The enemy within?

Who Are We?

The Challenges to America's National Identity

Samuel P. Huntington

Simon & Schuster, $27, 428 pp.

Samuel P. Huntington has long been one of America's most influential political scientists. In each of the last five decades, Huntington has framed debates on an astonishing variety of issues--from civil-military relations to American political institutions, from political order in developing countries to the role of political Islam, from U.S.-Soviet relations to the "clash of civilizations." His penchant for big questions, his lucid and often limpid prose, and his willingness to pose unconventional and unpopular arguments have combined to make him a must-read. His masterful Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), for example, made a compelling case that the biggest distinction in world politics was not between forms of government but between degrees of government, and that societies need to build strong political institutions in order to achieve effective governance. His argument that highly institutionalized one-party regimes (including those in China, Russia, and Mexico) provided more effective governance than very weakly institutionalized multiparty "democracies" was not politically correct, but it was insightful and on target. Over the years, Huntington has passed such insight on to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his students, including me, as my doctoral dissertation adviser. Like many others, I will always be in Sam Huntington's debt.

With his latest book, Who Are We?, Huntington has identified an important set of questions, marshaled provocative data and arguments, and stimulated wide discussion. This time, though, Huntington's analytic strength, research, and expository skills unfortunately falter. Who Are We? confuses more than it clarifies, overstates its thesis, outruns its evidence, and ultimately fosters needless polemics rather than constructive dialogue about real choices.

Huntington's central thesis is that America's national identity--forged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around race, ethnicity, ideology, and culture--is now under severe stress. Race and ethnicity have long since been eliminated as aspects of American identity in a multiethnic and multiracial age, a change Huntington explicitly welcomes. Still, the Anglo-Protestant culture that has been central to America's identity has also been increasingly challenged, Huntington asserts--by new waves of immigration from Latin America and Asia; by the rising influence of notions of multiculturalism and diversity; by the Hispanization of U.S. society; by the impact of diasporas and their homeland governments; and by the growing commitment of elites to cosmopolitan and transnational identities.

Huntington argues that these challenges could lead to a bifurcated America, divided between Anglo-Protestants and Hispanics; to an exclusivist America, once again defined by race and ethnicity and subordinating those who are not white and European; or to a revitalized America, reaffirming its Anglo-Protestant culture, religious commitments, and values. Huntington fears and opposes the first two scenarios and greatly prefers the third, which he seeks to make more likely by making people more aware of the first two possibilities and the need to avoid them.

Who Are We? makes two important contributions. First, it raises two significant and generally underdiscussed questions: What qualities make the United States distinct and attractive? How can these qualities be preserved in new historical circumstances so different from those in which U.S. identity was forged?

For three centuries, the United States has had an exceptional capacity to incorporate many people of diverse backgrounds and win their allegiance to a core set of values and practices that have been central to this country's unity, power, prosperity, and international leadership. Huntington succinctly and persuasively analyzes when and how America's core values and cultural identity emerged, and how these were reinforced over its history. Yet all societies historically have faced threats to their distinct qualities, Huntington reminds us. He is right to probe beyond easy rhetoric and patriotic flourishes to ask whether U.S. identity today is strong enough to withstand these major international challenges: the erosion of national loyalty by intellectual, political, and business elites increasingly involved in transnational and subnational communities; and the growth of a very large immigrant population from neighboring Mexico, with special characteristics that may cause greater resistance to assimilation and incorporation than in previous waves of immigration.

The book's second major contribution includes Huntington's most controversial chapter, "Mexican Immigration and Hispanization" (a version appeared in Foreign Policy). This section draws much-needed attention to a policy challenge for the United States that is plainly evident to Californians: how to respond to unprecedented levels of immigration from Mexico. Huntington points out that the size and other special qualities of Mexican immigration raise potential problems for the assimilation of Mexican-origin people into U.S. society. The problems that could be exacerbated by the comparatively low educational level of Mexican immigrants; their relatively slow rates of political naturalization and socioeconomic advance; and the understandable resentment by the host population of the costs of incorporating large numbers of Mexican immigrants into the educational and social-welfare systems. The concerns are valid, and they must be considered and addressed as high-priority issues for public policy, in California and nationally.