And he views some nations as caught in-between larger cultures, like Japan, Mexico, Australia, and Indochina.ĭiamond’s theories about European success don’t address the reasons Europeans dominated India or China, or why they failed to defeat Arabic Islam.Īnd it is India that causes the division of Eurasia into three parts. He sees South America as being ripe with potential to coalesce into a cohesive culture but that culture is still embryonic. He sees Africa as having been irrevocably scrambled by colonialism and the influx of Islamic and Christian theology. Huntington identifies the Russian Orthodox, Chinese Confucian, Arab Islamic, European Christian, North American Constitutional, and Indian Hindi civilizations as paramount. Those civilizations are usually identifiable by a language grouping, or a religious grouping, and usually have a clear geographic center surrounded by a more nebulous frontier. Long repressed by European colonialism, the results of two World Wars, and the Cold War, in the 21st century they are re-emerging and re-asserting their place at the center of world affairs. Huntington theorizes that modern political and economic forces are shaped by ancient historical cultural groupings. I believe very strongly that the proper lens through which we need to view current events is the ideas presented in Samuel Huntington’s book Clash of Civilizations.
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