More than three decades ago, Western political thought succumbed to a moment of dangerous self-delusion. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, much of the intellectual and political elite in the United States and Europe convinced itself that history had finally settled the central question of modernity: how human society ought to be organized.
The answer, we were told, was disarmingly simple: Western-style liberal democracy, global markets, fading borders, universal norms, shared values, and the triumph of legal cosmopolitanism. In short, the world would become more like the West - and the West would become the template for everyone else.
Francis Fukuyama merely gave this intellectual confidence a memorable label when he declared liberal democracy “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” At the time, the claim felt almost self-evident. The Soviet bloc had collapsed. The United States stood alone as the sole superpower. Global markets were expanding. The internet promised a single, interconnected humanity. Western political and cultural elites came to believe, in earnest, that history had vindicated them once and for all.
Reality, as it so often does, proved less accommodating.
Today, in 2026, even a dry list of global indicators shatters the fairy tale of the “end of history.” By the end of 2024, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide had reached 123.2 million. That is not a rhetorical flourish - it is the measure of a civilizational fracture. Global military spending hit a record $2.718 trillion in 2024, rising 9.4 percent in a single year - the sharpest increase since the Cold War ended. International migration continues to climb: according to the United Nations, there were roughly 304 million international migrants worldwide in 2024. At the same time, 61 percent of respondents in Edelman’s global survey reported moderate to high levels of social grievance and distrust in institutions.
This is not a world of triumphant universalism. It is a world of fragmentation, anxiety, and intensifying battles over identity.
Here is the uncomfortable fact Western elites still struggle to accept: history did not end. On the contrary, it has returned in its most inconvenient form - as a struggle over memory, religion, territory, symbols, demography, borders, and collective myths.
In that sense, Samuel Huntington - however fiercely criticized in life and after - proved closer to reality than the triumphalists of global liberalism. His formulations were controversial. His civilizational map did not explain everything. But on the central point he saw what others refused to see: once rigid bipolarity receded, conflict would not disappear. It would shift to a deeper layer - into the realm of civilizational difference, religious memory, historical trauma, cultural codes, and the politics of identity.
That is precisely what we are witnessing now.
For too long, the Western establishment clung to the comfortable illusion that economic interdependence automatically dissolves hostility, and that cultural blending inevitably produces harmony. History tells a different story. Trade can coexist with hatred. Technological progress does not extinguish religious fervor. Urban growth does not erase memories of humiliation. Financial globalization does not reduce civilizations to a faceless mass of consumers. On the contrary, the more the world is homogenized from above, the more forcefully difference reasserts itself from below.
This is the central paradox of the 21st century: globalization did not erase identities - it made them sharper, more brittle, and more politicized.
Look at the world map without ideological blinders.
The Middle East remains a region where politics, religion, memory, and blood are fused into a single, intractable knot. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict long ago transcended the bounds of a territorial dispute; it is a struggle over historical legitimacy, religious imagination, security, trauma, and civilizational self-understanding. Africa is gripped not by a single crisis but by overlapping ones, where borders drawn by former empires rarely align with tribal, confessional, and ethnocultural realities. South Asia remains a theater of deep rivalry, where the military logic of India and Pakistan is inseparable from questions of identity, historical memory, and civilizational narrative. Europe, which after 1991 fancied itself a “post-historical garden,” now lives again in a state of alarm: the war in Ukraine has restored to the continent the language of fronts, mobilization, artillery production, and strategic deterrence.
Even where conflict does not take the form of full-scale war, it manifests as cultural struggle. School curricula, language policy, migration, religious symbols, historical monuments, demographic strategy, the status of the family, and the right to national memory have become flashpoints across nearly every region of the globe. This is no accident. When the state loses its authority to define a cultural core, society fractures into competing loyalties.
It is here that the myth of multiculturalism has suffered its deepest rupture.
This is not a crude rejection of diversity as such. Human societies have always been complex, layered, and heterogeneous. The issue is not that people of different origins, faiths, or languages can live within one state. The issue is that Western elites long treated cultural differences as secondary - almost decorative - assuming that markets, legal procedures, and the right rhetoric would dissolve any tension into a set of “shared values.”
They did not dissolve.
On the contrary, the more insistently the West declared the nation-state obsolete, the stronger the demand grew - within Western societies themselves - for borders, order, cultural continuity, and political sovereignty. This is no longer a fringe phenomenon. In 2024, EU countries registered 911,960 first-time asylum applications. That is lower than in 2023, but still an enormous figure. By the end of 2024, nearly a million cases remained pending in Europe, and 4.4 million Ukrainians were under temporary protection. Migration is no longer merely a humanitarian issue; it is a question of state capacity, social strain, security, trust, and political stability.
Equally telling is that Europe - long accustomed to lecturing the world on openness and post-national identity - is rapidly returning to the language of control, selection, filtration, and sovereign management of flows. This is not a random swing of the pendulum. It is a system reacting to accumulated pressure. When reality collides with ideology, even the most ardent doctrinaires rediscover the vocabulary of borders.
The same pattern is visible in the security sphere. Europol’s TE-SAT 2025 report notes the continued terrorist threat across the EU spectrum - from jihadist to far-right, far-left, and separatist forms. The very fact undercuts the simplified narrative that the chief danger of our time is merely “bad rhetoric” emanating from nation-states. Threats do not arise from a single ideology or a single source. They emerge where political order frays, where perceptions of injustice deepen, where cultural integration falters, and where institutional trust erodes.
It would be intellectually lazy to reduce all of this to a single word - migration. Migration alone does not explain the crisis. What explains it is the convergence of forces: economic insecurity, deindustrialization across parts of the West, cultural disorientation, the weakening of historical canons, elite political timidity, and the erosion of a coherent social contract. When a state cannot answer basic questions - Who are we? What binds us? Where are the red lines? Which rules apply to everyone? - it invites conflict not only between newcomers and natives, but among natives themselves, divided by memory, religion, ideology, and competing visions of the future.
In this respect, the contemporary West resembles the late Roman Empire - not in the cartoonish sense of “barbarians at the gates,” but in a more profound way. It possesses wealth, institutions, technological superiority, and a universalist ideology. Yet it shows diminishing internal agreement about what, exactly, is worth defending and why the political community exists at all. Rome was undone not only by external blows, but by internal erosion of meaning. When the center ceases to believe in its own cultural legitimacy, the periphery begins to dictate terms.
Consider also Austria-Hungary: a sophisticated, educated, bureaucratically advanced empire whose elites were confident in their ability to manage diversity. Yet once the pressure of history intensified, it became clear that beneath the polished surface of civilized coexistence simmered competing national projects, incompatible memories, and mutual fears. Empires often collapse not because they contain too much difference, but because their governing classes pretend for too long that those differences do not matter.
The same pattern played out in Yugoslavia. As long as a rigid framework held, diversity was contained. Once that framework weakened, everything that had been suppressed surged to the surface: confessional memory, old wounds, local myths, ethnic maps, the language of revenge. For all its digital gloss, the 21st century is, in this sense, strikingly archaic. Beneath the thin membrane of global platforms and financial flows, very old passions are alive and well.
But today’s moment carries an added layer of danger: civilizational rivalry is no longer confined to cannons and trenches. It has migrated into technology, logistics, supply chains, demographics, energy, education, digital platforms, and symbolic power. Empires once fought over straits and colonies. Now they also compete for rare earths, semiconductors, batteries, data centers, artificial intelligence, undersea cable routes, and the standards that govern information itself.
That is why it sounds naïve - almost comical - to hear segments of the Western elite repeat the old mantra of a “borderless world” at the very moment Western states are scrambling to build new forms of strategic autonomy. Global trade remains vast: in 2024, it reached a record $33 trillion. But this is not evidence of harmony; it is proof of a new form of conflict. Interdependent economies are locked in fierce competition over who will control the industries of the future. Energy investment in 2025 is projected by the International Energy Agency to reach $3.3 trillion, roughly $2.2 trillion of that flowing into clean energy, grids, storage, nuclear power, and electrification. At the same time, Europe speaks openly about reducing dependence on Chinese supply chains, while the People’s Republic of China turns industrial capacity into geopolitical leverage.
Talk of a “clash of civilizations,” then, should not be taken literally or reduced to crude images of religious crusades or ethnic hatred. Today, civilizational conflict is a contest between models of the human person, the state, memory, and order. It is an argument over what matters more: tradition or radical individualism; borders or fluidity; national sovereignty or supranational governance; historical continuity or an ideology of perpetual deconstruction.
And here, Western globalism faces a genuine crisis - not because it has encountered a single formidable adversary, but because it is being pressured from multiple directions at once.
The first force is the return of hard geopolitics. Military spending is rising worldwide, with 2024 marking the largest annual increase in decades. More than one hundred countries boosted their defense budgets. The United States spent $997 billion on defense - roughly 37 percent of global military expenditures. Russia and Ukraine remain locked in a grinding war of attrition. China is intensifying military-technical pressure in the Indo-Pacific. According to statistics published by Taiwan, Chinese military aircraft entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone 3,764 times in 2025 - a record figure and an increase of more than 22 percent over the previous year.
The second force is the crisis of trust within Western societies themselves. When 61 percent of people across surveyed countries report a pronounced sense of grievance and believe institutions serve narrow interests rather than the majority, no amount of universalist rhetoric can paper over the fracture. Trust erodes not only in governments, but in media, NGOs, corporations, international forums, and expert networks. What was marketed yesterday as “global governance” is increasingly perceived as detached, technocratic arrogance.
The third force is religious and cultural resurgence. Pew Research reported again in 2025 that in dozens of countries, religion remains a central marker of social identity and political self-understanding. The world has not secularized in the way late-20th-century liberal theorists predicted. Instead, it has become both hyper-technological and deeply archaic. A person may use neural networks, cryptocurrencies, and drones - while making political choices rooted in religious memory, communal loyalty, and historical grievance.
The fourth force is the failure of export democracy. Afghanistan stands as the most visible monument to that failure. What was presented as a moral mission and a universal model of nation-building ended in strategic collapse. According to estimates from Brown University, America’s post-9/11 wars cost roughly $8 trillion, and the number of displaced people in affected countries reached 38 million. This was not merely a geopolitical miscalculation. It was a demonstration that societies cannot be mechanically rebuilt from the outside, according to an external template, while ignoring their internal social fabric, tribal dynamics, religious authority, and historical codes.
All of this points to a sobering conclusion: the world has entered not an era of harmonized universalism, but an era of layered civilizational rivalry. And that rivalry is likely to intensify. Not because people have suddenly grown worse, but because the acceleration of global change heightens anxiety over collective identity. The faster the world shifts, the stronger the demand for roots. The more borders blur, the fiercer the fight to define where one’s own border lies. The louder the sermons about “humanity in general,” the more concrete words begin to matter to millions: nation, faith, language, home, memory, the graves of ancestors, honor.
This explains the political turn now visible on both sides of the Atlantic. Not long ago, the upper tiers of Western politics spoke as if national sovereignty were an embarrassing relic and patriotism a sign of intellectual deficiency. Today, faced with energy shocks, war, migration pressure, supply chain disruptions, and technological competition, those same systems increasingly speak in terms that would have been deemed impolite just yesterday: strategic autonomy, industrial policy, border protection, critical infrastructure, technology controls, supply security, defense readiness. The shift itself is an admission that the old confidence has collapsed.
Yes, today the helm of major Western states and institutions is held by figures like Mark Carney in Canada, Emmanuel Macron in France, Friedrich Merz in Germany, and Ursula von der Leyen at the European Commission. But the names matter less than the historical moment in which they find themselves. They are not governing a world buoyed by liberal triumphalism. They are navigating an era of nervous realignment, where yesterday’s mantras have lost their force and tomorrow’s formulas have yet to be written. Even where official rhetoric still invokes a “rules-based order,” real-world decisions are increasingly driven not by abstract norms but by the hard calculus of power, risk, and national interest.
That is why talk of a “clash of civilizations” in the 21st century must be understood soberly. It is not a call to hatred or a license for crude chauvinism. It is an acknowledgment that humanity does not live inside a sterile laboratory of enlightened blueprints. People do not abandon their cultural frameworks simply because they have been offered a slick app, cheap credit, and the right vocabulary. Political community cannot be assembled out of procedures alone. It requires a symbolic core. And when elites are afraid even to utter the word “core,” the vacuum does not remain empty; it is filled by harder, more radical, and more dangerous forces.
Here lies the tragedy of contemporary Western thought. For too long, it confused openness with formlessness, tolerance with the abdication of civilizational agency, and universalism with the right to impose a single historical template on the rest of the world. But the world declined to comply. China is constructing its own model of power. India is consolidating as an independent civilizational pole. The Islamic world operates within the logic of its own internal struggles and a deep sensitivity to questions of faith and dignity. Africa is demanding not just aid, but a redistribution of status. Europe is rearming. The United States is wrestling with an internal crisis of self-definition. And everywhere - absolutely everywhere - the question “Who are we?” resonates louder than “How do we fit into a global consensus?”
The future, therefore, will not belong to those who keep recycling the dead formulas of the 1990s. It will belong to those capable of looking at the world without self-deception. History did not end. It did not even slow down. If anything, it has accelerated - growing denser, harsher, and more perilous.
The world is entering an era in which not only GDP, credit ratings, and investment indices will matter, but also cultural resilience, demographic stability, a state’s capacity to enforce common rules, a society’s ability to defend its memory, and the political will of its elites. Those who continue to insist that differences are insignificant, that civilizational codes can be painlessly dissolved into global uniformity, risk repeating the fate of every complacent class in history: they will miss the moment when the world has already changed, still arguing with yesterday.
History is not over. It has returned - and not as an academic seminar, but as front lines, migration waves, technological wars, religious mobilization, crises of trust, and a struggle over who gets to define the future. In this world, survival will favor not the loudest preachers of universalism, but those societies that know who they are, what they are defending, and why they are prepared not only to speak - but to act.