Walid Abdel Hai
When Samuel Huntington put his idea about the clash of civilizations, he considered that religion and language (the two main components of civilizational identity) will make the general feature of the upcoming wars civil wars, although the military encyclopedia indicates that only about 6% of the wars of history were religious wars. Alexander Dogan sees the Ukrainian war as a war on “Orthodox traditions, including their spirituality, family values, and the historical glory of Russia.”The Ukrainian and Russian sociological structure together does not support either Huntington or Dugin thinkers, as most of the Russian and Ukrainian society are Christians, and even from the same Orthodox sect. The rest is a mixture of subsidiary or non-affiliated sects. In Russia, the Orthodox represent about 87% of the population, and therefore the two conflicting countries are Christian and occupy the first and second place in the number of followers of the Orthodox sect in terms of population.
On the other hand, Catholic Europe (especially central and western) has 38% of Catholics, and a significant percentage of them tend to escalate the conflict with Russia, while Protestantism is more concentrated in Northern Europe (more than 85%), Britain (55%) and America (52 %) are the most enthusiastic to curb the Russian rise.
This means that religion in this war has no place, for they are all Christians, and if we look at the matter doctrinally, the conflict in its central focus is between two orthodox countries.
On the other hand, a lot of Islamic literature considers that the “Christian” West has nothing but to set fire to the homes of Muslims to destroy the Islamic religion. And one religion? Rather, the official Arab and Islamic position appears to be closer to the Protestant Catholic camp than to the Orthodox camp, although the Orthodox position is relatively less bad than other Christian sects vis-à-vis Arab issues, and the Arab-Islamic media, starting with Al-Jazeera (the smartest media arm of the Muslim Brotherhood), Al-Arabiya and most Gulf channels. The rest of the Arab channels cheered widely for any Russian setbacks and extended their coverage in return for less widespread Islamic media (most of which are linked in one way or another to Iran, Syria and sometimes Algeria) that turn a blind eye to Russian setbacks and flee to other issues or cheer for any Russian progress..
Huntington saw Confucianism and Orthodoxy as two civilizations in which the seeds of potential conflict lay, and considered that Islamic civilization was the most likely to converge with Confucianism based on his political distance scale, which I claim he stole literally from the Klingberg model, which set the scale 55 years before Huntington’s model. He was the most cautious in his book Foundations of Geopolitics from China and the most inclined towards Japan, considering China the geopolitical base of the Anglo-Saxons. We see that the exchanged messages between Putin and Xi Peng indicate a calm and deep development in the strategic partnership between the two countries, in contrast to Dogini theorizing, even for a while.
Religion in the contemporary international conflict cannot be denied absolutely, but I think that it has often been a mirage “that the thirsty considers water”, but I tend to say that the international conflicts in their essence (taking into account some transient peculiarities) are between the contemporary model represented in the forces of interdependence (globalization). Regardless of the normative view of it (good or evil) and between the traditional historical model that adheres to religious and national identities, and during the decline of the old model, there is a transitional stage represented in building disintegrating international blocs of political geography and strategic geography, or what the French thinkers Deleuze and Guattari called (Gilles Deleuze). and Félix Guattari’s) refer to “Deterritorialization”, but this transformation is taking place with a gradual adaptation, voluntarily at times and unwillingly at other times. it seems thatDurkheim’s theory is the closest to explaining the relationship between organic bonds and the disintegration of mechanical bonds, and it is necessary to look at the issue on the basis of mega-trends and not on the basis of transient states or sub-trends, assuming that the kinetics of transformation will take a dialectical Hegelian approach, perhaps with longer timescales… Probably.
