The empire strikes back? Huntington on East and West

In his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard University's Samuel P. Huntington made several very large claims and offered numerous policy prescriptions for the West and for non-Western countries as well. The book was greeted with rather uncritical acclaim by such luminaries of the U.S. foreign policy establishment as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, but as this article explains The Clash of Civilizations is a seriously flawed piece of work. The author uses a critique of Huntington's book as a springboard to examine several broad issues: (1) the rise of China and its possible implications for the West; (2) the idea that the West's days of primacy are numbered; (3) the question of whether the West has pioneered ideas-philosophical, scientific, economic, moral, or political-that that universal validity, or whether they are "uniquely" Western; (4) the concept of "civilization"-its foundations and boundaries; (5) whether withdrawal and defensiveness or boldness and openness will be the better prescription for the West in the coming decades; and, finally, (6) Australia's place in the West in the context of a changing strategic environment in Asia. This article concludes that it is not the cultivation of a single, defensive, univocal Western civilization that is our best hope, but embracing polylingualism and diversity in a world of unprecedented and anti-traditional change.