Review: Russia's World Order. How Civilizationism Explains the Conflict with the West, by Paul Robinson

Paul Robinson's subject is the remarkable transformation of Russian official discourse about the nature of international relations, including a fundamental shift in Putin's own thinking. Twenty years ago, President Putin was a modernising ‘Westerniser’ who saw Russia as essentially European. His primary goal was to integrate Russia into the West, albeit based on respect for its interests and status as a great power. Putin conceived of a greater Europe that stretched from the Atlantic to Vladivostok, but it was, nonetheless, a common European home of shared history, culture and values.

Nowadays Putin talks about Russia as a self-contained civilisational world with its own special values, traditions, interests and identity. According to Putin, Russia is a state-based civilisation coexistent with a diversity of other world civilisations that together constitute the core of the global society of sovereign states.

As Paul Robinson shows, Putin's embrace of ‘civilisationism’ has been a gradual process, driven as much by pragmatics as philosophy. The claim that Russia was a unique civilisation with the right to choose and tread its own path of development was a convenient counter to Western claims for the universal validity of liberal values. It also meshed neatly with another key theme of Putin's discourse: the complexity and diversity of the emerging multipolar world that was supplanting the supremacism and exceptionalism of post-Cold War Western global hegemony.

Putin's civilisationism has blossomed during the three years of the Ukraine war. In October 2022, he told the Valdai Discussion Club (a Moscow-based think tank) ‘I am convinced that real democracy in a multipolar world is primarily about the ability of any nation, any society or civilisation to follow its own path and organise its own socio-political system.’ In 2023, Russia's reformulated ‘Foreign Policy Concept’ stated that ‘more than a thousand years of independent statehood determines Russia's special position as a unique country-civilisation’ and its ‘striving towards a system of international relations that would guarantee reliable security, preservation of its cultural and civilisational identity and equal opportunities for the development of all states.’ Commending the reformulated Concept to Valdai in October 2024, Putin said he was ‘convinced humanity is moving not towards the soulless universalism of a new globalisation but, on the contrary towards a synergy of state-civilisations.’

Unlike Samuel P. Huntington, Putin is a true believer in the comity of civilisations and sees the current clash between Russia and the West as a matter of politics and ideology, not civilisational differences. Most of Robinson's book is devoted to the deep historical and philosophical roots of Russian civilisationism, which he sees as a reaction to historical determinists—both foreign and home-grown—which asserted that Russia was destined to follow the same path to progress as western Europe. According to these ‘Westerners’, such progress could be speeded up or subverted but not prevented. Famously, the mid-nineteenth century ‘Slavophiles’ responded that Russia was different, that it had traditions of spirituality and communality that enabled the pursuit of its own historical destiny. The Slavophiles had many successors, and Robinson provides an intricate intellectual history of their various writings. Particularly interesting is his account of the continuing influence on Russian civilisationism of various Western thinkers, like Johann Gottfried Herder, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee—each of whom emphasised the importance of civilisational identities and challenged the kind of unilinear model that had led to Francis Fukuyama's 1989 claim that liberal democracy's triumph meant ‘the end of history’.

Russian civilisational theory was founded by two books: Nikolai Danilevsky's Russia and Europe (1869) and Konstantin Leontyev's Byzantinism and Slavdom (1876). While Danilevsky asserted that Russia was one of many distinct civilisations, Leontyev identified the Byzantine roots of the Russian Orthodox Church as the source of its civilisational distinctiveness. Neglected in their own lifetimes, the two men's ideas came into their own in post-communist Russia, especially Danilevsky, whose valorisation of civilisational diversity was cited by Putin himself.

Eurasianism—the idea that Russia should look east for its allies and identity—is another strand of civilisational thinking that has attracted a lot of attention, but, as Robinson points out, its key contemporary exponent—Alexander Dugin—is actually a rather isolated figure in Russia and has little or no influence in elite circles.

Most civilisationists (including Putin) want Russia to help safeguard the integrity of all the world's civilisations, but there are those who seek separation and isolation. One example is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Russian nationalist, who wanted to reduce Russia to its ethnic and cultural core to enable the country to concentrate on its internal spiritual development. In the context of Russia's alienation and isolation from the West as a result of the Ukraine conflict, such thinking is not as outlandish as it might once have seemed.

Robinson shows that civilisationism has political breadth as well as intellectual depth. The unilinearism of communism was discredited by the failings of the Soviet system, while the disastrous economic consequences of 1990s ‘shock therapy’ undermined the credibility of Westernising liberals. The idea that history was cyclical and not necessarily progressive found a receptive popular audience.

Strikingly, Robinson highlights the role in spreading civilisationist thinking of two unlikely figures: the leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, and the flamboyant founder of the populist-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky. For Zyuganov, Russia constitutes ‘a special world, a complete ‘social cosmos’ with specific historical, geopolitical, philosophical, national and economic features.’ Zhirinovsky founded an Institute of Global Civilizations and published several books on the subject. ‘Experience, common sense, scientific analysis and cultural tradition confirm’ he wrote, that Russia was a unique civilisation based on communality and collectivism. As Robinson notes, the ideas of Zhirinovsky and Zyuganov eventually found their way into Putin's speeches and into the discourse of the ruling United Russia party. Facilitating their dissemination has been the Russian state's promotion of ‘culturology’—educating Russian youth about the existence and interactions of world civilisations.

Do Putin and other state officials really believe their civilisational rhetoric? For Robinson, what matters is that civilisationism ‘is the ideological terrain on which they have chosen to plant their flag. Domestically civilisationism helps promote the idea of Russian distinctiveness and through that helps boost patriotism and support for the state. It also justifies Russia's political battle against the West and on the international scene provides the Russian state with a powerful tool for persuading countries in the developing world not to join with the West against it.’

Civilisationism has its critics within the Russian policy community. Ivan Timofeev, Director of the Russian International Affairs Council, has pointed out that nineteenth century Slavophiles were inspired by an actually existing system of traditional culture and values that embraced the vast majority of the population, most of whom were peasants. Since then, a century and a half of modernisation and political history have transformed Russian society. Present day Russians are radically different from most of their ancestors. Civilisationists assert that Russia is special and unique but are vague when it comes to specifics.

Civilisationists consider identities as natural and organic—that is the source of their distinctiveness and longevity—but, as Timofeev argues, civilisational distinctiveness is more often than not an artificial political construct. Moreover, while some Russian civilisationists may wish to distance and isolate Russia from the West, the same is not true of counterparts in other civilisations, many of whom want to incorporate elements of the West's spiritual, political and material culture.

Singled out by Timofeev is the quintessentially Western concept of Westphalian state sovereignty. Russia defines itself as a state-civilisation which combines sovereignty with distinct values. But not all states are civilisations and not all civilisations are states and it is difficult to envisage civilisational relations superseding sovereignty and the nation-state as the basis of international relations. Russian civilisationism is a work in progress, concludes Timofeev, that will require a lot of conceptual and practical development before it can stand as a fully-fledged, alternative world view of global politics and society.

Paul Robinson's concise and elegant book is a text of huge and compelling content, an invaluable guide to a significant and seemingly enduring development in Russia's identity as an international actor.

Russia's World Order: How Civilizationism Explains the Conflict with the West, by Paul Robinson. Cornell University Press. 168 pp. £24