ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an alternative perspective by putting fundamentalist and communal religious movements into the context of large-scale social transformations, especially the restructuration of the classical model of the nation-state and the increased global interconnectedness allowing for new interpretations of the cultural programme of modernity as it has developed in Western Europe. Fundamentalist and communal-religious movements, drawing simultaneously on the religious dimension of Axial civilizations and on the Jacobin dimensions of modernity, are indeed very modern, even if they do not accept the premises of the Enlightenment, but they challenge the West's claimed monopoly on modernity. New potential for conflict at a global level therefore arises from the multiplication of different, yet presumably universalistic, interpretations of modernity rather than from the confrontation of different civilizations. While such diversity has certainly undermined the old hegemonies, at the same time it has been closely connected with a globalization of cultural networks and channels of communication far beyond those that existed before.
