Huntington comes far on ancient dates, following the item of the items of peoples, civilizations and empires in their hatred and their escape. Then, as a wave in a raging sea to contemporary times burdened with conflicts and packed with inconsistent contradictions.
Through all this, you see him panting behind the search for the laws ruling the clash of civilizations. When the “Juda” is anchored cultural contradictions, it establishes strict rules for the state of permanent engagement, especially in the depth of the rift circles that nominate the causes of wars, severe tensions and complex relationships.
Today, more than three decades, we separated from the first appearance of the book (1993), here is the “clash of civilizations” that regains its current by launching the Palestinian resistance a new round of conflict called “The Flood of Al -Aqsa”. They are developments that raise the question about the explanatory ability of this theory of the course of the international conflict, based on its basic concepts in a civilized clash.
The truth is that we did not expand the expansion of the dismantling of the college of the clash as the book contained. The field does not accommodate that. We preferred to limit the conflict in Palestine as the model of that clash.
Transformations of the international conflict
The 1989 Malta Conference came to announce the end of the Cold War. The end of Silde, from its side, is a new world order, one of its most important features is the victory of liberalism over the directed economy and democracy over totalitarianism. Just as the Higle bet won over Marxism’s promises. In 1992, Fukuyama drew for preaching “at the end of history.”
Huntington did not deviate from that rule in tracking the facts of the international conflict. He saw that the world had turned for the first time from an “ideological conflict” between two camps, into a civilized conflict “between groups of different civilizations.
Hence, civilization became the new axis of international policy. Behind conflicts, confrontations, and all aspects of border contradiction between the forces lies a second power: its name is the cultural identity of the peoples. The economy is no longer the main driver of international relations as Marxism claimed, nor are it ideologies as the Cold War was expressed, but rather the civilization that does not slow down its lights revealing the deep contradictions between the patterns. This base has found its translation into emerging international balances.
The rearranging of the global order on a civilized basis means a complete coup in international hierarchy. The countries of the center in civilizations are the reference of that system through the culture in which they share with the member states in the same civilization. “The common cultural factors give legitimacy to leadership and the role of the center of the center in imposing order, for both member states, forces and external institutions.”
Hence, the basic ingredients for the new world -based world -based system are reduced to the perceptions of the center of the center and its cultural depth. On the basis of that cultural factor, new hierarchy is adopted in international relations. We come out of the balance of the Cold War, which was based on the existence of two great powers, plus their international bloc, plus their areas of influence in the third world, to new balances, which the state focused on the civilized pole plus the regional state with which it shares in a cultural basis, plus the area of influence.
This reflects the importance of the center of the center in the new strategic screening that led to a group of civilizational blocs that lead each bloc in which a center is a center.
The United States is a country center in the civilized West, Russia is a state centered in the Orthodox Bloc, and China is a country center in the Konovician pole. While “the civilizations of Islam, Latin America and Africa have no concentrated states.” It is an absence that is mainly due to the effects of Western colonialism in breaking up these civilizational entities. It is the fragmentation that carries a lot of the Saddam vow.
Saddam civilizations
The book is more like a prophecy, Huntington, in which the conflict engines in the coming times. The intended conflict was not “now and here”, but it was a reading in the “palm” of the future. It sees this future with the eye of “historical inevitability”. The “clash of civilizations” is “the last phase in the process of developing conflicts in the modern world,” as he says.
The civilization in the definition of Huntington is “a complex mix of morals, religion, education, art, philosophy, technology and material prosperity.” When she was linked to clash, it turned into “Pradigham”, which is guided by the interpretation of contradictions between peoples who always introduce themselves out of their civilizational identity and cultural stock. We are the civilizational, and they are the ones who are outside that civilization, from the constants in human history. ” Wars between countries of different civilizations are more fierce and bloody when sensing the threat of identity.
In this context, Huntington asserts that relations between civilizations will be more aggressive, especially between Islam and its neighbors. And that the most dangerous conflicts in the future will be “the result of the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic fanaticism and Chinese affirmation.” It stops a lot at the details of Western arrogance, so we see it followed the details that form it between the historical and cultural line.
Tarhi line separating the Christian Western peoples and Islamic and Orthodox peoples. It was historically linked to the Roman Empire in the tenth century.
A cultural line is related to the historical division between the Austro -Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, as it is the cultural limit of Europe, meaning that “Europe ends where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodox begins.
After the “red danger” demise, that separation line became the political and economic limit for Europe and the West. And the fall of communism was the West’s view of itself and to the world. He saw that his liberal ideology could rule the world. Globalization was an echo of that victorious thesis. This increased the possibility of clash. What the West sees as noble values that others see are pure colonialism.
Rift
The clash is made, according to Huntington, at civil division lines, rift lines or rift countries. They are the countries that “ride the borders on the areas of seams between civilizations.” Unlimited conflicts erupts at the division lines between countries or groups belonging to various civilizations.
The conflict may take place within the same state. He believes that those concerned are more partial lines of division are the main Muslims. Sometimes, “the issue is a issue of a struggle to control lands. At least one of the participants is the goal of one of the participants to extract and liberate a land from others by expelling them, killing them, or doing the two actions together, and the disputed land is often a symbol of identity and history of a party from both sides of the conflict or for them, it may be a sacred land in which they have a right that cannot be violated.”
This talk has some validity. Muslims were often the subject of subjugation and occupation at the seam lines, or in the depth of countries that do not condemn Islam such as China, India, or Myanmar .. Perhaps Palestine is the summary of that conflict.
The civilizational conflict in Palestine
With the end of the Ottoman Empire, Islam – the opposite of Western, Orthodox and Chinese civilizations – became “lacked a centered state.” That void fully fully folded colonialism and Zionism. But what Huntington did not realize that the political vacuum resulting from the absence of the nation’s state, has been mobilized by the civilized depth of the Palestinian issue.
Therefore, it is no wonder that the Palestinian issue has been assumed since the mid -twentieth century the location of the nation’s central issue. The main problem at Huntington’s thesis was that the conflict in Palestine did not see as a central conflict of an exceptional nature, but rather dealt with it as one of the ethnic or ethnic conflicts that make the contemporary world. He belongs to the wars of rift lines, like the India War, Pakistan or between Muslims and Christians in Sudan and others, so he attended in his book as an example of inference whenever his theoretical need requires.
Huntington believes that “the Western sponsorship is at the top of its strength in the face of Islam, for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, set the basis for an ongoing Arab -Israeli hostility.”
In the civilizational background of the conflict, Huntington looks at Palestine through its affiliation with Islam, while putting Israel within the Jewish Christian circle. Noting that the West has given this project a religious character, and made it “within the components of the religious dimension in Western civilization.”
The pages of history have indicated a deep and continuous conflict between Islam and Christianity. “Both of them were the other for the other.” The friction between the two sides has always raised identity and belonging issues.
During most of the conflict rounds, “Islam was the only civilization that made the West survive in doubt.” Despite Huntington’s attempt to research the reality of Islam, his perception was unable to access the philosophical and existential depth of that religion. His reading was re -reading in concepts dispensed with violence, blood and the rejection of the other. He walked on the “civilized depths” of the conflict without being it. So a faded picture came, barely uttered by the provisions of geography of maps demolishing civilized weapon. The conflict in Palestine becomes a struggle governed by the theory of “rift lines”, or “civilized division” lines.
It is a rough approach if we look at it from the angle of Palestinian geography itself. Palestine does not fall within the rift lines, as Huntington calls it, that is, the countries on a seam between two civilizations, but rather- with the logic of history and geography- is part of the Land of the Levant. It is located in the depth of the Arab map. It is the line between the eastern wing and the western wing of the nation.
The recruitment of the Diaspora Jews from the Earth’s parts was only due to the necessity of controlling the “secret” of the world. Then perpetuate the incident of retail, backwardness and cultural attachment. The intersection of colonialism with Zionism to produce this emergency.
He saw that we will see as searching for the area of contradiction between Islam and the West that the struggle in its depth is a struggle between religious values and secular values. It is the conclusion that prohibited the man to enforce the depth of the conflict, so it was suspended on its surface.
These relative criteria are not suitable to be objective to a struggle of the most complex conflicts in history. In addition to the difficulty surrounding it when the sorting between the forces.
In 1968, for example, the Fatah movement, which led the Palestinian struggle in the 1960s, announced that its political project aims to build a “secular, democratic Palestinian state.” Where are the opposite forces differentiating? In addition, the broad adoption of the Western model of politics in the Arab world and the third world has been adopted with the state of independence in the Arab world, and the third world.
Therefore, Huntington moves on to focus on the importance of the land and sanctities and the value of Jerusalem in the Palestinian -Israeli confrontation. He acknowledges that “the place has a deep historical, cultural and emotional significance for each party,” but it is unable to explore the founding texts of the greatness of the place in order to be implemented to the depth of the conflict.
It is true that he realized that the conflict is a radical struggle that does not accept middle solutions. But he did not realize that it is a struggle between the two points of view towards the universe, life and man, who are issued by two distinct philosophical bases. And when he escapes from all of this to determine the nature of the enemy, he sees in the singularity of Zionism the entire civilization of the West.
Huntington believes that the occupied entity is only part of the civilized West. Israel is not a stand -alone force, but rather a force that exists with others. The West planted it in the heart of the nation for civilized and strategic reasons. It was associated with the West with the “cultural kinship” link. It is the link that makes the member states of one civilization one family.
The concentrated state always takes itself “providing support and order for relatives”, as it is a reciprocal relationship. The Israelis often presented themselves as the primary defense line from the West, yesterday against the threat of communism and the Soviet Union, and today against “the threat of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the whole Middle East.”
Hence, we can understand how Western countries have called to support the occupation state after the launch of the Al -Aqsa Flood operation. And how it opened supply lines to provide their needs of equipment and weapons and even field participation in the aggression on Gaza. It is the link of kinship that was justified by Germany involved in the “Nazi Holocaust”, to be involved in the Gaza Holocaust; “We are all Zionists in a way.”
Huntington defended the idea of ”clash of civilizations”. Despite the loss of theory of scientific consistency, it represents a contribution to the mind of the civilized conflict in Palestine. This historical position in Gaza reflects a collision between two civilizational projects: one based on the centrality of God in existence, and another has risen to the centrality of man in existence. Be behind the civilizational vision lies the essence of the conflict.
There is no doubt that the conflict with Zionism is a continuation of the conflict with the West itself, as the Zionist movement inherited from the West its imperialism and its philosophical base, which was in light of the active sorting between the fruits of the civilians and the frustration of the barbarians, and the justification of the approach to violence and arbitrariness out of the preparation and urbanization of those who have no civilization. The broken cylinder itself is repeated by Netanyahu with a hatred to justify the war of ethnic cleansing on Gaza.
The opinions in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al -Jazeera.