ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Western civilisation cannot be reduced to the liberal empire but reflects overlapping cultural commonwealths that emerged from the complex connections between different world civilisations. In his 2016 BBC Reith Lectures, the British-born Ghanaian-American thinker Kwame Anthony Appiah argued that the West does not exist and that it is time to abandon the idea of Western civilisation. At the heart of the liberal world order lies the West and at the heart of West lies a paradox: compared with civilisational states such as contemporary China or Russia, the West is the only civilisational community of nations and peoples founded upon shared political values rather than a predominantly national history. The idea of commonwealth as multinational associations of peoples is connected with the notion of covenant – people, often brought together by a shared faith, which are covenanted to one another in the interest of mutual benefit.
