The validity and necessity of the Alliance of Civilizations in a multipolar world

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said that every word has consequences, but so does every silence. The end of 2023 and so far in 2024 have been very complicated, marked by war, destruction and the systematic death of innocent civilians. In these last months, there have been words of condemnation, but also shameful silences. The result is a discouraging geopolitical scenario. We live in global “disorder”.

The world has reached a dangerous and unacceptable level of polarization. Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, hate speech, racism and intolerance are growing unparalleled, fueled by hoaxes and fake news. Proof of this is the remarkable rise of the extreme right in the last European Parliament elections, with a clear xenophobic discourse.

If every word counts, so does every action. The working tool of the United Nations is diplomacy, exercised through words. It is true that, in times of war, dialogue seems a chimera, but it is not. It is the sine qua non for peace. It may not be easy to achieve, but it is the only alternative to violence, and it is worth remembering that the United Nations was created to achieve peace. We, from the Alliance of Civilizations, seek permanent dialogue between cultures, religions and societies, precisely as a conflict prevention measure.

The Alliance of Civilizations was an initiative that arose at the end of 2004, after the jihadist attacks of March 11 of that year in Madrid. The then Prime Minister of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, proposed to the United Nations the creation of an “Alliance of Civilizations” to combat extremism and confront intolerance. In a few months, the Alliance will celebrate its 20th anniversary, and its mandate is as relevant as ever.

To provide some context, it is useful to recall the theory developed in the early 1990s by the American professor Samuel P. Huntington, who argued that “in the future, every new source of conflict will be cultural or religious. It was what he called the “Clash of Civilizations”. This American professor could not resist the temptation to explore the fields in which American-Western hegemony could be threatened.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, and the “end of history” proclaimed by the American professor Francis Fukuyama, there was only one field left where the West could be the object of rivalry or conflict: culture and/or religion. This whole political-intellectual architecture of the American conservative world reached its apex after the Al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001. The terrorist attack placed Islam and Muslim civilization in a clear and open confrontation with the West.

The so-called “Clash of Civilizations” was thus automatically justified and a whole geopolitics of power was set in motion to continue guaranteeing Western moral, political and cultural supremacy. But if anything has been demonstrated in the last two decades, it is precisely that there is no clash of civilizations.

What there is, if anything, is a “clash of ignorances” or a geopolitical power struggle, which has used cultural and religious diversity to justify its theory, and to polarize and divide the world in a false confrontation built on spurious interests. Today the context has changed. We are facing a multipolar world with different actors and multiple global challenges that require new approaches.

At the Alliance of Civilizations, we feel challenged by the changes our world is experiencing, and therefore we remain committed to creating new opportunities for cooperation with different organizations, from religious leaders and representatives of civil society to high-level leaders and members of the private sector.

The promotion of intercultural and interreligious dialogue, with a broad and renewed vision, is crucial to combat isolation, mistrust and confrontation. We at the Alliance are committed to this. Moreover, our mission is particularly important in tackling the root of problems related to polarization and radicalization, as well as in providing a counter-narrative to racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and other forms of religious hatred and intolerance. Hatred brings out the worst in the human species.

And it is our collective responsibility to curb and condemn hate speech against people based on religion, belief, race, gender, sexual orientation or any other grounds. There are multiple cultures and civilizations, but we are all part of one humanity, which is why our motto is “Multiple Cultures, One Humanity”. Because there is much more that unites us than separates us.

Miguel Ángel Moratinos

United Nations Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations

Article previously published in The Diplomat