Since 11th september, political leaders have struggled to define the sides in what is clearly a kind of war. Is it a war between radical Muslims and the US? Is it a war between the Christian west and Islam? Or is the conflict an even larger one-between secularism and fundamentalism around the world?
The most influential attempts to define the post-cold war world have been those of Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and Samuel P Huntington, in his essay “The Clash of Civilisations” (1993). Fukuyama famously argued that liberal democracy is the final stage of human political evolution. Huntington emphasises the persistence of pre-modern linguistic, cultural and religious divisions, like those between western and eastern Christendom and Confucian and Hindu Asia.
Each of these schemas captures aspects of reality. But an alternative that deserves consideration is one that defines “civilisations” in terms, not of technological development or culture, but of world view. This approach gives us fewer civilisations than those listed by Huntington-but more than the single end-stage civilisation proposed by Fukuyama.
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