Of all of Samuel Huntington's contributions to the study of politics, the most important was his 1968 work Political Order in Changing Societies. This book was probably the last major attempt to write a general theory of political development, and its significance needs to be placed in the context of the ideas that were dominant in the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the heyday of "modernization theory," probably the most ambitious American attempt to create an integrated, empirical theory of human social change. Modernization theory had its origins in the works of late 19th-century European social theorists like Henry Maine, ?mile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Ferdinand T?nnies, and Max Weber. While based primarily on the experiences of early modernizers like Britain or the United States, they sought to draw from them general laws of social development.

European social theory was killed, literally and figuratively, by the two world wars. The ideas it generated migrated to the United States, and were taken up by a generation of American academics after the Second World War at places like Harvard University's Department of comparative politics, the MIT Center for International Studies, and the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics. The Harvard department, led by Weber's protégé Talcott Parsons, hoped to create an integrated, interdisciplinary social science that would combine economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology.

The period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s also corresponded to the dissolution of European colonial empires and the emergence of what became known as the third or developing world -- newly independent countries with great aspirations to modernize and catch up with their former colonial masters. Scholars like Edward Shils, Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye, Gabriel Almond, David Apter, and Walt Whitman Rostow saw these momentous developments as a laboratory for social theory, as well as a great opportunity to help developing countries raise living standards and democratize their political systems.

If one were to sum up the Americanized version of modernization theory, it was the sunny view that all good things went together: Economic growth, social mobilization, political institutions, and cultural values all changed for the better in tandem. There was none of the tragic sense of loss that one sees in Weber's concepts of disenchantment or the iron cage of capitalism, or in Durkheim's anomie. The different dimensions of social change were part of a seamless and mutually supportive process.

Political Order in Changing Societies appeared against this backdrop and frontally challenged these assumptions. First, Huntington argued that political decay was at least as likely as political development and that the actual experience of newly independent countries was one of increasing social and political disorder. Second, he suggested that the good things of modernity often operated at cross-purposes. In particular, if social mobilization outpaced the development of political institutions, there would be frustration as new social actors found themselves unable to participate in the political system.

Political Order pointed out that from the vantage point of the year 1968, political development was not occurring in much of the recently independent, former colonial world. The world was rather characterized by coups, civil wars, upheavals, and political instability. Huntington suggested that if the pace of social mobilization outran the ability of political institutions to incorporate new actors, you would get a condition that he called praetorianism, or political breakdown and political decay.

It is safe to say that Political Order finally killed off modernization theory. It was part of a pincers attack, the other prong of which was the critique from the left that said that modernization theorists enshrined an ethnocentric European or North American model of social development as a universal one for humanity to follow. American social science found itself suddenly without an overarching theory and began its subsequent slide into its current methodological Balkanization.

Huntington drew a practical implication from these observations, namely that political order was a good thing in itself and would not automatically arise out of the modernization process. Rather the contrary: Without political order, neither economic nor social development could proceed successfully. The different components of modernization needed to be sequenced. Premature increases in political participation -- including things like early elections -- could destabilize fragile political systems. This laid the groundwork for a development strategy that came to be called the "authoritarian transition," whereby a modernizing dictatorship provides political order, a rule of law, and the conditions for successful economic and social development. Once these building blocks were in place, other aspects of modernity like democracy and civic participation could be added. (Huntington's student, Fareed Zakaria, would write a book in 2003, The Future of Freedom, making a somewhat updated variant of this argument.)

This argument is still very much with us. In the wake of America's flawed nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, many people have suggested the need for sequencing in development, putting state-building ahead of efforts to democratize and expand political participation.

Political Order in Changing Societies was one of Huntington's earlier works, and one that established his stature as a political scientist, but it was far from his last major contribution to comparative politics. His work on democratic transition also became a point of reference in the period after the end of the Cold War. Ironically, this stream of writing began with a 1984 article in Political Science Quarterly titled "Will More Countries Become Democratic?" Surveying the situation following the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American democratic transitions of the 1970s and early 1980s, Huntington made the case that the world was not likely to see more shifts from authoritarianism in the near future given inauspicious structural and international conditions. This was written, of course, a mere five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He shifted gears quickly after the collapse of communism, however, and wrote The Third Wave, a book that gave the name to the entire period.

The Third Wave's take on democratization was, however, different from many others in the field, which focused either on agency (as in the Schmitter-O'Donnell-Whitehead series) or on structural conditions for democratic stability (as in the tradition running from Seymour Lipset through Adam Pzreworski). Huntington noted that the vast bulk of Third Wave transitions had occurred in culturally Christian countries and that there was a distinct religious underpinning to the pattern of democratization in the late 20th century. The Catholic world, in particular, was catching up to the Protestant first movers, just as Catholic societies had come late to the capitalist revolution.

The Third Wave was not, however, a manifestation of a broader cross-cultural modernization process that would eventually encompass all societies, but one rooted in a particular set of cultural values inherited from Western Christianity. Democracy's spread after the early 1970s did not rest on its universal appeal, but rather had to do with the power and prestige of the United States and other culturally Christian societies.

Although it may not have been obvious at the time, The Third Wave anticipated by this argument many of the themes that would be reprised in much greater detail in The Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We?, as well as in the volume that Huntington and Lawrence Harrison edited titled Culture Matters. In perhaps an even deeper rebuff to modernization theory than the one made famous in Political Order, Huntington believed deeply in the durability of cultural values and the primacy of religion as a shaper of both national political development and international relations. In the face of this, globalization was a superficial force that created the thinnest veneer of cosmopolitan "Davos men" and would not in the end guarantee peace or prosperity. And the United States did not represent the vanguard of a universalizing democratic movement; rather, it was successful due to its origins as an "Anglo-Protestant" society. His last scholarly efforts prior to his passing focused on the impact of religion on world politics.

Huntington is incontrovertibly right that historically the origin of modern democracy is, as he says, rooted in Western Christianity. This is not a new insight; thinkers from Tocqueville to Hegel to Nietzsche have all observed that in many ways modern democracy is in fact a secularized version of the universalism of Christian doctrine. But the fact that it arises in a particular historical context doesn't mean that it can't subsequently have universal application. To the extent that democracy has spread, it is because it is an effective method of holding rulers accountable to their people, and not simply because of its cultural prestige. If China ever becomes a democracy, it will not be because ordinary Chinese people so admire Americans and want to emulate them; it will be because they cannot solve their own problems of political corruption, environmental degradation, and social injustice without a greater degree of downward accountability.

Similarly, Who Are We? makes a similarly incontrovertible assertion -- that American identity is not simply allegiance to the Constitution and the American creed, but that it has religious roots in what he calls "Anglo-Protestant culture." He says early on in that book that 'If North America had not been founded by Anglo-Saxon Protestant Englishmen but by Spanish, Portuguese, or French Catholics, it wouldn't be the United States -- it would be Mexico, Brazil, or Quebec.' But again, while this assertion is historically true, the question it raises is whether this historical fact actually makes a difference in contemporary American politics. Huntington spends a whole chapter on the famous Protestant work ethic, which he sees as deeply embedded in American character and central to American identity. But if you ask who is it who actually works hard in the United States today, it is not likely to be either old-line Boston Brahmin WASPs who are clipping their coupons from their trust funds, nor the Scotch-Irish who settled in a band from Appalachia through Texas to the Southwest, who have one of the lowest per capita incomes of all American ethnic groups. That modal American culture is now borne by Russian cab drivers, Korean grocery store owners, and Mexican day laborers because it has a kind of universal appeal and universal accessibility.

Huntington's arguments were always made with great force, erudition, and persuasiveness. Even if one disagreed with him, it was impossible to not take his arguments with the greatest seriousness. They provided vocabulary and structure to all subsequent discussions of the topic, whether it was American politics, defense policy, democratic transition, or American identity. In addition to his written work, he was a great teacher and produced an entire generation of students who have reshaped virtually all the subfields of political science. From his earliest writings to his last works, he has drawn vociferous critics, but that is the mark of a scholar who has important and fundamental things to say. It is a safe bet that we won't see his like for some time to come.

This article is based on a 2008 piece on the website of the American Interest and the preface to the 2006 edition of Political Order in Changing Societies.

The first time I met Sam Huntington, I was not yet his student; I was an intern for the New Republic. I was still an undergraduate at Yale, and there was a peculiar campaign being waged by a Yale math professor named Serge Lang to deny Sam Huntington a seat in the National Academy of Sciences. I was intrigued by the whole thing, so I went to interview Huntington.

He was more troubled by the campaign than I would have ever imagined. The basic premise was this: Sam was a hawk in general, and during the Vietnam War, he had written a number of pieces, including a long report for the government and a couple of articles in Foreign Affairs, on the matter. Lang believed that this made him effectively a war criminal and argued that Sam should therefore not be part of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, while he was a hawk on this particular issue, Sam was actually on the dovish side of the debate. He was arguing that the United States needed a much more political, rather than military, strategy in Vietnam. But Lang was fixated on one page of Sam's work.

What I remember most, however, isn't the details of the case, but how transfixed I was just sitting there talking to Huntington, thinking to myself, "this is so fascinating." He was able to take policy debates and frame them in a much broader theoretical context. Sam was able to explain to you what confirms and what falsifies your argument.

A couple of years later, as a Ph.D. student at Harvard, I started working for Sam myself.

Today, in commemoration of Huntington's work at Harvard, I imagine the question for most of you is why you should care about Sam Huntington and why you should read his books. I think more than anything else, Sam Huntington represented the view that social science is about connecting two large variables: the dependent and independent variable. Sam would often say to me, "You have to find a big independent variable and a big dependent variable." In other words, you've got to start with something big to explain. If you're trying to explain something trivial, who cares? Then, if you try to explain the French Revolution, you have to have a powerful reason to explain it. If you have 19 reasons that explain the French Revolution, nobody cares. He once said to me, "If you tell people the world is complicated, you're not doing your job as a social scientist. They already know it's complicated. Your job is to distill it, simplify it, and give them a sense of what is the single, or what are the couple, of powerful causes that explain this powerful phenomenon."

That's always stayed with me as the central insight that Sam Huntington had for his students, particularly at a time, and in an academic profession, in which the instinct was to go for the capillary rather than the jugular. Sam always went for the jugular. If you look at his books, he always asked, what are the biggest things in the world that need to be explained? And what do I think is going on there? He did it with post-colonial development, with American politics when it seemed to be spiraling out of control in the 1970s, with the end of the Cold War, where he saw a resurgence of ethnic and religious identity. Whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions, what is striking is how he never shied away from taking on big questions. Walter Lippmann once said, "Most people mumble because they are afraid of the sound of their own voices." When you put yourself out there, people will disagree with you, and Sam had his fair share of that. People disagreed with him vigorously, but he was trying to shed some very powerful light on what was going on in the world. And he did so in so many different fields.

To me, Sam Huntington's most important book remains Political Order in Changing Societies. That's the book that really changed the way I look at the world. Today, if you are puzzling the question of whether China will get more democratic as it gets richer, this is the book to read. Huntington takes you back in history and makes you understand why the United States has a tough time understanding whether societies become democratic as their economies modernize. I read the book when I was 22 or 23 years old, and I can still remember it vividly. How many books can you say that about when you're 46, in my case?

Sam Huntington was also a man of great character, with a very strong will and very strong beliefs. I remember once reading a furious attack of his work and asking him why he didn't respond. He said, "Well you know, Fareed, my view has always been that you put your best work out, you let people attack you, and then you move on. You can spend your whole life getting caught up in letters to the editor, and 'I didn't say this and I didn't say that,' but it's pointless. The best thing you can do is write the next book which will cause disagreements among people." I thought that was such a fascinating way to look at his role as an intellectual. In many ways, he was thin-skinned like all of us. But he was able to rise above it and act out of this higher mission, this calling.

He was also a man of great principle. It was not always a principle that was popular, a principle that people agreed with. I remember one case when he was chairing an administrative session at the Olin Institute, of which he was the director. The administrative assistant explained that there was a lot of pressure from the university for the institute's brochure to say something like, "We especially welcome and invite blacks and Hispanics to apply to these fellowships." The dean had thought that this would be just a matter of course -- to just throw in the phrase and it would be fine. But Sam said, "You know, I really can't go along with that. I feel very awkward sending special invitations to people based on their descriptive qualities, so you'll have to tell the dean I won't do it." As I say, you may agree or disagree with it, but there's a certain steel to his core that he simply would not compromise, even when it was a trivial matter.

Finally, Sam was a great mentor and believed very much in the human dimension of mentoring. He was a WASP in every sense of the word, and he was emotive very rarely. But there were very few professors who would invite vast numbers of students to their place on Martha's Vineyard and plan a whole day of fun and festivities. He and his wife Nancy used to have us over for these sorts of things. He was representative of some of the best qualities that make Harvard great: great intellectual standards but also a very real emphasis on the human element.

So I think back on Sam Huntington first and foremost as one of the most towering intellects I have ever come across, but also as a great human being and a man of enormous character. As I get older, I feel as though one learns a lot from books, but one also learns a lot from human beings -- and from the character of a man.

If there is one central, recurring mistake the United States makes when dealing with the rest of the world, it is to assume that creating political stability is easy. We overthrew Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, and then cavalierly dismantled the entire structure of the Iraqi state, sure that we could simply set up a new one. We toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and were confident that with foreign aid, elections and American know-how, we would build a new, modern Afghan nation. After all, the governments we were helping to set up—democratic, secular and inclusive—were so much better than the ones that preceded them. We should have paid more attention to the words of a wise man who opened one of his pioneering studies by declaring that "the most important distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government."

Look around. So many of the world's problems—from terrorists in Waziristan to the devastating AIDS epidemic in Africa to piracy in Somalia—are caused or made worse by governments that are unable to exercise real authority over their lands or people. That was the central insight of Samuel P. Huntington, the greatest political scientist of the last half-century, who died on Christmas Eve.

Huntington is most famous for "The Clash of Civilizations," but his scholarly reputation properly rests on his earlier work. His analysis of political order had immediate, real-world applications. While studying the topic, he was asked by Lyndon Johnson's administration to assess the progress of the Vietnam War. After touring the place he argued, in 1967 and 1968, that America's strategy in South Vietnam was fatally flawed. The Johnson administration was trying to buy the people's support through aid and development. But money wasn't the key, in Huntington's view. The segments of South Vietnam's population that had resisted the Viet Cong's efforts had done so because they were secure within effective local communities structured around religious or ethnic ties. The United States, however, wanted to create a modern Vietnamese nation and so refused to reinforce these "backward" sources of authority. This 40-year-old analysis describes our dilemma in Afghanistan today.

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Huntington noticed a troubling trend. Sometimes, progress American style—more political participation or faster economic growth—actually created more problems than it solved. If a country had more people who were economically, politically and socially active and yet lacked effective political institutions, such as political parties, civic organizations or credible courts, the result was greater instability. That has been the story of parts of the Third World over the past three decades. Think of Pakistan, whose population has gone from 68 million in 1975 to 165 million today, while its government has proved ill equipped to tackle the basic tasks of education, security and social welfare.

Living through change, people have often stuck with their oldest and most durable source of security: religion. That was the most important message of "The Clash of Civilizations." While others were celebrating the fall of communism and the rise of globalization, he saw that with ideology disappearing as a source of human identity, religion was returning to the fore.

My own relationship with that particular work is complicated. Huntington asked me to comment on a draft of the essay while I was his graduate student. I told him that while I disagreed with central elements of it, the essay was riveting and thought-provoking. A few months later, as the new managing editor of Foreign Affairs, I helped publish it. I still think he got some important things wrong, but much in that essay is powerful and prescient.

My relationship with Sam Huntington, however, was uncomplicated. I admired him through and through. He was brilliant—a prodigy who graduated from Yale at 18, a pathbreaking scholar and a devoted and generous teacher.

He was remarkably broad. His first book practically invented the field of civil-military relations; his last was on demographics and culture. He was also broad-minded. While many academics of his age and political persuasion—temperamentally conservative— were seared by the campus chaos of the 1960s, Huntington saw the student radicals as part of a recurring tradition of American puritans, righteously enraged that American institutions didn't live up to the country's founding principles. He closed one of his books, another classic, by noting of such critics, "[They] say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope."

I learned from the books but also from the man. I never saw Sam Huntington do anything deceitful or malicious, never saw him sacrifice his principles for power or access or expedience. He lived by the Anglo-Protestant principles he cherished: hard work, honesty, fair play, courage, loyalty and patriotism.

In Robert Bolt's play about Sir Thomas More, "A Man for All Seasons," the young Richard Rich wonders whether it is worthwhile to be a teacher. "If I was [a fine teacher], who would know it?" More answers, "You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that." Not bad at all.

The E.U. is the world’s great no-show

 

By Fareed Zakaria Opinion writer July 24

http://www.washingtonpost.com/the-european.html

 

The Ukraine crisis has shone a spotlight on one of the glaring gaps in the world: the lack of a strategic and purposeful Europe. The United States can and should lead on the response to this conflict, but nothing can really happen without Europe. The European Union is by far Russia’s largest trading partner — it buys much of Russia’s energy, is the major investor in Russian companies and is the largest destination for Russian capital. Some of President Obama’s critics want him to scold Vladimir Putin. But ultimately, it is European actions that the Russian president will worry about.

Consider how Europe has dealt with Ukraine. For years, it could not really decide whether it wanted to encourage Ukrainian membership in the union, so it sent mixed signals to Kiev, which had the initial effect of disappointing pro-European Ukrainians, angering Russians and confusing everyone else.

Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and editor at large of Time magazine. View Archive

In 2008, after Moscow sent troops into Georgia, Europe promised an “Eastern partnership” to the countries along Europe’s eastern fringe. But, as Neil MacFarlane and Anand Menon point out in the current issue of the journal Survival, “The Eastern partnership was a classic example of the EU’s proclivity for responding to events by adding long-term and rhetorically impressive, but resource-poor, bolt-ons to existing policy.”

European leaders were beginning to woo Ukraine without recognizing how this would be perceived in Russia. Moscow had its own plans for a customs union, to be followed by a Eurasian Union, which was meant to be a counter to the European Union. Ukraine was vital to Russia’s plans and was dependent on Russia for cheap natural gas. Plus, of course, Ukrainians were divided over whether to move west or east.

Negotiations between the European Union and Ukraine for an association agreement meandered along, with the lawyers and translators taking a year to work out the text. In describing this tardiness as a mistake, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said, “The same thing applies to the [European] Union as to the Vatican. God’s mills grind slowly but surely.” The deal that was offered to Ukraine was full of demands for reform and restructuring of its corrupt economy, but it had little in the way of aid to soften the blows and sweeten the pot. When then-President Viktor Yanukovych rejected Europe’s offer and sided with Moscow, he set in motion a high-speed, high-stakes game that Europe was utterly unprepared for and could not respond to.

If Europe was trying to move Ukraine into its camp, it should have been more generous to Kiev and negotiated seriously with Moscow to assuage its concerns. Instead, Europe seemed to act almost unaware of the strategic consequences of its actions. Then when Russia began a campaign to destabilize Ukraine — which persists to this day — Europe remained a step behind, internally conflicted and unwilling to assert itself clearly and quickly. Those same qualities have been on display following the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

The European Union still has a chance to send a much clearer signal to Ukraine, Russia and the world. It could demand that Russia pressure the separatists to cooperate fully with the investigation of Flight 17 and allow the Ukrainian government — which Moscow recognizes — to take control of its own territory in eastern Ukraine. It could put forward a list of specific sanctions that would be implemented were those conditions not met within, say, two weeks.

In addition, Europe should announce longer-term plans on two fronts, first to gain greater energy independence from Russian oil and gas. European nations must also reverse a two-decade downward spiral in defense spending that has made the E.U. a paper tiger in geopolitical terms. Germany, for example, spends about 1.5 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, among the lowest rates in Europe and well below the 2 percent that is the target for all NATO members. It’s hard for a country’s voice to be heard and feared when it speaks softly and carries a twig.

The problem is now being described as European cowardice and appeasement. It is better explained by an absence of coherence among the European Union’s 28 very different countries, a lack of strategic direction and a parochial inward orientation that looks for the world’s problems to go away. The result is a great global vacuum, with terrible consequences.

 

If we look back years from now and wonder why the liberal, open, rule-based international order weakened and eroded, we might well note that the world’s most powerful political and economic unit, the European Union, with a population and economy larger than America’s, was the great no-show on the international stage.

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