Huntington defines civilizations as a "cultural entity". Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, and religious groups, all with distinct cultures at different levels of cultural diversity. A civiliz

The Clash of Civilizations asserts that the West is in a unique situation. Countries that for the reason of culture and power do not wish, or cannot, join the West instantly compete with the West by developing their own economic, military, and political power. They do this by promoting their internal development and by cooperating with other non-Western countries. The most prominent for of this cooperation is the Confucian-Islamic connection that has emerged to challenge Western interests, values and power. Asian assertiveness is rooted in economic growth; Muslim assertiveness stems in considerable measure from social mobilization and population growth. The economic development in China and other Asian societies provides their governments with both the incentives and the resources to become more demanding in their dealing with other countries. Population growth in Muslim countries provides recruits for fundamentalism, terrorism, insurgency, and migration. Economic growth strengthens Asian governments; demographic growth threatens Muslim governments and non-Muslim societies. In general, states belonging to one civilization that become involved in war with people from a different civilization naturally try to rally support from other member of their own civilization. S. Greenway has termed the "kin-country" syndrome, is replacing political ideology and traditional balance of power considerations as the principal basis for cooperation and coalitions. This was witnessed during the Gulf war, as Safar Al-Hawali describes "The West against Islam". A world of clashing civilizations, states Huntington, is however, inevitably a world of double standards: people apply one standard to their kin-countries and a different standard to others. With respects to the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, Western publics manifested sympathy and support for the Bosnian Muslims and the horrors they suffered at the hands of the Serbs. Relatively little concern was expressed, however, over Croatian attacks on Muslims and participation in the dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Islamic government groups, on the other hand, castigated the West for not coming to the defense of the Bosnians as over two dozen Islamic countries were reported to be fighting in Bosnia. Huntington acknowledges that conflicts and violence will also occur between states and groups within the same civilizations. Such conflicts, however, are likely to be less intense and less likely to expand than conflicts between civilizations. Common membership in a civilization reduces the probability of violence in situations where it might otherwise occur. As the conflicts in the Persian Gulf, and Bosnia continued, the positions of nations and the cleavages between them increasingly were long civilizational lines. The next World War, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations, Huntington concludes.

The overall pattern of language use in the world did not change dramatically. Significant declines occurred in the proportion of people speaking English, French, German, Russian, and Japanese, that a smaller decline occurred in the proportion of people speaking Mandarin, and that increases occurred in the proportion of people speaking Hindi, Malay-Indonesian, Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages.

At the end of the Cold War several "maps" were introduced as to how nation-states of the world would exist. The first is of One World. This paradigm was based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War meant the end of significant conflict in global politics and the emergence of one harmonious world. The one harmonious world paradigm is clearly far from reality to be a useful guide to the post-Cold War world. The second is of Two Worlds. The "us and them", but more commonly the rich (modern developed), and the poor (traditional, underdeveloped or developing) countries. However the world is too complex to be envisioned as simply divided econ

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Approximate Word count = 4683
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page double spaced)