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.

Sadly, though, Huntington does not contribute positively to this debate. Instead, he leaps from a cogent discussion of the special nature of Mexican immigration to a parade of imaginary horrors, jumping at several turns from considering a remote prospect for societal bifurcation to describing what sounds like an imminent threat. Huntington's correct statements that almost all of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah was once part of Mexico, and that some Mexican Americans argue that the time of reconquista has arrived, lead too quickly to a projection that there could be a "consolidation of the Mexican-dominant areas into an autonomous, culturally and linguistically distinct, economically self-reliant bloc within the United States," and even a "move to reunite these territories with Mexico." No one familiar with life in Southern California today counts this among the top ten nightmares!

Similarly, Huntington emphasizes important trends and data on educational and economic lags by Mexican immigrants to the neglect of contrary data showing considerable progress on both fronts. Citing two bits of anecdotal evidence that Mexican immigrants reject American identity, Huntington asserts that "as their numbers increase, Mexican Americans feel increasingly comfortable with their own culture, and often contemptuous of American culture." Yet he disregards survey data showing that Mexican immigrants actually admire the rule of law and rewards for hard work so often lacking in Mexico. Far from rejecting the values of the United States, Mexican Americans are actually more likely than non-Hispanic whites to embrace core American tenets of individualism and patriotism, as George W. Bush's popularity suggests.

While Huntington worries about how Mexican immigrants could be mobilized to support Mexican policies against the interests of the United States, available data show that to the modest extent U.S. Latino communities affect U.S. foreign policy, their effect has been to support and advance mainstream U.S. foreign-policy goals: to strengthen democracy and promote international trade and investment.

Of all these excesses, Huntington's most striking and widely discussed conclusion is that "the continuation of high levels of Mexican and Hispanic immigration plus the low rates of assimilation into American society and culture could eventually change America into a country of two languages, two cultures, and two peoples." Even allowing for rhetorical flourish, only gross exaggeration at various points in the argument and consistent dismissal of contrary evidence could lead Huntington to this conclusion. In a remarkable warning in the book's foreword, Huntington concedes a tension between his identities as a patriot and a scholar, and admits that "my selection and presentation of evidence may well be influenced by my patriotic desire to find meaning and virtue in America's past and in its possible future." Whatever the motives, Huntington's warning is warranted.

An accelerating process of economic, demographic, social, and cultural integration is indeed taking place between Mexico and the United States, not invited or necessarily condoned, but nonetheless real and irreversible. Americans do need to understand the causes, nature, and impact of this integration. We must work to manage its pace and effects--to reinforce its positive aspects and to reduce and fairly distribute its costs. However ill-informed, poorly supported, and nostalgic Huntington's argument, Who Are We? can make a positive contribution if it helps Americans focus on the unique U.S.-Mexico connection, and how to turn it to advantage in the long American tradition that Huntington celebrates.

Abraham F. Lowenthal, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, is the founding president of the Pacific Council on International Policy. With Katrina Burgess, he co-edited and contributed to The California-Mexico Connection (Stanford University Press, 1993).