The Attack Of The Civilization-State
“Always remember that China is a civilization rather than a nation-state.”
“From now on, Asia will rule the world, and that changes everything because in Asia, we have civilizations rather than nations.”
There was a time when that liberal philosophy was taken seriously almost everywhere. Many of the independence movements in what used to be called the “third world” fully subscribed to it and used the language of human rights and the rule of law against the European colonizer.
Western political societies had oddly misplaced scientific ambitions. They wanted their political values to be accepted universally, much like a scientific theory enjoys universal validity.
Western civilization was to be a civilization like no other. Properly speaking,
it was not to be a civilization at all but something closer to an operating system. It would not embody a rich tapestry of traditions and customs or pursue a religious doctrine or vision. Its principles were meant to be broad and formal, no more than an abstract framework within which different cultural possibilities could be explored.
By being rooted in tolerance and democracy, Western values were not to stand for one particular way of life against another. Tolerance and democracy do not tell you how to live — they establish procedures, according to which those big questions may later be decided.
The problem with Western universalism was twofold. First, Western values seemed to many people living in Asia or Africa as just one alternative among many. The promise that traditional ways of life could be preserved in a liberal society was a fatal conceit.
Were Turkey or China or Russia to import the whole set of Western values and rules, their societies would soon become replicas of the West and lose their cultural independence.
American political scientist Samuel Huntington started from this realization, arguing in one of the starkest passages of his book “The Clash of Civilizations” that “the concept of a universal civilization helps justify Western cultural dominance of other societies and the need for those societies to ape Western practices and institutions.” Universalism is the ideology of the West for confronting other cultures.
The return of the civilization-state poses a delicate problem for the West. Remember that to a great extent, Western societies have sacrificed their specific cultures for the sake of a universal project. One can no longer find the old tapestry of traditions and customs or a vision of the good life in these societies. Their values tell us what we can do but are silent on what we should do. And then there is this question, particularly acute in Europe: Now that we have sacrificed our own cultural traditions to create a universal framework for the whole planet, are we now supposed to be the only ones to adopt it?
There are those in Europe — the populists, to use a catchy term — who want to turn the clock back and recover the wholesome content of a traditional Christian society. But many more believe that the core of a modern, secular European civilization will remain valid even if the rest of the world takes a different path.
The European Union is in the process of being reconfigured as a civilization-state, a political entity aggregating all those who live by a specific value system and using political tools to protect European civilization from the attacks of its enemies. The universal framework of rules can be refurbished for a different purpose. Previously, it was meant to accept every world culture under its wings, but now it is the root of a specific way of life: uncommitted, free, detached, aesthetic. Liberated from its commitment to an increasingly abstract and rarefied framework of rules, European liberalism can focus on developing the concrete possibilities contained within itself. This is mainly work for artists, writers and technologists.
Europe may have been convinced that it was building a universal civilization. As it turned out, it was merely building its own.
https://www.noemamag.com/the-attack-of-the-civilization-state/
