The irresistible rise of the civilisation-state

Western liberalism has no answer to assertive powers that take pride in their cultural roots

BY ARIS ROUSSINOS

In any case, even within the American empire, the collapse of US power abroad and the growing disfavour with which European civilisation is held in the United States itself do not bode well for the longterm survival of a coherent Western civilisation. If the West, like liberalism, is at this stage merely a justifying ideology for the American empire, then we will be forced to replace it with something else soon enough. It is precisely this problem of determining what that replacement will be that will define Britain and Europe’s politics for the rest of our lifetimes. Europe’s ageing liberal ideologues, the fading 1968 generation which has dominated our politics for so long, do not appear to have answers for these questions; indeed, they do not even seem to realise, even now, that these questions exist. 

It is only when we see Macron struggling to rally European civilisation for the coming age of empires, or observe European strongmen like Viktor Orban, hailed by many Anglo-Saxon conservatives as the saviour of Western civilisation, railing against the West with all the passion and fury of an anti-colonial revolutionary, that we see glimpses of a future stranger and more complex than our current political discourse allows. When we see Poland mandating the study of Latin in schools to imbue pupils with an understanding of “the Latin roots of our civilisation,” or the young rising star of the Dutch radical right Thierry Baudet asserting that we are living through a “European spring,” “contradictory to the political spectrum that has dominated the West since the French Revolution,” which will “change the direction that all our countries are going to take in the coming two generations,” we discern, just as we do in the BLM protests or the spread of the American social justice faith in our streets and universities, the political battlegrounds of Europe’s future.

The most perceptive critique of Huntington’s civilisational thesis was always that the bloodiest confrontations were within civilisations and not between them. In the new age of the civilisation-state, perhaps the greatest challenge to our social harmony will come not from the challengers beyond our cultural borders, but from the battle within them to define who and what they defend.

https://unherd.com/2020/08/the-irresistible-rise-of-the-civilisation-state/?=refinnar