Global Forces Cosmopolitanism Nationalism Civilization Discussion

Please give this a read first 

Civilizational identity   and   Cosmopolitanism are not always mutually exclusive. There are older Cosmopolitan civilizations that predate the modern secular ones of socialism and liberalism: Christianity and Islam span numerous national and ethnic regions and languages. In Medieval times, religion-civilization implied a single holy script (Greek,  Latin,  Arabic), a single holy book, a few sacred places, and a list of rules and a moral code, dietary rules, a relationship with God, and a common destiny for adherents. Though a world of several cosmopolitan civilizations, is not a world of a single global civilization, nevertheless medieval Christianity and Islam spanned numerous peoples and languages. Islam had its N. African, Turkic, Arabic, Persian, and Malay regions (the two largest Muslim societies today are Indonesia and Pakistan, by the way). In the 17th century Catholicism spanned Western, Southern, and Central Europe, North and South America.

Later, by mid 19th century there eventually arose secular ideologies that were universalist/cosmopolitan: Liberalism and Socialism (later Communism). Like religions before them, they saw themselves applicable to the whole world rather than being unique to only specific societies. They used terms such as “natural rights”,  “natural law”, “humankind”, “progress”, “the course of history”. They critiqued existing social, economic, and political conditions advocated reforms and even revolutions, seeing these as both necessary and inevitable. Old institutions, traditions, laws, practices, beliefs, even entire social classes were to be swept away.

Unlike the cosmopolitan religions, the ultimate destiny of the secular ideologies was earthly progress and the good life here on earth, not in the next world. They argued that humanity can advance to a better and better condition through the application of reason to society, economy, and politics, through reform or abolition of existing institutions. Humanity was not warped, sinful, and irredeemable except through Divine Grace. Instead humanity was improvable, even perfectible, reasoned being, one whose ultimate destiny is to achieve progress and to create a just, fair, and free social order on earth and to do this by its own efforts. Progress would emerge from human conflicts as people create laws, constitutions, institutions in order to better regulate their social and political relations: “Man became master over himself…subjected himself to reason and laws”. Ultimately, this would also entail progress in relations between states: those that became liberal republics would not fight each other but would form a pacific federation. Marxists instead predicted that international conflict would end when communism triumphs as communist societies will be peaceful towards each other, being free from the capitalist drive for profit and empire. 

Liberalism and Socialism both came out of Western European Enlightenment of the 18th century and proceeded to hold sway as the two dominant global ideologies during the 20th century. After the end of the Cold War, liberals proclaimed victory. Their path was now “the only show in town” for societies that wish to progress (see Fukuyama’s “The End of History” 1989). Advocates of socialism countered that liberalism too will soon decline and collapse (see Wallerstein “The Collapse of Liberalism” 1992) because the pseudo-socialism of the Western welfare state is now ending and is being replaced by a conflict between global capitalism and local labor.  

One of our authors, Samuel Huntington, published his own response (“The Clash of Civilizations?” 1993) to Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” 1989. Huntington argued that rather than the triumph of Western liberalism, we will witness the return of civilizational identities. Western liberal cosmopolitanism will have little global appeal beyond the Western civilization. 

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Like civilization and cosmopolitanism, nationalism and civilization are not always mutually exclusive: in many places civilization (religion, script) has helped shape and feed local nationalism. For example, for centuries in Spain the idea of a Catholic struggle against the Muslim kingdoms on the peninsula helped form Spanish national identity. Polish national identity is intimately tied with Catholicism and Latin (i.e. Western) script. Serbs and Croats speak the same language and are almost the same people, but Croats are Catholic and use the Western script while Serbs are Eastern Orthodox and use the Cyrillic script. Greek and Armenian nationalism were both greatly influenced by wider civilizational identity as Eastern Christian societies confronted with Muslim Turks. Recently the leading Western states have sided with the western Ukrainian nationalists, as had the Austrians and Germans in WW I and WW II, while Russia, Serbia, and Belarus have sided with the eastern region of Donbas. Like the conflicts that broke apart Yugoslavia, the conflict in Ukraine is in part rooted in civilizational identities – that now parade as nationalism: the western Ukrainians that fought alongside Austrians and Germans are today once again aligned with Western states (NATO). 

Therefore, do keep in mind that while nationalism is a powerful political force (though not as interesting as philosophies of Marxism and Liberalism), that can divide peoples from the same civilization (Germans and Poles, or Germans, French, and British;  Turks and Kurds, etc.), it is not entirely separate from civilizational identity. In cases where peoples of different religions were neighbors, religion played an important role in forming national identity (Spaniards, Poles, Russians, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Pakistanis, Hindus). So, in short, civilization sometimes helped form national identity, and yet in other instances nationalism divides peoples from the same civilization. 

Finally, don’t forget that many national flags have religious symbols on them https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/11/25/64-countries-have-religious-symbols-on-their-national-flags/ (Links to an external site.)

Questions:

Cosmopolitanism …     Nationalism….    Civilization

– Discuss the forces (social? cultural? whichever fits) and main ideas behind/within each cultural phenomenon above.   (use our authors to bulk up your understanding)

– Do these three cultural phenomena manifest themselves today? Please explain. Feel free to use examples from your country, from your observations, etc. but please try to relate it to our readings