"The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order"
(1996) by Samuel Huntington sets forth a hypothesis regarding the nature of
global politics in the post Cold-War era. According to Huntington, wars in the
21st century will not be thought between countries (nationalism) not between
ideologies (such as Liberalism, Marxism, Fascism etc.) as they did in the 20th
century but rather between civilizations. In the "The Clash of
Civilizations" Huntington listed several different civilizations
comprising the world today (see detail below), and argued that after the end of
the Cold-War the next battles will be thought between the Western civilization
and the Islamic world (and it took history only 5 years to prove him right).
The philosophical backdrop to Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations" is the Hegel inspired thought (like Fukuyama's "End of History") that the fall of
the Berlin Wall marks the end of human conflict with the eventual victory of
Western Liberalism, Huntington opposes this by suggesting that conflicts are
only about to take on a different shape, a cultural one. According to his
hypothesis, when local and even national identities are being eroded by
globalization culture in its broadest sense is becoming more and more important
in defining who people are. A common religion, language, history, heritage and
traditions is what groups people into sects that oppose one another.
Huntington's analysis also holds that globalization brings civilizations
into closer interaction, resulting in higher tensions. The victory won by the
West in the Cold-War and the global spread of its Capitalism actually prompted
these processes and pitted the West against "the rest". The spread of
Western ideology and economy actually drives other cultures into fundamentalism
in an attempt to protect their cultural identity.
Huntington lists several civilizations and sub-civilizations including:
the Western civilization, the Muslim world, Latin American civilization, the
Eastern civilization, the Orthodox civilization and the Sub-Saharan African
civilization. These civilizations are the tectonic plates of humanity, and when
the clash earthquakes happen. Huntington further maps out the relations between
the civilizations and their potential for conflict. For Huntington the most acute
potential for conflict is along the fault lines of the Islamic and non-Islamic
worlds (remember he first suggested "The Clash of Civilizations" in
1992 and published the book in 1996).
Related summaries:
Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities
Roland Robertson on Globalization in "Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity
Roland Robertson on Globalization in "Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity