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TWO: A straightforward discussion of Huntington's ideas in case you don't want to struggle with the longer articles following.

(A slightly abbreviated version of a straightforward discussion of Huntington's ideas in Clash of Civilizations  found at http://Hausarbeiten.de/faecher/hausarbeit/pot/19275.html , a German site that appears to have international relations articles from a wide range of authors.  I cannot read German so I cannot really evaluate the site, but this article is nice and clear.) Philosophical and Methodological Aspects of International Relations Lent Term Essay 1 A critical analysis of Samuel P. Huntington′s thesis that, after "ideology", "cultural differences" now form the dynamics of international politics. Gunnar Matthiesen 22 March 1999 Introduction It was before the background of the end of the Cold War and the resulting instability, although accompanied by a decline of immediate (military) threat, that Foreign Affairs published Samuel P. Huntington′s controversial article on "The Clash of Civilisations", which suggests that "the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic, [... but] cultural" while "the fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future"1, thus refuting the idea that the breakdown of bi-polarity has left the world in an anarchic, realist system of billiard ball-like, fully unrelated nations.2 In sharp contrast to other scholars...it is assumed that the likely outcome of this will be a clash between civilisations for several reasons. First and foremost, Huntington argues that cultural distinctions are basic and fundamental as well as being rooted in centuries of identity development, thus making compromise between different civilisations difficult. Furthermore, the process of economic modernisation and its weakening effect on the nation-state is seen as a force that separates people from their traditional identities, and therefore leads to cultural and religious fundamentalism. Other factors mentioned by Huntington include the emergence of culture-emphasising regional (economic) blocks and the West′s assertive attempts to spread its own culture. Since ideology is no longer an important political force, it is concluded that cultural differences remain the last mobilising force against unwanted (Western) influence. This essay addresses the question of whether Huntington′s approach is a valid explanation of post-Cold War politics. In the first part, it will be suggested that there are indeed some indications (such as Islamic fundamentalism or extremist identity politics, to name but two) that cultural differences are an important force to be reckoned with on the political agenda. The second part, however, will argue that economic globalisation, shared (economic) interests and political (or even military) cross-culture cooperation have already blurred or even overcome cultural differences to a large extent, so that an actual clash of civilisations, or, put more moderately, the emergence of cultural differences as major political driving force, is concluded to be somewhat unlikely, although cultural issues are clearly back on the political agenda. The return of cultural issues in post-Cold War politics ....Huntington seems right to suggest that during the Cold War, ideologies have been the dominant factor shaping politics. Equally, both super powers have gone to great lengths to ensure that their respective ideology would be perceived as part of their own national identity and, indeed, culture, and therefore given an additional raison d′être, while the other′s ideology would be portrayed as hostile and dangerous.3  ....After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, however, this situation came to an abrupt end. Subsequently, there was a re-emergence of often extreme identity politics and nationalism dominating politics in many of the newly independent states, leading to several ethnic conflicts within the former Soviet-controlled block. Cultural identity issues have been taken up - quite successfully - by extremist leaders to consolidate their power (which some of these have formerly held by dwelling on ideological principles) and to confront the spreading of democratic values. (The Yugoslav crisis is only one of many examples of this.) Equally, several African states are finding themselves in severe ethnic conflict with neighbouring states or internal minorities. However different from each other, both cases show that the emphasis on cultural difference has a strong effect on the perception of national identity in some countries, and that such notions are both capable of mass-mobilisation and very relevant in policy making. Even though the targeted area itself is fairly small in many cases, this can still be of major international concern, as NATO′s involvement in the current Kosovo crisis has made plain. Furthermore, Islamic fundamentalism, the notion of `jihad′ (holy war) and the extent to which both are accepted by the people on the one hand, and officially supported by some governments on the other, also suggests that cultural considerations have an important impact on international political reality - especially as Islamic fundamentalism is probably one of the single most dangerous and militant challenges faced by the West. Clearly, for fundamentalists, the mere questioning of their cultural and, more importantly, religious foundations and the infiltration of their culture by foreign values is good enough a reason even to go to war (in the widest sense, including organised international terrorism) against almost anyone who is perceived hostile. Any response to this by the threatened entities is, by implication, at least indirectly also driven by cultural differences.... It has also been argued - by Huntington and many others - that the West has been too assertive in trying to spread its own culture and values, which has led to stronger resistance against the superimposition of further Western influence on non-Western countries in need of financial help from the West. Indications of such an approach, often dubbed `cultural imperialism′, can be found in the conditionality of many development aid programmes (as it is the case with the EU′s Lomé convention) or IMF loans, both of which normally insist on the respect of basic (Western) rules of democracy and human rights before aid is granted. While this is often regarded as attempting to consolidate democracy and market economy as the universally most efficient political and economic system, others argue that the imposition of the Western system elsewhere aims at little more than to spread Western culture as widely as possible. In addition, there are also some theoretical arguments supporting Huntington′s thesis. Oswald Spengler, for example, observes that historically speaking, it can be seen that "mature civilisations do clash" because "at advanced stages, [they] tend to become hermetically sealed [...and] resist learning from each other"4. From this point of view, the fact that "mature civilisations are abundant at present [...] could be a very dangerous situation"5 and supports Huntington′s warning of a potential clash of civilisations. Furthermore, as Geertz argues, culture and ideology are often interlinked, since it is "a loss of [cultural] orientation that most directly gives rise to"6 the latter. Hence, if there is an overall decline in ideology, it seems reasonable to predict a resurgence of cultural orientation in return: ideological confrontation having ceased to replace strictly cultural identity politics, these are now logically on their way back into international politics. This does in fact not necessarily lead to outright confrontational politics, but even when trying to avoid a "clash", politics are in fact driven by cultural concerns. Among all the political uncertainties caused by the end of the Cold War, there is, however, one uncontested fact, namely that the end of bi-polarity has been followed by the creation of scores of newly independent states and the mounting of claims of sovereignty by ethnic minorities within and across states, all of which points to growing cultural awareness and the rise of identity politics, not only in (Eastern) Europe, but also in Asia and Africa. Consequently, one of the major challenges in world politics is to accept that there will be "a world of different civilisations, each of which will have to lean to coexist with others"7, because it seems likely that there will be a progressive re-emergence of non-Western cultures, many of which may have experienced colonial suppression and therefore share a desire to limit Western influence.8 The blurring of cultural differences and cross-cultural cooperation Nonetheless, there are several strong arguments suggesting that although cultural concerns are becoming more important in the formulation of international politics, Huntington overestimates their significance and is likely to be overly pessimistic when predicting a full scale civilisational conflict.... To start with, Rosencrance points out that Huntington′s approach is methodologically problematic as there is empirical evidence that the coexistence of different cultures in itself is not a reason for conflict to emerge. This is indicated by the fact that most modern states comprise several cultures within their society without causing major conflicts between different groups. More importantly, the enormous number of wars and conflicts within one civilisation (as for example in Western Europe history), which is far greater than the number of cross-cultural conflicts, suggests that the causal correlation between cultural differences and conflicts is fairly low.9 This is strongly supported by the fact that the vast majority of the present potential for conflict lies within one, rather than between two civilisations.10 Examples for this are numerous: the Middle East, for a start, is a hugely unstable region with scores of conflicts taking place within the Islamic civilisation (Iran-Iraq war, Iraq′s invasion of Kuwait, Egypt′s problem with internal fundamentalist terrorism, etc.). As Kerr points out in support of Rosencrance′s argument that civilisations do not usually act as coherent units, but often produce "as many conflicts within cultures than between them", conflicts within the Arab world "are just as common as the common hostility to Israel"11. Similarly, hostilities between Pakistan and India also fail to coincide with Huntington′s fault lines between civilisations. Furthermore, where there is a conflict involving two or more cultural groups, Huntington′s claim that "groups and states belonging to one civilisation that became involved in war with people from a different civilisation naturally try to rally support from other members of their own civilisation"12 is not an adequate account of the state of affairs either. While there have been no Islamic warriors rushing to the support of Muslim forces in Bosnia, the second Gulf war has seen an anti-Iraq alliance of the West, Russia and, significantly, Turkey (whose membership of NATO as a country with a strong Islamic community is quite telling in itself) and several Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. According to Ajami, this gave a clear indication of general national interests and "showed the lengths to which [states] will go to restore a balance of power"13 within the region. Quite clearly, cultural differences with the West have not been strong enough to prevent Western-Arab cooperation against another Arab country. Even more significant is the fact that this alliance is still largely intact, taking into account that Iraq receives little, if any, support from fellow Islamic countries, even in the face of US and British unilateral military action, thus suggesting that shared political interest is still considered more important than cultural allegiances. In addition, the undisputable threat which is coming from (mainly Islamic) fundamentalist groups is more of a terrorist nature than being a real demarcation line between civilisations - partly because moderate forces within its own culture are as much seen as their enemies as members of other cultures, and partly because strong as it may be, the movement cannot claim to be representative of the entire Islamic community. Furthermore, the general development of states in the world shows that the overall number of democracies is increasing. However, Huntington himself suggests that "democracies don′t go to war with each other"14, thus in a way deconstructing his own argument of an increased likelihood of international or intercultural conflict. Nonetheless, what is probably the strongest indicator against Huntington′s vision of cultural divides becoming the "battle lines of the future" is the degree of world-wide and cross-cultural economic and thus political interdependence, cooperation and communication brought about by the globalisation process and assisted by modern IT facilities and the Internet offering easy contact and access to information, thus facilitating mutual understanding. Virtually all countries have a vested interest in enjoying peaceful economic relations with trading partners of any culture, no matter how different. While cultural concerns may play a role in international politics, it is in the basic, shared interest most countries to achieve and maintain economic prosperity. In an increasingly globalised world, however, this is hardly possible if a government isolates its country from the world market by leading overly confrontational identity policies. Consequently, as the highly multi-cultural membership of the WTO shows, the tendency is to overcome cultural differences in economic dealings rather than to emphasise them in an attempt to assert one′s own identity against foreign influence.... This is shown by the relevance of economic considerations as opposed to cultural ones in terms of foreign investment, which has an almost excessive cross-cultural pattern. Much of German FDI, for example, goes directly to China, Eastern Europe and East Asia, while the US invest heavily in Latin America, China and Europe, and largest share of Japan′s FDI is targeted at the US and Europe. Since the invested capital is fairly immobile (due to investment in production and manufacturing plants in foreign countries which cannot be easily moved), there is a high level of economic interdependence, and any confrontation on mere cultural grounds would be economically devastating for all participants.... The final indicator that economic considerations can easily override cultural differences can be seen in the set-up of some regional economic blocks. Huntington suggests that these stress borders between different civilisations. However, it can be argued that he is wrong on two accounts: firstly, ASEAN, for example, is culturally highly diverse, comprising, among others, Islamic, Christian and Buddhist communities. Secondly, the economic interaction between these blocks is fairly intense and successful and not normally hampered by cultural differences, since economic considerations and benefits usually take precedence. Conclusion In conclusion, one can argue that cultural distinctions clearly play an important role in international politics, and indeed a more significant one than most ideological considerations, which have become somewhat redundant after the end of the Cold War. However, they are not the most important dynamics in politics: as Ajami argues, "civilisations do not control states, [but] states control civilisations"15. Equally, "the task for most countries is not to demarcate civilisations but to mix and meld them"16 in order to promote their economic well-being, which implies closer cross-culture economic ties normally leading to more political dialogue. In view of increasing global competition, it therefore seems adequate to suggest that economic concerns are the strongest driving force of politics - although the cultural element remains significant, especially where extremist governments or non-state actors who are prepared to sacrifice economic prosperity for power and identity politics are involved. These, however, are in a striking minority, and to isolate cultural divisions as the single most dominant factor determining international politics seems somewhat ignorant of the complicated, cross-cultural network of common economic and political interests and interdependencies. Bibliography Fouad Ajami: The Summoning in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 4, 1993, pp. 2-10 Robert L Bartley: The case for optimism, in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 4, 1993, pp. 15-18 Liu Binyan: Civilisation Grafting, in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 4, 1993, pp. 19-21 Clifford Geertz: Chapter 8: Ideology as a Cultural System in The Interpretation of Cultures, Fontana Press, New York, 1973, pp. 193-233 D R Gress: The Subtext of Huntington′s "Clash" in Orbis, Vol. 41, No.2, 1997, pp. 285-299 Samuel P. Huntington: The Clash of Civilisations? in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No.3, 1993,p p. 22-50 J B Miller: Review: Huntington′s "The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order" in Journal of Comparative Economics, Vol. 26, No. 4, 12/98, pp 833-835 D J Puchala: International encounters of another kind in Global Society, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1/1997, pp. 5-29 R Rosencrance: The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order review in American Political Science Review, Vol. 92, No. 4, 12/98, pp. 278-280 1 Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations? in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No.3, 1993, p. 22 2 Cf Rosencrance in American Political Science Review, Vol. 92, No. 4, 12/98, p. 278 3 Cf Geertz, The interpretation of cultures, chapter 8, pp. 193-233 4 Spengler, quoted in Puchala, International encounters of another kind in Global Society, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1/1997, p. 27 5 Puchala, International encounters of another kind in Global Society, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1/1997, p. 28 6 Geertz, The interpretation of cultures, p. 219 7 Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations? in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No.3, 1993, p. 50 8 Cf Puchala, International encounters of another kind in Global Society, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1/1997, p. 28 9 Cf R Rosencrance in American Political Science Review, Vol. 92, No. 4, 12/98, p. 280 10 Cf Bartley, The case for optimism in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 4, 1993, p. 16 11 Cf Rosencrance in American Political Science Review, Vol. 92, No. 4, 12/98, p. 279, quoting from Kerr′s The Arab Cold War 12 Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations? in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No.3, 1993, p. 35 13 Fouad Ajami, The Summoning in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 4, 1993, p. 7 14 Cf R Bartley, The case for optimism in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 4, 1993, p. 17 15 Fouad Ajami, The Summoning in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 4, 1993, p. 9 16 L Binyan, Civilisation Grafting in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 4, 1993, p. 19

SEVEN: Discussion at Harvard between Samuel P. Huntington and David Carrasco over "THe Hispanic Challenge"

What is an American? Discuss.

Author Huntington mixes it up with Carrasco and Little over national identity

By Ken Gewertz
Harvard News Office

Asking "Who am I?" may launch a quest to understand one's own identity, but unless one happens to be Michel de Montaigne or Jean Jacques Rousseau, the effort is unlikely to be of much concern to anyone else.

But asking "Who are we?" is bound to be controversial, if only for the reason that so many "I's" make up the collective "we," and that each has a stake in defining the group to which he or she belongs.

Samuel Huntington, no stranger to controversy, asks exactly this question in his new book, "Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity." The book has sparked numerous impassioned responses, focusing particularly on Huntington's assertions about the current wave of Latin American (and particularly Mexican) immigration.

Harvard Divinity School gave Huntington a chance to face some of his critics in a panel discussion Tuesday (Oct. 12). The panel was comprised of Huntington, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor; David Little, the T.J. Dermot Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict; and Davíd Carrasco, the Neil L. Rudenstine Professor for the Study of Latin America.

Huntington went first. Addressing a diverse, standing-room-only crowd of graduate students, professors, and other interested individuals, he began by putting America's national identity crisis in the context of the global shake-up of ethnicities brought on by higher levels of economic interaction, revolutions in communication and transportation, and increased waves of immigration. Other countries are asking the same questions we are, he said:

"Can Muslims be real French people? Can Turks be real Germans?"

"Who Are We?" asks whether recent Mexican immigrants, who are entering the United States in record numbers, can adopt what Huntington identifies as America's core identity, characterized by the values planted here by America's original English Protestant settlers - hard work, individualism, social reform, religiosity, and the rule of law. The question only takes up one chapter of the book, Huntington pointed out, but it is the chapter that has stirred up by far the greatest controversy.

To emphasize the importance of these core values, Huntington asked a simple question:

"Would America be the country it has been if it were settled by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? No, it would be French Canada, Mexico, or Brazil."

Little questioned the way Huntington went about defining America's national identity. Quoting Max Weber, he defined ethnic identity as "a subjective belief in common descent or common origins." According to Little, the operative word here is "subjective."

"The notion of national identity is normative, not descriptive. It is always a matter of 'imagined selves,' of what we want to be."

People make their identities, Little said. Identities are socially constructed, often in the midst of conflict, to establish lines between insiders and strangers. They are dynamic, not static, and subject to contestation between majorities and minorities.

Little criticized Huntington for treating American Protestantism as if it were a homogeneous and monolithic force. Conflict over values abounded in the early colonial period, he pointed out. Roger Williams, for example, broke with the New England Puritans and went south to found the Rhode Island colony, asserting that atheists, Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians should not be considered outsiders.

"Certainly this was a minority opinion, but Williams was a person who did not yield to the majority and continually contested the majority view," Little said.

Carrasco, an anthropologist who has written extensively on the religion of the Aztec civilization, focused more on metaphors and imagery than on systematic analysis. He took exception with Huntington's use of the word "core" to characterize America's identity, suggesting that a better image would be that of the crossroads.

"The notion of a core has the virtue of clarity and simplicity, but the historical and ethnographic record suggests that culture is a crossroads or even a borderland."

Carrasco also questioned Huntington's alleged description of Mexicans as lazy and lacking in initiative, ambition, and independent spirit. "I simply do not know the people you describe here," he said. (In replying to this criticism, Huntington pointed out later that these generalizations about Latin Americans were not his own but came from Latin American writers.)

Some of Carrasco's strongest criticisms concerned bilingualism and the danger Huntington saw in allowing Spanish to become a second national language of the United States.

"The U.S. has been called the cemetery of foreign languages," he said, referring to the hostility American schools and other institutions have demonstrated toward the retention by immigrants of their native languages.

He quoted studies showing that bilingual youngsters tend to do better on almost all cognitive tests and that most of them become fluent in English by age 17.

"In other words, we've got the crossroads in our brains, and we're better off for it," he said.

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FOUR: Review of "Clash" as historical analysis

This is an article that finds Huntington extremely conservative,  not to say reactionary but very valuable nonetheless in breaking people out of their assumptions about historical development.  It is from QUESTIA, an online library.  I have put this under the typelist ADVENTURES. Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order by Christian Stracke The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) 367 pp. After Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations" appeared in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993, the editors of that journal claimed that it had generated more debate than George Kennan's "X" article at the dawn of the Cold War. Huntington, writing at the dawn of the post-Cold War era, had undertaken to recast our general understanding of global political dynamics. The new dynamic, Huntington wrote, would be shaped by civilizational conflict--as nations coalesced into larger supernations founded on common cultural and historical dimensions, global political competition would consist of these civilizational blocs vying against one another for power, influence and resources. The global dynamic, Huntington argued, would no longer be one of national superpowers competing for allies and influence in every corner of the world, but instead one of broad civilizational "fault lines" along which the world's newly resurgent civilizational blocs would engage each other. Those who responded to Huntington in the wake of the Foreign Affairs article were, to say the least, of divergent opinions. Some praised Huntington for having the intellectual courage to break from the dominant realist paradigm of international relations theory; offering a more realistic, more subtle and more human approach to understanding world politics. Others, as Huntington had anticipated, rejected his decidedly anti-rational choice model for these civilizational blocs, in which mysterious centripetal force is engendered not by raw self-interest but instead through tradition, culture and history Nations would continue to compete as rational actors, these critics argued, in a continuation of the great game; when leaders see that it is in their best interest to bolt from their civilizational pack, they will do so and defect to a more attractive suitor in another socio-cultural camp. Yet, while the debate that ensued covered many of the important and radical elements of Huntington's international relations theory; the majority of the critics overlooked a much more serious and ultimately perhaps more interesting element of Huntington's new paradigm. This element comes to the fore much more clearly in the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Underneath his debunking of traditional models of international relations, Huntington offers an extraordinarily conservative but intensely anti-modern philosophy of history Huntington's thrust, which becomes more clear in its full-length book form, is not so much to challenge traditional theories of global politics, but rather to undermine a long tradition of teleological history In Huntington s implicit argument, history is not a progressive march toward some glorious finale, nor even the gradual victory of (mostly Western) universalist ideals. History is not progress, nor is it characterized by dramatic shifts from era to era. It is instead, as the German historian J. Burckhardt argued in the 19th century; characterized by a dramatic continuity "Man's mind and soul were complete long ago," Burckhardt, and Huntington with him, argue, and history is therefore only a reflection of that complete human mind as crystallized in the form of humanity's great civilizations.(1) A brief look at much of the body of The Clash of Civilizations reveals this fundamentally historical dimension. First and foremost, Huntington refers often to the mid-20th century English historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who, like Burckhardt and Huntington, was a conservative historian who rejected contemporary notions of teleological history.(2) Toynbee's influence on Huntington is clear throughout his treatment of what civilizations are and why they are important. Civilizations, Huntington explains, are broad cultural entities that unite individuals around common mores, traditions and institutions. As such, they are "the most enduring of human associations," and are therefore the foundations of long-term historical continuity Because civilizations are, after blood and tribe, the most important factors binding individuals together into potential political identities, they are naturally the most important actors in the field of global politics. Civilizations, Huntington argues, now increasingly determine the shape of, and relations between, multinational alliances, as well as the nature of domestic politics within individual nations. By nature of their potent psychological force, civilizations have always been able to transcend the particular material self-interests of their members, binding them together around common values that possess powers to motivate individuals much more profoundly than simple self-interest. Thus, according to Huntington, humankind's history is a continuous thread of intercivilizational dynamics. Huntington's anti-modern perspective, which rejects the dominant modern notion of history as progress and instead proposes history as continuity, is even more radically anti-modern considering his general treatment of civilizations as actors. Any truly modern, post-Wittgenstein understanding of civilization would necessarily include the concept of civilization as construct, which implies first the inherent artificiality of any civilization and second the constant potential for the innovation of civilizational content. Such a view of innovation within civilizations is perhaps best seen in a standard modern understanding of the history of Western civilization as a progressive fusion of classical, Christian and Enlightenment ideals, the latter being rooted in the past but in some important sense new and unprecedented. Under this modern conception, Western civilization, with all its internal divisions and constant innovational struggles, would have an extraordinarily difficult time trying to behave as a unitary actor. Regardless, Huntington portrays his six or seven great civilizations of today as unitary actors. Autonomous nations within a given civilization gradually merge, either literally or metaphorically, into large super-bodies that then behave as unitary actors. The world's important conflicts thus emerge not between individual members of these civilizations, but mainly between these civilizations as a whole. This notion of civilizations as continuous, fixed bodies is often reflected in Huntington's language. For example, the use of the terms "nature" of one civilization or another, or "natural conflicts" between civilizations, suggest some sort of essential qualities that inhere permanently within a given civilization. This conservative theory of civilizational continuity is best reflected in his rather blatantly racist image of a group of young Arabs who may be wearing blue jeans and listening to rap music, while they (by nature?) build a bomb to destroy a Western installation. Thus, no matter what cultural "fads" might reach a civilization, its members continue to behave according to that civilization's essential and unchanging nature. An essentialist idea of civilization is, of course, problematic. History suggests a host of empirical cases where changing material conditions forced civilizations to reject previous mores or institutions and, after a process of internal strife, innovate to adapt to new conditions. This notion of civilizations changing to adapt to new conditions is especially relevant to Huntington's argument against a growing universal civilization. A universal civilization, Huntington argues, is purely a Western dream; civilizations have been maintaining and even reinforcing their distinctions throughout the late 20th century However, if civilizations do adapt to meet new conditions, especially material conditions, as the modern view might suggest and if life within the world's major civilizations is gradually encountering similar, if not identical, material conditions, then those civilizations should tend to converge, at least to some degree, in the face of those similar challenges. Dwelling on these problems in Huntington's essentialism ma26 however, obscure the true import of The Clash of Civilizations. In many ways, the book is refreshingly new. Huntington offers a coherent case, backed by a wealth of well-researched empirical information, for overturning the dominant, primarily American notion that the end of the Cold War means the final victory for the West's capitalism and universalist ideals. Also it is nonetheless important to note that Huntington is planting himself within a long tradition, stretching back through Toynbee to Burckhardt, that rejects modern teleology in favor of historical continuity. Huntington is in this way by no means forward-looking, but instead is quite reactionary. (1) Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970) p. 22. See also J. Burckhardt, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1943). (2) See A.J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 1934-39 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946-1957). Christian Stracke is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of political Science at New York University. -1-

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Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Article Title: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. Contributors: Christian Stracke - author. Journal Title: Journal of International Affairs. Volume: 51. Issue: 1. Publication Year: 1997. Page Number: 302. COPYRIGHT 1997 Columbia University School of International Public Affairs; COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

THREE: Critique of approach to China in "Clash of Civilizations"

The article, "Clash of Civilizations" on which the book is based can be found for purchase at http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19930601faessay5188/samuel-p-huntington/the-clash-of-civilizations.html

Below is a review by Paul M. Monk which especially addresses the representation of China with a great deal of  historical context.  It is written from an Australian perspective.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK? 

Huntington on East and West by Paul M. Monk, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol 31 1999

The author uses a critique of Huntington's book as a springboard to examine several broad issues: (1) the rise of China and its possible implications for the West; (2) the idea that the West's days of primacy are numbered; (3) the question of whether the West has pioneered ideas — philosophical, scientific, economic, moral, or political — that that universal validity, or whether they are "uniquely" Western; (4) the concept of "civilization" — its foundations and boundaries; (5) whether withdrawal and defensiveness or boldness and openness will be the better prescription for the West in the coming decades; and, finally, (6) Australia's place in the West in the context of a changing strategic environment in Asia. This article concludes that it is not the cultivation of a single, defensive, univocal Western civilization that is our best hope, but embracing polylingualism and diversity in a world of unprecedented and anti-traditional change.

It is the central idea of the dramatic reshaping of the geopolitical order of things — in ways that could "dwarf" anything else that has happened since 1500 — that I want to concentrate on. 25Viewed in such terms, the world of the mid-1990s was not the post-26cold war world, but the pre-Sinocentric world. contrary to the famous proclamation of Frank Fukuyama, in 1992, history had not — and has not — come to an end at all Indeed, if old Harry Lee is right, then just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water of liberal internationalism, as it were, a behemoth is stirring in the deeps and the waters are about to be displaced on such a scale as to generate tidal waves, so that even the coastlands will offer no safety from what is about to happen. It seems quite odd to contemplate such prophecies alongside more sober estimates of

China's condition and prospects. In particular, it is necessary to critically examine Huntington's underlying supposition that Western civilization has simply enjoyed a sort of fortuitous ascendancy and that it is an illusion to believe that the ideas on which its ascendancy has been based are universally applicable or prdscribable. For this, in the final analysis, is the principal issue on which the whole debate about a "clash of civilizations" turns. I shall argue that, in fact, Huntington's position in this regard is internally incoherent and that this undermines the policy suggestions he makes, and would do so even if his prognostication about the extent of China's rise could be shown to be warranted. That the prognostication itself is open to serious question is actually only a secondary objection to his argument, though clearly an important one.

As late as 1800, by common scholarly agreement, the Chinese economy was still, in aggregate terms, the largest in the world — as its population was, by a wide margin, the largest of any political entity in the world. Yet, in the nineteenth century, it sank into decrepitude compared with the industrializing West. As late as the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire was still seen as a major threat to the security of Western Europe, but in the nineteenth century it also sank into such decrepitude that it became' known as the "sick man of Europe." This perceived decadence of the old civilizations "all points East" was notably expressed by the English poet Alfred Tennyson, in 1842, in the early days of the British industrial revolution and in the immediate wake of the First Opium War against China. In his lyric "Locksley Hall," he wrote: Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward, let us range; Let the great world spin forever down the ringinig grooves of change Thro' the shadows of the globe we sweep into the younger day: Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.  However, by the last decade of the cold war, the economic rise of Japan and the beginnings of China's economic transformation under Deng Xiaoping gave rise to the idea that a whole new epoch of Asian resurgence was under way. The real significance of the rise of Japanwas not that it represented a threat to America, so much as that it inspired emulation elsewhere in Asia, starting with its own erstwhile colonies in Taiwan and (South) Korea and culminating in the China of Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, and Zhu Rongji. What was just as significant was that, even as these East Asian economies truley "took off" economically (in a quite Rostowian sense) in the 1970s and 1980s, the communist economies everywhere, starting with the Soviet Union, were clearly running into intractable developmental bottlenecks rooted in their command economics. In China's case, this had been seriously compounded in the 1960s by the irrational and uncontrollable tendency of Mao Zedong to try radical politics and anti-intellectual flying leaps in economic development.

It is this agenda, nonetheless, and not any autochthonous virtues of the Chinese Communist Party or the traditional Chinese culture, that have made possible the growth that has occurred over the past two decades. This seems to elude those like Huntington who see in China's recent economic revival the resurgence of a traditional civilization. To grasp this is, already, to see beyond the more ill-considered kinds of geopolitical rhetoric that tend to cloud conversation about what  China is and where it could be heading. China's annual growth rate averaged 10 percent for the whole period from 1981 until 1995, which, of course, is what gave rise, in the mid-1990s, to the sorts of projections about China's future wealth and power with which we are chiefly concerned in the present paper. Military modernization was neither high on China's list of priorities nor observably occurring at other than a very modest net rate; and, moreover, once the series data going back over several decades were deflated it became clear that China's defense expenditure had decreased substantially in the 1980s and had only regained the real levels of 1979 in about 1992. In the interim, China had slipped so far behind the West in military technology that it was China, not the United States, that had reason to be alarmed about the trend of things. This, of course, was the underlying reason why China's defense budget had been increasing again in the 1990s — apart from the fact that economic growth made it possible.

Huntington, at some points in his book if not at all points, appears to subscribe to the most alarming and ill-founded sort of estimate as to the rate of China's progress in military modernization. Yet when Britain rose to its extraordinary global pinnacle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was no bigger geographically than it is now and its population was a fraction of its present 50 million or so.

China, conversely, even then, was as large as it is today and had a population of several hundreds of millions; none of these factors made it dynamic or immune to foreign intervention. Why, therefore, should these particular factors be assumed to give it advantage in the coming century, when if anything the importance to economic and political power and influence of those subtle energies, that China so lacked in the nineteenth century and that the Communist Party continues to suppress, will be greater than ever?

In order to understand how portentous a prophecy Huntington

is actually making, it is useful to actually set it in the five hundred-year perspective he himself suggests. Let us recall the precise words he uses: "The emergence of new great powers is always highly destabilizing and, if its occurs, China

's rise will dwarf any comparable phenomena in the last half of the second millennium."

Now, the last half of the second millennium dates from 1500, but might usefully be considered as starting from either 1492, when Columbus crossed the Atlantic to Hispaniola, or 1498, when da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The former date perhaps merits preference because it also happens to be the year in which the last of the Moslem Moorish kingdoms was destroyed in Spain. At any rate, it was the decade before 1500 that initiated what all those of us given pre-deconstructive Western educations were told was the "Age of Discovery": that era in which Christian, humanist, energetic, "enlightened" Renaissance Westerners voyaged everywhere into the "unknown" and brought more and more of the world under the aegis of Western civilization. That other perspectives are possible concerning what took place in those centuries was not, until very recently, something most of those in the West were accustomed to considering closely. There are still those to whom doing so is so counter-intuitive as to seem an affront to good sense and self-evident historical reality. Yet to the vast, civilized, and culturally complacent empires of the Ottomans, the Mughals, and the Ch'ings, the Western seafarers were very much barbarians disturbing the established order — certainly not the bearers of a recognizably "Western civilization" — seen as their equals, much less as their superiors. The resulting clash of civilizations drastically altered the world order and we may be quite certain that the way in which this occurred and the extent to which it did so are not remembered outside the West in the heroic terms in which it is taught to Western children. Quite the contrary.

Huntington himself links the two, seeing the Islamic resurgence and the rise of China as a dual and even allied challenge to the West. Second, because Islam was pre-eminently the civilization that nearly overwhelmed the West in the European Dark Ages, after the fall of the Roman Empire. It was, also, the great obstacle around which the Europeans needed to negotiate, one way or another, in order to get to China. Third, because the question of what clashes of civilization are and how we are conditioned to look at their histories, begins in the second half of the second millennium for the West, with the huge threat that Islam was then seen to pose to the West — in the decades after the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the Battle of Lepanto (1571). The sense of superiority that the Islamic world enjoyed over Europe in 1500 is easy for Westerners in the twentieth century to forget, but it is very much comparable to the sense of superiority the Chinese felt in regard to the Europeans, when the bearded barbarians arrived off Cathay; and the comparison is useful for understanding what may be at stake in the coming century, if Huntington is correct in his prophecy.

While Europe was caught between Islam in the south, the steppe in the east, the ocean in the west and the frozen wastes in the north, the world of Islam was in contact with the rich and ancient civilizations of India and China. From the one they imported positional, decimal notation of numbers; from the other paper, with immense effect both on their sciences and on their humanities, as well as on government and business. The Islamic world enjoyed a rich and diverse culture, vast lands and resources and a complex and flourishing economy. It also had a sophisticated and law-abiding society, in such contrast to Europe that, as late as Ottoman times, European travelers marvelled at the city of Istanbul, where gentlemen and even soldiers walked without swords. The Islamic occumene was one society...united by one language and the culture which it expressed. In the Arabic language, the Islamic world possessed a medium of communication without equal in pre-modern Christendom — a language of government and commerce, science and philosophy, religion and law, with a rich and diverse literature that, in scope, variety and sophistication was as unparalleled as it was unprecedented. The ossified Greek, debased Latin and primitive vernaculars of Europe

in the early medieval centuries could offer nothing even remotely comparable.... Compared with Islam, Christendom was, indeed, poor, small, backward and monochromatic....

Startling as this still sounds to Western ears in the twilight of the twentieth century, much the same might be said of T'ang and Sung China by comparison with Europe between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. By common agreement, China, like Islam, had attained a level of civilizational development by the end of the first millennium that Western Europeans conspicuously did not enjoy. Writing from the court of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, at Istanbul, to which he was the Ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq commented to his master, Emperor Charles V, in the early 1550s, that the Ottoman Empire would surely conquer Christendom, since the latter, being divided, irresolute, and debauched, would be incapable of withstanding the disciplined might of the Turks. Istanbul was detained only by the need to deal with Persia , he averred, and then it would turn its attentions to Europe, "supported by the might of the whole East." (but of course Europe was becoming quite agile at moving around)

Islam was certainly outflanked by the West in the sixteenth century, but it was also trumped by the vast acquisition of wealth by the West in the Americas; by the rise of systematic capitalism and technological inventiveness in the West; and, more subtly, by the rise of mercantilism in the West, that, as Bernard Lewis has observed, helped European states and companies to achieve a level of commercial organization and concentration unknown in the Islamic world. The extraterritorial immunities bestowed on them — as an act of condescension — by Muslim rulers, made it easier for them to exploit and, in time, to dominate the open markets of the Islamic World. 

And this of course, is the fourth reason why the parallel between China (or East Asia  more broadly) and the Islamic antecedent is useful. For is not this issue, of mercantilism and open markets (bestowed as an Act of condescension by the United States after the Second World War), precisely that which is at stake it the debate over the strengths of the East Asian model — especially as it was widely perceived before the Asian financial meltdown of 1997-98 — trade imbalances and the challenge to Western primacy by Japan and its emulators? Only, in this instructive instance, the boot was on the other foot.

If the thesis of that weighty and fascinating tome could be summarized in one sentence, it would, perhaps, be that powers rise militarily in direct proportion to their command over economic resources and decline in direct proportion to the insolvency induced by over-commitment to securing access to just such resources. In particular, Kennedy was at pains to point out to his American readers that the British Empire had begun to decline, relative to rising powers — most notably Americaitself and Germany — from the late nineteenth century, well before such decline was evident to any but the most astute of observers. He sought to highlight the indications that the United States is now at a comparable stage to that at which Britain stood a hundred years ago and that it should heed the warning signs. It is notable that Kennedy saw the United States as suffering from more serious over-commitment than the Soviet Union, that reads oddly now that the Soviet Union is no more. He also, however, saw China as the most probable challenger to the United States  in the not-too-distant future. What he did not assay was to show just how China's rise was likely to displacewhat led China into stagnation centuries ago and that continues to bedevil it because of the Communist Party's obsession with maintaining a monopoly on political power and ideological authority. Instead of such conservatism and monolithicity, what is actually needed is a certain amount of disunity, of dissonance; what we in market economies are wont to call competition. The Ottomans and the Mings and the Ch'ings suppressed such dissonance to the best of their ability, until it was too late for them to compete or adapt. The Europeans, conversely, were animated by a fierce spirit of competition with one another and this was the source of their vitality.

Let me quote Huntington's prescription for what he goes so far as to call the "survival" of the West: "The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique, not universal, and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies" (20-21). Now, I want to suggest that this begs some very basic questions. First of all, it is rather dramatic to write of the "survival" of the West being in the balance, when by Huntington's own account: "The West is and will remain for years to come the most powerful civilization" (29). Secondly, he asserts that the West must, at one and the same time, recover a sense of its uniqueness and give up its universalist aspirations. Yet, by his own account, it is Western Christianity that is, and I quote, "historically the single most important source of Western civilization" (70). As Bernard Lewis has pointed out: "The idea that there is a single truth for all mankind and that it is the duty of those who possess it to share it with others begins with the advent of Christianity...."

I would suggest that a good case could be made that the deeper universalism of Western civilization dates back to the speculations of the pre-Socratics, as Karl Popper argues in The World of Parmenides,  and as surfaces again with Giordano Bruno (as Hilary Gatti has shown in Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science 28) in opposition to the anti-scientific orthodoxy of Western Christianity in the sixteenth century, but it is Huntington's own premises I am concerned with here, for the moment.

My question would be: is not Huntington trying to have it both ways here? Would he have us reaffirm the uniqueness of our strife-torn heritage on a Catholic basis without universalist theological claims, on a Protestant basis without universalist evangelical aspirations, or an Enlightenment one without universalist natural law and critical reason? If any one of these, how does he propose that the evident contradiction be dealt with? If none of them, what Western civilization can he be talking about? Oddly enough, he remarks at one point that the West has derived some of its vitality and inventiveness from its multiplicity of tongues. This is surely true, and yet it stands in marked opposition to the observation by Bernard Lewis, to which I have already drawn attention, that the Islamic world of the ninth and tenth centuries ce flourished on account of the universality of Arabic as the language of a cosmopolitan and sophisticated civilization. The two observations intersect, as it were, in the sixteenth century, by which time the Arabic universe has given way to the Ottoman domain and the crude European vernaculars have become the vigorous languages of Shakespeare, Luther, Rabelais, Machiavelli, and Cervantes. Now however, Huntington

seems to suggest, we should learn once more to speak with one voice. His deep error here is to imply that Western civilization is or could be in the future something "univocal"; since it is radically "dialogical"...just 20 years ago, Chinawas ragged and poverty-stricken and its political leaders...[were determined] to mend China after the disaster of the Mao years...." (Labor mobilization during Great Leap Forward. Credit: Xinhua News.)

That has been the source of its fertility, interrogating itself, the external world, and other civilizations. This is not only its future, but the human future universally and not one from which there can be a fruitful turning back or away from.

Let us imagine, for a moment, that in the sixteenth century, the Catholic Counter-Reformation had succeeded in suppressing the Protestant revolts, north of the Alps , against Papal authority; that the Habsburgs had succeeded in universalizing the Holy Roman Empire, subduing their rivals in France and England and keeping the Netherlands in hand. Let us imagine further that the Ottomans had, after all, built the Suez Canal and embarked on a systematic program of naval development and alliance formation around the Indian Ocean littoral. Let us imagine, finally, that Ming China had decided against building the Great Wall and, instead, had divided, under the pressure of Mongols, into several separate, but vigorous states, of which at least two, inspired by the breathtaking voyages of Zheng He ( Sanbao) had set out to become maritime powers in the "Spice Islands" and the Indian Ocean. I submit that, under this completely hypothetical scenario, Holy Roman Europe might well have remained a mere jutting out promontory of Asia, its navies unable to take command of the Indian Ocean and ultimately being ousted by the Chinese from the Pacific and then the Atlantic; and that the Industrial Revolution might have taken place in China after all, with the obstacles to it — that have been retrospectively identified by Joseph Needham and Mark Elvin in the twentieth century — having been removed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Ottomans might then have gone on, at last, to conquer much of Habsburg and Papal Europe and the Chinese to colonize North America and Australia. Indeed, it tickles one's sense of historical irony to ponder the remote counterfactual possibility of the Chinese entering the Atlantic Ocean and, after the First Silk War against the Habsburg Emperor, in 1842, compelling him to cede in perpetuity the City of London as a trading entrep`t and colony of the rapidly industrializing state of Great Guangzhou. My more serious point is that it was not by trying to prevent rapid change or avoid dangerous ventures that Europe emerged from the Dark Ages and went on to create, by force and invention, chicanery and science, what is universally called the modern world, with its expanding universe cosmology and its solar calendar. For anything like these high dramas to be acted out, I suggest, we would need to see at least three things over the next generation: the massive, sustained growth of the Chinese economy at a rate and for a period of time unprecedented in all economic history; the unrelenting commitment of China to a military buildup that could allow it, by 2025, to overtake the United States in terms of Pacific naval power and strategic air power, and the defection of Japan and even the European Union from the U.S. alliance, in favor of an alignment with China. Under these improbable conditions, especially if accompanied by a deepseated and unappeasable Chinese thirst for "revenge" against the West, we might at least imagine a concerted Chinese effort to humiliate and subordinate the United States of America. . This would siurely result in a hegemonic war of historic proportions and most uncertain outcome. Let us allow, however, for Lee Kwan Yew's sake, as it were, that China meaningfully won such a war. The way might then be more or less clear for the "biggest player in the history of man" to strut its hour upon the stage and do things that would "dwarf any comparable phenomenon in the last half of the second millennium." Merely to state this scenario, however, is to realize how much further from reality it is than Huntington's inflated language implies.

In actual fact, there are observable constraints on the growth of Chinese power, independent of any notional U.S.effort to contain it, that should lead us to more sober estimates of how big this "biggest player" will become. These constraints are such, I believe, that China's continued growth will be caught between the imperative of unity for the sake of stability and market coherence, on the one hand; and the pressures for fragmentation and evolution, for the sake of flexibility and vitality, on the other hand. I have never been impressed by the argument that China's sheer geographic and demographic size makes it a supreme player. Its size, like that of many an empire before it, is actually one of its greatest liabilities. It was Deng Xiaoping himself, during a visit to Singapore

in the early 1980s, who was overheard to remark, "Ah! If only I had just Shanghai!" The very uniformity of language and ideology that are entailed in empire hamper the capacity of its subjects to maneuver, learn, and reinvent themselves. Even more decisive, however, is the consideration that China, so long turned in on itself, has finally turned outward into a world that has changed radically from the one in which earlier imperial powers carved out their spheres of hegemony. In such a world, China is almost certainly at its maximum feasible territorial extent already and would find no cost-efficient rationale for even attempting significant further expansion: It follows from these premises that Chinacould disintegrate or disaggregate quite as readily as it may exert imperial sway over Asia. And even if it does not do so, the conditions of its continued economic growth are more likely to make it a cosmopolitan and commercial civilization than an imperialist one, even if its civilizalional influence does gain a new lease on life in places like Central Asia, in the manner of the great T'ang dynasty of the eighth and ninth centuries ce. It was something along these lines, I should think, that Ross Gamaut had in mind, when he remarked, in early 1997, that China's rise is something "immeasurably" to Australia's benefit. He may have been too sanguine, but plainly he had a very different view of the matter to that of Huntington. For Huntington sees Australia's efforts to enmesh itself more fully in Asia as self-defeating. He sees only a clash of civilizations in the future and urges Australia to draw in under the shelter of the U. S.mantle (as if it were not there already) and affirm its Western identity, as its last best hope, if it does not want to be swept away in the rising tide.

One could be forgiven for thinking, both in 1997 and in 1999, that Huntington has been working as a personal adviser to Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Yet the choice is neither as simple nor as craven as Huntington presents it: between defecting guilelessly and fatefully from the West and huddling under the Western banner as it retreats. What, after all, does it mean to be "Asian"? The term is itself of European derivation. Indeed, in its very beginning, as "Azawa," it was Hittite name for the Aegean coast of Anatolia, only gradually becoming " Asia " to the Greeks, then Asia Minor

to the Romans, as the Western sense of "Asia" extended indefinitely eastwards from Athens. By Huntington's own account, Asia is a vast geographic region filled with extremely diverse civilizations: Sinic or Confucian, Japanese, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Russian. Why not, therefore, also Australian — however its civilization might be defined? Besides, where is the spice or enticement in doing what he counsels us to do; withdrawing into a conservative, defensive, culturally diffident bastion of "Western civilization" to fend off the strange and the challenging? Such has not been the Western way since the Greeks explored the Mediterranean and planted their colonies on its many then wild and daunting shores. That way and the way of the Greek natural scientists and skeptical philosophers was to inquire, contradict, experiment, trade, negotiate. A similar spirit arose after the downfall of the Roman Empire, giving rise slowly to what Huntington sees as Western civilization — essentially Western Christendom. Through many centuries, the post-Roman Western barbarians learned from the Arabic Muslims, even as they fought them; developed various state forms; invented the politics of contestation and civil liberties; invented modern capitalism and experimental science; and fought their way free of theological orthodoxy to a civilization of which one could truly say e pluribus unum. And this stands in significant contrast with the fate of those other civilizations, especially after 1500, that looked inward rather than outward, to the past rather than to the future, and to dogmatic creeds rather than to critical reason. That Huntington should counsel us now to do likewise is poor counsel indeed and should on no account be heeded.

Huntington calls upon Western civilization in general to give up its universalist pretensions; something which, as I have remarked, it cannot do without ceasing to be Western civilization: since its religion, its science, and its political philosophy are all alike universalist in their foundations. He then urges that a world order of co-existing civilizations be brought into being, along the lines of the "peaceful co-existence" attempted during the height of the cold war. Now as he actually admits, this would require the acceptance by other civilizations of international norms of a kind that can only be traced to Grotius and Western diplomatic discourse.

How does Huntington get out of this peculiar philosophical contradiction? He doesn't, because he doesn't appear to so much as recognize that he is caught in it. We must do better than this. Australia, for one, clearly requires the growing acceptance of international norms conducive to strategic and economic stability. The effort to develop such norms has been a major feature of twentieth-century international relations and it certainly has not proceeded by means of retreats into civilizatimal bunkers. In any case, it is frankly difficult to see how civilizational blocs of the kind Huntington calls for would work. Even in the general war he sketches out as happening in 2010, China opens its game by attacking its Sinic kin in Vietnam, while Australia works closely with its giant Muslim neighbor, Indonesia, to check Chinese aggression. So much, one has to comment, for "civilizational blocs"! And when does he anticipate that Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey will form even a regional Islamic bloc? Under the aegis of which of them?

Early in this paper, I quoted Alfred Tennyson on the decrepitude of nineteenth-century China. Let me quote once more from the same lyric poem, "Locksley Hall", penned in 1842, on the old dream, even then, of a peaceful world: There has always been something rather millenarian about the hope for a "Federation of the world" and an end to human strife. It is, therefore, quite odd to see Huntington, in one and the same tome; prophesying the clash of civilizations and calling for a federation of civilizations to hold the general peace. If it could be shown that nation states were, indeed, passing away into civilizational blocs and given that one would need some form of dialogue between the real powers, then his suggestion might have some merit, but of course he begs the question by urging that nation states coalesce into the dangerous and unnatural blocs required for his prescription to have any purpose to serve.

Our freedom and inventiveness are rooted in the protean multiplicity and mutability that derive from our being the language animal. Only in the twentieth century have we truly begun to make headway, as Franz Kafka intimated in his parable "The Great Wall of China", in the immense task of understanding our humanity "after Babel

" — i.e., in terms of the astonishing variety of human languages and what that wealth and prolixity of the human mind signifies. Linguistic variety and the capacity of human beings to rethink themselves through language are far deeper realities than the mere civilizational differences Huntington seeks to highlight. If, therefore, out of a commitment to human freedom and the human future, consistent with the brightest hopes of the modern world, one was to prescribe a simple rule for the twenty-first century, I want to suggest that it would not be that we should all decide which civilization we belong to and draw in behind its battlements to withstand the siege of otherness, but rather that we should all strive to become polylingual, so that possibilities for communication across all manner of boundaries and obscurities will be multiplied manifold. Then, in the great oecumene of third millennium civilization, the few centuries of confusion and strife that Huntington refers us back to in foreboding a clash of civilizations could pale into insignificance by comparison with the astonishing multiplicity of real and, possible worlds that open up before us, in the manner of the cosmology of Giordano Bruno. To assay this future, whether one is Western, Muslim or Chinese, will be to sail out into the blue oceans. To opt for anything resembling Huntington's view of things would be to settle in behind the delusion and implicit decay of the Great Wall.

ONE: Introduction to Samuel P. Huntington's ideas in "Clash of Civilizations" and "The Hispanic Challenge."

Samuel P. Huntington says that he is "an old-fashioned Democrat", but in fact his latest essay, "The Hispanic Challenge," and the book, "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity" play right into the hands of the Republican Right and those phobic about Mexicans, immigrants, "the other," whoever they might be. Mexico is anxious to reinvigorate immigration talks with the U.S., and Huntington seems determined to poison the discussion by playing into the hands of elements in the U.S. who are outspoken in opposition and who can mobilize their armies of protesters.

In the article, Huntington puts his old themes in a new bottle. He defines the creators of America as "17th- and 18th-century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British and Protestant."  He continues, "Their values, institutions, and culture provided the foundation for and shaped the development of the United States in the following centuries.  They initially defined America in terms of race, ethnicity, culture and religion.  Then, in the eighteenth century, they also had to define America ideologically to justify independence from their home country, which was also white, British and Protestant.  Thomas Jeffersonset forth this "creed"...in the Declaration of Independence, and ever since, its principles have been reiterated by statesmen and espoused by the public as an essential component of U.S. identity.(Huntington, Samuel P., "The Hispanic Challenge," www.foreignpolicy.com/story/ p.1 

After acknowledging that all kinds of other people came t0 the U.S.(never mentioning indigenous Americans or slaves as such) and were "assimilated," he says, "Most Americans see the creed as the crucial element of their national identity.  The creed, however, was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers.  Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity: religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, including the responsibility or rulers and the rights of individuals, and the dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a 'city on a hill.'" (Huntington, p.2.)

Essentially, Huntington then goes on to give what he sees as the contrast between other immigrant groups (they assimilated fairly completely, he claims, and come to speak English fairly rapidly.  One wonders if he has been to San Francisco lately) and Hispanics whom he sees as NOT assimilating to his satisfaction, and thus threatening U.S. national security by diluting our national identity.  He concludes by implying that it's not just the well-being of English-speaking assimilated Americans he's thinking of: unless those hispanics can learn English, they won't be able to share the American Dream. The article is accompanied by colorful charts in Sidebars which appear designed to alarm the WASPS.

Huntington's ideas about Hispanic immigrants draw on his previous work, "The Clash of Civilizations."  Basically, in this book and article he said that Culture was the strongest glue among people and that with the crumbling of ideologies, we were likely to have the birth of clashes among large, disparate cultures.  In this book and article, he did make a point of considerable value, and it was a major point, when he said other cultures should be respected as themselves and that the U.S. should not be imposing itself all over the world on people who did not wish us to.  His emphasis that other countries resented the U.S. thinking everyone would welcome our cultural/political model is important in these post-election days as our way of doing things seeming creakier than ever.  But again, not only were the civilizations he defined extremely questionable, he also drew the non-European civilizations as "the other."  However, it did not occur to him that he was obliterating all sorts of cross-currents and hybridization among and within the civilizations he drew up nor did it occur to him that the notion of these civilizations might be altogether wrong or that people might might or might not fight for entirely different reasons.  And while he may not have intended it, Islam did come out on the bad end of things, with China a close second.

In the 1950's, Huntington wrote about national defense and the need for realism in how we looked abroad.  He believed we should have a professional military that  and that we can't maintain a "liberal optimism" in the face of foreign threats.  When he wrote this, it made sense.  Some of it still makes sense. We do need professionals in the military and intelligence who look with clear eyes at potential dangers from a practical perspective. I wonder what he would say about our highly privatized operations in Iraq.

Huntington, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, says of his family, "The Huntingtons arrived in Boston in 1633.  Almost all Huntingtons in the U.S. are descended from Simon and Margaret Huntington who were part of a group of settlers from Norwich, England, who founded Norwich, Connecticut." ("Three Cheers for Assimilation," interview with Deborah Solomon, www.nytimes.c0m/2004/05/02/magazine/02QUESTIONS.html)   One wonders if he isn't suffering a bit and trying to hold up the old Club colors as they become tattered in the wind.  Or if he's spent too much time in what academics like to call The Academy.  Like the neocons, he deals in theory drawn from theory and does not appear to be very experienced outside these realms.  Or perhaps he's doing both.  Paul Wolfowitz, a neocon of a different stripe who also sees things in great abstractions, did live abroad, in Indonesia, I believe, and fell in love with it. He, however, carries the albatross of his family's experience with the holocaust.  Under all the grand theories lurks some shaping personal experience, I think.

Anyway, better minds than mine have criticized Huntington, and it is important to do so because he is pwerful and has powerful friends and distorts the discussion so that we divurge from addressing real issues.  In separate posts labeled by  topic (Clash of Civilizations or The Hispanic Challenge) you can find a variety of critiques.  Each post referring to Huntington's ideas is labeled with a number in capital letters (for instance, this one is ONE) so that you can tell they are all part of the same issue. 

"The Clash of Civilizations" -- All Whites are not Anglo-Protestants

Given the upcoming conference on immigration in San Antonio this Monday, the 15th of November, I'd like to address Samuel P. Huntington's ideas, particularly as he discusses them in "The Hispanic Challenge."

Before the long version, I have to blow off steam.  Huntington speaks of the need to defend the "Anglo-Protestant" heritage of this country as THE heritage -- the core of our identity.  We need to remember that a huge band at the center of our country was in French hands until 1803 and that much of the West was in Spanish, then Mexican hands and that these cultures have shaped much of  those two areas -- as much as the Anglo-Protestant heritage shaped the East Coast and the eastern mid-west.  One might add that the Scandinavian heritage shaped Minnesota and other parts of the northern Midwest, as can be seen in the history of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party and the presence of lefsa (sp) and lutefisk.

More quite soon.

Forum in San Antonio: Immigration: What Reform Will Bring to Our Nation. A Call to Action

Forum -- Immigration:  What Reform Will Bring to Our Nation.  A Call to Action

Monday, November 15, 2004

UNAM Campus in San Antonio, Lecture Hall

600 Hemisfair Park

San Antonio, TX 78205, Tel. 210.222.8626

Hosted by Charlie, Fote, Chairman and CEO, First Data Corporation. Co-Host: The National Autonomous University of Mexico in San Antonio (UNAM)  Co-Host for the Mexican Panel: Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU)

Registration: 12:30-1:00pm

Session 1: Mexican Panel, 1:00-3:00

Mexican Panel: Mónica Verea, Researcher, Center for North American Studies (CISAN); Hector Osuna, Senator, National Action Party (PAN); Orlando Paredes, Senator, Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Raymundo Cárdenas, Senator, Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD); Miguel Basañez, International Vice President, Market and Opinion Research International, Mexico.

Moderator: Mario Melgar, Director, UNAM-San Antonio

U.S. Panel:

Theresa Cardinal Brown, Director, Immigration Policy, U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Frank Sharry, Executive Director, National Immigration Forum; Tamar Jacoby, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; John F. Gay, Co-Chair, Essential Worker Immigration Coalition; J. Traci Hong, Counsel, National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium; Dr. Rowena Fong, Center for Asian American Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Moderator: Marguerite Rivera Houze, Board Member, Paso al NOrte Museum in El Paso, Texas.

Reception for attendees will follow the U.S. Panel