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Alexey A. Gromyko / Analele Universităţii „OVIDIUS” / Vol. 6/ 2009 civilization-based comparative studies are significant means of analysis global processes, trends and forecasts. It is a good sign that weighted and unbiased attention to civilizational theme has been shown recently by the Russian leadership on foreign policy. “Today, nobody can cope with global challenges single-handedly… What is needed is collective leadership of major powers that should represent the geographical and civilizational dimensions… Spiritual values of all world religions make it imperative to achieve multicivilizational accord and fight manifestations of xenophobia and racism… These are the tasks to be tacked within the framework of the Alliance of Civilizations,” – writes Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. 4 The renaissance of civilizational studies over the past decades has been followed by the emergence and the increase of numbers of research centers in many countries. In Russia, there are the Center for Civilizational and Regional Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Pitirim Sorokin/Nikolai Kondratieff International Institute, Inter-Civilizational Council at the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences to name but a few. Among international bodies, one of the many is the Dialogue of Civilizations World Public Forum. In 2008, the international organization Alliance of Civilizations held the first Forum in Madrid. The Alliance was initiated in 2005 by the former United Nations general secretary Kofi Annan with the support of Spain and Turkey. Those were the works of Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama, with opposite views on the prospects of mankind, that gave rise to the popularity of civilizational discussions, at least in North America and Western Europe. Since their publication in the 1990s, the discourse has much broadened. In the past the same interest to the subject was shown in the first thirty years of the 20 th century and associated with the names of Nikolay Danilevsky, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. After the war, the interest was associated with Fernand Braudel and the Annales School. The term “civilization” was coined by French Enlightenment philosophers who set off progressive forms of the developments of mankind against barbarism. This understanding of human history (common history of human civilization), as getting rid of wildness and barbarism, was articulated by Louis Morgan. The same understanding settled among ordinary people and in everyday life. Today, to be a “civilized person” means to be “polite, well-bred, refined”, as “to join civilized countries” means to become an “advanced society”. Later, the Enlightenment developed several interlinked approaches: economic-social – Agrarian, Industrial and Post-Industrial (informational) 4 The speech of Sergey V. Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, at the 62 nd Session of the UN General Assembly. N.Y. 28 September 2007. P. 2, 7. Available at: http://www.un.org/webcast/ga/62/2007/pdfs/russia-eng.pdf ISSN -1841-138X 20 © 2009 Ovidius University Press
Civilizations and Russia: Ongoing Discussions Analele Universităţii „OVIDIUS” / Vol. 6/ 2009 civilizations; socio-economic, including the Marxist theory – slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism. Similar methodology is used by those who divided states into pre-modern, modern and post-modern ones. But what is seemingly more interesting and prospective is the part of political discourse which proposes understanding of civilizations as large human communities, bound with common history, mentality and socio-cultural characteristics. The history of these communities spans centuries. For civilizations which are interpreted this way, it is very important to have a long history rooted deep in past epochs. In Fernand Braudel’s terminology, the history of civilizations is a “slow history” (history of structures), that is, stable historical realities which do not change for centuries. The essence of the “slow history” is not the same as diplomatic, political, social or economic history; they are just the chapters in a history of civilizations. Which is why a separate state, or a group of states, cannot flips easily from one civilization to another. It is comprehensible but requires profound reasons and decades or centuries to happen. The idea of civilization as a large historic human community means that, apart from some exclusions (Japan, China), its borders cannot coincide with national borders – even if the state is one of the biggest (like Russia, the US, Australia). At the same time every civilization is diverse and heterogeneous but to some limits, because if centrifugal force were to prevail over centripetal, once united civilizational space would crash and its pieces would be pulled away by “gravitational fields” of other civilizations. The idea of internal diversity of civilizations allows to assume that from the perspective of the “slow” or “moderate” history, various parts of a civilization can move at different speed or even in different directions what may cause conflicts and clashes (like religious wars in Europe). With the idea of the “slow history”, civilizations can be described “horizontally” or “vertically”. The former suggests that a single criterion, a unit of measurement, confines the whole methodological ground. For example, in a wide-spread outlook on civilizations as separate states, it is national borders that act as criterion. Form outpaces substance in this case. This interpretation arose from the works of H. Buckle (A History of Civilization in England), F. Guizot (A History of Civilization in France) and R. Altamira (A History of Spanish Civilization), all of whom lived in the 19 th century. A civilization is interpreted as the history of the particular people – English, French or Spanish. In some cases, it is in fact true that state borders are the borders of civilization (for example, India or China). But the opposite wouldn’t be true for the majority of the countries which are not separate civilizations. To refuse this fact is to downscale civilization to the size of local culture and/or other specifics of the given population. If so, the civilizational science is a merely different name of cultural studies, anthropology or ethnography and thus bears no self-sufficient gnoseological meaning. ISSN -1841-138X 21 © 2009 Ovidius University Press
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