This video provides a brief overview of main ideas that Samuel P. Huntington set out in a 1993 article in Foreign Affairs and later expanded into his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. (See my review of Huntington's book here).
Huntington was responding to Francis Fukuyama's highly influential 1989 article, "The End of History," which argued that the West had, by winning the Cold War, ushered in a new era of a single, dominant political philosophy and global culture. This was the source of many national political leaders in the 1990s proclaiming the advent of a new world order based around the idea of liberal democracies.
Huntington argued that rather than being the "end of history" as Fukuyama suggested, the end of the ideological conflict between the West and the Communists would instead usher in a period of conflict between the major civilizations; or, rather, that future conflicts would spring up along civilizational lines. As I and others have noted (see here and here), events have proven Huntington correct. The global war on terror, the conflicts in the Middle East, the fight in Ukraine, the Islamic colonization of Europe, the flow of Latin American colonists into the U.S., and the burgeoning cold war with China, are all aspects of intercivilizational conflict.
In any event, the video below goes over Huntington's ideas, describes the major civilizations, and the budding conflicts. One of the more interesting points raised in the video is that Huntington not only saw a clash between civilizations, but a rejection of the West and its culture by the rest of the world. The video argues that this West versus everyone else underlies the formation of the BRICS economic alliance. But there is no guarantee that the West will remain the dominant political, economic, or ideological powers.
VIDEO: "Get Ready for the Age of Civilizational War"
ThinkingWest (12 min.)
No comments:
Post a Comment