Last week in this space, I argued that the idea of the Westphalian nation-state is an insufficient way of thinking about Putin’s Russia. I used the term “civilization-state,” coined by Martin Jacques, to describe the Russian president’s understanding of his own country. A civilization-state is a polity whose collective self-consciousness far predates the advent of the nation-state on the world stage and can subsequently maintain political identity across vast expanses of time in spite of changing constitutional settlements. The salient features of these polities are language, race, religion, and other characteristics that can be projected back into the mists of time in order to fasten the present to the past with bonds of affection and recognition that obtain over centuries, if not millennia. The truth is that Russia is only a “junior varsity” civilization-state (to use the American parlance) in comparison with China. Until we come to terms with the fact that China “is a civilization pretending to be a nation-state,” as Lucian Pye put it, our prognostications about the plight of Hong Kong will continue to miss the mark.
The sense of intimacy between the Chinese and their own history absolutely dwarfs all other nations in both fervor and longevity. As Jacques writes,
Comments