An Analysis Of Samuel P. HuntingtonS Book The Clash Of Civilizations And The Remaking Of World Order

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For the first time ever, after the Cold War, the world was turned into a bipolar stage set with the United States and the Soviet Union as the two poles. Prior to this, communications between states were either minor or nonexistent. According to Huntington, “For over four hundred years, the nation states of the West—Britain, France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Germany, the United States, and others—constituted a multipolar international system within Western civilization and interacted, competed, and fought wars with each other.” While the West was internationally interacting it also imperialized every other civilization throughout the world. There was no single place outside the reach of the West’s grasp. This point is extremely significant. So much so that Samuel P. Huntington in his book, titled “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” uses it to describe how and why drastic changes to world politics, economics, and interactions have occurred following the Cold War. With the fall of communism in the late 1980s, the peoples of the world began to identify themselves in a different way. Before, people had found commonplace in government, economies, and even ideologies. This was how people were thought to identify themselves. However, the post Cold War world is a place where people’s identities are cultural. Some may ask, isn’t a shared government, a similar economy and shared ideals the makings for a culture? The answer to this question is both yes and no, and an underlying factor still remains to be discussed, religion. Huntington argues that “Of all the objective elements which define civilizations, however, the most important usually is religion. To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions; and people who share ethnicity and language but differ in

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