Re: Kosovo and Hegemony

I applaud Peter Grimes's attempt. I also disagree on a great number of details.
The main conclusion, however, emerging from this rear-guard hegemonic war
is  that Huntington IS right in his political project.  We may decry his
Clash of Civilizations  as intellectually unsound and morally wrong. But it
is the likeliest default option of hegemonic defense in the nearest decade.
The current neo-Wilsonian vision of a unified and isomorphous world made
safe for the markets and democracy cannot be sustained financially or
militarily.
The alternative from the Left is fuzzy, and, given the movement
composition, mostly irrational, resembling the alternatives to Liberalism
within the core before 1848.
The conservative alternative is Huntington's.  It is the project of
consolidating the world power within the ruling elites of several
geopolitical blocs called "civilizations" and using the ideology of
"civilizations" as disciplining mechanism within each bloc. For the West
this means Christian coalition in power. For Russia, the imperial-Orthodox
revival espoused by the neo-Communists and post-yeltsenists. Incidentally,
some of their theoreticians are very much wallersteinian. One can read of
core and semiperiphery in many nationalist outlets.
 China becomes the vessel of Confucian values ruled by the same hooligan
geriatrics who were Maoists before converting to the Singaporean brand of
developmntalism.
Huntington does most obvious violence to logic and historical sense when he
defines the West excluding the Christians of Eastern Europe and Latin
America. But why should an ideological mythology be logical if it works?
Huntington's West is the conservative version of the N.Atlantic core. I
know even know some political scientists in Ann Arbor who claim that
Anglo-Saxons should be meaningfully distinguished from other Protestants.
Huntington presented a blueprint for the world of multiple racist
exclusions, with a fortified and internally policed core, and essentially
an orwellian scenario for a never-ending cold war between "oceania",
"asiania", islamia" etc. The question is will this cold war stay cold.
Yours,
Georgi
P.S. A few years from now many of our peace-loving and anti-imperialist
colleagues might regret that the NATO social-democrats didn't win against
the neo-nationalist regime in Yugoslavia.

Georgi M. Derluguian
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Northwestern University
1812 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, Illinois 60208-1330
(847) 491-2741 (rabota)