The New Civilisation

• Across the world, the idea of civilisation is being utilised in the service of a narrow nationalism.

CIVILIZATIONISM

• It is an intellectual fad sweeping across the corridors of power in important capitals around the world.
• Since civilisations are the broadest cultural entities into which the human species is often divided, one would have expected civilisationism to transcend nationalism.

Civilisation-state and Nation-states

• The civilisation-state is now counterpoised to the nation-state.
• India, China, Russia, Turkey, and Iran are among countries which have made statements to the effect that their countries are civilisations unto themselves and not nation-states.
• It is perhaps not a coincidence that countries that have tried to find a middle ground on the Russo-Ukraine war are also aspirational civilisation-states.

What do these aspirational civilisation states have in common?

• They are relatively large countries that are often described as middle powers, regional powers.
• The territories of these countries were once home to ancient civilisations and great empires and kingdoms in the precolonial era.
• A particular value system as being foundational to Europe's civilisational identity points to a view that civilisationism, like nationalism, also has its good and bad versions.
• In a 1945 book, Hans Kohn, made a controversial distinction between Westem and Eastem nationalisms.
  • Only Western nationalism was connected to the Enlightenment's legacy of the free individual; the nationalisms of Central and Eastern Europe and Asia were not.
• Nations belong to the era of political modemity and they are all necessarily young.

Position of civilisational Idea in modern times

• But if civilisations are utilised in the service of nationalism, what happens to the promise of the civilisational idea as a higher order principle for judging the nation-state as a political form?
• Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, nearly a century ago, wrote, "Before we can build a stable civilisation worthy of humanity as a whole it's necessary that each historical civilisation should become conscious of its limitations and its unworthiness to become the ideal civilisation of the world".
• One can only hope that the civilisationism fad soon becomes passé and that the world embraces a new, just, and peaceful form of planetary politics.