Cultural isolation causes states to be excluded from regional alliances and aid.

Evidence

A lone country lacks cultural commonality with other societies. Ethiopia, for example, is culturally isolated by its predominant language, Amharic, written in the Ethiopic script; its predominant religion, Coptic Orthodoxy; its imperial history; and its religious differentiation from the largely Muslim surrounding peoples. … Haiti’s Creole language, Voodoo religion, revolutionary slave origins, and brutal history combine to make it a lone country. “Every nation is unique,” Sidney Mintz observed, but “Haiti is in a class by itself.” As a result, during the Haitian crisis of 1994, Latin American countries did not view Haiti as a Latin American problem and were unwilling to accept Haitian refugees although they took in Cuban ones. “[I]n Latin America,” as Panama’s president-elect put it, “Haiti is not recognized as a Latin American country. Haitians speak a different language. They have different ethnic roots, a different culture. They are very different altogether.” Haiti is equally separate from the English-speaking black countries of the Caribbean. Haitians, one commentator observed, are “just as strange to someone from Grenada or Jamaica as they would be to someone from Iowa or Montana.” Haiti, “the neighbor nobody wants,” is truly a kinless country. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 372

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Haiti material in A Midwife’s Tale less directly, but the 1994 refugee refusal echoes US treatment of Haitian refugees documented in the late-20th century foreign policy literature; also resonates with the ADDENDUM on sacrifice for the revolutionary slave origins angle.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the kinless country’ as a category — what happens geopolitically to states whose culture fits no regional civilization bloc — Haiti, Ethiopia, Japan.