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During the Christmas holidays, a scholar who has had a profound influence upon my own personal thinking, died. Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard political scientist, died at age 81. He wrote many books, but two of his most recent had an enormous influence on my thinking—The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.
In the former, he analyzed a world in which the nation state and ideology are replaced with what he called “civilizations.” He argued for a world in which cultural identities—ethnic, national, religious, civilization—are central, and cultural affinities and differences shape the alliances, antagonisms and policies of states. The implications of this new reality involve the emerging politics of culture, the rising power of non-Western civilizations and the increasing cultural assertiveness of these societies. For that reason, America needed to abandon its Cold War thinking about the world. “The war of ideologies would yield to a ‘civilizational’ struggle of soil and blood. It would be the West versus the eight civilizations dividing the rest—Latin America, African, Islamic, Sinic [i.e., Chinese], Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese.” The enemies of the US (and the West) do not know borders and are not associated with modern nation states. Terrorism fits that description perfectly. Finally, the relevance and universality of western culture is now questioned. Islam certainly does not accept that proposition and it is one of the defining civilizations that Huntington cites. The US is only now beginning to understand that the seemingly ubiquitous western culture is not as appealing to Asia and to the Middle East. Indeed, the terrorists of 9/11 wanted to destroy that ubiquitous western culture. The current War on Terror is a classic “clash of civilizations.” He wrote this about Islam: “The relations between Islam and Christianity, both orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictional relations between Islam and Christianity.”
His second and more recent book is even more compelling. In Who Are We?, Huntington wrote of the “American Creed” and its erosion within America. Fouad Ajami summarizes his thesis: “[the key elements of the American creed] are the English language, Christianity, religious commitment, English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals—[these elements] he said are derived from the ‘distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’” The success of America has depended on the willingness of each generation of Americans to honor the creed of the founding settlers. Today, there is neither deep attachment nor deep-seated commitment to America’s national identity. He therefore envisioned three possibilities for America: “cosmopolitan, imperial and national. In the first, the world remakes America, and globalization and multiculturalism trump national identity. In the second, America remakes the world: Unchallenged by a rival superpower, America would attempt to reshape the world according to its values, taking to other shores its democratic norms and aspirations. In the third, America remains America: It resists the blandishments—and falseness—of cosmopolitanism, and reins in the imperial impulse.” Huntington preferred an America that was “devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that have defined America since its founding.”
His writing and thinking were provocative and thought-provoking. He will be missed.
See his book, The Clash of Civilizations, especially, pp. 84-101 and pp. 301-21; and Ajami’s essay in the Wall Street Journal (30 December 2008) |
