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August 1, 2004
REVIEWS: Identity crisis
If there is one thing Samuel Huntington has succeeded in achieving in his new book, it is turning the term “immigrant” into an all-out abusive slur. After being termed a racist by both mainstream media and many of his contemporaries in response to his first book, The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington returns with a vengeance post 9/11 with an even more racist analysis of contemporary America today.
The central theme of Huntington’s new book Who are we? is based on the premise, that firstly, America is a nation founded on the basis of Anglo-Protestantism. Secondly, immigration and multiculturalism are fast becoming a threat to American society, as they are strengthening racial, ethnic and other sub-national identities at the expense of American nationalism. Thirdly, the Mexican-American immigrants are, in particular, advocating the division of America into a bi-cultural, bi-lingual and bi-racial society.
There are numerous contradictions in Huntington’s arguments. Most of them stem from his overwhelming assessment, that “America was founded in large parts for religious reasons” and that “Americans are one of the most religious people in the world, particularly compared to people of other highly industrialized democracies”. Following this, Huntington very conveniently puts the responsibility of America’s current identity crisis on the Mexican-American diasporas directly, and the Muslim-American community somewhat indirectly.
He argues that one of the main reasons why America today is grappling with the threat of disunity is because the immigrants of the past centuries were willing and able to assimilate into “American society”, whereas the current wave of immigrants is not. Instead, and he uses the Hispanic population as targeted subjects to prove this, immigrant diasporas are a threat to American policies, because they never fully assimilate and try and hold on to their culture, politics and economics, by continuing to support their homelands at the expense of America itself. Huntington is especially fearful of the fact that there is a powerful lobby present in most Hispanic communities that wants Spanish as America’s second official language. Not if Huntington has his way though. He asserts with frightening force and callousness, “There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that society only if they dream in English.”
It seems that Huntington has been encouraged after some arguments, that predictions from his earlier book have come true post 9/11. But this time around, he sounds more like a paranoid schizophrenic where everything is a conspiracy against White Christian America. The book is littered with statistics from surveys (mostly) past and present to prove his point, only they don’t. He contradicts his own previous argument that nations will be divided as civilizations on the basis of religion, culture, etc. by saying that “religiosity distinguishes America from other western societies”, as if insinuating that other Christian nations are less Christian than America and hence do not deserve to be part of “Christian civilization”. There is no mention of the fact that such a “Christian nation” chooses to ignore a people obsessed with hate crimes, celebrity sex scandals, not to mention the philandering of a former president while in office.
But Huntington’s most incriminating remarks are what lead to the reader repudiating his thesis. He writes on the collapse of the Soviet Union, “For forty years, however, America was the leader of the ‘Free World’ against the ‘evil empire’. With the ‘evil empire’ gone how was America to define itself?” Simple — by creating another evil empire, or the ‘axis of evil’, as we are now more familiar with. He subtly endorses America’s military might when he says, “Muslims increasingly see America as their enemy. If that is a fate Americans cannot avoid, their only alternative is to accept it and to take measures necessary to cope with it”. Why this is so, is something he does not bother himself with.
Huntington’s world is one that is very simplistically divided into compartments. There are either (white) settlers or (non-white) immigrants. There are those who are in favour of the American “creed”, or those who oppose it. There are those who are nationalists and those who are separatists. He pays no attention to the issues and causes both within and outside America, which cause people to make social, political and economic decisions. He makes sweeping judgments such as “dual citizenship ends the exclusivity of citizenship” and “Muslim minorities have been ‘indigestible’ to non-Muslim societies”, without looking into the impacts of such issues in a global context. In fact, to Huntington, the globe is America and everyone is out to get it. Such assumptions make one not just repudiate Huntington’s analysis, but also add legitimacy to the fact that, America is still a nation isolated and individualistic in nature, especially as the book concludes on an equally self-absorbed note; “this new world is a fearful world and Americans have no choice but to live with fear if not in fear”.
What about the rest of the world, Mr Huntington, or don’t we exist? Apparently not, would be his answer.
Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity
By Samuel P. Huntington
Simon & Schuster. Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi. Tel: 021-5683026 Email:
libooks@cyber.net.pk Website:
www.libertybooks.com
ISBN 0-684-87053-3
428pp. Rs895
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