Prejudice and War

Running head: PREJUDICE AND WAR
PREJUDICE AND WAR
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

1PREJUDICE AND WAR
In his article published in 1993, entitled ‘‘Clash of Civilizations’’, Samuel P.
Huntington argues that future wars would rather be fought over cultural and religious
differences and to attain cultural supremacy, rather than over political or economic disputes
(Huntington, 1993). His hypothesis was that future wars would be between cultures and
religions instead of between countries. However, after the 9/11 attacks on U.S soil, a ton of
academic arguments have charged the statements made by Huntington. One of them is titled
‘‘Terror and Liberism’’ by Paul Berman. In this 2003 book, Berman argues that conflicts
rather arise out of philosophical beliefs that persist differently across various groups. This
essay would be aiming at comparing the two arguments made by the two authors, and analyse
their relevance in the current scenario.
According to Huntington, the wars that will follow the cold war will be solely based
on cultural and religious differences, and not on political and ideological ones. He predicts
that America will remain the centre of power in terms of cultural dominance, while the rest of
the world could either try to match up, resort to isolation to protect their own values, or
simply attempt at making a balance with the west through modernization. This is termed as
‘west versus the rest’. He further reckons six reasons as to why civilizations would clash, all
of which are based on the assumption that cultural identity would be an integral part across
various cultures, more than ever before (Huntington, 1993).
Countering Huntington’s arguments post the 9/11 attacks however, Berman in his
book ‘‘Terror and Liberism’’ argues that cultures such as the Islamic culture and the western
culture, as identified by Huntington, do not exist distinctively. He states that this is in no way
indicative of a cultural warfare taking place in the future. To support his statements, he points
out that numerous extremists of Islam have been in the west for a fair duration of time. To