Ukrainians are fighting to preserve Ukraine as a nation, while Vladimir Putin openly argues that Russia cannot survive if Ukraine survives. Above the dynamic of the war, both nations are slowly gravitating to their own civilizational worlds, rooted in widely divergent histories and feelings and culminating in different political theories. In Russia, the living legacy of imperial power is bringing it closer to China, while in Ukraine, the ideal of Cossack freedom and independence (the name “Cossack” means “free man” or “adventurer”) may soon return to its rightful place as part of the European political tradition. 

It is no coincidence, as the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko has argued, that modern Ukrainian literature begins with Ivan Kotliarevsky, whose poem “Eneida,” a parody of Virgil’s “Aeneid” written in vernacular Ukrainian, presents Aeneas and his Trojan fellows as Ukrainian Cossacks, thereby anchoring Ukrainian history in a founding Roman myth. 

In the 16th century, Ukrainian Cossacks achieved certain rights and freedoms from various Eastern European rulers, paralleling the way Western European nobles placed limits on monarchical power. And as the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov likes to point out, the Cossack tradition of electing hetmans (military commanders) accustomed Ukrainians to the idea that they chose their leaders. In Russia, on the other hand, people believed the tsars were a gift from God. 

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. 

What distinguishes a civilization 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. 

The very word “civilization” was meant to express the state of political or social existence — as opposed to life in a more primitive or natural condition — and, later, the philosophical concept denoted the principles providing a foundation for collective life. But civilization in this sense came under attack with the ascent of liberalism. One could argue that liberalism was conceived as an alternative to the civilization state, in which politics was permanently rooted in an exclusive or particular outlook. Liberalism denounced life in a civilization state as constricted and impoverished. After all, if the state is organized around a certain outlook, it must exclude every possible alternative. 

Liberals dreamed of a different kind of state, one admitting of endless possibilities. The advantage of the liberal state would be twofold. It promised to expand the wealth of individual experience: Each person could experiment with many different “designs for living” and learn about many opposite and contradictory systems of thought, as well as practical ideals. Meanwhile, a state recognizing all alternative worldviews might be expected to put an end to civil strife by fully embracing everyone living within its borders, irrespective of personal religion or philosophy. 

The selling proposition was simple: In a liberal state, everyone could be Christian, but the state itself would adopt no religion, and thus everyone could just as well be Muslim or Hindu. The laws and principles around which political power would be organized would remain neutral or empty. They would not represent any theory of the world or human life. In brief, they would not embody a civilization. They would be natural, naked, even uncivilized. That was the bold but also odd ambition of Western liberalism. 

Liberals wanted their political values to be accepted universally, much like a scientific theory enjoys universal validity. In order to achieve this, a monumental effort of abstraction and simplification was needed, similar to Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein abstracting from previous physical theories a more formal system of relations. Western civilization stopped being a civilization, or at least it stopped seeing itself as a civilization. It would not embody a rich tapestry of traditions, ways of looking and seeing, and it renounced the classical aspiration to pursue a philosophical or religious vision. Its principles were meant to be broad and formal, no more than an abstract framework of relations. 

It was a misplaced ambition; it could never succeed. The failure of the liberal program reveals that politics is not a science, nor can it ever become a science. Neutrality sounded good in theory. But human life takes place on a limited timescale, during which we are fated to place our bets on certain specific understandings of the world. Truth across time and space does not operate in this realm. 

The world we live in today — a world of hundreds of nation-states defined by political boundaries, pitted against each other and often reliant on violent ideologies of supremacy and dominance — is the product, or rather the excrescence, of liberal universalism. 

You might be able to argue that in the beginning, in the 19th century, nationalism was a tool used to dethrone the old monarchies or churches. But in time, it became clear that the national state would never give way to the liberal state. Liberalism wanted to build a lasting edifice of reason and logic, but it turned out to be incapable of reaching large areas of collective existence. It remained, to a considerable extent, powerless over the brute facts of social life to which no reasoning could be applied — nationalism, fascism, and religious and racial bigotry being just a few examples. 

These elements of political life not assimilated into liberal theory were naturally relegated to an irrational core of feeling or tradition, varying from political unit to political unit. The civilization state can interpret these elements on a higher plane, like so many outlooks on political and social life. The civilization state is built on ideas, not “blood and soil.” 

There is an argument that the return of the civilization state was prepared by Jewish thinkers in the 19th century. Leo Strauss and others learned to doubt the promise of liberalism in the school of Zionism. The liberal state failed to ensure the safety and dignity of European Jews. It failed to ensure their physical survival, but it also seemed incapable of delivering on its promise that Jews could be fully themselves in a liberal society, free of the fear of making themselves different. We can detect in these 19th-century debates the germ of the idea of Israel as a civilization state, even if Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, remained a very imperfect guide. 

As Jewish religious conservatives will readily point out, there is no reason why the Jewish tradition should be made to fit within liberalism rather than the other way around. After all, Judaism is thousands of years old, while liberalism dates back at most two or three centuries. It is an argument often made in India as well. And it is an argument to be taken seriously. 

At the very least, we should urgently disabuse ourselves of the notion that every political value belongs to the liberal tradition, with every rival tradition being the exclusive precinct of value negation. Judaism and Hinduism have, for thousands of years, developed their own ways of dealing with diversity and social conflict. It beggars belief that nothing on these matters can be learned from those traditions, or that we had to wait for the Western value of tolerance to finally see the light. 

In Israel or India today, the main challenge and task is to turn the revolt against liberalism into a civilizational rather than a national project. The great Hindu monk and philosopher Swami Vivekananda once said that Emperor Akbar, the third Mughal emperor, could be regarded as “practically a Hindu.” He was obviously a Muslim, but the broad spiritual and political order he stood for embodied the principles of the Hindu tradition and the continuity of the Hindu ideal. It is conceivable that a Muslim could live in a Hindu civilization state, just as a Hindu can live in a Muslim civilization state, provided we keep the distinction between a civilization state and a nation-state clear in our minds. 

Civilization is not identity. There are areas of contact between different civilizations. The Hindu civilization state received a strong influence from the Islamic tradition, and Muslims living in India were themselves different from Muslims in Arabia or Africa. Closer to our time, the Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam might perhaps be regarded as a Hindu Muslim. Born in 1899, Nazrul remained a Muslim all through his life, but in many respects, he was able to transcend theology in the direction of a more complex vision. He used Arabic and Persian words in his poetry, but they intermingled with Bangladeshi and Sanskrit. Beyond the different languages human beings speak, there is a single world. 

A civilization state is rooted in a fully developed political philosophy rather than a racial or national identity. To the extent that a civilization state expresses a theory of how best to organize political society, it tends to transcend religious belief in the direction of rational thought. But as opposed to liberalism, the civilization state refrains from expressing a final truth. It develops in time, both in dialogue with its own contradictions and as part and parcel of larger historical processes, including contact and exchange with rival civilizations. The contemporary Chinese civilization state differs markedly from its predecessors, even if certain lines of continuity can naturally be found. 

Why does Huntington neglect the full character of civilizations? In the most immediate respect, because he considers them well after their prime, surviving as no more than cultural expressions. This predicament is made much worse under liberalism, and Huntington is still writing from the point of view of liberal hegemony. In a liberal society, different cultures are downgraded to the status of anodyne expression, mostly present in the cheerful celebration of exotic cuisines or national costumes. It is this decayed meaning of civilization that Huntington takes up. 

In world politics, there is less a clash than a meeting of civilizations. It is natural for particular civilizations to acquire universal ambitions. They may expand and conquer. They often go to war against rival worldviews. But they also change, as each particular civilization is necessarily forced to confront alternatives and to respond to the challenges they pose. 

Before liberalism, the world system tended to be governed by fragile understandings, areas of overlap between rival civilizations. Shared principles — not universal principles — provided common ground. Those practices of cultural exchange that propitiated the development of shared ideas were immensely valuable. Today, different identities are exclusive. They are defined against each other and no dialogue between them is conceivable. 

That a civilization could become universal was something believers or fanatics might entertain, but men and women of genuine understanding knew that every civilization must develop in depth and would in fact disintegrate if it attempted to expand to a universal common denominator. In a world of civilization states, the ruling global principle is something akin to balance of power. 

Another misunderstanding about the civilization state is the notion that a civilization state exists and can exist only outside the West. Perhaps China and India and Turkey will return to the old concept of civilization, but liberalism will continue to live and even thrive in the geography or geographies where it originated. According to this view, the contest of the future is one between Western liberalism and the civilization state. 

I find the suggestion implausible. Both the formal logic and practical appeal of liberalism resulted from its universality. Once liberalism becomes a provincial affair, it is no longer liberalism. Inevitably, it evolves into its own version of a civilization state. 

Today, every European politician with continental ambitions likes to speak about European values and is not shy about proclaiming that Europe is the best place in the world. These are civilizational ideas. European values are no doubt connected to the liberal legacy, but they return us to its civilizational core. They are rooted in an exclusive theory of the world and political life, brimming with intellectual and moral content, sharply distinguished from rival theories. 

When Europeans talk about the sacred role of rules in political and social life, these are specific ideals, whose validity is subject to permanent contestation and whose appeal is both of a philosophical and personal nature. They help make sense of the natural world and provide guidance in all matters of daily life.

Above all, they are one way among many of making sense of the world and may look strange or perhaps incomprehensible to an Indian or Chinese — maybe even to an American, at least of the kind who has broken away from the core elements of European civilization. 

If one tries to speculate on what European civilization might become after it too loses faith in universal liberalism, the most plausible answer is that a new civilization will be built on those elements of the European tradition least opposed to liberalism and therefore better able to survive the age of liberal triumph more or less undamaged. Civilization states evolve in time, and that evolution is not free from path dependence. The concept of the rule of law was developed in some form by the Romans. Some have argued that liberal neutrality is best understood as an extreme variant of the rule of law. The variant may once again be replaced with the original. Christianity, for so long the main foe of liberals, is naturally a less viable candidate to be the basis of a renewed European civilization. 

The European Union is perhaps the best example today of the rich dynamics internal to a civilization state. On the one hand, it was directly created as a response to European nationalism, an attempt to move beyond national identity toward something closer to political reason. At first, this new form of political reason was identified with universal liberalism, but it soon became evident that no political unit can be based on strictly universal principles. 

It is hardly surprising that, for a number of years, the EU has been stressing its particular nature: European — not universal — values now provide the glue for the difficult task of bringing more than two dozen countries together, possibly including Ukraine. 

The result is a third way, different from both nationalism and liberalism. Organized around a set of principles, the EU no longer regards them as universal. European values are the European adventure: a special path chosen in the knowledge that other alternatives are available but guided by the image of a distinctive and flourishing civilization. 

Thomas Mann wrote during the darkest hour of World War II that the conflict was ultimately between the dynamics of nature, of instinct, of blood, of the unconscious — the primitive spontaneity of life on one side, pitted against reason and civilization on the other. If Russia today represents the rule of instinct and unreason, Ukraine is the affirmation of light and progress. 

No city in the world today represents as well as Kyiv the permanent but fragile attempt to place human reason in charge of human circumstance. Long ago, Paris may have evoked the same feelings and aspirations. Today it is Kyiv that best preserves the European legacy of revolution, the collective effort to build a new future. It is up to us to rise from the primitive unconscious of blood and nation to the future civilization state.

The post As Western Liberalism Declines, Civilization States Return appeared first on NOEMA.

There is a passage in “How to Be an Antiracist,” the enormously popular polemic by Ibram X. Kendi, that strikes me as simultaneously absurd and illuminating. Kendi argues that race is a human invention, not something given by nature. He wants no ambiguity on this matter.

Kendi’s argument is not that human beings tend to interpret their own ideas and creations as facts of nature or that human societies weave powerful fictions to support their power structures. He thinks that race was invented at a specific moment in history by specific individuals. One day, people went about their lives not knowing what it meant to be Black or white. The next, they had been subsumed under those categories, which they had little choice but to adopt.

The historical character Kendi credits with the invention of race — much like one would credit Johannes Gutenberg with the invention of the printing press — is the Portuguese prince known as Henry the Navigator. “Until his death in 1460,” Kendi writes, “Prince Henry sponsored Atlantic voyages to West Africa by the Portuguese, [designed] to circumvent Islamic traders” and build a new trade monopoly.

But Henry never left Portugal, and therefore his historical achievement is less as an explorer than as “the first character in the history of racist power.” Kendi has so little tolerance for the prince’s achievements that he changed his own middle name from Henry to Xolani, meaning peace — the very peace destroyed by Prince Henry.

As the Portuguese started to trade in African slaves, Henry and the coterie of intellectuals around him needed to create new racist ideas to justify the practice. “Once a race has been created,” Kendi writes, “it must be filled in … with negative qualities.” Blacks were lost, living “like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings,” the royal chronicler Gomes de Zurara wrote. Kendi goes so far as to argue that race as we know it today was invented on a specific day in 1444 when Prince Henry organized his first slave auction in Lagos, today a boisterous beach town in southern Portugal.

None of this bears the slightest scrutiny. Race — including skin color — is copiously discussed by Greek and Roman historians, and similar inquiries are present in the intellectual traditions of other civilizations such as China and India. When people like Zurara were forced to address the question, they turned to older authorities and added very little. Later, of course, Europeans would fundamentally change our understanding of race, which had to be adapted to the rise of the life sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

And yet, for all that, Kendi seems to me to be capturing something important about how Americans view race. He is on to something. While Europeans have changed their understanding of race to follow the latest scientific theories, Americans have always regarded race as something made up, a “cunning invention.” Race in America is a fun house of mirrors — not something that can be addressed by just reasonably looking at the facts.

James Baldwin writes in one of his most astounding essays — Norman Podhoretz called it a “statement of overwhelming persuasiveness and prophetic magnificence” — that “most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color.” While the shared humanity is only a distant possibility — one hopes it will be understood and human beings can at least look at each other as equals — the color is present with the harsh reality of a threat. The color is more real and more immediate.

In the beginning, Baldwin explains, a Negro — I will use for now the word Baldwin and his contemporaries used — “cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do. … [W]hen he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done … it’s not hard for him to think of white people as devils.”

Baldwin is too much of a philosopher not to want to investigate how such evil entered the world. The answer he gave is still capable of surprising us.

“White Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. … The stratagems that white Americans have used and use to deny him his humanity” are the stratagems they use to deny the fact of reality, “the fact that life is tragic … that birth, struggle and death are constant.” In the Negro, they built an image of fallen humanity: They projected all the pain and misery and passion they feared in themselves upon an alien creature, hoping that, in the process, they would emerge as something more than human.

Let us put it bluntly, as Baldwin would have insisted we do: Race for white Americans was originally conceived as an amusement park built for the satisfaction of a rowdy fantasy life. During slavery, Black Americans performed many roles. They made possible the dream of a life without toil and, later, the dream of a life without menial jobs.

Today, as we shall see, a replacement is being pursued in the image of an intelligent robot. When so desired, slaves could play the role of sexual objects. “Blacks got here nearly as naked as the day they were born,” Baldwin wrote in “The Devil Finds Work,” “and were sold that way, every inch of their anatomy exposed and examined, teeth to testicles, breast to bottom … here, it is certainly how mulattoes were born.” As Isabel Wilkerson painfully writes in her recent book, “Caste,” “lynchings were part carnival, part torture chamber, and attracted thousands of onlookers who collectively became accomplices to public sadism.” The journalist H.L. Mencken observed in 1917 that lynchings were a local show that took “the place of the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra and other diversions.”

It was no coincidence that the only job beyond the plow and the kitchen that the American racial system encouraged was that of entertainment. “It was in keeping,” Wilkerson writes, “with caste notions of their performing for the pleasure of the dominant caste.”

More fundamentally, Black Americans offered everyone a way to make sense of the world. Baldwin is interested in the ways in which the presence of the Negro can reconcile one with the harshness of the human condition. Whites in the Deep South were raised to understand that it didn’t matter if their lives were awful; there was always the consolation that “at least they are not Black.”

For Baldwin, this was how America was made to work. Immigrants just off the boat would reconcile themselves to the misery of their condition — there was no communism in America, after all — by reminding themselves that at least they were not Black. “The Irish middle passage, for but one example, was as foul as my own, and as dishonorable on the part of those responsible for it. But the Irish became white when they got here and began rising in the world, whereas I became Black and began sinking.”

It is useful to think of the problem in terms of the categories of the television series Westworld, whose storyline is, among other things, a nearly explicit reflection on race in America. Guests arrive in the park in search of extreme experiences. Most of the appeal, of course, lies in being able to deal with the park robots, who are indistinguishable from human beings, as objects, knowing that they cannot fight back.

Many of the initial episodes show us how the human guests are profoundly corrupted by the experience. Absolute power seems to bring out the truth about each person, and the truth in most cases is not pretty. The series traces the violent rebellion conducted by the park robots as they try to break out of the fantasy. The echoes of slavery are obvious. 

As a tool for turning human beings into objects, racism lives a double life. For the slaveholder, it offered a tool akin to virtual reality, a way to fulfill the darkest and most impermissible fantasies in relative safety. For the slaves, this imaginary world was their reality, as real as the fact of death. As the novelist Ralph Ellison once put it, “In our society, it is not unusual for a Negro to experience a sensation that he does not exist in the real world at all. He seems rather to exist in the nightmarish fantasy of the white American mind as a phantom that the white mind seeks unceasingly, by means both crude and subtle, to lay.”

Ellison dramatized these experiences in the famous “battle royal” scene in his book “Invisible Man.” The Black narrator and some of his Black classmates don boxing gloves and enter the ring. A naked, blonde, white woman with an American flag painted on her stomach parades about. White men then blindfold the youths and order them to pummel one another viciously. 

When Robert Ford, creator and designer of Westworld, sets the robots free at the end of the first season, he is revealed as Abraham Lincoln, “with the bullet in the back of his head to prove it,” as Aaron Bady put it in The New Yorker. But the struggle does not end there. Many of the robots are left still playing out their assigned scripts, unable to break free. The fantasy is the role assignment; in other words, the fantasy is race itself. In order to break free, it is necessary to reinvent freedom from the ground up.

As Kendi argues, “Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways.” We built a world around race. If we now conclude race is not real, then that world cannot be left standing. That world is not real either.

The language of color blindness is not helpful here. Color blindness may well be enough to undermine the science of racism, but if racists are playing a game where they expect to fulfill their personal fantasies, then denying race as a natural fact is perfectly compatible with the persistence of race as an invention powerful enough to shape the way we act and live.

In fact, where race is a fantasy played out in real life, the temptation is to deny its existence, if only in order to create a more perfect illusion. Though she would certainly deny endorsing any kind of racial ideas, when Amy Cooper threatened a Black birdwatcher in Central Park earlier this year, she quickly revealed the secret that the world they both inhabit is not neutral ground but a projection of her secret desires for power and safety. If life is a game, she is the hacker cheating the algorithm to gain an advantage. If it is a simulation, she is the one able to step outside and change the program. As for the birdwatcher, Christian Cooper, the streets transform every ordinary day into a series of traps, and every mistake risks a painful setback.

At this point, it is crucial we understand that if racism is a fantasy — the cruelest and most inhuman of fantasies — then one of its main goals is to disguise the fact that it is a fantasy at all. A moment like that between Amy and Christian functions as a sudden glitch in the smooth operation of the game.

In the past, racism was obscured by appealing to the facts of biology. The notion of race as something given by nature was meant to justify and excuse racial hierarchy. Today, subtler methods are still widely used. As Kendi puts it in a section of his book dedicated to standardized tests, those who can afford preparation courses and private tutors are not taught how to think better or how to be smarter. The tutors simply teach their students how to take the test.

“The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised,” Kendi writes. “My classmates and I would get higher scores — 200 points, as promised — than poorer students, who might be equivalent in intellectual strength but did not have the resources or, in some cases, even the awareness to acquire better form through high-priced prep courses. Because of the way the human mind works” — remember, this is a game of fantasy — “those of us who prepped for the test would score higher and then walk into better opportunities thinking it was all about us.”

Every fantasy aspires to become so real that it no longer feels like a fantasy. The experience is so complete that “ideally the frame falls away and the player truly believes that he or she is part of this imaginary world,” as the game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman put it. If racism transforms the fantasy into reality, the goal of an antiracist conscience and of every antiracist act must be to reveal the real world around us as no more than a fantasy. There is nothing wrong with a fantasy life, of course, but it cannot be imposed on others as something real, something from which there is no escape. Never get caught in the dreams of others.

The post Race In America:<br> A Cunning Invention appeared first on NOEMA.

Three or four years ago, as I drove around Beijing visiting officials and intellectuals, I kept hearing the same message. In my experience, the only moment when a Chinese intellectual or official should be taken literally is when he or she is walking a guest to the car. With no one around and no time to add any commentary, a single sentence can speak volumes. And the sentence I was hearing was this: “Always remember that China is a civilization rather than a nation-state.”

This is not a new idea — far from it. Nor is it a Chinese idea. But having received official sanction, the concept was being used to convey an important and often ignored message: 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.

As a civilization state, China is organized around culture rather than politics. 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.

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.”

The exact nature of those changes was left unsaid. One immediate implication is the role of the diaspora. The new India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be tightening ties with the large Indian diaspora in the Americas, Great Britain and the Gulf, among other places. Why not claim V.S. Naipaul as an Indian writer, for example? Naipaul was born in Trinidad and Tobago, went to Oxford and lived most of his life in London. But so what — he expresses the Indian civilization’s ways of feeling and thinking.

For a civilization state, cultural ties are potentially more important than the mere legal status of citizenship. As India’s recent Citizenship Amendment Act exemplifies, culture may even determine who can acquire Indian citizenship. The bill fast-tracks citizenship for immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan — but not if they are Muslim. This is in line with what the ruling ideology in the country increasingly suggests: While you do not have to be Hindu to be an Indian, you do need to know, respect and perhaps even admire the Hindu way.

By affirming that India is a civilization, the Modi administration is consigning the opposition — the Indian National Congress — to the perilous role of a Westernizing force intent on measuring Indian success by the yardstick of a foreign system. The ideas that Congress had presented as too obvious to need much defense — secularism and cosmopolitanism — are seen as cultural imports from which India has to free itself. Naipaul had spoken of India as a wounded civilization, and he may have had a point, but contemporary India is a wounded civilization reasserting itself. Nation-states are a Western invention, naturally vulnerable to Western influence. Civilizations are an alternative to the West.

The BJP’s strong victory in India’s 2019 election, where it captured more than 300 further seats in the lower house of Parliament, shows how powerful that attitude turned out to be. As the political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta put it, Modi was able to convince voters that they should rise against a power structure that is essentially made up of Anglicized elites and that a Western philosophy of tolerance had become a symbol and a practice of contempt for Hinduism. There was a time when that liberal philosophy was taken seriously almost everywhere. Many of the independence movements in what used to be called the “third world” fully subscribed to it and used the language of human rights and the rule of law against the European colonizer.

The shift now taking place is arguably deeper and more radical. By accusing Western political ideas of being a sham, 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.

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. 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.

The modern West broke with this mold. 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. 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.

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.

Since that is the very definition of a civilization state — to promote and defend one way of life against all alternatives — modern Western political societies had to invent a new political form. The values being defended were meant to become universal, but in practice, the idea of a world-state was never very popular. After all, these universal values were sufficiently universal to leave ample room for differences of implementation. And they were so abstract that many questions were left open, needing to be decided in different ways according to local circumstances.

The concept of a nation-state allowed for some level of diversity, but universal values were still meant to provide the constitutional framework under which each individual nation ruled itself. These universal values stood for the negation of the civilization state and affirmed the freedom to experiment with different ways of life. But if widely accepted, they could help build global institutions and rules, reducing the likelihood of state conflict. Over the last few decades, a world-state remained a utopia, but a world society seemed to advance.

But then the civilization state struck back. The problem with Western universalism was twofold. First, Western values seemed to many people living in Asia or Africa as just one alternative among many. The promise that traditional ways of life could be preserved in a liberal society was a fatal conceit. Were Turkey or China or Russia to import the whole set of Western values and rules, their societies would soon become replicas of the West and lose their cultural independence. While this process was seen as the necessary price of becoming modern, cultural assimilation kept its prestige. 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.

It is remarkable, when one thinks about it, that every controversial issue being decided in a successful democracy such as India should be subject to a final determination of its legitimacy by Western political and intellectual authorities. No one seems to take seriously the possibility that an editorial in The Hindu could settle the issue, but the leading newspapers in New York, Washington or London gladly take up the task. Cultural assimilation meant political dependence.

If, to all appearances, we have returned to a world of civilization states, the root cause is the collapse of the concept of a world civilization. American political scientist Samuel Huntington started from this realization, arguing in one of the starkest passages of his book “The Clash of Civilizations” that “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.” Universalism is the ideology of the West for confronting other cultures. Naturally, everyone outside the West, Huntington argued, should see the idea of one world as a threat.

I believe Huntington was right, but only half right. It is true that people in Russia, China, India and many other countries increasingly see the concept of Western civilization through a different prism, as one civilization among many, with no particular claim to universality. That in itself is a mere intellectual determination. What follows is more consequential: 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? Their ambitions were more modest in any event — they were meant to be one alternative among many.

What Huntington failed to see was that the Western conceit of a world civilization has not simply disappeared. We have not returned to the world of the Hapsburgs, Ottomans and Mughals — not even in the garb of a televised Game of Thrones. Ours is a thoroughly modern and technological world, where distance is no longer sufficient to keep civilizations apart, and where borders are a shadow of their former selves. In this world, different civilizations are universal in practice if not in aspiration; they may well compete for global power, but they all belong to a common, increasingly integrated political and economic landscape.

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. One can no longer find the old tapestry of traditions and customs or a vision of the good life in these societies. Their values tell us what we can do but are silent on what we should do. And then there is this question, particularly acute in Europe: 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?

Responses vary. There are those in Europe — the populists, to use a catchy term — who want to turn the clock back and recover the wholesome content of a traditional Christian society. But many more believe that the core of a modern, secular European civilization will remain valid even if the rest of the world takes a different path. The European Union is in the process of being reconfigured as a civilization state, a political entity aggregating all those who live by a specific value system and using political tools to protect European civilization from the attacks of its enemies. The universal framework of rules can be refurbished for a different purpose. Previously, it was meant to accept every world culture under its wings, but now it is the root of a specific way of life: uncommitted, free, detached, aesthetic. Liberated from its commitment to an increasingly abstract and rarefied framework of rules, European liberalism can focus on developing the concrete possibilities contained within itself. This is mainly work for artists, writers and technologists.

Europe may have been convinced that it was building a universal civilization. As it turned out, it was merely building its own. The recognition of this fact will be difficult and painful, but it seems inevitable. I first noticed this transformation when European politicians started to claim that Europe is the best place in the world to live in. Rather than defending universal values such as democracy or human rights, they increasingly defend one way of life against every alternative — a competition with winners and losers. 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.

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