Domingo Soto: Because Freedom Isn't Dumb

THE TRAP
In 1993, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published, in Foreign Affairs, an essay entitled "The Clash of Civilizations." Its thesis was that the essential divisions in the post-Cold War world are not among nations or ideologies but among "civilizations": Islamic, Slavic-Orthodox, Confucian, Hindu, Japanese, and Western. "The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations,"Huntington wrote.
Just as Francis Fukuyama's essay on "the end of history" was—for a while, in certain circles—a convenient and triumphal way of looking at the collapse of Communist ideology, one that allowed us to dream sweetly of the inexorable spread of market democracy to all reaches of the world, Huntington's much darker scheme is now sure to be revived in primary colors by some as a map of the conflict now before us, with the most irreconcilable clash being between the West and Islam.
(from a 9/23/01 Issue of New Yorker)