The Evolution of Civilizationalism

In order to understand the civilizational turn, we need to look not only at the international political environment but also at domestic developments. Within the West and especially within Europe, the civilizational turn seems to be connected to a particular form of neoliberalism that seeks to “encase” the economy and protect it from democratic interference. As economic policy has been taken out of the space of democratic contestation in the last several decades, especially within the eurozone, political debate has shifted to cultural issues. Civilizationalism is a kind of identity politics produced by neoliberalism. 

In many non-Western countries, civilizational ideas have also become influential in the context of economic reform policies that opened up state-protected economies to the free flow of capital and market forces and drastically reworked the balance between public and private authority. Civilizationalism frequently serves as an idiom of legitimation for neoliberal reforms. For example, the Turkish state has used civilizational lessons about Ottoman practices of indigenous capitalism to justify neoliberal reforms while also championing civilization as a defense against the homogenizing effects of globalization. In China and India, civilizational assertions of power mirror the global aspirations of the new economic elites and middle classes and rationalize economic inequalities in terms of cultural reward. 

For all the differences among them, all cases of civilizationalism around the world are emerging in a context in which the distinction between authoritarianism and democracy is increasingly blurred. Both within the West and outside it, democracies are showing authoritarian tendencies—often referred to as “democratic backsliding”—and producing hybrid regimes. Conversely, even authoritarian states like China feel the need to draw on democratic rhetoric to legitimate themselves. This is why the concept of civilization is so useful to political elites as a source of legitimacy. 

Civilizationalism is not a phenomenon that should be identified exclusively with illiberal forces within and outside the West, as many seem to imagine. Rather, the global civilizational turn should be understood as a product of the way in which the boundaries between liberalism and illiberalism are becoming unclear as the center-right mainstreams and normalizes far-right ideas. If neoliberalism tends to produce identity politics, civilizationalism may be the form that this identity politics takes in a world in which international politics is increasingly being imagined as a competition between continent-sized powers.

- More Here