Sociological Approach to Civilizations
Discussion
Gregorio Bettiza and Fabio Petito:
"We suggest a third line of thinking about civilizations, which better helps to explain why we have seen the remarkable and unexpected rise of civilizational politics – the idea that civilizations and their relations matter – in international relations from the 1990s onwards. We label this approach Sociological. Such an approach recognizes that, on the one hand, civilizations are intersubjective phenomena that change and evolve across time; but, on the other, as Peter Katzenstein (2010b, 5) puts it, civilizations should be thought of as ‘loosely coupled, internally differentiated, elite-centred social systems that are integrated into a global context’. Hence they cannot be said (pace Huntington) to have a historically fixed and culturally distinguishable and invariable essence, which separates them along clear-cut boundaries; yet at the same time their cultural legacies, as we have argued before, constrain and produce structural effects on important socio-political developments beyond their discursive function. Therefore, we treat the meaning and interpretation of civilizations seriously. Unlike Critical approaches, which singularly view civilizations as the instantiation of a particular form of hegemonic discourse, we suggest that because civilizational politics is primarily about the crucial relationship between culture and power synthesized by coalitions of cultural and political elites, wider social, cultural and political forces outside of the discursive realm must be integral to explaining why civilizational imaginaries and narratives are gaining growing salience today.
In particular, we argue that civilizational imaginaries and narratives are becoming more prominent today in world politics for three reasons:
(1) they are an expression, in more general terms, of novel forms of identity politics that draw upon culture, religion and tradition;
(2) they provide novel ‘frames of reference’ at a time when globalization contributes to the deterritorialization of national identities, borders and actor-hood; and
(3) they constitute political and intellectual critiques of singular conceptions of modernity and liberal universalizing projects, while acting as sites for the articulation of programs of multiple modernities."