Abstract

This chapter examines the politics of civilizational clash focusing on Samuel Huntington (The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997). It has been given enormous attention after the Cold War once capitalist democracy prevailed over communist dictatorship. ‘Democracy is the only game in town’ has become a cliche and in turn civilizational clash has seemingly replaced democracy as the zeigeist of the post-Cold War global politics. Religiously flavored and adversarially toned, the theory of civilizational clash was propounded by Huntington. Collet and Inoguchi (Jpn J Polit Sci 13(Part 4):553–585, 2012) has tested its four hypotheses against AsiaBarometer Survey data and shown that overall they are not empirically and theoretically valid. Perhaps most importantly, the subtlety, complexity and the context-dependency of culture are not very well understood and skillfully handled as Foucault and Bagehot advise.