Gregorio Bettiza
Gregorio Bettiza is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on the role of ideology, religion, and civilizational discourses in international relations and world order. He is the author of Finding Faith in Foreign Policy: Religion and American Diplomacy in a Postsecular World (Oxford University Press: 2019), which received three book prize honorary mentions. He is currently working on a second book project that explores how states gain and exercise power through religion in 21st-century world politics.
Reflection on “Civilizationism” as Critique and Alternative Vision of World Order
Part of my research over the past decades has been motivated by a persistent puzzle and paradox. Why, despite the nearly unanimous scholarly criticism of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis, his Foreign Affairs article and book remain among the most widely cited and read works within the social sciences? Along the way, I’ve been fascinated also by how the view of a world shaped by the peaceful or conflictual interactions among diverse civilizations has since the 2000s progressively transcended the confines of academia, to increasingly animate public debates, inspire initiatives, and inform international policies across multiple societies, states, and regions of the globe.
At first, this turn (or return, as some suggest) to civilizational discourses in international relations appeared to me as a distinctive form of post-ideological identity politics. Over time, however, I have gradually come to see the widespread endorsement and deployment of civilizational imaginaries – whether in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Israel, Russia, China, India, and other parts of the Global South – as a specific ideological formation and project in its own right. This is what many, myself included, now refer to as civilizationism. At the core of civilizationist thinking today, I would argue, rests a critique of powerful forces associated with liberal modernization and globalization that have profoundly reshaped economies, societies, and politics within the West and across the world since the end of the Cold War.
Civilizationism goes beyond solely articulating an identity politics of difference. It seeks to advance and legitimize alternative arrangements, modes of existence, and visions of domestic and international order that draw upon distinct – largely non-liberal – traditions, histories, values, worldviews, practices, and institutions. Forces associated with liberalism are critiqued for their universalizing, homogenizing, individualizing, disempowering, disenchanting, conflictual, and destabilizing tendencies. Against these perceived evils, civilizationism promises to restore and promote particularism, difference, community, agency, meaning, spirituality, order, and stability.
Such an ideological formation is gaining ground internationally at the present historical juncture also because it speaks to several ongoing transformations and connects to multiple longstanding intellectual, cultural, and religious traditions. First, by partly transcending the temporality and spatiality of modern territorially defined nation-states, civilizational imaginaries provide forms of belonging and being in a globalizing era where nation-states are no longer the sole actors and exclusive points of reference for societies and political forces worldwide. Second, in an international system becoming increasingly multipolar and less Western-centric, the logic of a multi-civilizational order resonates with reactionaries outside the West who seek a return to empires and spheres of influence, as well as with progressive anti-colonial voices who contest Western hegemony and neo-colonialism. Third, in the context of mounting anxieties about Western decline in North America and Europe, civilizationism contributes to the reassertion of Western uniqueness and boundaries.
Let me return, by way of conclusion, to Huntington and my puzzling over the “success” of his (in)famous thesis. From the standpoint sketched out in this short reflection piece, the intellectual power of the late Harvard professor’s account is therefore not to be found in any putative social scientific character of his theory about inter-civilizational relations and clashes. It emerges instead from Huntington’s capacity to articulate some of the basic tenets of contemporary civilizationism, understood as ideological critique and alternative vision of modernity and world order to what has invariably been called liberal globalization, internationalism, or imperialism.