What Was Huntington Actually Advocating? Posted by Heather Hurlburt

In preparation for a bloggingheads debate with Eli Lake tomorrow, I've activated my inner poli sci geek and been rereading the late Samuel Huntington.  You may think you know what he had to say about the clash of civilizations, and to a great extent, you do.  But just imagine if the folks who had their hands on the levers of power the last eight years had taken this peroration from the original Foreign Affairs article to heart (emphasis mine):

Non-Western civilization will continue to attempt to acquire the wealth, technology, skills, machines and weapons that are part of being modern. They will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their traditional culture and values. Their economic and military strength relative to the West will increase. Hence the West will increasingly have to accommodate these non-Western modern civilizations whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of the West. This will require the West to maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect its interests in relation to these civilizations. It will also, however, require the West to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others.**

**Edit- via the Boston Globe obit, I learn that he was a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson.  No wonder I have a soft spot for him.

I still find the underlying framework a bit cartoonish -- many Indians and Pakistanis would find the splitting of Bengal or Kashmir into separate Hindu and Islamic "civilizations" quite ahistorical; and much of the current devastating violence in Africa is within "civilizations" (Somalia, Congo, Zimbabwe, arguably Darfur which cuts across lines that are more racial than religious), just to pick two examples.  Time has not been kind to his assertions about the economic threat Japan posed, just to pick one nit of many.  Isn't the Iran vs. Saudi Arabia dynamic really a fight about two versions of Islam -- to the extent, that is, that it's not just a fight for power and influence in a way that any political scientist ought to be able to understand without reaching back for mystical categories of civilization?  And there remains the fundamental debate about Al Qaeda -- is it best understood as waging a war within Islam, a war in which the West happens to have chosen a side, or as waging war with the West per se?

Having said all of that, Huntington was onto one big thing.  Where there is new, fierce energy unleashed in the world in the last 15 years, it has come in the name of civilizational rather than political ideologies.  This doesn't mean those frameworks have to make rational, historical sense to outsiders; but it also doesn't mean they are immutable and can only be confronted with force and violence. 

As I recall his seminal work on the relationship between militaries and politics, which I read as an undergraduate, it similarly looked deeply and seriously at a factor that, in those ideology-centric days of the 1950s and 1960s, was too often overlooked.  But its weakness was -- and I am drawing on my 19-year-old judgment here -- that it then tried to use that one factor to explain too much of the political evolution in Africa and other de-colonizing regions, and that it didn't do enough to situate the military in its socio-economic context.

I'll let the real poli sci experts comment on that.  But perhaps this is a good moment to draw a lesson about the difference between being a sharp observer and cataloguer of how the world works and being a wise deviser and implementer of solutions for how the US should be in the world that is.  Speaking of which, Hat Tips to Mark Lindeman for unrging a reconsideration of the oeuvre and Dan Drezner for his post about Huntington the human being (which also has interesting comments from folks who knew Huntington).

Comments

[Zathras]

An interesting peroration, that, considering that the most important non-Western "civilization" -- that of the Chinese -- has already had its "basic religious and philosophical assumptions" modified by two radical innovations originating in the West: Marxist ideology and Chinese integration in the global economy, both of which were consciously promoted by the Chinese government. Modern India, too, would not be the country we know without the combination of the British imperial legacy and the influence of economic globalism, either of which Indians could have rejected but chose not to. Japan consciously transformed itself once in response to the pressure of Western empires, again in response to one of the most devastating military defeats any modern nation has ever suffered followed by American occupation, and a third time after emerging as the world's second-largest economy. In the most important cases, it seems that "elements of commonality" between Western and non-Western cultures already exist, brought into being by ideas originating in the former and adopted more or less willingly by the latter.

That does, of course, leave out the Muslim world. But does it really? I don't know Huntington well enough to know how well he understood or how carefully he distinguished among the many countries with large populations of Muslims. Surely, however, it is clear enough by this time that many people invested in one side or another of the War on Terrorism have used the "clash of civilizations" idea to obscure those differences -- sometimes using "Muslim" as a synonym for "Arab," even more commonly equating Muslim concerns with those of people living in the area stretching from eastern North Africa to Pakistan.

I have always thought this unwise in practice, from the American point of view. The absence of potential divisions in any possible threat should never be assumed. Beyond that, though, some of the most important Muslim countries long ago decided they had interests apart from the beliefs of what we think of as the most troublesome Muslims, interests largely consistent with or at least not in mortal conflict with our own, and products as much of conscious choices by these countries as of anything forced on them by the West. The "clash of civilizations" discussion has always seemed to me to give these shared interests short shrift -- again, I won't claim to know Huntington well enough to say if this was a flaw in his own thinking or in that of people who have picked and chosen from his writing for their own reasons.

Even acknowledgement of all this leaves troubling questions unanswered. What if a "civilization" -- however that term is defined -- comes to define itself by rejection of the elements of commonality that enable diverse nations to get along peaceably? Significant strains of thought in the Arab countries, in Iran, in Pakistan do just this; so does an ideological tradition long powerful in Russia; so do ruling elites in some African countries and leaders of armed militias in others. Is it really enough to think in terms of accommodation between the West and powers elsewhere with "different" values that happen to be profoundly dangerous values? How accepting does such accommodation require us to be of things like terrorism or even genocide?

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[Greg R. Lawson]

In this day of 24 hour news media and the cult of the soundbite, true intellectual achievements are becoming rarer as information rapidly proliferates. Samuel Huntington was a true intellectual. Irrespective of whether one agrees or disagrees with him, he shaped the perceptions of many not only in academia, but even more relevantly, in the world of policy.

I hope we can continue to produce thinkers of his caliber.

[Peace]

I happen to believe that ideology trumps civilization in defining a particular country's identity. In the last fifty it seems that various political ideologies have created their own views of various civilizations. In the nineteen fifties Nasser used the used the history of ancient Egypt for his own political purposes while the Muslim Brotherhood emphasizes the early Islamic period in Egyptian history. Iranian leaders also seem to pick what civilization that they believe bests represents their country, for the Shah it was the ancient Persia while the current Islamic regime admires the medeval Shiite period. Chinese leaders have also displayed similiar patterns, Mao wanted to get rid of the past altogether while his successors use the writings of ancient Chinese philosophers such as Confucious to legitimize their authoritarian rule. Civilization in these previous example seems to be an elastic term that regimes use to justify their ideological positions.

[Alana Ronald]

I listened, sadly, to your bloggin'heads discussion with Eli Lake.

PLEASE READ OR REREAD THE HAMAS CHARTER!

You, as a Jew, (Zionist), are an enemy, as you believe in Israel's right to exist, you and your ilk control world-wide money, media, and have incited Communism, WWll, and the French revolution.

Peace is not an option in article 7:The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree (cited by Bukhari and Muslim).

Article 13: [Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of t

Also Article 22 is most edifying...http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html

Do you want Israel to lie down and be annihilated?

With respect,

A. Ronald

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