A Western society can voluntarily seek to defect from the West.

Evidence

In the early 1990s, however, Australia’s political leaders decided, in effect, that Australia should defect from the West, redefine itself as an Asian society, and cultivate close ties with its geographical neighbors. Australia, Prime Minister Paul Keating declared, must cease being a “branch office of empire,” become a republic, and aim for “enmeshment” in Asia. This was necessary, he argued, in order to establish Australia’s identity as an independent country. “Australia cannot represent itself to the world as a multicultural society, engage in Asia, make that link and make it persuasively while in some way, at least in constitutional terms, remaining a derivative society.” Australia, Keating declared, had suffered untold years of “anglophilia and torpor” and continued association with Britain would be “debilitating to our national culture, our economic future and our destiny in Asia and the Pacific.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 411

Categorization

• XREF: The failed prediction here - Australia did not in fact defect from the West - is a useful counterexample to Huntingtons civilizational determinism. — connects to: The West’s imagined independence from outside is failing as borders break down — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2015
• SEED: A retrospective essay: which of Huntingtons torn-country predictions actually came to pass, using Australia as a falsifying case.