If by "fatally flawed" you mean Huntington's writing off or Latin and Orthodox civilization as distinct from, and generally inimical to, Western Civlization, I am inclined to agree with you. I think I know why he did it: Because with those two in our camp, and portrayed on a map, it looks like we are well poised to dominate the world for the next couple of thousand years, but without them, it looks as if we're on our last legs.Originally Posted by marct
Gesnippt
Just to get back to your specific questions / ponders about Latin America, what answers would we get if we dumped Huntington's fatally flawed model and looked at reality instead? Probably the key areas would be the social and technological. Put simply, there is just no way that any of the Latin American states could (or would) become industrialized nations; their environments don't force them to (which, BTW, is what happened in England and the US, albeit for different reasons). Without mass industrialization and the consequent economic surplus to support massive bureaucracies, expensive militaries, large public school systems (for literacy), etc., you can't actually field the type of force that we tend to assume is "Western". Perhaps more importantly, without 100+ years of social organization around that industrial model, you don't have cultural expectations of "rightness" surrounding that way of war (actually, it's an exaptation of social organization between the social and military spheres).
Anyway, 'nuff of that - I'm going to get some more coffee and try and wake up.
Cheers,
Marc
Conversely, I don't know how one argues against the notion that, historically, conflict along civilizational lines among peers and near peers tend to be particularly intractable and bloody, since it usually is.
I'm inclined to disagree that Latin states "cannot" become industrialized, in part because some of them seem to be, in part because some of them have been for some time, and in part because the opportunity is opening for them as the core west deindustrializes and shifts ever more to service. This is not to say that they will industrialize well, or honestly / without massive corruption, or efficiently, or anything along those lines. But, if you look at countries capable of building, say, tanks - not bad measures of industrialization - among the few countries that can, can because they have, are Brazil and Argentina. (Though, admittedly, the TAM was rather light and based on a German design.)
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