The predominance of economics-speak — the habit of casting every discussion in terms of its financial or economic implications, as if nothing else mattered — forced the world’s focus onto the economic fallout of the trade and tariff wars launched by Donald Trump.
There has been less of a focus on the way Trump is leaning into civilisational war talk, of making civilisations great again by way of creating a plural sphereology, incorporating distant territories and locales into what the redoubtable Russian intellectual Alexander Dugin referred to as a “plurality of civilisational spaces,” a multipolarity that pits “civilisations” against one another.
This differs from the multipolarity that rests on existing or new multilateral institutions — held together by liberal internationalism with all its shortcomings — in the sense that it seeks to make one or another “civilisation” the dominant orb. In Dugin’s view the world is divided into competing civilisations — Atlanticist, led by the US, and Eurasianists, led by Russia.
By accident or design, Trump’s attempts to incorporate Canada and Greenland into the US is almost exactly what Dugin envisions. In Dugin’s mind — so it seems, anyway — the US is the leader of a putative Atlantic civilisation; the Atlantacist civilisation that runs from Greenland to the Panama Canal. The irony is not lost that Russians share values with the US.
Both countries consider themselves to be standard-bearers of some permutation of freedom. According to Dugin. the ethnic Russian people are the bearers of a unique civilisation and are a messianic people, possessing “universal, pan-human significance”. This has distinct parallels with America’s self-image as a “cause” and not a country.
This apparent battle for “civilisational supremacy” carries whispers of a civilisational war that has to do with the idea, or belief, that some civilisations are better than others, that they are more durable, and in need of restoration or making them great again.
We heard echoes of civilisational greatness in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s criticism of Iran, in Budapest on April 3. Unsurprisingly, Netanyahu was simply repeating the words of George W Bush who, when he launched the US attack on Afghanistan in 2001, said: “This is the world’s fight... This is civilisation’s fight... Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists”.
In 2003 Wilfried Martens, the Belgian former chair of the Christian Democratic alliance in the European parliament, explained his opposition to Turkey’s bid to become an EU member: “The European project,” he said, “is a civilisational project” so the inclusion of a large Muslim-majority country “is unacceptable”, Mertens said.
Further still, we may go to Thomas Mann (now feted by democrats in Germany) who wrote in the German Sonderweg tradition (a body of thought contending that Germany has followed a separate path to modernity) that German culture was superior to the French, American and British democratic polities and civilisations.
We pick up this talk of civilisational pre-eminence in the Chinese response to Trump’s trade war: “China has been here for 5,000 years. Most of the time, there was no US and we survived... China will fight to the very end in a trade war,” replied Victor Gao, vice-president of the Beijing-based Centre for China & Globalisation.
China has been described as a civilisation “pretending to be a state” by Andrei Tsygankov of San Francisco State University. India, too, has been described as a civilisation state making like a nation state.
It is into this debate, positioning and repositioning of “civilisations” that Trump has slipped. It is difficult to see how he will contend with China, which has been emboldened and regained the courage to build a future that draws on its civilisational foundations.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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