Dump All Those Paradigms: It's Nationalism, Stupid!
Dump All Those Paradigms: It's Nationalism, Stupid! Since the end of geostrategic competition between the U.S. and the (former) U.S.S.R and with the ideological struggle between Democratic Capitalism and Communism over, pundits have been proposing new conceptual frameworks for understanding the evolving global political and economic balance - or imbalance -- of power. Indeed, for close to two decades, scholars have been debating the direction that the "paradigm shift" in international relations would take. What would replace the obsolete bipolar international system and the strategic and ideological forces that had driven it? From Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" assuming a stable unipolar system under which the process of economic globalization and the spread of democratic and liberal values would widen to Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" forecasting a challenge to American power and values from the Muslim World and other civil...