If Not Civilizations, What? Samuel Huntington Responds to His Critics
Author(s)
Huntington, Samuel
Abstract
For 40 years students and practitioners of international relations thought and acted in terms of a highly simplified but very useful picture of world affairs, the Cold War paradigm. The world was divided between one group of relatively wealthy and mostly democratic societies, led by the United States, engaged in a pervasive ideological, political, economic, and, at times, military conflict with another group of somewhat poorer, communist societies led by the Soviet Union. The Cold War paradigm could not account for everything that went on in world politics. There were many anomalies and at times the paradigm blinded scholars and statesmen to major developments, such as the Sino-Soviet split. Though the model served political scientists better than its rivals, there is now need for a new paradigm to account for global politics in a world that is no longer split along dichotomous alliances and ideologies. This paper is an exploration the familiar paradigm in light of recent world events and seeks to establish that while the need for a new model exists, the old model is still quit useful as a means of understanding global politics.
