The Fukuyama-Hundington scientific dialogue on West-East relations and its impact on the Western scientific community
In this dissertation an attempt is made to study the scientific dialogue opened by two of the most widely read political theories of the 20th century regarding the “West-East” dipole and the convergence or conflict of their societies in the future. The aim was to seek, through them, the sources of the stereotypical perceptions of the West about people of the East (as perceived by the West), and specifically from countries of the Islamic world. The reason for this study were the various cases of islamophobia, as they have taken place within European and American territory in recent decades. Therefore, a retrospection of the Orientalist thought of the 18th and 19th century, which shaped the hegemonic discourse of the West for the “other” and especially that which participates in Islamic culture, is attempted. The following is a summary of the theories of Francis Fukuyama’s the End of History and Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, published in the early 1990s, on the occasion of the collapse of the Soviet front and the re-emergence of American liberal democracy in a dominant force. Finally, the acceptance of these theories by some members of the Western scientific community is cited in order to establish the general tendency of maintaining or abandoning the hegemonic discourse in question today regarding the relations of the western world with Islam.