Your Thoughts Exactly

I am reading "The Clash of Civilizations," by Samuel Huntington right now as well as playing a whole lot of Civilization 4. Huntington is valiantly attempting to construct a new paradigm of international relations following the end of the WWII-fall of the Soviet Union Cold War paradigm and the “Three worlds.” Thus far (about halfway in,) I think Huntington does a good job of explaining the important distinction between modernization and westernization and how different parts of the world have modernized without westernizing. There are too many loose parts of his argument, however, and while his civilizational theory has shown more predictive power than say, neo-realism following the end of the Cold War (which predicted a collapse of NATO and EU-U.S. conflict,) Huntington struggles to fit certain states and trends of the world into his paradigm, rather than having a paradigm that explains all international relations. That’s not really his fault, the fact is no one has ever come up with a universally accepted “theory of international relations,” that truly explains how people (or states,) interact on a global scale. It also may be impossible, because of how rapidly these interactions change over time.

I want to focus on an assertion Huntington makes throughout the book with regards to the relationship between culture and power. Huntington is responding to another Harvard historian, Joseph Nye, who for the last decade has been arguing for a three-tiered structure of power within the international realm: military power, economic power, and “soft power,” which can be loosely defined as the ability to get countries to do what you want through promoting attractive culture, values, and not pissing people off through your foreign policies. Huntington dismisses the idea of soft power, or any power being derived from sources other than old fashioned “hard power,” (economic/military.) The attractiveness of one’s culture or ideals, according to Huntington, is rooted in a country’s material success and military influence. Increasing hard power increases the worldwide belief in whatever values are succeeding, be they Western liberalism or East Asian collectivism.

Huntington, however, misses some of the nuances of culture and power by only focusing on the world as civilizational blocks. The ability of a country to get what it wants through promoting (or not promoting) attractive ideals is best seen in the U.S.’s total failure to promote an attractive message with regards to the War in Iraq. Soft power advocates like Nye would argue that the collective effect of Abu Gharib, the Guantanamo incarcerations, and the misrepresentation of the threat from weapons of mass destruction have had an important adverse effect on relative U.S. power, even though their relative military and/or economic power has not changed, the U.S.’s ability to get what it wants in the international arena has.

What the U.S desires in 2006 is increasing support for the redevelopment of Iraq and a global consensus movement to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Alliance with the United States on its foreign policy objectives however, is not a strong selling point in many countries, even those that Huntington in 1996 argued were key parts of “our” civilization (U.K., France and Germany.) Thus the U.S. is finding it exceedingly difficult to get anything it wants done in the international arena: in dealing with Iran specifically it’s been relegated to the role of the “slighty crazy,” country who may go nuts and invade if something isn’t worked out by the more rational states like Russia and Pakistan. Oh say can you see!

I think Nye has been proven right over the last decade, that there is some other level of “power,” that can be used to effectively get what you want other than guns and dollars, and this has occurred due to the current administration’s lack of understanding of the importance of soft power. Huntington should understand this because his entire argument is based around the linking of various states and peoples through these cultural ties. But according to Huntington, the world is static not fluid, and countries and peoples are locked into their cultural groupings by history (and religion,) unable to understand, acquire, or fully share cultural values. The spread of western liberal ideals only occurred due to the massive economic and military superiority of the West; with the return of balance in the world we see a rising in the indigenous values of each area.

If this happens, then the ability of the United States to influence non-Western countries through soft power will be limited, for as these countries do not share our values or ideas, it will be difficult to attract them through promoting our selves. Yet I do not think that the appeal of specific ideas as “Western,” or “liberal,” is limited to only our Western counterparts. I think that rather, when the United States makes foreign policy decisions (or unpopular domestic decisions,) that go against what we are trying to promote, or help reinforce the portrayal of ourselves as meddling bullies, we encourage the development of the civilizational paradigm by causing countries to turn inwards rather than look outwards.

The key to peace in the 21^st century, and the key to the success of the human race, is the utilization of technologies and the ease of sending information and the ease of human migration to promote a new universality between peoples and cultures that simultaneously allows parts of all cultures into each other while protecting the uniqueness of each person’s worldview. This is very difficult, because of the natural human fear of the different and the unknown. I don’t understand why people are scared of the idea of a world culture. Personally, I’m thrilled by it. Because foreign chicks are sooooo hot.

# posted by Marmaniac @ 1:50 PM