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
The United States has been an immigrant country. The Hispanics who come here are largely from Mexico and South America. They are Catholics, but that is an American religion. One-third of our population is Catholic so that does not have the same impact as Muslims coming into Europe.
The biggest difference as far as Muslims in Europe and America are concerned is that the number of Muslims in America is small compared to the number in Europe.
Certainly here in the U.S., we've had fundamentalist movements that have taken very critical and hostile attitudes toward immigration and the assimilation of immigrants into our society and culture. So these tendencies are fairly universal. The problem is what if they get out of hand and become the dominant factor in a society, which can only lead to the oppression of minorities or even to war with neighboring societies with differing cultures. That's why it seems to me it's important to try to keep these tendencies toward extremism under control.
Fundamentalist tendencies and movements existed, so far as I know, in all societies and civilizations.
I think fundamentalism is this radical attitude toward one's own identity and civilization as compared to other people's identities and cultures.
Many of the most difficult questions concerning the role of ethnic minorities centers on language.
The larger society has to recognize some degree of autonomy for the minority: the right to practice their own religion and way of life and to some extent their language.
When you have increased migration of peoples and ethnic and religious minorities, you develop a set of rules and language the larger society can accept and the minority community can accept.
America doesn't border on Muslim countries. European countries do and that seems to be a fundamental difference.
I think we can expect leaders of Muslim societies to cooperate with each other on many issues just as Western societies cooperate with each other.
In 1920, the West ruled huge amounts of the world.
These transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations
Also, of course, for most of this time most Americans thought of America as a white country with, at best, only a very segregated and subordinate role for blacks.
I am doubtful that there will be any sort of real coherence of Muslim societies into a single political system run by an elected or non-elected group of leaders.