Second-generation native elites reject Western values as a career strategy, not just ideology

Evidence

The rise of these attitudes is a manifestation of what Ronald Dore has termed the “second-generation indigenization phenomenon.” In both former Western colonies and independent countries like China and Japan, “The first ‘modernizer’ or ‘post-independence’ generation has often received its training in foreign (Western) universities in a Western cosmopolitan language. Partly because they first go abroad as impressionable teenagers, their absorption of Western values and life-styles may well be profound.” Most of the much larger second generation, in contrast, gets its education at home in universities created by the first generation, and the local rather than the colonial language is increasingly used for instruction. These universities “provide a much more diluted contact with metropolitan world culture” and “knowledge is indigenized by means of translations—usually of limited range and of poor quality.” The graduates of these universities resent the dominance of the earlier Western-trained generation and hence often “succumb to the appeals of nativist opposition movements.” As Western influence recedes, young aspiring leaders cannot look to the West to provide them with power and wealth. They have to find the means of success within their own society, and hence they have to accommodate to the values and culture of that society. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 254

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘second-generation indigenization phenomenon’ as the shift from foreign-trained modernizers to home-educated natives who resent and reject Western dominance.
• XREF: The correlation between where elites are trained and the ideology they absorb resonates with theories of elite reproduction and credentialing — e.g., the Bourdieu-adjacent work in my library on education as social reproduction.
• SEED: Angle: educational migration as a predictor of civilizational alignment — the training location of a country’s ruling class as a leading indicator of its foreign policy orientation.