Question: Is there a clash of civilizations?

Parag Khanna: I don’t believe there ever was such a thing as the clash of civilizations. There was a term that caught on. Many people used it because they were afraid it might happen, in a way it was negatively aspirational, in the sense of this is what we want to avoid.

But was there ever genuinely any monolithic civilizations to be clashing? No, they weren’t. Civilizations have always been far too broad to be defined in that way, and to be so exclusive as the term lead people to believe. So I don’t really think there is a clash of civilizations.

Recorded on: 3/3/2008