Civilizations Are a Matter of Scale

I’ve been reading Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. His central argument is that, after the Cold War, the major sources of international conflict would increasingly follow cultural and civilizational boundaries rather than political ideologies.

It’s a compelling framework when looking at contemporary conflicts. Russia and Ukraine seem to fit his description of a fault line between Western and Orthodox civilizations. China and the West are another example. As I thought about Germany after WWII, recent Russia-Ukraine war, and East Asia, I started wondering how much of what we call a civilization depends on the scale at which we’re looking.

The Iron Curtain and Ukraine

After WWII, Germany was divided into two countries. East and West Germans lived under fundamentally different political and economic systems for over four decades. One side was integrated into the Western capitalist world, while the other belonged to the Soviet bloc. Then in 1990, Germany reunified. The reunification wasn’t inevitable. It required extraordinary political circumstances, negotiations, and the willingness of people on both sides to come together. Decades of separation also left differences between the two parts of the country that remain visible today.

Forty years of ideological separation did not erase centuries of shared language, history, and national identity. Political boundaries changed much faster than the cultural foundations underneath them. This seems to support Huntington’s argument. Political ideologies can come and go, while civilizational identities are more persistent.

The book also mentioned Ukraine, describing Ukraine as a cleft country divided between Western and Orthodox cultural influences (though Huntington made a wrong prediction about the war). Western Ukraine was historically shaped by Polish and Habsburg rule, while much of eastern Ukraine experienced longer periods under Russian imperial and Soviet rule. These differences are real. Language, religion, institutions, and historical memory all reflect them. The Russia–Ukraine war can be understood partly through these historical divisions, although security interests, political leadership, and national sovereignty are also essential to explaining it.

How we interpret these changes really depends on the historical window.

Over the past few decades, Ukraine has moved toward a more distinct national and political identity, increasingly oriented toward Europe. Russia’s interventions since 2014, particularly the full-scale invasion in 2022, have contributed to that development.

Looking back several centuries, however, Russians and Ukrainians share important religious, linguistic, and historical roots. Their histories intersect through Kyivan Rus, the Orthodox Christian tradition, and later imperial and Soviet institutions.

Not a contradictory observations. A Ukrainian can share historical and religious traditions with Russians while identifying firmly with an independent Ukrainian nation. Shared cultural inheritance doesn’t imply shared political allegiance.

Huntington himself recognized that cultural identification operates at multiple levels. In defining civilization, he observed:

“People have levels of identity”

He illustrated this with someone who might identify as Roman, Italian, Catholic, Christian, European, or Western, depending on the context. This key observation is that we don’t necessarily abandon one identity when we adopt another. We can belong to several communities simultaneously, each meaningful at a different level.

Ukraine’s experience raises a question about how these levels change over time. What will the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian identities look like to historians several centuries from now? Will today’s separation be understood as the beginning of a lasting cultural divergence? Or will their deeper historical connections remain prominent despite centuries of political differences?

Unfortunately we won’t know for now. And I’ll explain why I don’t think we should treat today’s civilizational boundaries as permanent.

China, Japan, Korea, and the Boundaries We Choose

East Asian countries such as China, Japan, and Korea share a long history of cultural exchange. Chinese writing, Confucian philosophy, Buddhism, and forms of political organization influenced all three societies. For centuries, Classical Chinese functioned as a common scholarly language across much of East Asia. Yet each society developed its own language, institutions, traditions, and national identity.

Huntington groups China and Korea within Sinic civilization while treating Japan as a separate civilization. That distinction is reasonable within his framework. Japan developed a distinctive political and cultural identity, partly helped by its geographical separation from the Asian continent. But it still feels a bit arbitrary to me.

Why do we classify Japan separately while grouping France, Germany, Britain, and other European countries within Western civilization?

Europe has its own long history of warfare, religious division, and competing political systems. Its societies share important foundations in Greco-Roman traditions and Christianity, but they have also developed quite differently.

Huntington defines civilization in broad terms:

“A civilization is the broadest cultural entity.”

But what determines how broad that entity should be? Zoom in, and China, Japan, and Korea are distinct cultural systems. Zoom out, and they belong to a broader East Asian cultural tradition. Zoom out further, and East Asian civilization is part of humanity’s collective cultural development.

The same applies to Europe. Germany has its own national identity, belongs to a broader European tradition, and participates in an even larger human history.

None of these descriptions requires the others to be false. Civilizations are not naturally divided into a fixed number of distinct groups. They form overlapping, nested structures, whose boundaries become more or less meaningful depending on what we’re trying to understand.

History Doesn’t Move at One Speed

This reminded me of Fernand Braudel’s idea of the longue durée, or long duration.

Braudel distinguished between events that unfold relatively quickly and deeper historical structures that change much more slowly. Wars, revolutions, and political decisions happen over years or decades. Economic institutions and social organizations develop over longer periods. Geography, cultural traditions, and patterns of human settlement can persist for centuries.

It is myopic to examine these processes as though they operate on the same clock. A political revolution can replace a government in days. Changing the institutions underneath that government may take generations. Cultural practices can survive for centuries after the political structures that created them have disappeared.

This historical framework is still a bit too narrow.

Human civilization itself occupies only a tiny fraction of the history of the universe. Agriculture emerged roughly 10,000 years ago. Modern nation-states are much more recent. The universe, by comparison, is approximately 13.8 billion years old. Over that enormous period, matter formed stars and galaxies, stars produced heavier elements, life emerged on Earth, and eventually human societies developed language, institutions, and cultures.

Not suggesting that the expansion of the universe and the development of civilizations follow the same laws. Cosmic expansion is a physical phenomenon, and cultural development depends on human behavior and historical circumstances. The comparison just reminds me to think differently about permanence.

The categories through which we understand history are products of a particular moment in that history.

Space Matters as Much as Time

There’s another dimension to this: geographical scale.

Over much of human history, physical distance constrained cultural interaction. Mountains, oceans, transportation costs, and communication barriers shaped how societies developed. Geography made some connections easier and others much harder.

Political, economic, and technological development gradually changed those constraints.

Empires connected distant populations. Trade routes moved religions, technologies, and ideas across continents. Industrialization made transportation cheaper. Modern communications allow people separated by thousands of miles to interact almost instantaneously. Think how differently humans fight cross-continent wars nowadays than it was centuries ago.

As the effective distance between societies changes, so does the scale at which shared cultural practices can develop.

This doesn’t mean greater connectivity inevitably produces one unified civilization. Interaction can generate conflict as readily as cooperation. Economic integration can coexist with strong national identities. Cultural traditions can remain distinct even as people participate in increasingly global institutions.

It also doesn’t mean civilization must constantly expand. Societies can fragment, political connections can collapse, and cultural traditions can disappear. And merge together.

“Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they divide and merge.”

It is about how we choose the scale at which we observe that change.

Consider a person who belongs to a city, a nation, a broader cultural tradition, and a global community. These identities don’t have to compete all the time. What changes with historical circumstances is which identity becomes most relevant. Same is true of civilizations. Their boundaries may be meaningful without being absolute, and their importance may change depending on the scale of historical observation.

Huntington’s Timescale

This is not to invalidate Huntington’s theory. I just find his argument more useful when understood as an explanation of a particular historical period, rather than as a timeless classification of humanity.

The book was written in the aftermath of the Cold War. The ideological division between capitalism and communism had weakened, and he was trying to understand which identities might shape the next international order.

At that scale, civilizational differences can have considerable explanatory power. Shared religion, history, language, and cultural memory influence how societies understand themselves and their relationships with others.

Civilizations evolve. Their boundaries are never entirely rigid. It is not the broadest meaningful level of cultural identity.

Western and Sinic civilizations are still distinct cultural entities at our current scale of observation. But zoom out across millennia, they become branches of a larger history of human societies developing institutions, exchanging ideas, and adapting to their environments.

This is not to predict an alternative to Huntington’s world order. We have little reason to believe that cultural development follows a predetermined path toward either unity or fragmentation. What we can observe is that the scale of human interaction has changed dramatically, and cultural identities have continued to evolve alongside it.

Choosing the Right Lens

I started reading Huntington to better understand contemporary geopolitical conflicts, hoping to learn about why countries align or fight.

Why do we treat some differences as divisions between civilizations, while treating others as variations within a civilization? How long does a shared tradition have to persist before we consider it fundamental? And how much historical change is enough before we decide that a civilization has become something else?

I’m more convinced that these questions don’t have answers independent of the scale we’re examining.

Civilizational theories may work in much the same way as maps. A map of the world is useful precisely because it leaves things out. A map showing continents cannot explain the streets of a city. A street map cannot explain the movement of continents. They all describe something real, but none is the whole picture.

We shouldn’t be expecting any single historical framework to describe humanity at every resolution.

World orders and our interpretations change, yet human civilization continues to make remarkable progress collectively.