This thought-provoking and thoroughly documented essay challenges the dogma of a “religious backlash” dominating global geopolitics from Washington to Moscow. According to distinguished Lebanese economist and historian Georges Corm, the real focus here should be less on religion and more on the fact that long-established democracies, undermined by the effects of globalization, are increasingly losing their legitimacy. Resorting to religion to empower their state, political and economic leaders are taking the world down a dangerous path. Yet, Corm argues, there still may be time to reverse the trend.

Taking as his starting point a call for the rigorous separation of religion and politics, he advocates the promotion of international rights and citizenship, as well as cosmopolitanism in the Kantian sense. He warns of an “ideological neo-conservatism that legitimizes the expansion of American imperial power”. Corm provides a serious analysis and clarification of the uses and misuses of language in this global conundrum, clearly pointing out misrepresentations of issues of identity, culture, and civilization. In doing so, he also examines through this unique linguistic prism the perception the global community has developed of religion and history, as well as the philosophical and political realities of many of the world’s city-states over the past thirty years.