defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self- identification of people.Ĭivilization identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.Ī civilization is. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. 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 civilizations. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food -with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribes- a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures-both bleak, neither democratic. The United States remains the largest and richest power with the greatest capacity to shape the future. The twin dangers that Americans face are complacency about the domestic agenda and an unwillingness to invest in order to maintain confidence in their capacity for international leadership. A strategy for managing the transition to complex interdependence over the next decades will require the United States to invest its resources in the maintenance of the geopolitical balance, in an open attitude to the rest of the world, in the development of new international institutions, and in major reforms to restore the domestic sources of US strength. The implications for stability in the nuclear era are immense.
_900_721_1585727285.jpg "gaius julius caesar bundestag")
The critical question is whether it will have the political leadership and strategic vision to convert these power resources into real influence in a transitional period of world politics. power in the 21st century will not be new challenges for hegemony but the new challenges of transnational interdependence. It also has the soft ideological and institutional resources to retain its leading place in the new domains of transnational interdependence. Unprecedented is that the cycle of hegemonic conflict with its attendant world wars may not repeat itself The United States today retains more traditional hard power resources than any other country. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. The end of history will be a very sad time. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing from the scene. This does not by any means imply the end of international conflict per se. And the death of this ideology means the growing "Common Marketization" of international relations, and the diminution of the likelihood of large- scale conflict between states. the fact that there is not a single large state in which it is a going concern underlines completely its pretensions to being in the vanguard of human history. For while there may be some isolated true believers left. The passing of Marxism Leninism, first from China and then from the Soviet Union, will mean its death as a living ideology of world historical significance.
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