"Culture" is a word that has acquired various meanings. Until fairly recently, it was mainly used metaphorically in the sense that a gardener prepares the soil to produce a suitable medium for the cultivation of flowers, or grasses, or vegetables. Culture meant the development of the mind -- the intellectual side of civilisation. It reached giddy heights during the Victorian era when, according to John Stuart Mill, a cultured mind is "one to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened" or, in Matthew Arnold's words, "Culture is properly defined as the love of perfection".

But those definitions of the mid-19th century were already producing a reaction, particularly by a poet who was a long way removed from the precious English middle classes. In Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman wrote: "Are not the processes of culture producing a class of supercilious infidels", and this was followed up by yet another iconoclastic poet who despised the London intelligentsia, Dylan Thomas. In his poem, "Early One Morning", he wrote, "See the garrulous others . . . garlanded . . . from one nest of culture-vultures to another." But the death sentence on the use of culture in its Victorian meaning was given by Hitler's Nazi colleague, Goering, who growled that every time he heard the word "culture" he would reach for his revolver. It was not this that debased the meaning, however; it was the paradox that Goering, one of the most evil men of the 20th century, had been a culture-vulture in a literal Bloomsbury-intellectual sense because he had looted hundreds of the greatest paintings of Europe from national art galleries for his private collection.

Left somewhere in the British Museum, or perhaps in the Royal Covent Garden Opera House, the original meaning of culture thus had to mutate and to do so very quickly in the latter half of the 20th century if the word was going to survive at all. It is now vaguer and has lost all its elitism. It now means the general character of a region, large or small, and of its inhabitants' conceptual beliefs, values and everyday practices. And these may not be very perfect or cultured at all, because we often use the word, more or less pejoritavely, in phrases like "street culture" or "fundamentalist (Christian or Islamic) culture", for example.

Culture, in its new sense, is a very useful term, however, and this is why it is now used so often by both scholars and politicians. Almost everything can be explained in terms of culture, or "culture areas" now, it seems, whether it's politics or ideas, diplomacy or warfare, economic growth or stultification, pop celebrities or Nobel prizewinners, and so on.

The most paradoxical aspect of the increasing use of culture is that it is really not supposed to exist in this modern globalised world -- ' the one-village world' -- where everybody is supposed to want, and often achieve, much the same things -- cars, television, cups of coffee, suburban homes, and so on. Yet the differences between what we refer to as different cultures seem more pointed than ever before despite the common consumerist elements. We all admired the American culture after WWII, but now the culture clash between America and Europe (excluding England perhaps) has now become very great.

No wonder therefore that weighty and scholarly books on the matter of cultures and possible looming clashes of culture, have been thundering towards us in the last decade or so like a herd of galloping bison. If the present rate of books continues, those of us who try to keep abreast of current thinking will be squashed by the weight of them. In the last decade we have had the following notables among many others:

Who Prospers? How cultural values shape economic and political success, by Lawrence E. Harrison (1992);

The End of History, by Francis Fukuyama (1992);

Making Democracy Work, by Robert Putnam (1993);

Race and Culture; a world view, by Thomas Sowell (1994);

Jihad versus McWorld, by Benjamin Barber (1995);

American Exceptionalism, by Seymour Martin Lipset (1996);

The Ends of the Earth, by Robert Kaplan (1996);

The Clash of Civilisations, by Samuel Huntington (1996);

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes (1998)

Globalization and its Discontents, by Joseph Stiglitz (2002)

The book that has received the most publicity is Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations. He writes of large cultural blocs, such as Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Buddhist, Latin American, African civilisations, and so on, and that these will be the main protagonists in future troubles and wars. His case is reminiscent of Max Weber's polarisation of capitalist Europe into Protestants and Catholics. The Protestant Ethic countries such as Germany and Switzerland produced the grit, determination and sheer stamina of the early businesses which started the industrial revolution while the easy-going Catholic countries lost out. But it wasn't quite like this. The very earliest initiators of Europe's rejuvenation were the Catholic merchants and sea-traders of Italy, Spain and Portugal who sailed across formidable oceans in tiny caravels and found new markets to trade with, bringing back new products to Europe and stimulating demand there.

Similarly, Huntington's blocs are too large to make much sense. The Buddhist cultures of Thailand are quite different from those of Mongolia or Tibet. The Islamic world is not a uniform one but is fractured into many parts, and some of these can be bitter enemies when they are confined in one coutry or region and are vying for political control -- the Sunnis versus the Shias in Iraq, the Wahhabi versus the Shias in Saudi Arabia, the Shias versus the Taliban in Iran. Each of these schisms is as different from one another as chalk from cheese even though they sprang from common origins a thousand years ago.

A much finer grade of analysis is needed in order to discover why one apparently uniform culture takes off at the expense of another or why one culture clashes with another. In the first case, the history of innovation shows that quite small groups -- albeit within a generally supportive social environment -- can start powerful waves of economic growth. For example, the 'Lunar Society' group of only about a dozen individuals at the most -- people such as Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgewood and Erasmus Darwin -- almost single-handedly got the industrial revolution moving in England. Similarly, only a handful of the original innovators of the microprocessor in what is now called Silicon Valley got the IT revolution going. No doubt both of these revolutions would have occurred anyway -- perhaps within a decade or so in both cases -- but nevertheless they needed seeding with almost microscopically small seeds.

As regards a culture clashing with another in the comprehensive sense that Harringdon implies, let us choose by way of contradiction what must be one of the largest and most dramatic clashes in the whole of human history. This was the expansion of the Mongols in the13th century. In no way could the Mongols be called a unified culture. They were a collection of disparate Mongolian pastoral tribes of quite different customs and languages. They were impelled to unite by Genghis Khan, not so much by the force of arms or his personality or any particular cultural ideology but by a cooling of the climate over the whole of the Eurasia which greatly reduced the amount of grass that grew on the Mongolian steppes. In short, their horses, on which their whole livelihood depended, lacked sufficient pasturage. They had to expand anywhere they could in order to survive. Their desperation drove them with a degree of savagery which has rarely been equalled since. Over a period of about 150 years, Genghis Khan, his sons and then grandsons invaded (and took over) Sung China, northern India, the Muslim Empire of Khwarizm (now Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstand and Uzbekistan), then down to the Persian Empire of the Mamalukes and then across to Russia and central Europe to the central plains of Hungary.

This Golden Horde and their subsequent trashing of empires one after another was not a clashing of cultures. The Mongolian assemblage had absolutely none of the arts or sciences which had characterised all the existing civilisations they were destroying and was but brigandage on a huge scale. The texture of one part of the Mongolian 'Empire' was totally different at one edge as any other. There was certainly no meaningful communication between them because the distances were so vast. Genghis Khan himself exemplified this total lack of any sort of unified culture by welcoming philosophers, and religions leaders of all sorts to his court (showing a touching thirst for culture in the Victorian meaning of the word perhaps!). But his so-called empire as such was still a loose assemblage of many different traditions which had only one thing in common -- suberb horsemanship which enabled them to run rings literally round any opposing army. Oh, and a couple of apparently trivial inventions which had found favour in Mongolia but not yet anywhere else at that time. Due to their use of the stirrup (which enabled them to be superb archers while riding at full speed) and a type of harness which didn't strangle the horse (which those of all previous civilisations had tended to do) they were irresistable. Although their area of control was greater than any empire before or since (except the British Empire for a briefer period of time) they neither brought nor established a culture. Their 'empire' started falling apart just as they reached the maximim span of occupation.

Fukuyama gets a little nearer reality when he writes of social trust as being the originator of enterprise, commerce and the non-ideological western way of life (which, he avers quite rightly, the ordinary people of all cultures want to achieve). Even so, his case is also faulty because of too blunt and broad analysis. For example, he sweeps all of China into one "low trust" category. He argues that in China, where -- apparently -- relationships of trust don't extend much beyond the family, then large complex bodies such as multinational corporations can't develop. Well, we have news for Fukuyama. Even in the brief period that has elapsed since his books have been published, some of the largest Chinese firms are now poised to become multinationals. One firm has a factory employing 80,000 people, making most of the microwave ovens that are bought in the west. Another mammoth firm, Legend Computers, is the largest PC manufacturer in the world. One or two others makes most of the TV sets that are bought in America and Europe. Many of the largest Chinese firms, with hitherto unbranded names and thus mostly anonymous to their customers, are now poised to expand into the west with their vast dollar holdings gained from trade in the last few years. They only await the nod from the mandarins of the Poliburo.

For every 'large' culture Huntingdon and other authors discuss and contrast -- and why one culture has succeeded economically at the expense of another, and so on -- further subdivisions can always be found within them which have disparate economic performances and strong antithetical emotions. For example, the countries of western Europe, once brought together in harmony after the shock of WWII (and whose politicans and bureaucrats are even now still trying to finagle into some form of centralised federal government), are now becoming fractious. Contrarily, the inhabitants of these countries are thinking of themselves as less European from year to year and increasingly in terms of their own nationalities. And within the nationalities themselves there are widening differences. In Belgium, for example, the political and social divide between the Walloons and the Flemish is becoming more bitter from year to year; and in Great Britain we are thinking of ourselves increasingly as English, Welsh and Scottish. And, within England too, we are becoming increasingly divided between the north and the south, a largely self-governing northern parliament becoming more certain as the economic difference grows. And even within the largely prosperous south, the less fortunate counties of the extreme south-west want to detach themsleves from London rule, even though it's only 150 miles away.

Take Iraq also, which never quite made it as a nation and is now collapsing to its former sub-Huntingdon state. This is a very good example of the fallacy of thinking of it as a nation or as one cultural bloc as the American occupiers did (or at least as they did before they invaded). Two invaders previously, the Ottomans, had had a relatively long and successful reign because they saw the region with unblinkered eyes and governed the three different cultures of Iraq as separate provinces (Baghdad, Basra and Mosul). When the Ottoman Empire collapsed , the British invaded in 1920 and made the country into one Hashemite kingdom. But it could only do this by means of using overwhelming force and frequent indiscriminate bombings of villages -- quite as savagely as Saddam Hussein was to repeat 60 years later. Unless the Americans (or perhaps the United Nations) impose a form of government that will be just as oppressive as Saddam's or the British's of the 20s, it is very likely that a federal government will be too flimsy despite a sophisticated constitution. The three cultures, the Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Kurds (with schisms of their own, including Turkoman remnants from the Mongolian invasion of the 13th century!) will probably fly apart again.

Nation-states come in all sorts of shapes and sizes but there's a fairly common feature about them all. The ones that we know today are a fairly recent phenomenon and are essentially the product of regions that were large enough to sustain large artillery regiments by taxation, and could defend themselves adequately by being able to send their armies quickly to any part of the region by means of a well-developed railway system. Despite the fact that the western democracies have succeeded in suborning their army generals into secondary roles, the modern nation-state is still a highly centralised, hierarchical system -- an army at rest, as it were. (And, of course, they haven't been at rest very often during the past two hundred years or so.)

But the era of the nation-state really came to an end when the nuclear bomb was developed and then used on Japan. A nation-state could no longer defend itself, no matter how well equipped its army is or how efficient its railway system might be to take regiments to the front. A nuclear bomb can now be carried by a terrorist in a brief case and the whole government of even quite a large nation-state can be destroyed in a fraction of a second. It hasn't happened yet, but the political leaders of all the powerful nation-states are afraid of this, occasionally to the point of hysteria.

So where are we? Cultures of the Huntingdon sort are too large to be actors in history, sociological traits of the Fukuyama sort are too vague and, these days, nation-states have reached the end of their usefulness. Great historical trends start with very small nuclei of individuals even though they may well be nourished by a larger supportive culture. We are now at the beginning of a period of great change and almost nothing can be forecasted about future large events with any certainty.

The only thing we can say with certainty is that the nature of man has hardly changed in the past 150,000 years and, until we are into sophisticated genetic engineering in perhaps several hundred years' time, it is not going to change much in the future either. If mankind is to survive and, considering the transnational nature of many of our problems -- such as shortages of fresh water and other resources, pollution, the potential of small groups of terrorists -- then we obviously need new forms of governance that are beyond the geographical bounds of the nation-state. But these institutions must be designed in a quite different way from all those that have gone before, impelled as most of them were by military innovations -- and usually with associated ideologies. We don't want words any longer.

We are more than halfway there, I feel. Politicians are no longer trusted. Even if they press the right jingoistic buttons (one of our genetic predispositions that men of power have always known about!) as Bush and Blair have done recently, and carry most of their populations along with them for one nefarious scheme or another, their strategies don't last for long because their motives become quickly transparent, given the growing intrusive power of the media and the increasing importance of an intellectual elite in such a complex society. Unfortunately, the intellectual and media elite are not sufficiently familiar with science as they might be but, given the human importance of the science of genetics and its likely considerable commercial development (e.g. unrejectable organ transplants), then knowledge of the other evolutionary sciences is bound to grow and become part of the culture in a way it has never been so far. What seems like growing anarchy and alienation in modern developed countries may, in fact, be temporarily obscuring a large number of potential innovations in the sphere of governance. The fantastic mushrooming of specialist voluntary societies in the past two or three decades is already a powerful sign of revolutionary change in the way we inform ourselves and lobby governments. It is not too much to imagine that some of these might well turn into specialist governances themselves. Certainly some of the environmental movements now treat the world as their oyster in much the same way as the transnational corporations they frequently shadow.