Latest news with #SamuelHuntington
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Business Standard
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Standard
Civil-military synergy: More urgent than ever for national security
Both the civil and military arms of a nation are crucial to governance, with jointness — collaboration among services — and integration, which involves alignment between civil and military institutions, as key aspects. Civil-military coordination varies across political systems — authoritarian regimes see military dominance, while democracies emphasise civilian control. Post-colonial India has had to consciously evolve its civil-military relationship, shifting from a command-driven structure to one based on democratic norms and institutional synergy. Samuel Huntington's 1957 all-time classic on civil-military relations advocates military autonomy under civilian control. Echoing this, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his first Combined Commanders' Conference
South China Morning Post
25-04-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
When it comes to a ‘civilisational state' is there really such a thing?
The notion of a civilisational state has always intrigued me because it seems to be a contradiction in terms. And yet, it has been in vogue for decades. In varying guises, it's being promoted and encouraged in such diverse and even hostile countries as China and India, Iran and Israel. Advertisement When you have such a long glorious civilisation or religion, and sometimes they are indistinguishable – the West, for example, used to be called Christendom – it's inevitable the state will incorporate that history into its ideology to legitimise itself. On the other hand, 'youth' can also be an ideology. The once-young United States thought of itself as the vanguard of 'the new world' as opposed to the corrupt 'old world' in Europe. The US is the opposite of a civilisational state, in terms of their contrasting ideologies. It strikes me that civilisation – or being 'civilised' into a particular way of life – is the pervasive background to how you think, speak, live your life, and accept or fear death. It's quiet and semi-conscious. However, ideology is loud and in your face; it's about mobilising and controlling others, and being mobilised and controlled willingly. It's about power – that of being acted on or acting on someone. Advertisement Also, civilisations throughout history often learned and mixed with each other. Unfortunately, Samuel Huntington turned them into practically enemy states! What led me to revisit this idea is a new post on X by Yishan Wong, the former CEO of Reddit and one of the original 'PayPal Mafia' that includes such controversial billionaires as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
South China Morning Post
21-03-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
The West just ain't what it used to be – and we all should welcome it
For many Westerners, the West used to stand for enlightenment, progress and freedom. More recently, though, more of them have lost such cultural confidence and sense of superiority. Advertisement But for most outside the West, the term has meant one thing first and foremost – domination. While many of us will freely admit those other more positive influences, non-Westerners never forget the humiliation, subjugation and destruction, which to some extent, still continue today. As the late American political scientist Samuel Huntington once put it, '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. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.' Now, at this point, someone will inevitably say: but 'the West' is an overgeneralisation. The Nordics are very different from southern Europeans, the Catholic countries have historical roots very different from the Protestant ones, and Europe, whatever it stands for, is nothing like the United States. And Canada has more in common with Australia than its southern neighbour. That is true. But 'the West', at least in the past three-quarters of a century, has had a coherent reference, thanks to the post-war American hegemony which peaked with the collapse of the Soviet communist bloc. It primarily references the transatlanticism of Europe and North America, codified by Nato membership; the even closer Anglo-American ties, exemplified by the intelligence-sharing Five Eyes of English-speaking countries; and the global institutional dominance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, so-called Bretton Woods institutions that have long dictated, until recently, the terms and workings of the global economy. Advertisement In all these multinational links, the US has been the dominant force. But those links are now breaking down before our very eyes. France, Germany and the United Kingdom, along with Brussels (HQ of the European Union) are spearheading a restructuring of European defence forces apart from the US as hitherto established under Nato.
