The author of The Clash of Civilizations died on Christmas Eve. Huntington was a brilliant analyst of international politics, and more importantly the father of one big idea. I am indebted to him for the latter, as I have frequently assigned his paper in my classes on geopolitics. While I think that his thesis is in the last analysis a mistake, it is the kind of mistake that illuminates a lot of the truth about world politics.
It's easy enough to state Huntington's big idea. It is that some persons will appear to me as strangers or even foes in a more local context, and as friends and allies in a larger context, but, and here the "but" is very heavy, other persons will never be perceived by me as "one of us," because there is no larger context in which we both fit.
If that isn't clear, let's give it specifics. In a Craighead County Arkansas nightclub, two persons, Black and White, might perceive each other to be very different. But if they met in a bar in St. Paul, surrounded by a lot of Minnesotans, they might suddenly feel like brothers. At that table, Reuben and Matt have a lot more in common than they have with the folks sitting around them. But put the two of them and one Minnesotan in a pub in Oxford England, and then the three all suddenly become homeboys. That is an important fact that is apparent to anyone who has traveled abroad or works on an American campus with international students. Watch who shops with whom at the Aberdeen Wal-Mart.
But Huntington argued that there are limits to the enlargement of cultural inclusiveness. Put a guy from Arkansas and a grad student from Italy and one Iranian in a restaurant in Beijing. It no longer works. The Arkie and the Italian feel a kinship. The Iranian is just as alien to "us" as the Chinese around us.
With that in mind, Huntington argued that the world is divided into a number of distinct cultural continents, or civilizations. Mostly, the fault lines are familiar: Western Christendom (U.S., Canada, Western Europe), the Orthodox World (Eastern Europe, Russia), Latin America, the Muslim World, Sub-Saharan Africa, China, Japan.
Huntington argued that international politics in the future would be largely driven by clashes between these cultural continents. As I said, it's a brilliant idea, and it's true for a lot of purposes. But it is not the bottom line in world history. For all the derision it has taken, I think Francis Fukuyama's End of History thesis is closer to the truth. Modern liberal democracy, including a more or less free market, is the only viable modern for civilizations that want to bring prosperity to their peoples and become master of their fates. I think that I and someone from Japan have more in common than we have with an Al Qaeda foot soldier. But maybe that is the question.
Anyway, Godspeed Professor Huntington. You have given this blogger a lot to think about.
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