Politics



Politics

The Clash Of Civilizations

In the immediate post- Cold War period some scholars suggested that the historic tension between modernizing secularism and reactionary fundamentalism, along with older religious/cultural divisions among Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and other great religious/cultural traditions, would henceforth dominate world politics through a clash of civilizations that identified the major fault lines of world affairs. Those scholars proposed that, instead of a continuation of the contemporary international state system, the world was evolving toward a community of civilizations in which smaller states would group together for common purposes on a regional, or “civilizational,” basis.

Crudely and ahistorically conflating Christianity with Westernization and modernization, and overly impressed by the parochial and still only partial integration of European states, they argued that the ebb tide of Christianization of the non-European world, which attended Europe's twentieth century retreat from empire, meant that the dominance of Western ideas and organizational principles in world affairs had also ended. Indeed, in the extreme they argued that to profess belief in universal ideas with roots in the history of the West (human rights, sovereignty, political liberty, and market economics) was simultaneously false, immoral, and dangerous.

Even if all that were true to some degree, the claims of this “theory” remained specious and shallow. Fundamentally, “civilizational” divisions in the modern world are at best of secondary, or even tertiary, importance as compared with ethnic, national, and territorial (state) divisions when it comes to causation in matters of war, peace, and international intercourse. Moreover, major religious faiths and the civilizations they historically underpinned are not just deeply divided from each other. They are also much less internally cohesive than often thought, are subject to frequent and debilitating schism the more widespread they become, and—in their political and social aspects—remain on the defensive against an intense assault, especially in deeply traditional societies, by the cumulative effects of mass literacy, mass communications, modern consumerism, globalization, and other secular forces to which states appear to adapt more readily. Finally, in the political and even in the economic realm, nations and states still command far more intense and violent loyalties than civilizations continue to identify and organize most collective interests, and still define most conflicts. “Civilizational” differences are thus highly unlikely to lead directly to global conflict. Despite several decades of Cassandra-like warnings from social scientists about the looming demise of the state system, states look to remain the dominant international players for a very long time.

The End Of History

The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992, is one of the most notable books of the 90s. It has certainly captured the spirit of an era, that of democracy triumphant and the new world order, at a time when the Soviet adversary disappeared. His question is fundamental to the future of international order.

Yet it is this value can be an icon that is now more twist to the book by Francis Fukuyama. Indeed, the end of the story is much more than the testimony of the spirit of ...