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Showing posts with the label civilisations

'The Clash of Civilisations', 30 Years Later

I have selected the following, as the article is for subscribers only Samuel P. Huntington’s greatest contribution to the world of ideas was the phrase “Davos man.” This was his term for the capitalists to which our globalized socioeconomic order had given rise: highly educated, generally English-speaking people who profited from the world of borderless trade and travel, represented by the attendees of the yearly economic  conference  held in the small Swiss town of the same name. Huntington … was less sanguine than Fukuyama about how total liberalism’s victory had been. For him, the ideological struggle between communism and liberalism had not proved the strength and appeal of the latter but confirmed that no single universalist worldview could claim purchase on the lives of people across the globe. “In this new world the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups,” he writes in...

“A very dangerous epoch”

The historian and broadcaster Michael Wood, a professor of public history at the University of Manchester, says: “Everything that is going on at the moment, it seems to me, all links together.”   History has seen great civilisations in China, India and across Eurasia, “but they’ve not caused these crises that we are living through now, and nor has the African world. “You know what happened? Roughly 500 years ago, these small, aggressive maritime powers on the shores of Europe went across the world with their technology and created their empires by sea. “And I think what we are seeing now can all be interpreted in the light of the post-imperial [age].”  Other societies may now be enthusiastic participants, but it was not they who created western industrial capitalism, he argues . Related Anti-capitalist politics