In an interview on Islam v Modernity

And so on to your final book, Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams.

I threw this in not because I agree with it, but because it’s a book that represents the different terms in which the West is now beginning to think about the 21st century’s big themes. And what a relief: no more Islam v Modernity, far less ‘evil Muslims’, a real quietening of the cultural discourse that invented these fake ideas of a monolithic ‘West’ or ‘East’ or ‘Islam’ or ‘Modernity’. Kagan is a neo-Con thinker who was close to the Bush administration and is married to an ex-ambassador to NATO. His first book, Of Paradise and Power, was about the intellectual dishonesty of Europe’s Lockean pacifism (guaranteed, as Kagan sees it, by America’s Hobbesian engagement with the real world). The Return of History is a double rejoinder to Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations that saw the 20th century as being made up of battles drawn along cultural lines and to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. Kagan, contrary to Huntingdon’s civilisational approach and Fukuyama’s wrong-headed optimism about a post-ideological world, sees the battle-lines of the 21st century drawn between highly successful autocracies and highly ineffective democracies. The relief is that finally it told me that this whole obsession that pitted Islam against modernity and wanted to see Islam as the Manichean double, as the opposite of the West, has flown. That idea is no longer as powerful as it was. It is a sign that the debate has moved on – perhaps we should also thank the recession. We now have more pressing problems to think about.