Identity, Culture and Challenges to the West Flashcards
What major theoretical conceptualisations have occurred since the end of the Cold War?
- 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?
What types of culture are there?
- Performative Culture
- Aesthetic Culture
- Material Culture
What is performative culture?
- Social organisation, or ‘how we do
things round here’ - Dress, greeting, child-rearing,
religious practices
What is aesthetic culture?
The arts, broken up into high culture (literature, poetry) and low culture (mass consumer culture)
What is material culture?
- Things and how they are used
- iPads, clay pots, stone tools, hair
brushes - Who these people are
What are the mainstream approaches regarding the cultural turn?
- 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)
What is the cultural turn?
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.
What are the critical approaches regarding the cultural turn?
- Culture, Power & Hegemony
- Ideas that circulate and are
normalised via culture help to create
the conditions for exclusion &
exploitation - Cultural Imperialism
What is “The end of history”
- 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
What did Fukuyama mean by liberal democracy’s having means of overcoming contradiction?
- 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
How did Fukuyama know that history was over?
- Capitalism has produced unprecedented levels of material prosperity - Modern natural Science has had a uniform effect on all societies - People are protesting for democracy
What was Fukuyama’s understanding of globalisation?
- All countries must resemble on another
- They Must:
- Unify on the basis of a
centralised state - Urbanise
- Replace traditionalism with
rationalism - Provide universal education
- Unify on the basis of a
- Consumer culture is universalising
- We need to go back to Hegel
Which established conceptions did Fukuyama take greatest interest in?
- 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
- Manifests violently at first
- 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
- Dialectical struggle that
- Motor of human history is
- Motor of human history is
What was the problem with Hegel for Fukuyama?
- 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
What was the “Clash of Civilizations?”
- 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
According to Huntington what is a civilisation?
- A culture entity of the highest
grouping and broadest level of
identity
- Cant get higher in regards to
what groups of countries have in
commonWhat civilisations did Huntington identify?
- Western
- Confucian
- Japanese
- Islamic
- Hingu
- Slavic-Orthodox
- Latin American
- Possibly African
He’s been roundly critiqued for this
Why did Huntington think all future conflict with be civilisational?
- 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
How did Fukuyama and Huntington approach culture?
- 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
- There is only one rational
- Huntington
- There is only one rational culture
- Cultures are linked to geography
and history and are immutable
(unchanging) and incommensurate
(incompatible)
What does a network society lead to and what might be the problem?
- Increase knowledge leading to action
- New forms of organisation (civil
society) - May not always be progressive
- Insurgent Groups
What are insurgent groups?
- Violence to achieve political goals
- Asymmetric warfare
- Networked
- Often have a political wing
- Can be characterised by civil society
What was the Bush Doctrine?
- Order through US power projection
- Unipolarity
- Unilateralism
- Pre-emptive strikes
- Regime Change
- Alliance Pragmatism
- American Exceptionalism
- Promotion of Western Values
What is the argument for New American Empire?
- 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)
