Introduction: Assembling the Civilizational Jigsaw

This book starts from the assumption that civilizations, or rather narratives about civilizations, matter not only as research subjects in textbooks, literary and scientific essays, but also in politics. Civilizations have been cited in international politics in order to legitimize aggressive political behavior, to achieve mass mobilization against foreign states and to consolidate strong national political elites. This seems to be the case in China, Turkey, and Syria, which Christopher Cooker has termed “civilizational states.”1 Also in Western countries, in recent decades, the notion of civilization has often been used in public discourse: political parties and leaders have referred in particular to the need to protect Western civilization, calling in this regard for policies to restrict immigration from Muslim countries.Starting from the contemporary approaches to the issue, the studies in this collected volume reconstruct how civilizational paradigms and narratives have been used to explain political relations, to define the global order, to justify attempts to gain hegemony over particular geopolitical areas, and to make predictions on global developments in specific times of crisis. Civilizational narratives, paradigms and models are considered in light of their crucial role in consolidating the belief in, and the identity of, imagined communities by politically supporting, justifying, or delegitimizing the practices of political institutions and agents. The theories of civilization are seen here Introduction 9 also, as Archin Adib- Moghaddam does,47 as discourses that permeate the public opinion and politics, but, at the same time, differently, the power structures that they imply are highlighted through a plurality of methods, that range from comparative approach, to the analysis of intellectual discourse, to the political analysis of the models suggested by the different theories, to a geopolitical approach. In particular, this book analyzes the concepts of civilization as they have been used in the intellectual and political discourse in periods particularly critical for global relations and for the consolidation or contestation of the West’s dominant role in international, national politics and academic discourse. In order to understand the impact of civilizational narratives on politics and public opinion, the studies in this book consider civilizations not only as academic issues, but altogether as components of wider cultural and political discourses which justify and enhance political practices intended to consolidate, defend or contest an internal and international political order.