Shaping Nations: Constitutionalism and Society in Australia and Canada

8. Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater? Huntington's "Kin-Country", Thesis and Australian-Canadian Relations

8 Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater? Huntington's "Kin-Country" Thesis and Australian-Canadian Relations KIM RICHARDNOSSAL Introduction The end of the Cold War between 1989 and 1991 forced many students ofinternational relations to rethink their theoretical perspectives to account for the profound changes so obviously underway in world politics. Among the theoretical newcomers in the early 1990s was the civilizationalperspective advanced by Samuel P.Huntington.In an article in Foreign Affairs in 1993, entitled "The clash of civilizations?" and expanded in 1996 in a book (which lost the question mark of the article along the way), Huntington argued for a fundamental retheorizing of international relations. Asserting that world politics had entered a "new phase," he suggested that international politics in the post-Cold War era was no longer going to be dominated by nation-states or even collectives of states organized into four compass points along ideological or economic lines (North, South, East, and West). Rather, he hypothesized that the world consisted ofa number ofcivilizations, and suggested that the major conflicts of 21st century world politics were going to be found along what he called the "fault lines" between these various civilizations. Huntington's civilizational theory was not without its normative implications: he argued that the world's dominant civilization, the West, 168 SHAPING NATIONS was in danger of declining against other civilizations - unless, that was, it moved to maintain its economic and military power. Huntington's theory, while original, is not without deep empirical and normative problems, as I will argue. This chapter will examine the civilizationalperspectiveasoutlinedby Huntington,and will suggest that for a variety of reasons civilizational theory can be dismissed as so much bathwater, richly deserving to be pitched. At the same time, however, I will argue that there is one aspect of the civilizational perspective - the Kin-Country thesis - that is analytically useful and provides an explanation for a particular phenomenon not well explained by orthodox international relations theory: relationships between some kinds of countries, such as Australia and Canada, that do not at allconform to the predictions of orthodox international relations theory. The Bathwater: Civilizational Theory and its Discontents Huntington's theory rests on the idea that the crucialunit ofanalysis for world politics in the 21st century will be civilizations rather than nation-states. Likeother civilizationaltheorists, such asFernandBraudel1 , Huntington defines civilizations asbeing amalgams of culture, language, ethnicity, religion, customs and "ways of life". But, importantly, Huntington argues that civilizations are not just cultural entities, but essentially political entities as well. While civilizations do not replace or supplant the main political entities that have dominated world politics since the 17th century - Westphalian nation-states - they co-exist with them. Indeed,most civilizationsinHuntington'sviewhave a "core state"the acknowledged centre of the civilization, around which other kin countries rally in order to support the civilizationin its struggles against other civilizations. In other words, civilizations as political entities have an overt political component. They inspire the same kind of political loyalty as nation-states did in the past. Most importantly, people will, in Huntington's view at least, put themselves inharm's way indefence ofthe interests of "their" civilization. It is this political loyalty that gives rise to Huntington's idea ofcivilizational "fault lines". In this view, civilizations do not have clear cut borders. Where they "meet" - on "fault lines" conflict is likely to develop; and these conflicts between civilizationswill be the dominant source of war in the 21st century. The civilizational perspective advanced by Huntington almost immediately generated a wave of objections and criticisms. In fact, both THROWING OUT THE BABY WITH THE BATHWATER? 169 the article and the book provided grist for a variety of mills. Some critics, including Fouad Ajami and Binyan Liu, focussed on Huntington's misreading of other civilizations, particularly the Islamic and Confucian (or, as he was to rename it by the time he wrote the book, the Sinic)2 . Others fixed onhis underestimation ofthe durabilityofthe sovereign state as the primary actor in world politics, and the difficulties of ascribing political control to amorphous "civilizations".3 Others still criticized the civilizationalperspective asinappropriatelyencouraging thecreation and maintenance of artificially constructed notions of "fault lines" between civilizations.4 These objections alone would be grounds enough to callinto serious question the civilizational perspective as advanced by Huntington. But there is an even more basic problem: the very characterization of the civilizations deemed to exist in contemporary global politics is, it can...