The American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who gained prominence through his Clash of Civilizations thesis of a post-Cold War new world order, died December 24th 2008.
I’ve read some obituaries since, and would like to remind everyone of the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies:
"Some see Huntington's thesis as creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and reasserting differences between civilizations. Edward Said issued a response to Huntington's thesis in his own essay entitled "The Clash of Ignorance". Said argues that Huntington's categorization of the world's fixed "civilizations" omits the dynamic interdependency and interaction of culture. All his ideas are based not on harmony but on the clash or conflict between worlds. The theory that each world is “self-enclosed” is applied to the world map, to the structure of civilizations, to the notion that each race has a special destiny and psychology.
According to Said, it is an example of an imagined geography, where the presentation of the world in a certain way legitimates certain politics. Interventionist and aggressive, the concept of civilizational clash is aimed at maintaining a war time status in the minds of the Americans. Thus, it continues to expand the Cold War by other means rather than advancing ideas that might help us understand the current scene or that could reconcile cultures.
Critics (see Le Monde Diplomatique articles) call The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order the theoretical legitimization of American-led Western aggression against China and the world's Islamic cultures. Nevertheless, this post–Cold War shift in geopolitical organization and structure requires that the West internally strengthen itself culturally, by abandoning the imposition of its ideal of democratic universalism and its incessant military interventionism. 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. Huntington's influence upon U.S. policy has been likened to that of British historian A.J. Toynbee's controversial religious theories about Asian leaders in the early twentieth century.
Personal Representative of the Secretary-General for the UN Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations, has said:
- History does not kill. Religion does not rape women, the purity of blood does not destroy buildings and institutions do not fail. Only individuals do those things".For more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations
