Alexey A. Gromyko. Civilizations and Russia: Ongoing Discussions
Discussions about civilizational nature of Russia root deeply in history. They are a story of many chapters telling about various stages in the life of the country. These discussions are of the same importance as reflections on its political, social or economic conditions. The consciousness determines the being of men not less than the being determines consciousness. Attitudes of other nations to Russia are as important for its progress as GDP, inflation or any other indicator of that kind. Civilizational identity of a man, which may be primarily seen as lofty and abstract matter, has in fact a real implication for personal outlook, values, lifestyle and an attitude to other nations, and vice versa.
Until the late 1990s, the subject of civilizations lied mostly in the focus of anthropologists and historians of the Ancient World and lacked the contemporary context. In the bipolar world, nobody described a “first”, “second” or “third” world as a civilization. The term circulated in the day-to-day language during military cataclysms, like world wars (“saving the world civilization from destruction”), or was used by political populism at the international stage (“western civilization against communist threat”). The bipolar, and later unipolar world, promoted images of consolidation and unity, which did not suggest that the world might be fractional and polychrome. Civilizations, as one of the ways to describe and comprehend contemporaneity, were left outside the discourse.
The world needed to become multipolar, polycentric in order to blow off academic dust of the concept of civilizations and to return it to modern politics, to contemporary social sciences. The heralds of the “end of history” had barely announced the victory of one of the polars, one "true civilization", when the attention was diverted to the idea of the “clash of civilizations”. This idea is more pragmatic and more practical, it looks to the future, not to the past. With ideologies having lost their role as true definitions of most significant identities in the world, former ideas of capitalist West, socialist East and catching-up South have been replaced with studies of what they disguised before – civilizations. The idea of the united West broke into American and European (with the latter not as homogeneous in fact either), the idea of the Third World into Latin American, African and few Asians. The Second World got similarly fragmented.
Interest for this kind of categorizing rose as popularity of Euro-centric and West-centric ideas in general abated, as values (or even their equivalence) for various cultures, systems of values, histories spread, and as the concept of polycentric world settled both in discussions and real life. Despite the terms “West” and “East” (the latter referring to Asia as a whole) being still used, especially by politicians and spin doctors, they are so outdated that have lost any meaning. But the current terminology, adapted from the past and prone to splitting reality into meta-spaces, is also full of clich