Hans Kundnani
Hans Kundnani is a visiting fellow at the Remarque Institute at New York University and an Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop fellow. He was previously the director of the Europe programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London, a senior Transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of three books including Eurowhiteness. Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (2023). He tweets @hanskundnani.
Reflections Upon “Civilizationisms”
By civilizationalism I understand an ideology based on the belief that there are coherent and distinct civilizations and that international politics centres on conflict between them – in contrast to a realist view of international politics which understands it in terms of conflict and cooperation between nation states and a liberal view which emphasizes ideology and regime type. Central to civilizationalism is the essentialization or reification of civilizations. Like others in the network, I am sceptical that civilizations with clear boundaries exist in reality. Rather, they are imagined. In that sense, civilizationalism is analogous to nationalism, though the relationship between civilizationalism and the nation state may vary across cases.
In my book Eurowhiteness (2023), I argued that, during the last decade and especially since the refugee crisis in 2015, there has been an increasing tendency to imagine the European Union in civilizational terms – what I called the civilizational turn in the European project. There has been a resurgence of Huntingtonian thinking in Europe – but whereas in The Clash of CivilizationsHuntington imagine the West as a single civilization that would come into conflict with China and Islam after the end of the Cold War, some “pro-Europeans” like French President Emmanuel Macron imagine Europe as a civilization that is distinct from the United States. In other words, in Europe, there are multiple, competing civilizationalisms – a broader Western one and a narrower European one.
Within the West, at least, the use of the language of civilization must be understood not just in relation to nationalism but also in relation to racism. In particular, civilizationalism can be thought of a soft version of racism centred on cultural rather than biological difference. In that sense, it is closely connected to what Étienne Balibar has called “neo-racism” or “cultural racism”. In the first half of the twentieth century – a period in which racism, especially biological racism, was more accepted and could be expressed more openly – international relations were widely imagined as race relations. The idea of international politics as a clash of civilisations represents a revival of this view, albeit in new, softer form.
I am now particularly interested in understanding the relationship between civilizationalism within the West and “new civilizationalisms” elsewhere in the world – in other words, in locating the civilizational turn in the European project within what appears to be a global civilizational turn. Civilizationalism within the West may be different from civilizationalism beyond the West in several respects. In particular, whether in the narrower European or wider Western form, it tends to be supranational. It may also have a different relationship with universalism than civilizationalisms elsewhere. I hope to explore these questions further through the New Civilizationalisms network.