At the dawn of the 21^st century, we seem to be living in on a Euro-American planet. The phenomenal expansion of western civilisation from its spiritual heartland in western Europe to its current multi-continental stretch is striking. Global policemen (the UN, the World Bank, the IMF and the CIA) patrol the new-world order, which is monopolised by Mc-thugs. Popular culture has Coca-Cola stains all over it and although no-one can really be said to control information technology, America comes darn close.

Recently president Bush and his Euro-compatriots declared that the ‘war against terror’ is really a war about civilization. The civilization that’s been invoked in the post 9-11 world is not Chinese or African, it is western. Free-market capitalism and democracy are its unique traits. 

 The Greeks and the Romans were the first to differentiate themselves from the ‘barbarians’ in terms of their behaviour and habits. Revived during the Renaissance and ‘humanised’ by Enlightenment philosophers, civilised values (in the west) came to be defined in increasingly materialist terms. To be civilised, ultimately, is to rule from a position of moral and financial superiority. “Romans, be it your duty to rule other nations with imperial sway … to impose the rule of peace, to spare the humbled and crush the proud,” wrote the Augustan poet-laureate, Virgil, sounding like Napoleon or a latter-day Yankee. During the Victorian era, civilisation was described as a great chain leading back to Ancient Egypt and Greece, and on through Rome, the Renaissance and Enlightenment to the glory of Britain’s colonial empire. “Our goal,” declared Victorian historian Henry Buckle, “is to suppress, convert and civilise.”

Things weren’t always this way. The ‘great chain’ of western civilisation was nearly rusted through in the millennia following the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 AD. Mas’udi, a famous Arab geographer in the 10^th century AD remarked that the Europeans of the time were harsh in manner, dull in understanding and rough in tongue. “The further they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are,” he rightly scoffed.  Knowledge of the Greek and Roman arts and sciences was so diminished in Europe that Roger Bacon, a thirteenth century Oxford scholar recommended the study of Oriental languages and Islam as a means of accessing the great body of Classical learning. While Arab learning stimulated Renaissance humanism, the arrival of gunpowder and the magnetic compass from China ushered in an economic revolution. Within decades of its arrival, gunpowder had ended feudalism and sparked off massive social and technological upheaval. The compass, meanwhile, revolutionised sailing and sent Europeans in search for gold and glory.

If Columbus hadn’t ‘discovered’ a new continent ripe for the pillaging the xenophobic Europeans (who liked nothing better than fighting each other) may have literally shot western civilisation to pieces. As it was, the Americas became the ‘new Europe’ - supplying raw materials and trading opportunities for competing European powers and lining their coffers for colonial exploits further a-field. Its unfortunate native populations were ravaged by guns and disease and its fragile and isolated empires of astounding complexity were shattered by shiploads of half-crazed gun-toting conquistadors, outlaws and religious fanatics. Shiploads of African slaves joined opportunistic European colonists in one of the most dramatic population movements in history. The chains of western civilisation were thrown around the pillars of the Atlantic and Plato’s fabled Atlantis was refloated: Europe had found a new world to vampirize … and a new sense of purpose.

Today, America, the successor of England’s empire, peddles Roman-style representative democracy around the globe, along with Euro-flavoured capitalism. By all accounts, things are getting better not worse for countries that have joined the western bandwagon. Democracy promises material prosperity to all its citizens. There’s plenty of food in the supermarkets and human life-spans, health and wealth are on the increase – or so the story goes. Even countries fiercely resistant to the west have taken on some of its characteristics. Radical Islamic terrorist cells are online, sporting gangsta bling.