Cultural Identity: Ideology or Nationalistic Sentiments

Huntington predicts that in modern world nation states will form groups on the basis of civilizational identities, so any coming conflict will be motivated by cultural identity contrary to any ideology or nationalistic sentiments. To explain why any upcoming conflict across different civilizations, he argues that heterogeneity among groups of people, increasing interactions, globalization affecting national identity, non-Western civilisations exploring their own identities, inflexible nature of variations Vis a Vis culture and focus on area based financial agreements. According to him, the confrontation will appear at two levels, lower and higher level.

At lower level groups living next to each other quake for control of territory and themselves, while at higher level they outweigh each other in financial and military terms as well as exploitation of IGO’s and propagate their ideologies. Then he explains how west exploits international institutions for her interests and imposition of their civilization values which are not parallel to others, particularly Muslim world. He describes torn countries where leadership is curious to be part of West and being challenged in their efforts by fundamentalists in the society. It will give way to clash between West and non-West and one of the popular reaction would be make an alliance against West. Further, he explains that there will be an anti-West centric alliance due to above mentioned reasons between Confucian and Islamic States against West, and both are working on enhancing of their military capabilities.

He concludes his essay with prediction that in the future there will be more and more clashes between different groups among different civilizations and situation will be West Vs non-West. And a conflict between West and Islamic-Confucian alliance. And to stop this emerging threat, he recommends to unify Western civilization, help other civilizations close to West, strengthen international institutions and take steps to stagnant Islamic and Confucian states by limiting their military capabilities plus exploiting internal differences. Lastly, he believes in long term West should maintain its defence and economic strength to any rising civilisation, also understand other civilizations and find elements which both share.

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