We often come across two kinds of idioms being used in our everyday political life: The civilizational and the national. Both are idioms of belonging, expressing a shared world of going about. Sometimes, the two journey along together, with the civilizational idiom feeding into the idea of nation. And there are times when the two come into intense conflict. Intriguingly, both are today seen as belonging to the political right as opposed to the grammar of individual rights which recognizes no special, territorial affinities.
On closer observation, we see the two idioms are different. They reflect two different layers of cultural expression about how members of a civilization understand themselves and their place in the world and its history.
The national idiom is the cultural and political language of the nation-state – a distinct historical and political entity with a clearly defined border. It talks of a government, a state that identifies itself with a territory, and of a people possessing a shared national narrative (In Europe, nations are also bound by a single language and religion). The concepts of citizens, nation-state, governance, rights and duties are part of it. It thrives on emphasizing a national identity which is often territorial and relies on emphasizing its difference from other nations.
In contrast, the civilizational idiom operates at a larger, diffuse level. It refers to large cultural ecosystems that thrive over centuries or millennia and transcend today’s national borders. Often, the civilizational idiom is used to draw attention to the limitation of a nation-state imagination and all that it excludes because the nation is part of a more recent, nineteenth century imagination. It instead emphasizes some idea of a pre-political, cultural sharedness that exists prior to the formation of the modern nation-state. They are less about some defined political structures and more about a shared ethical life, cosmologies, philosophy and aesthetics.
Hence, unlike the language of the nation which is mostly a political idiom, the civilizational idiom is the idiom of knowledge, ethical life and cultural traditions. It is trans-national, more abstract and plural in its imagination. It appeals to something older, deeper and closer than the nation-state and refers to coherent, unified ways of being in the world. If nation-states speak the language of citizens, majorities and minorities, of boundaries and flags, civilizations speak of vast epochs and shared heritage. They point to something more abstract than religion for civilizations can contain multiple religions. What shall we call this? Perhaps, the best way to capture the difference is to say that civilizations are about a shared ethical life, bound by ideas and practices that are reflections on the question of How to lead a good life and live well. It is in this shared ethical life that we might find some coherence.
This tells us that the ethical domain – a shared world bound by traditions, reflections and actions regarding how to lead a good life – is logically prior, and a more abstract category than that of religions and nation state. Attending to the distinction between the two idioms/ideals and how they interact can help us better understand and resolve the innumerable conflicts that have arisen due to clashes between these two ways of understanding our place in the world.
-We can trace proto-national tendencies in India as early as the Chola period, when political identity became tied to territory and lineage. Not exactly 19th century concept.
-I see civilizational identity as a moral foundation within which art, religion, customs and practices evolve. It’s origin as you said isn’t political rather shared cultural and ethical that binds people across space & time.
-National idiom is a custodian (should always be) that translates and institutionalizes the civilizational idioms into a living civic order.
-Civilizational idiom plays a mediating role between the abstract power of the state machinery and the vulnerability of the individual. Also, without it, we’d be spiritually and morally hollow.
-Meanwhile, without National idiom we’d be existing as “They were once..” paragraphs in dusty history books.
-To me they both need each other. One tells us why to belong and other gives it an institutional form to ensure durability.
Thanks, Aswanth, for that response. Nation, in the sense we understand it today, implies the sovereign will of the people and not rule by a monarch. So, though you might find some idea of a shared past and unified geography, the modern notion of nation necessarily involves the idea of citizens (“will of the people” is an important concept here) with a cohesive national identity. The nation-state, a political entity, is the coming together of the people with distinct territorial, political border and it is their will that is expressed in governance. This concept is a fairly new one with the treaty of Westphalia (1648) often considered as paving the way for the system of modern nation states as we know today. In fact, it is possible to see the nation and the nation-state as one specific way of institutionalization of civilizational ethos (that specifically arose in the West).
You are right. Sometimes civilizational idiom does flow through the ideals of the nation, in which case there are no clashes. However, today we see many clashes precisely because the idiom of the nation is unable to converse with the idiom of the civilization. Trying to understand where and why they clash may help us understand the conflicts around the world today. The idea of India versus Bharat that plays out in the sub-continent is one such example. There are others as is evident today.
My argument is that we must attend to both.