1. Lecture 12a:
Beyond bipolarity:
the “End of History” and the
“Clash of Civilisations”

2. “The End of History?”
Francis Fukuyama
published his article, “The
end of history?”, in the
journal National Interest in
the summer of 1989
He expanded his ideas in
the book The End of
History and the Last Man,
published in 1992

3. The context of the “End of History”
• When Fukuyama wrote his
article in 1989, the Cold War
was close to finishing
• Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev had started to
soften the USSR’s Marxist-
Leninist ideology

4. 1989
• During that year, the
Soviet Union allowed its
satellite countries in
Eastern Europe to break
away
• October 1989 saw the
opening of the Berlin
Wall, for 28 years a
symbol of the Cold War

5. New democracies
• Most of the former Soviet
satellites became
parliamentary
democracies, with anti-
Soviet heroes, like Vaclav
Havel in Czechoslovakia
and Lech Walesa in
Poland, becoming the
new leaders

6. The end of the Soviet Union
• The Cold War ended
definitively in December
1991, when the Soviet
Union was dissolved by
its own leaders
• Millions welcomed the
passing of the Soviet
Union and its Marxist
ideology

7. “The End of History?”
• Fukuyama claimed that the end
of Marxism-Leninism in the
USSR meant the end of a serious
ideological challenge to Western
values – this challenge had been
central to the Cold War
• Marxism had once claimed it
would be the logical culmination
of history; Fukuyama argued that
Marxism had clearly failed, and
instead proclaimed the victory of
Western liberal values

8. “The End of History?” (2)
• Fukuyama claimed that
alternatives to
democracy were either
discredited or too weak
to pose a serious
challenge to Western
values in the long term
• Democracy had proved
to be a more efficient
system, and would
become more common
in the future

9. “The End of History?” (3)
• Fukuyama acknowledged
that future wars and
conflicts were possible,
but claimed that with the
absence of serious
alternatives, Western
values would eventually
become accepted as
universal

10. Critics of Fukuyama
• Many disagreed with Fukuyama’s claim that
Western values would become universal
• Those outside the West resented the claim that
Western values had proved superior
• Marxists, who once claimed that their ideology lay
at the “end of history”, resented the argument that
their vision of the future was not a credible
alternative
• Others, notably Huntingdon, did not share
Fukuyama’s optimism about a future without
major conflicts

11. “The Clash of Civilisations”
• Samuel Huntingdon
expressed his ideas
about the Clash of
Civilisations at a
lecture in 1992. He
published an article in
1993 and expanded
his ideas into a book
in 1996

12. “The Clash of Civilisations”:
the context
• Millions of people greeted
the end of the Cold War
with jubilation, but the end
of the world of the Cold
War meant the unfreezing
of many ethnic conflicts
that had been dormant for
many years

13. Nagorno-Karabakh
• Ethnic rivalries between
the former Soviet
republics of Armenia
and Azerbaijan,
suppressed in Soviet
times, erupted into full-
scale fighting in 1992
• Relatively few died, but
hundreds of thousands
became refugees

14. Georgia and Abkhazia
• In 1992-93, Abkhazian
separatists fought a war
to break away from
Georgia, which had
become independent
after the break-up of the
Soviet Union

15. The break-up of Yugoslavia
• The break-up of
Yugoslavia was the
worst of the conflicts
that followed the end of
the Cold War. Serbian
attempts to limit the
territory lost to Croatia
and Bosnia led to the
deaths of hundreds of
thousands

16. Huntingdon’s pessimism
• Huntingdon’s did not share Fukuyama’s
optimism after the end of the Cold War
• He observed the bloody conflicts caused by
ancient rivalries
• Rather than looking forward to an optimistic
future, he worried that the problems of the past
would return as the problems of the future
• Above all, he questioned Fukuyama’s claim that
modernisation meant Westernisation

17. The “civilisations” (1)
• Huntingdon believed that the conflicts of
the future would be cultural, rather than
political or economic
• These conflicts were likely to take place
between what he described as
“civilisations”, and identified eight main
civilisations in the modern world

18. The “civilisations” (2)

19. Islam and the West
• Huntingdon claimed the most likely conflict
would be between the Christian West and the
Islamic world
• He said this was because:
• Islam and Christianity had been engaged in a
cultural war since the Crusades
• After the end of the colonial era, Arab
nationalism and fundamentalism had risen
• Islam is antithetical to democracy and Western
values

20. Huntingdon and Western values
• Unlike Fukuyama, Huntingdon did not believe
that Western values were universal, and felt it
was dangerous for the West to believe that
other civilisations would accept them
• Huntingdon stressed that any attempt to
spread Western values would provoke
resistance, and urged the West to stay out of
conflicts involving non-Western civilisations

21. Huntingdon vindicated?
• Some claim that the rise
of Islamist groups and al-
Qaeda, responsible for
the 2001 attacks on the
United States, shows that
Huntingdon was right to
warn of a future clash
between the West and
the Islamic world
• Others have refused to
accept this

22. Critics of Huntingdon:
Edward Said
• Edward Said, the Palestinian-
American cultural critic,
mocked Huntingdon’s idea of
conflict between Islam and
the West as suggesting a
“cartoonlike world where
Popeye and Pluto bash each
other mercilessly”, and
dismissed his civilisations as
meaningless labels

23. Critics of Huntingdon:
Fred Halliday
• Fred Halliday, a renowned
expert in Middle Eastern
affairs, criticised Huntington’s
realist assumption that states
conflict because the world is
anarchical
• He also dismissed the claim
that culture or civilisation is a
major factor in international
relations

24. Halliday on Huntingdon
• Halliday stressed that few wars in the past were
fought over culture
• He also stressed that the Islamic countries may
share a degree of pan-Islamic solidarity, but this is
not the determining factor in their policy
• Halliday claims Huntingdon “has thrown fat into a
fire that was to some extent already there, and
just allowed it to burn”, and notes that
Huntington’s thesis “is very popular with
Islamists, as it is with Hindu nationalists and
radical Shintoists in Japan”

25. Islam: diversity or monolith?

26. Sunni and Shia