Civilization-States Vs. Nation-States
The Failure of Enlightenment Universalism
I was very interested to see the article “The Attack Of The Civilization-State: A world society seemed to be advancing. But then the civilization-state struck back” by Bruno Maçães (formerly Portugal’s secretary of state for European affairs) about civilization-states. I had previously encountered the term “civilization-state” in a Martin Jacques article (A Point Of View: Is China more legitimate than the West?) for the BBC in 2012. I wrote about this in some brief comments on the article, and then again in Civilization-States and Their Attempted Extirpation.
As with the earlier BBC article by Martin Jacques, there is a lot here with which I agree, and a lot with which I do not agree. It is an interesting read, but it should be read with caution. Maçães points out China’s and India’s growing rejection of western political ideas, which are tied to the nation-state, but he doesn’t discuss the extent to which the liberal democratic nation-state of the west is itself in crisis and many within the west have recognized that the liberal world order will eventually have its reckoning. Of course, to do this would have required an essay of twice this length or more, so I can understand why Maçães didn’t do this. Also, it wouldn’t be so well received.
Maçães discusses western universalism and contrasts this to the implicit ethnocentrism of India and China, but he doesn’t note that western universalism is only as old as the Enlightenment. The nation-state system is a little older — dating to the early modern period, or about the same time as the scientific revolution, which is also older than Enlightenment universalism. So what is really going on here is the clash of the west’s Enlightenment ideology with the cultures and civilizations of Asia, where there was no indigenous scientific revolution, and no indigenous Enlightenment to grow out of the scientific revolution.
China and India can accept or reject the Enlightenment as they see fit; it is likely, as Maçães implies, that they will reject it. And Chinese and Indian civilization will be fine without the Enlightenment. What about the west? Where will western civilization and western nation-states be without the Enlightenment?
The tradition of western civilization is neither existentially dependent upon, nor is it summarized in, or exhausted by, the Enlightenment, which is only about as old as the United States, which is a relative newcomer to the political scene. Western civilization is much older than this, and has deep roots that tap into forces that have nothing to do with the Enlightenment, although these roots have been neglected since the Enlightenment, and sometimes, especially recently, openly attacked.
For the time being, China and India are content to work within the international nation-state system, as indeed the western nation-states do. Whatever their diplomatic rhetoric, neither India nor China has attempted to step outside the anarchic state system in any significant way. And when, in the fullness of time, the political machinations of our planet eventually consign the nation-state to the dustbin of history, Chinese civilization, Indian civilization, and western civilization will all likely still be there, acting through different political proxies, but still acting one way or another.
