The Rise of the Civilizational State

Christopher Coker

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509534647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Globalización

In recent years culture has become the primary currency of politics – from the identity politics that characterized the 2016 American election to the pushback against Western universalism in much of the non-Western world.

Much less noticed is the rise of a new political entity, the civilizational state. In this pioneering book, the renowned political philosopher Christopher Coker looks in depth at two countries that now claim this title: Xi Jinping's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia. He also discusses the Islamic caliphate, a virtual and aspirational civilizational state that is unlikely to fade despite the recent setbacks suffered by ISIS. The civilizational state, he contends, is an idea whose time has come. For, while civilizations themselves may not clash, civilizational states appear to be set on challenging the rules of the international order that the West takes for granted. China seems anxious to revise them, Russia to break them, while Islamists would like to throw away the rule book altogether. Coker argues that, when seen in the round, these challenges could be enough to give birth to a new post-liberal international order.

1
Liberal Civilization and its Discontents

Even today, Western intellectuals still like to think that they occupy the commanding heights of intellectual debate; it’s their books that are to be found the world over in airport bookshops, though a fight-back of sorts has begun. Indeed, the rumblings of revolution are now becoming audible for the first time. Can Asians Think? is the provocative title of a book by Kishore Mahbubani which first appeared in the bookshops in 1998. The book struck a chord at the time, not only because of the argument but because of the author’s reputation. He was described by The Economist as ‘an Asian Toynbee concerned with the rise and fall of civilizations’ and by the Washington Post as a ‘Max Weber of the new Confucian ethic’. Weber and Toynbee (1889–1975) were two of the public intellectuals whose writings were taken as gospel by their followers. Toynbee’s book A Study of History (1934–61) was a best-seller for twenty years before it finally fell out of fashion.

Mahbubani was only pointing out something that Western thinkers have tended to accept without questioning: the role that ideas played in creating the Western moment in history. It is quite common to speak of the 500-year ascendancy of the Western world and to date it from 1492 and the so-called discovery of the New World. But when one focuses in a little more, the picture is a bit more complicated. Economically, after all, Europe didn’t overtake the East until the late eighteenth century. Militarily, its hegemony really dates only from the Industrial Revolution. But, in terms of ideas, the European ascendency certainly did begin almost 400 years ago. As Mahbubani writes: ‘We live in an essentially unbalanced world. The flow of ideas reflecting 500 years of Western domination of the globe remains a one-way street from the West to the East. Most Westerners cannot see that they have arrogated to themselves the moral high ground from which they lecture the world’ (1998: 9). The title of his book included two questions folded into one. The first was addressed to his fellow Asians: ‘Can we think, and, if so, why have we fallen behind?’ The second was addressed to his Western readers: ‘Do you really think that Asians can think for themselves?’

Putting the answer to one side (I will come back to it in a later chapter), both questions start from the same point of departure: that thinking is not an abstract or abstruse pastime. It is popular of course to imagine academics cloistered away in their ivory towers, but, in the course of the twentieth century, philosophers became public intellectuals and ideas soon seeped from the intellectual salons onto the street. The ideas of the French Revolution eventually found their way into the political and legal systems of almost all European states. And late nineteenth-century imperialism, even if driven partly by industrial cartels and surplus finance capital, also involved the global projection of a civilizing mission. In other words, Europe was able to tap into a large reserve of conceptual capital. In the case of civilizational studies it still can, for most of the books are written by Westerners.

The subject really took off as a popular theme only with the idiosyncratic work by Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), The Decline of the West (1918). It brought its author instant fame, rapidly selling 100,000 copies. It has never been out of print since, despite its challenging style, apparent lack of organization and exhausting prolixity. For, if it’s not an easy read, the work has panache – who else would have begun his diagnosis of Western decline with a discussion of Euclidean mathematics? Of the many writers who have turned their attention to civilization, Spengler was intellectually by far the most audacious. Not only did he set out to invigorate the style of historical discussion by adopting the widest possible lens, he allowed the civilizations he studied to speak through their own textual and artistic achievements. And although it is fashionable these days to emphasize the tendentious character of Spengler’s work, we shouldn’t downplay its continuing appeal. It’s quite seductive to be drawn into the slipstream of his thought.

Spengler nevertheless was knocked into second place after the Second World War by the British historian Arnold Toynbee. The result of his labours was a much less interesting read – the exhausting twelve-volume A Study of History, which brought the author almost instant celebrity status. In 1947 he even achieved every author’s ultimate ambition; he appeared on the cover of Time. The editors called him the most important intellectual of the twentieth century for challenging Marx’s belief that class rather than civilization was the main driving force of history. But very few scholars read his work today – Toynbee was like a brief comet flaring in the academic story, scattering remnants of the tail after him but leaving little impression behind.

Both Spengler and Toynbee were attempting in very different ways to make sense of the complexity of life, to find in the general chaos of history some kind of pattern. ‘Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition . . . both a gift and a trap’ (the quote comes from William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (2004)). Or here is Don DeLillo and his most recent novel Zero K (2016), in which one of the characters asks: What are long journeys for? ‘To see what’s back behind you, [to] lengthen the view, find the patterns.’ Pattern seeking is merely a way of organizing information, a shorthand heuristic that allows us to make sense of some of the changes that we experience over time. They allow us to generalize, without which it would be impossible to write history.

The problem with both writers was intellectual overreach. Like Marx, they insisted that they had discovered certain invariant historical laws. For Spengler, civilizations have their seasons, beginning with spring and finally entering into winter gloom. For Toynbee, they were determined by the law of ‘challenge and response’: environmental challenges either spurred people to new heights or quite simply overwhelmed them – the Puritan settlers in North America eventually made the discomforts of New England too familiar to be noticed; the Vikings in Greenland were eventually forced out, leaving behind a treeless wilderness populated by a few Inuit clans. Spengler was eventually discredited by the turn against metaphysical thinking; Toynbee merely fell out of fashion. To the post-colonial era the concept was weighed down by the baggage it carried. By the mid-1960s one of the most famous historians of his time, Fernand Braudel, found himself on the defensive, protesting that while, as a historical category, civilization had always had an uneasy relationship with the granular reality of history, it was ‘still useful’ in denoting a social and cultural life with its own distinctive rhythms and cycles of growth (Braudel 1994: 30).

It is not possible to give a layered sense of the evolving history of the field in the years that followed. But, then, that is not my intention. The civilization game took off again in the public arena only in 1996 with the publication of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, which had begun life three years earlier as an article in the journal Foreign Affairs. The book was subsequently translated into forty languages; it helped that it was easy to read – its style was calm and matter-of-fact. To be frank, Huntington’s thesis remains popular because the study of civilization is too – when you are selling an idea it makes sense to sell an idea that will sell. It won devotees in the West for another reason. His claim to have discovered the shape of the future offered a refreshing alternative to the micro-histories encouraged by the overproduction of PhDs (one of the scandals of contemporary university scholarship). The public is right to suspect that something has been lost by ignoring questions of large-scale change – the currents, rhythms and recurrences that make history so interesting. If you are writing about these themes you enjoy a built-in advantage: a taste for historical imperatives is something shared by most of us.

Probably what annoyed his critics – and annoys so many of them still – is that the book is a thoroughly uncomfortable read, especially for those of a liberal disposition. It is uncomfortable to read that we all share a need, he insisted, to express our identity and have it recognized and even respected. In the post-Cold War world the most important distinctions among peoples were not ideological, or even political, but cultural. ‘Peoples and nations are attempting to answer the most basic question humans can face: Who are we? And they’re answering that question in the traditional way human beings have answered it, by reference to the things that mean most to them. People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs and institutions . . .’ (Huntington 1996: 21).

It was even more uncomfortable to be told that civilizations don’t always coexist in harmony with each other, or that they often ‘clash’. But Huntington’s thesis continues to come to mind whenever we read about the persecution of religious groups such as the Yazidis, who were expelled by ISIS from Mosul, Iraq’s second city, where they had been a presence for more than sixteen centuries, or the destruction of the last Christian church in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2010. The trouble is that, once you have read the book, you can’t unread it (the idea of a ‘clash’ comes to mind every time we read of another atrocity by ISIS or another terrorist group).

Huntington’s critics were quick, however, to argue that, if civilizations were as invariant as he suggested, they were also incoherent; their unity, such as it was, had often broken down. Aren’t most contemporary conflicts intra-civilizational – pitting Catholic against Protestant, Sunni against Shia, Hindu against Muslim and Buddhist in South Asia? They also argued that all civilizations have been marked by cross-fertilization, the adoption of foreign gods and styles and patterns of enquiry. History does indeed show that civilizational encounters can be both constructive and confrontational; more often than not they tend to be the former. But the fact that we must make up our own minds about where the balance should be struck is a fact of political life and not a failure in Huntington’s exposition. Remember that he was trying to prepare us for a conversation, not a viva.

We are still reading Huntington twenty years later because he appears to have been swimming with the tide, not against it. ‘There are signs that civilization is making something of a comeback’, claimed Krishan Kumar in 2014, and some of the reasons he gives are fairly self-explanatory (Kumar 2014: 16–17). One is the rise of militant Islam, which received a shot in the arm with the Iranian Revolution in 1979 which continues to inspire many radical Muslims in the same way that the October Revolution in Russia of 1917 continued to inspire many on the left long after they had lost their illusions about the ‘radiant future’ that it promised. Then there is the economic rise of China, and latterly India, which has led many commentators – many of them in the West – to conclude that Asian values are far superior to Western ones in generating economic growth. Economists predict that, by 2050, the Chinese economy will be larger than all the Western economies combined, and that India’s will be about the same size as that of the United States. Culture here matters too.

And then there was the War on Terror which George W. Bush proclaimed the day after 9/11. It also helped to give Huntington’s thesis a renewed lease of life. Critics might claim that the Bush administration saw the threat to Western civilization, as it were, at one remove: through its own overheated imagination. They might well complain that American officials were able to tell a great story without the hindrance of nuance or subtlety. But the story had traction outside the Western world too. In her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) Arundhati Roy doesn’t mention by name the cast list of the ‘War on Terror’, but there is no mistaking who they are: ‘the planes that flew into the tall buildings in America came as a boon to many in India too. The Poet-Prime Minister of the country and several of his senior ministers were members of an old organization that believed India was essentially a Hindu nation and that just as Pakistan had declared itself an Islamic Republic, India should declare itself a Hindu one.’ The ‘Poet-Prime Minister’ is Atal Bihari Vajpayee, prime minister from 1998 to 2004, and the ‘organization’ is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist missionary movement founded in 1925 that still sustains the BJP, the party that came to power a few years ago.

And finally there was the shock of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. In an article in Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt claimed that Trump and his advisers in the new administration were operating from a broad ‘clash of civilizations’ framework that informed both their aversion to multiculturalism at home and their identification of friends and enemies abroad. ‘In this essentially cultural, borderline racialist world view, the (mostly white) Judeo-Christian world is under siege from various “other” forces, especially Muslims.’ It was a worldview that explained, in part, the new president’s singular sympathy with Putin’s Russia. ‘For the people who see the world this way, Putin is a natural ally. He declares mother Russia to be the main defender of Christianity and he likes to stress the dangers from Islam . . . And if Islam is the real source of danger, and we are in the middle of a decades-long clash of civilizations, who cares about the balance of power in Asia’ (Walt, 2017).

Whether or not this analysis was fair to Trump, it certainly wasn’t fair to Huntington or, for that matter, to Vladimir Putin. If we care about fake history, facts should still matter. Huntington never claimed, as Walt insisted in his article, that religion constituted the ideational core of Russian civilization. As for Putin, he is fully cognizant of the fact that, in the near future, the fastest growing ethnic group in Russia will be Muslim. Putin has always been consistent in his insistence that the idea of building a mono-ethnic (Slav) state would not only be contrary to the country’s history; it would also represent ‘the shortest path to the destruction of . . . the Russian state system’ (Tsygankov 2016: 151).

The myth of liberal civilization

In one of Henrik Ibsen’s most famous plays, the heroine Hedda Gabler finds herself married to a historian who is writing a book on the domestic industries of Brabant in the High Middle Ages. Her former lover has recently published a popular book on a much bigger theme: the march of civilization. When he calls on Hedda’s husband he is quick to inform him that he is already writing a sequel. His first book was on the history of civilization; the second will be about its future. Good heavens, remarks Hedda’s husband, we know nothing of the future, to which his academic rival replies, rather archly: ‘There is a thing or two to be said about it all the same.’ The point is that Hedda’s lover is planning to write a book dealing with the biggest theme of all: the route by which Western civilization had become the end state of mankind.

Western writers ever since have shuttled back and forth between two ideas: one, which Spengler and Huntington embraced, that Western civilization is just one of many; the other that it is at the forefront of the historically sanctioned construction of a single normative order. This is why at the end of the Cold War Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about the ‘end of history’ resonated so much in Western minds. ‘What we may be witnessing’, he wrote, ‘is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (Fukuyama 1989: 4). There would be no more ideological grounds for major conflict between nations. Even Islamic fundamentalism would have ‘no universal significance’. The fact that the process was, as yet, incomplete in much of the world outside Europe and North America – what Fukuyama called those ‘most advanced outposts . . . at the ...