The Decay of Western Civilisation and Resurgence of Russia

Between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

Glenn Diesen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351012614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What explains the rise of populist movements across the West and their affinity towards Russia? UKIP's Brexit victory, Trump's triumph, and the successive elections and referendums in Europe were united by a repudiation of the liberal international order. These new political forces envision the struggle to reproduce and advance Western civilisation to be fought along a patriotism–cosmopolitanism or nationalism–globalism battlefield, in which Russia becomes a partner rather than an adversary. Armed with neomodernism and geoeconomics, Russia has inadvertently taken on a central role in the decay of Western civilisation.

This book explores the cooperation and competition between Western and Russian civilisation and the rise of anti-establishment political forces both contesting the international liberal order and expressing the desire for closer relations with Russia. Diesen proposes that Western civilisation has reached a critical juncture as modern society (gesellschaft) has overwhelmed and exhausted the traditional community (gemeinschaft) and shows the causes for the decay of Western civilisation and the subsequent impact on cooperation and conflict with Russia. The author also considers whether Russia's international conservativism is authentic and can negate the West's decadence, or if it is merely a shrewd strategy by a rival civilisation also in decay.

This volume will be of interest to scholars of international relations, political science, security studies, international political economy, and Russian studies.

Part I
Theorising civilisations

1 Civilisations balanced between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft

Introduction

Plato argued 2,500 years ago that there are two orders that Man must balance, the internal order of the soul and the external order of the commonwealth. The instinctive within the soul and the calculative required to engage with the external environment necessitate two conflicting ways of organising human interactions. The principal challenge for civilisations is to balance and harmonise the opposing impulses gravitating towards the irrational and the rational. Man is a social creature who acts in groups, perpetually drawn between traditional communities (gemeinschaft) and larger complex societies (gesellschaft). Civilisations developed as a network of local communities and cities with robust and distinctive pre-urban ethno-cultural features, which became capable of forming advanced societies by organising large groups of people and complex economic structures. Smaller and distinctive communities based on inter-personal ties and kinship provide a sense of belonging and security, while the ambition for intellectual freedom, economic prosperity, and power in the competition between groups spurred the need to form larger and more complex societies based on contractual interactions, calculative and rational structures.

Civilisation is conceptualised here as a meta-strategic disposition of power, the highest organisation of human tribes that gratifies the innate and primordial need for traditional social groups, and organises people into rational, advanced, and competitive societies. Civilisations are thus destined to endure internal friction due to their mutually dependent and contradictory inward-looking and outward-looking utility. These two functions are interdependent as social capital in cohesive communities is a prerequisite to form and sustain advanced and complex societies. Similarly, a prosperous and competitive society is needed to safeguard the sacred particularities from external rivals. Yet, these two functions of civilisation are also mutually opposing by gravitating simultaneously towards the instinctive and the conscious. States are under systemic pressures to attain greater autonomy to preserve and reproduce one’s own culture, and concurrently embrace regional integration for collective bargaining power against adversaries.

This chapter will first distinguish between community (gemeinschaft) and society (gesellschaft) with neoclassical realist theory on civilisations. The community represents the instinctive and irrational need for inter-personal ties in smaller communities founded on kinship and shared spirituality. The society denotes the calculative, rational, efficient, and competitive large-scale industrial society based on impersonal and contractual interactions. The ability of decision-makers to act in a rational and calculative way to maximise power and security in accordance with the neorealist balance of power logic largely depends on internal cohesion to perform as a unitary actor, which is contingent upon a sound understanding of the irrational and primordial nature of Man as recognised in classical realism.

Second, the tendency in human nature to swing from one extreme to another undermines the ability of civilisations to find a balance between community and society. The advancement and excesses of rationality during the Enlightenment and Renaissance produced the counter-Enlightenment movement and Romanticism as a reaction. The subsequent disastrous German experiment with National Socialism caused disenchantment in the West for the distinctive and irrational, and subsequently unleashed a radical push towards the universal and rational. The neglect of the distinctive causes a new imbalance with pending consequences.

Last, it will be argued that liberalism is especially vulnerable to neglect in the irrational component of Man and civilisation due to hostility towards arbitrary authority. Political liberalism tends to become increasing free by deconstructing the arbitrary but necessary authority of traditional social institutions. At its extreme, democracy turns on itself by denouncing the will of the majority as a form of totalitarianism over the minority. Economic liberalism similarly advances efficiency at the expense of the inefficient components of community Economic determinism represents the extreme when all facets of civilisation are defined primarily by the economic utility, in which faith, the family, and tradition are set to lose their utility and attractiveness.

Community versus society

The evolution of human consciousness established the internal contradiction between the instinctive and rational that defines the human condition and civilisations. The flawed narrative of a linear evolution of rationality suggests that Man gradually developed his consciousness and has since the Enlightenment continued the path towards shedding his superstitions and irrational traits. The competing view is that the primordial instincts Man developed over tens of thousands of years to survive cannot be transcended. Instincts are biologically entrenched in the nervous system and the brain to reward the ‘correct’ and traditional behaviour with a sense of security and meaning, and to punish deviation from the instinctive with a sense of discomfort, insecurity, and nihilism. By comparison, if an animal became completely conscious it would be much like the human animal, torn by opposing impulses. A penguin suddenly equipped with consciousness to make rational decisions would likely not walk a hundred kilometres through perilous weather to mate at the ancestral breeding grounds, but instead seek a more convenient location or even reconsider the utility of mating Such rational behaviour would, however, contradict what his instincts demand for self-preservation and thus trigger great discomfort and a sense of emptiness. Likewise, primitive Man who only relatively recently emerged out of nature is torn between acting on his primordial impulses and simultaneously becoming a modern civilised Man.

The concept of community (gemeinschaft) and society (gesellschaft) was initially developed by Tönnies (1957[1887]). Human development was postulated to adhere to objective realities in accordance with the positivism in German sociological tradition. Community embodied the purity of youth, and society signified the necessary but decaying process of adulthood. Tönnies may have based this concept on Thomas Hobbes’ distinction between ‘concord’ and ‘union’, with the former being the consensus-based ruled found at a local level and the latter representing the control required by the state (Hont 2015: 6). Max Weber (1924a) also deliberated on the human struggle between smaller community and larger society over prolonged periods of time and recognised the imperative of finding a balance between the two.

Community or gemeinschaft is the natural habitat for human beings. Man developed the instinct to seek refuge in close-knit communities with high social capital where kinship is the foundation for solidarity (Tönnies 1957[1887]). Communities are defined by inter-personal ties and interactions within small, rural, and traditional groups. United by blood, place, spirit, and common fate, the sense of community is typically defined by shared ethno-cultural and religious ties. The community is the foundation for belonging, morality, trust, and even a sense of immorality by reproducing its distinct character. Families are the strongest community in terms of providing meaning, common understanding, mutual sympathy, belonging, and shared security. In simple economic systems with more autonomy, such as agricultural societies, personal ties are maintained and serve an important function for local and recurrent commercial interaction. Social interactions within the community appeal to affinity and tradition as a key objective. The appreciation for personal ties within communities strengthens cooperative social organisation and cohesion. Communities therefore generate morality, justice, order, and security based on concord, with emotional ties as the mechanisms to uphold shared responsibilities and rights. As opposed to citizenship by contract, the smaller and homogenous social groups nurture a sense of moral obligation based on emotional attachment and traditions. In the community, law becomes indistinguishable from morality. The community appeals to what Plato and Aristotle refers to as ‘thumos’ or spiritedness. The human soul consists of three components; the intellect (theoretical reason), appetite (physical desire), and thumos (passion/spiritedness). Thumos represents the emotional and irrational centre of the soul that instinctively seeks passionate affection. Communities are ‘sacred’, which is defined as what must be preserved since loss of the sacred creates moral panic and loss of the self. Genetic evolutionary restructuring to decouple from the individual from the family unit and community would require thousands of more years of evolution (Luttwak 1995: 80).

Society or gesellschaft denotes large-scale modern, industrial, cosmopolitan, and rational organisation of human interactions. Hegel posited that Man seeks complex societies to liberate people from the intellectual restraints of small communities. Adam Smith described the birth of civilisation as the process when backward towns were exposed to fine arts, manners, and scientific understanding Society offers the prospect of greater economic prosperity and to become more competitive and capable of survival as it us guided by rationality and efficiency. Social interactions in society are more calculative and function as a means to an end. Societies rise with the development of technology and more intricate economic structures, yet society remains an artificial construct that becomes mechanic and spiritless by organising interactions with impersonal ties and contractual exchanges.

Man became ‘civilised’ and founded civilisations when various communities became interdependent and competition was organised with rules and justice to advance a common good. With different degrees of cultural heterogeneity, civilisations differ in terms of organising politics, the economy, culture, and social interactions. Civilisations are characterised by their material strength, culture, and ethics (Schweitzer 1949). Furthermore, civilisations define the relations between ‘God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy’ (Huntington 1993a: 25). The success of the nation-state is attributed to its ability to bridge the community and society. The community was recreated within a larger entity of power by constructing shared identity and citizenship, comprising legally enforced rights and responsibilities. Societies are also facilitated to maximise political and economic gains, which requires larger bureaucracies and organisational structures with complex division of labour. Increasingly multifaceted societies formed through region-building and globalisation are therefore less capable of facilitating the identity of the community

Neoclassical realism on civilisations between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft

Neoclassical realism can bring together classical realism and neorealism to survey the strengths and weaknesses of civilisations. Employing neoclassical realism is ideal to explore the challenges of civilisations as it assesses both the rational and irrational aspects of Man. Classical realism surveys the preservation of the primordial and instinctive as the foundation for internal cohesion, which is required for states to act rationally and calculatedly as advocated by neorealism Humans act in social groups, with the state as the highest sovereign social group and therefore the principal actor. While state-centrism is at the heart of realist theory, it is not an eternally fixed truth as authority overlapped in the past, and the highest sovereign evolved from city-states to empires. States pooling sovereignty in regional or civilisational configurations for collective bargaining power or the state fragmenting into smaller entities of power is therefore consistent with realist theory.

Classical realism explores objective laws of human nature that influence politics. While there are varying perspectives on human nature among classical realists, they share a pessimism and view conflict as the natural state. The position taken here builds on the arguments of George Kennan that human nature is not inherently bad, rather the predisposition to conflict derives from the duality of Man and contradictory impulses. Kennan (1993), commonly known as the architect of the US containment policy against the Soviet Union, referred to Man as a ‘cracked vessel’ in conflict with his own contradictions and tensions with other human beings. The cracked vessel condition has its roots in contradictions between the instinctive, ancient, and simple nature of Man, and the drive for evolving and constructing greater civilisation (Kennan 1993: 27). While the natural creed of humanity is to drift towards close-knit social groups as a family, kinsmen, and local community, Kennan notes that Man’s innate impulses also embodies a ‘universal need for people to feel themselves a part of something larger than themselves, and larger than just the family’ (Kennan, 1993: 74). Yet, while Man ‘tries to shape his behaviour in accordance with the requirement of civilisation’, he remains a deeply uncomfortable member of society due to his duality (Kerman 1993: 17).

Neorealism, or structural realism, as advocated by Kenneth Waltz (1979), employs a rational and calculative approach to international security. The international distribution of power is theorised to create systemic pressures or incentives for how states should act to survive. Peace can only exist when all states are balanced as states do not constrain themselves. Security is maximised by acting rationally in accordance with the balance of power logic by either band wagoning or balancing. Wars and other disruptions in the international system can disrupt the balance of power, yet the system will naturally move towards an equilibrium as states must constrain rival powers. The need to accumulate power provides great incentives for states to construct larger entities of power and increasingly complex societies to harness political, economic, and military power. Thus, the rational decision for states would be to become more efficient and integrate military power for collective strength in traditional geopolitics, or in the contemporary geoeconomic era pool economic strength for collective bargaining power.

Neorealism became the dominant political theory in the late stages of the Cold War when immense structural pressures had greater influence than human nature. Human nature was perceived to have less of an influence since the world was unequivocally divided into two diametrically opposite ideologies for two opposing centres of power. The hostility and clearly delineated ‘us-them’ ideational frontiers were a source for cohesion within states, regional blocs, and civilisations. After the Cold War, classical realism has returned as a pertinent analytical tool since human nature yet again became a cogent variable to assess impediments to the rational behaviour of states.

Neoclassical realism recognises the state must act as a unitary actor to mobilise both the material and political resources in accordance with the balance of power logic. Neoclassical realism bridges the gap in neorealism by assessing the rationality of the decision-makers as a human element. Neorealism is solely a theory on the systemic pressures created from the international distribution of power. Waltz was explicit that neorealism is not a foreign policy theory as decision-makers do not always act in accordance with the balance of power logic, which suggests that Waltz repudiated the rational actor assumption (Mearsheimer 2009: 242). Neoclassical realism extends upon neorealism by including the human element of classical realism as an intervening variable between the systemic pressures and foreign policy. Neoclassical realism suggests that identities, ideologies, institutions, and social cohesions produce ‘rational’ behaviour when they enable the state to maximise security by acting in accordance with the balance of power logic. In contrast, the state is ‘irrational’ when decision-makers are prevented from acting on the incentives outlined by neorealist theory. The state’s ability to act rationally is therefore contingent on representing and balancing the community and society. Failing to sustain cohesive communities undermines the sustainability of society, while a weak society leaves the state vulnerable to external powers Maintaining solidarity requires the state to homogenise the population with ethno-cultural and civic nationalism to harness the characteristics of the community In contrast, excessive empowerment and political autonomy of communities and sub-groups can create rivals to the identity and loyalty of the state.

The Hegelian pendulum between the rational and irrational

The contradictory impulses towards community and society can only be resolved with a balance. Such a balance is undermined by Man’s inclination to first swing ferociously from one extreme to another. The propensity in human nature to swing as a pendulum between extremes in the pursuit of greater truths is a common concept in philosophy and social science. Plato’s Symposium posited that we use strong contrasts to express truths, which undermines the stable and balanced middle ground or ‘metaxy’. The weakness of this human condition is that the imbalance from pursuing an extreme at one end will eventually cause a reaction pushing towards the other extreme. For example, unfettered capitalism at the expense of social equity increases the political attractiveness of socialism, while the inefficiencies in radical socialism spurs desire to embrace the ideology of free market forces. Propagating an absolute truth at one end will therefore reduce the feasibility of reaching the optimal middle as a compromise. Hegel’s ‘pendulum theory’ similarly theorised that events in human history tend to swing from one extreme to another before eventually settling at the centre as a stable variable. Hegel viewed history as a lethal rivalry over interpretations of who we are, and how to resolve the ensuing conflicts. The middle-ground/metaxy is undermined by modernist ideologies propagating the idea that the inherent flaw of Man can be transcended. Through informed and honest political discourse, the pendulum can reduce its volatility and stabilise towards the centre.

The Hegelian pendulum increased its velocity when Western civilisation thrived under burgeoning rationality during the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. The Enlightenment was spurred by scientific advancements, which promoted philosophy and social ideas about intellectual advancement and rationality in human nature. The Enlightenment is appropriately revered as a domineering pillar of Western civilisation by permitting sophisticated and complex societies to emerge that culminated in powerful states and empires. Epitomised by the American and French revolutions, the Enlightenment advocated for reason and individual freedom to liberate man from the superstition and darkness of medieval and archaic organisation of society with arbitrary religious authority. The new social and economic models accepted the market as preferable to older systems where the rulers distributed public goods. The subsequent emergence of political modernisation and the social contract set the foundation for both liberal democracy and free-market capitalism as rational endeavours. Religion was increasingly secularised, and power transferred to the state. The subsequent shift to an evolutionist perspective on civilisation entailed a future-oriented focus on science, modernity, and universalism to advance human kind However, the subsequent exuberant material success that lifted humanity to unprecedented levels of prosperity also began to strain civilisation by neglecting nature, culture and spirituality.

The absolutism of the Enlightenment and rationality neglected that Man is flawed by also acting on ancient instincts (Herder 1966[1800]). Western civilisation began to break from the traditional and religious as a source of bloodshed throughout the Middle Ages. Albeit, the medieval traditions and ideals with organic unity and spirituality were also weakened...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Theorising civilisations
• Part II Rise and fall of political liberalism
• Part III Rise and fall of economic liberalism
• Part IV Resurgence of Russia: neomodernism and geoeconomics
• Conclusion: cooperation and competition in the post-Western world
• Bibliography
• Index