Huntington is known best for his 1993 theory, the "Clash of Civilizations" otherwise known as COC, of a post–Cold Warnew world order. He argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures, and that Islamic civilization would become the greatest threat to Western domination of the world. Huntington is credited with helping to shape American opinions oncivilian-military relations, political development, and comparative government.[3] According to theOpen Syllabus Project, Huntington is the second most frequently cited author on college syllabi for political science courses.[4]
Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City, the son of Richard Thomas Huntington, a publisher of hotel trade journals, and Dorothy Sanborn (née Phillips), a short-story writer.[5][6] His grandfather was publisherJohn Sanborn Phillips. He graduated with distinction fromYale University at age 18. He served in theU.S. Army from April 1946 to May 1947 and was stationed atFort Eustis, Virginia.[7] He then earned hismaster's degree from theUniversity of Chicago, and completed hisPhD atHarvard University, where he began teaching at age 23.[8][3]
Huntington was a member of Harvard's department of government from 1950 until he was denied tenure in 1959.[9] Along withZbigniew Brzezinski, who had also been denied tenure, he moved toColumbia University in New York. From 1959 to 1962 he was an associate professor of government at Columbia, where he was also associate director of theirInstitute of War and Peace Studies.[3] Huntington was invited to return to Harvard with tenure in 1963 and remained there until his death. He was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965.[10] Huntington andWarren Demian Manshel co-founded and co-editedForeign Policy. Huntington stayed as co-editor until 1977.[11]
Huntington met his wife, Nancy Arkelyan, when they were working together on a speech for 1956 presidential candidateAdlai Stevenson. They had two sons, Nicholas and Timothy.[3]
After several years of declining health, Huntington died on December 24, 2008, at age 81 inMartha's Vineyard.[5]
InThe Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957),[16] Huntington presents a general theory of civil–military relations. Huntington proposes a theory of objective civilian control, according to which the optimal means of asserting control over the armed forces is to professionalize them.
In 1968, just as the United States' war in Vietnam was becoming most intense, Huntington publishedPolitical Order in Changing Societies, which was a critique of themodernization theory which had affected much US policy regarding the developing world during the prior decade.
Huntington argued that as societies modernize, they become more complex and disordered. If the process of social modernization that produces this disorder is not matched by a process of political and institutional modernization—a process which produces political institutions capable of managing the stress of modernization—the result may be violence.
During the 1970s, Huntington was an advisor to governments, both democratic and dictatorial. During 1972, he met withMedici government representatives in Brazil; a year later he published the report "Approaches to Political Decompression", warning against the risks of a too-rapid political liberalization, proposing gradual liberalization, and a strong party state modeled upon the image of the MexicanInstitutional Revolutionary Party. After a prolonged transition, Brazil became democratic during 1985.
During the 1980s, he became a valued adviser to the South African regime, which used his ideas on political order to craft its "total strategy" to reform apartheid and suppress growing resistance. He assured South Africa's rulers that increasing the repressive power of the state (which at that time included police violence, detention without trial, and torture) can be necessary to effect reform. The reform process, he told his South African audience, often requires "duplicity, deceit, faulty assumptions and purposeful blindness." He thus gave his imprimatur to his hosts' project of "reforming" apartheid rather than eliminating it.[17]
Huntington frequently cited Brazil as a success, alluding to his role in his 1988 presidential address to theAmerican Political Science Association, commenting that political scienceplayed a modest role in this process. Critics, such as British political scientist Alan Hooper, note that contemporary Brazil has an especially unstable party system, wherein the best institutionalized party,Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva'sWorkers' Party, emerged in opposition to controlled transition. Moreover, Hooper claims that the lack of civil participation in contemporary Brazil results from that top-down process of political participation transitions.
In his 1991 bookThe Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Huntington made the argument that beginning with Portugal's revolution during 1974, there has been athird wave of democratization which describes a global trend which includes more than 60 countries throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa which have undergone some form of democratic transition. Huntington won the 1992University of LouisvilleGrawemeyer Award for this book.[18]
Map of the nine "civilizations" from Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations"
In 1993, Huntington provoked great debate amonginternational relations theorists with the interrogatively titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", an influential, oft-cited article published inForeign Affairs magazine. In the article, he argued that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Islam would become the biggest obstacle to Western domination of the world. The West's next big war therefore, he said, would inevitably be with Islam.[19] Its description of post-Cold Wargeopolitics and the "inevitability of instability" contrasted with the influential "End of History" thesis advocated byFrancis Fukuyama.
Huntington expanded "The Clash of Civilizations?" to book length and published it asThe Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996. The article and the book posit that post-Cold War conflict would most frequently and violently occur because of cultural rather than ideological differences. That, whilst in the Cold War, conflict occurred between the Capitalist Western Bloc and the Communist Eastern Bloc, it now was most likely to occur between the world's major civilizations—identifying eight, and a possible ninth: (i) Western, (ii) Latin American, (iii) Islamic, (iv) Sinic (Chinese), (v) Hindu, (vi) Orthodox, (vii) Japanese, (viii) African, and (ix) Buddhist. This cultural organization contrasts the contemporary world with the classical notion of sovereign states. To understand current and future conflict, cultural rifts must be understood, and culture—rather than the State—must be accepted as the reason for war. Thus, Western nations will lose predominance if they fail to recognize the irreconcilable nature of cultural tensions. Huntington argued that this post-Cold War shift in geopolitical organization and structure requires the West to strengthen itself culturally, by abandoning the imposition of its ideal of democratic universalism and its incessant military interventionism. Underscoring this point, Huntington wrote in the 1996 expansion, "In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous."[20]
The identification of Western Civilization withWestern Christianity (Catholic-Protestant) was not Huntington's original idea, it was rather the traditional Western opinion and subdivision before the Cold War era.[21] Critics (for example articles inLe Monde Diplomatique) callThe Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order the theoretical legitimization of American-caused Western aggression against China and the world's Islamic and Orthodox cultures. Other critics argue that Huntington's taxonomy is simplistic and arbitrary, and does not take account of the internal dynamics and partisan tensions within civilizations. Furthermore, critics argue that Huntington neglects ideological mobilization by elites and unfulfilled socioeconomic needs of the population as the real causal factors driving conflict, that he ignores conflicts that do not fit well with the civilizational borders identified by him, and that his new paradigm is nothing butrealist thinking in which "states" became replaced by "civilizations".[22] Huntington's influence upon US policy has been likened to that of historianArnold Toynbee's controversial religious theories about Asian leaders during the early twentieth century. TheNew York Times obituary on Huntington states that his "emphasis on ancient religious empires, as opposed to states or ethnicities, [as sources of global conflict] gained ... more cachet after theSept. 11 attacks."[23]
Huntington wrote that Ukraine might divide along the cultural line between the more Catholicwestern Ukraine and Orthodoxeastern Ukraine:
While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian-Ukrainian war, a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent thanthat of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody thanthat of Yugoslavia.[24]
Huntington's last book,Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, was published in May 2004. Its subject is the meaning of Americannational identity and what he describes as a cultural threat from large-scale immigration by Latinos, which Huntington says could "divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages". In this book, he called for America to force immigrants to "adopt English" and the US to turn to "Protestant religions" to "save itself against the threats" of Latino and Islamic immigrants. In a book review for the academic journalPerspectives on Politics, Gary M. Segura, Dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs,[25] asserted that the book should not be considered social science because of its divisive views and rhetoric.[26] Segura also called Huntington's writing of the book unforgivable on account of Huntington's academic position, saying that the work was a polemic rather than a work of scholarship.[26]
Huntington is credited with inventing the phraseDavos Man, referring toglobal elites who "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".[27] The phrase refers to theWorld Economic Forum inDavos, Switzerland, where leaders of theglobal economy meet.[28]
In 1986, Huntington was nominated for membership to theNational Academy of Sciences. The nomination was opposed bySerge Lang, a Yale University mathematician inspired by the writings of mathematicianNeal Koblitz, who had accused Huntington of misusing mathematics and engaging inpseudo-science. Lang claimed that Huntington distorted the historical record and used pseudo-mathematics to make his conclusions seem convincing. Lang's campaign succeeded; Huntington was twice nominated and twice rejected. A detailed description of these events was published by Lang in "Academia, Journalism, and Politics: A Case Study: The Huntington Case" which occupies the first 222 pages of his 1998 bookChallenges.[29]
^Smith, Michael A.; Anderson, Kevin; Rackaway, Chapman (2015).State Voting Laws in America: Historical Statutes and Their Modern Implications. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 73.doi:10.1057/9781137483584.ISBN978-1-137-48358-4.
^"Index Record for Samuel Huntington (1927) US, Veterans Affairs Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem Death File, 1850-2010",Fold3 by Ancestry.com website. Retrieved November 30, 2023. Enlistment Date is listed as "17 Apr 1946" and Release Date is listed as "11 May 1947".
^Michael C. Desch. 1998. "Soldiers, States, and Structures: The End of the Cold War and Weakening U.S. Civilian Control." Armed Forces & Society. 24(3): pages 389–405.
^Michael C. Desch. 2001.Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
^Peter D. Feaver. 1996. "An American Crisis in Civilian Control and Civil-Military Relations?"The Tocqueville Review. 17(1): 159.
^Joseph Lelyveld, Move Your Shadow (New York, 1985), pages 68–69; Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, "South Africa Since 1976: an historical perspective," in Shaun Johnson, ed., South Africa: No Turning Back (London, 1988), pages 28–29
Interview by Richard Snyder: "Samuel P. Huntington: Order and Conflict in Global Perspective," pages 210–233, in Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder,Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
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