Samuel P. Huntington - a longtime Harvard University professor, an influential political scientist, and mentor to a generation of scholars in widely divergent fields - died Dec. 24 on Martha's Vineyard. He was 81.
He was famous for his book, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order”. The work proved to be controversial and scholars around the world had different opinions on it.
Christopher Caldwell wrote in Financial Times on January 3 2009 in his article titled, “Huntington's disputed legacy”
Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist who popularised the expression "clash of civilisations", died on Christmas eve at age 81. Obituaries have been evenly divided about whether he outlived the world he described. The phrase was coined by Bernard Lewis, the scholar of Islam, in 1990, but it was Huntington's essay of that name, published in 1993, that encapsulated the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic," Huntington wrote. "The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural."
The early 1990s presented fresh data that did not conform to the cold war rubrics, including the break-up of Yugoslavia, wars in the Caucasus, China's rapid industrialisation, the first Iraq war and the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. Huntington's thesis was an admirably simple explanation. But after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 2001 and western coalitions invaded Afghanistan and Iraq it was used in ways that were simplistic. Half the world hailed Huntington as having foreseen the conflict between Islam and the west and half mistook him for a promoter of it.
Huntington's opponents did not have an alternative idea of where conflicts would arise from. They had the hope - which they tended to mistake for an analysis - that there would be no conflicts at all, because humanity was converging on some uniform set of cultural values. Huntington was sceptical. "The very phrase 'the world community'," he wrote, "has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing 'the free world') to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other western powers." Human rights were western provincialism masquerading as universalism. What Huntington saw less clearly was that, while universalism might be an illusion, it was an illusion with a constituency?
Huntington focused on civilisations (Arab, Chinese, western, eastern Orthodox and so on) rather than cities or nations or tribes because they were "the broadest level of identification with which [a person] intensely identifies". That has been true for most of history, but in the era of globalisation an alternative level of identification emerged (or re-emerged): that of class. The new global "leadership class", which developed first in Europe and then spread to the business and governmental classes of even the poor nations, followed the pattern of the US social system and was accessible in similar ways - through education and self-promotion. Paradoxically, these global elites identify more readily with suffering humanity than humanity itself does, because elites feel they can speak on humanity's behalf and wield power in its name. For a peasant to proclaim himself a member of "humanity" is to efface and subordinate himself. For a member of an elite it is to exalt himself.
Huntington sometimes believed that elites were becoming more diverse. "A de-westernisation and indigenisation of elites is occurring in many non-western countries," he wrote, "at the same time that western, usually American, cultures, styles and habits become more popular among the mass of the people."
That was true in Iran and somewhat true in France. It may become more true in coming years if western economies weaken relative to Asian ones. But in recent years, elites have become more homogeneous. Sometimes Huntington acknowledged this. Almost everywhere, he noted, the International Monetary Fund was more popular among finance ministers than among peoples.
Huntington never arrived at a general explanation of how globalisation got transmitted through (and disrupted) individual nations' class systems. Perhaps no such explanation was possible. But without one, it was unclear to many of Huntington's readers whether the centrepiece of western diplomacy, spreading democracy, would avert inter-civilisational violence or incite it. Most assumed Huntington thought the former. In fact, he consistently thought the latter. The book that made his reputation, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), argued that liberalisation was not an automatic route to either prosperity or peace and could indeed bring penury and violence.
In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Huntington noted that no sentence in his 1993 essay had aroused more controversy than: "Islam has bloody borders." To him, this was an empirical statement, not a judgment on Islam's merits as a civilisation and still less an argument for western meddling.
Anyway, the west's increasing entanglement with Islam has not been the result of an increasing enmity. On the contrary. Viewed from Orthodox Christian civilisation, in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo the west took the Muslims' side. It is curious that the west has shown so little inclination to ask whether it did not perhaps back the wrong horse. Western policy towards Islam did considerably more to produce Vladimir Putin than it did to produce Osama bin Laden.
It is bizarre that The Clash of Civilizations has been taken in some quarters as "orientalist" or "imperialist" or even as an endorsement, avant la lettre , of the Bush administration's efforts to reorder the Middle East through political liberalisation. The Iraq war was the supreme expression of the belief that Islamic civilisations are not different from western ones in any fundamental way. It was the expression not of a hard-headed doctrine but of a woolly-minded one and, as such, a repudiation of ideas Huntington held his whole life.
