I suppose I'm the last person to have gotten around to reading this.
I can see why he's controversial. Telling the truth usually is.
Before I review the work, I should go over an aspect that's implicit in the book but never quite spelled out.
A nation is not durable if people are not willing to sacrifice for it. A man is willing to sacrifice for his wife and children, for his extended family, for his tribe—for those he feels a bond with. He will spend money on them, spend time on them, spend effort on them—if necessary risk his life for them. A nation lives by the same bonding. The citizens must be willing to pay taxes to aid other citizens they don't know, and be willing to risk life to defend other citizens.
Some governments rule largely by fear—pay or be beaten, join the army or die—but such conscripts tend to melt away or clutter the battlefield while the professionals fight. Or they can be bribed by the prospect of loot and slaves, but that's hard to maintain in a defensive war.
Of course not everybody has to feel such a bond, but enough have to be willing to fight for the country for it to be able to beat off enemies.
The commonality behind that bond varies. Friendship is a strong but very local bond—we have very few real friends, and not all that many acquaintances. Family bonds are farther reaching, and tribal ones reach still farther. Some nations are giant tribes—a single related people—like Japan (tiny minorities excepted). Some (like the USA) are both ideological and tribal. Some are religious and tribal—like Israel. Some nations are cultural/linguistic and tribal—like France, which is nominally (but not entirely) willing to welcome anyone convinced of the superiority of French culture and language.
If there is no common bond I doubt that the result is stable. Many empires through history simply disintegrated when the imperial force diminished. Think of Charlemagne's empire, or Alexander's. Even within a nation, if regions or groups stop thinking of themselves as part of the whole, the nation risks civil war and disintegration—think of China.
Where a commonality exists, whether of tribe or language or religion or ideology; it is possible to find some center for the people to rally round. Of course it doesn't have to be the central country—Pakistan is a good example here. The country was founded as a Muslim state, and is held together by religious adversity to its neighbors and inertia. The various tribes hate each other, but if they perceive an infidel threat they can unite—sometimes in extra-governmental ways.
When that commonality subsides, the nation starts to disintegrate. Somalia is a tribal nation, and you'd think that a single tribe with a single language and a single religion would be stable—but the sub-tribes vie for dominance, and it isn't. Ideologically-founded states (and to a lesser extent religiously based ones) face a similar threat. If the population loses enthusiasm for the ideology, it seems likely to split into tribes. The USSR was an ideologically based nation, and so is the USA. (Religions change more slowly than ideologies, since they are more all-encompassing descriptions of reality.)
With that preface understood, Huntington's book is a largely accurate description of the big international picture as driven by conflicts between major cultural groups. One might quibble with his divisions, but I don't plan to. I don't know enough of the interaction of Orthodox Christianity with the government to understand why “Russia” is supposed to be radically enough different as to be irreconcilable with the Catholic/Protestant West.
Huntington sees a rough division of the world into 8 civilizations: Sinic (China and its traditional client states), Japanese (sufficiently large and different enough from China to be distinguished), Western, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, African, and South American. “African” is sort of a geographic/racial catch-all, and South America leans strongly Western; but the rest have fairly distinguishable characteristics. A civilization often has a central state (like China or Russia), and partners/clients at several levels removed. These partners are sometimes enemies, of course—think of Vietnam and China. Vietnam's culture derives from China's, and their histories are intertwined—and Vietnam isn't always happy about that. He points out from recent history that the Orthodox states, despite apparent similarities to Western ones, have tended to band together rather than with their Catholic neighbors. Western civilization does not have a single core country, but instead 3 or 4.
Cultural influence is linked with military power which is inextricably linked with economic power, and the rise of non-Western economic power has allowed non-Western civilizations to wield influence they haven't seen in hundreds of years. The result is a multi-polar and substantially more volatile international scene. Every civilization can point to a time in its history when it was king of the hill, and regards that time as normative forever. Huntington doesn't give a lot of weight to ideological influence, or to the possibility of having central tenets of a culture change. They can change, as history shows. Christianity replaced paganism, and Islam destroyed the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations (as well as a lot of Eastern Christendom). It just took time (and some force).
Islam has a central location among the civilizations, and perhaps some of its “bloody borders” can be attributed to its being “in the middle,” but it seems clear enough that quite a bit of the conflict is intrinsic to Islam. At the moment the Islamic civilization has no core state, though several are vying for that position (Iran, Saudi-controlled Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey being the main contenders). It is unusual among the battling civilizations that it has virtually no economic productivity—oil is pretty much the only thing it has going for it.
The writing has some little gems: If Muslims allege that the West wars on Islam and if Westerners allege that Islamic groups war on the West, it seems reasonable to conclude that something very like a war is underway. This was pre-9/11, of course.
If the West is in relative decline, who will be the next big winner? Huntington thinks China, and marshals some reasonable arguments for that. He implicitly assumes that the Chinese economy won't collapse under the weight of political/personal-deal bad loans, and he may well be right. The penchant for Chinese to Chinese deals rather than transparent contracts increases the relative clout of Chinese in other societies, and the traditional approach of Chinese culture societies (weak states strive for position by allying with strong ones, rather than trying to maintain independence) also feeds into increasing Chinese dominance.
In any event, around the world we are learning that what we Westerners thought were universal values and rights aren't even close. Rule of law? Abolition of slavery? Individual autonomy? These seem to be as Western as Esperanto.
Perhaps. History shows us that cultures don't like to change, and can resist it violently. And it shows us that cultures sometimes change. Kemal's changes may not have taken root. But they still might, if something displaces the Islamist parties in Turkey. In a few generations. . .
If you haven't read the book yet, do so.
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