America’s decline is impossible to disentangle from China’s rise, so it is natural that the rapid climb of the Middle Kingdom back to its historic global primacy dominates discussion of the civilisation-state. Though the phrase was popularised by the British writer Martin Jacques, the political theorist Christopher Coker observed in his excellent recent book on civilisation-states that “the turn to Confucianism began in 2005, when President Hu Jintao applauded the Confucian concept of social harmony and instructed party cadres to build a ‘harmonious society.’” In any case, it is only under his successor Xi’s rule that China as a rival civilisation-state has really penetrated the Western consciousness. “The advent of Xi Jinping as the Chinese president in 2012 propelled the idea of ‘civilization-state’ to the forefront of the political discourse,” the Indian international relations scholar Ravi Dutt Bajpai remarks, “as Xi believes that ‘a civilization carries on its back the soul of a country or nation.’” [...]
Yet the appeal of the civilisation-state model is not limited to China. Under Putin, the other great Eurasian empire, Russia, has publicly abandoned the Europe-focused liberalising projects of the 1990s — a period of dramatic economic and societal collapse driven by adherence to the policies of Western liberal theorists — for its own cultural sonderweg or special path of a uniquely Russian civilisation centred on an all-powerful state. In a 2013 address to the Valdai Club, Putin remarked that Russia “has always evolved as a state‑civilisation, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions. It is precisely the state‑civilisation model that has shaped our state polity.” In a 2012 speech to the Russian Federal Assembly, Putin likewise asserted that “we must value the unique experience passed on to us by our forefathers. For centuries, Russia developed as a multi‑ethnic nation (from the very beginning), a state‑civilisation bonded by the Russian people, Russian language and Russian culture native for all of us, uniting us and preventing us from dissolving in this diverse world.” [...]
In a revealing 2018 essay, Putin’s adviser Vladislav Surkov — who was fired from his role this February — foregrounded this hybridity, part-European and part-Asian, as the central characteristic of the Russian soul. “Our cultural and geopolitical identity is reminiscent of a volatile identity of the one born into a mixed-race family,” Surkov wrote. “A half-blood, a cross-breed, a weird-looking guy. Russia is a Western-Eastern half-breed nation. With its double-headed statehood, hybrid mentality, intercontinental territory and bipolar history, it is charismatic, talented, beautiful and lonely. Just as a half-breed should be.” For Surkov, Russia’s destiny as a civilisation-state, like that of the Byzantium it succeeded, is one as “a civilisation that has absorbed the East and the West. European and Asian at the same time, and for this reason neither quite Asian and nor quite European.” [...]
Warning his audience that “we know that civilisations are disappearing; countries as well. Europe will disappear,” Macron lauded the civilisational projects of Russia and Hungary, which “have a cultural, civilisational vitality that is inspiring,” and declared that France’s mission, its historic destiny, was to guide Europe into a civilisational renewal, forging a “collective narrative and a collective imagination. That is why I believe very deeply that this is our project and must be undertaken as a project of European civilisation.”
