Is China the only civilisation state?
- As countries such as Turkey, India and Russia have laid claims to similar ideas, the notion may well serve as a model in international politics to explain rising competition between states in a multipolar world
China often complains about its lack of “discourse power” in international politics. But there is one crucial idea where it is taking a lead, and suddenly everyone seems to want to claim it as its own, even some Canadians. That’s the notion of a civilisation state as opposed to the modern nation state.
Okay, I exaggerate a bit about the Canadians, but not by much, as you will see.
Certainly, China has been most vocal in promoting such an idea of itself. It’s not just a communist state, but one based on a millennial civilisation founded on Confucianism. Other countries with grand ambitions on the world stage today are not far behind. Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to recall the glory of the Ottomans. Vladimir Putin’s Russia increasingly considers itself apart from the West. Rather it is the embodiment of an orthodox Christian civilisation that emerged from classical Byzantium.
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And India? As an op-ed in the Hindustan Times put it last year, “India is not a nation-state, or a state-nation. It is a civilisational-state.”
It says: “At present, most of the geographically contiguous parts of India are united under a single political authority and this political unification derives its justification from a shared civilisational heritage.
“And this political unity under a single state is what can be termed as a civilisational-state. A civilisational-state doesn’t just represent an ethnic or linguistic community or a single religious community, but a unique civilisation distinct from others.”
Meanwhile, right-wing thinkers and politicians in Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia want to create something called the CANZUK nations. As CANZUK International, an independent NGO puts it in its mission statement, the goal is to “facilitate migration, free trade and foreign policy coordination between Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom”.
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“Our campaign advocates closer cooperation between these four nations so they may build upon existing economic, diplomatic and institutional ties to forge a cohesive alliance of nation states with a truly global outlook,” it says.
British historian and Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts has gone beyond free trade and migration, to propose creating a “second Anglospheric superpower of CANZUK nations … a mutual defence organisation and combined military capabilities” that will be a close ally of the United States.
Even though the CANZUK proponents don’t necessarily see each country individually as a civilisation state, collectively, they are the heirs of Anglo-Saxon heritage and civilisation, or the English-speaking, white-peopled nations of the British Commonwealth.
But what, exactly, is a civilisation state? This is how Zhang Weiwei, a professor at Fudan University and the pre-eminent proponent of the idea, puts it.
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China’s rise is not just the rise of a modern nation state, which is a Western construction dating back to the Peace of Westphalia after the Thirty Years’ War, but one of civilisation. This means the Chinese state replicates an ancient millennial tradition and culture, an amalgam of the modern state and ancient civilisation, comprising, as it always has, “a super-large population, a super-vast territory, super-long traditions, and a super-rich culture”, but also a “unique language, unique politics, a unique society, and a unique economy”.
Zhang goes on to claim China is the only such state in the world today. Frankly, it’s hard to agree with him on this last assertion, both on practical and theoretical grounds. As a professor of international relations, he is well-versed in China’s growing relationships with Russia, Turkey and Iran, which has its own once glorious Persian empires. It may be off-putting to such potential allies for China to claim exclusivity to this notion of state.
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In any case, the attributes he cites to characterise a civilisation state seems to apply equally to those other countries.
And the notion also fits nicely with that once influential book by the late Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in which he lists the following civilisations: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Western, Latin American and “African (possibly)”, the last qualification is Huntington’s, which may be considered racist by some.
What international relations theorists in China should do is to promote the idea of the civilisation state as a value-neutral model to explain rising competition between states in a multipolar world. In doing so, they can certainly lay claims to leading a global discourse.
