Civilizational Discourse
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civilizational mode operates from a political-juridico discourse of cultural neutrality in which
what is at stake is the rule of law, tolerance is crucial to liberalism’s denial of its imbrication with
culture, its conceit that it is independent of culture, neutral with regard to culture...a conceit that
in turn shields liberal polities from charges of cultural supremacy and cultural imperialism. This
is precisely the conceit that allows G. W. Bush to say, without recourse to the infelicitous
language of “crusade,” that “we have no intention of imposing our culture” while insisting on a
set of liberal principles that cannot be brooked without risking being bombed.
Tolerance conferred as well as tolerance withheld serves this function; indeed, both are
crucial in the circuitry that establishes tolerance as a civilizational discourse. Tolerance
conferred upon “foreign” practices shores up the normative standing of the tolerant and the
liminal standing of the tolerated–a standing somewhere between civilization and barbarism. It
reconfirms, without reference to the orders of power which enable it, the higher civilizational
standing of those who tolerate what they do not condone or share–their cosmopolitanism,
forbearance, expansiveness, catholicity, remoteness from fundamentalism. Against this
backdrop, tolerance withheld succeeds in marking the other as barbaric without implicating the
cultural norms of the tolerating civilization in this marking. When a tolerant civilization meets
its limits, it does not say that it is encountering political or cultural difference, but rather
encountering the limits of civilization itself. At this point, the tolerant civilization is justified not
only in refusing to extend tolerance to its other, but in treating it as hostile–oppressive internally,
dangerous externally. This hostile status in turn legitimates abrogation of the tolerant
civilization’s own civilizational principles in dealing with the Other–principles which range from
political self-determination and nation-state sovereignty to rational deliberation, legal and
Convention