Response #2

My response is an analysis and impression of the prescience of Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” article (and subsequent book) written in 1993. His article is a macro-level theory in the mold of those discussed in class like Robert Putnam, Gabriel Almond, Sydney Verba, Max Weber, and even Karl Marx. Writing in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union, Huntington attempts to identify the next clash that will dominate history, or the substance of the next clashes that will dominate history. Eager to move past the ideological, military, and economic clashes of the Cold War Era, he focuses on a less micro subject—cultural differences and what culture adds to one’s identity will be a point of contention between people. Naturally, clashes will most likely occur on the “fault-lines,” as it were, where different civilizations meet. Huntington’s argument here proves compelling when looking at the modern international order—conflict between India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, Russia and the former Soviet Bloc States, to name a few, all lend credence to this theory. Huntington defines “culture” in the widest scope possible, thereby minimizing the number of cultures he must necessarily involve in his theory. Still, he outlines the differences between West and East and the many sub-cultures that exist in each. Ultimately, it remains rather ambiguous what Huntington considers a “culture” in his theory (though he says there are about 7-8 important ones); at times “culture” appears to function as broadly as an entire region or state in his theory, and at other times something as small as an ethnic or religious minority (sub-culture or even sub sub-culture). This is not necessarily a criticism of his theory per se, as I believe the definition of “culture” to be a highly subjective one; if you were to ask twelve different academics, you would likely get twelve different definitions. Perhaps the most prescient observation Huntington made in the wake of the Cold War, however, is the “West versus the rest” argument. He posited that the West may contain the seed of her own destruction—that is, it built the modern international system through nation-states and intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations and European Union, and the desirability to promote these societies as a whole cloth solution is prevalent. This seed may have existed well before the end of the Cold War, but certainly didn’t manifest itself until after the U.S. had other countries to focus on, rather than exclusively on Russia and her surrogates. The insistence that our norms are “universalizable” (to use a Kantian term) and desirable all over is extremely naïve, yet it persists according to Huntington, because the West invented liberal democracy, and through its institutions, gave the international system so much substance through IGO’s and NGO’s. Moreover, current Western policies indicate the militarization of these values, a move that is indicative of our insistence that these values, norms, and forms of government be spread. The fact that this is antagonistic to other cultures is only further proven in the terrorist attacks of September 11th and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.