The global condition is one of heightened vulnerability. National boundaries are increasingly porous. States are finding it harder and harder to run their economies and defend their borders. As the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Bali, Madrid and London have demonstrated, wealth, power and nuclear arsenals offer little guarantee of protection.

In a rapidly globalising world, “high consequence risks” (Beck, 1992) have become integral to the functioning of society. The global condition is one of heightened vulnerability as much for states as for groups and individuals. One need only think of the effects of financial crises, oil spills, ozone depletion, global warming, ethnic cleansing, genocidal policies or terrorist attacks. We are living through a period of profound economic, ecological, political and cultural transformation. If there is one characteristic that distinguishes this period, it is, as we shall see, the “globalisation of insecurity”.

If this reading of events is at all accurate, then a number of difficult questions suggest themselves: what challenges does the globalisation of insecurity pose for ethical and political discourse, for the way societies organise themselves, for the way people participate in society and in the decisions that vitally affect their future? What are appropriate cultural and institutional responses? And what of the role of the world’s religious traditions and civilisations? Before turning to these questions, it may be useful to probe a little more deeply into the dynamics of globalisation.

GLOBALISATION OF INSECURITY

In order to make sense of this current we first need to revisit the meaning of “security”, since it remains a prob-lematic and highly contested concept. It has been traditionally understood as referring to a set of objective condi-tions involving some form of protection from military threat. There is, however, much to be gained from conceptualising “security” as a state of mind and not just as a physical condition. This is precisely the nature of the terrorist threat. Its effectiveness does not normally lie in the destruction of the enemy’s military capabilities. The terrorist succeeds if his actions and utterances manage to produce fear, panic, and a combination of counter measures that are at best costly, and at worst likely to prolong the current state of uncertainty. In real-ity, all security discourse and practice ultimately revolves around the experi-ence of “insecurity”. Security policies, whether or not they rely on the use and threat of force, derive their content and legitimacy from the way they address, or are thought to address, this generalised sense of insecurity.

The question arises: how does the insecurity/security dynamic manifest itself in the present conjuncture? What, in other words, are the specificities of this period of transition? A key part of the answer lies in the first of the three currents that we propose to examine, namely the “globalisation of insecurity”. To convey something of the multi-dimensional character of this phenomenon, we focus on three distinguishing traits: the destructiveness of military technology, the rise of transnational threats to security, and the growth of international and transnational actors on the world stage.

The lethality of modern warfare has intensified over time. The ascendancy of offensive over defensive weapons systems has meant a marked decline in military protective capability. The fortress-type shells of defence characteristic of the European state system in the 16th to the 18th centuries have been rendered obsolescent by the advent of total war (Herz 1962), the potency of economic and ideological instruments of warfare, and the rise of urban and aerial piracy. These trends have combined to increase the vulnerability of all societies, including advanced industrial systems. In the atomic age, the power to hurt has vastly outdistanced the power to defend (Schelling 1966).

Mirroring and reinforcing the policies of the major declared nuclear powers has been the slow but steady widening of the nuclear club. Given the prospect of a North Korean or Iranian nuclear capability, it is now entirely feasible that US counter-pro-liferation policy might lead to a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Insofar as the nuclear weapon remains a symbol of power and prestige, proliferation ten-dencies are likely to intensify, with far-reaching implications for the reli-ability of strategic calculations and the predictability of state behaviour. Adding fuel to these uncertainties is the scale of the nuclear black market.

The multiple threads connecting politics, economy and technology in the nuclear age – porous national borders, expanded commerce in potentially dangerous dual-use technologies and materials, intensifying conflicts and nuclear ambitions – point to a trend that is pervasive yet diffuse, namely, the globalisation of insecurity.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE DIALOGUE OF CIVILIZATIONS

Globalisation, as we have noted, is an elusive, confusing and contradictory phenomenon. With the collapse of communism no credible alternative to global capitalism is in sight. There is as of now no international agency or political movement that can exercise effective leadership in interpreting, much less guiding, economic and political change. There is no simple or single solution to the globalisation of insecurity

In response to the uncertainties and complexities of the present con-juncture, numerous ideas and initia-tives have been proposed since the end of the Cold War as an ethical and political compass for the journey ahead. Particularly useful in this regard are the various proposals to democratise the institutions and mechanisms which will make vitally important decisions about the future (Aksu and Camilleri 2002, Commission on Global Governance 1995, Held 1995). This is why the reform of institutions has become such a critical issue – institutions at all levels: local, provincial, national, regional and global (Prakash 1999). In this context, the rather limited achievements of the 2005 UN summit have been a source of widespread disappointment.

If we are to develop a much more encompassing and integrated approach to the multiple sources of human insecurity, and if we are to build institutions that citizens can trust and in which their voices can be heard (Kymlicka and Norman 1995, Falk 1994, 1995, Urry 1999), what intellectual and cultural resources can we call upon as we approach these daunting tasks? It is here that the dialogue of civilisations may have a great deal to offer. It may in fact hold an important key to the future.

Dialogue across cultural and religious boundaries is not, of course, a new idea. It is now well over a century since the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago, brought together representatives of eastern and western spiritual traditions. Today it is recognized as the occasion that formally launched interreligious dialogue in the modern period. The Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions (CPWR), which officially dates from 1988, was established as a centennial celebration of the 1893 Parliament. The 1993 Parliament adopted Towards a Global Ethic: an Initial Declaration, a powerful statement of the ethical com-mon ground shared by the world’s reli-gious and spiritual traditions.

The dialogical agenda has since gained considerable momentum with several national and international centres making civilisational dialogue a focal point of research, education and advo-cacy. The UN General Assembly adopted in November 1998 a resolution proclaim-ing the year 2001 as the Year of Dialogue among Civilizations. In November of that year, the General Assembly adopted the Global Agenda for Dialogue among Civilisations, which has in turn given rise to a great many governmental and non-governmental initiatives. Most recently, the Spanish Prime Minister launched the idea of an “Alliance of Civilisations”. The proposal launched in partnership with the Turkish Government has now been endorsed by the UN.

The dialogical approach will in the years ahead prove critical to our capacity to respond constructively to the globalisation of insecurity. What such dialogue envisages is a prolonged and dynamic interaction between cultures. In such interaction all traditions, not least the Islamic, Hindu and Confucian worlds, must be accorded full respect. They must be accepted as major poles of cultural and geopolitical dialogue. Such a project needs to appreciate the speci-ficity of each culture, while contributing to an evolutionary process that builds on commonality but more importantly strives for synthesis.

For all their differences, these axial traditions share a sense of the dignity of human life, a sense of the transcendent, a commitment to human fulfilment, and a concern for standards of “right-ness” in human conduct (Muzaffar 1999, 25–31). Common to all of them is the notion of humane and legitimate governance, although the criteria used to measure of legitimacy may vary con-siderably from one tradition to another.

Needless to say, each of the civilisational currents and cultural formations has its own unique features, but such differences need not be inimical to normative discourse either within or between the major civilisational traditions. The emerging inter-civilisational dialogue may benefit as much from difference as from commonality.

CIVILIZATIONAL DIALOGUE: ITS CONTEMPORARY FUNCTION AND SIGNIFICANCE

But how are we to approach the dialogue of civilisations? How are we to apply dialogical principles in the present geopolitical and geocultural context? Here, it may be helpful to draw attention to two influential voices which have in different but converg-ing ways helped to place the dialogue of civilisations on the intellectual and political map. They have much to tell us about the way forward.

The first is Mohammad Khatami, the fifth president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a religious scholar with a keen understanding of Western philosophy.

For Khatami, dialogue is the com-mon search for truth. Dialogue cannot therefore obscure or evade the differ-ences that separate its participants, which is why for him the act is one in which listening is at least as important as speaking. Dialogue is the encounter across cultural, religious, philosophi-cal, ethical, civilisational boundaries, in which each participant listens to the other, becomes open, even vulnerable to the other. In this sense, dialogue engages the participant in a journey of self discovery:

It is only through immersion in another existential dimension that we could attain mediated and acquired knowledge of ourselves in addition to the immediate and direct knowledge of ourselves that we commonly possess. Through seeing others we attain a hitherto impossible knowledge of ourselves. Dialogue among cultures and civilisations, rests upon rational and ethically normative commitment of parties to the dialogue. . . [It] is a bi-lateral or even multi-lateral process in which the end result is not manifest from the beginning (Khatami 2000).

What, then, are dialogue’s normative foundations? The recurring themes in Khatami’s numerous speeches on the sub-ject suggest the following key elements:

a) the dignity of human being – made possible only through the will to empathy and compassion – as the measure of world order;

b) the refusal of politics without morality;

c) the notion that ideas and values, embedded in cultures and civilisations, are an important determinant of political behaviour;

d) the sense that intellectuals, poets, artists, scientists and mystics, precisely because they have the capacity and authority to articulate the large questions of human existence, have a unique role in civilisation dialogue. Many questions remain unanswered: Who participates in this dialogue? What are the modalities of dialogue? What is to be the role of states and governments in the dialogical process?

There is nevertheless one idea, central to Khatami’s conception of dialogue, which merits attention. In his celebrated 1999 speech at the University of Florence, he offered the following juxtaposition of East and West:

Orient, which even in an etymo-logical sense signifies the process of imparting direction and order to things, can beckon Europe and America to equilibrium, serenity and reflection in the context of an historical dialogue . . . If deeply understood in their Eastern connotations, equilibri-um and serenity lie beyond both the Dionysian and Apollonian extremes of western culture. The age of reason is an Apollonian age while romanticism is the opposite pull on the swing of the same pendulum (Khatami 1999).

Khatami’s exposition takes us back to the question of what is to be the discursive framework that guides the post-Cold War era. For Khatami dialogue among civilisations is designed specifically to address the fault line that separates Orient and Occident, a fault line that has a long history, of which the present difficulties between Islam and the West are but the most recent, perhaps geopolitically most troublesome manifestation.

Another influential voice that merits attention is that of Tu Weiming, perhaps the foremost neo-Confucian thinker of our time. Born in February 1940 in Kunming, China, he grew up and was educated in Taiwan and is now Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confucian Studies at Harvard University (Tu Weiming 1985a, 1985b, 1999, 1996).

A recurring theme of Tu Weiming’s intellectual contribution is the modern transformation of Confucian humanism (de Bary 1988). Confucian values, he argues, remain highly relevant to moder-nity and are evident in contemporary social practices, at least as principles of societal organisation. These include:

a) the role of the state in the management of the market;

b) social civility as the key to civilised mode of conduct (law is useful but not enough);

c) the family as the foundation stone of social civility;

d) civil society as the indispensable nexus between family and state;

e) education as the key to civil society;

f) self-cultivation understood as both goal and process.

Confucian societies retain many of these values even as they embrace the fierce competitiveness of the West. The reason is not hard to fathom: moderni-sation and modernity are shaped by cultural forms rooted in tradition:

Traditions in Modernity are not merely historical sedimentation passively deposited in modern consciousness. Nor are they simply inhibiting features to be undermined by the unilinear trajec-tory of development – on the contrary they are both constraining and enabling forces capable of shaping the particular contour of modernity in any given soci-ety (Tu Weiming 1999).

For Tu Weiming, these traditions constitute the critical elements of sustainable dialogue.

What can Confucianism bring to such a dialogue? Here is where Tu Weiming is at his most illuminating. He draws attention to what he calls the “ecological turn” of neo-Confucian thought which, he argues, takes us beyond aggressive anthropocentrism and instrumental rationality. This paves the way for an inclusive cosmological and humanist vision that transcends the either/or mode of thinking in favour of a non-dualistic understanding of the continuity of heaven, earth and humanity.

Put simply, Tu Weiming suggests that we may be entering a second axial period in which all the major religious and ethical traditions that arose during the first axial period are undergoing their own distinctive transformations in response to the multiple challenges of modernity. It is possible that such reassessment will make possible, through a process of mutual learning, an “anthropocos-mic” worldview where the human is embedded in the cosmic order.

This period of transition is the “dialogical moment”, the beginning of a new history that is simultaneously global and plural. Such a moment, Tu Weiming tells us, can flourish when “the politics of domination is being replaced by the politics of communication, networking, negotiation, interaction, interfacing and collaboration” (Tu Weiming 2001).

Despite the vastly different cultural and ideological backgrounds from which they spring, influential voices have emerged calling for a distinctive approach to world order, sharply at variance with western triumphalism or imperial discourse. This approach lends itself to the following propositions:

1. Dialogue, that is encounter with the other, is the path to self-discovery and is therefore a profoundly transformative process;

2. Dialogue can proceed only with the renewal of tradition against the backdrop of modernity;

3. The dialogue of civilisations proposes first and foremost the dialogical encounter between East and West;

4. Such encounter will involve a new synthesis constituted of both differences and commonalities;

5. The dialogue of civilisations offers a particularly promising cultural underpinning for a new conception of global citizenship and governance;

6. The encounter of civilisational insights should inform and even guide the political processes of states, but also the international rule of law and the constantly expanding network of regional and global institutions.

One other observation is highly relevant. Dialogue is no simple or easy remedy for the world’s current ills. If the philosophy and method of dialogue are to be applied to the theory and practice of citizenship and the wider normative framework governing state conduct, this will inevitably involve a good deal of pain. For citizens and the various communities to which they belong (as well as states themselves) must come to terms with the difficult task of reconciliation.

Many communities have suffered from past violence, some continue to suffer today. Yet, we also know that many of these same communities have been the perpetrators of violence. Reconciliation will require citizens and authorities of different communities to share their stories, to listen to one another’s experience of pain, to confess past wrongs, to acknowledge collective responsibility for righting the wrongs of the past. Civilisational dialogue can become a force for healing to the extent that it nurtures a radical ethic in the evolving organisation of human affairs. The strong have to cultivate the virtue of humility

In this unfolding transitional moment, the initiative is likely to lie as much with civil society as with the state – though there is a great deal that states can and must do. If we as members of civil society (locally, nationally and transnationally), are to address the immense challenges of the next several decades, we will need to participate in a dialogue of global proportions – global not simply in geographic terms, but global in the sense that it cultivates a “global spirituality”. This will be a dialogue tailored to a new conception of citizenship that puts an entirely different complexion on unity and difference, and allows them to coexist, illuminate and reinforce each other.

Dr Joseph Camilleri is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Centre for Dialogue at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Council Member of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research (Honolulu, Tokyo), and a member of the Advisory Board of the International Movement for a Just World (Kuala Lumpur). This article is an abridged version of the paper presented at the 6th Annual International Conference on an Inter-faith Perspective on Globalisation for the Common Good: “A Non-violent Path to Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding”, Istanbul, Turkey, 5-9 July 2007.

REFERENCES

Aksu, Esref and Joseph A. Camilleri (eds.), Democratizing Global Governance, London: Palgrave, 2002.

Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992.

Camilleri, Joseph A., "Security: Old Dilemmas and New Challenges in the Post-Cold War Environment", GeoJournal, October, 1994.

Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

de Bary, W. Theodore , "Neo-Confucianism and Human Rights", in Leroy S. Rouner (ed.), Human Rights in the World’s Religions, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.

Friedman, Edward, "Asia as a Fount of Universal Human Rights", in Peter Van Ness (ed.), Debating Human Rights: Critical Essays on the United States and Asia, London: Routledge, 1999.

Falk, Richard, ‘The Making of Global Citizenship", in Bart van Steenbergen (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship, London: Sage, 1994.

Held, David, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.

Herz, John, Politics in the Atomic Age, New York: Columbia University Press, 1962.

Khatami, Seyyed Mohammad, address at the Dialogue Among Civilizations Conference at the United Nations, 5 September 2000 (sighted at http://www.un.int/iran/dialogue/2000/articles/1.html on 12 May 2004).

Khatami, Seyyed Mohammad, speech at the European University Institute, Florence, 10 March 1999 (sighted at http://www.dialoguecentre.org/PDF/Florence%20Speech.pdf on 15 June 2004).

Kymlicka, Will and Wayne Norman, "Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory", in Ronald Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Citizenship, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Muzaffar, Chandra, "From Human Rights to Human Dignity", in Peter Van Ness (ed.), Debating Human Rights: Critical Essays on the United States and Asia, London: Routledge, 1999.

Prakash, Aseem and Jeffrey A. Hart (eds.), Globalisation and Governance, London: Routledge, 1999.

Schelling, Thomas C., Arms and Influence, New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1966.

Tu Weiming, Lecture delivered Colorado College, 5 February 1999 (sighted at http://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/anniversary/participants/Tu.htm on 23 April 2005).

Tu Weiming, "The Ecological Turn in New Confucian Humanism: Implications for China and the World" (sighted at http://www.tc.columbia.edu/centers/coce/pdf_files/s8.pdf on 23 April 2005).

Tu Weiming’s presentation to the seminar organised by the Danish Foreign Ministry, Copenhagen, June

A Path to Conflict Transformation2001 (proceedings edited by Jacues Baudot, Building a World Community: Globalisation and the Common Good, Copenhagen: Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001).

Tu Weiming, Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity: Exploring Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons (editor), Harvard University Press, 1996.

Tu Weiming, Confucianism in A Historical Perspective, Singapore: Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1989.

Tu Weiming, Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1985a.

Tu Weiming, The Way, Learning and Politics in Classical Confucian Humanism, Singapore: Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1985b.

Urry, John, "Globalization and Citizenship", Journal of World-Systems Research, 5 (2), Spring 1999, pp. 263–273.