Is There A Single World?

Beyond the different languages human beings speak, there is a single world.

| Bruno Maçães, As Western Liberalism Declines, Civilization States Return

As so often happens, I stumbled upon an article that builds on a topic that I have been researching for some time. Jeff Sommer, of the New York Times, who focuses on investments and the economy, reviewed a new book by Edwar Prasad, a professor at Cornell. Ostensibly, the discussion was about why investors are unconcerned by the polycrisis roiling the world, but Prasad's book is really about the decline of the neoliberal, globalist economic order.

For the last few years, Professor Prasad has immersed himself in studying global danger. He has come out with an ambitious book that provides an up-to-date model for the toxic mix of economic, social and political disruption afflicting the world. The book is called “ The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling Into Disorder.” We chatted about these problems for a couple of hours recently. The book isn’t cheerful reading. We had a disturbing and mind-bending conversation.

[...]

A former International Monetary Fund official, Professor Prasad talked about the battered trend known as globalization. A system of free trade and commerce and global supply chains that knitted much of the world together, it lifted the status of desperately poor people in countries like India and China, but caused hardship in industrial regions of countries like France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan and the United States.

That already looks like the distant past. In no small part because of President Trump, Professor Prasad said, the system “is being shredded.” So are multilateral institutions that had worked to ensure some degree of world peace and stability. I would include the I.M.F., the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the United Nations in that list.

At the same time, he said, political turmoil in many countries is fueling a breakdown in global economic and political relations. For example, the Trump administration’s widening immigration crackdown, which has kindled domestic unrest, is often seen in other countries as an integral part of “America First” policies that are shattering illusions of global cohesion. And anti-immigrant sentiment is rife in other countries.

“This is all part of the doom loop,” he said.

China has seen extraordinary economic growth, which, on one hand, has been an enormous benefit to the millions raised out of rural poverty over the past decades, but destabilizes the status quo for the Western world, who have pursued a policy of globalist economic integration. Underlying that Western dream is the belief that free trade and global supply chains would lead to a universal rise of democracy and a worldwide liberal order. China – and to a similar extent India – have not played along, exactly.

But I think we need to look to other political theorists for a better understanding of what is happening, rather than viewing this through a narrow focus on investment and the economy.

In particular, I offer the work of Bruno Macães^[1], who I have quoted at the top of this post, and who has taken the concept of 'civilization states' from Samuel Huntington, and clarified it in his own work.

As he defines it:

What distinguishes a civilization state [from a nation state] is its ability to provide an overarching framework for social and political life and therefore a viable or plausible alternative to the liberalism of the West. The civilization state is a foundational concept reaching the deepest layer of collective existence. If Israel or India, for example, were to become civilization states, their animating mission would be to curate and develop the old and manifold Jewish and Hindu traditions. They would give life to a certain vision of the world and humanity. Civilization states, thus understood, might well have a territory and a people, but their center of gravity would lie in the way of life embodied in the state. The illusion of a homogeneous people inhabiting an ancestral land is not part of the logic of a civilization state.

Macães made the distinction between civilization and identity [emphasis mine]:

What Huntington and others — like Ross Douthat, who a few months ago penned a New York Times essay arguing that “yes, there is a clash of civilizations” — are unable to understand is that there is a difference between identity and civilization. Civilization needs to be distinguished from any notion of religious, ethnic or national identity. The former is an exercise in political reason, the effort to organize collective life around principles that express our fundamental relation to truth, to the world and to each other. Identity, as we shall see, is something peculiar to liberalism; it is the mutilated corpse of civilization. 

The rise of China – and Putin's efforts to enlarge his control of what he considers the 'Russian World' – are two of the most glaring example of civilization states challenging the neoliberal dream. And of course, Trump's trampling of the status quo ante in the US, and his efforts to undo the US role as a global hegemon through a rejection of the universalist post-WWII order might seem like an effort to announce the US as a civilization state. However, Trump's MAGA vision is merely a nationalist one, based on blood, soil, and religion. Trump's antics might precipitate the agglomeration of Europe nation states into a civilization state, so long as they retreat from the neoliberal, universalist order.

Macães, again:

But lately, doubts have been growing about whether it is really necessary to imitate Western nations in order to acquire all the benefits of modern society. There was a second difficulty: Western values and norms still needed to be interpreted and enforced, and the most powerful nations in the West had always arrogated that task to themselves.

Hence the friction over non-Western cultural practices – like centrally-controlled economic markets blocking Western business practices, women's rights, or religious intolerance.

Maçães quotes Samuel Huntington:

“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”.

'I believe Huntington was right, but only half right. […] If the West feels entitled to pursue its particular vision with all the tools of state power — in many cases, even military power — why should others refrain from doing the same? Why should they refrain from building a state around their own conception of the good life, a state with a whole civilization behind it?

Hence, Russia invades Ukraine to get its civilization back. (And don't forget Transnistria, Abkhazia, and Ossetia. What's next? Central Asia? Alaska?)

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.

And the paradox: the universal civilization dreamed up by the West has only attracted the Western nation-states.

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?

The populists like Trump and Orban – or maybe nativists is better – in Europe want to return to a pre-universalist past. Others, Maçães argues, want a secular, European civilization even if we are confronted on all sides by non-universalist civilization-states.

Europe may have been convinced that it was building a universal civilization. As it turned out, it was merely building its own.

The continent that hoped to move beyond the logic of civilization is very close to converting to it, as is America. When that happens, the triumph of the civilization-state will be complete.'

I would say 'the dark patterns of civilization', because not all of it is logic, like the deep incongruities in the failure of Europe to become a 'closer union' – note the departure of Britain – and the resurgence of borders in the Schengen zone, because of a perceived immigration crisis.

Returning to Jeffer Sommer's interview with Prasad,

In a review of “The Doom Loop,” The Economist praised the book’s sweeping analytical power but said it came up short on solutions. That was true of my conversation with Professor Prasad, as well, but I don’t fault him. Without major political shifts, it’s hard to see how to turn around the global situation. Ordinary people will need to try to protect themselves as institutions fray.

The rise of civilization states is a 'wicked problem' – there are no 'solutions', only innumerable causes, a constantly changing context, and without an 'answer'. As a result, we will find no protections for ourselves, as individuals, in the clash of civilizations.

1. Bruno Macães was Portugal’s secretary of state for European affairs from 2013 to 2015. He is now a non-resident senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is the author of “The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order” (2018) and “History Has Begun” (2020). ↩︎