Chapter 1: The New Era in World Politics
One of the main themes of chapter one is that people define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs and institutions. They also identify themselves in terms of cultural groups like tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and civilizations.
The world was separated into 9 major civilizations: Western, Latin America, Africa, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Japanese, and Buddhism. Doing this provides an easily grasp and intellectual framework for understanding the world, distinguishing what important from what is unimportant among the multiplying conflicts and predict future developments.
Also past paradigms have been ineffective in explaining or predicting the reality of the global political order. He also developed a new Civilization paradigm to create a new understanding of the post-Cold War order, and to fill the gaps of the already existing paradigms.
Chapter 2: Civilizations in History and Today
There is a distinction between civilization in the singular and the civilization in plural. Civilized society differed from non-civilized society because they were settled, urban, and literate. The concept of civilization provided a standard in which societies can be judged .
Civilizations are comprehensive,They can't be fully understood without reference to the encompassing civilization. Civilizations are the broadest cultural entity. A civilizations is the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as history, religion, customs, institutions, language, customs, and by the self subjective self identification of people.
Civilizations don't last forever because they evolve, adapt, and are the most enduring of human associations. Their "unique and particular essence" is their long historical continuity. Empires rise and falls, governments come and go, civilizations remain and survive. "International history rightly documents the thesis that political systems and transient expedients.
Because civilizations are cultural and not political entities, they don't maintain order, establish justice, collect taxes, fight war, negotiate treaties, or anything that governments do. The political composition varies between civilizations and varies overtime within a civilization. Most civilizations contain more than one state or other political entity but in modern world, most civilizations contain 2 or more states.
Chapter 3: A Universal Civilizations ? Modernization and Westernization
One of the main themes is that the distribution of languages in the world has reflected the distribution of power in the world. English, Mandarin, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Russian are the most spoken languages and are or were the languages of imperial states which actively promoted use of their languages by other peoples. Shift in the production of power produce shifts in the use of languages. It is one of the central elements of any culture of civilization
Modernization involves industrialization, urbanization, increasing levels of literacy, education, wealth and mobilization. It is a product of the enormous expansion of scientific and engineering knowledge beginning in the eighteenth century that made it possible for humans to control and shape their environment. It is a revolutionary process comparable only to the shirt from primitive to civilized societies.
Human beings of all societies share certain basic values such as murder is evil, and certain basic institutions. Most people in most societies also have a similar moral sense or a basic sense of what is right and wrong. Humanity is divided into subgroups -tribes, nations, and broader cultural entities normally called civilizations. If people shared a few fundamental values and institutions throughout history, this can explain some persistence in human behavior but it cannot explain history, which consists of continuous changes in human behavior.
