Identity, Culture and Challenges to the West

Question 1

What major theoretical conceptualisations have occurred since the end of the Cold War?

Answer 1

- Democracy: The Globalisation of Civil
  Society
- The Communications Revolution & The
  Network Society
- End of History (Fukuyama)
- Clash of civilisations (Huntington)
- The age of Terror (asymmetric warfare)
- A new American Empire?

Question 2

What types of culture are there?

Answer 2

• Performative Culture
• Aesthetic Culture
• Material Culture

Question 3

What is performative culture?

Answer 3

• Social organisation, or ‘how we do
  things round here’
• Dress, greeting, child-rearing,
  religious practices

Question 4

What is aesthetic culture?

Answer 4

The arts, broken up into high culture (literature, poetry) and low culture (mass consumer culture)

Question 5

What is material culture?

Answer 5

• Things and how they are used
• iPads, clay pots, stone tools, hair
  brushes
• Who these people are

Question 6

What are the mainstream approaches regarding the cultural turn?

Answer 6

• Huntington, Fukuyama
• Cultural deficits: culture and
  behaviour create barriers to
  progress, democracy and growth;
• “The Battle for Hearts and Minds”
• Asian Values, African Values (Mugabe)

Question 7

What is the cultural turn?

Answer 7

The cultural turn predominantly describes a movement beginning in the early 1970s among scholars in the humanities and social sciences to make culture the focus of contemporary debates; it also describes a shift in emphasis toward meaning and away from a positivist epistemology.

Question 8

What are the critical approaches regarding the cultural turn?

Answer 8

• Culture, Power & Hegemony
• Ideas that circulate and are
  normalised via culture help to create
  the conditions for exclusion &
  exploitation
• Cultural Imperialism

Question 9

What is “The end of history”

Answer 9

• Francis Fukuyama (1992)
• Post Cold War
• The end of of mankind ideological
  evolution and the universalisation of
  Western liberal democracy as the
  final form of human government
• Post-Cold War Consensus: legitimacy
  of liberal democracy
• “man’s idelogocial evoultion” = final
  form of government
• Liberal Democracy has a built in
  means of overcoming contradiction
• History exhibits a Rational Pattern
  (Universal History, taking up
  somewhere, progress, end point)
  (Shared with Hegel, Marx, JS Mill)
• Says all the big question have been
  settled

Question 10

What did Fukuyama mean by liberal democracy’s having means of overcoming contradiction?

Answer 10

• inherent flaws in Communism etc.
• Liberal democracy’s values of liberty
  and equality can be leveraged by
  minorities against the state to
  include excluded groups

Question 11

How did Fukuyama know that history was over?

Answer 11

- Capitalism has produced unprecedented
  levels of material prosperity
- Modern natural Science has had a
  uniform effect on all societies
- People are protesting for democracy

Question 12

What was Fukuyama’s understanding of globalisation?

Answer 12

• All countries must resemble on another
• They Must:
  
  • Unify on the basis of a
    centralised state
  • Urbanise
  • Replace traditionalism with
    rationalism
  • Provide universal education
• Consumer culture is universalising
• We need to go back to Hegel

Question 13

Which established conceptions did Fukuyama take greatest interest in?

Answer 13

• Hegel
  
  • Motor of human history is
    “struggle for recognition”
    
    • Manifests violently at first
      (masters and slaves)
      
      • Dehumanises both
    • Dialectical struggle that
      results in universal democracy
  • Marx said something similar:
    
    • Motor of human history is
      contradiction in the material
      of society (class antagonism)
      
      • Dialectical struggle that
        ends with the triumph of
        capital whose
        contradictions beget the
        revolution into socialism

Question 14

What was the problem with Hegel for Fukuyama?

Answer 14

• Motor of human history is “struggle for recognition”
• Universal recognition stymies
  continued aspiration and creates a
  mediocre “last man”
• Inequality might be good for
  development so dialectical struggle
  continues

Question 15

What was the “Clash of Civilizations?”

Answer 15

• Samuel Huntington (1996)
• Future wars will be culutral and
  civilizational
• Represents the latest ‘phase’ in the
  historical evolution of conflict, is
  the nature of the post Cold War
  global order
• Countries should be grouped by their
  culture and civilisation

Question 16

According to Huntington what is a civilisation?

Answer 16

- A culture entity of the highest
  grouping and broadest level of
  identity
    - Cant get higher in regards to
      what groups of countries have in
      common

Question 17

What civilisations did Huntington identify?

Answer 17

• Western
• Confucian
• Japanese
• Islamic
• Hingu
• Slavic-Orthodox
• Latin American
• Possibly African
  He’s been roundly critiqued for this

Question 18

Why did Huntington think all future conflict with be civilisational?

Answer 18

- People of different
  cultures/civilisations have different
  views on how social and poetical life
  should be organised
- Mass communication and travel in
  increasing interaction and awareness
  of differences
- Economic modernisations is separating
  people form longstanding local
  identities (Dis-embedding, creative
  distruction)
- Globalisation is eroding national
  consciousness
- Religious Fundamentalism is rushing
  in to fill the void left by national
  identity and modernisation
- Westernisation is eliciting a
  chauvinistic response

Question 19

How did Fukuyama and Huntington approach culture?

Answer 19

• Fukuyama
  
  • There is only one rational
    culture that reflect human nature
    and aligns humans with nautre
  • Rational culture is created
    developmentally and can be taught
• Huntington
  
  • There is only one rational culture
  • Cultures are linked to geography
    and history and are immutable
    (unchanging) and incommensurate
    (incompatible)

Question 20

What does a network society lead to and what might be the problem?

Answer 20

• Increase knowledge leading to action
• New forms of organisation (civil
  society)
• May not always be progressive
• Insurgent Groups

Question 21

What are insurgent groups?

Answer 21

• Violence to achieve political goals
• Asymmetric warfare
• Networked
• Often have a political wing
• Can be characterised by civil society

Question 22

What was the Bush Doctrine?

Answer 22

• 1. Order through US power projection
• 2. Unipolarity
• 3. Unilateralism
• 4. Pre-emptive strikes
• 5. Regime Change
• 6. Alliance Pragmatism
• 7. American Exceptionalism
• 8. Promotion of Western Values

Question 23

What is the argument for New American Empire?

Answer 23

• Debate emerges in the late 90s
• Not all debate is critical of empire
• Resuscitation of empire both as an
  analytic and political term
• IR recognises its lack of theory of
  empire
• More systematic study of empire
  (network centric)