September 11th and The Clash of Civilization

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Does September the 11th mark the end of liberal cosmopolitanism and the beginning of a clash of civilizations?

The end of the Cold War, combined with the catastrophic failures of Communism and Fascism, led theorists like Fukuyama to declare the liberal ideas of freedom and equality to be universal and no longer ideologically challenged.  However, the terrorist attacks of September 11th lead to more cynical perceptions, with Huntington echoing Bernard Lewis in raising the spectra of a ‘clash of civilizations’. This suggested that, the end of the Cold War marked only the end of a historical anomaly of ideological conflict, and the resurgence of conflict based upon lines of ethnic, religious and cultural differences.  This essay will examine liberal cosmopolitanism and consider if there is something specific within Islam or the Middle East that makes it incompatible with liberal cosmopolitanism.  In order to do this it will use the work of the Neo-orientalists (Huntington, Scruton, Lewis) to highlight possible traits of Islam, that would make it inherently incompatible with liberal  democratic ideas.  Using this analysis it will critically evaluate the claim that certain key Islamic traits preclude the formation of a modern, liberal state.  

In ‘The End of History’ Fukuyama ,drawing upon Hegel’s dialect approach, suggests that ideological conflict that has marked the world thus far was effectively at an end with the fall of the Soviet Union.  By this he means that history as a series of dialects was over, not as events or conflicts.  Dialects can be considered to be fundamental contradictions in a society, which cannot be solved within the current social paradigm, this is key to why Hegel and Fukuyama see history as progressive, which equally is important in Liberal thinking.  Each regime, be it monarchy, feudalism, despotism, communism, has a dialect, a kind of argumentative dialogue, within it.  If it is internally contradictory then the ideal and regime will not be able to deal with certain problems that highlight this internal contradiction.  Perhaps then we might say that feudal monarchy was unable to deal with the mass mobilisation and urbanisation of the industrial revolution, there was no intra-systemic way to deal with this problem, therefore the paradigm collapsed and transited into a capitalist system.  In a similar way, Fukuyama argues, communism was unable to deal with the demands of globalisation and the electronic revolution, therefore it was internally flawed and collapsed.  Fukuyama, like Marx, considers technological development to be key to progress.  As knowledge is not completely lost when one system, or civilization transits to another, in some ways society progresses.  Marx considered capitalism to be a progression from feudalism but that the capitalist system created a dialectical problems of its own .  However, here Fukuyama separates from Marx in suggesting that liberal democracy is the final dialectical progression, that, although liberal democracy has problems, these problems can be solved within the liberal democratic paradigm, and therefore offer no dialectical problem.  Liberal democracy is therefore, the ‘end of history’ in the respect that history of dialects is now over.