The “clash of civilizations” is characterized by pushing the effects of cultural differences to the extreme, emphasizing that not only differences between civilizations will become the deep causes of international conflicts, but also that groups of states will form within the civilizational blocs to confront other civilizations. States with similar cultures and institutions will see common interest.” The use of cultural differences to explain international conflicts may not be unreasonable, but it is also not new. He put forward the “clash of civilization theory” to find the reasons behind conflicts of interest, emphasizing that “Values, culture, and institutions pervasively influence how states define their interests. From this, we can see that the “clash of civilizations” cannot completely explain the conditions and causes of international conflicts in the post-Cold War era.Īs a well-known political scientist, Huntington certainly knows that international conflicts are related to interests. Although the “clash of civilizations” theory emphasizes how groups form within civilizations in opposition to external forces, this situation did not appear at all. From a civilized perspective, the Syrian civil war, which involved extensive international forces, was a war between Shia and Sunni forces within Islam. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran supported the al-Assad regime. In the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2018, the United States and its Middle Eastern supported the Syrian opposition, which tried to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime, without paying attention to the fact that many in the Syrian opposition were Islamic religious extremists. In the Bosnia-Herzegovina War and the Kosovo War, the Western group went beyond the “clash of civilizations” to support local Muslims’ “national self-determination” in order to dismember Yugoslavia. These wars were all related to Islam, but not to the conflict between Western civilization and Islamic civilization emphasized by the “clash of civilization theory.” This is because the two military operations carried out by Western groups in Iraq have been supported by their Islamic allies in the Middle East, and the anti-terrorism war in Afghanistan has also been supported by many local tribes. In the post-Cold War era, the largest military conflicts in the world mainly included the wars between the US-led Western bloc and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq in 19, the war beginning in 2001 between the United States and its allies and the Taliban regime and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Bosnia-Herzegovina War from 1992 to 1995 following the disintegration of the Yugoslav Union, and the Kosovo War in 1999. However, from the end of the Cold War to the foreseeable future, international conflicts have not actually appeared to be like this. The “fault lines” between civilizations would be especially likely to erupt into violent conflicts, and the world would appear as if groups of civilizations are in confrontation with one another. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations theory” divides the world into eight civilizations, and predicts that international conflicts in the post-Cold War era will take place between them. Inexplicable International Conflicts in the Post-Cold War era.Furthermore, this theory, in terms of its world outlook level, is negative and destructive, and its negative impact on the building of a new world political and economic order cannot be ignored. It neither foresaw the form of international conflicts in the post-Cold War era, nor did it clarify the general trends of the era. In fact, Huntington himself has repeatedly emphasized that this theory is a simplification and has its limitations, but, “as a simple model of global politics, it accounted for more important phenomena than any of its rivals.” In this article, I argue that, precisely with respect to accounting for the most important phenomena of the post-Cold War era, the “clash of civilizations” is an erroneous theory. Researcher and Deputy Director of the Institute of European Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Director of the Marxism and European Civilization Research CenterĪmong the international relations theories put forward by Western scholars in the post-Cold War era, the American political scientist Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” has been most influential, and has drawn the most criticism. What’s Wrong with the “Clash of Civilizations”?
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