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Wall Street Journal
Dec 30 2008
Samuel Huntington's Warning
He predicted a 'clash of civilizations,' not the illusion of Davos Man.
By FOUAD AJAMI
The last of Samuel Huntington's books -- "Who Are We? The Challenges
to America's National Identity," published four years ago -- may have
been his most passionate work. It was like that with the celebrated
Harvard political scientist, who died last week at 81. He was a man of
diffidence and reserve, yet he was always caught up in the political
storms of recent decades.
Zina Saunders"This book is shaped by my own identities as a patriot
and a scholar," he wrote. "As a patriot I am deeply concerned about
the unity and strength of my country as a society based on liberty,
equality, law and individual rights." Huntington lived the life of his
choice, neither seeking controversies, nor ducking them. "Who Are We?"
had the signature of this great scholar -- the bold, sweeping
assertions sustained by exacting details, and the engagement with the
issues of the time.
He wrote in that book of the "American Creed," and of its erosion
among the elites. Its key elements -- the English language,
Christianity, religious commitment, English concepts of the rule of
law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals -- he
said are derived from the "distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the
founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries."
Critics who branded the book as a work of undisguised nativism missed
an essential point. Huntington observed that his was an "argument for
the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not for the importance of
Anglo-Protestant people." The success of this great republic, he said,
had hitherto depended on the willingness of generations of Americans
to honor the creed of the founding settlers and to shed their old
affinities. But that willingness was being battered by globalization
and multiculturalism, and by new waves of immigrants with no deep
attachments to America's national identity. "The Stars and Stripes
were at half-mast," he wrote in "Who Are We?", "and other flags flew
higher on the flagpole of American identities."
Three possible American futures beckoned, Huntington said:
cosmopolitan, imperial and national. In the first, the world remakes
America, and globalization and multiculturalism trump national
identity. In the second, America remakes the world: Unchallenged by a
rival superpower, America would attempt to reshape the world according
to its values, taking to other shores its democratic norms and
aspirations. In the third, America remains America: It resists the
blandishments -- and falseness -- of cosmopolitanism, and reins in the
imperial impulse.
Huntington made no secret of his own preference: an American
nationalism "devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those
qualities that have defined America since its founding." His stark
sense of realism had no patience for the globalism of the Clinton
era. The culture of "Davos Man" -- named for the watering hole of the
global elite -- was disconnected from the call of home and hearth and
national soil.
But he looked with a skeptical eye on the American expedition to Iraq,
uneasy with those American conservatives who had come to believe in an
"imperial" American mission. He foresaw frustration for this drive to
democratize other lands. The American people would not sustain this
project, he observed, and there was the "paradox of democracy":
Democratic experiments often bring in their wake nationalistic
populist movements (Latin America) or fundamentalist movements (Muslim
countries). The world tempts power, and denies it. It is the
Huntingtonian world; no false hopes and no redemption.
In the 1990s, when the Davos crowd and other believers in a borderless
world reigned supreme, Huntington crossed over from the academy into
global renown, with his "clash of civilizations" thesis. In an article
first published in Foreign Affairs in 1993 (then expanded into a
book), Huntington foresaw the shape of the post-Cold War world. The
war of ideologies would yield to a civilizational struggle of soil and
blood. It would be the West versus the eight civilizations dividing
the rest -- Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox,
Buddhist and Japanese.
In this civilizational struggle, Islam would emerge as the principal
challenge to the West. "The relations between Islam and Christianity,
both orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the
other's Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and
Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical
phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation
between Islam and Christianity."
He had assaulted the zeitgeist of the era. The world took notice, and
his book was translated into 39 languages. Critics insisted that men
want Sony, not soil. But on 9/11, young Arabs -- 19 of them -- would
weigh in. They punctured the illusions of an era, and gave evidence of
the truth of Huntington's vision. With his typical precision, he had
written of a "youth bulge" unsettling Muslim societies, and young,
radicalized Arabs, unhinged by modernity and unable to master it,
emerging as the children of this radical age.
If I may be permitted a personal narrative: In 1993, I had written the
lead critique in Foreign Affairs of his thesis. I admired his work but
was unconvinced. My faith was invested in the order of states that the
West itself built. The ways of the West had become the ways of the
world, I argued, and the modernist consensus would hold in key
Third-World countries like Egypt, India and Turkey. Fifteen years
later, I was given a chance in the pages of The New York Times Book
Review to acknowledge that I had erred and that Huntington had been
correct all along.
A gracious letter came to me from Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, his wife
of 51 years (her Armenian descent an irony lost on those who dubbed
him a defender of nativism). He was in ill-health, suffering the
aftermath of a small stroke. They were spending the winter at their
summer house on Martha's Vineyard. She had read him my essay as he lay
in bed. He was pleased with it: "He will be writing you himself
shortly." Of course, he did not write, and knowing of his frail state
I did not expect him to do so. He had been a source of great wisdom,
an exemplar, and it had been an honor to write of him, and to know him
in the regrettably small way I did.
We don't have his likes in the academy today. Political science, the
field he devoted his working life to, has been in the main
commandeered by a new generation. They are "rational choice" people
who work with models and numbers and write arid, impenetrable jargon.
More importantly, nowadays in the academy and beyond, the patriotism
that marked Samuel Huntington's life and work is derided, and the
American Creed he upheld is thought to be the ideology of rubes and
simpletons, the affliction of people clinging to old ways. The Davos
men have perhaps won. No wonder the sorrow and the concern that ran
through the work of Huntington's final years.
Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins
University, School of Advanced International Studies. He is also an
adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1230 60172023141417.html
Dec 30 2008
Samuel Huntington's Warning
He predicted a 'clash of civilizations,' not the illusion of Davos Man.
By FOUAD AJAMI
The last of Samuel Huntington's books -- "Who Are We? The Challenges
to America's National Identity," published four years ago -- may have
been his most passionate work. It was like that with the celebrated
Harvard political scientist, who died last week at 81. He was a man of
diffidence and reserve, yet he was always caught up in the political
storms of recent decades.
Zina Saunders"This book is shaped by my own identities as a patriot
and a scholar," he wrote. "As a patriot I am deeply concerned about
the unity and strength of my country as a society based on liberty,
equality, law and individual rights." Huntington lived the life of his
choice, neither seeking controversies, nor ducking them. "Who Are We?"
had the signature of this great scholar -- the bold, sweeping
assertions sustained by exacting details, and the engagement with the
issues of the time.
He wrote in that book of the "American Creed," and of its erosion
among the elites. Its key elements -- the English language,
Christianity, religious commitment, English concepts of the rule of
law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals -- he
said are derived from the "distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the
founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries."
Critics who branded the book as a work of undisguised nativism missed
an essential point. Huntington observed that his was an "argument for
the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not for the importance of
Anglo-Protestant people." The success of this great republic, he said,
had hitherto depended on the willingness of generations of Americans
to honor the creed of the founding settlers and to shed their old
affinities. But that willingness was being battered by globalization
and multiculturalism, and by new waves of immigrants with no deep
attachments to America's national identity. "The Stars and Stripes
were at half-mast," he wrote in "Who Are We?", "and other flags flew
higher on the flagpole of American identities."
Three possible American futures beckoned, Huntington said:
cosmopolitan, imperial and national. In the first, the world remakes
America, and globalization and multiculturalism trump national
identity. In the second, America remakes the world: Unchallenged by a
rival superpower, America would attempt to reshape the world according
to its values, taking to other shores its democratic norms and
aspirations. In the third, America remains America: It resists the
blandishments -- and falseness -- of cosmopolitanism, and reins in the
imperial impulse.
Huntington made no secret of his own preference: an American
nationalism "devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those
qualities that have defined America since its founding." His stark
sense of realism had no patience for the globalism of the Clinton
era. The culture of "Davos Man" -- named for the watering hole of the
global elite -- was disconnected from the call of home and hearth and
national soil.
But he looked with a skeptical eye on the American expedition to Iraq,
uneasy with those American conservatives who had come to believe in an
"imperial" American mission. He foresaw frustration for this drive to
democratize other lands. The American people would not sustain this
project, he observed, and there was the "paradox of democracy":
Democratic experiments often bring in their wake nationalistic
populist movements (Latin America) or fundamentalist movements (Muslim
countries). The world tempts power, and denies it. It is the
Huntingtonian world; no false hopes and no redemption.
In the 1990s, when the Davos crowd and other believers in a borderless
world reigned supreme, Huntington crossed over from the academy into
global renown, with his "clash of civilizations" thesis. In an article
first published in Foreign Affairs in 1993 (then expanded into a
book), Huntington foresaw the shape of the post-Cold War world. The
war of ideologies would yield to a civilizational struggle of soil and
blood. It would be the West versus the eight civilizations dividing
the rest -- Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox,
Buddhist and Japanese.
In this civilizational struggle, Islam would emerge as the principal
challenge to the West. "The relations between Islam and Christianity,
both orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the
other's Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and
Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical
phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation
between Islam and Christianity."
He had assaulted the zeitgeist of the era. The world took notice, and
his book was translated into 39 languages. Critics insisted that men
want Sony, not soil. But on 9/11, young Arabs -- 19 of them -- would
weigh in. They punctured the illusions of an era, and gave evidence of
the truth of Huntington's vision. With his typical precision, he had
written of a "youth bulge" unsettling Muslim societies, and young,
radicalized Arabs, unhinged by modernity and unable to master it,
emerging as the children of this radical age.
If I may be permitted a personal narrative: In 1993, I had written the
lead critique in Foreign Affairs of his thesis. I admired his work but
was unconvinced. My faith was invested in the order of states that the
West itself built. The ways of the West had become the ways of the
world, I argued, and the modernist consensus would hold in key
Third-World countries like Egypt, India and Turkey. Fifteen years
later, I was given a chance in the pages of The New York Times Book
Review to acknowledge that I had erred and that Huntington had been
correct all along.
A gracious letter came to me from Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, his wife
of 51 years (her Armenian descent an irony lost on those who dubbed
him a defender of nativism). He was in ill-health, suffering the
aftermath of a small stroke. They were spending the winter at their
summer house on Martha's Vineyard. She had read him my essay as he lay
in bed. He was pleased with it: "He will be writing you himself
shortly." Of course, he did not write, and knowing of his frail state
I did not expect him to do so. He had been a source of great wisdom,
an exemplar, and it had been an honor to write of him, and to know him
in the regrettably small way I did.
We don't have his likes in the academy today. Political science, the
field he devoted his working life to, has been in the main
commandeered by a new generation. They are "rational choice" people
who work with models and numbers and write arid, impenetrable jargon.
More importantly, nowadays in the academy and beyond, the patriotism
that marked Samuel Huntington's life and work is derided, and the
American Creed he upheld is thought to be the ideology of rubes and
simpletons, the affliction of people clinging to old ways. The Davos
men have perhaps won. No wonder the sorrow and the concern that ran
through the work of Huntington's final years.
Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins
University, School of Advanced International Studies. He is also an
adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1230 60172023141417.html