Culture, National Interest and Politics: Thinking on Huntington’s Clash of Civilization

CULTURE, NATIONAL INTEREST AND POLITICS: THINKING ON HUNTINGTON’S CLASH OF CIVILIZATION War is a continuation of policy by other means. Policy is shaped by the ‘interest’ each member of the international system seeks to pursue. Whatever the composition of internal structure, the states will always pursue their vital interest and historically nation states have got themselves involved in conflict for the preservation of their interest. Within the domain of modern world, the interest was perceived to be fueled by ideological or economic factor. The demise of cold war has brought about a new vista about the security dynamics of the international system and it is perceived that “the great division among human kind and dominating source of conflict will be cultural”. In order to assess such theory, the central question is how the contextual factors of culture influence the interest which, in turn, defines the politics. It is imperative to understand that the nation state will remain as principle actors in the global affairs and hence the international system in the new world is not governed by ‘civilization’. That said, every nation state belongs to a corresponding civilization and their cultural entity plays a critical role to shape their political values. Historically, establishing the superiority of identity has been a crucial factor for conflict between the parties involved. Each party to any conflict composes a group of people who are willing to fight for their entity and they share a common sense of belongingness to each other. “Civilizations are meaningful entities’’ and prior to the rise of nation-state, civilization carried the identity of human kind as Huntington argued that ‘the broader reaches of human history have been the history of civilizations’. Therefore, conflicts of that era were the result of clash of civilization. The rise of nation state provided more meaningful and closed integration of similar values to create identity among the people to

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