Not a clash of civilisations - yet
But Samuel Huntington's hypothesis may become a self-fulfilling prophecy unless European countries deal with the discontent and isolation of their Muslim minorities.
Add BT as a preferred sourceSINCE 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 that the end of struggle between the West and the communist bloc signalled the ultimate victory of the liberal-democratic idea that would now spread around the globe and emerge as the final form of government. No more conflicts over ideology that could ignite new civil and international wars. We're all Westerners now!
But as the post-Cold War global reality questioned many of Mr Fukuyama's assumptions in the form of new challenges to the West and the democratic-liberal idea from political Islamist movements as well as from China and other non-western powers, The End of History was seen more and more as a waning intellectual fad, and a new paradigm promoted by renowned political scientist Samuel Huntington that contended that people's cultural and religious identities would now be the primary source of domestic and international politics took its place.
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