After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union we have assisted in a strong religious resurgence in the post-Cold War “secularised” era. In fact, while on the one hand we are witnessing a decline of religious values in the so-called post-materialistic societies, on the other hand we can also observe the rise of groups willing to do “battle” to preserve the “fundamentals” of their faith. This “return of religion” in politics, both in radical forms such as in the cases of terrorism and fundamentalism or through a symbolic reinforcement of religious values, has brought back to the fore a long-running debate on the relationship between modernity and religion. The present work proposes a new framework for understanding the relationship between modernisation and religion in the contemporary world through a re-reading of Max Weber’s thought. More precisely, this work focuses on the following questions: why are we assisting in a strong religious resurgence in the post-Cold War secularised era? What happens when, after the collapse of Soviet Union, Western modernity, stepping out of its ethos, impacts on different and traditional societies? It is my opinion that these two levels of analysis are strictly related, both historically and epistemologically. The dialectic between secularisation and “the end of religion”, modernisation and religious revival must be placed within the larger framework of the relationships between all modern religions and globalisation. In fact, from a Weberian perspective the so-called globalisation can be seen as a technologically intensified and spatially enlarged Western rationalisation. Therefore, the “clashes” in the new international arena could be trigged by the two opposite tendencies of westernisation and identity, uniformity and otherness.
