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
In the coming decades, questions of identity, meaning cultural heritage, language, and religion will play a central role in politics.
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.
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.
Our relationship with Mexico in this regard is unique for us, and in many respects unique in the world.
The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.
Immigrants are people who leave one country, one society, and move to another society. But there has to be a recipient society to which the immigrants move.
They weren't immigrating to some existing society; indeed, they often did whatever they could do to destroy whatever existed here in the way of Indian society.
Finally, in my critique of the immigration image of America, it is also important to know that we're not only a nation of immigrants, but we are in some part a nation of emigrants, which often gets neglected.
We also thought of ourselves in racial and largely ethnic terms.
Much of what we now consider to be problems concerning immigration and assimilation really concern Mexican immigration and assimilation.
First of all, we haven't always welcomed immigrants.
The West hasn't reached its universal state as yet, although its close to it, but it certainly has evolved out of its warring state phase, which it was in for a couple of centuries.