Reevaluating Huntington's 'Clash'

An interesting article looking back at Samuel Huntington's famous thesis that the post-Cold War world would not finally be dominated by moderating, liberal globalizing forces, but by a "clash of civilizations". The conclusion:

More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.

Even if all this is true, there are still some problems with Huntington's narrative: even if Muslim countries have unified under the banner of Islam (and this is certainly disputable, given the fractures within the Muslim world), that is but one of Huntington's eight civilizations. In most of the rest of the world, especially East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa, the trend is still towards integration and moderation. The spirit of globalization may have tempered some since 9/11, but it is still strong. Some of its principles may have been reformed, but the underlying realities haven't changed much. The view that the rules have significantly changed is indicative of a Western-centric (or Islam-centric) worldview, and ignores the situation in much of the rest of the world.