Clash of civilizations essay pdf
As the Cold War was coming to an end, various intellectuals worked to explain and predict post-Cold War global politics. Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington were eminent scholars.
Fukuyama wrote his thesis, The End of History, declaring the victory of the ideologies of liberal democracy forever. According to him now the war of ideologies is over and liberal democracy has no rival ideology.
His argument becomes susceptible to criticism today when the entire Western world is at war with the ideology of "terrorism".
A few years later in 1993, Samuel P. Huntington in his article "The Clash of Civilization?" wrote. In Foreign Affairs magazine.
It was the most iconic and thought-provoking piece of writing published in that prestigious journal since George Kennan's article, Sources of Soviet Conduct, was published in July 1947.
Huntington later elaborated on the same arguments in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Reconstruction of the World Order.
Huntington observed that for 15 years after the end of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, there were large-scale conflicts between the princes and these conflicts led to the creation of nation states.
After the French Revolution, the principle lines of struggle shifted between nations rather than between princes. The end of this 19th century pattern coincides with the end of the First World War.
Then in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the struggle of nation-states came to the fore in the face of conflict of ideologies. Since the end of communist ideology, global politics has been structured on a cultural basis.
Huntington says, "In the 20th century, relations between civilizations have gone from a phase that has shifted from the dominance of one civilization's unidirectional influence over all civilizations to one of intense, continuous and multi-directional interaction between all civilizations." Has gone."
He argues that local politics is the politics of ethnicity, global politics is the politics of civilization and that superpower rivalry is replaced by a clash of civilizations.
According to Huntington, civilization is a cultural entity. Huntington considers religion to be the most important of the overall objective elements that define a civilization, to a large extent, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world's greatest religions and those who are of ethnicity and language. share but differ in religion can kill each other, as happened in Lebanon and the subcontinent.
Huntington divides civilizations, Hindu, Islamic, Western, Latin American and African. Some analyzes do not recognize the Japanese and African civilizations as distinct civilizations. He puts forward the following causes of inter-civilizational conflict.
The increasing interaction between people of different civilizations is increasing the consciousness of civilization and awareness of the differences and similarities between civilizations.
According to Huntington, the increase in civilizational consciousness of a people due to the interaction between peoples of different civilizations, in turn, strengthens the deep-seated differences and enemies in history.
During the Cold War a country could be non-aligned or it could change its alignment from one side to the other.
The leaders of countries can make these choices in the context of their perceptions of their security interests, their calculations of the balance of power, and their ideological preferences.
In the New World that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, cultural identity is the central factor in shaping the nation's associations and protests.
The question asked during the Cold War, "Which side are you on?" Now replaced by a more fundamental question, “Who are you? Every state has to answer.
The 1990s have seen an explosion of global identity crises. What do blood and faith, faith and family mean to people in dealing with an identity crisis? Modernization in non-Western societies is leading to a cultural revival in those societies. Modernization brings changes at the level of the individual as well as at the social level.
At the social level, it increases economic, military and potential power while at the individual level it leads to isolation and a crisis of identity. Both these changes contribute to bringing about a religious as well as cultural revival.
Huntington believes that, driven by modernization, global politics has been reconfigured on cultural grounds.
People and countries with similar cultures are coming together and people with different cultures are falling apart.
Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations give way to alignments defined by culture and civilizations.
According to Huntington, the fundamental conflict would be between the West on the one hand and Cynic and Islamic civilization on the other.
The conflict along the fault lines between Western and Islamic civilization has been going on for 1300 years. There are a number of factors that have contributed to the intensification of the Islam-West conflict in the late 20th century.
- Increase in population growth in Muslim countries led to unemployment in these societies and youth were recruited for Islamist purposes.
- The Islamic revival - an offshoot of the "back to the roots" phenomenon, created culture consciousness among Muslims more strongly than at any time in history.
- The West is trying to universalize its value and impose it on other countries, including Muslims, by loosening its economic and military power, but at the same time the West does not realize the decline or increase in power in its ability to do so. . To oppose any such attempt by other societies.
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