ABSTRACT
Samuel P. Huntington’s argument in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order was that with the end of the Cold War, it is now culture that governs political action, and that the world system of civilizations grouped together by shared cultures determines who is an ally and who is an enemy. As an example, Huntington offers the splintering of Yugoslavia, a state bordering three civilizations. During the Cold War it was held together by the ideology of communism, but afterwards it experienced an ethnic civil war. His focus on the distribution of power in the international system showed the reader that victory in the Cold War did not translate into victory after the Cold War—it translated into an entirely new game. The players of that new game, Huntington suggested, were civilizations. In essence, his framework of ideas defined the rules of the game and the nature of the players and enabled Huntington to make his predictions.
