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The chapter provides a critical and reflexive view of the idea of civilization. Civilizations are ongoing structure-forming processes based on cultural orientations and institutional patterns. They are not immutable or predetermined, but broadly defined orientations that shape otherwise diverse societies and are continuously changed as a result of new interpretations. Civilizations have also been shaped in inter-civilizational encounters and lead to entanglements. Any account of European civilizational history will have to address the inter-civilizational dimension as much as the intra-civilizational: Europe was shaped through relations with the non-European world as much as it was shaped from the cultures within Europe. Such relations include colonial ones as well as cosmopolitan expressions. This inevitably requires a global contextualization of the rise of Europe, which can no longer be looked at exclusively as self-creating. The argument in this chapter emphasizes the internal pluralization of the civilizations under discussion, their interrelations and the wider inter-civilizational context, both within and beyond "Europe". The sources of modern Europe lie in the plurality of civilizations that together constitute what can be termed the European inter-civilizational constellation. These sources constitute the basic orientation for the European civilizational heritage, which has been continuously reinterpreted in the light of the movement of that constellation. It is inevitable that the resulting heritage that it made possible would be a contested one, for it never gave rise to a single interpretation.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_1

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