Here's an excellent piece... too long to post whole, so do check the link:
The clash of civilisations
World politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be - the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a central aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years.
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological nor primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilisations. The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.
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During the cold war the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds. Those divisions are no longer relevant. It is far more meaningful now to group countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilisation.
What do we mean when we talk of a civilisation? A civilisation is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs, Chinese and westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilisations.
A civilisation is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a westerner. The civilisation to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies. People can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and boundaries of civilisations change.
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the efforts of the West to promote its values of democracy and liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military predominance and to advance its economic interests engender countering responses from other civilisations. Decreasingly able to mobilise support and form coalitions on the basis of ideology, governments and groups will increasingly attempt to mobilise support by appealing to common religion and civilisation identity.
The clash of civilisations thus occurs at two levels. At the micro-level, adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilisations struggle, often violently, over the control of territory and each other. At the macro-level, states from different civilisations compete for relative military and economic power, struggle over the control of international institutions and third parties, and competitively promote their political and religious values.
The fault lines between civilisations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the cold war as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed. The cold war began when the Iron Curtain divided Europe politically and ideologically. The cold war ended with the fall of the Iron Curtain. As the ideological division of Europe has disappeared, the cultural division between western Christianity and Orthodox Christianity and Islam has re-emerged.
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Many Arab countries are reaching levels of economic and social development where autocratic forms of government become inappropriate and efforts to introduce democracy become stronger. Some openings in Arab political systems have already occurred. The principal beneficiaries of these openings have been Islamist movements. In the Arab world, in short, western democracy strengthens anti-western political forces. This may be a passing phenomenon, but it surely complicates relations between Islamic countries and the West.
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The interactions between civilisations vary greatly in the extent to which they are likely to be characterised by violence. Economic competition clearly predominates between the American and European subcivilisations of the West and between both of them and Japan. On the Eurasian continent, however, the proliferation of ethnic conflict, epitomised at the extreme in "ethnic cleansing", has not been totally random. It has been most frequent and most violent between groups belonging to different civilisations. In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilisations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.
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sunday-times.co.uk
And it was written in 1993... prescient? Or 'only' very well analysed? |
