of the years to come will not be over ideology or economic interests,
but rather over cultural differences, between the West and Islamic
countries in particular.^79 This idea of clashing civilizations is appealing
because it is a huge and simple representation, which allows one to
paint a big picture with only a few strokes. Intellectuals on the right,
notably, have acclaimed a view stressing distinct traditions more than
universal traits, and force and insecurity more than cooperation and
distribution. On the left, on the contrary, this pessimistic worldview
has been broadly denounced. Whatever the case, Huntington’s per-
spective neglects the critical differences that remain within countries
sharing cultural characteristics. It overlooks the fact that, all over
the world, no matter in what “civilization,” social and political actors
disagree about the course their country should take. These divisions,
we believe, are most often organized along the left–right dimension. In
the end, however, this is primarily an empirical question. As we will
show in the coming chapters, there are good reasons to suggest that
the politics of left and right is truly global, which easily cuts across
cultures and civilizations.
Finally, one could contend that the idea of a global political clash
over equality is not so much wrong as trivial. Everyone knows, this
argument would go, that the left and the right are perennial political
categories, and there is not much to conclude from a statement of the
obvious. The previous paragraphs suggest on the contrary that the
left–right argument is far from uncontroversial. While it is true that
most people have a good grasp of the opposition between the left and
the right, this is not always the case for social scientists, except per-
haps when they think as citizens. In political science, for example, the
idea of a basic conflict between two competing worldviews has often
been neglected as too vague and too normative. The politics of left and
right may appear transparent to citizens and militants, but it has not
yet entered the world of the professional analyst of global politics.
Conclusion
Globalization has often been presented as an epochal transformation
propelled by technological, economic, and cultural forces, at the
(^79) Samuel P. Huntington,The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1998.
30 Left and Right in Global Politics