States-Civilisation

We come to a third concept, crucial for understanding the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world and the place of the BRICS countries in this process. We are talking about the concept of the civilisation-state. This idea has been formulated by Chinese scholars (in particular by Professor Zhang Weiwei [1]) and most often the concept of the civilisation-state is applied to modern China and then by analogy to Russia, India, etc. In the Russian context, a similar theory was put forward by the Eurasians, who proposed the concept of the Peace-State [2]. Actually, in that trend, Russia was understood as a civilisation, not just one of the countries, hence the main Eurasian concept - Russia-Eurasia.

In fact, Samuel Huntington had already suggested the shift to civilisation as a new theme in international relations in his insightful, if not prescient, article 'The Clash of Civilisations' [3]. The Anglo-Italian International Relations expert Fabio Petito [4] pointed out that relations between civilisations do not necessarily produce conflict, just as in the realist theory of International Relations a war is always possible between any nation-state (this derives from the definition of sovereignty) but far from always happens in practice. What matters is the shift in the theme of sovereignty, from the nation-state to civilisation. This is exactly what Huntington envisages.

The civilisation-state is defined through two negations:

• It’s not the same thing as the nation-state (in the realist theory of the ME), and
• It’s not the same thing as a world government uniting humanity (in the IR theory of liberalism).

It’s a middle ground: the civilisation-state can encompass different peoples (nations), confessions and even sub-states. But it never claims uniqueness and planetary reach. It is fundamentally large-scale and durable, regardless of changing ideologies, facades, cultures and formal boundaries. The civilised state can exist as a centralised empire, or as its echoes, remnants, fragments, capable under certain historical circumstances of reassembling into a single whole.

The nation-state emerged in Europe in modern times. The civilised state has existed since time immemorial. Huntington noted a new emergence of civilisation in a particular situation. In the second half of the 20th century, the nation-states initially merged into two ideological blocs, capitalist and socialist, and later, after the collapse of the USSR, the liberal order prevailed in the world (Fukuyama's End of History [5]). Huntington believed that unipolarism and the global victory of the liberal capitalist West was a short-term illusion. The global spread of liberalism can complete the decadence of nation states and abolish communist ideology, but it cannot replace deeper civilisational identities that have apparently long since disappeared. Gradually, it has been civilisations that have claimed to be the main actors in international politics - its subjects, but this implies conferring the status of 'politicisation', hence the concept of State-Civilisation.

There are forces and patterns at work in State-Civilisation that modern Western political science fails to grasp. They are not reducible to the structures of the nation-state and cannot be understood by macro- and micro-economic analysis. The terms 'dictatorship', 'democracy', 'authoritarianism', 'totalitarianism', 'social progress', 'human rights', etc. have no meaning here or require a fundamental translation. Civic identity, the state and social significance of culture, the weight of traditional values: all these aspects are deliberately discarded by modern political science and only come to light in the study of archaic societies. However, such societies are notoriously politically weak and serve as objects of research or modernisation. Civilisation-states have their own sovereign power, their own intellectual potential, their own form of self-consciousness. They are subjects, not objects, of study or of 'development aid' (i.e. of disguised colonialism), son merely reject the West as a universal model, but severely cut off the influence of Western soft power within their own borders. They extend their influence beyond national borders, not only defending but also counter-attacking, proposing their own integration theories and ambitious projects. Like the BRI or the Eurasian Economic Community, the SCO or the BRICS.

China is taken as an example of a state of civilisation for a reason. Its identity and power are the most illustrative. Contemporary Russia has come close to this status, and the special military operation in Ukraine, accompanied by its withdrawal from global networks, is evidence of this deep and powerful will. But while Russia and to a large extent China are successfully building their civilisation-states on direct confrontation with the West, India (especially under Modi's nationalist government) is trying to achieve the same result by relying on the West, and many Islamic countries aiming at the same goal (especially Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, etc.) are combining both strategies - confrontation (Iran) and alliance (Turkey). But everywhere they are moving towards one thing: the establishment of a civilised state.

The Second World as the new universal ME paradigm

Now let us put these concepts together. We have a conceptual series:

second world - semi-periphery - state-civilisation

"Second World" is a definition that emphasises the intermediate character of countries that today opt for multipolarism and reject unipolarism and globalism, i.e. the hegemony of the "first world". In terms of level of economic development and degree of modernisation, the 'second world' corresponds to the semi-periphery of the world system theory. However, unlike Wallerstein, this semi-periphery does not recognise the inevitability of the split into an elite integrated into world globalism and a feral, archaic mass, but affirms the identity and unity of the society that shares a single identity, both above and below.

The poles of the 'second world' (the semi-periphery) are the states of civilisation - both real (China, Russia) and potential (Islamic world, Latin America, Africa).

Armed with this apparatus, we can now better understand the BRICS. So far it is a rather conventional alliance, or rather a club of civilisation-states (explicit and implicit), representing the 'second world' and fulfilling the basic criteria of the semi-periphery. However, this club is in an exceptional situation in the present context: the 20th century has seen a significant erosion of the sovereignty of nation-states, which have lost much of their content due to the over-formalisation of their status within the United Nations and their division into ideological camps. In a bipolar system, sovereignty was almost taken for granted in favour of the two main decision-making centres - Washington and Moscow. It was these poles that were absolutely sovereign, and all other nation-states only partially and relatively. The end of the USSR and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact did not lead to a new consolidation of the nation-states, but temporarily cemented the unipolar world, which in the course of globalisation tried to insist that only Washington and the Western liberal system of values and rules henceforth had sovereignty on a universal scale.

The next logical step would have been the declaration of a world government, as called for by Fukuyama, Soros and Schwab, the founder of the Davos Forum. But this process has been derailed, both by internal contradictions and - most importantly! - the direct rebellion of Russia and China against established unipolarism. It was thus the 'second world', the semi-periphery and the civilised states that challenged globalism and prepared for its collapse, and what appeared to be a temporary and transitory phenomenon - the semi-periphery, the BRICS - turned out to be something much bigger. This set the stage for a multipolar world in which the 'second world', the semi-periphery and civilisation-states became the main trend-setters in world politics, going far beyond the status that Western-centric theories of international relations, including the Trotskyist version of Marxism (Wallerstein) prescribed for them.

The state-civilisation thesis, if supported by the members of the multipolar club, i.e. the 'second world' (primarily the BRICS countries), would mean a complete restructuring of the entire world picture.

The West, the 'first world', the core, will be transformed from a global to a regional centre. From now on, it will no longer be the measure of things, but one of the States-Civilisations, or even two: North America and Europe. But beyond them, there will be equivalent States-Civilisations - China, Russia, India, the Islamic world, Latin America, Africa, etc. - quite competitive and of equal value in every sense. Nothing in them will be future or past, but all will become zones of present and free choice.

This is the future, but already now it is clear that when the potentials of the two civilisation-states are added together, their combined potential is able to balance the West on the main parameters, which already makes it relative and reduces its global claims to fairly defined regional boundaries. It is the definition of these new boundaries of the West, which is ceasing to be a global phenomenon and transforming itself into a regional power (from a world government and core to a Western state-civilisation), that is determining Russia's military operation in Ukraine and the likely establishment of direct Chinese control over Taiwan.

Change in the world order often (but not always) occurs through wars, including world wars. The construction of a multipolar world will, alas, take place through wars. If wars as such cannot be avoided, it is possible to deliberately limit their scope, determine their rules and establish their laws. To do so, however, it is necessary to recognise the logic on which multipolarism is based and, consequently, to examine the conceptual and theoretical foundations of a multipolar world.

Notes

[1] Zhang Weiwei. The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2012.
[2] Основы евразийства. М.: Партия «Евразия», 2002.
[3] Huntington S. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
[4] Petito F., Michael M.S. (ed.), Civilizational Dialogue and World Order: The Other Politics of Cultures, Religions, and Civilizations in International Relations (Culture and Religion in International Relations). London:  Palgrave Macmillan,  2009.
[5]Fukuyama F.  The End of History and the Last Man. NY: Free Press, 1992.