The Young League Forum

CONSERVATISM      Conservatism is a form of political ideology that believes in the existence of social, political, and economic order, stability and the lack of change of political systems be it in cultural, customary and traditional practices of society or otherwise. In other words, conservatism advocates for status quo and if change must occur at all it should be by incremental or evolutionary.      The conservatives believe that change is good but it must be gradual so that it does not affect the tradition, custom and the social orderliness or practices of society. They advocate for small governments that will not intervene in the affairs of individual and their cultural practices. In other words, it seeks for the preservation, rigidity and continuity of the existing practice. The principle or tenet of conservatism opposes any form of change in existing system in society. Those who oppose change are called reactionaries, ...

CONFEDERALISM       Confederal system of government is a system of government based on structural arrangement whereby component or federating units are stronger than the central government . Under this system, central government is weak compared to the power of the component regions. Each component unit has legal right to govern and develop its entity at its own pace.      Contemporarily, confederalism has been loosely used to refer to a union of states in which each member state retains their sovereign power: like the United Nations, African Union, European Union, Organization of American States, Arab League, etc.     The following are some of the characteristics of confederalism: weak centre, autonomous union, flexible constitution, right of secession and so forth.    

COMMUNISM      According to Karl Marx, communism is the highest stage of socialism in which all forms of injustice, exploitation, man’s inhumanity to man and other deprivations will cease to exist. He went further to posit that even the state and its monopoly will wither away or cease to exist because it is a mere instrument of the ruling class to exploit the poor; the state is not an impartial being as claimed by the liberal scholars. Therefore, communism is the extreme form or last stage of socialism. It is a subset of socialism.      Karl Marx was the founder of the extremist and radical revolutionary movement known as the Communist League in the 1840s. He conceptualized the notion of communism in his famous book entitled the Communist Manifesto which was co-authored by Frederick Engels and published in 1848. He criticized the asocial nature of capitalist society and called for revolution which will overthrow capitalist mode of product...

COLD WAR Cold war was an ideological conflict between mainly the United States commonly known as western bloc and the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or eastern bloc immediately after the Second World War in 1945. It was an ideological tension, because what caused the war was based on two ideologies that dominated the world political, economic and social spheres then. According to Heywood (2007:133) “the term Cold war was coined by Walter Lippman in 1944.” He described it as “a state of protracted and extreme tension between countries or rival alliances that stops short of all-out war. The term is most commonly associated with a period of political, economic, cultural and military rivalry between the ‘capitalist’ western bloc and the ‘communist’ eastern bloc, and thus between the US and Soviet superpowers.” The two ideologies are: Capitalism ––– the United States Communism ––– the Soviet Union Analysis of Cold war: How did Cold War Start?   Cold...