Dr Joseph MacKay1
1Australian National University, Acton, Australia
Biography:
Joseph MacKay is a Fellow (Senior Lecturer) in the Department of International Relations, Australian National University. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. He works on the history of international theory and the history of international ordering. His research has appeared in the Review of International Studies, International Studies Quarterly, International Theory, the Journal of Global Security Studies, and Social Science History. His 2023 book, The Counterinsurgent Imagination: A New Intellectual History, is published with Cambridge University Press.
Abstract:
Samuel Huntington’s account of clashing civilizations is among the most famous and contentious public accounts of post-Cold War international relations. It has also sometimes been linked to contemporary forms reactionary world politics, exemplified in the global “new” right. This paper draws on archival material to unpack the sources of Huntington’s ideas. Drawing on Huntington’s correspondence, drafts, and published works, I argue the “clash” thesis reflected his longstanding concerns about culture, not just in global politics but in the political order of his home country, the United States. I link his late-career view civilizations to his longstanding use of the word “creed” to describe a distinctive conception of political ordering, combining both civic and cultural commitments and linking the political past to the present. I argue his late appropriation of a discourse of civilizations allowed him to reflect this distinctively American account of domestic politics onto a conception of world politics, by turns ordered and conflictual. I show how it grounded a distinctively reactionary or nostalgic frame for international relations—one echoed in right-wing views of world politics today.