ABSTRACT
For many political commentators the Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington provided confirmation that we had entered a new era of global civilizational war in which cultural differences between peoples threatened chaos and disorder on an hitherto unprecedented scale.1 As the Washington Post noted in December 2001, ‘For Huntington, a clash of civilizations was a worst-case scenario. For bin Laden it was a game plan.’2
Statements like these tend to exaggerate what remains a highly controversial argument about the limitations of international and especially intercivilizational understanding. Nevertheless, Huntington’s characterization of politics as being as much about culture and identity as power politics remains important and timely:
