Civilizational States

Description

Alain De Benoist:

"Liberal internationalism considers ... the civilizational state ... (its) inveterate enemy because such states are opposed by their very nature to the spread of the values that liberal internationalism represents.

So what are these newcomers to whom some writers have given the name of “civilizational states” (or civilization-states)? They are regional powers whose influence extends beyond their borders and who conceive the nomos of the Earth as fundamentally multipolar. Originally, the “civilizational state” label was reserved specifically for China and Russia, but this qualification can be applied to many other states which, by leveraging their culture and their long-running history, manage to project a sphere of influence exceeding their national territory or their ethno-linguistic group: India, Turkey, and Iran, to name but a few.

Civilizational states set against Western universalism a model according to which each civilizational group is considered to have a distinct identity, both in terms of cultural values and in political institutions, an identity that is not reducible to any universal model. These states do not simply want to pursue a sovereign policy without submitting to the dictates of supranational elites. They also seek to thwart any “globalist” project aimed at making the same principles prevail throughout the planet, because they are aware that the culture they embody is not identical to any other. Here we must bear in mind that no single culture can encompass all cultures; the notion of a “world culture” is a contradiction in terms.

Civilizational states have the common characteristic of denouncing Western universalism, which they regard as a masked ethnocentrism, an elegant way of concealing hegemonic imperialism. But above all, the civilizational states rely on their history and their culture, not only to affirm that these imply a political and social model different from the one that liberal internationalism seeks to impose but also to identify a conception of the world deemed to be the foundation of a “good life”, both politically and religiously—that is to say, built on a set of non-negotiable, substantive values that the state then has the mission of embodying and defending.

The civilizational state, in other words, seeks to establish a conception of the good that is based on particular substantive values and a specific tradition.

Whether they are led by a new tsar, a new emperor, or a new caliph, whether the rejection of the universal occurs in the name of the Confucian notion of “harmony”, the heritage of “holy Russia” (“Moscow, the third Rome”), Eurasianism, Hinduism, or the memory of the caliphate, civilizational states refuse to submit to the standards of the West, which some of them had accepted in the past in order to “modernize”. Westernization and modernization, therefore, no longer automatically go hand in hand."

(https://www.agonmag.com/p/the-dawn-of-civilizational-states?)

Typology

... of ideological sources for the concept in different regions of the world, by Alain De Benoist:

Russia

"The Russian philosopher Konstantin Krylov (1967-2020), in his posthumous book Povedenie (“Behavior”), published in 2021, describes Russia as a country totally foreign to liberal thought since its inception. He rejects liberalism, but not democracy. Although he personally became a Zoroastrian during a stay in Uzbekistan, he also emphasizes the importance of Orthodox Christianity.

Paul Grenier, the founder of the U.S.-based Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy, who recently devoted a provocative essay to Krylov, writes:

- “I do not know for my part any Russian conservative intellectual for whom Russia is part of Western civilization. Everyone sees in it something separate and different.” This was already the opinion of Nikolaï Danilevski and Oswald Spengler, who underlined the specificity of social behavior and Russian ethical precepts, starting with “nostrité” or us-ness (in Russian, one does not say “my brother and I went for a walk”, but “we with my brother went for a walk”).

To the liberal system based on the pursuit of individual self-interest, Russia opposes the prerogatives of the sacred, which it refuses to see relegated to the private sphere, at the same time as it denies state neutrality with regard to values. It is, therefore, understandable that in Ukraine, Russia believes it is not simply defending its stance that Kiyv cannot become a nation-state because it belongs in the Slavic civilizational space, but that it is also engaged in a larger struggle against the very logic of the nation-state, the proponents of a purely secular or laical vision of the world, the liberal values of the “collective West” it perceives as “decadent”, and American hegemony bolstered by the liberal system."

(https://www.agonmag.com/p/the-dawn-of-civilizational-states?)

Japan

"In the 1930s and 40s, the Kyoto School, formed around Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) and Tanabe Hajime, was undoubtedly the first—well before all the decolonization movements—to develop the idea of a multipolar world, divided into distinct large spaces considered as the many crucibles of culture and civilization, and to critique, in defense of the plurality of cultures characteristic of the “real world” (sekaiteki sekai), the abstract principles of Western universalism based on capitalism and scientism.

The principal representatives of this School were above all philosophers, such as Kōsaka Masaaki, Kōyama Iwao, Nishitani Keiji, and Suzuki Shigetaka. The European thinkers who seem to have influenced them the most were Johann Gottfried von Herder and Leopold von Ranke. Recently, the ideas of members of the Kyoto School have also been brought closer to those of communitarian authors such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre.

It was in this inner circle that the idea of a “greater East Asian co-prosperity sphere” was developed, associating several countries on the basis of shared values and respect for their autonomy, an idea that should neither be confused with the “Japanocentrism” of the nationalist right nor with the Japanese imperialism of the same period. As early as June 1943, in fact, Japan’s official censorship body ordered that the School's publications be kept silent, reproaching it precisely for wanting to assign to Japanese power a mission that must not be confounded with simple imperialist expansion."

(https://www.agonmag.com/p/the-dawn-of-civilizational-states?)

China

In today's China, we must also mention the members of the Tianxia School, such as Zhao Tingyang, the historian Xu Jilin, Xu Zhuoyun, Wang Gungwu, and Liang Zhiping, whose catchphrase is “using China to explain China” (yĭ zhōngguó jiěshì zhōngguó) — possibly including among them Jiang Shigong, a proponent of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Its theorists refer to the central notion of tianxia (“all that exists under heaven”), a spiritual principle of premodern China whose institutional embodiment was the Celestial Empire (Tiāncháo), an ideal whose origins can be traced to the Duke of Zhou (11th century BCE) who used the “mandate of heaven” to justify Western Zhou’s overthrow of Shang dynasty. A polysemic term, tianxia was used even before the time of Laozi (Lao-Tseu) and Confucius: it designates at once an ideal civilizational order, a spatial imaginary in which China lies at the core, a hierarchical order in which the “virtue” of its members determines their rank, and a political system supposed to guarantee the harmony of the whole.

Tianxia is “a dense concept”, argues Zhao Tingyang, “wherein, with respect to first philosophy, the metaphysical as political philosophy comes to replace the metaphysical as ontology”, which affirms that cultures have incommensurable values and that China must escape from Eurocentrism and fully assume its role as the Middle Empire. Relatedly, for Xu Jilin, “the origin of [China’s current] crisis is nothing but the mentality that grants absolute supremacy to the nation”. He adds, “To truly address the problem at its roots, we need a form of thinking that can serve as a counterpoint to nationalism. I call this thought the ‘new tianxia’, an axial civilizational wisdom derived from China’s pre-modern tradition, interpreted anew according to modern criteria”.

In this regard, the way in which, since the 1990s, the Chinese authorities, claiming “Asian values”, have rejected criticism directed at them in the name of human rights ideology is illustrative.

In January 2021, at the Davos Forum, Xi Jinping declared:

- "Just as no two leaves in the world are identical, no [two] histories, cultures, or social systems are the same. Each country is unique with its own history, culture, and social system, and none is superior to the other. […] Difference in itself isn’t a cause for alarm. What does ring the alarm…is the attempt to impose a hierarchy on civilizations or to force one’s own history, culture, or social system upon others."

(https://www.agonmag.com/p/the-dawn-of-civilizational-states?)