He died on Christmas Eve. The symbolism of that might be sweet music to Samuel Huntington?s enemies, and his clash of civilisations thesis spawned plenty of these. Arguing that civilisations were the natural successors to the worlds of the Cold War, he went on to provocatively claim that massive waves of new immigration into the US would encourage its disunification. In general, the West would be in a conflict with an Islam of bloody borders and innards. The late Edward W Said was one of his calmer critics. Said accused Huntington of personifying enormous entities as if they existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly.
Huntington kept reiterating that inter-civilisational issues are replacing inter-superpower issues as the top items on the international agenda. He paid special attention to the evidence of India, asking whether the inheritance of Nehruvian secularism would hold. He would have pointed to a recent Pew poll that found India notably the one country outside of the West to see increases in unfavourable opinions towards Muslims: 56% now voice a negative opinion, up from 43% in 2005. But India is a more complex country and its secularism can survive the worsening of inter-community relations, if such a thing is happening.
But, although his critics ignore this, Huntington also offered caveats like ?the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence.? It was on the basis of such ?immorality? that he privately opposed the Iraq war. Something his dogmatic critics tend to ignore.
