Hans Kundnani and Srirupa Roy in The Ideas Letter:
During the past decade, there has been what might be called a global civilizational turn as states around the world have increasingly imagined themselves as the representatives of civilizations. A lot has been written about the way that China, India, Russia, and Turkey have framed their foreign policies in civilizational terms—and have even explicitly called themselves “civilizational states.” But many political leaders in Europe and the United States are also increasingly using civilizational language. The very concept of “the West,” which until a decade or so ago seemed to be in decline, is making a comeback, driven in part by the far right, which imagines Western or “Judeo-Christian” civilization as dangerously threatened by Muslim or non-white immigration. Some, like French President Emmanuel Macron, also speak of Europe as a distinct civilization that “can die.”
In order to understand these developments, academics are increasingly using the concept of “civilizationalism” (or “civilizationism”). In particular, the concept denotes the tendency to think of civilizations as distinct and coherent entities and to imagine international politics as a clash of civilizations, as Samuel Huntington famously did in his 1996 book. Civilizational thinking like this is a way of understanding how international politics works that is distinct both from realism (which sees international relations in terms of conflict and cooperation between nation-states) and liberalism (which emphasizes ideology and regime type).
How should we understand civilizationalism? Although there has been an explosion of civilization talk it is not entirely clear whether the concept of civilization is doing the same work in the many different contexts in which it is used. In particular, its exact relationship with the nation-state and with nationalism is disputed and varies across cases. The same goes for its relationship with racism, to which civilizationalism has been historically connected. Finally, whereas civilizationalism is often understood as a defensive foreign policy response to an overbearing West and an outright challenge by non-Western states to the post-WWII liberal international order, it also seems to be connected to domestic economic and political developments—in particular, to neoliberalism.
More here.
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