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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (84408)	3/21/2003 11:08:11 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations? lib.pku.edu.cn lander.edu This is the original Foreign Affairs article from 1993; the book came out in 96, so presumably the article isn't an outtake. Looking up the book, I found this review by Michael Ignatieff, which may or may not have something to do with our esteemed moderator: Fault Lines query.nytimes.com I can't resist a little excerpt from that one: In expanding the Foreign Affairs article into ''The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,'' Mr. Huntington has thickened out his argument, but it remains controversial. If there are seven or eight world civilizations, he says, the West had better shed the hubristic notion that its civilization is destined to spread its values across the globe. The West is ''unique'' -- but its values are not universal. Universalism, Mr. Huntington maintains, is just a leftover from imperialism. Western aid workers have no business telling the Afghan Taliban to allow their women to go to school. Washington has no business tying human rights conditions to its trade with China. It is a significant change of heart for a former architect of American policy in Vietnam to assert that ''Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world.'' But Western intervention is not just dangerous, Mr. Huntington argues, it is also useless. Civilizational wars, like that between Islam and Orthodoxy on Russia's southern frontier, aren't susceptible to Western mediation: they've smoldered for centuries and are likely to keep on doing so. ''The first requirement of peace in a multicivilizational, multipolar world,'' Mr. Huntington writes, is the ''abstention rule'': that ''core states abstain from intervention in conflicts in other civilizations.'' The West should stay out of any conflict between China and Japan; Islam should stay out of conflicts in Europe, even on behalf of Islamic minorities there. While the West should pursue ''commonalities'' -- shared values and interests -- with other civilizations, it should discard the chief moral fiction of post-1945 liberal internationalism: the belief that cultural difference is secondary and common human interests are primary. An allied liberal delusion, in Mr. Huntington's view, is the promotion of multicultural policies both at home and abroad. American liberals were self-deluded to think a multi-ethnic Bosnia was defensible; in reality there could never be peace between the region's Christians and Muslims. The underlying problem is not ''fundamentalism,'' Mr. Huntington baldly asserts. The core values of even moderate Islam are antithetical to the rights-based individualism of the West. Whoops. I think resident authority tekboy is a fan of Huntington, but also thinks "Clash" might be his weakest book. I can certainly see why the PNAC crowd has latched onto Lewis instead. Other related links: dmoz.org , teaching9-11.org As to the original quote, I just picked out a phrase with big words and put it in quotes, see google.com