Afrasianet - Hisham Jaafar - The term imperialism has been associated with the stages of national liberation and resistance to colonialism, and the radical left has been used until now. Imperialism is no longer common in Arab political discourse, so we need to remind the reader of its meaning.
Imperialism is a policy aimed at expanding the rule of one country at the expense of other states and their peoples, in order to increase their political, economic, military and cultural influence.
Imperialism has historically been associated with the emergence and rise of the European nation-state and the conflict between it, but what we have been witnessing in today's world, for a decade, has been the reconfiguration of competition for (and cooperation) of economic and geopolitical interests as competition between "civilizational states" rather than nationalism.
Imperialism is returning to its original course, restoring the traditions of direct invasion, occupation of territory, expulsion or displacement of populations, as is happening in Ukraine now, and as Trump aspires to annex Panama and Greenland. As for Gaza, what is at stake is not annexation of Israel and the rebuilding of settlements, but the displacement of its inhabitants and the occupation of its land with real estate investments.
But what is meant by a civilized state that gradually replaces the nation-state that has arisen since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648)? What is the position of the war on Gaza in reshaping the nature of global conflicts?
Civilization State Attack
In my opinion, the civilized state has four characteristics that distinguish it from the nation-state that began with the Westphalian system:
1- Transcending the concept of the nation-state
It is a concept that has separated cultural identity from politics, interests from values, or let's say it has created a new identity, based on citizenship. The basis of conflict in the nation-state is political ideas and national and national interests, not religious or cultural differences.
The concept of a civilized state is based, as Maçis, former Portuguese Minister of State for European Affairs, argues that "nation-states are a Western invention and are naturally vulnerable to Western influence. Civilizations are an alternative to the West."
The Modi administration, by asserting that India is a civilization, is turning the opposition – the Indian National Congress – into a Western power bent on measuring India's success by the measure of a foreign regime.
The ideas of secularism and cosmopolitanism, historically attached to the Indian National Congress Party, are now seen as cultural imports from which India must free itself.
Turkey's military and political projects in the South Caucasus and the Middle East have a historical resonance, they are proof of Turkey's greatness, and they show that Turkey will be wherever President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says it should be.
2. Lack of universal values
These are values whose core after the Second War was the Western liberal order. Defenders of the civilized state argue: "The search for universal values is over, and we must all accept that we speak only for ourselves and our communities."
Vladimir Putin's Russia and China's Xi Jinping are resisting the global demands of the liberal world order. This rejection, in turn, also pushes the West to envision its presence in the world from a civilized perspective.
Putin implores Russians not to follow the West's song of individual self-expression, but instead to help make Russia great again.
Xi speaks in a similar tone of China's Great Project for National Renewal, which celebrates Chinese culture as distinct from Western individualism. The Turkish president rejects Western values on women's issues and supports the natural family.
Some tried to portray the war on terror – which began in 2001 and was staged by the Muslim world, or the so-called Greater Middle East – as a civilizational conflict between the West and Islam, but this description was quickly retracted. It was seen as a propagation of the values of democracy.
George W. Bush has repeatedly done his best to assert that the global war against terrorism and regime change in Iraq is being conducted on end-of-history terms—the dominance of the liberal order, not the logic of the clash of civilizations—as Huntington declared.
Bush Jr. (2001-2009) stated, "When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations," and said, "The requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa, Latin America, and the entire Muslim world. The people of Muslim countries want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every country. Their governments should listen to their hopes."
The war on terrorism certainly carried cultural dimensions, but its essence was a conflict in which the various international powers test the balances of power among themselves in light of the intense mixing of interests and geopolitical changes with the cultural and value dimensions of the conflict.
Since September 11, Washington has used its force to weaken restrictions on the use of force. The war on terror after 2001 eroded internationalism, with the United States using its superiority to coerce, persuade, or cozy nations into joining its military campaigns, with little regard for how Washington's actions damage U.S. relations with the non-Western world.
Since the global financial crisis in at least 2009, the rising powers of the Global South, a group of countries that can roughly be defined as "those countries that believe the rules-based order is nonsense," have become increasingly outspoken in their frustration about the hypocrisy at the heart of the global order.
Russian and Chinese anti-Western narratives have only provided the vocabulary for the countries of the Global South to describe what they have long felt: that a rules-based system was merely a moral cover for Western power, control, and interests.
3- The rise of the civilized state
As linked to a civilization, the State has the primary task of protecting specific cultural traditions. Its scope includes all areas dominated by that culture.
A civilized state is organized around culture, not politics or borders. A state with a civilization has the primary task of protecting specific cultural traditions, and for a civilized state, cultural ties may be more important than just the legal status of citizenship.
In most of its wars, the United States started from statements and goals of an unambiguous cultural nature, such as spreading democratic (American) values or spreading capitalist culture, but it was keen to present these slogans as neutral goals and public goods, and not as cultural justifications that suit some peoples while contradicting others.
According to the 2025 project, which Menfistto is the ruler, what is needed is to restore the spirit of America, which was founded on a number of foundations, the most important of which are: the revival of Judeo-Christian traditions - the restoration of the natural family consisting of male and female as the center of American life, and the defense of the nation's sovereignty, borders and resources against global threats.
Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 was an outright rupture and an ostensible rejection of one of the fundamental pillars of the liberal international order: that the borders of nation-states should not be redrawn by force.
Remarkably, Putin justified his move on explicit "civilized" grounds, arguing that Crimea has always been part of the "Russian world." But what is remarkable in this regard is that Orthodox Russia is against Orthodox Ukraine as well, and not against Muslim Turkey, as has been done historically, and this means that we are not rigid cultural or religious fault lines, as the author of the saying of the clash of civilizations said.
Similarly, the removal of Narendra Modi and the BJP to the MCP in 2014 was part of the Hindutva ideology, which presented India as a civilized Hindu state (regardless of hundreds of millions of non-Hindu Indians).
Xi emerged as a supreme leader increasingly interested in direct ideological confrontation with the West, and an aspirant to China's territorial integrity — as in Hong Kong, and what he seeks in Taiwan.
In February 2025, Israel's ruling Likud party, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, joined the far-right alliance Partnership for Europe, as an observer member.
Far-right parties emerged as the third largest political group in the June 2024 European parliamentary elections. Under this new logic, Jews and Europeans would become victims of rising "fascist Islam," leading to the formation of a new alliance between Israel and Europe's far-right to counter these alleged threats.
4- Role of the new state
The true definition of a civilized state is to promote and defend a single way of life against all alternatives.
The problem with Western globalization has been twofold, as the editor-in-chief of NOEME said:
• First, to many people living in Asia or Africa, Western values seemed to be just one alternative among many. The promise to preserve traditional ways of life in a liberal society was a fatal illusion.
• If Turkey, China, or Russia imported the full range of Western values and norms, their societies would soon become replicas of the West and lose their cultural independence.
Although this process was considered the necessary price for becoming a modern society, recently, doubts have been raised about whether it is really necessary to imitate Western countries in order to gain all the benefits of modern society.
• There was a second difficulty: Western values and norms still needed to be interpreted and implemented, and the West's most powerful states were always taking over the task.
In the shadow of a civilized state, cosmopolitanism is the ideology of the West to confront other cultures. Of course, everyone outside the West, Huntington argued, should view the idea of one world as a threat. Then why should others refrain from doing the same? Why should they refrain from building a state around their own concept of a good life, a state supported by an entire civilization?
In this world, different civilizations are universal in practice, if not ambitious, and may compete for global power, but they all belong to an increasingly common and integrated political and economic landscape, which will change the nature of future conflicts, which is worth pursuing.