“The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order”
Samuel Huntington’s organized approach in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, leads to his comprehensive analysis of a modern day war. He declares that global politics has been "reconfigured along cultural lines”. (Elliott) This is an extension of his original article called The Clash that was in the July, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs. Huntington’s book has many different arguments, the one that stuck out the most to me is the argument that the end of the Cold War resulted in a change in the nature of world conflict, with post-Cold War conflicts being based more on culture, mostly defined by religion, than those that occurred during the Cold War.
The main theme of the book is culture identities and culture itself. This theme of culture is shaping patterns of cohesion and is a conflict after the Cold War. Huntington divides it into seven civilizations. These include: Sinic, Western, Islamic, Orthodox, Japanese, Latin American, Hindu, and also offers that of African American. He explains this in the five parts of his book. In part one he goes on to explain that global politics is multicivilizational, that the modernization is distinct from the Westernization and is not producing a universal civilizational in any meaningful sense. Part two explains that of Balance of Power; He states that power is diminishing in the west, the Asian civilizations are expanding their military, economic, and political strength. The non-western civilizations are reaffirming the value of their culture.
After the Cold War, Huntington reasons that culture replaced ideology (Huntington p.138) and the question turned from “Who’s side are you on?” to “What are yo...
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...ssumed clash of civilizations. Another obvious weakness is that Huntington is not able to devote attention to the strong influences of modernization that could be an effective solution to prevent the clash of civilizations. Instead, he sticks to his belief and conviction that modernization will bring nothing but make the situation worse.
What I got most from Huntington’s book was his guidance to America to always stay in control and never make swift decisions. I agree with Huntington that America, being the superpower that it is, will play a key role in avoiding the global clash of civilizations. I think the key is for the present-day government to start fixing its impaired relations with Middle Eastern countries through peaceful negotiations to be able to show their genuineness in fixing the problems and achieving and maintaining overall peace all over the world.
One of the biggest fears of the American people is that the concept of communism contrasts drastically from the concept of capitalism, which the United States was essentially founded upon. The United States, as the public believed, was not a land of perfect communal equality, but rather a land of equal opportunity. However, what made communism so dangerous can be succinctly described by Eisenhower who compared the spread of communism as the domino effect. As his secretary of state, Dulles, put it, the propagation of communism “would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and independence” of America (Doc B). In addition, the Cold War also planted the seeds of rational fear of a global nuclear war. As Russia caught up to the United States in terms of technological advancements, they successfully developed the atomic bomb as well as the hydrogen bomb, which caused Americans to believe that the USSR would use these weapons of mass destruction to forcefully extend their ideologies to the USA. In fact, Americans were so frantic about a potential nuclear disaster that it...
Within this controversial topic, two authors provide their sides of the story to whom is to blame and/or responsible for the “Cold War.” Authors Arnold A. Offner and John Lewis Gaddis duck it out in this controversial situation as each individual lead the readers to believe a certain aspect by divulging certain persuading information. However, although both sides have given historical data as substance for their claim, it is nothing more than a single sided personal perception of that particular piece of information; thus, leaving much room for interpretations by the reader/s. Finding the ...
From the time of the Spanish American war until the beginning of the Cold War the United States went from relative isolation to increased global involvement because of 1 utopian thinking, 2 business expansion, and 3 changes in foreign policy. The consequences on American society of that greater involvement were 4 America’s development into an “international police power”.
Odd Arne Westad, Director of the Cold War Studies Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science, explains how the Cold War “shaped the world we live in today — its politics, economics, and military affairs“ (Westad, The Global Cold War, 1). Furthermore, Westad continues, “ the globalization of the Cold War during the last century created foundations” for most of the historic conflicts we see today. The Cold War, asserts Westad, centers on how the Third World policies of the two twentieth-century superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union — escalates to antipathy and conflict that in the end helped oust one world power while challenging the other. This supplies a universal understanding on the Cold War (Westad, The Global Cold War, 1).
Woodard explains to his readers about this “cultural Cold War” and clash of cultures that is occurring internally throughout the nations. He labels it as an “internal civil war” that led people as far as physical violence. So now, not only do we, as a nation, still struggle as a whole with these essential freedoms, our individual pockets of people are also starting to crumble and fall apart. Historically, this was a low moment, culturally, for the United States. Our identity became much foggier. The few parts of our culture we might have thought to be solid or concrete, now collapsed from the inside
Perry, Marvin, et al. Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics and Society. 4th ed. Vol. I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992.
Fiorina, Morris P., Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope. Culture war. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005. Hunter, James. A. James Davison.
There have been many attempts to explain the origins of the Cold War that developed between the capitalist West and the communist East after the Second World War. Indeed, there is great disagreement in explaining the source for the Cold War; some explanations draw on events pre-1945; some draw only on issues of ideology; others look to economics; security concerns dominate some arguments; personalities are seen as the root cause for some historians. So wide is the range of the historiography of the origins of the Cold War that is has been said "the Cold War has also spawned a war among historians, a controversy over how the Cold War got started, whether or not it was inevitable, and (above all) who bears the main responsibility for starting it" (Hammond 4). There are three main schools of thought in the historiography: the traditional view, known alternatively as the orthodox or liberal view, which finds fault lying mostly with the Russians and deems security concerns to be the root cause of the Cold War; the revisionist view, which argues that it is, in fact, the United States and the West to blame for the Cold War and not the Russians, and cites economic open-door interests for spawning the Cold War; finally, the post-revisionist view which finds fault with both sides in the conflict and points to issues raised both by the traditionalists as well as the revisionists for combining to cause the Cold War. While strong arguments are made by historians writing from the traditionalist school, as well as those writing from the revisionist school, I claim that the viewpoint of the post-revisionists is the most accurate in describing the origins of the Cold War.
Upon hearing the mention of “The Cold War” most people begin to imagine and think of a time focused on political and military tensions between two main powers, the United States of the Western world and The Soviet Union of the Communist world. The context of the Cold War has traditionally been seen this way, as a nontraditional war without any engagement of battle, as a nuclear arms race between to profoundly different political and economic ideologies. Though being accurate this view of the Cold War is not complete. The Cold War was not just a nonviolent war between the United States and the Soviet Union but one affecting the entire planet in different fashions and on multiple plains. It is for these reasons that while events during the 1980’s-1990’s seemingly led to the conventional end of conflict, they ironically only facilitated the existence and continuance of the Cold War even until today.
I share the view of Edward Said who responded to Huntington’s thesis in his 2001 article, “ The Clash of Ignorance”. He argued that Huntington’s categorization of the world’s fixed “civilizations” omits the dynamic interdependency and interaction of culture. Said (2004) also argues that the clash of civilizations thesis is an example of “ the purest individious racism, a sort of parody of Hitlerian science
War.” Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies after the Cold War. Eds. Ethan B. Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 1-27.
Throughout history, Western civilization has been an emerging force behind change in foreign societies. This is the concept that is discussed in the article the West Unique, Not Universal, written by Samuel Huntington. The author makes a very clear thesis sentence and uses a variety of evidence to support it. This article has a strong very convincing point. The thoughts expressed in this article can be related to a lot of events throughout history.
Since the origin of times, influences have been made; merging, converging, and transformation have happened, giving birth to new cultures all over the world. Transculturation has played a huge part in these unions since it a “give-and-take process” (Chasteen 71). Furthermore, hegemony also helped the merging of different cultures, taking in account that hegemony is “a kind of domination that implies a measure of consent by those at the bottom” (Chasteen 66). These two processes tried to impose uniformity among the cultures uniting, since they need to let go of certain traditions to accept the new ones brought by the other...
Griswold, W. (2013). Cultures and societies in a changing world. (4th ed.). United States of America: SAGE publications Inc.
In 1992 within a lecture Samuel P. Huntington proposed a theory that suggests that people's cultural and religious identities will undoubtedly be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world, this theory is known as the Clash of Civilizations. Therefore this essay provides a criticism of this theory, whether I agree or disagree with it and also the aspects I like or dislike about the theory as a whole.