Post-Secular Turkey (original) (raw)
2012, New Perspectives Quarterly
For 500 years the West was on the rise, culminating in Globalizaiton 1.0—the open system of trade, information flows and the spread of technology on the terms and in the image of the West. The benefits of that system over the last 30 years have led to the rise of the emerging economies. As a result we are entering the new era of Globalization 2.0 characterized by new forms of non-Western modernity and the interdependence of plural identities. The advent of this new era has been hastened by the fiscal and financial crisis in Europe and the United States. Turkey, with its Islamic-oriented democracy that has become a template for the liberated peoples of the Arab Spring, and China, with its effective neo-Confucian form of governance, are the most sharply defined new players in this multi-polar and multi-dimensional world. In this section, one of Turkey's most insightful sociologists examines the post-secular transformation of that nation. One of China's more provocative philosophers proposes a hybrid model that combines what has been learned from the experience of Western and Chinese governance in a way that “enhances democracy” in both systems.
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