These days we tend to use the word 'Civilisation' as simply the sum total of what we see as the good life, indoor plumbing, electric lights, and good, or at least passable, manners, and a thing somehow indestructible, and once attained, eternal.

But civilisations, plural, are something more. They are the living growing embodiment of a certain set of values and a shared view of life and the world. And as they are born from the minds and the toil of those who gave them form, so can they pass away, for a number of reasons.

There's a poem from the beginning of the last century by the Greek poet Cavafy, which imagines the scene in some city in late antiquity. Long since bereft of any true hope for the future, and existentially bored, they are waiting for the barbarians to come.

Then a messenger arrives. The barbarians have moved off to sack some other city, or gone back whence they came. And there is an air of disappointment. The barbarians at least would have been something.

There is a peculiar frisson which draws people to visions of calamity and Armageddon, whether it be the sinking of the Titanic, 70s disaster movies, the fall of Rome or the "Left Behind" book's pulp version of the Evangelical end times. It's as if, not being part of the rise of something great, there is at least the thrill of the prospect of being present at its fall.

One of the most influential prophets of doom in modern times was Oswald Spengler. In the years immediately preceding the First World War, this former school-teacher began writing a treatise on contemporary politics. Originally his focus was mainly Germany, and the perceived encirclement of the country by hostile nations. But as the drums of war grew louder, he became convinced that what was in fact happening could be interpreted as part of a wider crisis for European civilisation as a whole. It seemed to him that Europe, having reached its evening tide, was marching into suicide, and that this was only the first phase in a general "Decline of the West".

When the first volume of "Der Untergang des Abendlandes" was finally published in 1918, what had seemed fanciful only a few years before, with European colonial powers bestriding the globe like giants, seemed all too plausible following the wholesale slaughter of a whole generation in the trenches at Somme and Verdun.

Our present time does not want for prophecies of decline either. Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University, started out writing paeans to the British Empire. The chances of that particular venture making a comeback being rather slim, he then turned his hopes of a benevolent global hegemon towards its Anglo-Saxon offspring across the Atlantic. The United States should, he posited, lift "the white man's burden" that The Empire had discarded.

But the rather lacklustre showing in the wars in Afghanistan and, in particular, Iraq, seems to have soured him on that dream, leading him to his present flirting with inevitable declinism. Being firmly commited to the idea of the traditional empire based on a national state with foreign provinces and satelites, he is unable to imagine any other structure to a stable global system, or any non-Anglo-Saxon Western power making a go of it, least of all the European Union.

This blind spot is exasperatingly familiar for anyone who's had any dealings with modern Britain. The ghost of the Empire still haunts the nation, trapping it in a schizophrenic state as to its relations with the outside world.

It was the illusion of empire which stopped Britain from becoming a founding member of the European Union and a guiding force in that institution, as it is the heartbroken remnants of that illusion, manifested in a surly chest-thumping that stops it from finding its place in Europe today.

On the other hand you have the ones who are so politically correct and contemptuous of the legacy of the empire that they have severed almost all ties to their own history and culture, making them unable to lead Britain anywhere. One is sometimes tempted to grab hold of contemporary Britons, shake them and say, "You did good, better than most. Now let it go."

But Ferguson is correct that in pure metrics, Europe, and even the West at large, has been in relative decline when compared to other parts of the world for some time. In part this is inevitable. The low hanging fruits of technological progress have already been picked, and once available, are available to all who would implement them. But true civilisational decline must arguably show other symptoms besides a relative weakening in the trade balance. China, before the British introduced opium as a commodity to trade for porcelains and other luxury items instead of gold, ran a hefty trade surplus. But it was still a power in deep decline.

Art is often a reliable marker, in hindsight, of the trajectory of a civilisation. Graeco-Roman art first grew mannered and unoriginal, then outright sterile and debased, long before the first barbarian crossed the Limes. Future historians and audiences will have to be the final arbiters on our contemporary art. And what is deemed popular entertainments today, for example television shows, might well be tomorrow's high art. But as regards art proper, some of us might say the verdict on this matter is already in.

So the question as to whether European and Western civilisation is in decline is at least a valid one. And this goes deeper than Huntington's "Clash of Civilisations", as for there to be a clash, there has to be more than one showing up at the clash.

The Ummah, the dar al Islam, is without a doubt a civilisation. It might not, in its present form at least, be a particularly admirable one. But it is a coherent fellowship of ideals and a shared worldview. Is European/Western civilisation still one worthy of the name, or that is, a vital one any longer?

Any organisation or society, whether it be a political party, a union, or a nation or state, needs a common goal and a core conviction that that goal is worthy of pursuit. Without a driving force, and one adequate to the problems of the present, things will sooner or later fall apart. This is by no means an unprecedented problem.

The ancient Greek city-states, however great their earlier achievements, in the end fell for lack of a common Greek national spirit strong enough to supercede the purely local patriotism of the Polis. Greece could be united, by force, by temporary hegemons, such as the Spartans under Lysander, the Thebans under Epaminondas or even a Philip II of Macedonia, but not made to act in concert with the force of conviction. It was to prove their undoing when the individual city-states were no longer up to the challenges of states which had adopted Greek advances in matters technological and military, but did not suffer from the perennial Greek vice of discord.

The Romans not only had a fierce national pride, but one which was both flexible enough to encompass and integrate other peoples as the empire grew, and resilient enough to not simply dissolve when faced with Rome, itself subject to massive immigration, being but a minuscule part of a far larger state. It was to prove resilient enough to last for longer than modern European culture, born of the renaissance, has been alive.

At the fall of the Roman empire proper (its eastern half would linger on for half a millennium in the form of the Byzantine empire), another unifying, and inspirational force would keep the idea of a common European/Western culture alive, during a period that would see the creation of the ethnically based national states which are still with us today, in a twilight mirror image of the late Greek city-states, religion, in the form of the Catholic Church.

Religion and patriotism, these are the two forces through history that have been able to create unity, marshal solidarity, and direct that energy towards a common goal over a prolonged period of time. Political ideologies, such as Communism in the 20th century, can function as a substitute, but rarely for much more than a generation before burning out.

In short people need to feel like part of a team, striving towards a common goal, with peers with whom they have something in common, to make an effort as a team. The glue of mere rules and regulations can only take you so far. Solidarity can not be conjured out of thin air by bureaucratic decree. And absent that, a society will simply exist by inertia.

But it is not enough to simply exist, on a personal level perhaps, but not as a society. A civilisation that can no longer embrace its past achievements and take pride in them, and strive towards some common goal, however vague, is doomed to languish, lose its momentum, and, in the end, dissolve, with no foreign invader needed to give it the final push, or even a shot being fired in anger.

That feeling of belonging, or contributing to, a collective or an endeavour of importance, is the foundation for such communal advances as social security and the welfare state, support for which becomes difficult to muster in a totally atomised society.

Temporary health and safety, even affluence, can not altogether replace faith, hope, and solidarity as the driving force behind a vital society. "Après moi le deluge," is not a motto to rally the masses to any great feats of individual or collective achievement. Even giving birth to the next generation seems a futile endeavour, a coda into the dark, which could only detract from the enjoyment of the here and now.

Little wonder that, when faced by people animated by a fervent belief that they are in possession of the revealed truth, and one utterly antithetical to secular humanist values, modern Western Europeans are at a loss for how to react. Having themselves long forgotten such conviction, they find it incomprehensible in others. Or their recollections of the beliefs of the past are of ones so irreparably tainted and discredited, such as Communism and Fascism, that they almost instinctively shy away from the burden of passing judgement on anything, making relativism the only safe default position.

Scepticism and doubt are among the most important factors underlying almost all of the advances Western society has made, the freedom to ask, "Are you sure?" or, even more importantly, the courage to ask, "Am I sure?" But taken to the extreme of an almost ideological self-hatred, it is singularly un-helpful.

The cynic, or Margaret Thatcher, taken to her logical extreme, when she said, "There's no such thing as society," would say, "What is this 'We'? There is no 'Us', any more than you're the twelfth player of the team as you spill chips all over yourself shouting 'Goooaaaal!' and jumping out of your comfy chair."

But that's not really true, even in sports. Without the fans, some of them with far stronger, and longer standing, emotional ties to the club than any of the players on the field, no club would prosper for very long.

In the same way, by being born into, or actively choosing, a culture or civilisation, we are by default the inheritors, and caretakers, of that legacy, and the only means by which it is preserved for the future.

The bewildering muddle of modern Western society can obscure the bedrock of shared values and assumptions that really underlies that variety. "What does the weed smoking New Age Buddhist surf-hippie have in common with the buttoned up City director?" Bring them into a dialogue with an Alim at a Pakistani Madrasah, or a Chinese bureaucratic mandarin, and it will become all too clear.

It would clarify the centrality of the ethical and political concepts created and built by the many contributions from different philosophers and political thinkers in Europe over time, and that today have become the corner-stone of any democratic and law-oriented society in Europe, the free, autonomous, and critically thinking citizen, and the idea that any social or political organisation, can only draw its legitimacy from the consent of the members that constitutes this organisation.

Taking it as granted that, unlike the dark ages, a community wide religious revival, of any sort, doesn't hold the key to today's problems, and that the ethnically based national states of the European continent, even could they inspire their populations to common cause, like the Greek polis, are simply too small to tackle the challenges they are now facing in a globalised economy, one is left with the hitherto almost laughable idea of a common European patriotism.

It would perhaps be more correct to use the word nationalism, even with its far heavier semiotic burden of negative connotations, instead of the more innocuous patriotism. Because patriotism implies simply the support of something already existent and self-evident, such as the instinctive patriotism of a Frenchman, or a Hungarian, rooted in local history and common bonds. Whereas nationalism carries with it the message of active effort, of the creation of that which is not yet full wrought. But then again, the beligerent overtones of the word makes it problematic.

The idea of a common European patriotism is not without precedent. The early Romantics carried this banner, before disillusionment with the descent of the French revolution into collective sadism and bloodshed, and later Napoleon making himself emperor, and the victory of narrowly national reactionary establishments, turned them silent, inward or towards national-romanticism tied to purely ethnic, or Volkish, ideas; towards traditional patriotism.

Even those who did not join the establishment had wholly despaired of outward political action, and looked ever more into the past, to idylls of Medieval legend, or inward, into the labyrinthine world of the individual human psyche, finding there, like Poe, the miasma and frightscapes which were to lead to Freud and a new branch of human understanding.

But there was one who did not renounce the ideals of political Romanticism, Byron. Byron's Italian and Greek adventures, and his premature death at Missolonghi in 1824, in an attempt to support the Greek struggle for freedom from the Ottoman Empire, was this otherwise academic and still rather nebulous idea of a common European patriotism, unrelated to the religious concept of "Christendom", given practical political form.

And while a common European patriotism need not, and indeed should not, be outwardly aggressive, it is needed to build and hold a nation together, which is, it is time to be honest about, what the European Union is, and needs to be, striving towards.

The alternative is, like the elves of Tolkien's mythological sub-creation, to fade gracefully away, our great deeds behind us.