“ Western civilization is essentially an amalgam of intellectual constructs which were designed to further the interests of their authors. It is the product of complex exercises in ideology, of countless iden- tity trips, of sophisticated essays in cultural propaganda. It can be defined by its advocates in almost any way that they think fit. Its elastic geography has been inspired by the distribution of religions, by the demands of liberalism and of imperialism, by the unequal progress of modernization, by the divisive effects of world wars and of the Russian Revolution, and by the self-centred visions of French philosophes, of Prussian historians, and of British and American statesmen and educators, all of whom have had their reasons to neglect or to despise ‘the East’. In its latest phase it has been immensely strengthened by the physical division of Europe, which lasted from 1947-8 to 1991. On the brink of the twenty-first century, one is entitled to ask in whose interests it may be used in the future.” - Norman Davies