The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order [Paperback]

"The West", which he defines as coterminous with Western Christendom, attained its greatest power over the rest of the world by 1914. Had it been united enough, it would have controlled and ruled over the world for centuries, if not forever.

The West lost its chance. Now that the non-Western share of the world's economy is rising, this window of opportunity is not likely to come back.

Huntington is right to recognize that (although he's hardly the first). So he advocates a united West to maintain superiority over the rest of the world and to prevent itself from being dominated in turn.

The trouble is, I don't see how it's possible to unite "the West". Unlike India, it's not even a geographical concept. There was a time when the West was one whole unit: the Roman Empire. Even then it contained within its borders many peoples now considered non-Western (such as Egyptians), while many others, like the Germans, were not part of the Roman world. But ever since then the peoples who formed what Huntington calls the Western Christendom have not been a political or economic entity. Attempts to unite Europe by force, such as by Napoleon and Hitler, failed totally.

America, which formerly was part of the British Empire, and thus part of Europe's sphere of influence, broke off over two centuries ago. Ever since then it has been taking it own path. When Russia was a menace, there was a link between America and Europe in NATO. But even then there was no free trade pact or common currency zone between them.

With the communist threat gone, the incentive for unity between both sides of the Atlantic is weaker than ever. Europeans are trying to piece themselves together, form a common economy, and have one foreign policy. America's future ties seem to me to be with the rest of the Americas. We hear only news of growing differences between the US and Europeans, not the opposite.

Just when free trade and globalization are lifting billions of people out of poverty, Huntington advocates a policy whereby the West contains itself and ceases relations with the outside world. To do so would require the complete cessation of investment in non-Western countries as well as of all imports from them. Without a doubt this super Great Wall would stop economic development in the non-Western world. This is not only immoral - it will destroy the West.

Huntington's recommendation for America's domestic policy smacks so much of neo-Nazism that I shudder to think it comes from a Harvard liberal. All immigration from non-Western countries, whether legal or illegal, must be stopped, while the non-Western immigrants (i.e., non-whites) must be assimilated. How this assimilation is to take place, I don't know. You can't force people to marry each other. Yet Huntington can see that without actual racial blending, there will always be multi-racial and multi-ethnic divisions in American political life.

Huntington's divisions of civilizations are arbitrary and inconsistent. Some, like "Orthodox", referring to Russia and Eastern Europe - and believe it or not, "Buddhist" - are religious; while others, like "Sinic" (China) sound ethnic, and "Latin America" looks like nothing more than a linguistic civilization (based on Spanish, that is).

He calls for total integration - political and economic - between North America and Western Europe. How likely is THAT going to happen?. Europeans have enough trouble integrating themselves into one whole unit. Also, the cultural gulf between America and Europe is widening. Just look at the unpopularity of McDonald's restaurants in France. Nor are Germans crazy about everything American, either.

America itself is changing demographically. In 50 years' time white Americans may well be the largest minority, with no single group in the clear majority. This will make America even more different from Europe. Huntington calls for "Westernization" of Latin America. The fact is, America is Latinizing.

The notion about putting an end to trade with Asia is absurd. It would be a disaster for American businesses and the US economy, which could be plunged into a depression so severe as to make the 30's look like a boom. No sane American farmers or CEO's would support that.

If reform continues in China, it will make the country so powerful as to make a conflict between America and China a global catastrophe.

Russia's own trade with China is developing fast. Relations between the two countries have never been better and keep improving. If America can't get France and Germany (two countries from Huntington's Western Christendom "civilization") to go along on tiny Iraq, the possibility that America can get Europe and Russia on its side in a total war with China and Japan is pure fantasy. Huntington's scenario should put Tom Clancy to shame.

In any case, the assumption that China and America are on a collision course cannot be sustained. Just as America is changing, so too is China. Just as America's center of gravity is shifting away from the Atlantic and towards the Pacific, so China too will eventually liberalize and orient towards the West.

Economic reform already has made the people far more open than they used to be. Just look at the effort the people in Beijing are making to learn English, in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. The communist government for all its rhetoric never hesitates to hold up the Space Shuttle as a shining example of AMERICAN technology - it's on every poster. This trend will continue, notwithstanding Huntington's doubts.

Trade between China on the one hand and Europe, America, and Russia on the other is developing so quickly, that I don't see how Huntington can bet on a growing rift between the Sinic "civilization" and the rest of the world. With trade also comes cultural and value influences, as McNeill points out brilliantly. Huntington has to be quite myopic to despair of longterm changes. Perhaps he reads too little history.

As an ethnic Chinese born in then British-controlled Hong Kong, but also a Canadian citizen, having travelled all over America and Europe, I see more and deeper links between civilizations in the future. McNeill calls cultural interchange the basic pattern of history. With ever faster communication links - jets, internet, television - civilization boundaries are more porous and blurry than ever. Even the cleft between Islam and the West is not unbridgeable. (Of course, there will always be a small group of extremists - on both sides.)

Viewing the future with a Cold War mentality, from a time when America and Russia had little to trade with each other except bullets and propaganda, Huntington simply assumes the same will happen, this time on ethnic/religious/civilization lines rather than ideological ones. It makes me wince to think that a professor at Harvard - TR's and FDR's own alma mater - can be this dumb. A man of TR's realism or FDR's practical sense wouldn't even bother to pick up a book like this.

Shut up in a library all day, extrapolating things in a simple-minded manner, seeing everything in black and white, Huntington draws ivory-tower lessons from his books. He should get out in the open air, travel a bit more, and meet more people.