*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

In an article published in the New Statesman, Jeremy Cliffe (2022) claimed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had changed everything. Indeed, the Ukrainian conflict might be signalling the long-waited new multipolar world that IR experts have been heralding since the Iraq war and the geopolitical rise of the BRICS. Despite the new geopolitical transformations and the human tragedy that this conflict has triggered, it has also paved the way for the intensification of ‘civilisational politics’ (Bettiza and Petito 2018; Bettiza 2014) in the West. In this respect, Bettiza and Petito (2018) claim that ‘civilisational politics is primarily about the crucial relationship between culture and power synthesised by coalitions of cultural and political elites.’ Put differently, ‘civilisational politics’ is about ‘how social actors subjectively and intersubjectively make sense of world politics in civilisational terms’ (Bettiza 2014, 13). Bettiza and Petito (2018) suggest that this type of politics is becoming more prominent in contemporary global politics because they represent a ‘novel form of identity politics that draw upon culture, religion and tradition’ and ‘provide a novel frame of reference at a time when globalisation contributes to the deterritorialisation of national identities, borders and actor-hood’. In this short article, we briefly attempt to interrogate how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has intensified the mobilisation of ‘civilisational politics’ in the United States and France and how it has triggered internal ‘civilisational’ tensions within the West.

Beyond the racist discourses fostered by the political elites to justify the exclusion of certain refugees in the West and the hierarchisation of international conflicts in global politics, where some conflicts matter more than others, and some population “deserve” humanitarian intervention and protection more than others, we argue that the intensification of ‘civilisational politics’ in the context of the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has to do with the fact the United States is seeking to unify its political and military allies in Western Europe around cultural values and shared governing norms in a geopolitical context of deglobalisation, which is undermining American structural power within a global political economy that used to be structured around the dying US-led neoliberal globalisation. The United States’ willingness to create a totalising cultural and ideological sphere to cement its military and political alliances and legitimise its military goals has created some tensions in Western Europe. In France, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen has begun to discuss the idea of a ‘global France’ that directly challenges US’ ‘civilisational politics’ on what constitutes the West, evidencing a ‘civilisational schism’ within Western great powers.

The argument is set out in two steps. Firstly, we will briefly discuss how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has intensified ‘civilisational politics’ in the United States. Secondly, we will examine how the ‘civilisational politics’ fostered by the far-right politician Marine Le Pen represent an alternative civilisational discourse where a global France wishes to recover its imperial pulses and international centrality in global affairs, which is perceived to have been undermined by liberal politicians such as Emmanuel Macron and their globalist tendencies. Not let’s turn to examine the emergence of ‘civilisational politics’ and the decline of U.S hegemony.

‘Civilisational politics’ and the decline of US hegemony

‘Civilisational politics’ are not something new in the United States. In 1996, the political scientist Samuel Huntington published a seminal work titled The Clash of Civilisations and the remaking of world order where he argued that culture and religious identities would be the chief source of conflict in global politics after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush announced that the war against terrorism was a “struggle for civilisation”. According to Collet (2009), Bush’s ‘civilisational politics’ not only assumed Huntington’s framework of the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ but also was mobilised to foster the ‘New World Order’(NWO) project articulated around US power. Furthermore, the US new foreign policy towards the Muslim world began to be informed by ‘religious-cultural civilisational strategic frames of reference’ (Bettiza 2015, 575) that legitimised the US invasion of Iraq and Libya. Such a civilisational approach was embraced by the subsequent US administrations after Bush. It is important to note that emergence of this specific ‘civilisational........

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