ABSTRACT
Analyzing the mechanisms of cultural identity-building, Rogers Brubaker notes that the concept of nation no longer necessarily dominates the populist imaginary, but national belonging is being “recharacterized in civilizational terms.” Transnational civilizationism offers, then, an ideological space for creating transnational populist allegiances, as manifested in the recent but short-lived courting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. In Russia—a country which remains outside both Brubaker’s view of Europe and Conrad’s view of the non-European world—the concept of civilization has emerged as one of the key concepts of contemporary political and intellectual production. The chapter looks at civilizationism as an ideological discourse and discusses intellectual formations identified as crucial frameworks for the rise of civilizationism in Russia. The chapter also examines the imperial anxieties of civilizational rhetoric in Russian nationalist and geopolitical imagination. The Russian state’s cultural policy poignantly illustrates the recent rise of Russian civilizationism.
