Samuel Huntington’s seminal work “Clash of Civilizations” has awaked the world leadership to the new threat to world peace in the post-Cold War period. His study concentrated on the clashes between major civilizations. But the real world is suffering from racial, ethnic and religious sectarian conflicts rather than the conflict of civilizations.

During the Cold War, political ideology was the main cause of world conflict, although ethnic conflicts in newly independent countries began to surface. Political ideology and religion have similarity in terms of functions: both describe, explain, predict and propagate their views of humanity and the world, but ideology in addition masks and directs.

The main goal of political ideology is to gain political power to rule any political entity, whether local units of a state, a state, a region or the world. Religion in the contemporary world is not to rule any political entity but to lead humanity’s spiritual world.

The only exception is Islam. Forty-five countries of which a majority of the populations are Muslims recognize Islam as the state religion. Among them, 20 countries are Arab and five countries are Asian. In such states Islam performs the same functions as political ideology and consequently becomes a political ideology. The Muslim sectarian conflict between the Sunnis and the Shiites is becoming more and more serious and intensifying the sectarian conflicts within and between Islamic states in the Arab world.

The next sources of domestic and international conflicts are racial and ethnic conflicts. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination includes all kinds of discrimination based on race, color, descent and national or ethnic origin in its definition of racial discrimination. In actual reality, ordinary people distinguish people on the base of color and ethnicity.

Ethnicity is a concept encompassing descent (actual or imagined), culture (customs) and language. A state can be formed on the basis of one or more races as well as one or more ethnic groups. States which have come into being since WWII are mostly multiethnic states. Race is a scientific term and therefore ordinary people do not distinguish between race and color. According to scientists, the first thing a newborn baby distinguishes is color: If it is white and sees a white-faced person, it smiles. But if it sees a person of a different color, it cries. This means that to ordinary humans skin color is the most important distinguishing factor.

In other words, humans classify other humans according to skin color first and classify them as “us” or “them” (friends or foes). Humans are born racists. A single race can develop different cultures and form different ethnic groups. If people of the same racial and ethnic group form a state, it is called a homogeneous nation-state. Most former Western colonies are multiethnic states although their people belong to the same race.

Among the four foundations of the state -- race, ethnicity (culture), religion and political ideology -- political ideology was the strongest tie of the state during the Cold War, and afterwards ethnicity has become the strongest state bond. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, Muslim fundamentalism has become a political ideology and emerged as a strong determinant in the international arena.

As Muslim terrorist actions in the West and the ethnic conflicts in the non-West intensify and refugees from the non-West flood into the West, the world is entering into a new age of international relations: the age of racial conflict.

There are 57 ongoing armed conflicts in the world. Except for five interstate conflicts, the rest are internal conflicts. The internal conflicts are primordial conflicts (ethnic, religious and sectarian conflicts). Among them, 16 are ethnic and 15 are sectarian conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shiites. The rest are either ideological or political power struggles. It should be noted that regardless of the motives of these conflicts, many of them (13 among them) seek a separate state. Another noticeable fact is that most of these conflicts take place in developing countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It is not surprising because most countries in these regions are newly independent and their territorial boundaries are based on the colonial boundaries that their respective colonial powers created, disregarding the ethnic and religious boundaries of their colonial units.

These two main causes of conflicts are spreading to the Western world at a rapid pace.

The acceleration of globalization expedites this process. Liberal internationalists have been overjoyed over this rapid progress of globalization. But they have overlooked the destructive impact of globalization.

Globalization has accelerated the gap between the rich and the poor between and within all states mainly because the capitalist economy and free trade have accelerated the income gap between and within states, while all kinds of electronic mass media have exposed this wealth gap to the poor peoples in the poor nations to this wealth gap and prompted them to migrate to rich Western nations. As primordial conflicts in Africa, Asia and the Middle East aggravate, their victims desperately flee to their colonial masters’ homelands and seek asylum.

But these refugees and their former masters belong to different races and ethnic and religious groups. Under the circumstances, the conflict between white Westerners and refugees of color becomes inevitable. To make matters worse, the white natives in the West fear Muslim extremists among the refugees and immigrants. Poor whites are more antagonistic toward Muslim immigrants or refugees mainly because they are less liberal and more chauvinistic than more educated and wealthier whites.

Now and hereafter the whole world will suffer from racism and extremist religious movements. Both non-white and white-dominant countries are responsible for world peace. The former should make all-out efforts to overcome primordial conflicts within their states, while the latter should deal with the refugee and immigration issues jointly and in close cooperation with the former and international organizations.


By Park Sang-seek

Park Sang-seek is a former rector at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies at Kyung Hee University and the author of “Globalized Korea and Localized Globe.” -- Ed.