A New Wave of Research on Civilizational Politics

Abstract

A new wave of scholarship has made major advances in how we understand the politics of civilizational identity by drawing powerfully from conceptual tools developed over the years to study other forms of identity. What unites this wave is treating civilizations not as distinctive “things” that might “clash” but as meaningful social imaginings. This growing body of work is far from monolithic, generating alternative theories that should structure scholarly debate going forward. Central issues include whether civilizational identity is primarily elite led or mass driven, whether it inherently involves conflictual human impulses, what the role of religion and values are in driving it, what its relationship is to nationalism, and how similarly we can expect the countries and people who share civilizational identity to behave. We also find emerging debates on what this newly conceptualized civilizational identity explains in contemporary world politics. Social scientists are now only beginning to apply important tools of social science to this question, with even public opinion research in its infancy. Early findings suggest civilizational identity may be shaping not only elite foreign policy making but also patterns of domestic politics, including the recent rise of populism and levels of democracy and authoritarianism more generally.

Russkiias the NewRossiiskii? Nation-Building in Russia After 1991

“…While for a long time Russian national identity was discussed within the discursive field defined by these four models, the article also introduces a fifth model to capture the most recent developments in the Kremlin’s nation-building discourse: “civilization.” Henry E. Hale and Marlene Laruelle define civilization as “a macro identity category – often seen as inclusive of meso-level identity categories like ethnicity, nation, or country” (Hale and Laruelle 2021, 600). While Rogers Brubaker argues that “civilizational discourse refers to a different kind of imagined community, located at a different level of cultural and political space, than national discourse” (Brubaker 2017, 1211), in the Russian case, one might argue that the two are to a large extent conflated (see, for example, Verkhovsky and Pain 2012; Hale and Laruelle 2020).…”

“…According to Olga Malinova (2020), the current “civilizational talk” reflects Russia’s imperial legacy as a multi-ethnic nation, while at the same time addressing the strained relations with the West (see also Hale and Laruelle 2021, 604). Increasingly, the Kremlin’s emerging identity discourse has been colored not only by “Russianness” ( russkost’ ) but also by a language inspired by supranational, civilizational thinking.…”

“…Phase 4: Enter Civilization? (the 2020s) As the decade was drawing to a close, the values-based identity project was increasingly anchored in a supranational, civilizational rhetoric (Kazharski 2019), presenting Russia as a "distinct civilization" (Hale and Laruelle 2021). An identity discourse cast in civilizational terms has deep roots in a Russian context, dating back to the 19th century but surviving only as a marginalized school of thought throughout the 1990s and up until the onset of Putin's third term (Zevelev 2009;Tsygankov 2016;Mjør and Turoma 2020).…”

Eric Zemmour, The New Face of the French Far Right: Media-Sponsored, Neoliberal, and Reactionary

“…52 While Zemmour is almost the only French public figure to use the term "race," he combines it with more accepted notions such as "civilizations" and of course "war of civilizations" that resonate better with the culturalist zeitgeist. 53 Policywise, he advocates for theories of "national preference," i.e., that social policies in employment, healthcare, pensions, and education prioritize "ethnic French" and benefit only secondarily migrants who have "assimilated" to French culture. Those deemed "non-assimilated" (obviously, the definition of assimilation is Zemmour's own subjective one) would be deported back to their country of origin.…”

Reconciling National and Supranational Identities: Civilizationism in European Far-Right Discourse

“…Problematizing Far-Right Civilizationism Although civilizationism appears to serve a strategic purpose in the Far Right's battle against Islam, questions remain as to how it relates to nationalism and to what extent the Far Right's simultaneous invocation of both is paradoxical (De Cesari, Bosilkov, and Piacentini 2020;Hale and Laruelle 2021). Regarding the relationship between nationalism and civilizationism, Brubaker (2017Brubaker ( , 1211 writes, "Civilizationism does not supersede nationalism; it combines with nationalism.…”