A nation must think before it acts.
The apparently sudden reemergence of religious movements in world politics since the 1970s stunned scholars of international relations who had clung to the myth that secularization of politics and diplomacy began when the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended Europe’s “Wars of Religion.” The author challenges that myopia, arguing that even in (or especially in) the twentieth and twenty-first centuries religion remains a principal driver of politics in European civilization and the current “Clash of Civilizations.”