Book review: The Clash of Civilisations? The Debate: 20th Anniversary Edition, edited by Gideon Rose
reviewed by FRANK FUREDI
If Huntington had more deeply probed the dynamics of what he called the internal clash of civilisations, it would have been evident that these disputes are fuelled by ideas and values that are integral to the same civilisation – that of the West. Multiculturalism, cultural relativism, anti-foundationalism, the counterculture and the therapeutic imagination are not the products of Islamic fundamentalist teaching or Confucian philosophy. Rather, this contestation of the cultural authority of the Enlightenment and of classical liberal democracy has emerged from within the soul of Western capitalism itself.
Societies that are divided about the values that constitute a way of life are unlikely to unify around wider civilisational values. Instead of representing global conflicts as civilisational clashes, it makes more sense to see them as, in part, the externalised manifestation of cultural tension immanent within capitalist society. As I have noted elsewhere, the phenomenon of homegrown terrorism, and the estrangement of a significant number of Muslims from the society they inhabit, points to the domestic source of some of the wider global conflicts. The rhetoric of civilisational conflict actually serves to distract attention from the crisis of elite authority on the home front...read more:
