ABSTRACT
The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, a metaphor for the collapse of communism throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (FSU) between 1989 and 1991, ushered in a new era in world politics. It removed the chief structural basis upon which post-war politics had rested, thereby transforming the nature of international relations. But as well as changing the geopolitical map and the dynamics of international politics, it also fundamentally transformed the conceptual map that had long underpinned our understanding of the world. With the collapse of communism, the major conceptual challenger to Western liberal democracy seemingly disappeared. This does not mean that all states now had political and economic systems like those in the capitalist West, but throughout most of the globe where such systems did not exist, the sets of politico-economic arrangements which were in place were not generally presented as viable long term alternatives to Western liberal democratic capitalism, or intent on creating societies different from those of the West. The range of dictatorial and authoritarian regimes still to be found in various parts of the world hardly represented the onset of a new civilisation. A partial exception to this generalisation can be found in parts of the Islamic world, where some states profess to rest upon religious principles and to be building a society based upon fundamentals very different to those of Western liberal capitalist democracy. But even here the aspiration to underpin society by strict observance of religious principles has generally been muted or, where it has been sought vigorously as in Iran, of relatively short-term duration. Secularism and industrialism have tended to impose their own logics. But in any case, given that the construction of a society based upon Islamic principles would require commitment to that religion generally within the populace, this has not appeared to be a realistic conceptual threat to Western liberal democracy, at least in the short term. Unlike communism, Islam does not rely upon the processes of Western capitalism to predict the fall of that civilisation and its own dominance.
