I’m starting on Pat Buchanan’s book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and the Conquest of America, which is clearly intended as a more America-focused sequel to his The Death of the West; and what immediately strikes me is that Buchanan appears to see complete equivalence between the Muslim immigrants in Europe and the Latino immigrants in the U.S., as being threats to “Western Civilization.” Even though the Mexicans, Brazilians, etc., have a European-derived culture like we do, and speak a European language (Spanish, or Portuguese), and have exactly the same religion as Buchanan himself (Roman Catholic). This reminds me of how Samuel P. Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations, posited a “Western” civilization that includes Spain and Portugal and the U.S., but not Latin America. Now, waitaminnit: How is LA any less a part of “Western Civilization” than the U.S. is?
Not to slight Latin America, but it doesn’t have much of an influence on the rest of the world, does it? I used to try skipping the whole Latin America section of the Economist, and the rest of it still made the same sense.
Buchanan is certainly a conservative, but much of the time he still makes pretty good sense. Overall, he seems pretty well informed. I don’t want him running things because of his core beliefs, but his reading of world politics seems pretty accurate.
I think Latin America is thought to be more mixed in with the Native blood and as such were not fully Westernized in the way North America was. Generally the inability to form a stable government is cited as a reason. Argentina was pretty much there before the collapse.
I think that what Huntington, at least, argues is that the distinction between “Latin American” civilization on the one hand, and “Western” civilization on the other, have to do with differing attitudes about politics and economics; that Latin American countries are, at the same time, both more autocratic and more patron-client/less capitalist than “The West”.
He does point out that of all the other civilizations he mentions, Latin America is closest to the West, and the two civilizations are converging.
Many of the poorer, more rural parts of Europe are (or at least until recently were) little better examples of “western” civilization than Latin America, but they get taken with the rest of Europe as a whole.
Argentina, maybe. Chile if we really stretch things.
Seriously, I think the issue is more of an economic one than anything else. Latin Americans are largely poor and many are more ethnically Native American and/or African. Politically, the region has had a rocky relationship with Democracy, but then much of Europe had, too, in the early to mid 20th century.
The review of that book on the Amazon web site mentions “Aztlan”, and how Mexican Americans hope to recapture the lands that were allegedly part of that region historically. Now, I don’t know enough about the Aztlan movement to know that it’s an attempt to regenerate Native American culture, or just an attempt to establish Mexican culture/control in that area. Since most of the LA immigrants to the US are Mexican, this might be what Buchanan is talking about.
I don’t know much about it either, but I would be very, very surprised if it had anything at all to do with, say, reviving the Nahuatl language or the worship (with or without blood sacrifice) of the old Aztec gods.
Would it be too cynical or unjust of me to suspect that Buchanan might be trying to conflate in his readers’ imagination the reconquista movement, which appears to be a pretty negligible political force, with Latino immigration per se, which of course is quite a powerful political and cultural force but seems to be overall very little concerned with the reconquista movement?
That way, every poor shlub of an ex-corn farmer who sneaks across the border to pick tomatoes for American agribusiness firms to keep his family from starving and maybe someday own a house and a car and a television can be cast as a sinister foot soldier in the alleged war on Western civilization. Enemies at the gates! Enemies at the gates!
Furthermore, even if the Mexicans somehow do manage to “reconquer” the Southwestern U.S., they would not thereby taking it away from “Western Civilziation.” It would be more like transferring Alsace-Lorraine from France to Germany yet again – in civilizational terms, strictly intramural.
It is even worse when one takes into account that even organizations that were branded as radical among Latinos distance themselves from proponents of the Aztlan plan.
I have yet to see a non-racially based definition of Western Civilization that can include Eastern Europe/Russia while excluding Latin America. My guess is that race is a big component to how people are making these definitions.
Personally, I’ve always considered Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa to all be a part of Western Civilization.
The question of whether South America is more capitalist or socialist aside, it bears mentioning that both capitalism and socialism are Western traditions. So that can’t be it.
It is certainly an issue of race for nativists and anti-immigrant activists. However, that’s not to say that “socialism,” as bandied about by the American right, has nothing to do with it. Since the labels “socialist” and “communist” became epithets during the Cold War, they have routinely been used to attack those who fight for civil rights. Martin Luther King was attacked as such. And there is a great quote from an American general during the Cold War who said something to the effect of, “My problem with the Soviets is not communism per se; it is their fundamentally different racial makeup” [note: this is a paraphrase; I’ll try to find the actual quote and source].
This is a bizarre definition. Crony capitalism, socialism and communism as modern economic theories for running a nation-state economy all originated in the west. How can adopting economic theories that originate in Western Civilization somehow make a culture not part of Western Civilization?
Edit: sleeping makes the same point with regard to economic theories above.
Hmm. For something that was kept at a distance, there seems to be a certain, shall we say, fondness for that document by MECHA?
From the MECHA website:
Huntington’s scheme classifies Russia and (most of) Eastern Europe as the “Orthodox” civilization, separate from the “Western.” The MENA is part of the “Islamic.” (And, as for the latter, the Arabic-speakers of North Africa, etc., probably really do feel more fellowship with, say, the Iranians and the Pakistanis than with the Europeans.)