Implications in Political Culture and International Relations

As the Western paradigm gradually shifts through these so-called crises, there is a shift of a more visible kind happening in the East, namely, the birth of a conventional democracy that has arguably outrun its usefulness in the West. This is in fact one of the most visible symptoms of this interconnected shift. There is a conceptual differential emerging between the collective mind-set of the West that is moving beyond democracy and the production-driven economy and the East where democratic impulses naturally emerge as demanded by a people who still have room to progress materially on the basis of equality of access and political voice. While the East is waking to a new democratic potential that is generating a renewed political identity and along with it a crisis of transition, there is a corresponding atrophy of democracy and socio-political culture in the West with its own transition crisis toward a new identity adjustment. In the Western experience, one can see three broad political stages in recent history. The first is ideological struggle. This is the struggle of the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries with the emergence of communism, fascism, and how they interacted with the capitalistic establishment.