Death of an ideologue

Dec 29, 2008 Editorial

Samuel Huntington, arguably the most influential Western political scientist of the last fifty years, passed away this Christmas Eve at the age of 81. He had become quite famous in the last decade, even to those not in academia, for his thesis that, in a post-Cold War world, violent conflict would arise not from ideological friction between countries, but from the competing cultural identities of the world’s major civilizations.

He identified those civilizations as Western (including the United States and Europe), Latin American, Islamic, African, Orthodox (with Russia as a core state), and Hindu, Japanese, and “Sinic” (including China, Korea, and Vietnam).

Huntington made the argument in a 1993 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, then expanded the thesis into a book, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order”, in 1996. The book has been translated into 39 languages and the thesis has become a fundamental, if controversial, premise of post-Cold War foreign policy theory. After the 9/11 attack on America, many saw in Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations a prescient harbinger of, and guide to, the future.

However, some saw Huntington’s prognosis as a caution to foreign policy adventurism in the near future. Michael Ignatieff understood Huntington’s argument to suggest: If there are seven or eight world civilizations, the West had better shed the hubristic notion that its civilization is destined to spread its values across the globe. The West is “unique” — but its values are not universal. Universalism… is just a leftover from imperialism. Western aid workers have no business telling the Afghan Taliban to allow their women to go to school.

Washington has no business tying human rights conditions to its trade with China. It is a significant change of heart for a former architect of American policy in Vietnam to assert that, “Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multi-civilizational world.”

Ignatieff alludes to Huntington’s earlier claim to fame in the world of politics. Earning his PhD at the age of 23 at Harvard and immediately joining the staff (1951), Huntington plunged enthusiastically into the field of “Development Studies”.

Academic interest in problems of social and political change in the Third World had coincided with post-WWII US foreign policy, and funding by the government forged a nexus between academia and policy makers that was to prove very long lasting. Initially, the US had assumed that the newly independent nations would embrace “modernisation”, become economically developed, and democratic US-leaning regimes would automatically follow. Results proved otherwise, especially for those countries that were attracted to the Russian Bear.

With relevance to developments that were to unfold in our country, in 1961, Huntington prepared a report for Project Vulcan that was commissioned by the Special Studies Group of the Institute for Defence Analysis.

“Instability at the Non-Strategic Level of Conflict” was to become a primer for the US administration. With reference to the competition with the USSR, Huntington proposed that two questions were paramount in the consideration of Third World Politics – commitment and stability. Once the commitment was given, internal stability was to be supported at all cost.

Intervention into Third World countries was to depend on the importance of the particular country to US interests. As Huntington put it: “What is required is a strategy of pre-military intervention, indirect intervention, and positive action to shape the course of politics and to strengthen the groups committed to our side, or most likely to enhance stability before the situation gets grave enough to raise the issue of direct military intervention.” Rigging of elections was about as innocuous as one could get to maintain stability and yet be supported, in the scenario outlined by Prof. Huntington.

In 1968, Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies was published and was to develop further his thesis that it is not democracy per se in developing countries that would serve the US interests, but their degree of stability.

He famously recommended: The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government, but their degree of government…Men may, of course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order.” He was the precursor to those who would parse the distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” regimes.

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