “varied, complex, multi-layered international
order more closely resembling that of medieval times.”33
For all of this critique, however, Huntington is extremely careful not to
abandon Realism altogether.34 Thus, in a rather unsettling counterpoint to
the point just made regarding the erosion of the nation-state – and more
fundamentally to his strongly affirmed prioritisation of civilisational commu-
nities over the existing structure of political states – on a number of occa-
sions he endorses the standard Realist position that individual nation-states
“are and will remain the dominant entities” and “principal actors” in world
affairs. The behaviour of these states, moreover, will continue as in the past
to be “shaped…by the pursuit of power and wealth.”35 Power as such
remains a vital factor overall in his scheme of global relations,36 and the
Realpolitik imperative for states to enhance their respective position through
balance-of-power arrangements will continue to operate in a New World
Order dominated by civilisations. Indeed, this imperative will supersede on
occasion even the all-important parameters of civilisational affinity, produc-
ing thereby “cross-civilizational alliances.”37
Although the civilisational perspective clearly predominates over Real-
ism in the Clash of Civilizations, the coexistence of these two very different
paradigms of global order in a single analytical framework represents one of
the fundamental paradoxes of Huntington’s work. Indeed, it may be argued
that Huntington’s own most genuinely original, although certainly unin-
tended contribution to the distinguished legacy of civilisational discourse
lies precisely in his de facto conflation of the two to produce an idiosyn-
cratic sort of “Realist” model of civilisations and civilisational interaction. At
the same time, however, the two perspectives obviously involve very different
premises and effectively pull the Clash of Civilizations in different directions.
 Civilisations and Their Discontents 357

The analytical tension which this generates runs through the entire work,
and I will argue that it lies at the basis of his ambivalent engagement with
geography.

CIVILISATIONS AS POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

Early in his work, Huntington explicitly formulates his project as an exercise

in political geography. He refers to patterns of international strategic align-
ment and opposition as “global political geography” and notes that this has
gone through successive phases across the twentieth century. His own
intention is to elaborate a “map…of world politics” that will depict these
patterns as they are being reconfigured in the novel conditions of the
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twenty-first. Echoing the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, 38 he desig-
nates this as an “exercise in geopolitical cartography” that will be useful
precisely because it provides a picture of the global political landscape in
terms that everyone can understand.39
Most fundamentally, Huntington’s map depicts a world in which the
Cold War standoff between two superpowers is transformed into an uneven
and disjointed pattern of collusion and collision between the seven (or
eight) civilisational entities noted above.40 It should be noted at once that
Huntington’s new model in fact displays a number of vital continuities with
the Cold War model which it is intended to replace. Most strikingly, the
macro-units in question are understood as political-geographical entities
structurally similar to the superpower “blocks” that took shape after 1945.
Indeed, Huntington stresses this continuity through his frequent reference
to them as “civilizational blocks,”41 a characterisation which betrays the
influence of Realism. Like the superpower blocks which they supersede, his
civilisational blocks are assemblages of discrete nation-states. Moreover, in
the same way that the morphology of the Cold War blocks was character-
ised largely through state-based typologies – “superpowers,” “allied states,”
“client states,” “non-aligned states,” “neutral states,” “gateway states,” “domi-
noes,” and “shatter belts” – so Huntington’s typologies for his post-Cold War
civilisational blocks are also state-based.
The political-geographical foundation of the civilisational block is pro-
vided by so-called “core states.” These are states which dominate over the
other “member states” of the respective civilisational macro-unit by virtue of
their relative power and “cultural centrality.”42 The role of these core states
is crucial. On the one hand, they represent the organisational foci and
“source of order within civilizations” and hence provide a vital service of
internal leadership. This “ordering function” of the core states may be
reflected in the morphology of the civilisational block, insofar as member
states are often grouped in concentric circles around them. Beyond this,
core states act as the vital points for contact and negotiation between
 358 Mark Bassin

civilisations, a function which secures their status as “the central elements of

the new international order based on civilizations.”43 In addition to core states,
Huntington’s categories of the constituent parts of a civilisational block
include “cleft countries” – states whose population is significantly divided
between two or more civilisations (India, Indonesia, Ukraine) – “torn coun-
tries” – states belonging to one civilisation whose leadership attempts to
move it to another (Russia, Turkey, Mexico, Australia) – and finally “lone
countries,” which belong to no larger civilisation (Haiti, Ethiopia, Japan).44
At the same time, however, the differences between Huntington’s
model and its Cold War precedents are no less significant. In the civilisa-
tional paradigm, the straightforward bi-polarity of the Cold War period is
fragmented into a highly diversified poly-centric pattern of interrelations.
Huntington characterises this new arrangement as “multi-polar,”45 but this
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should not be confused with the more familiar multi-polarity of the interna-
tional order of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries.
The multi-polarity of this earlier period referred to the competition between
a cluster of imperial Great Powers which belonged almost exclusively to
one – Western – civilisation, and their pooled hegemony allowed this civili-
sation effectively to control the fate of all the others. This fundamental
imbalance in civilisational juxtaposition persisted after 1945, moreover, and
was reflected in the absolute political and strategic pre-eminence of the so-
called “First” and “Second Worlds” over the “Third.” The multi-polarity of
Huntington’s civilisational model, by contrast, is much more genuinely and
even-handedly global. The power and influence of the West has declined
appreciably over the twentieth century, he argues, while major parts of the
former colonial realm – notably China and the Islamic world – have gained
rapidly in these respects and now represent autonomous political-geographical
actors of major significance on the global arena. These points resonate
powerfully with civilisational discourse as a whole, the origins of which
coincided with the beginnings of decolonisation – Spengler’s magnum opus
was first published in 1918 – and which always directly associated this
development with the eclipse of Western civilisational dynamism. Huntington
not only reconnects with this fatalistic conflation of decolonisation with the
“decline of the West” but effectively updates the implications for the twenty-
first century.
Although Huntington treats these civilisational blocks as a uniform cat-
egory, the component units of each one are configured in different ways,
with the result that the blocks themselves are in fact strongly differentiated.
Some civilisations have overwhelmingly powerful core states which com-
prehensively dominate their peripheries (China, Orthodox, Hindu), while
others effectively have no core state at all (Islam, Latin America, Africa).
Western civilisation alone enjoys the distinction of having several.46 Civilisa-
tional blocks also differ in terms of their respective power capabilities, and
this variation in power potential in turn offers one of the most significant
 Civilisations and Their Discontents 359

contrasts to the global order of the Cold War. For nearly half a century after
1945, the standoff between the superpowers was characterised by a care-
fully maintained parity of power capabilities. Indeed, this rough balance
was a conditio sine qua non of the Cold War itself which served to check
the aggressive inclinations of the contending blocks, and it was of course
the disintegration of this parity that brought the Cold War order to its defin-
itive end. This sort of critical strategic balance, Huntington insists, is quite
simply gone for good, and the clash of civilisations that he heralds is des-
tined to take place among very highly unequal partners in an inherently
unstable network of global interaction.
The strategic instability that Huntington prophesies, moreover, comes
from more than inherent differences in power endowment and capability. A
single unadorned axis of confrontation between two contenders is being
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replaced by an intricate and highly asymmetrical matrix of cross-civilisational

interactions. Within this matrix, bi-lateral relations between individual civili-
sations will vary broadly, ranging from mutual friendship and alliance to
implacable hostility. Western civilisation confronts the most intense animos-
ity and its gravest threat from what Huntington terms the “challenger civili-
zations” of Islam and China, and these particular vectors of engagement will
accordingly “be more central to global politics than other lines of cleav-
age.”47 Relations with Latin America and Africa, by contrast, are likely to be
characterised by relative good will and cooperation, and are implicitly less
important. From the “swing civilizations” of Russia, Japan and India, affinity
and cooperation with the West will be mixed with equal measures of con-
frontation.48 The resulting pattern of global interaction is thus enormously
complicated – Huntington’s attempts to clarify it diagrammatically are not
particularly successful49 – and the prospects for peaceful development are
decidedly inauspicious. Indeed, global relations in the twenty-first century
will be heavily coloured by the re-emergent primordial antagonisms that
inhere in the very nature of civilisational cultures, and future relations
between different civilisations will be “almost never close, usually cool, and
often hostile,” Hopes for intercivilisational partnerships will in all probability
by frustrated, for “emerging intercivilizational relations will normally vary
from distant to violent, with most falling somewhere in between.”50

THE FACTOR OF GEOGRAPHICAL SCALE

One of the most significant innovations in Huntington’s “geopolitical cartog-

raphy” is a concern for geographical scale as a salient factor in the anatomy
of global relations in the post–Cold War era. Throughout the Cold War, only
one geographical level of political engagement was acknowledged to be
genuinely significant, namely the macro scale of the superpower confronta-
tion itself. Engagement or conflict at national, regional or local levels was
 360 Mark Bassin

not ignored, of course, but it was consistently subordinated to and valorised

in terms of the political, ideological and strategic contours of the super-
power standoff. Huntington’s perspective, by contrast is fundamentally
more sensitive to the factor of geographical scale. Paradoxically, this is pos-
sible precisely because he can draw on an alternative sense of civilisation as
a body of cultural attitudes and beliefs which are not geographically delim-
ited. As such, “civilisation” per se may be manifested equally significantly in
various forms and on various geographical scales. However improbable, the
influence of post-modernism on this perceptual diversification and frag-
menting in Huntington’s perspective is clear.51
Huntington’s treatment of identity provides the most significant exam-
ple of this sensitivity to scale. Civilisational identities are articulated by a
diverse assortment of social communities – tribes, ethnic groups, religious
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communities, nations, and of course civilisations themselves – which by

their nature are organised at different geographical scales.52 Although the
macro civilisational scale represents the “broadest [geographical] level” for
this articulation, Huntington does not exclusively prioritise this level over
the others. To the contrary, he implies that the nature and affective quality
of cultural identity is more or less the same at the various levels. He makes
this point using a military metaphor: “In a world where culture counts, the
platoons are tribes and ethnic groups, the regiments are nations, and the
armies are civilizations.”53 While the geographical scale shifts dramatically
across these different civilisational agents, the vision of social and cultural
identity to which they all adhere is essentially the same. He makes this point
repeatedly, linking local and macro levels by characterising civilisations pro-
vocatively as “extended families” and as “the ultimate human tribes,” while
the clash of civilisations itself is “tribal conflict on a global scale.”54 “In this
new world,” he concludes, “local politics is the politics of ethnicity; global
politics is the politics of civilizations,” and there is an implicit organic con-
nection linking the two.55 In Huntington’s vision of the New World Order,
the civilisational imperative provides a genuine resonance and symmetry
between these geographical scales that simply did not exist in a world in
which a single Manichean opposition of two highly stylised political ideolo-
gies was superimposed in top-down fashion across the globe.
Huntington uses the factor of geographical scale to press his argument
for the on-going fragmentation of nation-states. Despite the allusion to them
as “regiments” in the civilisational “army” just cited, identity as such is not
really matter for nations. He only rarely uses the term “national identity”56
and implicitly calls into question the continuing relevance of the nation-
state as a locus and organisational framework for social identity. Huntington
takes up the argument that the forces of globalisation are giving rise to new
post-national identity structures, as we have noted, but he spins this very
much to his own purposes with the suggestion that these new post-Cold
War identities are in fact not new at all, but are merely a return to the
 Civilisations and Their Discontents 361

essentialised categories of primordial civilisations. Thus, he points out that

the national identities of the French, German, and Belgians are increasingly
giving way to an awareness of belonging to European (i.e., Western) civili-
sation, the large Chinese diaspora scattered across South-East Asia increas-
ingly identifies with the PRC, Muslims of the Mid-East identify with Bosnia
and Palestine, Russians identify with the Orthodox Serbs, and so on. All of
these are examples of the enduring pull exercised by what he calls
“‘greater’cultural communities,” whereby “greater” reflects precisely the geo-
graphical circumstance that in all of these cases such communities “tran-
scend national boundaries.”57 And in those cases where Huntington is
prepared to recognise “national” as significantly distinct from “civilizational”
identity, he clearly subordinates the former to the latter. His discussion of
the new sovereign nation-state of Ukraine provides a good example of this.
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In Huntington’s scheme, Ukraine is a classic “cleft” state, riven more or less

equally between Orthodox (eastern half) and Western (western half) civili-
sations. His belief that cultural-civilisational affinities are eclipsing national
identities leads him to the rather awkward prediction that Ukraine as a
nation-state may well succumb by splitting, politically and geopolitically,
along civilisational lines.58
Elsewhere, Huntington offers a rather more complex argument for the
geographical displacement of identity away from the national level. He sug-
gests that the intensity of “loyalty” to a particular identity varies in significant
ways across a geographical gradient from the local/regional to the global.
Traditionally in Western civilisation, the intermediate level of the nation-
state itself

has been the apex of political loyalty. Narrower [i.e. more geographi-
cally restricted] loyalties are subordinate to it and are subsumed into loy-
alty to the nation-state. Groups transcending the nation-state – linguistic
or religious communities, or civilizations – have commanded less
intense loyalty and commitment. Along a continuum of narrower to
broader entities, Western loyalties tend to peak in the middle, the loyalty
intensity curve forming in some measure an inverse U.59

This pattern is currently undergoing a transformation in Western civilisation,

as just noted. Huntington’s larger point, however, is that the corresponding
gradient for civilisations other than Western is, and has always been entirely
different. His example is Islamic civilisation, which throughout The Clash of
Civilizations attracts special attention and concern. In the Muslim world, he
suggests, identities have always been balanced at the extremes of the gradi-
ent, between “the small group and the great faith.” The former is local,
focused regionally on clan and tribe, while the latter is enormously broad,
defined in religious and cultural terms by the extent of Islam in toto. What is
missing however is the mediating middle ground of the nation-state, for
 362 Mark Bassin

political consolidation in Islamic culture tended throughout history to focus

either on tribal or on imperial agglomerations. “National identities,” under-
stood in Western terms, simply “did not exist.” The Muslim world thus has
“a hollow middle” in its geographical “hierarchy of loyalties,” and the
inverted U characteristic for the West is re-inverted and turned right side up.
Huntington argues that this pattern is a necessary feature of Islam, for “the
idea of sovereign nation states is incompatible with belief in the sovereignty
of Allah and the primacy of the ummah.” Islamic fundamentalism displays
this same geographical bias, rejecting “the nation state in favour of the unity
of Islam just as Marxism rejected it in favour of the unity of the international
proletariat.”60
Huntington displays a similar sensitivity to the factor of geographical
scale in his analysis of inter-civilisational conflict. Indeed, he classifies con-
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flict in terms of three geographical categories or scales. The largest of these

is a single global bifurcation, in which Western civilisation on one side con-
fronts a sort of united front made up of all other civilisations. “At the macro
or global level of world politics,” he explains, “the primary clash of civilizations
is between the West and the rest.”61 The parameters of this dramatic juxta-
position go entirely beyond the political contours of the old superpower
standoff, however, and can be understood once again only in terms of the
vital reconnection with the process of decolonisation that is implicit in
Huntington’s civilisational discourse. The West he has is mind is not so
much the anti-communist free-world West of the Cold War as what he calls
the “hitherto dominant civilization,” that is to say the West as the inheritor
of an older and deeper legacy of pooled imperial power and global con-
trol.62 It is this imperial legacy which explains the striking unanimity of
opposition to the West at the global level. Huntington is quick to point out
however that the anti-Western “rest” coheres only by virtue of a common
opponent and does not in any other way represent a unified entity. Very
much to the contrary, it is made up of highly distinctive civilisations, which
define their respective identities and interests in contrast and even in direct
opposition to each other. The matrix of bi- and multi-lateral relations
between the seven or eight civilisational entities comprises Huntington’s
second geographical level of global conflict. We have already noted the
highly non-symmetrical and imbalanced nature of this matrix, which makes
for its inherent instability
Finally, Huntington identifies a third geographical scale of conflict,
which takes place not between civilisational blocks as integral totalities but
rather on local or regional levels between or within civilisations, In a strict
sense, this category represents not a single geographical level but rather is a
range of sub-civilisational levels, up to and including that of nation-states.
The commonality across all of these scales comes from what Huntington
refers to as the “communal” character of the conflict at issue. This is a decid-
edly awkward designation – the struggle of an entire nation-state, for example,
 Civilisations and Their Discontents 363

is not generally thought of as “communal” – but Huntington presses it in

order to emphasise precisely that the conflicts at issue are not “national” but
rather uniformly the result of civilisational enmities, and moreover that the
parties involved understand them in this manner.

Wars between clans, tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, and

nations have been prevalent in every era and in every civilization
because they are rooted in the identities of people. These conflicts tend
to be particularistic, in that they do not involve broader ideological or
political issues…. They also tend to be vicious and bloody, since funda-
mental issues of identity are at stake. In addition, they tend to be
lengthy; they may be interrupted by truces or agreements but these tend
to break down and the conflict is resumed.63
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Huntington designates these localised conflicts as “fault-line wars.” Despite

the drama of this classically geopolitical imagery, however, these fault lines
are not really conceived of as geographical, much less geological bound-
aries. Rather, they mark the shifting lines of encounter between contending
cultural-civilisational groups. As examples of these fault-line conflicts,
Huntington points to the collisions of Western, Orthodox, and Islamic civili-
sations in the former Yugoslavia, India and Islam in Kashmir, Islam and the
West in Palestine, and Russia and Islam in the North Caucasus.64
In one important respect, Huntington’s geographical scaling of conflict
is motivated by a quintessentially Cold War imperative, namely to reduce
and generalise all manifestations of social conflict into a single standardised
and universal formula of opposition. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet
empire, this formula involved a political-ideological confrontation, while for
Huntington the issues at stake in a post-Soviet world are those of cultural
identity. These two perspectives are nonetheless at one in their failure to
acknowledge the individual specificity that comes from contingencies of
place and time. It is in this sense that there is a real validity to the conclu-
sions about the “anti-geographical” nature of Huntington’s thinking cited at
the beginning of this essay. At the same time, however, I would argue that
Huntington’s sensitivity to geographical scale represents a highly significant
innovation – if not an improvement – upon the Cold War tradition. The
Cold War universalised conflict by imposing clumsy externalities that were
artificial and often simply implausible – the imputation by the US govern-
ment that Soviet agency was behind civil unrest in Nicaragua or indeed
Grenada in the 1980s provides a characteristically bald example of this. Via
a concept of civilisational identity that is geographically variable, however,
Huntington can claim to link local “communal” conflict to global civilisa-
tional confrontation in terms of issues and values that by their nature appear
genuinely indigenous and thus can at least be argued to have real signifi-
cance. While this does not in any sense confirm Huntington’s assertion that
 364 Mark Bassin

these identity matters are in fact the actual source of the conflicts at issue, it
may go some way to explain the plausibility and perhaps even the appeal
of his perspective.

HUNTINGTON AND GEOPOLITICS

How exactly does Huntington understand the role of geographical space in

the political process? Does his thinking reflect traditional perspectives in
international relations and political science, which see geographical space
essentially as a multi-layered framework for politics, an inert arena or back-
drop upon which dynamic political processes come to life and are played
out? Or is his approach more explicitly “geopolitical” in that it recognises
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geography as making a dynamic contribution of its own, exerting what Paul

Kennedy has recently referred to as an “influence” upon the political pro-
cess?65 This distinction is not a frivolous one, and the fact that Huntington
himself grapples with geopolitics in this sense at a number of points in his
work indicates that it is well worth our attention. Ultimately, it provides
significant insights into his views of the essential dynamics of the clash of
civilisations.
At an early point in the Clash of Civilizations, Huntington discusses
how the factor of geography has figured in the civilisational analyses that he
draws upon, and he reflects on its significance for the particular historical
processes and political constellations that are the subject of his attention. He
notes Arnold Toynbee’s view that civilisations emerged as a response to
environmental challenges and that their initial developmental phases were
characterised by “increasing control over its environment.”66 In response, he
sets out his own position on the role of the natural environment in the
development and configuration of civilisations. His argument is for a stan-
dard modernist perspective on social development, which draws a distinc-
tion between “traditional” and “modern” societies precisely in terms of
environmental interaction and control. Traditional societies were based
upon horticulture and animal husbandry, and for this reason were largely
dependent on the natural environment. “Patterns of agriculture … vary with
soil and climate,” and forms of “land ownership, social structure, and gov-
ernment” may in their turn vary with them. Huntington refers specifically to
Karl Wittfogel’s thesis of hydraulic civilisation in this connection, endorsing
Wittfogel’s conclusion that an agricultural system which involves the con-
struction and operation of massive irrigation works conditions as it were the
emergence of a highly centralised and heavily coordinated bureaucratic
political system. Indeed,

it could hardly be otherwise. Rich soil and good climate are likely to encour-
age development of large-scale plantation agriculture and a consequent
 Civilisations and Their Discontents 365

social structure involving a small class of wealthy landowners and a

large class of peasants, slaves, or serfs who work the plantations. Condi-
tions inhospitable to large-scale agriculture may encourage [the] emer-
gence of a society of independent farmers. In agricultural societies, in
short, social structure is shaped by geography.

This geographical influence is not however sustained as these tradi-

tional communities undergo the transition to modern societies, for the rela-
tionship to the natural environment becomes inverted. Agriculture loses its
primacy to industrial production, which is “much less dependent on the
local natural environment,” and the development of modern technology
increasingly puts society in a position of control over rather than submission
to the natural world. In the societies of the contemporary world, he con-
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cludes, economic, social, and political differences between regions and

countries are likely “to derive from differences in culture and social struc-
ture rather than geography, and the former can conceivably converge while
the latter cannot.”67 It is precisely this convergence (or reconvergence) of
disparate groups and regions that he places at the very centre of the civilisa-
tional dynamics shaping the political life of the twenty-first century. This is a
process based on cultural affinity, in which geographical phenomena do not
and cannot figure significantly. For the “geographical determinism” of Toynbee
and Wittfogel, Huntington thus appears to exchange his own sort of “cul-
tural determinism.”
At the same time, however, Huntington is surprisingly reluctant to pur-
sue his own argument consistently and banish altogether the spectre of geo-
graphical influence from the clash of civilisations. Very much to the
contrary, he frequently acknowledges the importance of geographical fac-
tors in his analysis, and references to the immanent force of “geopolitical
realities” are scattered generously throughout his work. His inconsistency
on this point, I would argue, can be traced back to his more general ambiv-
alence regarding the Realist paradigm discussed above. Within the Realist
perspective as a whole, the geographical environment has traditionally been
accorded a special niche as one of the basic categories of objective material
factors that influence the nature of the state, shape its possibilities and con-
strain its behaviour. Historically, the field of geopolitics developed out of
this niche, and as a so-called “science of environmental influences” was in
its turn instrumental in securing geography in the larger analytical perspec-
tive of Realism.68 To the extent that Huntington continues to operate with
Realist premises, therefore, geography and indeed geopolitics in the sense
we are discussing it have a definite place in his thinking. This stands
entirely at odds, of course, with his argument just noted for the end of
geography’s relevance in the modern world. The result is an obtrusive and
awkwardly managed tension – between geography on the one hand and
culture on the other – that runs throughout his work.
 366 Mark Bassin

Huntington’s argument noted earlier for the “natural” pre-eminence of

core states over the other constituent members of civilisational blocks pro-
vides an example of this. To begin with, he founds this imperative squarely
on the principle of what he calls “geopolitical realities.” Distinctly (if not
consciously) echoing Karl Haushofer’s argument for “pan-regions,”69
Huntington insists that it is a “geopolitical reality” that in any given region
where there is a dominant state, “peace can be achieved and maintained
only through the leadership of that state.” The criteria of dominance are
understood in standard Realist terms as state size, location, population,
resource endowment, economic potential, social organisation, and so on.
This imperative of core-state dominance is indeed powerful enough to
counteract even the countervailing imperative of civilisational affinities.
Thus the Orthodox civilisation is comprised of an “Orthodox heartland”
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(Russia and an “inner circle” including Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan,

Ukraine), and a “surrounding buffer” of states from an alien civilisation,
namely Islam (Central Asians, Tatars, Chechens).70 According to Hunting-
ton’s model, two such groups are not supposed to cohabit within a single
civilisational structure, and indeed he points out that in the case at hand the
Islamic “buffer” periodically rises in resistance to Russian domination.71 The
deeper point however is the enduring geopolitical coherence – Huntington
stresses the continuity from Tsarist and Soviet times – of what is effectively a
trans-civilisational civilisation, where “geopolitical realities” confront and
overcome the affective ties of cultural identity.
For the most part, however, Huntington is ambivalent about the bal-
ance between geography and culture. His point about core states leads him
to a vehement critique of the United Nations’ policy of maintaining regional
balances by permitting the most powerful state in a given region to contrib-
ute no more than a third of the total of any peacekeeping forces to be
deployed there. This practice, he implies, artificially subverts and under-
mines the deeper geopolitical imperative. Yet in the following paragraph,
less than a dozen lines later, he hurries to provide a neutralising qualifica-
tion: this “geopolitical reality” gives way to cultural determination in that it
is effective only among members of the same civilisational grouping. “In the
absence of that kinship, the ability of a more powerful state to resolve con-
flicts in and impose order on its region is limited.”72 Elsewhere, he invokes
the same principle of “geopolitical realities” in arguing for Brazil’s potential
for domination of the South American continent. The latter country’s “size,
resources, population, military and economic capacity” all qualify it “to be
the leader of Latin America, and conceivably it could become that.” It turns
out, in fact, that Brazil could conceivably do nothing of the sort, for he proceeds
in the next sentence to point out how “sub-civilizational differences” –
above all Brazil’s Portuguese in an otherwise predominantly Hispanic milieu –
effectively preclude the domination to which its geopolitical endowments
appeared to have predestined it.73
 Civilisations and Their Discontents 367

The inconsistency of Huntington’s position emerges yet more clearly

from his treatment of the significance of geographical location. In places his
discussion appears to accord this factor an autonomous significance. Indo-
nesia provides a negative example, for although its size and economic
dynamism make it suitable for core-state leadership of Muslim civilisation,
its location “on the periphery of Islam, far removed from its Arab center” is
a major obstacle.74 Egypt’s relative prominence in Muslim civilisation is
much enhanced by its “strategically important geographical location in the
Middle East,” while the “geographical vulnerability” (Huntington does not
tell us exactly what this is supposed to mean) of Saudi Arabia contrariwise
contributes to its abject dependency on the United States.75 Elsewhere how-
ever Huntington is categorical in his insistence that geographical proximity
and location possess no meaning in and of themselves. His reactions to the
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so-called “regionalist” models of international development, according to

which the growing interaction between geographically adjacent states in a
given global region (e.g., Europe, North America, and the Far East) lead nat-
urally to social, economic, and political coalescence, are predictably nega-
tive. These models obviously offer an alternative to Huntington’s own
scheme of civilisational affinities, and he stiffly rejects their assumption that
the factor of geographical proximity might work to foster interaction and
affinity. “Regions,” he declares pointedly, “are geographical and not political
or cultural entities.” They do not in other words necessarily possess an
inherent and genuine dynamic for integration. Indeed, space that is cohesive
geographically may in fact be riven by civilisational antinomies so substantial –
he offers the Balkans or the Middle East as examples – that coalescence is
effectively precluded, no matter how irresistible the economic or geograph-
ical imperatives in that direction may seem to be. Cooperation within a
given region can take place “only to the extent that geography coincides
with culture,” that is to say only if there is the requisite civilisational com-
monality among the states involved. His dismissal of the factor of geograph-
ical location could not be more explicit. “Divorced from culture,” he
concludes, “propinquity does not yield commonality, and may foster just
the reverse.”76
In this spirit, Huntington offers a critique of the factor of geographical
proximity in his discussion of Australian domestic politics in the 1990s. Early
in the decade, then Prime Minister Paul Keating began arguing for a realign-
ment of Australia’s international priorities and connections. In the quest for
a redefinition of its traditional identity as a “branch office” of the British
Empire, he urged a gradual re-orientation in favour of the regionalist-
geographical logic of “enmeshment” in Asia and the Pacific basin.77 Huntington
sees this as nothing less than an attempt to redefine Australia’s civilisational
identity, and predictably he is heavily critical. Regardless of its great distance,
he points out, Australia remains a member of Western civilisation, and it
Westernness – like civilisational identities everywhere – is an essentialised,
 368 Mark Bassin

effectively permanent quality. It cannot be changed by a simple act of pop-

ular will, and much less through a policy gambit of a self-absorbed political
elite. Huntington takes obvious satisfaction in describing the unamused
scepticism with which Australia’s Pacific neighbours have reacted to the
Asian pretensions of their Anglo-Saxon neighbour, for their dismissive atti-
tude precisely confirms his own point about the primacy of essentialist cul-
tural-civilisational factors above all else in determining identity affinities.78
Huntington’s own alternative suggestion for a new Australian alignment
serves to reconfirm his utter indifference to geography: Australia should
seek an alliance not with the East Asia economic block but rather with the
North American free trade zone, which would thereupon be transformed
from NAFTA into NASP – a North American-South Pacific association. Such
a grouping would abort the “futile efforts to make Australia Asian” and pro-
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vide it instead with a “solid and enduring identity” that rested securely on a
traditional civilisational and not a regional-geographical basis.79
The full ambiguity of Huntington’s engagement with geography
emerges most clearly from his discussion of the significance of territory. On
the one hand, he makes it quite clear that the struggle over territory per se
does not represent a significant element in the primal antagonisms that
drive the clash of civilisations. While “control of territory” indeed used to be
a major issue in Islam’s historical confrontation with other civilisations, for
example, the “effective end of Western territorial imperialism” has meant
that this issue has now become “relatively insignificant.” Conflicts today
“focus less on territory” and involve rather “broader inter-civilizational
issues” such as human rights, democratic norms, terrorism, and Western
intervention. Huntington’s implication is that this pattern could be genera-
lised more broadly to characterise inter-civilisational confrontation overall.80
Nor does the extension of the power and hegemony of core states that he
heralds necessarily involve extending control over territory, as it did in the
past. China’s current reestablishment of its “historical position” as the hege-
monic power in East Asia, for example, “is unlikely to involve the expan-
sion of territorial control” through military force.81 Given the particular
juxtaposition of the PRC to Taiwan, this is a judgement of enormous political
significance.
Indeed, the essential irrelevance of territory is apparent in the fact
noted at the outset of this essay that it does not even figure as an element of
Huntington’s most basic vision of cultural identity. Identity is about “blood
and belief, faith and family” and derives from “similar ancestry, religion, lan-
guage, values, and institution.”82 The notion that it might also involve an
affective group attachment to a particular geographical space is not really a
part of it. He makes this point emphatically through the example of Islam,
citing Bernard Lewis to the effect that Muslims “find their basic identity and
loyalty in the religious community – that is to say, in an entity defined by
Islam rather than by ethnic or territorial criteria.”83 Among other things, this
 Civilisations and Their Discontents 369

clearly brings out the extent to which the cultural identities that drive
Huntington’s clash of civilisations differ from what we understand generally
as “nationalism,” in which specific and exclusive territorial attachments play
a central role.
Yet Huntington’s evaluation of territory is fraught with the same sort of
contradictions that characterise his discussion of other geographical factors.
It turns out that territory does in fact figure as an important source of con-
flict in the clash of civilisations, and indeed in precisely the ways in which
we have just observed him arguing that they do not. The imperative for ter-
ritorial expansion and control, for example, is not “insignificant” after all,
but rather remains a potent factor in inter-civilisational relations. In the
present day, he relates this imperative to the dynamics of rapid population
growth. “Larger populations need more resources, and hence people from
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societies with dense and/or rapidly growing populations tend to push

outward, occupy territory, and exert pressure on other less demographically
dynamic peoples.”84 Huntington does not refer explicitly to this particular
“need” as a geopolitical reality, but the jarring resonance with the Lebensraum
concept of classical geopolitical theory – which rearranged Malthusian prin-
ciples along Social-Darwinian lines to precisely the same effect – is quite
unmistakable.85 He explores the implications of this point once again
through the example of Islamic civilisation. Despite his conclusion that
there has been “an absence so far of renewed Muslim territorial expansion,”
86
he observes nonetheless that “Islamic population growth” represents “a
major contributing factor” to the conflicts along the borders of the Islamic
world, and the territorial factor is clearly implicated.87
Elsewhere Huntington addresses the issue yet more explicitly, noting
that in the struggle between different civilisations

frequently the issue is control of territory. The goal of at least one of the
participants is to conquer territory and free it of other people by expel-
ling them, killing them, or doing both, that is, by ‘ethnic cleansing.’
These conflicts tend to be violent and ugly, with both sides engaging in
massacres, terrorism, rape and torture.

In these cases, moreover, the profound significance of territory is not lim-

ited to its material function of providing burgeoning populations with the
food and other resources that they require for survival. Beyond this, Hun-
tington is prepared to acknowledge a symbolic and affective element in the
territorial imperative – effectively a recognition of the salience of territory as
a key element in identity structures. In contemporary conflicts over territory,
he explains, it is often the case that the disputed land “is for one or both
sides a highly charged symbol of their history and identity, sacred land to
which they have an inviolable right: the West Bank, Kashmir, Nagorno-
Karabakh, the Drina Valley, Kosovo.”88
 370 Mark Bassin

Geographers may take some satisfaction in the fact that Huntington

ultimately concedes the dynamic and existential interplay of identity and
territory, and his final point – taken by itself – is certainly correct. At the
same time, however, it must be appreciated how inherently disruptive this
concession is for other aspects of his civilisational model. By allowing a ter-
ritorial dimension into the identity calculus, it becomes fundamentally more
difficult and perhaps even impossible to sustain the principle that a single
uniform civilisational-cultural identity can range effectively across geograph-
ical scales. To see this we need go no further than the examples he pro-
vides to illustrate his own final point. In the case of the West Bank,
symbolic attachments to the lands in question that are felt powerfully at the
local level – powerfully enough, indeed, to sustain a conflict that tragically
meets Huntington’s depiction as “violent and ugly” – simply do not have the
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same resonance at the most general civilisational level for one of the would-
be civilisational contenders at least. While the Muslim world may readily
identify with Palestine as a fraternal civilisational region, that is to say, the
same certainly cannot be said for the West, much or indeed most of which
would pointedly not be prepared to include it within the territorial scope of
its own civilisation.

CONCLUSION

What is the significance of Huntington’s ambivalent engagement with geog-

raphy? Most immediately, of course, the analysis offered in this article con-
tributes to a general critique of the Clash of Civilizations, which as its
numerous critics have noted – and indeed as even a casual examination of
the text makes very clear – is overall a work of remarkable ambiguity and
self-contradiction. Beyond this, however, there is a deeper insight to be
drawn from it. It can be argued that the inconsistency of Huntington’s
deployment of geography – the unresolved tension between a Realist
acknowledgement of geography as an “objective” and autonomous element
of the political process on the one hand and the affirmation of the primacy
of subjective, non-geographical factors of social psychology on the other –
is itself entirely consistent with a “fault line” that has been characteristic for
at least one important tendency in American security discourses in the twentieth
century.
Perhaps the best example of this is provided by an earlier (and yet
more influential) attempt to chart out the future shape of global politics in
the wake of a major transition, namely George Kennan’s celebrated Foreign
Affairs article from the late 1940s that provided the rationale for the Cold
War doctrine of containment.89 As Richard Russell’s recent study of Kennan’s
thinking makes clear, 90 his strategic perspective was heavily influenced by
Halford Mackinder’s “heartland” model91 and its reformulation by the
 Civilisations and Their Discontents 371

Dutch-American political scientist Nicholas Spykman.92 A comparison of the

respective texts, however, is most revealing. Briefly, Mackinder and Spykman
offered geostrategic visions that were driven by a geographical logic inherent
in the existential spatiality of the regions involved. Above all this involved
factors of location and juxtaposition, relative size, land vs sea, and resource
endowment. Kennan adopted their tri-partite model of global political mor-
phology, but then critically animated it through the introduction and prioritisa-
tion of the factor of ideology, in the form of Marxism or Soviet Communism.
For Kennan, it was ultimately the geographical configuration and juxtaposi-
tion of the Heartland plus its dominant ideology that made it so strategically
dangerous to a free world led by the United States. Mackinder’s analysis, by
contrast, does not even include ideology as a category in this sense.
In striking anticipation of what we have observed in Huntington’s own
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thinking, Kennan’s overall evaluation of the Soviet threat was coloured by

an inability to resolve the tension between these contending emphases. The
historian L. C. Garner makes this point succinctly (if ungenerously) in his
observation that in Kennan’s analysis “the Presbyterian elder wrestled with
the Bismarckian geopolitician.”93 The paradox of the comparison with
Huntington – who after all was attempting to overcome precisely Kennan’s
emphasis on political ideology and the “global political geography” of the
Cold War that it produced – is striking. At the same time, however, I would
suggest there is a significant analytical and even epistemological continuity
between the two. On the basis of these two influential landmarks in the
evolution of American security doctrines in the twentieth century, it may be
possible to begin to speak of a peculiarly American form of “torn” geopolitics,
“torn” not civilisationally but rather between the simultaneous recognition
of and refusal to recognise the fundamental place of geography in politics.

NOTES
1. S. P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs 72 (1993) pp. 21–49.
2. S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon
and Schuster 1996), cited hereafter as Clash. In addition to these major statements, Huntington has pro-
duced a string of rebuttals and refinements (S. P. Huntington, ‘If Not Civilizations, What? Paradigms of
the Post-Cold War World,’ Foreign Affairs 72 (1993) pp. 186–194; S. P. Huntington, ‘The West Unique,
Not Universal,’ Foreign Affairs 75 (1996) pp. 26–48; S. P. Huntington, ‘No Exit: The Errors of Endism,’ in
The New Shape of World Politics: Contending Paradigms in International Relations, Foreign Affairs
Agenda Series (New York: W.W. Norton 1997) pp. 26–38). His 1996 book nonetheless remains the most
comprehensive and multi-faceted statement of his thinking, and the analysis in this article is based
largely on it.
3. For books alone which have been produced in response to Huntington, see S. T. Hunter, The
Future of Islam and the West. Clash of Civilizations or Peaceful Coexistence? (Westport, CT: Praeger
1998); D. Frawley, Hinduism and the Clash of Civilizations (New Delhi: Voice of India 2001); S. Rashid
(ed.), “The Clash of Civilizations?” Asian Responses (Dhaka: University Press 1997); J. Sacks, The Dignity
of Difference. How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum 2002); R. Herzog, A. Etzioni,
and H. Schmiegelow, Preventing the Clash of Civilizations. A Peace Strategy for the 21st Century (New
York: St Martins 1999); H. Müller, Das Zusammenleben der Kulturen. Ein Gegenentwurf zu Huntington
 372 Mark Bassin

(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer 1999); V. L. Tsymburskii, ‘Zemlia za Velikim Limitrofom: Ot ‘Rossii-Evrazii’ k

‘Rossii v Evrazii,’’ in Rossiia – Zemlia za Velikim Limitrofom: Tsvilizatsiia i ee geopolitika (Moscow: Edito-
rial URSS 2000) pp. 6–26; I. I. Komar, Demokratiia i avtoritarizm v tret’em mire v kontse XX v. Kont-
septsiia S.P. Khantingtona i otkliki na nee (Moscow: RAN: INION 1995); B. Seebacher-Brandt and N.
Walter (eds.), Kampf der Kulturen oder Weltkultur? Diskussionen mit Samuel P. Huntington (Frankfurt/
Main: 1997); U. M. Metzinger, Die Huntington-Debatte. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Huntingtons “Clash
of Civilizations” in der Publizistik (Cologne: SH 2000); M. Mokre (ed.), Imaginierte Kulturen – reale
Kämpfe. Annotationen zu Huntingtons “Kampf der Kulturen” (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft
2000); R. Lee, The Clash of Civilizations. An Intrusive Gospel in Japanese Civilization (Harrisburg, PA:
Trinity Press International 2000). This list is far from complete. The corresponding periodical literature is
immense.
4. E. W. Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap (London: Bloomsbury 2004) p. 120.
5. E.g., I. Buruma and A. Margalit. Occidentalism. A Short History of Anti-Westernism (London:
Atlantic Books 2004) p. 147; M. Jacques, ‘Our Moral Waterloo,’ The Guardian (5 May 2004) p. 23; P.
Bilgin, ‘A Return to ‘Civilisational Geopolitics’ in the Mediterranean? Changing Geopolitical Images of the
European Union and Turkey in the Post–Cold War Era,’ Geopolitics 9/2 (2004) 269–291.
6. H. Kreutzmann, ‘From Modernization Theory Towards the “Clash of Civilizations”: Directions
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and Paradigm Shifts in Samuel Huntington’s Analysis and Prognosis of Global Development,’ GeoJournal
46/4 (1998) pp. 255–265; H. Kreutzmann, ‘Kulturelle Plettentektonik im globalen Dickicht: Zum
Erklärungswert alter und neuer Kulturraumkonzepte. Internationale Schulbuchforschung,’ 19 (1997) pp.
413–423; E. Ehlers, ‘Kulturkreise – Kulturerdteile – ‘Clash of Civilizations’: Plädoyer für eine zeitgemässe
Entwicklungsforschung,’ in U. Holtz (ed.), Probleme der Entwicklungspolitik (Bonn: DSE 1997); M. D.
Gismondi, ‘Civilisation as a Paradigm: An Inquiry into the Hermeneutics of Conflict,’ Geopolitics 9/2
(2004) pp. 402–425.
7. G. Ó’Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics. The Politics of Writing Global Space (London: Routledge 1996)
pp. 244, 245; A. Chauprade and F. Thual, Dictionnaire de Géopolitique (Paris: ellipses 1998) p. 592.
8. K. Dodds, Geopolitics in a Changing World (Harlow: Pearson 2000) p. 11, emphasis in original.
9. Huntington, Clash (note 2) pp. 29–31.
10. O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte
(Munich: C.H. Beck 1923 [orig. 1918]); A. Toynbee, A Study in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press
1934–1961); M. Weber, Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon 1968); E. Durkheim and M. Mauss, ‘Note
on the Notion of Civilization,’ Social Research 38 (1971) pp. 808–813; S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Cultural Tradi-
tions and Political Dynamics: The Origins and Modes of Ideological Politics,’ British Journal of Sociology
32 (1981) pp. 155–181; F. Braudel, History of Civilizations, R. Mayne (trans.) (London: Penguin 1994); W.
H. McNeill, The Rise of the West. A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press 1963); A. L. Kroeber, Style and Civilizations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1973); C. Quigley,
The Evolution of Civilizations. An Introduction to Historical Analysis (New York: Macmillan 1961).
11. Huntington, Clash (note 2) pp. 43, 55.
12. Ibid., pp. 21, 253, 47, 66.
13. Ibid., p. 40.
14. Ibid., p. 154.
15. F. Fukuyama, ‘The End of History,’ The National Interest (Spring 1989) pp. 2–18; F. Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamilton 1992).
16. Huntington, ‘No Exit’ (note 2).
17. Huntington, Clash (note 2) pp. 128, 31, 53, 92.
18. Ibid., p. 130.
19. Ibid., p. 291.
20. Ibid., p. 129.
21. Ibid., p. 21.
22. C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, G. Schwab (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press 1996 [orig. 1932]).
23. Huntington, Clash (note 2) p. 129)
24. Ibid., p. 125.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 21.
27. Frobenius of course was a student of Friedrich Ratzel, and his notion of Paideuma drew signif-
icantly on his mentor’s concept of Kulturkreis. Thus Huntington is linked, after a fashion, to the tradition
 Civilisations and Their Discontents 373

of modern human geography (G. Buttmann, Friedrich Ratzel. Leben und Werk eines deutschen
Geographen (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlaggesellschaft 1977) p. 87).
28. Huntington, Clash (note 2) p. 43.
29. Ibid., pp. 45–46.
30. K. N. Waltz, ‘The Emerging Structure of International Politics,’ International Security 18/2
(1993) pp. 44–79; J. J. Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War,’ Inter-
national Security 15 (1990) pp. 5–56.
31. Huntington, Clash (note 2) pp. 33–5.
32. Ibid., p. 34.
33. Ibid., p. 35; S. Krasner, ‘Westphalia and All That,’ in J. Goldstein and R. O. Keohane (eds.),
Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press
1993) pp. 235–264.
34. Gismondi (note 6) pp. 406–407; R. Rubenstein and J. Crocker, ‘Challenging Huntington,’
Foreign Policy 96 (1994) pp. 113–128: 115.
35. Huntington, Clash (note 2) pp. 21, 34.
36. Ibid., p. 92n.
37. Ibid., pp. 128, 232.
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38. J. L. Gaddis, ‘Toward the Post-Cold War World,’ Foreign Affairs 70 (1991) p. 101.
39. Huntington, Clash (note 2) pp. 54, 30, 31.
40. Ibid., pp. 21, 28, 125.
41. Ibid., pp. 155, 163.
42. Ibid., p. 135.
43. Ibid., pp. 20, 154–156.
44. Ibid., pp. 136–138; 150–151.
45. Ibid., pp. 28, 245.
46. Ibid., pp. 135, 177.
47. Ibid., pp. 238, 102–103.
48. Ibid., pp. 184–185, 241–144.
49. Ibid., cf. Figure 9.1 on p. 245.
50. Ibid., p. 207.
51. Gismondi (note 6) pp. 407ff.
52. Huntington, Clash (note 2) p. 129)
53. Ibid., p. 128.
54. Ibid., pp. 156, 207.
55. Ibid., p. 28.
56. E.g., Ibid., p. 126.
57. Ibid., p. 127.
58. Ibid., p. 37, 167.
59. Ibid., p. 174.
60. Ibid., p. 175.
61. Ibid., pp. 255, 183.
62. Ibid., p. 36.
63. Ibid., p. 252.
64. Ibid., pp. 28, 252–254.
65. P. Kennedy, ‘The Pivot of History,’ The Guardian (16 June 2004) p. 23.
66. Huntington, Clash (note 2) p. 44.
67. Ibid., p. 69.
68. J. Haslam, ‘Geopolitics,’ in No Virtue like Necessity. Realist Thought in International Relations
since Machiavelli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2002) pp. 162–182; W. Fox, ‘Geopolitics and
International Relations,’ in C. E. Zoppo and C. Zorgbibe (eds.), On Geopolitics: Classical and Nuclear
(Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff 1985) pp. 15–44.
69. K. Haushofer, Geopolitik der Pan-Ideen (Berlin: Zentral-Verlag 1931).
70. Huntington, Clash (note 2) p. 163–165.
71. Ibid., p. 155.
72. Ibid., p. 156.
73. Ibid., pp. 135–136.
74. Ibid., p. 177.
 374 Mark Bassin

75. Ibid., pp. 177–178.

76. Ibid., pp. 130–131.
77. Ibid., pp. 151–152.
78. Ibid., p. 152.
79. Ibid., p. 154.
80. Ibid., p. 212.
81. Ibid., p. 230.
82. Ibid., p. 126.
83. B. Lewis, ‘Islamic Revolution,’ New York Review of Books (21 Jan. 1988) p. 47, cited in Huntington,
Clash (note 2) p. 98.
84. Huntington, Clash (note 2) p. 119.
85. F. Ratzel, Der Lebensraum. Eine biogeographische Studie (Tübingen: Laupp’sche Buchhandlung
1901); W. D. Smith, ‘Friedrich Ratzel and the Origin of Lebensraum’ German Studies Review 3 (1980) pp.
51–68; M. Bassin, ‘Imperialism and the Nation-State in Friedrich Ratzel’s Political Geography,’ Progress in
Human Geography 11 (1987) pp. 473–495.
86. Huntington, Clash (note 2) p. 212.
87. Ibid., p. 119.
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88. Ibid., p. 252.

89. Mister X [G. Kennan], ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct,’ Foreign Affairs 25 (1947) pp. 566–582.
90. R. Russell, George F. Kennan’s Strategic Thought. The Making of an American Political Realist
(Westport, CT: Praeger 1999) pp. 9, 10, 53, 154.
91. H. Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History,’ Geographical Journal 23 (1904) pp. 421–
442; H. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality. A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (London:
Constable 1919).
92. N. Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace 1944).
93. L. C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion. Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy 1941–1949
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1970) p. 285; see also Russell (note 90) passim.