A civilisation is a broader entity than a nation. In fact, a civilisation can be considered to be the broadest coherent human grouping short of all of humanity itself. The United States and France are clearly distinct nations, but they belong to the same civilisation, namely, ‘the West’. It is true that a civilisation can be an amorphous entity and that its borders can be subjective. This, of course, excludes the universalist meaning of ‘civilisation’ where it refers to all of humanity, or all of humanity minus the ‘barbarians’ however defined.
