Portugal once had an enormous Empire. There certainly was a Lusitanian civilization which enabled a Goan, a Macauan, to feel a connection with a Brazilian or an Angolan. In recent years Portuguese people are doing very well in the booming Angolan economy and I believe there was some migration to Brazil during the economic crisis. Portugal also belongs to European civilization within which it is a beautiful and distinctive culture. But it is itself civilizational in a non-European context.
Bruno Maçães, who was Portugal’s secretary of state for European affairs from 2013 to 2015, wrote an article published in Noema two years ago complaining that 'A world society seemed to be advancing. But then the civilization-state struck back'. In particular the Chinese and the Indians were saying that they were civilizational states. They did not accept the Wilsonian model or whatever shite it was that the West was supposed to be peddling. In any case, Portugal only cottoned on to that model in the Seventies. Intellectually speaking, it was more backward than India. It got rid of its monarchy in 1910, but its Liberals were the shittiest in the world. Salazar, a boring economist, kept that rotting corpse together but the Portuguese working class paid a terrible price. Since then, the place has come up very rapidly as you would expect from such a hardworking and enterprising people.
Macaes says that a few years back Chinese officials started saying to him that China was a civilization, not a nation. I suppose they meant that it was an Imperial civilization which would have tributary states and deal with the trade requests of suitably humble, barbarians in a centralized manner. This makes sense. Xi and Li had made it clear they didn't need the West any longer.
Macaes goes on to quote a senior BJP spokesman- i.e. somebody who doesn't count at all- to suggest something similar is happening in India. But Indian civilization was not Imperial. India doesn't want to annex Nepal or Sri Lanka. Once Modi is out of power, the BJP will be a 'States' Rights' Party just as Congress, in opposition, became.
The myth that China is destined to be assimilated to a Western model of political society is over. From now on, the Chinese would be treading their own “Sonderweg” — special path. Progress with Chinese characteristics.
The Communist Party controls China. What Chinese officials were saying was 'we may tolerate a different system in Taiwan but it is ours. Also, don't interfere in our relations with Korea, Vietnam, Burma etc.
As a civilization-state, China is organized around culture rather than politics.
Its civilization was Imperial and centralized. Politics was part and parcel of literary culture.
Linked to a civilization, the state has the paramount task of protecting a specific cultural tradition. Its reach encompasses all the regions where that culture is dominant.
Communist China scarcely fits that bill. The fact is Empires want strategically significant, economically or culturally valuable territories or trade routes. This does mean that there is a 'Great Game' over 'Zomias'- shatter zones for Empires- vast wildernesses whose tribes were perhaps constituted by those fleeing earlier Imperial overlords.
India is a different story. Civilization was decentralized and based on the coexistence of 'Margi' (high road 'Sanskrit' i.e. cultivated) civilization with a Desi (Regional & Prakrit 'natural') culture which was welcome to be as widely different as possible.
The importance of this concept became more obvious to me in India during a conversation with Ram Madhav, the general secretary of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. After a conference in Delhi, he explained: “From now on, Asia will rule the world, and that changes everything because in Asia, we have civilizations rather than nations.”
In other words, India would continue its policy of non-alignment. It didn't sign up on either side during either the Cold War or the War on Terror which succeeded it.
The shift now taking place is arguably deeper and more radical. By accusing Western political ideas of being a sham,
They were. It was already obvious that the War on Terror was revanchist. The West had no interest in building Democracy and supporting Human Rights and so forth in Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else.
When the 'War on Terror' failed it became obvious that the West had a Huntingtonian model of the world. They wanted to impose their values so that they could get richer and more powerful. Their Islamophobia was naked. Hindu India got the message. It started fighting back against anti-Hindu propaganda. The Chinese went the extra mile. Putin, on the other hand, appears to have fucked up. Still, the West finally gets what everybody has been saying to it for the last 200 hundred years- viz. it is a hypocritical cunt.
of masking their origin under the veneer of supposedly neutral principles, the defenders of the civilization-state are saying that the search for universal values is over, that all of us must accept that we speak only for ourselves and our societies.
Trump did that. Davos Man tried to pretend Xi could take his place. But that game was well and truly played out.
The world of the civilization-state is the natural political world. Think of how states are built and how they expand. If a state has developed a successful formula to organize social relations and collective power, it will tend to absorb its neighbors.
No. There can be decentralized coordination. For stochastic and game theoretic reasons this can be superior to centralization. After all, Europe did defeat Napoleon.
As it expands and concentrates new forms of wealth, social life will become increasingly complex. Myths will be created, the arts and sciences will prosper. Within its dominion, some possibilities will be opened while others are irredeemably closed. A way of life — a way to see the world and interpret the human condition — will develop. Outside the realm, other states will offer alternatives, but because these alternatives are in turn different ways to think and to live, states are coextensive with civilizations and subordinate to the civilizational form.
This is baloney. States have had and will have different types of social organization within their borders. The urban elite will live one way. The proles in a different way. In the forests and highlands, older ways of life will survive while the fertile areas may see great changes as a result of new technology and infrastructure.
Civilizations always maintained emporia cities which were multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. There will be a global knowledge elite of a commercial as well as a Jesuitical or diplomatic or military type.
The modern West broke with this mold.
Portugal didn't. It had a big Empire and a bit of cosmopolitan culture in a couple of cities, but its hinterland was stuck in medieval poverty. Salazar did eliminate rural illiteracy but conditions in the countryside were pretty dire. Hard work and freer markets enabled the Portuguese to rise quickly though the country remains too bureaucratic. What of its future? Will the EU hold together? Will migrants replace the Natives?
From the perspective of what had come before, 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.
No. The West accepted that economically backward regions might have to wait many decades before transitioning from monarchy to representative democracy. On the other hand, 'human rights' became a shibboleth.
In order to achieve this — we shall have occasion to doubt whether it was ever achieved — a monumental effort of abstraction and simplification was needed.
No. Some NGOs and bureaucrats of various sorts talked virtue signaling bollocks about human rights and democracy and the rights of women to fist themselves vigorously in the streets.
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.
I suppose this may be one way of describing what was happening in Brussels. But to Africans and Asians, Western Civilization was a fortress which spent a lot of money keeping out darker people more particularly if they were of a different Faith.
The author gasses on in this vein for several more paragraphs. Meanwhile, it appears that Europe is going to become not just 'Civilizational' but racially so. Like China, it will be expansionist at its borders and will seek to retain or impose unequal trade and other relationships. It may be that it is the people of Ukraine who will decide the fate of the 'Civilizational state'. If they win, perhaps the Chinese will leave Taiwan alone. They may rethink their 'Belt and Road' as potentially a means of ingress of Islamic and other immigrants. They may double down on overtaking the West in Science and Technology and, in the process, become identical to those parts of the West where Scientific progress is concentrated.
If the Ukrainians lose, Civilization of any sort will be fucked.
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