Samuel P. Huntington
Samuel P. Huntington
Samuel Phillips Huntingtonwas an American political scientist, adviser and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor. During the Carter administration, Huntington was the White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council. He is most well known by his 1993 theory, "The Clash of Civilizations", of a post-Cold War new world order. He argued that future...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth18 April 1927
CountryUnited States of America
Both sides are divided and Western countries collaborate with Muslim countries and vice versa.
People everywhere talk about Islam and the West. Presumably that has some relationship to reality, that these are entities that have some meaning and they do. Of course the core ofthat reality is differences in religion.
Obviously there are divisions within the West and divisions within Islam - there are different sects, different communities, different countries. So neither one is homogenous at all. But they do have things in common.
I don't say that the West is united, I don't suggest that.
Obviously Pakistan and the U.S. are very different countries, but we have common geopolitical interests in preventing communist take over in Afghanistan and hence, now that Pakistan has a government that we can cooperate with, even though it is a military government, we are working together with them in order to promote our common interests. But obviously we also differ with Pakistan on a number of issues.
Countries will cooperate with each other, and are more likely to cooperate with each other when they share a common culture, as is most dramatically illustrated in the European Union. But other groupings of countries are emerging in East Asia and in South America. Basically, as I said, these politics will be oriented around, in large part, cultural similarities and cultural antagonism.
The question really is what will be the central focus of global politics in the coming decades and my argument is that cultural identities and cultural antagonisms and affiliations will play not the only role but a major role.
Fascism and communism have not entirely disappeared but have been sidelined certainly, and liberal democracy has come to be accepted, in theory at least, around the world, if not always in practice.
In the 19th century it was basically nationality and people trying to define their nationalism and create states which would reflect their nationalism. In the 20th century, ideology came to the fore, largely, but not exclusively, as a result of the Russian Revolution and we have fascism, communism and liberal democracy competing with each other. Well that's pretty much over.
Quite obviously power will continue to play a central role in global politics as it always does. But usually there is something else.
The relations between countries in the coming decade are most likely to reflect their cultural commitments, their cultural ties and antagonism with other countries.
As far as ideology or political beliefs are concerned, countries are very different.
Two significant developments in the past several decades have been the collapse of communism as an ideology and the general acceptance, in rhetoric, if not practice, of liberal democracy.
Hispanics speak Spanish or Portuguese, which are languages we Americans are familiar with, so it doesn't seem to pose the same types of problems as Arabic-speaking Muslims do in Europe.