ABSTRACT
There is a widespread consensus in Political Science today that the cultural factor is going to play an increasingly crucial role in the national and transnational political arenas after the end of the ideological cold war. According to this view the politics of identity will be topmost on the political agenda in the new era of globalization and regionalization in all parts of the world and in the relations between them. Some even argue that the cultural factor is about to outrank economic and political strategic interests in the arena of global political conflicts. A whole variety of causes for the unprecedented prominence of the cultural factor has been advanced in the last two and a half decades. Samuel Huntington has initiated this debate with his famous prognosis that cultural differences will form the main axis of political conflict in the twenty-first century at the global level as they are essentially irreconcilable in an era when the different cultures of the world are doomed to come in ever closer contact with each other (Huntington, 1996). This argument was – despite the host of sharp and profound criticism offered ever since its first introduction into the academic and political debate – able to develop a paradigm-building power that exercises its open or hidden influence even among the ranks of some of its critics, notwithstanding, meanwhile, the strong qualification by its original creator.
