This work has analyzed the impact of the idea of civilization on the global order since the concept came to prominence in French court circles in the late 18th century. Understanding the conditions under which civilized self-images emerged sheds light on their role in a critical period in recent world politics, namely the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘torture debate’, which was discussed in Chapter 1. The need for the long-term perspective on such narratives was a fundamental element in Elias's examination of the processes by which Europeans came to regard themselves as uniquely civilized. Chapter 2 discussed the Eliasian analysis of the interdependencies between state-formation, significant internal pacification and the general lowering of the threshold of repugnance towards violence. Elias was unconventional among sociologists of the time in rejecting the standard focus on ‘society’ that largely ignored the interwoven nature of domestic and international politics. As explained in Chapter 3, Elias stressed the recurrence of the ‘split within civilization’ – the firm judgement that the restraints on force in the relations between the members of the same ‘survival unit’ have to be relaxed in major struggles with adversaries. The discussion of the ‘duality of nation-state normative codes’ provided a more nuanced approach to relations between states by describing the tensions between nationalist-Machiavellian and universal-egalitarian principles in civilized societies – tensions that were abundantly clear in Western debates about the ethics of torture that have probably not yet run their course.

A core theme in the global ‘war on terror’ – namely that the constraints on force in the relations between civilized peoples cannot be observed in relations between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘savage’ – was a reminder that the ‘split within civilization’ runs deep in conflicts between ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ societies. The former category belonged to a society of states with distinctive diplomatic rituals and protocols that were regarded as symbols of civility and refinement. As Elias argued, civilized self-images provided the rationale and justification for colonial domination, but he did not explore the relationship between the civilizing process and imperialism in detail.