Samuel Phillips Huntington (18 April 1927 - 24 December 2008)

Samuel Phillips Huntington (18 April 1927 - 24 December 2008)

 (English: Samuel Phillips Huntington) was an American political scientist, a 58-year-old Harvard professor and conservative thinker. He worked in several subfields of political science and business, described by Harvard as the teacher of a generation of scientists in widely divergent fields and one of the most influential political scientists of the second half of the 20th century.

The most famous of his works was his thesis on the clash of civilizations, in which he argued that post-Cold War conflicts would not be based on differences of ideologies between nation-states but on cultural and religious differences among the world's major civilizations. Huntington's first book is still a yardstick for studying how military affairs intersect with the political sphere. As defined by his analysis of political and economic development in the Third World. His latest book, published in 2004, was an analysis of US national identity and identified what he saw as threats to the culture and values ​​on which the United States was based.

In addition to his work at Harvard, Hennington was a security plan in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, co-founder of Foreign Policy magazine, and chaired several research research centers. He was a Democrat and served as an adviser to Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey. He died on December 24, 2008 at the age of 81 years.

background

Samuel Phillips Hannington was born on April 18, 1927 in New York City to Dorothy Sanborn and Richard Thomas Hannington. He graduated with honors from Yale University at the age of 18, served in the US Army, obtained a master's degree from the University of Chicago, and a doctorate from Harvard where he began teaching at the age of 23. He was a member of the Harvard Department of Government from 1950 until Privilege in 1959. Served as Associate Professor of Government at Columbia University where he was Deputy Director of the Institute for War and Peace Studies. Huntington was invited to return to Harvard with possession in 1963 and remained there until his death. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965. Huntington co-founded Foreign Policy magazine and continued to edit it until 1977.

His first major book, The Soldier and the State: The Civil Military Theory and Policy of 1957, sparked controversy when published, but today it is considered one of the most influential books on American civil-military relations. Emerged most prominently after the writing of his book The Political System in Changing Societies of 1968, which challenged the traditional view of modernizationists that economic and social progress would produce stable democracies in countries that had recently decolonized. In 1968, he wrote an influential article in the Foreign Affairs magazine, calling for the concentration of rural people in South Vietnam as a means of isolating the Viet Cong. He was also a co-author of the Democracy Crisis: Good Governance of Democracies, a report to the Tripartite Commission in 1976. During 1977 and 1978 in the Jimmy Carter administration, he was the White House Security Planning Coordinator at the National Security Council. He died on December 24, 2008 at Martha's Vineyard, Mass., At the age of 81.

Soldier and State

The "Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations" was published in 1957. Huntington's view of civil-military relations was shaped by the circumstances of that period. Where the United States faced internal and external threats, including the Korean War, Soviet and Chinese expansion and competition, and more specifically, the strained relations between President Harry Truman and General Douglas McCarthy. The policy of containing Soviet expansion requires the United States to maintain large military forces for the first time in its history during peacetime, and every reorganization of the army after World War II has set conditions for future reorganization. In addition, the political rift with Joseph McCarthy's claims of betrayal and conspiring with the Soviets at home has raised Huntington's interest in political stability. Huntington analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of liberal American institutions and argued that the effective response to McCarthyism was from the army and the Senate, not liberals. Huntington says that the study of civil-military relations has become a confusing set of misguided assumptions and beliefs

From the precepts of American liberalism, this group is not systematic according to Huntington because it fails to absorb many important facts and is based on an outdated value system.

Military institutions consist of two formulas: a functional or practical formula stemming from threats to the security of society, and a societal formula emerging from social forces, ideologies, and dominant institutions in society. Military institutions that reflect community values ​​alone may not be able to perform their practical tasks effectively. At the same time, it may be impossible for any society to contain a military institution formed in a functional or purely functional form. The balance of this relationship did not become important until late in American history. Security in the United States was a result of nature and circumstances, more inherited than manufactured. Military policy was limited to the army's budget and the number of ships and barges needed by the Navy. There was no interest in military-civilian relations except in a limited framework, the military's influence on economic and political values ​​and institutions. For Huntington, the question was about what kind of civil-military relations are compatible with liberal American democratic values. The question now (the Cold War era) has changed to what types of civil-military relations will preserve the security and stability of the American nation.

Civil-military relations are one aspect

National Security Policy. The national security policy aims at strengthening the protection of the State's social, economic and political institutions from threats emanating from other countries. National security policy has three forms and two levels, military security policy, a program of activities designed to minimize or eliminate efforts to weaken or destroy the nation by armed forces acting outside its institutional and regional boundaries. And an internal security policy to deal with conspiracy threats to weaken or destroy the nation by armed forces acting within its institutional and regional boundaries. The third is the interim security policy whose task is to deal with the threat of erosion resulting from long-term changes in the nation's social, economic, political and demographic structure that may tend to limit the relative power of the state. All these three styles have two levels, institutional and practical. Practical policy consists of direct actions to deal with the security threat, and institutional policy concerns how these procedures are formulated and implemented. The direct practical issues of military policy usually include: quantitative issues related to the size, recruitment, and funding of the armed forces, including the basic question of the allocation of state resources to military needs. Qualitative issues related to the organization, structure, equipment and distribution of armed forces, including the quality of armaments and weapons, bases locations, arrangements with allies. The dynamic issues related to the use of armed forces, when and under what circumstances military force is used. Huntington says public debate focuses on these issues, but the decisions taken are determined by institutional patterns. The objective of this policy at the institutional level is to develop a system of civil-military relations that maximizes military security capabilities with minimal losses to social values. Achieving this end requires a complex balance of powers and behaviors between military and civilian groups. Nations that can develop a balanced pattern of civil-military relations increase the likelihood that they will receive appropriate answers to practical issues in military policy. Nations that fail in this respect, waste their resources and fall into unaccountable risk. This is the basic thesis of the book. Professionalizing the officers' corps is the essential component of a secure solution that ensures effective civil control over the armed forces, without compromising the efficiency of the national defense system. Professionalization means that military officers must reflect the same characteristics of experience and responsibility as corporate personnel. For experience, Huntington sums up the "soldier's ability to manage violence" rather than its application. The special responsibility of the military officer is to use this experience for the benefit of the state. At the same time, this testimony of experience comes from the corps of officers themselves as the clearest bureaucracy. Huntington's solution to link civic control to national defense includes the distinction of two types of civilian control: objective civilian control: relying primarily on independent military ethics, politically neutral, and professionally competent. Civil control derives from the transformation of the army into a tool of the state. The function of the military in this case is to develop ways and means to achieve the goals and objectives set by a civilian political leadership. Civil self-control: These come from the army by giving the independent role in determining national priorities. In this case, the army is one of the competing groups for influence and national priorities, which Huntington opposed in principle. Huntington's argument relies on the corrective power of a sound social philosophy rather than on special institutional arrangements and processes. His definition of objective and subjective control is his impressions of conservative social philosophy and liberalism. Liberal values ​​emphasize human individuality, logic and moral dignity and reject political, economic and social constraints on his freedom. These values ​​are rooted in the American conscience, but their application to all situations may have catastrophic consequences. The origin of the American military problem in the 1950s is that these liberal values ​​gave rise to civilian self-censorship of the military. "Do not try to apply the same ideas to all human problems and institutions and allow a variety of goals and values, recognize the role of authority in human relations and accept existing institutions and prefer to address social goals in a limited way," said Edmund Berck, a conservative thinker. He says that conservatism, unlike Marxism, does not have an ideological pattern to impose on military institutions. Huntington proposes conservative situational or interim safeguards to ensure national security and the professionalism of the military.

Political system in changing societies

In 1968, when the US war on Vietnam reached its peak, Huntington published the book The Political System in Changing Societies, criticizing the modernization theory that has been behind many American policies in the developing world over the past decade. Huntington says that as societies develop, they become more complex. If the social modernization process that produces this disorder does not coincide with a political and institutional modernization process that produces political institutions capable of managing modernization, the result is a boom in violence. The distinction between democracy and dictatorship is less than the differences between the countries that embody opinions, society, legitimacy, organization, political effectiveness, stability, countries that are politically impotent and lacking the above-mentioned qualities . All countries, whether communist totalitarianism or liberal democracy, belong to this category, the category of effective states. The size of order and authority, not the nature of the ideological system, is the most important

Huntington argues in 1968 that there is American indifference to political development when analyzing the problems of the Third World. The Americans have not experienced the experiences of pushing for a political system. They have found equality, not seeking equality, and the fruits of a democratic revolution without suffering any of them. The United States was born with a government and institutions imported from England and therefore there was no American concern about the establishment of the government. Therefore, when Americans think about state building, they do not pay attention to the creation and accumulation of power to the extent of limiting it and dividing it. When they ask about the design of the government, they automatically respond to a written constitution, a document of rights, separation of powers, federalism, regular elections and competitive parties. To reduce government and agree with the classic American anti-government logic

He adds that in many changing societies, this form of governance is unrelated. The problem is not the holding of elections but the creation of institutions. In many cases, if not most, elections in changing countries lead to the strengthening of a destructive and reactionary force that destroys public power structures. The causes of unrest and violence in developing countries have nothing to do with the nature of the ruling regime, in large part the product of rapid social change and the emergence of new political groups, accompanied by the slow development of political institutions in conjunction with social changes.

who are we?

A Huntington Latest Who We Are? The US national identity challenge in 2004 refuted the premise that the United States was "a country of immigrants" arguing that the founders of the United States were not "immigrants" but settlers, because the British came to America to establish a new society rather than to integrate into an existing society. Others who came to live in the settlements established by the first few were already immigrants but the United States was not a "country of immigrants". "If the French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics were the first to settle in what became known as the United States, it would be a country like Brazil or Mexico or Québec in Canada, but it was settled by the English Protestants, which is why the United States is what it is today, Brazil or Mexico.

Huntington refers to American doctrine and defines it as the core of American identity, defining its principles as the embodiment of the values ​​of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private ownership. Of all the European countries and colonies, only the United States developed this doctrine based on Protestant reform, which means that the United States was an English colony, because the political and legal institutions of the settlers, which were created in the seventh and eighteenth centuries, quoted many institutions and practices late The 6th and 17th centuries in England. Huntington emphasizes the Protestant influence on American identity. He adds that Protestantism's emphasis on the conscience of the individual and the responsibility of individuals to know God's truth directly from the gospel is to reinforce the values ​​of individualism, equality and the right to choose religion and freedom of opinion in the United States. Democracy should be exercised at the level of Governments.

Huntington argued that American doctrine has been threatened since the 1960s with the emergence of civil rights movements and the globalization of the economy. Towards the end of the Cold War, American nationalism was less important. Huntington was opposed to quotas, job quotas, and admission to universities just because one of them belonged to an ethnic minority, because US legislation provided for employment based on competence and capacity rather than race or religion. He also focused on much of his book on Latin American and Mexican immigration specifically and its impact on the United States. Huntington says that former immigrants and non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds were learning English. This changed with civil rights legislation of the 1960s that prohibited discrimination based on national origin, The law has been interpreted as allowing those who do not speak English to vote in the elections, and laws have been amended to help the children of immigrants who do not speak English to progress in the American education system. Huntington argues that these policies have hindered the integration of immigrants American society and increased them in connection with their original cultures and turned into a tool to show their national pride.

Huntington also spoke of Aspena (Spain) areas in the United States, particularly in the south-western regions, because of immigration from Mexico, because they are much higher than the migration of Germans and Irish people through American history. Mexicans are different from the Germans and the Irish

And others, because they stress their children born in the United States speak Spanish. The Catholic culture is characterized by "mistrust of people outside the family; lack of initiative and self-reliance, low priority for education, and accept poverty as a necessary virtue to enter paradise," according to Huntington. The conclusion of the book is that the United States found on the basis of enlightenment and Protestant reform, and Americans must understand this fact that distinguishes it from the rest of the world, immigrants speak English and define themselves according to this culture of the United States instead of their native countries. The Clash of Civilizations In 1993, Huntington raised a great debate among international political theorists by writing an article entitled The Clash of Civilizations in the magazine Foreign Affairs, a direct response to his student Francis Fukuyama's thesis entitled End of History and the Last Man. Francis Fukuyama argued at the end of history and the latter that at the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy would be the dominant form of regulation around the world. He argued that post-Cold War conflicts would not be between nation states and their political and economic differences, but cultural differences would be the main engine of human conflict in the coming years. Huntington expanded his essay and wrote a book entitled Clash of Civilizations and Restructuring the Global System, arguing that During the Cold War, the conflict was ideological between capitalism and communism, but the next conflict would take a different form and be among possible civilizations: Western Civilization Latin Civilization Japanese Civilization Chinese Civilization Indian Civilization Of the Islamic (all Muslim majority countries) Orthodox civilization African civilization Buddhist civilization This cultural organization contradicts the concept of the nation-state in the modern world. To understand the current and future conflict, Huntington argues that cultural faults, not ideology or nationalism, must theoretically accept as the focus of future wars. Huntington argues that cultural differences or characteristics can not be changed as ideological affiliations. One can change from communist to liberal, but the Russian can not become a Persian. In ideological conflicts, people can choose the side they support, which does not happen in cultural or civilizational conflict. The same logic applies to religion. One can have dual French and Algerian citizenship, but it can not be both Muslim and Catholic. That cultural factors help to build cohesive economic blocs such as the case of Asian tigers and their proximity to China and perhaps Japan's accession to them despite their belonging to civilization itself, which will lead to the growth of ethnic and cultural identities of civilizations and overcome ideological differences. In his book, Huntington focused on Islam and said that "its borders are bloody as well as its internal regions," referring to Muslim conflicts with other religions such as the conflict in Sudan and its south, between India and Pakistan and conflicts within India itself between Muslims and Hindus. Huntington questions whether India will remain a secular democratic state The problems of immigration in Europe, the rise of racism in Germany and Italy against immigrants from North Africa and Turkey, the problems of Muslim Turkmen in China, the conflicts of the Azeri Muslims with the Armenians, the conflicts of Muslims in Central Asia with the Russians, Who identified the Turks in Bulgaria, but defined the conflict as a "Christian world" with its secular values ​​on the one hand, and "the Muslim world" on the other. Huntington cited the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Saddam Hussein's popularity was high among Arab and Muslim peoples, although most Arab regimes did not support his position and joined an international coalition led by the United States to liberate Kuwait. The groups of political Islam were opposed to the international coalition. Saddam Hussein used a popular speech in which war was portrayed as a war between civilizations. Islamic groups denied that it was an "international alliance against Iraq" but a "Western alliance against Islam." Even King Hussein bin Talal, Jordan is a country on the "axis of moderation" reconciled with the West, he said it is not a war on Iraq, but "a war against all Arabs and Muslims." Another Turkish example was the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Turkey found itself compelled to support the Azeris after formally committing itself to neutrality. Turkish President Turkut Ozal in 1992 said Turkish newspapers were filled with images of massacres and increasing popular pressure on politicians to remind Armenia that Turkey still existed To defend the Azeris who share ethnically with the Turks. In this crisis, the Communist Soviet Union, the atheist, was a former supporter of Azerbaijan, but immediately after its collapse, the Russians found themselves forced to help the Armenian Orthodox like them. The third example is related to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, where the West showed its support for Bosnia because of the massacres committed by the Serbs without any practical measures to prevent the massacres, but the European countries did not show the same attitude towards the massacres of Croats against the Muslim minority. Germany made extraordinary efforts to persuade European countries to recognize Croatia and Slovenia, two countries with a Catholic majority but have taken a moderate position in the direction of the Orthodox Serbs. Russia found itself under growing public pressure not to intervene to support the Serbs. By 1993, hundreds of Russian fighters were fighting in Serbia , Iran has armed and trained three to four thousand fighters to help Bosnia and Saudi Arabia found itself under mounting pressure from fundamentalist groups inside to determine a clear position of what is happening in that country .. Samuel Huntington sets several

Scenarios of the West's relationship or "Western civilization" means the United States, Canada, the European Union, and to some extent Japan, with "others." Huntington says that the West is not facing an economic challenge from anyone. UN and IMF resolutions in one way or another reflect the interests of the United States and the European Union and have been disguised as the "international community" to legitimize decisions that are in the best interest of the United States. Western countries are a combination of military power and international institutions and promotion of the values ​​of democracy and liberalism to protect their interests and ensure their hegemony over world governance. Huntington says that this is a non-Western view at least and has a great deal of truth. Huntington says that the struggle and the military and economic quest for power will determine the shape of the conflict between the West and other civilizations, no matter how the West tries to say that the values ​​of democracy, human rights, freedom, secularism and the Constitution are universal values ​​that benefit all mankind. However, the values ​​of democracy, the rule of law and the free market may not seem logical in the mentality of Muslims or Orthodox and will result in negative reactions. According to Huntington, democracy and education are leading to the "rooting" of societies and their return to their "roots" Western values ​​superficial but drinking Coca-Cola does not make the Russian American, and do not eat Alsohicedjal of American Japanese, Western consumer goods proliferation is not an indication of the spread of Western culture. Huntington identified scenarios of conflict between the West and what he called "others". That these countries try to isolate themselves and protect their societies from "Western corruption" and perhaps isolation from the arena of international politics, but the price is high and a few countries have the ability to initiate such a plan. The second scenario would be to operate that state-allied West and "alienate" its communities like Turkey. The third scenario is that these countries or civilizations join forces with other non-Western civilizations and seek to form an economic or military force with them in order to balance the Western countries. Huntington concludes by saying that he does not propose the disappearance of nation states, the emergence of these civilizations as clear and unified political blocs, and does not suggest that internal fighting will end, but says that "civilized conscience" is real and real and has been increasing since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The West will strengthen its internal front by increasing alliance and cooperation between the United States and the European Union and trying to bring America closer to the West. The minaret is very close to the west as well as Japan.

 Source: Wikipedia