Not a clash of civilisations - yet

SINCE the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end to the global competition between liberal democracy and communism, public intellectuals have been fascinated by, if not obsessed with, two competing paradigms that attempted to place the new post-Cold War international reality into context and develop theoretical frameworks that would allow us to forecast the shape of things to come.

On the one hand there was "The End of History And the Last Man" thesis advanced by American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama (in a 1992 book, expanding on an earlier 1989 essay) that argued …