Dialogue of Civilizations as an Alternative Model for World Order

More than fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, the overwhelming political and ideological dominance of a US-centred Western and Liberal world seemed entrenched but the promises of a peaceful ‘New World Order’ had clearly not been fulfilled. On the contrary, international society has been drawn into a crescendo of instability, wars and political violence. Against such a background and within the context of a widespread public debate on the future of the world order, the call for a ‘dialogue of civilizations’ has emerged as a set of ideas, often generic but increasingly perceived as a political necessity all over the world to somehow contribute to a more peaceful and just world order. Since then, the idea of dialogue of civilizations has been the subject of many public conferences and international meetings, but has received scant attention by international relations and political theorists in clarifying and articulating its potentiality as an alternative framework for the future world order. This is even more regretful when one notes that Khatami had explicitly put forward this vision with this precise aim in mind.

Against this background of academic indifference, I will take the suggestion of Khatami seriously and outline an argument for a normative structure of contemporary multicultural and globalized international society inspired by the political discourse of dialogue of civilizations. In the same way that modern political theory did not emerge from (and within) a vacuum but in response to the political problems and inquiries of the day (think of the key founding texts of the modern theory of the state), the great issues of today’s politics, arguably in primis its global predicament of a crisis of order combined with a growing worldwide political manifestation of cultural pluralism, are calling for an adequate international political theory of world order, i.e., a theory for the normative structure of a multicultural and globalized international society.

DIALOGUE OF CIVILIZATIONS AS A GLOBAL POLITICAL DISCOURSE: AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF THE ‘END OF HISTORY’ AND THE ‘CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS’

As I have previously argued, the idea of dialogue of civilizations emerged in the 1990s as a global political discourse against the background of two competing and powerful discourses, the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and the ‘Globalization of Liberalism/End of History’.  From this perspective, the idea of dialogue of civilizations constitutes a third political reaction to the end of the Cold War that, while not a synthesis of the two above-mentioned discourses, could not be set and framed, except against the background of these two intellectually and politically powerful theses.

However, from the outset a crucial distinction needs to be underlined. The political discourse of dialogue of civilizations has yet to be conceptualised in the realm of the theoretical reflection on international relations, very broadly conceived, in the way that the ‘end of history’ and the ‘clash of civilizations’ have been. As a first step in this direction, a preliminary analysis of dialogue of civilizations as global political discourse may well explore more in details the comparisons and contrasts with the abovementioned two theses.  In a simplified and schematic way familiar to International Relations (IR) mainstream scholarship – that this chapter indirectly aims to criticise – it can be argued that dialogue of civilizations shares analytically some essential assumptions with the thesis of the clash of civilizations while normatively it is closer to the approach endorsed by the end of history.

In contrast to the analytical and empirical argument that finds the globalization of liberalism as the last stage of the modernization and secularization of the world, dialogue of civilizations stresses the global resurgence of cultural and religious pluralism in world politics, and identifies in the quest for cultural authenticity as the main contemporary political issue effecting the relationships between the Western and non-Western world. But whereupon Huntington saw the clash of civilizations scenario as mainly a social-scientific prediction grounded in a primordialist worldview of politics, the political discourse of dialogue of civilisations considers it as a dangerous possibility (or political construction) resulting from wrong policies that need to be opposed.

From a normative perspective, it is self-evident that the proposal for a dialogue of civilizations is formulated as a reaction to the clash of civilizations thesis. Put simply, the former is primarily designed to prevent the latter. The reason why, from rather convergent empirical considerations, the political discourse of dialogue of civilizations derives at a different conclusion from that of Huntington’s is due to their differing notions of (international) politics. Where Huntington subscribes to a realist political framework, dialogue is committed to an idealist notion of politics that’s implicit in the end of history thesis.

In the first case, struggle for power is perceived as an unavoidable necessity of politics, which condemns international politics to the realm of conflict recurrence and repetition that can only be, partially, mitigated by a consequentialist ethics of statecraft based on non-interference. In the second case, both an idealist commitment to politics as a search for justice as fairness and a liberal emphasis on cooperation and non-military issues prevail, and as a consequence, international politics is perceived as a realm where progress, however difficult, is nonetheless possible on the base of an ethics of ends.

These two distinctions – normative/analytical and realist/idealist – essential to mainstream approaches in IR, are however part of the theoretical problems that a fully-fledge international political theory of dialogue of civilizations will have to confront. It is important to stress that such preliminary comparative reading does not suggest that dialogue civilizations as an argument for the normative basis of contemporary international society, can be interpreted as a via media theoretical position between ‘the clash of civilizations’ and ‘the end of history’. Rather if attention is shifted from theory to practice, the radical distance between dialogue of civilizations and the other two theses becomes apparent. In particular, while the two envision respectively a ‘thin’ or ‘thick’ – but essentially Western-centric and mainly liberal – international society, the political discourse of dialogue of civilizations calls for the reopening and re-discussion of the core Western-centric and liberal assumptions upon which the normative structure of the contemporary international society is based.

From this perspective, the idea of a dialogue of civilizations represents a powerful normative challenge to the contemporary political orthodoxy implicit in the above political discourses. In other words, as Amitai Etzioni has convincingly argued:

both the end-of-history and the clash-of–civilizations arguments approach the non-Western parts of the world as if they have little, if anything, to offer to the conception of a good society – at least to its political and economic design – or to the evolving new global architecture.

Within this horizon, three major theoretical and political lines of arguments emerge as prerequisites to any normative structure of contemporary international society that wishes to be sensitive to the call for a dialogue of civilizations.

Firstly, if the normative structure of future global coexistence is to be genuinely universal, then it cannot only be liberal and Western-centric. Genuine universality requires a sharp awareness of the presence of different cultures and civilizations in world affairs; in many ways it must also spring from there. A fundamental void looms when this normative structure reflects the tenets of cosmopolitan liberalism, a political tradition that excludes the centrality of cultural and religious identity in the everyday practices of ‘really existing communities’.

Secondly, any reflection on a principled world order based on dialogue of civilizations must acknowledge something like a fundamental ethical and political crisis linked to the present liberal Western civilization and its expansion and recognise that dialogue civilizations seems to enshrine the promise of an answer, or rather to chart a path towards an answer as, in Khatami’s words, every dialogue, based on a presumption of worth of the Other, ‘provides grounds for human creativity to flourish.’  Furthermore, as the Indian post-colonial theorist Ashis Nandy has interestingly argued, such an opening also call for a re-engagement with the disowned or repressed traditions that make up the European experience for ‘any alternative form of dialogue between cultures cannot but attempt to rediscover the subjugated West and make it an ally.’

Finally, the present international situation places on all of us a moral obligation to pursue an active politics of inter-civilizational understanding by engaging in a concrete practice of cross-cultural dialogue. It cannot be ignored that since September 11, the shadow of a ‘clash of civilizations’ came hammering down on the world with incredible velocity, leaving in its wake an atmosphere of fear and war. Not only that: the search for a new normative order, that is unity in diversity, is needed today even more to defend the plurality of world politics against any imperial temptation. In the words of Gadamer ‘the hegemony or unchallengeable power of any one single nation . . . is dangerous for humanity. It would go against human freedom.’  With this context in mind, a politics of understanding would already be a great achievement. Nevertheless, to effectively face this challenge at its roots we need to imagine an exit from the strict grid of choices imposed by the contemporary Western-centric and liberal global order and move towards the construction of a multicultural and peaceful world order.

DIALOGUE OF CIVILIZATIONS AS INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL THEORY

There is no blueprint for the construction of a multicultural and peaceful world order. It is my contention, however, that for such a new normative structure to emerge, an adequate theory of world order inspired by the political discourse of dialogue of civilizations is an essential element. Such an international political theory of dialogue of civilizations needs to articulate an intellectual strategy that problematizes the contemporary predominant cosmopolitan preference predicated on the idea of ‘world unity’ – visible in Fukuyama’s thesis but also in other streams of post-89 international theorising  – and gives a renewed centrality to the issue of cultural and political pluralism. Integral to this theoretical re-centring is a critique of the ‘wishful thinking’ approach and its underlying philosophy of history with its absolute faith in progress and in the unlimited perfectibility of human nature typical of cosmopolitan-liberal political theorising. This brings into question what, in IR theory, is normally referred to as Idealism with its emphasis on the idea of world government and its commitment to anthropological optimism and a philosophy of history.  From this perspective, an international political theory of dialogue of civilizations would clearly be anti-idealist.

This would be a paradoxical conclusion, however, since one of the major arguments of the supporters of dialogue of civilizations is a normative (idealist-like) critique of the Realist discourse of power politics. Such criticism is unsurprisingly mirrored by the Realist accusation against the idea of dialogue of civilizations concerning the idealist and wishful thinking nature of its discourse. The argument goes that dialogue of civilizations might well be normatively worthwhile and even conceptually possible, but ultimately it remains an unrealistic utopia (or worse, a rhetorical escamotage in the hands of dangerous illiberal politicians) when projected into the realm of real-world politics where power and interest are sovereign. This argument reproduces, of course, the classical realist critique to the idealist worldview of international politics according to which any attempt to construct a world order based on ethical and normative considerations is doomed since it fails to engage with the ‘real nature’ of international relations as power politics.  From this perspective, the international political theory of dialogue of civilizations could not but be located in the anti-realist camp.

In what follows I want to address this apparent contradiction. As I have already anticipated, the Realist/Idealist opposition, essential to mainstream approaches in International Relations, is in fact part of the theoretical problem that a comprehensive international political theory of dialogue of civilizations needs to address. By rejecting the usefulness of the Realist/Idealist divide, I will delineate, more clearly, the contours of dialogue of civilizations as an argument for the contemporary normative structure of a peaceful and multicultural global order around the notions of multipolarity, cross-cultural jus gentium and a comprehensive idea(l) of peace. To the discussion of these three dimensions, I want now to turn.

Multipolarity as the Spatial Order of Dialogue of Civilizations

As argued, the political discourse of dialogue of civilizations represents a radical critique of the political and ideological dominance of a US-centred Western and Liberal world. At the core of this discourse one finds a clear normative resistance against the idea of a unipolar world order often accompanied by the conviction that we are gradually, but ineluctably’ moving towards a multipolar world. The question then arises of whether such an international political theory of dialogue of civilizations should endorse the idea of a multipolar world order.

This is an awkward question, since polarity is clearly associated with a Realist (and Neo-realist) approach to international politics and with a conceptualisation of the international arena as a system of forces to be brought into equilibrium (the stability of the system) by the well known mechanism of the balance of power.  The emphasis here is overwhelmingly on material sources and great power status, the rest (the ideational/normative dimension) being fundamentally irrelevant.

It should be noted, however, that a widespread debate has been ranging throughout the post-Cold War period whether the end of the bipolar international system would lead to unipolarity or multipolarity. While there have been different positions on the nature of the post-89 international system in terms of distribution of power – and the predictive assessments of the evolution of the polarity of the system have been even more diverging – it is fair to say that the view that we are living in a ‘unipolar era’ is today less popular than it was in the early 1990s and the predictions that the twenty-first century will see the emergence of a genuine multipolar structure are increasingly common.  This view is arguably the result of the recent security and political developments and in particular the ‘quagmire’ of the war in Iraq, but it is also based on less contingent medium/long term economic evidence and estimations which suggest the fast progression of the (relative) economic decline of America in favour of the new Asian fast-growing economies of China and India.

My point here is that the increasing consensus on the empirical trend of worldwide decentralisation of power away from what Huntington has defined the ‘lonely superpower’  towards other major regional powers (China, India, EU, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Iran and others) may well be more conducive to the emergence of a pluralistic world order. This is why even critical scholars such as Chantal Mouffe and Danilo Zolo have recently focused on the idea of a balance of regional spaces and argued for a multipolar world order in the context of their critique of the American unipolar/imperial project.  Mouffe has argued that the central problem that the current unipolar world, under the unchallenged hegemony of the United States, is facing is the impossibility for antagonisms to find legitimate forms of expression. Under such conditions, antagonisms, when they do emerge, tend to take extreme forms. In order to create the channels for the legitimate expression of dissent we need to envisage, Mouffe suggests, a pluralistic multipolar world order constructed around a certain number of ‘greater spaces’ and genuine cultural poles. Along similar lines, Zoloargues that to confront the United States’ dangerous imperial tendencies, the project of a peaceful world needs a neo-regionalist revival of the idea of Gro?raum [greater space], together with a reinforcement of multilateral negotiation between states as a normative source and a democratic legitimisation of the processes of regional integration.

These arguments for a multipolar world order, however, require a degree of caution for as Zolo has correctly sensed ‘before this kind of order can be achieved complex economic, technological, cultural and religious conditions must be met that make a dialogue between the world’s major civilizations possible’.  The risk is that without a process of dialogue of civilizations at different levels, as an overarching framework of reference, this multicivilizational world order would look very much like the model of multipolar multicivilizational order put forward by Huntington as the antidote to what he sees as the greatest threat to world peace, the clashes of civilizations.  This is an important point as this part of Huntington’s argument – absent in his original Foreign Affairs’ article – has gone largely unnoticed (the reason also being that it is sketched in the last few pages of a book of more than 300 pages - an unbalance which arguably confirms the impression that the book is really about the clash rather than how to avoid it).

Huntington argues that the only way to avoid the clash of civilizations is to envisage a multipolar multicivilizational order organised around what he calls ‘the core states of civilizations [which would be the] sources of order within civilizations and, through negotiations with other core states, between civilizations’.  He then adds that ‘a world in which core states play a leading or dominating role is a sphere-of-influence world’ and that ‘a core state can perform its ordering function because member states perceive it a cultural kin.’  Such a framework seems strikingly similar to the arguments advanced by Mouffe and Zolo, the idea being the construction of a planetary balance of power around macro-regions defined along civilizational lines.

The problem with such a model of order is its being constructed only on the grounds of a material structure of power, which might well represent the spatial orientation of the global order but does not make for the normative structure of such an order. It is true that Huntington sketches very briefly (in less than a page) three rules for a possible normative structure of his multipolar multicivilizational order: the abstention rule (core states should abstain from intervention in conflicts in other civilizations); the joint mediation rule (core states should negotiate to contain or halt fault-line wars among states or groups from their civilizations); and, finally, the commonalities rule (peoples in all civilizations should search for and attempt to expand the values, institutions and practices they have in common with peoples of other civilizations).  These rules, however, reveal even more neatly the ‘IR realist’ assumptions of the model as they in essence amount to nothing but a minimalist ethics of non-interference – the commonalities rule pointing perhaps to some ‘thin’ minimal communal denominator of universal morality, but in fact being the perfect exemplification of that rhetorical technique which consists in vaguely referring to some kind of undefined normative necessity of an opposite aspiration to the clash. The result of the Huntingtonian construction is, therefore, a worrying system of forces, of civilizational macro-regional great powers ready for collision – the clash of civilizations – and the only possible hope is to make the stability of the system attainable through the mechanism of the balance of power. However, the ‘IR realist’ emphasis, shared by Huntington on the centrality of fear, insecurity and threats in an anarchic environment, seem simply to make the clash of civilizations unavoidable – as merely a matter of time.

This is why Zolo correctly cautions about the apparent self-evident force of this multipolar model and points to the necessity of immersing it in a broader and real process of dialogue between the world’s major civilizations. I will add some further comments on this aspect in the final section of this paper. This leads me to the need for what I have called an active politics of dialogue of civilizations, that is, to  practically enter into this inter-civilizational dialogical encounter to create, in Gadamer’s words, these ‘new normative and common solidarities that let practical reason speak again’ in a way that is appropriate to the new global predicament.  It is my contention that practical reason should speak today in the form of a new cross-cultural jus gentium providing the normative structure appropriate to the contemporary multicultural and globalized international society.

A New Cross-Cultural Jus Gentium as the Normative Order of Dialogue of Civilizations

As Hedley Bull has argued, the emergence of a ‘multicultural international society’ imperatively requires a new normative structure since ‘we have… to recognise that the nascent cosmopolitan culture of today, like the international society which it helps to sustain, is weighted in favour of the dominant cultures of the West.’  The political discourse of dialogue of civilizations calls for the reopening and re-defining of the core Western-centric and liberal assumptions upon which the normative structure of the contemporary international society is based.

The discussion of jus gentium has recently been reinvigorated by John Rawls’ The Law of Peoples.  This is a welcomed development as it has contributed to advancing a debate on the philosophical basis of international law that has unfortunately been severely limited by the legal positivism predominant in the theory and practice of international law. More importantly, as Fred Dallmayr outlined,

in times of historical change and upheaval, the law of peoples (jus gentium) has tended to serve as a go-between or mediating agent between local or city law and rational philosopher’s law, an agent able to stretch the former’s parochialism while harnessing the latter’s aloofness. It is in this sense that…Vico speaks of ‘natural law of peoples’ (jus natural gentium), distinguishing it from mere custom and philosophers’ precepts.

The mediating role of the jus (naturale) gentium seems to confirm the usefulness of reinvigorating a discussion of this concept as a response to the crisis of global order whose solution, I would argue, revolves precisely around the dilemma between universalism and pluralism.

Commenting on Rawls’ ‘quasi-Kantian tenor’, Dallmayr suggests that his approach should be ‘integrated and ‘sublated’ (aufgehoben) in a more densely textured cross-cultural jus gentium’. Interestingly he contends that this requires a shift from the level of universal moral theorising predominant among liberal-cosmopolitan supporters to a political plane or what he calls a global political praxis which can address ‘the neglect of relevant differences among peoples and cultures and also the sidelining of motivational disposition which might foster moral conduct’.

Echoing Vaclav Havel’s critique of a technology of world order and the need for a genuine universality grounded in the social ethics and practices of ‘really existing communities’, Dallmayr’s point reprises the first line of argument I identified as a prerequisite to any forward-looking reflection on the normative structure of contemporary international society that wishes to be sensitive to the call for a dialogue of civilizations. From this perspective, what is at stake in this cross-cultural encounter is the very legitimacy and, as a consequence, legal effectiveness of a future jus gentium in a context whereby: on the one hand, international law is increasingly perceived – for reasons that are understandable and worrying at the same time – as the ideological component of new imperialist strategies; and, on the other hand, as even Michael Walzer has argued, the legal positivist interpretations of the UN Charter ‘have constructed a paper world, which fails at crucial points to correspond to the world the rest of us still live in’. 

But, drawing on the second insight identified as essential for an international political theory of dialogue of civilizations, a dialogically-constituted cross-cultural jus gentium seems to enshrine the promise of not only a more genuine, but also of a ‘better’, common ground. Whether in the empirically-grounded (though daring) statement of Parekh according to whom ‘since each culture is inherently limited, a dialogue between them is mutually beneficial’; or in Taylor’s more cautious presumption of worth which involves in his own words ‘something like an act of faith’ about a world where different cultures complement each other, the argument here is that, in Khatami’s words, every dialogue, based on a presumption of the worth of the Other, ‘provides grounds for human creativity to flourish’.  This is particularly challenging for the ‘Orientalist mindset’ of superiority of the West but it also provides a hope for those Westerners perceiving a fundamental ethical and political crisis in their liberal societies.

Dialogue is an open-ended process, which frequently involves difficulties, and there is no guarantee that it can produce a cross-cultural consensus. With reference to the case of human rights, unquestionably an essential element of any future jus gentium and arguably a realm where the idea of a world dialogical consensus has been making way in recent times, Taylor has asked, for example, how their conceptualisation might be transformed through an understanding of the Theravada Buddhist search for selflessness, for self-giving, and dana (generosity), or through the Hindu notion of nonviolence, or by resting on the Islamic themes of the mercy and compassion of God.  Similarly Etzioni has called for a ‘new normative global synthesis’ between the West’s preoccupation with autonomy and the East’s preoccupation with social order.  Perhaps the dialogical encounter with the cultural Other, by stretching our imagination, might bring about a cross-cultural human rights regime, on the one hand, more adequate to the multicultural nature of contemporary international society and, on the other, transformed and expanded in terms of its moral horizon beyond (and more profound than) the western emphasis on rights-talk with its implicit set of liberal assumptions on the nature of subjectivity.

In addition, the third dimension integral to any international political theory of dialogue of civilizations, peace through inter-civilizational mutual understanding, bears some implications for the idea of a new cross-cultural jus gentium – which I will deal with more extensively in the final section of this chapter. But before turning to that, I should add that the very logic of the argument I have been making for a cross-cultural jus gentium as a praxis of dialogue in a sense disqualifies me, in that context, from saying more on the content of this cross-cultural jus gentium a venir. This remains the exclusive mission of the dialogue among scholars as well as practitioners who are personally engaged in this inter-cultural dialogue academically and in various public fora. Here, however, I would like to mention that there is a thriving and well-established field of comparative philosophical study as well as a growing set of works in the young and flourishing field of comparative political theory whose aim is precisely to contribute to this global political inter-cultural dialogue.


Peace as the Critical Horizon/Aim of Dialogue of Civilizations

As I have already argued, the present international situation imposes on all of us a moral obligation to pursue a politics of inter-civilizational understanding: to engage in an inter-cultural dialogue is today crucial for peace as it cannot be ignored that since September 11, in the very year designated by the United Nations as the ‘Year of Dialogue of Civilizations’, global political violence and conflicts have reached a critical new level both quantitatively and qualitatively and the shadow of a future clash of civilizations has been hammering down on the world and, very worryingly, in the collective psychologies of its peoples.

This overall political context of growing cultural misunderstanding and mistrust, which prompted Edward Said to speak of a real danger of a clash of ignorance, should be opposed by creating the conditions for widespread processes of ‘inter-civilizational mutual understanding’ at multiple levels. In this respect, the link between civilizational dialogue, mutual understanding and peace is fortunately becoming more widely acknowledged. The ideal of ‘building bridges of mutual understanding’ in order to learn (or re-learn) how to live together among different cultural communities – what Andrea Riccardi has called in his last book the art of ‘con-vivere’  – is also critical for the global order in a more specific sense: it provides the key for the combination of the spatial orientation of multipolarity and of the normative order of a cross-cultural jus gentium. To explain this point I want to return for a moment to the Huntingtonian model of multipolar multicivilizational order discussed above.

The popularity of Huntington’s thesis no doubt has to do with bringing to centre stage of the post-89 debate on the future of international relations the political resurgence of religion and the emergence of a multicultural international society. In other words, it could be said that Huntington has framed post-89 international politics as a multicultural fact. In this respect, its proposal of multipolar multicivilizational order is indeed an acknowledgment of the centrality of the growing multicultural nature of international society but, and here lies the problem, is based on the opposite logic to the dialogical multiculturalism that I have defended.

In Huntington’s view the multicultural nature of the world has, on the one hand, internationally to be almost confined within a civilizational cage following the ‘good fences make good neighbours’ principle and, on the other hand, has domestically to be contrasted through strict immigration policy and a new integrationist approach, as Huntington has argued in his most recent book with reference to the growing presence of Latinos in the United States and what, he argues, could be its weakening effect on American national identity.  In sum, his argument is not about building bridges of mutual understanding but rather walls of containment and separation.

The international political theory of dialogue of civilizations envisages ‘bridges’ not ‘walls’, to link multipolarity with a cross-cultural jus gentium. In particular, here the emphasis is not on the geographical-territorial dimension of civilizations but rather on the normative one, that is, on civilizations as the great cultural and religious social traditions of the world. This implies, for example, that the neo-regionalist revival that Zolo and Mouffe favour as a way of constructing a multipolar spatial ordering does not need to take shape along civilizational-culturalist lines. Ratherit cannot be dismembered from reinforcing a politics of multiculturalism ‘at home and abroad’.  To illustrate this point I refer to a case of contemporary relevance to European regional integration and the relationship between Europe and the Muslim world: the hotly debated issue of the EU enlargement to Turkey.

From such a perspective, the framing of Turkey’s EU-accession discursive strategy, by the current Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a ‘bridge’ between Asia and Europe or as a new ‘alliance of civilizations’is to be welcomed and supported.  My argument is, in fact, that multiculturally-constituted processes of regional integration are more conducive to a peaceful global order as they act as a preventive antidote to the possible negative politicization of cultural differences on a global scale. A similar additional point can be made to support the creation of multicultural forms of regional cooperation and integration, which are, anyway, arguably justifiable on functionalist grounds to respond to the common challenges brought about by the processes of globalization. Initiatives of regionalization involving, for example, member-states from a plurality of existing regional political organizations can further contribute to the dilution of the risks of a multipolarization along enclosed civilizational lines. 

Regionalization processes can be multiple and overlapping insofar as collective identities and political circumstances allow. For example, from such a perspective initiatives of Mediterranean regionalization involving European and Arab countries are to be encouraged as a way of fostering bridges of communication and mutual understanding between the European Union and the Arab League and can also constitute laboratories for the praxis of inter-civilizational dialogue necessary for the emergence of a new cross-cultural jus gentium. Finally, multiculturalism ‘abroad’ is likely to facilitate ‘living together’ at home and vice versa, a fact that cannot be overlooked in our era of global communication. I would, for example, anticipate a reciprocally beneficial relationship between the integration of the growing Muslim presence in Europe, arguably the greatest challenge facing the future identity of Europe, and a peaceful relationship between Europe and the Muslim world in the Mediterranean and in the Middle East.

An active politics of dialogue of civilizations may represent an essential mechanism of connection between multipolarity and a new cross-cultural jus gentium, both as a way to mitigate the risk of a ‘culturalist enclosure’ in the former and to dialogically inscribe plurality in the latter. If this is so, however, the driving idea, the polar star of dialogue of civilizations as international political theory, is a comprehensive and politically realistic idea(l) of peace. I can only suggest a few lines of thought to shed light on this comprehensive and realistic idea(l) of peace which I think should be the object of a separate study.

A realistic idea(l) of peace points to the need for creatively accommodating into a broader normative vision the realities of interests and power represented, in this case, by the condition of multipolarity. But more importantly, the ideal of peace needs also to be comprehensive. Contrary to an abstract emphasis on legal-positivistic engineering of the cosmopolitan ‘legal pacifism’, which expands on the Kelsenian maxim of ‘peace through law’, and the ethnocentric and problematic emphasis by the so-called ‘democratic peace theory’ on the liberal-democratic model as conditio sine qua non for international peace;  a comprehensive re-conceptualisation of peace should explore the mutually constitutive and reinforcing relationships, at various concrete levels, among peace, justice and reconciliation, as the visionary words of John Paul II, ‘there is no Peace without Justice and no Justice without Reconciliation’ suggest and the remarkable concrete experience of the ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ in South Africa proved.  It is my view that such a comprehensive re-conceptualisation might effectively inform real-world bottom-up initiatives of conflict-resolution, prevention and post-conflict reconstruction and may indeed have greater chances of politically realistic success that the top-down abstract approach of proceduralism and liberal rule of law.

Dialogue of civilizations is at the very heart of such three-dimensional interplay and more cross-cultural work needs to be done to explore these relationships in theory and practice.  At a time when a great deal of thinking has been devoted to justifying and making sense of the doctrine of ‘preventive war’, I reunite with Andrea Riccardi in arguing that now is instead the time for a strategy of ‘preventive peace’.

SKETCHING DIALOGUE OF CIVILIZATIONS AS AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL FOR WORLD ORDER

This investigation began by suggesting that the global political discourse of dialogue of civilizations emerged as an alternative political reaction to the end of the Cold War against the background of the clash of civilizations and the globalization of liberalism. In the cases of two outspoken supporters of this political discourse, Khatami and Havel, an awareness of the inadequacies and problems of these two alternative visions of world order is accompanied by a moral elan for fostering universality while recognising and valuing plurality. The post-modern need for transcendence (Havel) and the Sufi-inspired mysticism of unity (Khatami) ground, respectively, what are indeed two impressive dialogical visions for the future of world order. But they also manifest the necessity for more work to be done by international and political theorists for a translation and accommodation of these visions into the language and concepts of international political theorising.

Moving from these reflections, therefore, I have attempted to bring these visions into the realm of academic reflection on the nature of contemporary global politics and the future of world order. The alternative model of world order inspired by dialogue of civilizations has multipolarity as its spatial orientation and a new cross-cultural jus gentium as its normative order. An active politics of dialogue of civilizations represents the combination mechanism of connection between multipolarity and the new cross-cultural jus gentium, both as a way to mitigate the risk of a ‘culturalist enclosure’ in the former and to dialogically inscribe plurality in the latter. Concretely, this neo-regionalist, multipolar and cross-cultural model of greater spaces is different from the Huntingtonian model of multipolar multicivilizational order as: (1) it is not shaped by civilizational-culturalist lines but by a dialogical multiculturalism; (2) its conflicts and disputes are neutralised by a ‘thick’ dialogically-constituted normative order (a new cross-cultural jus gentium) based on a ‘genuine’ and ‘enriched’ universality; (3) it is committed to a widespread process of ‘inter-civilizational mutual understanding’ at multiple levels.

Such an outline of dialogue of civilizations as an alternative model for world order is of course still very general. Many other contextual conditions and considerations should be brought into the discussion to provide a more developed model responding to the present international situation. Here is not the place to deepen such a discussion.

Seven years after the designation of the UN Year of the Dialogue among Civilizations and the events of September 11, in a time of great international tensions and political turmoil, critics have increasingly labeled the idea of inter-civilizational dialogue as idealistic, abstract, rhetorical, and even politically dangerous. At the same time, there exists a critical mass of activism and commitment – at different levels – to the idea and practice of dialogue of civilizations, cultures and religions. In other words, it seems to me that a critical juncture has been reached: the global political discourse of dialogue of civilizations needs to move beyond general and rhetorical statements and assume a clearer and concrete political agenda if it wants to be taken seriously and not be cursorily dismissed or relegated to the margins.

The idea of dialogue of civilizations as an alternative model for world order might provide this global movement with a more intelligible and effective political synthesis, which can contribute to the necessary conceptual and political upgrade. But perhaps more importantly is the need for new heterodox alliances: the promotion of common initiatives (cultural, social, communicative and political) to build new transversal practices of solidarity, cooperation and mobilization, involving groups from different cultural backgrounds and religious affiliations acting together on the basis of common political aspirations. This practice of dialogue of civilizations carries the hope that we may learn how to live together in our increasingly multicultural and globalized international society. Dialogue of civilizations as international political theory hopes to be a small contribution to this great dream.