Strange Bedfellows: Samuel Huntington and the Advocates of Asian Values
Wednesday, September 22, 1999
6:00 to 8:00 PM
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Choate Room, First Floor
1779 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC
Main Speaker
Discussants
Summary
The forces of globalization--science, technology, markets, communication--are demolishing borders and integrating cultures to an astonishing degree. Why, then, is there a process of re-ethnicization and greater priority given to cultural identity in much of the world? Those who once spoke of modernizing their cultures now speak of Sinifying modernity and Hinduizing it or Islamizing it. In East Asia, some politicians have discovered "Asian Values", a system of beliefs and practices which they insist require distinctly different political and social organizations from those which prevail in the West. And in the West, Samuel Huntington, an American and thus a beneficiary of the most developed "globalized" economy in the world, has theorized that a "Clash of Civilization" is inevitable, and that the US should formulate its foreign and economic policy accordingly. This talk will address this question: given the real economic, technological and financial confluences of globalization, why is there now an insistence on cultural differences, differences so insistent that they may well result in clashes?