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January 10, 2009
Huntington's Cultural Premise Worthy of Consideration
By Robert RobbSamuel Huntington, who died over the holidays, was a useful public intellectual. He forced Americans to think about things that make us uncomfortable and squeamish.
After the end of the Cold War, the assumption was that the world was in for a period of benign calm. Either the United States, as the world's sole superpower, would gently guide global geopolitics, or the spread of democratic capitalism would make the world less conflict-prone, reducing the importance of geopolitical power and influence.
Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard, sounded a strongly discordant note, with his Foreign Affairs essay and subsequent book about "the clash of civilizations."
According to Huntington, the Cold War had held in abeyance a reshaping of the world order based upon culture, primarily from ethnicity and religion.
Nation-states would increasingly align themselves with competing and conflicting civilizations: the West, Russian Orthodox, Chinese, Islamic, Hindu, Latin American, African and Japanese - although Huntington predicted that Japan would accommodate itself to the rise of China and work within its civilizational orbit.
Globalization would actually result in more conflict not less, since it reduces the elbow room each civilization has with respect to the others.
This was quite a splash of cold water. Huntington was saying not only would the world not be like we expected, but that we were not as we saw ourselves.
The tendency in the West, particularly in those heady days, was to see people and values as universal. Huntington was saying that isn't true. People are different. They believe different things and have different values.
Moreover, Huntington contended that people not only define themselves as what they are, but what they aren't - that there is an innate human need for an "other" to be against.
Huntington also fingered the Islamic civilization as a particularly likely source of conflict, referring to its "bloody borders."
After 9/11, Huntington's views from the 1990s seemed to be prescient and his construct came into greater vogue. Nevertheless, Bush's "war on terror" was anchored in the universalism Huntington discounted and warned against.
In this decade, Huntington provoked great controversy and bitter attacks with his book, Who Are We? The subtitle of the book was, "The Challenges to America's National Identity."
Huntington believed the essence of the United States was its Anglo-Protestant culture. There was a secular American creed that held the country together as it became more ethnically and religiously diverse. But the creed, in Huntington's view, derived from the Anglo-Protestant culture and needed it for continuing sustenance.
He saw two contemporary threats to maintaining America's national identity: intellectual multiculturalism and Mexican immigration. Multiculturalism diluted what immigrants were expected to assimilate into, while Mexicans had a unique ability to maintain their own culture while living in the United States.
There is much to quarrel about in Huntington's analyses. Despite differences in cultures, desire for democratic governance does seem universal. Electoral participation is high wherever it is introduced, including in Islamic countries.
Japan hasn't been brought into China's orbit. Instead, the rise of China seems to be stimulating it to affiliate even more closely with the West - consistent with Robert Kagan's construct that the main post-Cold War geopolitical fault line will be between autocratic and democratic states.
Mexican assimilation may be on a slower pace than past waves, but it is on the same trajectory. And a public consensus in favor of the American creed seems to be holding even as the dominance of the Anglo-Protestant culture wanes, although a more supportive intellectual class would help.
Nevertheless, Huntington's main point, that culture matters, is important. We pretend otherwise to our disadvantage, and possibly peril.
