Samuel P. Huntington

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Samuel P. Huntington in 2004

Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) was a highly respected (we don't know why) political scientist in the United States, and the person who popularized the infamous term "clash of civilizations," first in a 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, and then as a book in 1996, to try to predict how the post-Cold War world would pan out. It has to be noted, though, that Huntington's original Foreign Affairs article was written as a response to Francis Fukuyama's[wp] Panglossian ideas about the End of History (first in a 1989 article in The National Interest, later expanded into the 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man).

[edit] Clash of Civilizations

Nine civilizations

Huntington proposed the notion that the world could be divided into nine more or less self-conscious civilizations, separated by cultural fault lines. These nine civilizations were: Western, Islamic, Buddhist- except that the Buddhist bloc doesn't really matter-, Sinic, Japanese (sorry, little guy), Hindu, Slavic/Orthodox, Latin American, and Black non-Islamic, sub-Saharan African plus majority-African-descended Latin American countries.

But more importantly, the theory forgets how close certain nations are. For example, the United States, Turkey, and Israel all have a close relationship, yet the US is Western, Turkey, Islamic, and Israel, a supposed "lone state." In fact Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan all have something of a client-state relationship to the US, yet Huntington sees Western civilization and Islamic civilization at odds. Granted, Pakistan's loyalty as a client-state is so-so post-Cold War, but that could be because the CIA really rubbed off on the ISI.

The fact is, "civilizations" are not self-conscious units, are not homogenous, and are not easy to draw lines between. In order to accept Huntington's proposition, one must accept the notion that Albania, Tajikistan, Bangladesh, Mauritania, Syria, and Indonesia are all in the same civilization in terms of international relations on the basis that they are all majority-Muslim. Never mind how culturally different they may be, how they may differ in their general philosophies on religion in politics, the drastic geographic separation between each of them, their very different and largely unconnected histories, their pre-existing relations with other nations (like who they were aligned with during the Cold War), or the nature of their relationships with each other.

By using "macro-religions" (Islam, Western Christianity etc.) as his defining parameter, Huntingdon ignores the historical precedent of bloody conflicts within these greater entities, e.g. between Sunni and Shi'a Islam or between Protestants and Catholics (such as the Thirty Years' War[wp]). Especially odd is his lumping in Iran and the Arab states in a single Islamic civilization, because Iran is not only the largest and most powerful Shi'a state, it's also Persian, not Arabic, which is yet another reason why Wahhabis, Salafists and other Sunni Islamists consider Iran to be among their greatest enemies. Not to mention quite secular concerns about Middle Eastern geopolitics which makes Saudi Arabia view Iran with great suspicion and hostility, just like the ayatollahs probably haven't forgotten that the Saudis, along with the other Gulf Arab states, bankrolled Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War.[wp]

[edit] Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity

This is the 2004 book of Huntington's that nobody wants to talk about because he shows his true nativist, xenophobic colors. He gets really scared that the Mexicans are coming to take urr jerrrrbs Latino Catholic immigrants who are, of course, lazy might not be able to integrate with us good hard-working White Christian folk into America's Protestant Anglo-Saxon culture. Did we mention he had the book published in 2004?

[edit] See also

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