Europe as a civilizational community of practice¹

I identify civilizations with communities of practice and associate a major turning point in the history of civilizations with the development of a new kind of civilizational community of practice and the polities in which it becomes embedded. This community of practice is constituted by securitycommunity practices (Deutsch et al. 1957; Adler and Barnett 1998b), in particular by novel self-restraint civilizing practices (Elias 2000, 1978b) that stand in contrast to power-politics practices of the modern era. Were this transformation to occur, at least from the perspective of the quality of power relations, it would transcend Shmuel Eisenstadt’s (1987, 2000a, 2000b, 2003, 2004a) notion of “multiple modernities, " and would de facto negate Samuel Huntington’s concept of the “clash of civilizations” (1993). My hypothesis is that contemporary Europe or, as I will refer to it following Ian Manners (Manners 2002, 2006a, 2006b; Diez and Manners 2007), “normative power Europe” may be reinventing itself as a civilizational security community of practice, which could change the practice of international politics. Whether this succeeds depends on a competition between Europe, trying to change the world in its own mostly secular normative-power image, and the good old anarchical world, trying to shape and shove Europe in its own image.