Douthat cites an article by Bruno Maçães, a Portuguese politician, academic and author and formerly that country's secretary of state for European affairs, that expands on the idea of a civilization state with specific reference to China and India. Such states, he contends, see the preservation of cultural traditions as of paramount importance.
Similarly, for Russia, the goal is not world revolution or world conquest but civilizational self-containment, in Putin's words as expressed in his pre-war speech "our own history, culture and spiritual space" but with some erring children (e.g. Ukraine) dragged unwillingly back home.
An interesting, if abhorrent, notion. Its looking like Putin is prepared to destroy Ukraine to save it if that is what is required to bring it back into Greater Russia. No room, needless to say, for the Ukrainians to exercise a say on the matter.
Note: this article is behind the NYT paywall. If so inclined, you can do what I do and take out the introductory $1 a week offer for four weeks (but don't forget to cancel if you don't want to pay the higher price that cuts in).
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In this vision the future is neither liberal world-empire nor a renewed Cold War between competing universalisms. Rather it’s a world divided into some version of what Bruno Maçães has called “civilization-states,” culturally cohesive great powers that aspire, not to world domination, but to become universes unto themselves — each, perhaps, under its own nuclear umbrella.
This idea, redolent of Samuel P. Huntington’s arguments in “The Clash of Civilizations” a generation ago, clearly influences many of the world’s rising powers — from the Hindutva ideology of India’s Narendra Modi to the turn against cultural exchange and Western influence in Xi Jinping’s China. Maçães himself hopes a version of civilizationism will reanimate Europe, perhaps with Putin’s adventurism as a catalyst for stronger continental cohesion. And even within the United States you can see the resurgence of economic nationalism and the wars over national identity as a turn toward these kinds of civilizational concerns.
In this light, the invasion of Ukraine looks like civilizationism run amok, a bid to forge by force what the Russian nationalist writer Anatoly Karlin dubs “Russian world” — meaning “a largely self-contained technological civilization, complete with its own IT ecosystem … space program, and technological visions … stretching from Brest to Vladivostok.” The goal is not world revolution or world conquest, in other words, but civilizational self-containment — a unification of “our own history, culture and spiritual space,” as Putin put it in his war speech — with certain erring, straying children dragged unwillingly back home.