Samuel P. Huntington

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Samuel P. Huntington at the WEF 2004 in Davos .

Samuel Phillips Huntington (born April 18, 1927 in New York City , † December 24, 2008 on Martha's Vineyard , Massachusetts ) was an American political scientist and author. Huntington taught at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University in Cambridge . He was an advisor to the US State Department .

Life

Huntington earned his bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1946 , his Master of Arts in 1948 from the University of Chicago and his doctorate in 1951 from Harvard University . From 1959 to 1962 he was assistant director of the Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University . In 1965 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . As a professor of political science at Harvard, he became deputy director of the Center for International Affairs in 1973 and its director in 1978, a position he held until 1989. From 1989 to 2000 Huntington headed the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard and in 1996 took over the chairmanship of the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies .

In addition to his university career, Huntington advised politicians and was thus able to supplement his extensive scientific work with an empirical basis. Several of his books have been awarded prestigious prizes.

plant

In his early writings, Huntington dealt primarily with military-political issues, such as the development of a specific military ethic and the historical change in relations between the military and civil society .

The intellectual basis of his analyzes of the nation states, their domestic politics and foreign political power interests was political realism . His investigation of the politics of the superpowers overcame the still common clichés by limiting himself to realpolitik, the meaning of political ideas, the relationship between the system and the citizen, and the formation of political will. Huntington later looked at the opportunities for societies to modernize and democratize.

In 1968 Huntington referred to the problem of political undesirable developments in many non-Western societies in his comparative cultural book Political Order in Changing Societies . The social and political mobilizations that result from economic modernization would often lead to the arbitrary rule of military potentates because of the poor development of political institutions .

To characterize the change in the 20th century, Huntington coined the term democratization wave in his book The Third Wave . The global change from authoritarian to liberal and democratic societies therefore took place in three big waves, which were made possible by internal social and foreign policy factors. Each wave was marked by an increase in the number of democratic states in the world, followed by a countermovement in which some democracies returned to totalitarian systems before the next wave of democratization began. For him, democracy remained a fragile form of government that was always at risk and had to be preserved and defended.

theses

In his controversial book The Clash of Civilizations ( clash of civilizations , 1996) turns Huntington against the idea of a universal world culture, as after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the end of the Cold War, among others, Francis Fukuyama was represented. Huntington's theses first appeared in the summer of 1993 in the Council on Foreign Relations' renowned journal for foreign and security policy " Foreign Affairs " .

Rather, the political scientist Huntington assumes a shift in the conflict between ideologies, which shaped the national alliances, to a conflict between civilizations , because civilizations are the highest in curbing Western dominance with their history, languages, values ​​and religions have become meaningful unity.

A distinction is usually made between eight, sometimes nine civilizations (in the sense of global cultural areas ). Three of them are emerging: those of the Hindu , the Sini and the Islam . They resulted in geopolitics becoming multipolar, and Western civilization is expected to be challenged in the process. For too long it had held the misguided, arrogant, wrong and dangerous view that economic modernization was simultaneously leading to the breakthrough of Western values . Instead of a policy of human rights , Huntington calls for a geopolitics of power led by the United States . Huntington also encourages the strengthening of western identity externally and internally.

Samuel Huntington's prognoses are based primarily on the violent clashes between Muslims and non-Muslims that occur worldwide in the context of globalization . However, the reunification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are also mentioned as examples . One of Huntington's supporters is Bassam Tibi , who represents his theory of the “clash of civilizations” in his own interpretation.

Huntington's Who Are We was controversially received . The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004). Here he turns his thesis of the conflict of "civilizations" inward and looks at the different cultures in the United States. He considers Latin American (explicitly Mexican) immigration in particular to be questionable and advocates a return to the Anglo-Protestant values ​​of the first European settlers; in those he sees embodied the true national identity of the United States. This has been heavily criticized, particularly by Latin American organizations and left-wing liberal intellectuals. As a possible future scenario, Huntington describes a development in the USA towards a bilingual and bi-cultural society, in which Latinos assume the dominant role in some states and Anglo-Americans move to other states.

Before his considerations of civilization, Huntington appeared as a leading proponent of modernization theories and as a democracy researcher.

He already supported US military policy during the Vietnam War . He was one of the supporters of the concentration of the South Vietnamese civilian population in military-guarded zones. Until recently, Huntington defended the support of the military dictatorship in Brazil as a success. Huntington advocated “authoritarian one-party systems” in order to be able to carry out the necessary reforms radically. In 1960 he described South Africa, which was shaped by the apartheid system, as a "satisfied society".

Huntington was against the Iraq war from the start . After the attacks of September 11, 2001 , he emphasized the need to differentiate the formula from the clash of civilizations :

“It is Osama bin Laden's goal to turn this war by a terrorist organization against civilized society into a clash of cultures between Islam and the West. It would be a disaster if he succeeded. "

When there was clashes between American intellectuals after the September 11th terrorist attacks, Huntington was a key spokesman. With 57 other intellectuals, he signed an appeal in 2002 to support the president in the fight against international terrorism . In special situations there could be a just war if narrow limits were observed.

reception

Huntington's work represents a cultural turn in political science: He emphasizes the role of cultural identities and cultural differences as shaping forces in international politics. At the same time, he points to massive cultural defensive reactions against the globalization emanating from the West, which meets strong countercurrents.

Because of his pointedly pointed, broad-based theses, he became a much quoted and controversial author. Above all, his concept of culture and its consequences for global governance sparked criticism. While on the one hand it was emphasized that the theses represent an important contribution to the interpretation of the international problem situation, the critics referred to the emphasized conservatism and the holistic approach, which limited the ability to analyze.

Years ago, Fred Halliday (1946-2010) of the London School of Economics denied the theses of Samuel Huntington in his book "Islam and the Myth of Confrontation". Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire , he argues, no Muslim country has had an army so strong that it could threaten the West. The united armed forces of the Islamic countries - in the unlikely event of joint action - are far inferior to the western armed forces. Meanwhile, many leading scholars and cultural critics have attacked Huntington's theses as inadmissibly falsifying.

The Indian-American economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen believes that Huntington's theories attach too great importance to cultural affiliation among the many aspects that make up a person's identity. He criticizes man's commitment to religion and culture (“we” and the “others”) and criticized Huntington's one-dimensional fixation on cultural identity (“identity can kill”). If the relationships between human individuals were reduced to a “war of cultures”, then snap the “identity trap”. The business of the fundamentalists consists in this miniaturization of human existence, with which all ideology of violence begins. Amartya Sen also shows how the spiral of identity and violence can be broken. Because nobody is condemned to a single identity, everyone can shape and have a say in their personality. The world could move towards peace just as it now seems to be heading towards violence and war.

In 2007 Ilija Trojanow and Ranjit Hoskoté published the "Kampfabsage" for Huntington's Clash of Cultures . The authors put forward the holistic counter-thesis: Cultures do not fight each other, they flow into one another. In her book “Kampfabsage. Cultures do not fight each other - they flow together ”they direct your criticism against a view that is widespread in North America and Western Europe, according to which cultures had an unchangeable core in unbridgeable demarcation from other cultures. According to the authors, these are only historical myths, because the exchange in art, philosophy or economics first led to the development of Western European societies towards their current status. Using simple everyday phenomena in food culture, art, music, fashion, architecture and technology explain that there has always been a convergence or mixing of cultures.

The debate about Huntington's theses on the “clash of cultures” was extensively traced in German by Udo Metzinger. Harald Müller and Gazi Çağlar are among the German critics of Huntington's theory .

"Davos Man"

Huntington is also considered to be the creator of the expression “Davos man” , which - alluding to the World Economic Forum in Davos  - denounces an aloof international elite whose members showed little national loyalty.

Membership: National Academy of Sciences

Huntington was proposed for membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 and 1987 , but was rejected both times. One of his main opponents was the mathematician Serge Lang . In reviewing Huntington's method in his publication Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), Lang found a serious abuse of mathematical methods. Huntington had come in this publication to the conclusion that South Africa in the 1960s, a "satisfied society" (satisfied society) was.

Fonts (selection)

  • Political Order in Changing Societies. Yale University Press, New Haven 1969, ISBN 0-300-01171-7
  • The Soldier and the State. The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Belknap Press, Cambridge 1981, ISBN 0-674-81736-2
  • The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman 1991, ISBN 0-8061-2516-0
  • The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster, New York 1996, ISBN 0-684-84441-9
  • S. Huntington, LE Harrison (Ed.): Dispute over values. Goldmann, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-442-15265-8
  • Who are we? The American Identity Crisis. Europa-Verlag, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-203-78060-7

literature

  • Berndt Ostendorf: Samuel P. Huntington. In: Stephan Moebius , Dirk Quadflieg (Ed.): Culture. Present theories. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 3-531-14519-3 .
  • Leander Scholz: Oswald Spengler in America: The clash of cultures and its techniques. In: Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie (ZKph), ed. v. Ralf Konersmann u. Dirk Westerkamp, ​​Volume 11, year 2017, Issue 2, pp. 389–401.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary for Samuel Huntington , Harvard Gazette, Feb.5, 2009.
  2. ↑ a b Political Theory of the Present, Samuel Phillips Huntington, p. 241, Kröner, Stuttgart 2004.
  3. ^ Lexicon of Politics, Vol. 1 Political Theories , Modernization Theories , p. 350.
  4. ↑ Who Are We review notes. The Challenges to America's National Identity at perlentaucher.de
  5. ↑ Samuel Huntington: The organic intellectual of power , in: Frankfurter Rundschau, December 29, 2008.
  6. ↑ Christian Geyer: " The catchy tune - On the death of Samuel P. Huntington ". In: FAZ of December 29, 2008
  7. ↑ Political Theory of the Present, Samuel Phillips Huntington, p. 242, Kröner, Stuttgart 2004.
  8. ↑ Political Theory of the Present, Samuel Phillips Huntington, p. 243, Kröner, Stuttgart 2004.
  9. ^ Fred Halliday: Islam and the Myth of Confrontation. Tauris, London 1995, ISBN 1-86064-004-4 , p. 107 ff.
  10. ^ Ranjit Hoskote, Ilija Trojanow: Fight cancellation. Cultures don't fight each other - they flow together. Blessing, Munich 2007. ISBN 978-3-89667-363-3
  11. ↑ Udo M. Metzinger: The Huntington's Disease. The discussion of Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations' in journalism (Cologne work on international politics, vol. 13), Cologne: SH-Verlag 2000. See also Ulrich Menzel's criticism of The Clash of Civilizations : The West Against the Rest Samuel Huntington's Reconstruction of the West , in: ders., Globalisierung versus Fragmentierung , Frankfurt / M .: Suhrkamp 1998, pp. 70–96.
  12. ^ Samuel Huntington: Dead Souls. The Denationalization of the American Elite ( February 2, 2009 memento on the Internet Archive ). In: The National Interest. 2004
  13. ^ Serge Lang: Challenges. Springer, New York 1998, ISBN 0-387-94861-9 . Available online on Google Books
personal data
SURNAME Huntington, Samuel P.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Huntington, Samuel Phillips
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American political scientist and author
DATE OF BIRTH April 18, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH December 24, 2008
Place of death Martha's Vineyard , Massachusetts