DWC 201 · Mexico City, 1991
Mexico,
1991
Mexico,
Huntington's account
Huntington · paraphrased
You want Mexico to stop being Latin American and become North American.
The adviser
“Exactly! That's precisely what we are trying to do, but of course we could never say so publicly.”
“That's precisely what we are trying to do.”
Is a civilization something that gets recognized or something that gets made?
Who Is the “We”?
Common ground · August 31
Last time
What kind of thing is the West?
a placea lineagea conversationan institution
The same historical material can be connected by different stories.
Today
What can something called a civilization do?
Huntington turns a way of grouping history into a subject that can explain events.
Huntington's wager
clash.
In Huntington's account, civilizations...
clashrally kinaccept countriesdefend interests
Nation-states still make decisions, but civilizational identity is supposed to organize their behavior.
But a civilization has no...
cabinetvotechain of commandagreed spokesperson
The question is how a broad identity becomes a cause without being mistaken for a person.
Classification is not yet explanation
Difference does not explain conflict by itself.
Cultural difference
→
What makes identity politically decisive?
→
Conflict becomes more likely
Choose one of Huntington's answers.
Then ask whether it explains stronger identity, conflict, or both.
A useful theory must give good explanations.
Historical facts→
Fit→
Resist
Begin with what happened
Bosnia
The war included kin-country support, Croat–Bosniak fighting, NATO intervention, and the Srebrenica genocide.
Ukraine
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Where Huntington's model fits
Bosnia
Serb, Croat, and Bosniak forces received important support from perceived cultural and religious kin.
Ukraine
His internal fault-line claim identifies a political and cultural division inside the country.
Where the model resists the evidence
Bosnia
Alliances and interventions did not sort neatly into civilizational blocs.
Ukraine
Huntington's expectation of little Russian–Ukrainian violence did not survive later events.
What result would make us revise the theory?
People can act on the categories used to predict them.
A category becomes politically consequential when institutions organize action around it.
We createcivilizational boundaries
→
These predictallies, threats, and loyalties
→
This affordspolicies that react to those predictions
↶ Policy can help produce the pattern the model expected.
Huntington's immediate advice
Protect the West's advantage
Hold Western states together, bring culturally similar countries closer, and preserve military superiority.
Huntington's longer view
Understand and coexist
Learn how other civilizations understand themselves, find common ground, and abandon the expectation of universal Westernization.
His conclusion asks for a richer understanding than his map may be able to provide.
Said brings us back to the core issue just three weeks after September 11.
Bernard Lewis · 1990→Huntington · 1993→the “clash” revived after September 11
Which actors are hidden inside the noun?
Click a category aboveor press I / W
Return to the first “we”
“The major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture.”
What is inherited?
Histories, languages, institutions, and political memories.
Histories, languages, institutions, and political memories.
Who interprets it?
Governments, citizens, movements, and dissenting voices.
Governments, citizens, movements, and dissenting voices.
What can change?
Which affiliations matter, and what they are taken to mean.
Which affiliations matter, and what they are taken to mean.
Civilizations are assembled from inherited histories, but the meaning of that inheritance is continually revised through argument within them.
Inherited histories→Internal arguments→Revised collective identity
The next “we” is already divided.
Pius IX · 1864
“The Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself...with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”
This is proposition 80 of the Syllabus of Errors—a statement Pius IX condemns.
Edgeworth
Remembers the French Revolution as the destruction of religious and social order.
Grégoire
Argues that Christianity can serve liberty, equality, abolition, and republican citizenship.
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