Globalization and the Clash of Civilizations

Abstract

In less than 150 years the world has gone from a global population of one billion to one that is now about six billion, and more than three-quarters of these people live in developing countries. As the number of countries registered with the UN rose, a troubling tendency emerged in the 1990s that looked at the world as ‘us versus them’ and defines and redefines the ‘other’. Certainly, Huntington’s ‘west and the rest’ segregation is one such unfortunate example. On a wider scale, a number of countries (or whole civilizations) were lumped into a group to be termed as the ‘other’, or targeted as the enemy (Huntington 1993). For instance, the ‘Moslem world’, or the poorer developing countries (once called the Third World) were readily molded into the ‘other’ in the eyes of the richer ‘west’.

This book is based on the notion of disembedded nature of equilibrium generated by globalization in LDCs. The point is pursued at length by B.N. Ghosh in his work on Gandhian political economy. We have many commonalities of thoughts that configurated the theme of the present book. I offer my sincere thanks to him for inspiring and successfully completing the project. I also thank my wife, Oya Atakan (Olga Atajanova), for her continuing support, love and encouragement.