Building on his historical research, Bowden shows how seeming abstract ideas have decisively shaped concrete political practices. More specifically, he retraces the process through which European powers managed to have their particular understanding of civilisation accepted as a set of shared norms and institutional practices in today’s international society.

Bowden’s main ambition is to offer a substantiated critique of the values that drove this globalisation process. He demonstrates how the concept of civilisation was often used to legitimise a range of political projects – from colonialism to war – which had little to do with civilised values. This ‘mission civilisatrice’ became closely intertwined with the project of empire: an attempt by Europe’s self-professed defenders of civilisation to spread their cultural values and political institutions – from Christianity to market economics – to their colonial subjects in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Underlying this colonial project was the idea that to be civilised entails a number of key traits, among them the ability of a people to have achieved a high level of self-governance. Every society that falls outside of this category – the barbarian rest – is deemed incapable of justice, order and law, and thus in need of correction or development.

The contemporary residues of this ‘mission civilisatrice’ are obvious. Well-known examples range from W.W. Rostow’s modernisation paradigm to Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis and Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’. Or consider the notion of rogue states and the division between ‘evil’ and ‘good’, which has been central to the ‘war against terror’ waged in the wake of 9/11. The ensuing vocabulary evokes more than just a fleeting similarity with a taxonomy that classifies cultures and peoples according to how far they have progressed on the scale from barbarism to advanced civilisation.

Up to this point, Bowden’s argument is not new or surprising: it is a standard post-colonial critique of the values and power relations that drove colonial expansion and continue to influence global politics. But Bowden goes further, critiquing not just the role that the concept of civilisation has played in imperial ambitions but also the underlying and much less acknowledged universal framework that anchored this project. The problem, then, is not civilisation as such but the attempt to establish a universal telos and a corresponding value system that captures what civilisation is and should be for all times and places. The result, Bowden believes, is inevitably a political project that imposes a very particular and ideologically shaped understanding of civilisation.

Bowden goes as far as claiming that universals are problematic, even when – or perhaps precisely when – they claim to be doing good. There are residues of Nietzsche here, or at least of Zarathustra’s (1885) famous claim that he found the ‘good’ to be ‘the most poisonous flies: they bite in all innocence, they lie in all innocence’. Universal principles, even if pronounced in the name of justice and the good life, inevitably mask power relations.

This is why Bowden is inherently sceptical of cosmopolitan approaches to ethics, arguing that the type of moral anchorage that comes with them often leads to a sense of righteousness. He goes back to Kant to outline how intolerance often results from the very approaches that promote tolerance. He shows how Kant’s categorical imperative and his model for universal ethics and perpetual peace coexists with texts that claimed that ‘humanity achieves its greatest perfection with the white race’ and that ‘the negroes are much inferior and some of the peoples of the Americas are well below them’.

Bowden believes that such comments cannot simply be dismissed as unfortunate but ultimately insignificant biases related to either a character flaw in Kant’s personality or a problematic societal attitude that existed during a long-past historical period. Bowden associates such problematic biases in the very nature of the cosmopolitan project. He also finds them reappearing in numerous contemporary contexts, from the ideologically biased Universal Declaration of Human Rights to seemingly altruistic practices of humanitarian intervention that mask a range of far more sinister ulterior motives.

Bowden takes to task numerous cosmopolitan authors, such as John Rawls, Thomas Pogge, Martha Nussbaum and Jack Donnelly. But he reserves most of his scorn for how the ‘war on terror’ has been conducted, lamenting, in particular, that ‘imperialism is once again being dusted off and coated in a new sheen of respectability’. A familiar example of this new ‘humanitarian imperialism’ is Michael Ignatieff’s belief that the renewed ‘case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike’.

It is easy to take issue with Bowden. Many readers would undoubtedly associate him with an alleged relativism that makes it impossible to distinguish good from evil and to defend the type of civilisational values we cherish and should stand up for. Some would probably lament that Bowden is so focused on a few isolated problems of universals that he fails to see and appreciate the overwhelming good that comes from them.

Other readers, such as Ignatieff, might see Bowden as a theorist who fails to see how political dilemmas in the real world are far more complex than he acknowledges, and how solving the ensuing problems often requires compromise. But no matter how exposed his position might be, Bowden has an important message. He might, in fact, have been able to pre-empt some criticism by making more of the distinction he advances between approaches that are ‘uniform’ and those that are ‘universal’.

Sometimes we need universals to get things done, particularly at a global level. But we do not necessarily need to anchor these universals in uniform approaches: in stable foundations that become ahistorical laws and are then placed beyond political scrutiny. Expressed in other words: we do not necessarily need a categorical imperative and cosmopolitan principles to justify global projects. If universal foundations are seen as contingent and advanced as such, it becomes possible to establish a cross-cultural consensus in a way that is less likely to exclude. Or, at minimum, they would not exclude silently or by default, but as part of a conscious and self-critical attempt to separate right from wrong.

One could then, for instance, take on board Bowden’s critique but still explore how various versions of democratic ideals and practices are, in fact, shared across different cultures. Or one could learn from how different cultures – such as China – have established alternative notions of civilisation, leading to a different set of values and political practices. The issue is one that Manfred Steger explored in a recent and compelling book on The Rise of the Global Imaginary (2009): that there are – and indeed have been – a range of competing ideologies that take the globe as their vision, from liberalism to socialism, from fascism to communism, from ‘Christian fundamentalism’ to ‘Islamic Jihadism’.

The task is to understand the politics of these global imaginaries and to find a way of evaluating and engaging them politically and ethically. Bowden’s inquiry into the concept of civilisation, contentious as it might well be, makes an important contribution to this political task.