MOST academic articles in the social sciences fall silently into the abyss. Published in obscure journals and read by a handful of scholars, their fate is to gather dust on the shelves of university libraries. But occasionally an exception sends shock waves beyond the cloistered academy. Such is the case with an essay by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.
One need look no further than the front page of any serious newspaper to understand its significance. Mr Huntington's thesis is as simple as it is powerful: world politics, he argues, is entering a phase in which the fundamental source of conflict is between once-dormant civilisations rather than between ideologies or economic interests.
Countries are more and more aligned, in other words, not by political systems or markets, but by culture, once thought to be the least important ingredient in the geo-political power mix. At first blush, talking about civilisations sounds quaint, like an out-of-date textbook tracing the rise and fall of great empires.
But looking at the broad sweep of history, one realises that the modern nation state - and the complicated and imperfect web of international laws and treaties that binds them together - hasn't been around that long. The end of the Cold War has revealed just how fragile the so-called ''international order'' is. Mr Huntington distinguishes eight major civilisations, among them Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox and Latin American.
''The most important and bloody conflicts,'' he predicts direly, ''will occur along the borders separating these cultures. The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.'' The three-way carnage in the former Yugoslavia is only the most visible example of many worldwide conflicts that fit this description. There are many reasons why Mr Huntington is right.
First, civilisations overlap in large measure with religions which - even if they preach tolerance among the faithful - have proven to have little patience with those outside the faith. Indeed, as local identities are dissolved by the solvent of economic and social change, fundamentalist religion is rushing in to fill the void. The process of secularisation, if it ever existed, has been reversed. Second, bonds of history, culture, language and tradition that have evolved over the ages are not easily broken.