ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some perspectives on the making of modern Europe in terms of a six-fold framework of cultural encounters. The invocation of a common Western European civilisation based on Christianity, democracy, and capitalism was of course a construction that had political purposes. Most of Western Europe was far from democratic, with fascist regimes on the rise and limited franchise in the few democracies that did exist. The chapter discusses the six kinds of encounter: Collision and Conquest, Cultural Assimilation and Loss, Resistance and Renewal, Negotiation and Exchange, Transfer and Entanglement, and Fusion and Hybridity. The chapter suggests that a key feature of cultural encounters is that a result of the encounter of one culture with another, it is very often the case that at least one undergoes a certain amount of re-interpretation. The history of Europe offers much evidence of how the encounter of cultures entails processes of re-signification and re-interpretation in the interacting cultural models.
