Dominic Sachsenmaier

Reflections Upon “New Civilizationisms”

In recent years, the concept of civilization has begun to play new public roles in societies around the world. Of course, when populist rhetoric resorts to civilizational concepts, it almost always presupposes the allegedly unique character of single civilizations. Yet these twenty-first century civilizational self-understandings appearing on our world stage are not as homegrown as they purport to be. The fact that they are rising around the same time in places as different as the United States, Turkey, India, and China means that we need to understand them as parts of much larger networks of exchange. On the general level, they are part of the growing wave of militant and confrontational narratives that increasingly characterize our current international condition. On a more concrete level, there are probably direct flows of tropes and ideas between the new protagonists of new civilizational identities around the world. Much research needs to be done on both levels. 

As scholars, we need to investigate an entire range of additional questions related to the rise of populist civilizationism. One rather complex problem is discerning the relationship between these civilizational identities and more ordinary forms of nationalism. The connections between them can be full of synergies and tensions: In some large countries like Russia, India or China, right-wing populist movements can conflate national and civilizational boundaries, but in other cases the size and historicity of the nation does not allow for this approach. For example, in the PRC, ideas of China as a unique civilization state (as articulated by public figures like Zhang Weiwei) have received much attention. By contrast, right-wing movements in Europe, ranging from the Front National in France to the Polish PiS, appeal to notions of civilizational belonging that are not reduced to nationhood. In these smaller states, discourses of civilization need to appeal at least partly to transnational identities of a shared Christian or European heritage. Similar things can be said about the role of Islam in recent Turkish civilizational rhetoric.  

The potential frictions between civilizational narratives and national identities lead to many additional questions. How can we define the intellectual roots of the current civilizational political language in different parts of the world? The answer will need to be both globally aware and locally sensitive: after all, the politics of civilizational discourses is not new. After the Second World War, many anti-colonial decolonization movements resorted at least partly to civilizational symbolism when articulating their demands. Gandhi is an early example for forces that we can see, even if only as a side current, across the Cold War period. Are there continuities that carry through from the political language of anti-colonial liberation movements to the populist – and in many cases increasingly authoritarian – drumming up of civilizational concepts? Are earlier narratives instrumentalized and taken in different directions? Can similar things be said about postcolonial and other critiques of Eurocentrism?  

Who are the declared enemies of various new civilizational narratives, domestically and internationally? Who are their main social carriers? In many cases, they include transnationally and nationally organized religious groups. But when, and under what conditions, do religious forces feed into a political mobilization of civilizational identities, and under what circumstances do they espouse ecumenical, border-crossing notions of civilizational belonging? 

We can only pursue complex questions of this kind from a combination of global and local perspectives. An international team of scholars from different fields like history, political science and sociology (and with different kinds of regional expertise) would be an ideal forum to critically assess, historicize and contextualize the fast-growing civilizational rhetoric we see around the world.