Religion and Diplomacy: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ as Historical Libel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ hypothesis suggested that global politics would revert to inter-civilizational (inter-religious) conflict with the end of the Cold War. Conceptual and empirical refutations followed, but the idea that pre-Cold War inter-polity interaction was generally characterized by such conflict was not addressed. We consider this a possible historical libel. First, we briefly review the position of major faith traditions toward making and keeping agreements with those of other faith traditions. Most forms of agreements are sanctioned, and there is inconsistent and minimal support for duplicity. Second, using the MATRS database of multilateral treaties, we identify 79 sovereign entities active between 1750 and 1900 (when multilateral treaties were numerous and official state religions were prominent), link states to their official religions, and analyze the pattern of 385 multilateral treaties’ signings. We conclude that there is no tendency among states with one official religion to avoid entering into treaties with those of other official religions. The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ hypothesis is a historical myth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".