The West’s universalist pretensions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China… The survival of the West depends upon Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies. Avoidance of a global war of civilization depends on world leaders accepting and cooperating to maintain the multicivilizational character of global politics.

– Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

… dialogue means exposure to an otherness which lies far beyond the self… it signals an alternative both to imperialist absorption or domination and to pliant self-annihilation… it requires a willingness to ‘risk oneself,’ that is, to plunge headlong into a transformative learning process in which the status of self and other are continuously renegotiated.

– Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism

A great deal of debate and controversy has been generated by the idea of a “clash of civilizations” between the Western and Islamic worlds. The outcome of this debate, in real terms, is one which has taken on a particular urgency after the Arab Spring. If citizens of majority Muslim states are calling for a new rule of law, including rule of “the law” or the shari‘a, alongside demanding democratic and institutional representation of their values and identities, what does this mean for universal notions of equality, fairness, and human rights? How can minority rights be protected? Is it right to force states writing new constitutions to ensure their conformity with supposedly universal values which are admittedly Western in origin?

Rather than seeing an inevitable clash in these competing values, Fred Dallmayr’s approach is one in which the bounds of the civilizations themselves are not taken for granted as having any real and clear definition, but rather they are evolving entities which, much like individuals in relationships, “risk themselves” in the process of interacting openly in the “transformative learning process in which the status of self and other are constantly renegotiated.” It is this attempt to examine pre-defined boundaries, reassess them, and to create a discursive space between and beyond these boundaries which this paper seeks to undertake in an effort to derive a pluralist framework for understanding normative and political discourses in multi-civilizational, but particularly Western and Islamic contexts.

In terms of political representation, this means that democratization is not privileged above other goals and is just one amongst many other paths for deriving a legitimate constitutional regime that can be a fully participating member of international society. Instead, this approach looks at core political/constitutional values like the Rule of Law, Representation of National Character, and Restriction of State Power which are extremely fluid and flexible in regards to particular normative content. Ultimately, this paper argues that using Dallmayr’s hermeneutically based approach it is possible to create a level playing field on which the contest of ideas can occur. Specifically, it is the process of using foundational political texts to assess the origin of core political values, to examine how they have evolved historically, and to imagine how they may be usefully employed in the future, which this paper argues can provide a way forward in the intransigent debates between advocates of universal values and ardent adherents of local cultural and political traditions.